Amelia Hruby: 00:01

Hello and welcome to Pleasure Reading. I'm your host, Amelia Ruby, and this is a podcast about the pleasure of reading, where I share curated reading lists, author rankings, chats with my bookish friends, and more. If you, too, take pleasure in reading, I hope that you will subscribe and share the show with a friend. Cheers to your next best book. Hello, and welcome to Pleasure Reading a podcast about the many pleasures of reading, including some of our favorite books.

Amelia Hruby: 00:39

I'm Amelia Ruby. And on this show, I share curated lists of books on topics ranging from Girlboss influencers to nonfiction for foodies, to today's episode, where I have curated six dark academia recs that are all young adult standalone novels. I did an episode on dark academia back in late twenty twenty four. And there I shared five dark academia recs that were all adult fantasy books. In that episode, I talked a little bit about how dark academia is a genre of books, a subgenre more likely of fiction that is set in academic settings.

Amelia Hruby: 01:29

So typically at a high school or boarding school or college, occasionally at an academic institution like a library or a secret society. And speaking of secret societies, in many dark academia novels, there is a secret society, and there is often a death or a murder that motivates the plot, and the academic setting sets up this backdrop of secrets and knowledge. And very often, I'd even say most often in dark academia books, this tension of class differences. Many of these books will have a main character from a working or middle class background among many other characters who are very wealthy or definitely in the upper class, part of the 1%. And much of the tension in the book can be that sort of clash of classes, social classes, financial classes, economic classes, and how that is exacerbated amidst the backdrop of these competitive academics.

Amelia Hruby: 02:38

So I would say that the two, like, foundational texts of the subgenre of dark academia are The Secret History by Donna Tartt and If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio. Those are both adult fiction novels. And in my last dark academia recs episode, I focused on other adult fiction novels that all explored dark academia through the lens of magic and fantasy.

Amelia Hruby: 03:05

So if you're interested in that, you can listen to my previous episode. But in this episode, I wanted to focus on young adult dark academia. And I think that this was particularly interesting to me because I actually went to a boarding school for my last two years of high school, my junior and senior years here in The US, and I had a lot of big feelings about what it meant to go to boarding school, to live at school, to suddenly have, like, a totally different perspective on relationships, on education, and on class. When I was kind of pulled out of my small town and nuclear family unit and put into this really competitive academic environment when I was 16. So that's what led me down this path of reading You dark academia books.

Amelia Hruby: 04:00

And today I am going to share six recommendations of my favorite books in this genre. They have all been released, I think in the past five years, definitely in the past ten years. So these are very recent releases, and they all take place in high schools or immediately after high school graduation in one case. So there are You dark academia books that are set at colleges, but I really wanted to focus on that high school experience, especially because I feel like the tension between friend groups is just so rife and ripe in high school. And I felt like that would really set up some interesting dynamics in these books.

Amelia Hruby: 04:44

Of the six books that I am reading here, four of them have also been written by BIPOC writers. So I think that something that is really interesting in more contemporary dark academia is the way that the genre has expanded to consider and analyze not just the class dynamics within academic institutions, but also the race dynamics in those institutions. And so many of the books that I will be recommending today have a special emphasis on race and really consider what is it like to be a person of color, what is it like to be black, or to be an Asian immigrant and to be working to achieve in these, like, predominantly white super rich institutions? So I love how dark academia is embroiled in and also breaks down those dynamics. And I can't wait to recommend these six books to you.

Amelia Hruby: 05:43

I'm also gonna do something I've never done before, which is at the very end of this episode, I'm gonna tell you the other six You dark academia books that I DNF'd on my way to making this episode. So I picked up 12 books as I was working on this project of an episode, and I ended up loving six of them and then not finishing six others. So at the very end, I will tell you what those books were and a quick, quick, quick blurb about each of them in case you want even more dark academia ideas, and some of the ones that weren't for me might be for you. So all of that shared, let's dive in to this list of six dark academia recs, the You standalone edition. With this list, I have ranked each book on how many out of five it is dark and how many out of five it is academia.

Amelia Hruby: 06:40

And I'm going to go through the list from the least dark to the most dark. And I wanna be clear that when I say dark here, I'm really just kind of assessing how screwed up I think the violence in the book is. So it's very subjective. All of the darkness in these books involves violence. Some of it, I thought, was more insidious than others or more shocking than others.

Amelia Hruby: 07:08

And, of course, they're also all You. So none of the books are particularly graphic, but part of what makes dark academia dark is how the violence is embedded in the academic institution or stems from the competitive nature of the academic institution. So we're gonna go from least dark to most dark, and I just wanna say that you may read a book and think it's way darker than I thought it was. So these are totally subjective, half hazard ratings just for fun. The first book on this list is actually the most recent one that I have read, and that is How We Fall Apart by Katie Zhao.

Amelia Hruby: 07:42

At the beginning of this book, we meet Nancy Luo, and she is shocked to discover that her former best friend, who was the top ranked junior at their high school, has gone missing and is presumably dead. Nancy and Jamie have been friends, but they've always had a tense relationship because Nancy's mom was the housekeeper for Jamie's family. Both of the girls go to Sinclair Prep, and they have three other friends there, Crystal, Akhil, and Alexander. Alexander is a scholarship student like Nancy is, and Crystal and Akhil are from other wealthy families. So when the book opens, we have this dynamic where Jamie, who's been the top ranked student, has just gone missing.

Amelia Hruby: 08:29

Their friends are trying to figure out, like, what has happened. They're worried about her. And on top of that, there is this, like, anonymous school wide social media app. It's called Tiptap, which I really found hilarious. I was like, okay.

Amelia Hruby: 08:44

Not TikTok, but Tiptap. Got it. And on that app, someone calling themselves The Proctor has started posting people's secrets, particularly the secrets of these five, and it started saying that they're going to reveal this friend group's secrets. So that's really the setup of the book, and then throughout the book, we learn the different secrets of these friends. We learn more about Jamie's life.

Amelia Hruby: 09:09

We see a lot of instances of, like, the tension between Jamie and Nancy and Jamie and other students in the school, how cutthroat the environment was there, how stressed out all the students are about their AP exams and different things happening in their classes. And we, again, we see these sort of class dynamics between the scholarship students and the wealthy students. We also in this book, I really appreciated that the author talks a lot about the reality of being a first generation immigrant and really paints a beautiful picture of Nancy's relationship with her mother and the things that her mother has sacrificed for Nancy to be able to go to Sinclair prep, and also the pressure that that puts on Nancy and how challenging it is for her to live up to those expectations and what she ends up doing to try to do that. So I really enjoyed this book. I thought it was a fantastic addition to the sort of dark academia You canon that has been growing, that I'm trying to point to a bit here, and I think that on my dark and academia scales, I'm gonna give it two out of five dark.

Amelia Hruby: 10:19

The secrets here are definitely a little dark. They're pretty challenging, things that you would maybe not expect high school students to do, but some of them were also totally things I would expect high school students to do. And some of the violence in the book, it turns out, was, like, maybe not quite as, like, horrible as it was foreshadowed to be. So two out of five, dark on this one for me. Four out of five academia.

Amelia Hruby: 10:42

I mean, we do get a great setup with how Sinclair Prep looks, where it is in New York City, what the students are like there. They often go to classes. We hear about AP exams. There's some, like, cheating scandals that play into the plot. So I think we get a lot of academia here.

Amelia Hruby: 10:58

And then I would say this book has, like, a healthy dose of immigrant parents and first generation immigrant experience. And so if that's something that you're interested in, particularly the experience of Asian immigrants and the children of Asian immigrants then I think you would love How We Fall Apart by Katie Zhao. The next book that I'm recommending is Where Sleeping Girls Lie by Farida Abike Iyamide. Let me tell you a little bit about the plot here. Our main character is Sadeh Hussain, and Sadeh is recently orphaned.

Amelia Hruby: 11:31

She lost her mother years ago, her father has just passed, and we meet her on her very first day at Alfred Noble Academy, which is often called ANA throughout the book. On her first day, she is toured around campus by her roommate Elizabeth. And then the next day, Elizabeth disappears. Pretty ominous start to boarding school. Right?

Amelia Hruby: 11:51

You're like, great, I've met a roommate, she seems friendly, I think we could get along, and then she's gone. So after that, Sade teams up with Elizabeth's best friend, Baz, and they try to find Elizabeth. Like, where could she have gone? And that takes them really to uncover the, like, seedy underbelly of the very posh culture at Alfred Nobel Academy. And they find a really violent side of many of the students there, and we also learn some ways that maybe some folks knew about that all along.

Amelia Hruby: 12:25

So I think that this book has great friendships, it has some secret trauma, definitely has some horrible, horrible high school boys, as well as some queer side characters and race commentary along the way. So I gave this one three out of five dark and four out of five academia, and it definitely comes with a great side dose, as I'm calling it, of queer romance and BIPOC representation. I also just really enjoyed how clearly I felt like I could see the campus of this book and the different houses and the different friend groups. One of the most popular friend groups here is called, I think, the unholy trinity, which I found really great. I also liked that the different, like, buildings or houses at this school were named after famous scientists.

Amelia Hruby: 13:23

So there's Turing House and Hawking House. And so there are just some really lovely intellectual details throughout that I think really set the scene for the academic institution here. And this book definitely feels a little gothic to me. I think it has that type of vibe. So that is Where Sleeping Girls Lie by Farida Abike Iyamide, who actually I have another book of hers on the list that I will talk about soon.

Amelia Hruby: 13:53

The third book on my You dark academia list is The Mary Shelley Club by Goldie Moldavsky. I love horror movies, and this book definitely integrates that into the plot, so I was a big fan from the outset and it did not disappoint. So in this book, we are at Manchester Prep, which is a fancy fancy prep school in New York City. And Rachel Chavez is a new student at Manchester Prep, but, of course, she's a scholarship kid, as many of our protagonists are in dark academia, and she struggles to fit in. On one of her early nights at the school, she goes to a party with her one friend, and she gets kind of caught up in a prank that goes a little bit wrong, and people blame her for it.

Amelia Hruby: 14:48

As she's trying to figure out who did this prank, she finds out that there's actually, like, a secret club of students at the school called the Mary Shelley Club, and they are trying to kind of orchestrate these elaborate pranks to scare their fellow classmates. So it's a kind of competition where each one of them picks someone that they're trying to scare, and then sets up this very elaborate sort of fear test with the goal of getting that person to scream. And so Rachel joins the Mary Shelley Club, and they start doing these pranks. And because of something that's happened in Rachel's background, the pranks become a bit traumatic for her, and she starts to wonder if there's something else going on here. I really enjoyed the Mary Shelley Club, and I'd say for me, this was, like, three out of five dark and three out of five academia with a very large side dose of horror movie lore.

Amelia Hruby: 15:52

I think that this one, more than the others, does really try to veer in that horror direction, but I didn't find it scary at all. I just liked how it engaged the idea of fear and tried to bring that into the book. And I really liked the other members of the Mary Shelley Club. There are definitely conversations about class here. We have that sort of scholarship student, wealthy student dynamic.

Amelia Hruby: 16:15

And I think that if you like horror and you're interested in dark academia, you definitely want to read The Mary Shelley Club by Goldie Woldowski. The fourth book on my You dark academia list is Their Vicious Games by Joel Wellington. This is the one on the list that takes place immediately after high school graduation. So we meet our main character, Adena Walker, the day that she is graduating from Edgewater Academy. Now she had initially planned to go to Yale after graduating from Edgewater, and she, in fact, was even accepted.

Amelia Hruby: 16:53

But because of something that happened at the very end of the school year, her acceptance was rescinded, and now she does not have plans to go to any college, even though she had worked so incredibly hard at Edgewater Academy for the past four years. So after graduation, she goes to the sort of bonfire party that some of the students are hosting with this mission, and her mission is to get invited to a competition called The Finish. The Finish is hosted by the richest family at the school, And essentially, it's a competition typically for, like, 10 to 12 girls, now, I guess, 18 year old women, all over The US who are invited there to compete for acceptance to any college they wanna go to and essentially just, like, connections for the rest of their life. So since Adena had lost her spot at Yale, she really wants to get into the finish to get back on the path she was trying to be on. So when she goes to the bonfire, she kisses Pierce, who is the Remington son that was a part of her high school class, and the next morning, her invitation to the finish arrives.

Amelia Hruby: 18:08

So she goes to the Remington Estate for two weeks to begin this competition, which has three events, the ride, the raid, and the royale. I don't know about you, but that setup was, like, plenty enough for me to really wanna read this book. And I'll be honest, I hated every single boy and man in this book. I think I was supposed to, and it was much more violent than I expected. There are definitely a lot of kind of slasher, final girl vibes in this book.

Amelia Hruby: 18:41

It didn't feel like horror, but those three events and the finish, they can get a little bloody. So I would say that this book is four out of five dark, but it's really only, like, one out of five academia because it's not set at a school. And so while, like, the desire to go to the school of your choice and have your academic and professional career connection set up for you is, like, the motivation for the plot, you don't get that type of academic institutional setting that is typical in dark academia. So this one's maybe a little different than the others, but if you are looking for that dark academia with a side dose of Eat the Rich Slasher, I definitely think Their Vicious Games by Joelle Wellington is for you. Okay, that takes me to the fifth of my six dark academia You recs and this is Ace of Spades, which is my second rec by Farida Abike Iannide.

Amelia Hruby: 19:41

Ace of Spades is maybe the first You dark academia that I heard of or was interested in. I feel like it was everywhere at ye local Barnes and Noble over the past few years or since it came out in 2021. It was also a Goodreads Choice Award nominee, so definitely one of the more popular books on this list. And in Ace of Spades, we have two main characters. There is Chiamaka, who is the daughter of wealthy Nigerians, and Devon, who is a talented musician who lives in a very low income neighborhood that is painted throughout the book as dangerous and challenging, and Chiamaka and Devon are the only two black students at Niveus Private Academy.

Amelia Hruby: 20:32

This is, like all the other ones, a super rich private school. In this instance, it's not a boarding school, it's just a day school where all of the wealthiest kids in this city go to be educated. And at Niveus, there is this anonymous texter who calls themselves Aces, who has started sending these really awful texts about Devon and Chiamaka. And the texts are obviously targeted at them, and they really seem to be trying to get them to either be kicked out or leave school. But both of these students are incredibly smart, they're incredibly driven, they're two of the top students in their grade, and they are determined to fight back against ACEs.

Amelia Hruby: 21:25

So the book really charts how they go from being, like, the only black students at school who never talk to each other and are in totally different social and economic classes, to partnering up and becoming friends because they have to fight against aces and racism along the way. I don't wanna spoil anything about this book, but I will say that of the books on this list, this is the one that takes on institutionalized and structural racism the most directly. And I felt like that was such a powerful part of this book and also something I really appreciated being brought into the dark academia genre, because often in these books, we will see institutional violence, but it plays out on, like, the personal scale. So we'll see the sort of pressure cooker that the institution might create, but then the emphasis in a dark academia book is often on, like, the one bad actor, the person who actually kills someone else, the one who really does the wrong thing. But I think that what this book did so well is it showed the way that that violence and racism are built into the structure of this school and a broader society itself, and that just made it such a powerful critique wrapped inside of this, like, You thriller to a certain extent.

Amelia Hruby: 22:51

So I loved Ace of Spades, and I would say this was four out of five dark and three out of five academia. The darkness here was less like any of the events of the book, but just, like, the depth of what was happening and how pervasive it was. I've also seen this book called, like, Gossip Girl meets Get Out, and I would say that feels pretty accurate. So if you're looking for You dark academia with a side dose of Gossip Girl or Get Out, I think that Ace of Spades is the book for you. And finally, we're on to my sixth dark academia recommendation and that is A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee.

Amelia Hruby: 23:36

So of all of the books on this list, this is definitely the one that feels the most like The Secret History. It is the one that is giving us the most, like, boarding school at a gothic mansion in the woods vibe. And I ate it up. I loved this book. So let me tell you what it's about.

Amelia Hruby: 24:03

At the beginning of A Lesson in Vengeance, we meet Felicity Morrow, and Felicity has just returned to the Dalloway School after taking a year off after her best friend died mysteriously. Felicity is the daughter of a very rich and powerful woman who just sends her off to boarding school so that she doesn't have to deal with her. And Felicity is seemingly very happy to be back at school, but also experiencing these, like, waves of grief because of the loss of her friend. This is also complicated by the fact that everybody thinks Felicity probably killed her best friend. And so when Felicity goes back to school, she is immediately dropped into this sort of rumor mill and very complicated social situation.

Amelia Hruby: 24:51

When she moves back into her old room, which was in the Godwin House on this campus, she meets Ellis. Ellis is a writing prodigy who has just published a book that supposedly won the Pulitzer Prize, at least in this fictional world, and Ellis is at the Dalloway School to work on her second book, which is going to integrate elements from the school's history. Because Dalloway School was founded by witches who are descendants of Salem Witches and has a history of occult practice at the school, all of which was centered in Godwin House. So Felicity herself, when she was there previously, had gotten really wrapped up in re researching the magic that these witches were doing, and her thesis project was actually on the Dalloway Five, who were five women who had gone to the school and all died after they supposedly killed another student through a sort of magical ritual. So there is a lot of murder in the background of this book and throughout it, the tension just keeps getting, like, ratcheted up and up and up.

Amelia Hruby: 26:04

Felicity's relationship with Ellis gets more and more complicated, more and more nuanced, more and more tricky as Ellis kind of asks Felicity to go back down this path with the Dalloway five that Felicity had promised herself she wouldn't do because she felt like it led to the death of her friend who, slight spoiler, we eventually learned was more than just a friend. And I, again, just, like, really appreciated how dark and twisted this book got. So for me, this was 4.5 out of five dark. I'm not sure that I would say, like, the ending totally surprised me, but it really just made the whole thing super, super dark. And it was also, like, five out of five academia for me.

Amelia Hruby: 26:53

We have such a great gothic setting. We've got a boarding school with all these different and interesting houses. We have secret societies, secret rituals. We meet the academic advisors. We're going to class.

Amelia Hruby: 27:07

We're working on our thesis. We are reading books by firelight in the snow. Like, this just felt so academia to me, and I appreciated it. And this is definitely the dark academia pick for you if you were looking for that side dose of ghosts and sapphic romance. I loved it so much.

Amelia Hruby: 27:28

And I think that if you love dark academia for the academia, I would probably read this book, A Lesson in Vengeance or Where Sleeping Girls Lie. But if you love it for, like, the violence of the institutions, then I might go with Ace of Spades or Their Vicious Games. And if you want a dose of private school in New York City, then the Mary Shelley Club or How We Fall Apart would be your picks. So those are my six dark academia recs, the You standalone edition. I haven't mentioned, I guess, that all of these are stand alones yet, but after my experience with my last dark academia episode where it led me to, like, read all of these series, I was like, I'm just doing stand alones this time.

Amelia Hruby: 28:13

So that is what I did. And now let me very briefly tell you the dark academia books that I DNF'd along the way. So as I create these episodes, I typically will start with a book I wanna read. In this instance, that was Where Sleeping Girls Lie. I saw that book, I bought that book, I had that book, and when I learned that the author of that book had written another book, suddenly I had two You dark academia books.

Amelia Hruby: 28:41

And from there, I was like, I think I wanna do an episode of pleasure reading about this. So then I started doing some research, and I created this list of over 20 books that I thought could fit this category, and then I narrowed it down to 12. And with all of those, I either bought them or got them from my library. I think I own three or four of them, and I got the rest from my library. And then I started reading.

Amelia Hruby: 29:05

So the six that I have already talked about were my favorites. They were the ones that I read and loved and highly recommend. And then there were six others that I started or and some of which I read a few pages of. Some of them I read, like, almost half the book, and put them down for various reasons that they just didn't feel like the right fit for me or something that I could wholeheartedly recommend, Which on this show, I only recommend books I have read, unless I explicitly say it's part of a TBR or a books that are on my to read list, but I only recommend books I have read and loved. So it's really important to me to stay true to that, but in case you've already read all six books that I just talked about and you want some more ideas, here are the other six that I did not finish along my path to making this episode.

Amelia Hruby: 29:49

So the first book on that list was My Dearest Darkest by Kayla Cottingham. This is a sapphic horror dark academia that I really thought was gonna be for me and just couldn't quite get into in the first few chapters, but it's something I might return to. There's supposed to be a sort of, like, monster subplot here that does feel up my alley. The next book on my DNF dark academia list was Don't Breathe a Word by Jordan Taylor. I actually thought that this one was gonna be a horror, but it's more of a, like, historical speculative fiction.

Amelia Hruby: 30:27

So Don't Breathe a Word is set in two timelines. We have a timeline in the present day and a timeline in 1962. And in both timelines, we are at Hardwick Preparatory Academy. And in the 1962 timeline, there's something going on with a nuclear fallout shelter that somehow impacts whatever's happening in the present day timeline. I started this book, but wasn't super into the, like, sixty year separation of the two plots and ended up putting it down.

Amelia Hruby: 30:57

But when I look on Goodreads, it has really high reviews overall. So if you like historical fiction and want something like that with your dark academia, I think that Don't Breathe a Word could be a great fit for you. After that, I picked up and put down Youngblood by Sasha Laurens. This is a vampire dark academia, and I really thought I was like, I like vampires. That seems great.

Amelia Hruby: 31:21

But it wasn't quite right for me, maybe because I just wasn't feeling vampire season right now. But it definitely has the sort of class consciousness. We have that same sort of, like, scholarship student, wealthy student dynamics. I believe there's a sapphic love story in this one as well. So if you're looking for vampire dark academia, you might like Youngblood by Sasha Lawrence.

Amelia Hruby: 31:43

Next, I picked up I Am Not Jessica Chen by Anne Liang. This one, I was really interested in because another book by Anne Liang is on my romance TBR for February, that was This Time It's Real. And so when I saw that she had a sort of, like, dark academia book as well, I was really interested. The premise of this one is that Jenna Chen has been rejected from every Ivy League school that she's applied to, and she really feels like she's disappointed her Asian immigrant parents. And so she makes a wish to become her more successful Harvard bound cousin, Jessica Chen, and then that wish comes true.

Amelia Hruby: 32:25

I thought that the setup was really interesting. I couldn't quite get into the book as I was trying to read it, and I felt like it wasn't actually dark academia. It was much more like magical realism. It didn't have, like, the darkness or the academia ness that I wanted. So so I might pick it up again.

Amelia Hruby: 32:39

This one just didn't feel like it quite fit in this category for me. And then two more books that I DNF'd along the way. One is The Ivies by Alexa Donne. This book has a really fun premise. You have this group of girls that call themselves The Ivies, and they are five students at Claflin Academy whose mission is to get into an Ivy League by any means necessary.

Amelia Hruby: 33:06

This one also has a sort of gossip girl, super competitive, murderous subplot. I guess that's, like, a lot of things to call a subplot, but it also has that going on. I felt like the way this book was written, just the voice didn't quite land for me, but it did feel pretty salacious, if that is a tone that you like. And then the final book that I was reading and did not finish for this list was The Changing Man by Tomi Oyamakinde. And I actually read almost half of this book.

Amelia Hruby: 33:39

It's centered around this girl named Ife, and she has been accepted to Nethercott School as a scholarship student, although they call their scholarship program urban achievers, which is, like, kind of picked at throughout the book. And she has a really hard time at school. And the other students are relatively mean to her and the teachers are really mean to her. And as I was reading it, I just kept feeling like, I am sure this happens, but it feels almost satirical at points how mean these teachers are. Like, it felt like I was in some sort of, like, Willy Wonka Catholic school universe, where nobody had to be nice to each other at all.

Amelia Hruby: 34:24

And even Ife herself is kind of rude or mean to another student who really wants to be her friend and who, like, tries to show up and do things for her. And Ife is like, you're not as good as my other friends from my old school. And so I just couldn't buy into these characters' relationships, but I did think that the more horror plot of this was really interesting, and I read some reviews that really talk about how it's actually speculative science fiction by you the time you get to the end. So I was intrigued by how that happened from the beginning that I read, but not quite enough to get all the way through it. So so that's my list of the six books I DNF'd along the way, My Dearest Darkest, Don't Breathe a Word, Young Blood, I Am Not Jessica Chen, The Ivies, and The Changing Man.

Amelia Hruby: 35:11

And maybe it's worth mentioning that both The Changing Man and one of the books from my recommended list, Where Sleeping Girls Lie, are set in The UK. I'm pretty sure all of the others have a US setting, but I did notice some differences just in how they talk about the academics and the expectations at school between the two different countries and their settings in these books. So that's the list, my friends. Those are the six dark academia You reads that I recommend as well as six that could be a great fit for you, even if they weren't a great fit for me. I hope that this list gets you through the rest of winter.

Amelia Hruby: 35:49

I know that, like, fall is peak academia time, but for me, February is the month where I'm like, it is so gray. I have to work anyway. And that is the dark academia vibe, in essence, in my heart. So thank you for listening to this episode of Pleasure Reading. If you would like to explore or purchase any of these books, please head to the show notes to grab a link.

Amelia Hruby: 36:12

If you purchase through my Bookshop page, I will receive a small affiliate payment that I take as just a tip, and thanks for the book recommendation. And if you'd like to follow along with my reading, you can also connect with me on StoryGraph, which is linked in the show notes, or you can send me an email and let me know what you've been reading lately. I would love to hear from you. For now, I'm gonna go read something light and fun and neither dark nor academic. But until next time, here's to your next best book.