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When Beauty Tamed the Beast
When Beauty Tamed the Beast by Eloisa James is 99c! This is the second book in the Fairy Tales historical romance series. Many readers love the Beauty & the Beast retelling, but they mention the book is more humorous than historically accurate. It has a 4-star rating on Goodreads.
Miss Linnet Berry Thrynne is a Beauty . . . Naturally, she’s betrothed to a Beast.
Piers Yelverton, Earl of Marchant, lives in a castle in Wales where, it is rumored, his bad temper flays everyone he crosses. And rumor also has it that a wound has left the earl immune to the charms of any woman.
Linnet is not just any woman.
She is more than merely lovely: her wit and charm brought a prince to his knees. She estimates the earl will fall madly in love—in just two weeks.
Yet Linnet has no idea of the danger posed to her own heart by a man who may never love her in return.
If she decides to be very wicked indeed . . . what price will she pay for taming his wild heart?
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A Discovery of Witches
A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness is $1.99! This is the first book in the All Soul’s Trilogy. Many readers say this is a fantasy novel filled with romance and adventure. However, others didn’t like the characters and found the hype to be overrated. Have you read this one? What’d you think?
A richly inventive novel about a centuries-old vampire, a spellbound witch, and the mysterious manuscript that draws them together.
Deep in the stacks of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, young scholar Diana Bishop unwittingly calls up a bewitched alchemical manuscript in the course of her research. Descended from an old and distinguished line of witches, Diana wants nothing to do with sorcery; so after a furtive glance and a few notes, she banishes the book to the stacks. But her discovery sets a fantastical underworld stirring, and a horde of daemons, witches, and vampires soon descends upon the library. Diana has stumbled upon a coveted treasure lost for centuries-and she is the only creature who can break its spell.
Debut novelist Deborah Harkness has crafted a mesmerizing and addictive read, equal parts history and magic, romance and suspense. Diana is a bold heroine who meets her equal in vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont, and gradually warms up to him as their alliance deepens into an intimacy that violates age-old taboos. This smart, sophisticated story harks back to the novels of Anne Rice, but it is as contemporary and sensual as the Twilight series-with an extra serving of historical realism.
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Lovecraft Country
RECOMMENDED: Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff is $1.99! Carrie really loved this piece of fantasy horror and it earned an A grade:
Lovecraft Country is sad, and scary, and funny, and exciting. It’s also fist-pumping-in-the-air awesome. I loved the range of characters and the many tough, smart women. I loved the seamless melding of the magical and the mundane, the tragic and triumphant, the funny and the terrifying. The writing is simply impeccable. If I had extra thumbs, they would all be up.
The critically acclaimed cult novelist makes visceral the terrors of life in Jim Crow America and its lingering effects in this brilliant and wondrous work of the imagination that melds historical fiction, pulp noir, and Lovecraftian horror and fantasy
Chicago, 1954. When his father Montrose goes missing, twenty-two year old Army veteran Atticus Turner embarks on a road trip to New England to find him, accompanied by his Uncle George—publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide—and his childhood friend Letitia. On their journey to the manor of Mr. Braithwhite—heir to the estate that owned Atticus’s great grandmother—they encounter both mundane terrors of white America and malevolent spirits that seem straight out of the weird tales George devours.
At the manor, Atticus discovers his father in chains, held prisoner by a secret cabal named the Order of the Ancient Dawn—led by Samuel Braithwhite and his son Caleb—which has gathered to orchestrate a ritual that shockingly centers on Atticus. And his one hope of salvation may be the seed of his—and the whole Turner clan’s—destruction.
A chimerical blend of magic, power, hope, and freedom that stretches across time, touching diverse members of one black family, Lovecraft Country is a devastating kaleidoscopic portrait of racism—the terrifying specter that continues to haunt us today.
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The Love Potion
The Love Potion by Sandra Hill is 99c! This is a contemporary romance with a scientist heroine who creates a “love potion.” Readers are torn about the suspension of disbelief needed to enjoy this book. Some found it too silly, while others loved the ridiculous plot. It has a 3.9-star rating on GR.
Hijinks ensue when a beautiful chemist unwittingly tests her new love potion on a wildly handsome lawyer.
A love potion in a jelly bean?
Yep! Fame and fortune are surely only a swallow away when Dr. Sylvie Fontaine discovers a chemical formula guaranteed to attract the opposite sex. Though her own love life is purely hypothetical, the shy chemist’s professional future is assured … as soon as she can find a human guinea pig.
The only problem is the wrong man has swallowed Sylvie’s love potion. Bad boy Lucien LeDeux is more than she can handle even before he’s dosed with the Jelly Bean Fix. The wildly virile lawyer is the last person she’d choose to subject to the scientific method.
When the dust settles, Sylvie and Luc have the answers to some burning questions-Can a man die of testosterone overload? Can a straight-laced female lose every single one of her inhibitions?-and they learn that old-fashioned romance is still the best catalyst for love.
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Okay, wasn’t the heroine’s dress on that Eloisa James originally pink?
@Heather S: It’s pink on Goodreads, but how would we know it’s Beauty and the Beast without that Disney taxi dress?
@Heather S: That was also my immediate reaction, the copy I own definitely has a pink dress!
Also, I haven’t read that Sandra Hill book but her books are very hit or miss for me.
I absolutely loved A Discovery of Witches, and eagerly awaited the second book in the trilogy (Shadow of Night). I finished it but did not really enjoy it. I did not read the third book because people I trusted who read it said it was worse than the second book, although looking at Goodreads I see it has a good rating. For $1.99 I say A Discovery of Witches is a good deal, but I would not advise going further. If I recall correctly, book 1 ends in a cliffhanger, so be warned.
Seconding what Laurel said about A Discovery of Witches.
Also, and I say this as someone who loves Eloisa James, and House, and fanfic, and Beauty and the Beast retellings for that matter, but that book was like bad House fanfic.
I stalled out about 40% of the way through A Discovery of Witches. I feel like I should like it, so I keep it on my iPad just in case I ever decide to pick it up again, but it’s been over six months and I still have no desire to finish it. I don’t know why it didn’t hold my interest. It has a lot of elements that I like, but I was just bored. I think maybe I just found the heroine tedious, and since it’s told in the first person from her perspective, that was an insurmountable obstacle for my enjoyment.
“Yep! Fame and fortune are surely only a swallow away when Dr. Sylvie Fontaine discovers a chemical formula guaranteed to attract the opposite sex.”
A swallow away? Teeheehehe!
What’s that you say? Stop lowering the tone? I’m only human, I couldn’t resist!
I listened to A Discovery of Witches over Christmas and, while it wasn’t perfect, I loved it. I didn’t immediately start to listen to the next two books, not because I wasn’t eager, but because I was trying not to glom and I had other books I wanted to get to. However, some of the reviews for those books dismayed me so I confess that I skimmed ahead in both to see what would happen. There are some problematic things, including Matthew becoming more difficult (questionable decisions, possessiveness, etc), but I feel as if I’m prepared and definitely intend to continue.
There was a time when I gobbled up Sandra Hill’s books. But now I really have to be in the right mood to read her books. Of course half of my problem is with the advent of Kindle and owning *cough* thousands (eek!) of books I am more picky on what I want to read at any given moment. Before ebooks I’d been known to grab stacks of paperbacks, pile them around me and look through each one to help determine what I felt like reading at that moment. It was also comforting to sit surrounded by a pile of books. Now I have to have my Kindle within arms reach at all times.
It is impossible to recommend A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness highly enough. It is well written, the characters fascinatingly complex, the plot intrigues. Oh my, it is Just Plain Wonderful as is the rest of the trilogy.
I’m on Eloisa James’ Newsflash email list and today’s email noted that the cover dress had been changed to yellow to match Disney Belle. I personally preferred the pink, even though it’s not my favorite color.
I found the heroine in A Discovery of Witches tiresome. And the vampire yoga bits were laughable.
I’m with Gloriamarie….I loved A Discovery of Witches! The second book was insane with historical figures and I hated the portrayal of Christopher Marlowe, but I loved the book, especially Diana coming into her magic. The third book gets a little convoluted and I hated what the author did to a beloved character or three and the torture and subsequent rescue was also difficult, but there were parts of the final book that were wondrous. The audio books narrated by Jennifer Ikeda are incredible!
A Discovery of Witches was god-awful. Jenne’s one-star review on Goodreads was spot on. I cannot stand when authors tell us a character is intelligent, and then show her doing a bunch of really dumb stuff, or when an author tells us a character is a “strong female” and then fail to give her any agency. I tried really hard to like this book as a friend loaned it to me, but it was just too painful. DNF
I read A Discovery of Witches and LOVED it, and then immediately dove in to the second book, which did not work for me even a little bit. The first maybe 10-15% was OK but then I just could not move forward. When they are hanging out with Christopher Marlowe…just no. The hero got weird and the heroine got whiny and I could not deal. I always think I’m going to go back to it but it’s been more than a year and so far I haven’t. ADOW is a fun read though, if someone wanted to read it and stop there. Especially for $1.99.
I was no shit thinking about When Beauty Tamed the Beast yesterday & set up an eReader IQ alert for it. Emma Watson is bringing cheap books into my life– here’s hoping that all the other Beauty & the Beast retellings in Romancelandia follow suit!!
I am another reader who felt I “should” enjoy Discovery of Witches, but had real trouble with the female protagonist. From the description, I was thinking the character would be strong, intelligent, and rational, and was really appalled by the level of TSTL-ness. I think if I went in expecting a female in the mode of the helpless characters from the had-I-but-known, old-timey books, I would have enjoyed this more. I started Book 2, but could not finish.
Came here just to say, dagnabit, I don’t like the yellow dress. 🙁 The pink one worked better for me.
I’m one of those who just couldn’t get into A Discovery of Witches. The heroine was mind numbingly boring which is a problem when the book is in her POV. The hero was ridiculous and the whole thing was just stiff and pretentious. And as @cbackson mentioned the vampire yoga was unintentionally hilarious.
I made myself finish Discovery of Witches for reasons that I can’t remember, but it wasn’t because I liked the book. There’s almost an interesting premise, but it gets squandered with a lot of nothing happening for long stretches of time. I do remember these Amazonreviews which kind of summed up my feelings.
@MsCellanie – I was trying to find the link to that first review (the one by HistoryGrad) earlier today, but it didn’t show up. It made me wonder if Amazon was manipulating things to hide the best bad reviews.
I wanted to love A Discovery of Witches (I know Oxford really well), the premise sounded amazing, but when I started reading I found that it was basically Twilight for grown-ups. The heroine was far too easily bowled over by the ‘hero’s gorgeousness for a supposedly intelligent adult and the hero was over-possessive and controlling. And his family…
I was curious about A Discovery of Witches from the mixed reviews here and started reading the sample. My novice paleographer self mildly screamed at the way incunabula were treated in the first pages. Tugging at a call slip in a 17th C book? PUTTING a call slip in a 17th C book in the first place? Carrying A STACK of rare books “tucked under the chin” instead of one at a time with two hands? Aargh.
Never mind the confusion of manuscripts and incunabula, and the “my scholarship is rational and not intuitive” speech. Real paleographers (among whom I sadly cannot count myself) are super-intuitive. They touch and sniff (and according to academic urban legend even taste) books all the time in the interests of dating them and gaining information about them. There IS a rational basis for the touching. (An experienced scholar can tell the difference in feel not only between paper and parchment but between different KINDS of parchment, vellum, calfskin, etc. And noticing whether parchment pages are laid “hair-to-hair” and “flesh-to-flesh” side, and how well the “hair side” of a parchment page is prepared tells you something about how carefully the book was constructed, and by extension how expensive it was and the potential audience.) But there is also an element of wonder and even superstition among those who work with rare books that defies strict rationality. I didn’t buy the heroine’s voice as a scholar, and I started rolling my eyes at the idea that she would need to be told by her aunt (not in any of her classes!) that “chemistry used to be called alchemy…it had a lot of magic in it.” This is odd, since according to goodreads the author actually is a historian of science. It felt like she was dumbing down her field for a general audience to the point of making the character implausible.
I started skimming the biographical info-dump, which is not a good sign. I’m afraid it’s a pass.
Now I really want to read a romance with a paleographer heroine who investigates a book with that level of detail and inquiry. Whoa.
@Sarah – don’t tempt me. I have a stack of student essays to grade plus a dissertation chapter and a conference article due. Must. Resist. Paleography. Romance. Idea.
(To give you an idea of a paleographer hero, a very eminent German professor of the last century wrote a textbook about dating manuscripts filled with such gems as “this guide is intended to provide a rule of thumb for handwriting” and “the importance of the invention of spectacles cannot be overlooked.” And these are people for whom “romance” is a totally serious genre. The banter writes itself.)
I really liked “A Discovery of Witches”. Totally worth $1.99. BUT not if you want to read a trilogy because I would stop at the first one and be done. The second one was AWFUL. I’ve never in my life slogged through a book waiting for it to get better only to give up with maybe 50 pages left. Just terrible. I bought the third one in anticipation of finishing the trilogy but ain’t gonna happen.
@Rebecca – I absolutely want to read something like that!
To be clear, I understand that “smart” characters can still make mistakes (I’m looking at you, Miles Vorkosigan!!!). The problem is when they make lots of dumb choices for no good reason.
It’s fascinating how divisive A Discovery of Witches is! I loved loved loved it. I found the heroine interesting (especially because she is a bit older than your common 22-year old fantasy heroine) and has life scars and a personality. Book Two is very different from the first book and it took a couple of chapters to get into it but I loved the parts about old London and by the end I couldn’t put it down. Book three is dark but satisfying. Overall, yes this is a little Twilight for adults but in a good way. It’s Twilight with substance and a strong and interesting storyline and I loved the trilogy for that.
I loved The Love Potion by Sandra Hill but I miss the John DeSalvo cover!
Ugh, I hated A Discovery of Witches; basically felt it was meant to be “Twilight for grown-ups” and here’s a controversial statement: I thought Twilight was better!
That was my first Eloisa book.
Not all readers enjoy the same books, I get it, but comparing “A Discovery of Witches” to “Twilight” would be laughable if it wasn’t so insulting. Deborah Harkness’ academic credentials alone are very impressive, Meyer’s not so much. The popularity and success of books like of “Twilight” and “Fifty Shades of Grey” has always baffled me, the writing and the storylines are horrible. But alas, to each her own, variety is the spice of life.
When I read A Discovery of Witches I really, really, really wanted a book about the lesbian aunt. I loved them. I didn’t love the heroine.