Most Anticipated Books of 2019 (January – June)

Hello bookworms!

In the past, I wasn’t really into keeping up with all the new releases, but things have drastically changed as I’ve become a part of the bookish community online.  It’s hard not to get excited about new releases with all the hype on the internet.

Here are 10 books releasing the first half of 2019 that I am super excited for…

» The Winter of the Witch (Winternight #3) by Katherine Arden

Genre: Fantasy

Release Date: January 9, 2019

In the stunning conclusion to the bestselling Winternight Trilogy, following The Bear and the Nightingale and The Girl in the Tower, Vasya returns to save Russia and the spirit realm, battling enemies both mortal and magic.

This book was set to release fall 2018, but got pushed back until January 2019.  While I was supper bummed, these books were meant to be read in the winter!  This is the final installment in what has become one of my favorite series ever.

You can read a few of my thoughts on the first book here ⇒ The Bear and the Nightingale

and the second book here ⇒ The Girl in the Tower

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» The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi

Genre: YA Fantasy – Historical Fiction

Release Date: January 15, 2019

Set in a darkly glamorous world, The Gilded Wolves is full of mystery, decadence, and dangerous but thrilling adventure.

Paris, 1889: The world is on the cusp of industry and power, and the Exposition Universelle has breathed new life into the streets and dredged up ancient secrets. In this city, no one keeps tabs on secrets better than treasure-hunter and wealthy hotelier, Séverin Montagnet-Alarie. But when the all-powerful society, the Order of Babel, seeks him out for help, Séverin is offered a treasure that he never imagined: his true inheritance.

To find the ancient artifact the Order seeks, Séverin will need help from a band of experts: An engineer with a debt to pay. A historian who can’t yet go home. A dancer with a sinister past. And a brother in all but blood, who might care too much.

Together, they’ll have to use their wits and knowledge to hunt the artifact through the dark and glittering heart of Paris. What they find might change the world, but only if they can stay alive.

This book is already getting lots of positive hype.  A heist story set in late 1800s Paris?  I’m in!

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» Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy #1) by

Genre: Fantasy

Release Date: February 5, 2019

Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: “He has a nose,” people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.

As Tracker follows the boy’s scent–from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers–he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying?

Hodgepodge crew of unusual characters? Shape-shifting? Ancient cities? Mysterious lost boy?  Creatures?

I don’t know what the hell this book is going to be about, but I’m here for it!

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» The Shadow Glass (The Bone Witch #3) by Rin Chupeco

Genre: YA Fantasy

Release Date: March 1, 2019

In the highly anticipated finale to the Bone Witch trilogy, Tea’s life—and the fate of the kingdoms—hangs in the balance

Tea is a bone witch with the dark magic needed to raise the dead. She has used this magic to breathe life into those she has loved and lost…and those who would join her army against the deceitful royals. But Tea’s quest to conjure a shadowglass—to achieve immortality for the one person she loves most in the world—threatens to consume her heart.

Tea’s black heartsglass only grows darker with each new betrayal. And when she is left with new blood on her hands, Tea must answer to a power greater than the elder asha or even her conscience…

After reading the first book in this series, The Bone Witch, I wasn’t sure I was going to continue on with this series.  While I enjoyed the world & magic system that Chupeco created, I thought the book was too slow.  I also had issues with the audiobook narration.  I decided to go ahead and read the second book, The Heart Forger, in print form.   I am so glad I gave this series a chance, because I loved the second book!  It was much more action packed and the pacing was much better.  I cannot wait to read the third book!

You can read a few of my thoughts of the first book here ⇒ The Bone Witch

and the second book here ⇒ The Heart Forger (The Bone Witch #2)

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» Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Genre: Historical Fiction

Release Date: March 5, 2019

Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six, but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity . . . until now.

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock and roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.

Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.

Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.

The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.

After reading The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, I knew I wanted to read another one of Reid’s books.  I was super excited when I saw that she was coming out with a new book in 2019.   Daisy Jones and The Six is about a rock-n-roll group in the 1960s… Yup, count me in!  I am sad to say that I’m starting to see lots of disappointed reviews for this one… BUT I still have hope.

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» Children of Virtue and Vengeance (Legacy of Orïsha #2) by Tomi Adeyemi

Genre: YA Fantasy

Release date: March 5, 2019

After battling the impossible, Zélie and Amari have finally succeeded in bringing magic back to the land of Orïsha. But the ritual was more powerful than they could’ve imagined, reigniting the powers of not only the maji, but of nobles with magic ancestry, too. 

Now, Zélie struggles to unite the maji in an Orïsha where the enemy is just as powerful as they are. But when the monarchy and military unite to keep control of Orïsha, Zélie must fight to secure Amari’s right to the throne and protect the new maji from the monarchy’s wrath.

With civil war looming on the horizon, Zélie finds herself at a breaking point: she must discover a way to bring the kingdom together or watch as Orïsha tears itself apart.

Children of Virtue and Vengeance is the stunning sequel to Tomi Adeyemi’s New York Times bestselling debut Children of Blood and Bone, the first title in her Legacy of Orïsha trilogy.

I read Children of Blood and Bone last year and really enjoyed it.  I loved the world, heavily influenced by west African culture, and the magic system that Adeyemi created here.  Since we do not have a cover yet and it is set to be released in 2 months, I wouldn’t be surprised if the release of this book gets pushed back.  I guess we will see…

You can read a few of my thoughts on the first book here ⇒ Children of Blood and Bone

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» The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson

Genre: Fantasy – Historical Fiction

Release Date: March 12, 2019

From award-winning author G. Willow Wilson, The Bird King is an epic journey set during the reign of the last sultan in the Iberian peninsula at the height of the Spanish Inquisition.

G. Willow Wilson’s debut novel Alif the Unseen was an NPR and Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and it established her as a vital American Muslim literary voice. Now she delivers The Bird King, a stunning new novel that tells the story of Fatima, a concubine in the royal court of Granada, the last emirate of Muslim Spain, and her dearest friend Hassan, the palace mapmaker.

Hassan has a secret–he can draw maps of places he’s never seen and bend the shape of reality. When representatives of the newly formed Spanish monarchy arrive to negotiate the sultan’s surrender, Fatima befriends one of the women, not realizing that she will see Hassan’s gift as sorcery and a threat to Christian Spanish rule. With their freedoms at stake, what will Fatima risk to save Hassan and escape the palace walls?

As Fatima and Hassan traverse Spain with the help of a clever jinn to find safety, The Bird King asks us to consider what love is and the price of freedom at a time when the West and the Muslim world were not yet separate.

I’m loving all these Historical Fiction – Fantasy mash ups!  As soon as I read that Hassan can “draw maps of places he’s never seen and bend the shape of reality”  I immediately hit the “want to read” button on Goodreads.  I am a sucker for unique fantasy concepts.  AND WOULD YOU JUST LOOK AT THAT COVER!!!!

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» Descendant of the Crane by Joan He

Genre: YA Fantasy

Release Date:  April 2, 2019

Tyrants cut out hearts. Rulers sacrifice their own

Princess Hesina of Yan has always been eager to shirk the responsibilities of the crown, but when her beloved father is murdered, she’s thrust into power, suddenly the queen of an unstable kingdom. Determined to find her father’s killer, Hesina does something desperate: she engages the aid of a soothsayer—a treasonous act, punishable by death… because in Yan, magic was outlawed centuries ago.

Using the information illicitly provided by the sooth, and uncertain if she can trust even her family, Hesina turns to Akira—a brilliant and alluring investigator who’s also a convicted criminal with secrets of his own. With the future of her kingdom at stake, can Hesina find justice for her father? Or will the cost be too high?

In this shimmering Chinese-inspired fantasy, debut author Joan He introduces a determined and vulnerable young heroine struggling to do right in a world brimming with deception.

I’m a sucker for Chinese inspired fantasy.  The end.

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» Wicked Saints (Something Dark and Holy #1) by Emily A. Duncan

Genre: YA Fantasy

Release Date: April 2nd, 2019

A girl who can speak to gods must save her people without destroying herself.

A prince in danger must decide who to trust.

A boy with a monstrous secret waits in the wings. 

Together, they must assassinate the king and stop the war.

In a centuries-long war where beauty and brutality meet, their three paths entwine in a shadowy world of spilled blood and mysterious saints, where a forbidden romance threatens to tip the scales between dark and light. Wicked Saints is the thrilling start to Emily A. Duncan’s devastatingly Gothic Something Dark and Holy trilogy.

This book sounds very dark with lots of action & political intrigue… There are not a ton of reviews yet, but I have hopes that we will start seeing positive early reviews start rolling in.

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» When We Left Cuba by Chanel Cleeton

Genre: Historical Fiction

Release date: April 9, 2019

In 1960s Florida, a young Cuban exile will risk her life–and heart–to take back her country in this exhilarating historical novel from the author of Next Year in Havana, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick.

Beautiful. Daring. Deadly. 

The Cuban Revolution took everything from sugar heiress Beatriz Perez–her family, her people, her country. Recruited by the CIA to infiltrate Fidel Castro’s inner circle and pulled into the dangerous world of espionage, Beatriz is consumed by her quest for revenge and her desire to reclaim the life she lost.

As the Cold War swells like a hurricane over the shores of the Florida Strait, Beatriz is caught between the clash of Cuban American politics and the perils of a forbidden affair with a powerful man driven by ambitions of his own. When the ever-changing tides of history threaten everything she has fought for, she must make a choice between her past and future–but the wrong move could cost Beatriz everything–not just the island she loves, but also the man who has stolen her heart…

This book isn’t being marketed as a sequel to Last Year in Havana, which I read last year and really enjoyed, but When We Left Cuba follows a character from that book: Beatriz Perez.  While reading LYiH, I kept saying that I wished we got more about Beatriz!  She was definitely the most interesting side character in that book.  I cannot wait to read Beatriz’s story!

Which new releases are you anticipating in 2019?

Do we share any anticipated books in common?

Comment below & let me know 🙂