I first heard of Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo when I was in my lack of time and mental capacity for reading period and the show caught my eye on Netflix. I love a good fantasy world and I binge watched the first season of Shadow and Bone in an embarrassingly short period of time. I loved it and it was so good I actually kept track of when the second season was to come out and did a rewatch of the first season in preparation. Friends. It was not until after I had watched the second season that my eldest child casually mentioned that there were books! I was flabbergasted because usually I am on top of this type of thing but she was right and I became determined to get myself a copy of them.

I added them to my Amazon cart to save for later like usual and then spent a couple of years searching for them at used bookstores because I knew that they were popular enough to be there. Unfortunately I did not find them for so long my daughter finally was like you have made an effort why don’t you just buy them from Amazon. And yes, she was right, they were on sale and I got them super cheap. They are not they type of book that I would read once and be done and they also are right up my middle child’s alley so I ended up breaking down and purchasing them. I have only read the first book and it was amazing! I would have ripped through the whole series but I made myself wait until I had written out this review first to start the second one.

Shadow and Bone follows Alina and Mal on their growing of age adventure during a dark time in their world ruled by The Dark One. In the past this Dark One split the continent in two with a dark entity called TheFold which is host do demons that eat anyone who tries to go through it. The Dark One can only be defeated but a Sun Summoner which nobody has seen in a very long time. Alina and Mal grew up together at an orphanage and somehow missed the testing of their powers at a preteen age and the story follows their journey into discovery and how they plan on defeating The Dark One.

The books and the TV show are both very well written and I became invested in many of the side characters as well as the main ones. The level of the books is similar to and older YA book as a guide for those that were wondering. There is a little bit of adult stuff and the violence is similar to The Hunger Games.

I highly recommend both the show and the books to anyone who loves this type of fantasy. As always, I will not give too much away but know that I bought this series and Six of Crows and plan on reading the rest of them ASAP. It was that good!

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Links:

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst is a book that I picked up kind of on a whim but ended up loving. I honestly don’t remember if it was a book I saw in my Amazon suggestions or if it was one of the books my daughter bought me for Christmas a couple of years ago, but wherever I found it, it definitely called to me in the strongest manner possible. It is a fabulous book that hit all of my cozy fantasy spots while having a great story. I really wish there was a bunch more books about Caz the plant and Kiela the librarian!

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The book starts out with an overthrowing of the throne, a great library on fire and the escape of Kiela the librarian, Caz the talking plant and the crates of valuable books both have stashed away in a boat. Kiela and Caz end up far away on a small island in Kiela’s hometown. They settle into her old rundown house while hiding their top secret and forbidden selection of books. Needless to say, they have to interact with the locals and end up finding out a bunch of things about themselves along the way including the secrets of spellcasting.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book! I liked it so much that I bought her second book in the series The Enchanted Greenhouse which is about Caz’s creator and preordered her newest book, Sea of Charms, which comes out in July of 2026. The story is very well written and the romance that happens is very sweet with a great backstory. I love all of the fantasy elements to the story and the true conflict of an introvert stuck in a position where they have to rely on others to make it through. The internal struggle to socialize was well felt!

Needless to say I highly recommend this book! I have already started reading The Enchanted Greenhouse and so far it is good as well. I am thinking of doing a book club reading for Sea of Charms when it comes out, maybe for August since it comes out towards the end of July. Let me know what you think about joining!

As always, I encourage readers to find books at libraries and used book shops, but if you need more information on what to find or to snag an early copy of Sea of Charms, below are some links to the books mentioned in this post.

Happy Reading!

This site participates in affiliate links and receives a small fee for affiliate recommendations at no cost to you. As always we only recommend products we have tried ourselves. We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

Links:

The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst

The Enchanted Greenhouse

Sea of Charms

When I first say the concept of a Personal Curriculum on YouTube it was like something clicked in my head and I finally had a name to what I was trying to accomplish in the next few years. I have been trying to find things to learn while I am unemployed as I do not function well without new and exciting things to learn. I was roughly planning out what I would work on for 2026 when I came across a video on something called a Personal Curriculum and everything fell into place.

The concept of a Personal Curriculum was first coined by TikTokker Elizabeth Jean at xparmesanprincessx and has become more popular this fall. I do not have a TikTok account but it has made its way over to YouTube where I first heard about it. The idea is similar to homeschooling where you pick a few subjects to study over a period of time and complete projects or “assignments” that you have created. Some people do monthly or quarterly and I am going to go with quarterly because following the seasons seems wildly appropriate and is what I am used to with the colleges in the United States that I attended. I am not going to be very serious with it and assign large projects as I am doing this more for personal growth and I don’t want to stress myself out to the point of abandoning the project entirely but I do want the accountability of it so I will keep track of what I work through and post regularly on the Cozy Oscoey channel.

This site participates in affiliate links and receives a small fee for affiliate recommendations at no cost to you. As always we only recommend products we have tried ourselves. We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

For November and December of 2025 I am going to continue with the French studies I started in September by adding in a couple of more formal textbooks such as the one pictured above “Learn French Fast for Adult Beginners” and Short Stories in French for Beginners. I will be working on a few chapters a week for the main book and reading one story a week from the short stories book. I am hoping to push hard through the end of 2025 with French so I can learn it pretty fast. I do need a lot of repetition though and I am absorbing it very slowly. We are thinking of visiting France at some point in the next couple of years and it would be very helpful to know some of the language.

I also got a copy of the dual language version of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll with both French and English next to each other so we can practice our reading out loud. We have been casually taking turns at dinner once a week or so just for practice and it has been super helpful. Sometimes we run it through Google Translate afterwards to see if we were correct. We will eventually go to the library and check out a bunch of books in French to practice but I thought this would be a good beginning or us. Fun fact I learned when we started reading this book was that my kids have never read Alice in Wonderland or seen the movies! We are also going to read it in English as I am sure this in an abridged version.

We are also as a family taking French Lessons with a tutor once a week through the Preply app to help with pronunciation and boy do I need it! My kids are both taking French in school now so they get plenty of pronunciation help there but I really need to work on it. The sounds definitely do not come naturally to me at all and we are very lucky to have a fabulous tutor that has embraced the chaos of our family trying to learn at all different levels. I do have a sharable link for it and do get a small amount back if you subscribe to lessons but it gives you a coupon code for 70% off your first trail lesson linked with the following link: Trial Discount for Preply Lesson. I highly recommend finding a naturally speaking French teacher and checking out the reviews before you settle on someone. We picked someone based on the reviews and it has been such a good fit for us!

This site participates in affiliate links and receives a small fee for affiliate recommendations at no cost to you. As always we only recommend products we have tried ourselves. We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

Another class I decided on for the end of the year was Art. In November and December I will be working on creating original diamond painting art for these blank notebooks I bought from Amazon. I have the blank diamond painting canvases I bought over a year ago to use and tons of extra diamond drills from projects I have already completed so I am super excited to get started on it sometime next week. I have already started taking French notes in this book but it will still work to add some sparkle to it! I picked these notebooks because the outside paper is a little rough and I was hoping the glue would stick better when I glue my finished pieces onto it. I will post updates to this project both here on the blog and on the Cozy Oscoey channel as I work through it.

The last class I want to focus on for the end of 2025 is Fitness or Physical Education. I am still taking it slow through the end of the year with my fitness as I continue to recover from my many foot and knee issues along with leftover asthma issues from our run in with Covid last June. It will probably be spring again before I can fully get back into the swing of things and return to my triathlon training but for now I am just going to continue to do slow gentle exercise and maybe add in some core work. My eventual goal is to do a small triathlon and I will be focusing on swimming this winter with possibly some stationary bike riding and snowshoeing. My goal is to check back in with myself mid-January  prior to starting to intensify things or start running again but I am an impatient person so we shall see if I make it that long!

Looking ahead to 2026 I will be continuing with French, reading through a list of books, working through some of the above Historic Sampler book, learning some sewing and working on my piano technique. I would love to eventually learn the cello but that is pretty far out there in terms of time commitment. There are so many topics and directions my 2026 learning could go it is going to be hard to chose. I may end up just choosing something for the first quarter of the year and then adapting as needed.

What types of things do you want to learn in the future? How are you going to make that happen?

Great Videos to Inspire you to Start a Personal Curriculum:

Building a Personal Curriculum for Fall by Liane Likes

My Personal Curriculum: Books, Cooking & Cozy Projects by BIBLIOLIFESTYLE

Planning a personal curriculum for September by Ruby Granger 

Self Education: Your Best Defence Against Brain Rot by  Thought Couture

Thank you for reading and I hope you find something you enjoy to learn about this year!

Links:

Cozy Oscoey YouTube Channel

Check out our video on Cozy Oscoey: Introduction to Personal Curriculum

Preply: Get 70% off a trial lesson: Preply Trial Discount

Elizabeth Jean on TikTok: xparmesanprincessx on TikTok

Books:

Learn French Fast for Adult Beginners by Speak Abroad Academy

Short Stories in French for Beginners by Olly Richards

Dual Language Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (Author), John Robert Loehr (Translator)

Stitch by Stitch: Learning to Sew, One Project at a Time by Deborah Moebes

Alfred’s Basic Adult All-In-One Piano Course : Lesson, Theory, Technic by W.Palmer, M.Manus, A.Letheo 

Historic Samplers: Selected from Museums and Historic Homes by Patricia Ryan and Allen D. Bragdon 

Items I Bought:

Blank Notebooks for Added Sparkle 

Blank Diamond Painting Canvases