Dannii Elle > Recent Status Updates

Go ahead,, he’d once told her. Tell me what a monster I am so you don’t have to face the fact that you’re one, too.

Aidon is a not unwelcome arrival to this storyline!

"Death wasn’t a stranger, but that didn’t make it a friend."

I don't think the cover does justice to just how EPIC, in every aspect, this book is!

I can already feel the enemies to lovers subplot brewing!!

"Between the blood on her hands and the beer on her cloak, it was shaping up to be a horrible evening."

Love a strong first line!

Virtually Alive - 3.5/5 stars

Dead on the Hour - 3/5 stars

Just Two Clicks - 4/5 stars

Number 13 - 4/5 stars

12 Bolingbroke Avenue - 3/5 stars

Late starting but adding this to my morning routine for 2024.

Slumping hard with my reading so wondering if returning yo a non-fiction I've set aside for months will cure me.

"A man with more tales than people to tell them too."

I'm sobbing 😭

“Maybe we can be alone together.”

MY HEART!!!

"In eternity, time is meaningless . There is always another year, and another, and another. But with mortality, life is built brick by brick in the smallest of things. A lit candle. A woven blanket. Someone’s hand pressing into yours, or a sweet perfume suffusing the room and teasing one’s senses. The fear of death is very real."

"I am not gentle. I am a creature whose teeth were sharpened on suffering, and above all else, I will survive."

The sky foretells a coming tragedy. It is the palest of grays, yet a red stain clots the eastern horizon— evidence of the rising sun. The stain expands, sopping the clouds and dripping farther westward, puddling in dark splotches among the lingering shade of night. Huddled in the thicket of snow-laden trees, I watch the day waken with fear running cracks through my heart. The sky is red, like bloodshed. Like revenge.

"Violence is the nature of the world. Peace is the pause between blows."

Sammith and Alys!!! 💔

"All that was usual. Alys was beautiful, but she’d always been beautiful. Today, she was sharp; hard and brittle as cracking ice. And that was new."

"She’d thought she was doing better. Now, every bright feeling she’d had—every triumph, every laugh, every good night—seemed like a cheap song bellowed out to cover the weeping. A small voice in her mind calmly said This is only a hard moment. Ever since it happened, there have been hard moments. This one will pass too. But she didn’t believe it."

This author writes about grief in a way that is breaking my heart too

"To know a thing— a house, a city, a street, a lover— one must be with it for a full year. A street locked in winter’s ice is a different street than the same stones under spring storms. A lover in the first flame of passion is a different person when those fires have cooled."

"According to the vivisectionists at the university, the hearts of all animals were a kind of fist, relaxing to fill with blood and squeezing to push it out through the rest of the body. Alys imagined it working like a man flexing his hands before a fight he knew he’d eventually lose. The city had a pulse like that too, and harvest was the time when Kithamar filled."

"They killed him, she thought, but with a distance, as if she were only trying the idea on for fit. She didn’t have a they, but that was small. Hardly an annoyance. Killed him was the part that was too wide, too airy, too empty somehow to fit inside her. It was like They unmade the color green, or They murdered shoestrings. It was nonsense."

"children are like elm seeds on the river: some manage to set roots, but most rot in the flow."

"As the long centuries passed, Longhill slept, but its sleep wasn’t easy. It could never forget that it had once been free and unbound, and that it wasn’t anymore. And it changed. Buildings decayed and rotted and were replaced, and the district grew into something both the same and new."

The way this author writes settings has me swooning!

"Kithamar is an unforgiving city. The common wisdom states that it was founded on hatred, but this is a misunderstanding. In truth, it was founded on hunger, and there are many kinds of hunger at its heart."

“Truths are like spices.

When you add some in, it means you have more layers to digest. You get a taste of things you were missing before. But if you add too many, life can become unpalatable.

But when those truths are repressed for too long, when you realize you've grown accustomed to the bland lies, there's no hope of removing the overpowering taste from your tongue.”

"The sun dips and the moon crests, but there is no harmony with the goddesses slumbering in their eggshell stars. The horizon is tepid and lacking."