Hey Friends 👋🏽✨

As we’ve officially settled into our new Bindery home, it’s time to kick off something I’ve been so excited about - our first ever monthly reading challenge! 🎉

For September, we’re starting with something fun, chaotic, and a little competitive:

📚 Bindery Bingo Challenge

This isn’t your average bingo card. It’s Bindery Bingo, which means it’s trickier, quirkier, and built to celebrate every messy, glorious part of being a reader.

✔ Spot overused tropes

✔ Power through chunky 500+ page beasts

✔ Stay up “just one more chapter” past midnight

✔ Finish books you’ve been hoarding for years

✔ And maybe… just maybe… claim a full BINDERY for ultimate bragging rights 🏆

Here's how to join in:

1. Download the Bindery Bingo card from this post.

2. Complete as many squares as you can during September.

3. Share your progress in the community feed, the discord server, or post your card to your profile using #ShelleysBinderyBingo so we can all cheer each other on!

This is just the first of many monthly challenges we’ll be doing together, and we can’t wait to see how everyone tackles their cards. Whether you go for one square or the whole BINDERY, you’re part of the fun.

✨ Bonus coming soon: In future challenges, paid members will unlock extra perks like bonus prompts, downloadable templates, or even exclusive giveaways. But for now, everyone’s invited to dive in and join the fun!

📌 Download your card. Grab your TBR. Let’s make September unforgettable.

I went into this book expecting a dystopian story, but what I got felt closer to a historical retelling. Lauren’s voice is so honest, so unflinching, that it reads like she’s documenting events we’ve already lived through. Literally cautionary tale disguised as fiction.

One thing I really loved is how organic the relationships felt. This could have easily fallen into the ‘found family’ trope, and it kind of did, but it didn’t sit there. Instead, it felt like watching a community form out of sheer necessity, out of survival. Nothing about it is forced or romanticised. It’s raw, messy, and real.

And speaking of raw - this book does not hold back. Every time I thought, “Okay, surely we’ve had enough tragedy, we’ve suffered enough,” Octavia Butler said, absolutely not. At one point, I genuinely believed we’d reached a safe place, only for the rug to be snatched out from under me again. There were moments when I lost all trust, but by the end, I couldn’t help but love how relentless the story was.

At its core, this is a book about humanity - the best and worst of us. We see people at their most monstrous, capable of violence, cruelty, even cannibalism. But we also see resilience, compassion, and choice. In a world falling apart, some still refuse to become monsters. That tension sits at the heart of everything, and it’s brilliant.

There’s so much more I could say, but honestly, this feels like a book that stays with you long after the last page. I’m both excited and terrified to dive into Parable of the Talents next.

Have you read this one yet? I’d love to know what stuck with you most.