Teasers & Top Tens – December 30, 2025

By Denise @ Life With No Plot on December 30, 2025 • ( 0 )

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by Ambrosia at The Purple Booker. Here are the rules if you want to play along:

Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

This week’s teaser comes from The Iron Queen by Julie Kagawa.

I recalled the first time I stepped into the Nevernever through the door in Ethan’s closet. I remembered the enormous trees, so close and tangled that their branches shut out the sky, the mist writhing along the ground, the perpetual twilight that hung over everything. Here in the wyldwood, neither court held sway; it was fierce, neutral territory that cared nothing for the medieval customs of Summer or the vicious society of Winter.

And it was dying.

I love this series so much and figured a reread of it would be a good way to end 2025 and step into 2026.

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Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. This week is a freebie, so I chose for my topic:

Ten (or Two) Recent Additions to My Bookshelf

I was going to try and see if there was anything else to add to this, but then decided to use the topic how it was intended – to share the books we received for Christmas. I got two books this year from my TBTB Secret Santa and, while I didn’t get books from anyone else, I did get several gift cards that will be going towards books later. Since there were only two, I hesitated to post about them, but then figured why not! They both look really good, so here they are.

The Night Diary by Veera Hiranandani

It’s 1947, and India, newly independent of British rule, has been separated into two countries: Pakistan and India. The divide has created much tension between Hindus and Muslims, and hundreds of thousands are killed crossing borders.

Half-Muslim, half-Hindu twelve-year-old Nisha doesn’t know where she belongs, or what her country is anymore. When Papa decides it’s too dangerous to stay in what is now Pakistan, Nisha and her family become refugees and embark first by train but later on foot to reach her new home. The journey is long, difficult, and dangerous, and after losing her mother as a baby, Nisha can’t imagine losing her homeland, too. But even if her country has been ripped apart, Nisha still believes in the possibility of putting herself back together.

Told through Nisha’s letters to her mother, The Night Diary is a heartfelt story of one girl’s search for home, for her own identity…and for a hopeful future.

Beyond the Black Door by A.M. Strickland

Kamai was warned never to open the black door, but she didn’t listen …

Everyone has a soul. Some are beautiful gardens, others are frightening dungeons. Soulwalkers―like Kamai and her mother―can journey into other people’s souls while they sleep.

But no matter where Kamai visits, she sees the black door. It follows her into every soul, and her mother has told her to never, ever open it. When Kamai touches the door, it is warm and beating, like it has a pulse. When she puts her ear to it, she hears her own name whispered from the other side. And when tragedy strikes, Kamai does the unthinkable: she opens the door.

A.M. Strickland’s imaginative dark fantasy features court intrigue and romance, a main character coming to terms with her asexuality, and twists and turns as a seductive mystery unfolds that endangers not just Kamai’s own soul, but the entire kingdom …

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