Dungeons and Drama: A Review

Dungeons and Drama by Kristy Boyce

My Rating: 5 stars all the way!

Cover Rating: 10/10

Publisher: Random House Children’s

Publish Date: January 9th, 2024

Number of Pages: 304

Received: Netgalley provided an e-arc copy in exchange for an honest review.

Purchase: Amazon

Synopsis: When it comes to romance, sometimes it doesn’t hurt to play games. A fun YA romcom full of fake dating hijinks!

Musical lover Riley has big aspirations to become a director on Broadway. Crucial to this plan is to bring back her high school’s spring musical, but when Riley takes her mom’s car without permission, she’s grounded and stuck with the worst punishment: spending her after-school hours working at her dad’s game shop.

Riley can’t waste her time working when she has a musical to save, so she convinces Nathan—a nerdy teen employee—to cover her shifts and, in exchange, she’ll flirt with him to make his gamer-girl crush jealous.

But Riley didn’t realize that meant joining Nathan’s Dungeons & Dragons game…or that role playing would be so fun. Soon, Riley starts to think that flirting with Nathan doesn’t require as much acting as she would’ve thought…

Opening Sentence: “Of all the punishments my parents could have chosen, I can’t believe they went with this one.”

Musings:

*(Quick Disclaimer: even though I am behind on reviews of books I’ve finished I decided I had to review this book the second I finished it. This review will have a lot of nerdy emotional outbursts. You have been warned)

I read this book in less than 24 hours. I cannot say the last time a book did that to me where I was just so completely entertained that I had to finish it as soon as possible. I started it last afternoon at 1 or 2 before work as of writing this and I finished it this morning a bit after 11. Last night I had to stop myself from continuing as it had become 2:30 am and I was just halfway and I stole did not want to put it down.

I LOVE THIS BOOK! I cannot say how seen this little nerdy love story made me feel. It also was actually so funny and it’s so rare for a book to make me laugh. All the references and camaraderie between these musical and gaming nerds made me feel so at home. Ticket to Ride being mentioned had me smiling so hard from ear to ear knowing my boyfriend and his friends always play it on their board game nights I miss due to being at work. The way my boyfriend says Ticket to Ride! with this joyous cute tone had me so weak every-time the game was mentioned in this book.

I was obsessed with Nathan’s sweet nature and the easy banter he and Riley had the whole book. It was my boyfriend’s funny sweet nerdy nature in novel form and I WANTED TO CUDDLE HIM SO BAD! He’s such a good guy and it’s so clear from how respectful he is and the way he treats not just Riley but the others around him god it was like seeing my boyfriend Abdiel in another universe. If we’d met in high school I think this is how it would’ve happened for us, except maybe not the whole fake dating thing.

The friendships, relationships, and sense of community in this book are all top tier (SSR level you might say). I love how Riley gets to know her dad and balances that with her relationship with her mom. I love her friendships with each individual and how real and fleshed out they feel. Obviously…. I am FERAL over her relationship that develops with Nathan. It’s wholesome and cute and flirty and it made me smile the whole way.

Now that’s enough ranting! Go pre-order/buy this amazing book. If you have any sort of nerdy/musical heart in you this book will bring you so much joy.

THANK YOU ALL FOR READING! 

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The App that Saves My Life: Habitica

For a long time I have struggled endlessly to maintain motivation to actually do things that result in me being the me I want to be. It’s so easy to be lazy and give into thoughts that my apathy convinces me are true. So easy to let things go and believe “what’s the point? Nothing is going to come out of this anyway… so why bother?”

At first, I made a list of things that I wanted to do every day for self-improvement. It became what I called my daily instructions and it worked, but not completely. It was still really easy to let some things go undone and still try to call the day a success. So I added a motivational prize of the ability to buy something I really want to have every 30 Days that I complete all my tasks (which is still in place although I still haven’t made it that far yet).

Then one day I was looking through twitter and found a tweet by Akemi Dawn Bowman that said:

When I looked in the comments and someone had mentioned that an app like that did exist and it was called Habitica I HAD to check it out. Habitica is nerdy and full of questing and finding drops and collecting pets all by doing tasks in your daily life and I LOVE it!

At first it took me a little bit to figure out how to use this most effectively and what things should go in the three different sections habits, dailies, and to-does, but eventually I finally got the hang of it and it has made me more productive then ever!

There are two features that absolutely made me fall in love with this app Questing and Pets that could grow to be Mounts!

Right now these are the base pets I have collected:

They can be all different colors and when you feed them the correct food they grow up to be a mount that your character can ride. Everything is collected by random drops from doing tasks and habits during the day.

Right now this is what my character and rewards set up looks like:

As for Questing you have to be working with a party and once a member of the party submits a quest you can choose to accept or deny your participation. Quests give you extra experience, unique drops, and quest pets to collect on your journey. In order to complete quests all you have to do is commit to your habits and dailies!

There are so many nuances and specifics to this nerdy productivity app. One thing being guilds. If I spoke about all these things this post would go on for ages! But, I will leave you all with this: should you decide to use this app and have any questions let me know! I will definitely help you out. I love this application so much and I think it deserves a lot of love.

Thanks for reading! Let me know your thoughts down in the comments below.

-Till next time!

(Not Really) A Reading Slump

I love books. I never would have started a blog about them, allowing me to write about them everyday if I didn’t, but I am in the midst of a reading slump and so there doesn’t seem to be a book review post in sight. 

Books are everything to me, if I don’t give myself time to read for a little bit everyday, I think I might go mad. However, this doesn’t mean that I don’t get the disease that all book lovers hate called readingslumpitis. 

Readingslumpitis

Noun

A (tragic) disease in which a person desires to read from the bottom of their soul, but they just can’t seem to get interested in reading any books they try to read. 

Related terms: Book-Hangover, Booktrope shade, unspiration, & Bookaholic 

Now I could lie to you and say that this is a diesease that I currently have and am trying desperately to recover from, but that is just not the case. I am reading, just in drastically small slow portions to sate my daily need for reading before I go on to focus on other things (meaning YouTube, movies, and (a little bit of eating/exersize/and homework.)) 

I am at a point where I just don’t feel like reading as much and a part of me is ok with it (kinda). I am interested in pretty much everything. I am like a dog that gets distracted by anything that crosses its path to the point where a conversation will start about a road trip, and end on the reasons I used to believe in fairies. 

As of right now, my brain has decided that it needs to binge watch Markiplier, Dan & Phil, and random minecraft videos. I still read between eating, going out, going to class, and watching videos, but these last few days have been less about books and more about treating my soul to a lot of laughter. 

I want to say that this is a post saying that I am going to stop getting distracted and go back to my first love as soon as I can, but the truth is I am simply in the mood for enjoying a different form of media and I am ok with that. 

I hope to get to finishing a book soon, but for now I am succumbing to my childlike distractive whims. 

I hope you enjoyed reading. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. What are your experiences with readingslumpitis? Do you ever feel like your (not really) in a reading slump?

-Till next time!