Week Two Favorites End of the Week Wrap Up!

Soooo......

We highlighted some awesome blogs this week! Hopefully ones many could take something from, and maybe even come back to for future discussions!

If you missed it, here's who we featured:

Week Two for OUR favorites, Day Four: Blogs and Bloggers, Next up "Marieke Nijkamp" @ DiversifYA*+ Ellen Oh's Prophecy/Warrior & Sarwat Chadda's The Savage Fortress/The City of Death giveaway!

We don't know if there was one book in particular that have truly inspired us fellow book bloggers to start our book blog. Maybe it was the promise of free books? Or was it the chance to connect with other book lovers like yourselves. 

For us it was a blog. A called DiversifYA. 

I'm sure we talk about this ALL the time. Too much maybe. But when we started our book blog, we were really frustrated that there weren't a lot of blogs that highlighted diverse books, writers and stories. DiversifYA isn't really a book blog per say. It's more of a blog that tries to shed some light on some interesting topics, themes and interviews you often see missing from book discussions:

Diversity in books.

DiversifYA is run by Marieke Nijkamp, who describes herself as a storyteller, dreamer, globe-trotter, and proud-to-be-geek. We just describe her as TOTALLY DOPE!

(Check us out, we actually got the chance to meet her at this years BookCon via the #weneeddiversebooks presentation.)

Marieke Nijkamp is extremely dedicated to the cause of Diverse Books and wants to be your Pitch Wars mentor. Isn't that awesome?

Blogs like DiversifYA are a total gem and we always learn something new peeking through it's blog posts. Trying to be a writer that incorporates diversity? Afraid of getting it wrong?

 Marieke's blog is the right place to start to read about different people's experiences so you know some things to avoid!

The promotion of diverse books

Hopefully anyone who reads Twinja Book Reviews comes for the reason we review books.

To reach out and diversify your choice in books.

We admit, our approach to book blogging isn't the most conventional. With reviews for books nearly everywhere on the web, it's difficult to stand out on really, any blog, with just book reviews alone.

Reviewing books that feature main protagonists, and when we mean MAIN, we mean the main narrative in which the story is being told,or if told with dual protagonists, one is of a marginalized group, or at the very least a love interest, who's main objective is more than to making kissy faces with the main character.

Blogoversary Celebration Day 3: Are you Diversifying your YA? DiversifYA's Marieke Nijkamp + $15 Amazon giftcard giveaway

Since my sister and I started blogging, DiversifYa has become one of our go to blogs!We check in every new post and I'm pretty sure they were one of the first blogs we really started following religiously. DiversifYA features up and coming authors, aspiring writers and much needed discussions about all things diversity. So we're happy to invite the creator of the site, Marieke Nijkamp on our blog today!!!

1. Why don't spend the next moment describing yourself in 20 words or less :)

How about...  "Writer. Reader. Traveler. Dreamer. Geek. Lover of life." That's eight. Twenty if you include my humming and hawing.

2. No, we didn't forget we're talking blogs :) Why don't you talk a little about your blog and it's mission!

Celebrating for making it to a whole year, join us in our Blogoversary! Giveaways, interviews, Guest Post and much more.....

It's been an amazing year and an even more amazing experience since we began blogging last March of 2013. We can't believe a whole year has passed since we started blogging about books. Since becoming book bloggers we've made lots of friends, tons of connects and read A LOT OF BOOKS! 

For our Blogoversary we were hosting a bunch of interviews from some amazing blogs doing their "thangs" in the blogging world. Many of them are diverse book blogs or passionate about marginalized groups in media!So get ready to follow some of these great blogs!

Here are a list of our confirmed guests, in no particular order. 

This year on twinja Book Reviews!

We started up back in March of 2013. Our first post was sloppy and we had little direction XD(First Post). It wasnt until after we began reading books with no marginalized groups, that we really took it upon ourselves to promote diversity.

As a person of color, and female, it is very hard not to get excited about diversity. Were going on 2014 and at times, you can still feel invisible in this world if you are not white, male, cis gendered, straight, able bodied and Christian. I think we still have a very long way to go. But we can start by trying harder to read and demand more books featuring diversity.

My Little Pocketsbooks is hosting a diversity reading challenge starting in January. One can sign up here. Many other blogs try promote such things. Blogs I tend to often go back to I wanted to highlight for the end of the year: