An Enchantment of Ravens – book review

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It’s getting close to the end of the year and the completion of the Goodreads challenge, something I’m behind on at the moment. This means that these past few weeks have been full of speed reading (or as close to speed reading as a dyslexic student with an eye watering number of essays due can). One of the books I got my hands on to try to make up on my book count was An Enchantment of Ravens by Margaret Roderson.

An Enchantment of Ravens is a fantasy book that follows Isobel, a young master painter who has a particularly dangerous set of clients: the fair folk. In a world where craft is highly valued by fair folk and everything is paid for by enchantments, Isobel developed a sharp mind and polite mask that didn’t upset the fair folk she painted. Things take a turn for the worst when she paints her first royal fair one, Rook the autumn prince. After she painted him with human emotion endangering both the prince and herself, they travel to the autumn lands for Isobel to face trial for her crime. The book follows them as they form an alliance to survive, prompting forbidden emotions that endanger them even more.

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Tips for running a small business as a student

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This academic year I’ve been juggling working towards my degree, writing for this blog and running my own small business… it’s been wild.

I haven’t had my business, HyperHoot, for all that long. I started selling my needle felted gifts earlier this year and I still have a lot to learn. But over these past few months as I’ve juggled my university work and my shop, I’ve come across a few tips that have helped me out and I’d like to share them with you guys. I know many students often think of ways to have their own ‘side hustle’ when they’re at university, so I help these six tips will help you out if you do decide to take the leap and start up your own business.

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This or That – book tag

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A few weeks ago, I was tagged by Riddhi from Whispering Stories to do the This or That book tag. I’ve seen a few variations of this tag flying around, but I really liked the questions on this particular one. It’s just a bit of fun and is a nice way for you guys to get to know me a little better too.

As tradition will all tag, please do check out Riddhi’s blog and show her some love. You’re more than welcome to do the tag yourself even if I didn’t tag you in this post. If I did tag you and you want to give it a go, pop a link back to this post at the start.

OK, lets get on with it!

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Why I’m learning to write negative book reviews

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Leaving negative reviews of books has become a tad of a controversial topic in the book community. There’s been a fair amount of discourse over if anyone really benefits from them and if it’s morally OK for people to be writing them in the first place. Once you’ve gotten past that debate you then come to the question of what is even classes as a negative review? Is three stars a negative review, but three and a half a positive one? Very quickly you can find yourself overwhelmed with a lot of people with a whole bunch of strong opinions.

In all my years of blogging I’ve never published a negative review on my blog (I class a review of under three stars to be negative). Goodreads yes, but here on Lost in the Story no. My reasoning behind it was why waste time reviewing a book I didn’t enjoy? Why spend all that time going through the book a second time making notes when I didn’t enjoy it? I also had the opinion that there was enough negativity in the world, and I didn’t want to be adding to that. All of that combined with the fact I tend to dnf books I don’t enjoy meant I never really had to face these problems.

However, I wouldn’t be writing this post if my thoughts on the matter hadn’t changed to some degree. Over the past few months, I’ve been doing some thinking and I want to break down for you why I’m now learning to write negative reviews of books.

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