moondust books

Books - mainly YA, fantasy, fiction and fairytale retellings. Cats, space, art and history too.💜

[bookshelvesandtealeaves]

🎉 HAPPY PUBLICATION DAY 🎉

Drawing Nudes While Making Other Plans by Zoe Gaetjens

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

QOTD: What’s the last YA book you read?

[instagram]

Review below

Thank you Penguin Australia for sending me a copy of this one. All thoughts are my own.

This was a beautiful story, heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure.

Cleo’s grief is palpable for the whole book. It clings to everything she does, dictates so many of her decisions, steers her wrong just as often as it steers her right.

But I loved how much joy she experienced, too. The way that joy went hand in hand with her grief. I loved the friendships she made, her connection to Mattias, her relationship with her parents. I loved that her relationship with herself developed, too. It was great to watch her confidence grow.

A really great coming of age story.

[nzbookwyrm]

June 2026

[bookcoversonly]

Title: A Steeping of Blood | Author: Hafsah Faizal | Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2025)

[dailyrothko]

Just for you nerds out there, there are about 10 different wordings on this quote. But until I get some contrary evidence, the version I go with, appeared in Life magazine in 1959

"A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience."

- Mark Rothko

For me, this is also the version that is the most coherent as a thought. I do not know of this quote appearing earlier and I'm going to inquire. However, I can scarcely imagine it being corrected if it appeared this way in Life magazine.

[stealingpotatoes]

happy mermay to this beautiful mermai-- what do you mean that's a seal. that's literally a mermaid look at her

(links // tip jar!)

[kiki-de-la-petite-flaque]

Jonathan Wolstenholme - Autumn leaves

[allisonrw96]

she's done!

[ellievsbear]

Inugami

[erinmorgenstern]

The Folio Society edition of The Starless Sea, illustrated by Cristina Bencina

[wizardissues]

Finished strong poison and I really can’t just jump to the next one because I’m still so besotted with lord peter in love. Has a man ever been such a fucking disaster trainwreck. Handles the situation with the grace of a goose falling down some stairs & the best part is that while harriet is clearly bruised from her immensely awful ordeal she’s also clearly fascinated by whatever the fuck he has going on. What the fuck DOES he have going on. bunter calls him on it in .5 seconds because he’s been out at all hours trying to track down leads to prove harriet didn’t do it even though ALL AVAILABLE EVIDENCE SAYS SHE DID and he’s like (entirely serious) “how did bunter know i’m in love. i don’t think it’s super noticeable”

[abirdnamedkipling]

LITERALLY. Mr. fake-idgafer, famed for being inscrutable under his mask of silliness, walks into a jail, immediately goes "hi hello um do you wanna get married please" and then starts falling over his own feet when he realizes that he has accidentally been rude to Harriet. Then he spends a month bolting around London looking for clues, tells everyone who gently suggests that maybe Harriet did it to go to hell (including his best friend the Scotland Yard man), and somehow?? proves it??? with the power of love I guess???? Also he says that he "rushed off to his mother and said, 'look here, here's simply the one and only woman and she's being tried for murder and for God's sake come and hold my hand!'" like he sees *a murderess (as far as he knows)*, falls in love instantly, and instantly bursts down his mother's door like Candance in that one meme going "MOM THE LOVE OF MY LIFE IS ON DEATH ROW". The man is a maniac.

[sleeping-kate-blog]

[bookishleigh]

Open book

[autumn2may]

Today JC Kang reviews Shen Tao's debut, The Poet Empress! 🐉

"We sometimes read a book that makes us question whether or not we have any business writing…for me, most recently with Shen Tao’s debut, The Poet Empress."

[gollancz]

"If I could give The Poet Empress more than ten stars out of ten, I would. Heck, I still will:

Eleven stars."

[bunmellos]

i need everyone to see the cat i met today

his name is hercule purrot

[devinellekurtz]

My very first tiger drawing and my latest

[mfjrr]

water lilies by Claude Monet

[nzbookwyrm]

July 2026