The Pages of the Mind
The Pages of the Mind by Jeffe Kennedy is $2.99! This is a fantasy romance with an arranged marriage. Readers loved the scholarly heroine, but found that the second half of the book had a very different feel than the first half. It has a 3.9-star rating on Goodreads. I will also mention that this was one of the reader recommended books from our Reader Rec Party at RT yesterday!
An Orphan’s Throne
Magic has broken free over the Twelve Kingdoms. The population is beset by shapeshifters and portents, landscapes that migrate, uncanny allies who are not quite human…and enemies eager to take advantage of the chaos.
Dafne Mailloux is no adventurer–she’s a librarian. But the High Queen trusts Dafne’s ability with languages, her way of winnowing the useful facts from a dusty scroll, and even more important, the subtlety and guile that three decades under the thumb of a tyrant taught her.
Dafne never thought to need those skills again. But she accepts her duty. Until her journey drops her into the arms of a barbarian king. He speaks no tongue she knows but that of power, yet he recognizes his captive as a valuable pawn. Dafne must submit to a wedding of alliance, becoming a prisoner-queen in a court she does not understand. If she is to save herself and her country, she will have to learn to read the heart of a wild stranger. And there are more secrets written there than even Dafne could suspect…
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Shadowbound by Bec McMaster is 99c! Thanks to everyone who alerted us to this sale because it’s a great deal for a lot of catnip. Readers absolutely loved the worldbuilding, but found that there were some other dynamic secondary characters who made the main couple seem rather boring.
When a powerful relic goes missing from a secret society that dabbles in the occult, Miss Ianthe Martin is charged with finding it at all costs. She needs help, but all clues point to someone on the inside being the thief. The only sorcerer she knows that can’t possibly be involved, is the very man she saw locked in Bedlam a year ago…
The mad, bad, dangerous Earl of Rathbourne.
When the seductive Miss Martin appears in his Bedlam cell, Rathbourne fears he’s finally lost his mind. The devilish sorceress played a hand in his incarceration, and now she comes asking for help? Perhaps she should begin by begging for mercy…
But Ianthe’s offer of freedom is one he can’t refuse, although he has a clause of his own to add. She may bind him with her power–the only way to still the demons haunting him–but for every day spent under her command, the nights will be his… to wreak delicious revenge on her willing flesh
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RECOMMENDED: Time Served by Julianna Keyes is $2.99! This is a contemporary romance with an ex-con hero and it was mentioned on a previous podcast with Jane, who recommends Keyes if you like “moody loner dudes:”
You kind of have two unlikeable people. They reconnect after he’s out of prison. She’s a lawyer. She’s trying to angle for a promotion within her law firm, and they’re working on this class action suit regarding medical illnesses caused in a, a factory. So she runs into him again. There’s a lot of attraction there, lot of unresolved issues, and she can’t really bring herself to admit that she wants him, so he says, you don’t have to admit it, you only have to say no, which she never does. I thought it was a very gritty book, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.
Dean Barclay had nothing to do with my decision to flee my old life, but he is 100 percent of the reason I vowed to never look back.
I’ve never forgotten how it felt to follow Dean—dangerous, daring, determined—away from the crowd and climb into his beat-up old Trans Am. I was sixteen and gloriously alive for the first time. When I felt his hand cover my leg and move upward, it was over. I was his. Forever.
Until I left. Him, my mom, and the trailer park. Without so much as a goodbye.
Now Dean’s back, crashing uninvited into my carefully cultivated, neat little lawyerly life. Eight years behind bars have turned him rougher and bigger—and more sexually demanding than any man I’ve ever met. I can’t deny him anything…and that just might end up costing me everything.
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We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!A Night of Forever
A Night of Forever by Bronwen Evans is $1.99! This is a historical romance with a fake relationship and some enemies to lovers elements. Readers say that you might get more out of this romance if you’ve read the previous books in the Disgraced Lords series, while others loved the tortured Frenchman hero.
Distrust is no match for desire as a proper young miss and a self-professed rogue hunt down a murderer in this thrilling Disgraced Lords novel.
Arend Aubury trusts no one besides his fellow Libertine Scholars. After his family escaped from France, penniless and persecuted, only the Scholars took him in. So when the stepdaughter of the villainess who has been plotting against them approaches Arend with allegations against their enemy, he suspects a double cross. Yet Isobel is a tantalizing prize, with lips as sweet as champagne and skin as creamy as Camembert. Is she a feast for the senses—or a bitter trap?
Lady Isobel Thompson dreams of marrying an honorable gentleman with a spotless reputation, a trait that Arend seems to lack completely. But Isobel believes that her stepmother is responsible for her father’s death, and only Arend has the skills to uncover the truth. As a cover, Arend suggests a fake betrothal—and soon Isobel finds herself forgetting that their courtship is a ploy. He’s so different from the man of her fantasies, and yet he’s so terribly handsome, so dangerously intoxicating—and all Isobel wants is more.
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If Shadowbound is on sale, does that mean the 3rd book in this series is coming out soon? ‘Cause I’m going to need that right away.
The Night of Forever description lost me with “skin as creamy as Camembert” And I’m part French!
I’m not part french @justonemore – and I’m equally disturbed.
“Skin as creamy as Camembert.” Does she smell like cheese, too? I suggest a SBTB contest in which readers submit the weirdest, least romantic description from an actual book and then we vote on the winner.
@AlliK I submit any instance where the H is lapping any part of the h. “Lapping” is not a romantic word!
My submission: he’d have her “sizzling like garlic on a hot pan.”
@Nerdalisque: Just for that, I’m adding another clove to my garlic and rosemary flatbread.
@Ginger, I agree with you re: lapping.
I would also add lave/laving with one’s tongue (usually the hero). It reminds me of a cat grooming itself.
From Merriam-Webster online:
Definition of LAVE
laved
laving
transitive verb
1a : WASH, BATHEb : to flow along or against
2: POUR
intransitive verb
archaic : to wash oneself : BATHE
Did You Know?
Lave is a simple, monosyllabic word that magically makes the mundane act of washing poetic. Shakespeare used it in The Taming of the Shrew, when Gremio assured the father of his beloved Bianca that she would have “basins and ewers to lave her dainty hands.” And in Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, Nell “laved her hands and face, and cooled her feet before setting forth to walk again.” The poetry of “lave” is also heard when describing water washing against the shore, as in our example sentence, or even the pouring of water: “He … laved a few cool drops upon his brow” (John Lockhart, Reginald Dalton). Before washing our hands of “lave,” we’ll tell you its etymology: it, as well as “lavatory,” comes from Latin lavare, meaning “to wash.”
I mean, ick. Not sexy, not romantic in the context usually found in romance novels.
Laving is acceptable if it would be a romance between cats, although even then it would read odd.
The Camembert comparison is something else, neither the fuzzyness nor the insides of that cheese should be used to describe healthy skin.
One of my favorite awful descriptions comes from Robert James Waller (Bridges of Madison County fame), “The cool patrician face coming only from an upper-shelf gene pool”, how could that not turn your head (spinning around)?
Um… Tender Wings of Desire: A Colonel Sanders Novella can be yours for the low, low price of free.
When Lady Madeline Parker runs away from Parker Manor and a loveless betrothal, she finally feels like she is in control of her life. But what happens when she realizes she can’t control how she feels? When she finds herself swept into the arms of Harland, a handsome sailor with a mysterious past, Madeline realizes she must choose between a life of order and a man of passion. Can love overcome lies? What happens in the embrace of destiny, on the Tender Wings of Desire?
The sample is… not awful, actually. I’m going in.
Sadly, I could only find it at Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0713XG522/
It even contains a description somewhat befitting today’s comment challenge: “He looks like a vanilla biscuit.” (Granted, this one’s not meant to be flattering.)
@Ren Benton – I misread the first line in the description and thought it said, “she finally FLEES like she is in control of her life.” That would be a totally different story, I think.
@Chrisz: If they’d committed to the theme, it would have been “she finally flies like she is in control of her life.” 😀
Sticking this here since there’s no sale post on Friday:
Each of the three books in the Penryn and the End of Days series (Angelfall, World After, and End of Days) by Susan Ee is on sale for $2. (Amazon only, sorry.)
Highly rated post-recent-apocalypse YA with angels and a rescue quest.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010OQ3TYS/
Pages of the mind had so much of my catnip, but it was a DNF for me. I really liked the story ideas but The prose style didn’t do it for me, and the heroine got on my nerves in the second half. Maybe it would have helped if id read the previous books in the series?