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Darling Beast
RECOMMENDED: Darling Beast by Elizabeth Hoyt is $2.99! This book seven in the Maiden Lane historical romance series, and hinted at a Beauty & the Beast theme. Elyse and Redheadgirl did a join review of the book and gave it an A-:
Elyse: For me it’s a solid B+. It was a good read, but lacked the Beauty and the Beast storyline I really wanted. Also Plot Moppets. And questionable choices on Apollo’s part.
Oh, there are great sex scenes though!
So…maybe A-?
RHG: The sex scenes were great. I’d agree with the A-.
A MAN CONDEMNED…
Falsely accused of murder and mute from a near-fatal beating, Apollo Greaves, Viscount Kilbourne has escaped from Bedlam. With the Crown’s soldiers at his heels, he finds refuge in the ruins of a pleasure garden, toiling as a simple gardener. But when a vivacious young woman moves in, he’s quickly driven to distraction…
A DESPERATE WOMAN…
London’s premier actress, Lily Stump, is down on her luck when she’s forced to move into a scorched theatre with her maid and small son. But she and her tiny family aren’t the only inhabitants-a silent, hulking beast of a man also calls the charred ruins home. Yet when she catches him reading her plays, Lily realizes there’s more to this man than meets the eye.
OUT OF ASH, DESIRE FLARES
Though scorching passion draws them together, Apollo knows that Lily is keeping secrets. When his past catches up with him, he’s forced to make a choice: his love for Lily…or the explosive truth that will set him free.
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The Crown’s Game
The Crown’s Game by Evelyn Skye is $1.99 at Amazon and Barnes & Noble! This is a YA fantasy novel that has been sitting on TBR pile for a bit. It sounds so awesome, but I’m also hesitant to pull the trigger when it comes to YA. Readers loved the Russian setting and the magical element, but wanted more political intrigue over the romance.
Vika Andreyev can summon the snow and turn ash into gold. Nikolai Karimov can see through walls and conjure bridges out of thin air. They are enchanters—the only two in Russia—and with the Ottoman Empire and the Kazakhs threatening, the Tsar needs a powerful enchanter by his side.
And so he initiates the Crown’s Game, an ancient duel of magical skill—the greatest test an enchanter will ever know. The victor becomes the Imperial Enchanter and the Tsar’s most respected adviser. The defeated is sentenced to death.
Raised on tiny Ovchinin Island her whole life, Vika is eager for the chance to show off her talent in the grand capital of Saint Petersburg. But can she kill another enchanter—even when his magic calls to her like nothing else ever has?
For Nikolai, an orphan, the Crown’s Game is the chance of a lifetime. But his deadly opponent is a force to be reckoned with—beautiful, whip smart, imaginative—and he can’t stop thinking about her.
And when Pasha, Nikolai’s best friend and heir to the throne, also starts to fall for the mysterious enchantress, Nikolai must defeat the girl they both love . . . or be killed himself.
As long-buried secrets emerge, threatening the future of the empire, it becomes dangerously clear . . . the Crown’s Game is not one to lose.
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My Lady Jane
My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Jodi Meadows, and Brodi Ashton is $1.99! This book comes highly recommended and I keep bumping it up, higher and higher, on my TBR list. This is a YA fantasy novel that many readers find clever and really entertaining. However, others didn’t find it very memorable. It has a 4.1-star rating on Goodreads.
The comical, fantastical, romantical, (not) entirely true story of Lady Jane Grey. In My Lady Jane, coauthors Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows have created a one-of-a-kind fantasy in the tradition of The Princess Bride, featuring a reluctant king, an even more reluctant queen, a noble steed, and only a passing resemblance to actual history—because sometimes history needs a little help.
At sixteen, Lady Jane Grey is about to be married off to a stranger and caught up in a conspiracy to rob her cousin, King Edward, of his throne. But those trifling problems aren’t for Jane to worry about. Jane gets to be Queen of England.
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Rooms
Rooms by Lauren Oliver is $1.99! This is a departure from Oliver’s previous YA novels, as this seems to fall more into adult fiction. Based on the description, it also seems perfectly spooky for an October read. Reviewers say the book starts off strong, but their interest seemed to wane halfway through. Have you read this one?
A tale of family, ghosts, secrets, and mystery, in which the lives of the living and the dead intersect in shocking, surprising, and moving ways
Wealthy Richard Walker has just died, leaving behind his country house full of rooms packed with the detritus of a lifetime. His estranged family—bitter ex-wife Caroline, troubled teenage son Trenton, and unforgiving daughter Minna—have arrived for their inheritance.
But the Walkers are not alone. Prim Alice and the cynical Sandra, long dead former residents bound to the house, linger within its claustrophobic walls. Jostling for space, memory, and supremacy, they observe the family, trading barbs and reminiscences about their past lives. Though their voices cannot be heard, Alice and Sandra speak through the house itself—in the hiss of the radiator, a creak in the stairs, the dimming of a light bulb.
The living and dead are each haunted by painful truths that will soon surface with explosive force. When a new ghost appears, and Trenton begins to communicate with her, the spirit and human worlds collide—with cataclysmic results.
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I haven’t read the Crown’s Game, but in Russian, names are declined, ie they change according to the gender, number and part of speech in which they are used. The part of speech doesn’t matter in English, but Andreyeva is a woman’s last name. Andreyev is a man’s. My kids have Russian last names and when we got visas, they spelled my son’s name in Russian with the correct spelling for a Russian adjective (last names are either adjectives or nouns) and my daughter’s like was a foreign word, because the gender of the adjective did not match the gender of my daughter.
I presume if the blurb gets last names wrong, the book will be full of Googlisms — translations that are just odd. An easy example is that the way you say “Happy Birthday” in Russian directly translates as “With (the) day of birth (to) you.” With grammatical improvements and missing words added and English sentences structure, you get “Congratulations to you on the day of your birth,” which is still funky.
I can’t tell you how many Harlquins with Russian billionaires have them saying Khristos! because someone translated Christ, but the Russians never use it as a swear, so much so that when I said Christ! they wondered if I was shouting for God.
I’m willing to ignore the Andreyev glitch, but The Crown’s Game plot makes no sense to me. If the tsar was lucky enough to have two enchanters, each with their own skill set, wouldn’t it make more sense to say, use them both rather than killing one after wasting time in a magical competition? Hopefully the book provides some motive for not keeping them both around to help out.
Can anyone give me advice about reading Elizabeth Hoyt out of order? I would like to read it, but haven’t read any previous books in the series.
Emily, I’m reading Hoyt’s Maiden Lane out of order because of a combination of sale prices, library availability, and trope appeal. So far I’ve read 1, 3, 10, a novella, 2, and 11. It can be done, but I find myself spending a fair amount of time googling secondary character names to figure out which book (if any) is theirs. It’s a well-populated, well-integrated world. However, I haven’t run into any spoilers that weren’t already spoiled by reading the descriptions of each book on Amazon.
My recommendation would be to read in order, if possible.
SusanH – I’m glad someone else thought that too. It seems awfully wasteful to kill off one of only two enchanters in the kingdom for…. reasons? Especially if, as it sounds like, they want to get together and make baby enchanters. Give them titles and some money and enjoy all the bridges and ashes turned into gold you could ever need.
Emily, it’s totally doable to read them out of order; I didn’t really have any difficulty keeping track of everyone. Of course, I tend to read series out of order as a rule; otherwise I get burnt out.
It’s been a while since I read The Crown’s Game, but I vaguely remember that there’s a reason that only one can survive having to do with the nature of magic in that world. For me, it was a book that I’d read from the library but wouldn’t pay even a sale price for. It had some good moments, and some where I felt let down by the author’s predictable choices.
I would say that you can totally read Maiden Lane out of order; I think I actually did it, at least somewhat? and I mean I love that series almost absurdly much. It’s one of my comfort reads.
Thank you!
While you can read the Maiden Lane series out of order, why would you want to? You miss a lot of the subtleties of the mystery and how the characters interconnect.