The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black is $2.99! If this name seems familiar, it’s because The Coldest Girl in Coldtown was in the 2014 DABWAHA Tournment. This is a young adult paranormal romance, and readers loved the dash of horror and gore in the story. Regarding the plot, a few reviewers have commented that some of the action doesn’t quite make sense in the grand scheme of things. It has a 3.8-star rating on GR.
Tana lives in a world where walled cities called Coldtowns exist. In them, quarantined monsters and humans mingle in a decadently bloody mix of predator and prey. The only problem is, once you pass through Coldtown’s gates, you can never leave.
One morning, after a perfectly ordinary party, Tana wakes up surrounded by corpses. The only other survivors of this massacre are her exasperatingly endearing ex-boyfriend, infected and on the edge, and a mysterious boy burdened with a terrible secret. Shaken and determined, Tana enters a race against the clock to save the three of them the only way she knows how: by going straight to the wicked, opulent heart of Coldtown itself.
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Storm Born by Richelle Mead is $1.99 at most vendors! I’ve read about half of the Dark Swan series (two out of the four books) and I’ve really enjoyed this particular urban fantasy series. I know further along, more romance happens, but the first book only has a few elements of it. Richelle Mead writes a lot of paranormal and urban fantasy (Vampire Academy and the Georgina Kincaid succubus series), so this genre is her bread and butter. I will warn you that there is a love triangle, which readers either loved or hated. Any other readers care to weigh in?
Just typical. No love life to speak of for months, then all at once, every horny creature in the Otherworld wants to get in your pants. . .
Eugenie Markham is a powerful shaman who does a brisk trade banishing spirits and fey who cross into the mortal world. Mercenary, yes, but a girl’s got to eat. Her most recent case, however, is enough to ruin her appetite. Hired to find a teenager who has been taken to the Otherworld, Eugenie comes face to face with a startling prophecy—one that uncovers dark secrets about her past and claims that Eugenie’s first-born will threaten the future of the world as she knows it.
Now Eugenie is a hot target for every ambitious demon and Otherworldy ne’er-do-well, and the ones who don’t want to knock her up want her dead. Eugenie handles a Glock as smoothly as she wields a wand, but she needs some formidable allies for a job like this. She finds them in Dorian, a seductive fairy king with a taste for bondage, and Kiyo, a gorgeous shape-shifter who redefines animal attraction. But with enemies growing bolder and time running out, Eugenie realizes that the greatest danger is yet to come, and it lies in the dark powers that are stirring to life within her…
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The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo is $1.99! This is a mixture of historical fiction, fantasy, and romance. The Ghost Bride has actually been recommended to me by so many friends that I had to take notice, though I haven’t had a chance to read it just yet. Readers can’t say enough good things about the setting and Chinese folklore, though some mention the book reads more like a young adult novel, which they weren’t really expecting. It has a 3.7-star rating on GR.
Li Lan, the daughter of a respectable Chinese family in colonial Malaysia, hopes for a favorable marriage, but her father has lost his fortune, and she has few suitors. Instead, the wealthy Lim family urges her to become a “ghost bride” for their son, who has recently died under mysterious circumstances. Rarely practiced, a traditional ghost marriage is used to placate a restless spirit. Such a union would guarantee Li Lan a home for the rest of her days, but at what price?
Night after night, Li Lan is drawn into the shadowy parallel world of the Chinese afterlife, where she must uncover the Lim family’s darkest secrets—and the truth about her own family.
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The Taken by Vicki Pettersson is $1.99! This is the first book in the Celestial Blues urban fantasy and I just have to say that I love the cover model’s dress to pieces. A journalist and an angel private investigator (and I mean a PI who is also an angel, not a PI who investigates angels) team up to fight the stirrings of an evil conspiracy. For many readers, Pettersson seems to be an auto-buy author after enjoying her Signs of the Zodiac series, though several had a hard time liking the heroine. Anyone interested?
Griffin Shaw used to be a PI, but that was back when gumshoes hoofed the streets . . . and he was still alive. Fifty years later, he’s an angel, but that doesn’t make him a saint. One small mistake has altered fate, and now he’s been dumped back onto the mortal mudflat to collect another soul—Katherine “Kit” Craig, a journalist whose latest investigation is about to get her clipped.
Bucking heavenly orders, Grif refuses to let the sable-haired siren come to harm. Besides, protecting her offers a chance to solve the mystery of his own unsolved murder—and dole out some overdue payback for the death of his beloved wife, Evie.
Joining forces, Kit and Grif’s search for answers leads beyond the blinding lights of the Strip into the dark heart of an evil conspiracy. But a ruthless killer determined to destroy them isn’t Grif’s biggest threat. His growing attraction to Kit could cost them both their lives, along with the answer to the haunting question of his long afterlife . . .
I enjoyed Storm Born a lot when I read it, but that was several years ago and I can’t say I remember much in the way of story details other than liking the main character and some interesting secondary characters with mysterious motives.
Am intrigued by The Ghost Bride and wondering if anyone else here has read it?
@Joanna I’m also intrigued by The Ghost Bride – will probably take a chance on it! The first few pages were good.
I really enjoyed the Dark Swan series, but the end has some WTFery to end all WTFery.
I liked the Dark Swan series until the end. The ending was godawful. And I never could figure out if that was truly meant to be the ending or if the series got dropped suddenly. Either way, it pissed me off and I wouldn’t recommend the series to new readers because of it.
I have strong feelz about series that abruptly end. As a result, I usually prefer to start a series after they’ve concluded or they’re pretty well-established since I’ve been burnt so many times. (And this is why I’m so grateful to Moira Moore who self-pubbed the end of her series so readers could have closure. Class act.)
I liked The Coldest Girl in Coldtown—maybe not as much as a lot of other folks did, but it’s certainly worth a try at the sale price.
I bought all but the Ghost Bride earlier. Can’t remember much about Taken so it must not have stuck with me much, but The Coldest Girl in Coldtown was fantastic! The heroine was way more mature than her 18 (?) years listed. Sometimes I think authors are encouraged to age down the heroine so the book will crossover to YA. I pictured this character much older. The story was lush and well paced. It had been on my wish list but at $9.99 I couldn’t bring myself to push that buy button . Do it Now. Storm Born is still in the TBR pile.
I want to buy Ghost Bride. But some other blog convinced me to ante up $.99 for a box set. I think there’s five novels. Add that up to my other unread books on my Kindle. And NaNo is coming up next month in like eight days (or is it seven). In between books and work, there’s this wonderful thing called sleep. Will not click, will not click.
Absolutely recommending the Celestial Blues trilogy, which are all available for the low low $1.99 each. It is wonderful. Griff is a P.I. in the film noir sense who was murdered back in the fifties and was assigned to escorting souls to the afterlife in his afterlife. Kit is a journalist with rockabilly style so she’s always wearing stuff like that dress on the cover. I have the third book around here somewhere. The GBPL assures me I have it, and they wouldn’t lie. I’d be reading it now if could find it. Or I could play fast and loose with the book budget & buy them all…. decisions, decisions, decisions.
The Princess Bride ebook is $2.99 today at Barnes & Noble and Amazon. It’s the B&N Daily Find, and Ama’s price matching.
http://www.amazon.com/Princess-Bride-Morgensterns-Classic-Adventure-ebook/dp/B003IEJZRY/
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/ebook-nook-daily-find-bargain-deal/379003102
It’s probably to stir up interest for Cary Elwes’s new book, “As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of the Princess Bride.” Which looks pretty awesomesauce.
http://www.amazon.com/As-You-Wish-Inconceivable-Princess-ebook/dp/B00IWTWOI2/
I started out really liking the Dark Swan series. Then the dreaded Love Triangle happened. Honestly, it just got to be too much. At the beginning of one book, she was with one guy, then by the middle, she was with the other, and then by the end, she had gone back. Then she was hoisting the secret baby on somebody else to raise. It read like an angsty ADD New Adult/Young adult book, but with sexy times. I never finished the series – the anger wasn’t worth it.
Yet another vote for caution in reading the Dark Swan series. I really loved the first three books and was really disappointed in the final one. I read Richelle Mead’s blog and I don’t think the end of the series unplanned, just poorly executed. 🙁 I stayed away from her Succubus series due to similar comments about the last book in that series. But I did love the Vampire Academy books and I am still reading the spin-off series.
On a happier note, I am absolutely picking up The Ghost Bride. Sounds like it is just my cup of tea.
I read The Ghost Bride over a year ago, when it first came out. Really good story – the world-building is awesome, and coming at the story from a different perspective (the Chinese-Malay culture and traditions) is very cool. I’d call it historical magical-realism-fantasy, really. It has elements of macabre horror in it, too. If you read and liked “Peony In Love” by Lisa See, I think you’ll enjoy this.
“Ghost Bride” would make a fine creepy Halloween book.
@Vasha – ooh yes, a creepy Halloween book! I have to say I’m in the mood for some Halloween-themed reading, but not sure where to look in the romance world…that would make a great thread, I think. So far I have a Doctor Who book with a Halloween theme lined up, but that’s it.
I loved the Dark Swan series. I would encourage anyone who likes the genre to check it out.
So I really, really dislike YA, but like @Judy W, am finding the Coldest Girl in Coldtown just plain good reading. Reading about/running into self-absorbed, whiney TSTLers (imo: a common thread in the YAs I’ve read) tosses me out of a book as quickly as good as a whiff of hartshorn appears to remove the swoon from a Regency diva. The CGinC main character’s ability to consider whining internally is beautifully balanced by her “just suck it up and do” actions. The characters are complex and messy, which is absolutely necessary when the main point of the book seems to be showing that each and every choice, each and every reaction to an event beyond one’s apparent control, is an indication of who you have been, who you are now, and who you might become. While I imagine few will read the book quite the way I have, I certainly am finding it worth reading.