It’s Whatcha Reading time! This is where we talk about the books we’ve read in the past month, whether they’re good, bad, or just meh. It’s an expensive post and pretty damaging to the ol’ book budget, but it’s oh so much fun.
Besides, who doesn’t love talking about books?
Redheadedgirl: You literally caught me between books. I just finished Goodnight From London ( A | BN | K | G | AB ).
I’m making my way through A History of the Swedish People (all that stuff that happened between Vikings and IKEA). ( A | BN )
And I’m about to start Offstage and On by Melissa Hayden, upon recommendations from our lovely commentariat.
(NB: Offstage and On is mostly out of print.)
Carrie: I am reading The Guns Above by Robyn Bennis. It’s a steampunk that so far avoids cliche – I just started it but am already loving it.
Elyse: I just finished The Girl Who Knew Too Much by Amanda Quick ( A | BN | K | AB ). It’s a romantic mystery set in 1930’s Hollywood and the heroine is a gossip reporter. It’s really low on violence and gore so it would be a good fit for readers who want romantic suspense without the creepy-factor.
Amanda: I just finished some meh books. But I have Anna Kendrick’s Scrappy Little Nobody ( A | BN | K | G | AB ) on audio from my library.
To actually read, I’m thinking an erotic contemporary. My choices are the new Tessa Bailey – Disorderly Conduct ( A | BN | K | G | AB ). Yay! Or some books I took a chance on getting for my Kindle – Mister Romance by Leisa Rayven and SOLD by Gisele St. Claire ( A ).
Sarah: I am about to finish And It Came to Pass by Laura Stone ( A | BN | K | AB ), whom I met at RT. She told me about her podcast about being a former Mormon, Oh My Heck, and I followed a link to this book. It’s a contemporary about two young Mormon men on their mission in Barcelona, and their struggle to reconcile their faith, which is openly and fiercely anti LGBTQIA+ and their growing attraction to and love for one another.
Tell us what you’ve read this month! And don’t skimp on the details regarding your hits and misses!
By request, since we can’t link to every book you mention in the comments, here are bookstore links that help support the site with your purchases. If you use them, thank you so much, and if you’d prefer not to, no worries. Thanks for being a part of SBTB and hopefully, you’ve found some great books to read!
Because I think missed last month, want to mention I read 3 series last month:
Lake Lovelace by Vanessa North – m/m and f/f pairings about a group of friends who used to be professional wake-borders (had to look it up – kind of a cross between waterskiing and snowboarding)
Kris Ripper’s Scientific Method – very addictive queer, poly bdsm erotic romance series. I read 8 books in like 2 weeks.
Annabeth Albert’s Perfect Harmony series – m/m contemp about musicians and reality tv. The first two take place during two different mysical competion reality tv shows and the last one features a professional singer involved with both shows. Good trope-y fun.
And this month I read a lot of new releases. Highlights include:
Recovery by Amy Ray Durreson – mm fantasy / PNR. #3 in the series about dragons re-awakening after 1,000 years to fight an ancient evil (and fall in love). I love this world. This one hit a little too close to home – it’s set in a variation on medieval Vienna during a complicated election where one candidate is secretly backed by the evil Shadow. The similarities to the recent us election felt too pointed.
Mature Content by Satino Hassell and Megan Erikson – mm about rival gay you-tubers.
An Unatural Vice by KJ Charles – book 2 in her new Victorian romance series – the romance is stand alone but there’s an overarching mystery.
Provoked by Joanna Chambers – mm historical. This came highly recommended but I had trouble getting into it.
Best Book I read this past month was Tanner by Sarah Mayberry. She is a go to author for me and her writing style, characters and plots never disappoint.
I also enjoyed Julia Quinn’s Make Believe Husband although I agree with a lot of reviewers that the ending was what made the book. It did make me go back and reread Because of Miss Bridgerton which is one of my favorite recent Julia Quinn books.
I “discovered” Donna Alward a few months ago and have been reading her catalogue. Her recent books ( I read two this month) are really enjoyable although her older ones are hit and miss.
I love RaeAnn Thayne and accidently bought a rereleased book of hers ” Springtime in Salt River” so reread it and reminded myself why she is a favorite.
My only DNF this month was Olivia Kelly “Look to the Stars”…maybe it just was the mood I was in at the time but it seemed rather stiff.
Read some great Sabrina Jeffries and all of Christine TeTreault. I normally don’t like Billionaire books, but TeTreaults were quite good particularly the Later ones.
Very few books got finished this past month; plus what I really need to do is catch up on my pile of New Yorker magazines! I did read 2 more of Emily Larkin’s Baleful Godmother series, “Trusting Miss Trentham” and “Ruining Miss Wrotham”, which I think is the last. They were good, but I think she’s pretty well played out the magical gift theme of this series, and more books would be superfluous. I loved “Trusting Miss Trentham”, it had a very dark hero with serious PTSD. Coincidentally, at the same time I was also reading “How I Married a Marquis” with had another hero suffering from PTSD. It was not bad but Larkin did it better.
Unlike @Pat I did enjoy “Look to the Stars” several months ago.
I just finished “The Reluctant Thief”, a cute Signet Regency by April Kihlstrom, and now reading Balogh’s “Someone to Hold”.
Just finished The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. I didn’t go in with any preconceived notion of it, and it pleasantly surprised me. I really enjoyed the non-traditional love story. I read it all in one sitting!
Also read The Girl Who Knew Too Much. It was okay but not memorable. Light reading was required after last week at work.
Slogging through Night Film by Marisha Pessl now. My kids are away for 2 weeks so I will be getting a lot of reading in! Back to scouring these comments for more books to add to the tower of TBR on my Kindle.
Several of my favorite authors released books in the first week of June:
1. Roan Parrish: “Small Change”. I started it, but haven’t picked back up because of the avalanche of other releases.
2. Annabeth Albert: “On Point”. I enjoyed it, but it didn’t wow me like my favorite of her, “Treble Maker”.
3. Megan Erickson and Santino Hassell: “Mature Content”, book 4 in the Cyberlove series. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t my favorite one in this series.
4. K.J. Charles: “An Unnatural Vice”, book 2 in the Sins of the Cities series. Again, I enjoyed it, but book 1 “An Unseen Attraction”, was more to my liking.
I love it when I have a plethora of new releases to choose from! This made me very happy. 🙂
@Francesca: that sucks. I haven’t read Wheel of Time, but really enjoyed her Starbridge series about the Church of England, and my mother adored Penmarric, another sprawling saga set in Cornwall.
@LauraL: same here, I make an exception for the K-9 series because The Dogs! (and she writes good steamy scenes, which I usually skim through in other books)
Just finished Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster which I’d not read before and LOVED. So smart and laugh out loud funny.
Currently listening to A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L’Engle, but it’s slow going because I was listening at night while attending a trade show this week and kept falling asleep. I picked it up after reading the graphic novel version of A Wrinkle in Time. The graphic style was not my favorite, but always enjoy rereading the story.
Now we’re in the middle of a heat wave and I’m feeling a slump coming on.
@Francesca:
Best wishes to you with your cancer.
That Bee Johnstone book seems right up my alley, so I have bought it and based on the fact that that DA reviewer and I seem to like long involved historicals, I’m looking forward to getting a start.
I don’t have much to report on the reading front except I did finally start the last book of the Tea Rose Trilogy. something I haven’t felt up to since life was getting in the way. And on a related note, I hope to finish some books I started earlier this year and even recommended on here but also didn’t finish because life got in the way.
I’ve read too meh books lately 🙁
One audiobook that I really enjoyed and highly recommend is Jenny Colgan’s “The BookShop Around the Corner” narrated by Lucy Price-Lewis. It was one of my favorite reads last year and listening to it was even better!
@Francesca: YOU WILL DEFEAT THE EVIL CANCER! Sending you tons of blessings, get well Bitchery Sister.
@Donna Marie: I LOVED Wicked Abyss. I think it’s my favorite in the series so far.
@SBAmanda, that’s still Dark Skies for me, as it’s been a long time since I read all those early addiction causing books. Since she’s been a little uneven the last few years, I was extremely happy with this one. Good Book Noise™ paired with Bad Decisions Book Club™.
After a vacation in April and RT in May, I finally started to get some reading done again.
Excellent:
– Need Uou by Stacy Finz: Got this one at the Kensington party at RT – I would rate it Excellent minus or Very Good plus. Small town enemies (kinda)-to-lovers. The heroine is a fashion designer who can no longer design under her own name due to her divorce and she has lost her creative mojo. This reminded me of how kate spade no longer owns or designs for kate spade (not because of divorce) and I thought the details of being your own person but seeing your name on a company that is no longer yours was really well done. There were a lot of secondary characters introduced to set up later books in the series, but I will for sure be buying book #2!
Very Good:
None
Good:
Devil and the Deep by Julie Ann Walker – I won this at RT which was awesome since it was on my TBR and I really liked the first in the Deep 6 series. This was a page turner, but the plot points were very very similar to the first book in the series to the point where the heroine says something like I have done all of this before. Still the set-up for book 3 is great – geeky virgin heroine and grumpy strong and silent but emotionally wounded former SEAL. TW for domestic violence in the backstory.
– The Fixer by Helenkay Dimon – so much promise in this one – age difference between hero and heroine, a mystery to solve, and a mysterious hero with a dark past but the hero was both waaaay too alpha and not enough alpha for me, which I know makes absolutely no sense. Also be warned both the hero and heroine have super, super dark backstories.
– Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton: I know this was much-praised memoir, but it was super uneven to me – the behind the scenes at the restaurant chapters were really fascinating, while some of her personal story fell really flat.
Meh:
– Second Chance with the CEO by Anna DePalo: Enemies to lovers contemporary, but the reason the two didn’t get along after not seeing each other for 10 years was so thin that it didn’t work as a set up for the rest of the story.
Bad:
-A Good Debutante’s Guide to Ruin by Sophie Jordan: Got this one at RT, so much promise in this story of forbidden romance (stepbrother and stepsister), but the crazysauce plot did not work – heroine disguises herself (poorly) and hero doesn’t recognize her? Uh, no.
-Maid for the Billionaire by Ruth Cardello – also from RT, kind of a twist on Pretty Woman – although the heroine is a teacher filling in for a housekeeper, not a prostitute, but the story line is similar including the heroine getting sucked into potentially “messing up” the billionaire’s current business deal. Nothing about the storyline was realistic but the business subplot was especially rage-inducing in the totally fantasy land twists.
-The Bad Luck Bride by Janna MacGregor: so angry, this book made me so so so angry – the hero is first a tremendously bad judge of character with his head up his ass when it comes to what is socially going on around him. But in addition he is also terribly manipulative and tries to control a situation he doesn’t understand. Anyone in his way is just collateral damage which if he were actually serving justice properly you might understand, but see my first point above. Second, the hero seems to learn nothing and is basically stalking the heroine by the end of the book even after multiple betrayals. I wanted to yell at him to leave the poor woman alone and tell the heroine that his behavior and lack of any real grovel does not bode well for their future AT ALL.
Sorry for the typo in my post above, the first book on my list is Need You by Stacy Finz.
I absolutely loved MISTER ROMANCE! Probably one of my favorite reads of 2017 so far. It reminded me a lot of THE HATING GAME – smart, sexy, and hits you right where you want it to. So many feels! So good. Would love to see more romance like this.
A little late to the party . . .
First, @Francesca, I’m echoing the others and sending best wishes for your recovery. The Bitchery is behind you!
Next, my June reading has been dominated by Eva Ibbotson, whom I recently discovered via SBTB.
– The Morning Gift: My personal favorite, set in England pre WWII and revolving around an Englishman marrying an Austrian Jew to get her out of Vienna. A little melodramatic (they all are), but very emotional too, and I love a marriage of convenience tale!
– A Countess Below Stairs: Russian countess hiding as a housemaid to support her immigrant family
– A Song For Summer: English girl working as a housemother in an Austria school; had me worried about the HEA up until the very last moment.
– The Reluctant Heiress: An Austrian princess works behind the scenes of an opera company whilst falling for a self-made millionaire
There’s a bit of a pattern to her books, but right now I’ve been craving some mutual yearning and slow burn, so I’m really enjoying them. I still have Madensky Square and The Company of Swans on my TBR.
I’m almost finished with Amanda Quick’s Ravished, and it is AMAZING. I love the hero and heroine, I love the dialogue, I love the plot, I love everything. The best part to me (so hard to pick one) is that the characters TALK to each other. There’s no miscommunication driving the plot here. And yet the relationship development and tension is upheld throughout. So GOOD.
I’m also partway through Dating You/Hating You by Christina Lauren. Guys, I’m having trouble with this one and I don’t know why. Maybe my expectations were too high, or I wanted The Hating Game Part II, but for whatever reason, it’s been a bit of a slog. I think the romance happened a little too quickly for me. Ah, well. It’s funny and I’ll definitely go back to it when I finish Ravished.
Katie C: The third book in the Julie Ann Walker series sounds like it’ll be right up my street. 🙂 Doesn’t seem to be on Goodreads yet, is it? Is there any news about when it’ll be written/released?
I’m in a major reading slump, but recently was able to finish two books.
Pride Mates by Jennifer Ashley was a so-so read. I love her historicals, but here it was like she was still trying to find that blend of sassy and loveable for the heroine’s voice. C
Unforgiven by Anne Calhoun was a refreshing read. I liked that the chemistry between the characters was on from page one. I really liked the big reveal (though it was obvious it was coming) late in the book about Keith and Delaney just because it left such a powerful punch. Really wish I had the second book, Jaded, and that the series had kept on because sadly I don’t enjoy the military themed ones Calhoun is becoming known for. A
I’m days late but want to begin participating more in comment discussions on this site, when I can manage it. My list is quite the mixed bag. About four DNF in the last few months, and I’ve also been going through an old school reads phase for escapism and comfort.
Bad Behavior – Mary Gaitskill – read this collection of short stories for a book club. I was kind of bored by it and couldn’t really get into the stories. Much of it is pretty nihilistic, and many of the stories just seemed to end abruptly. For me, the characters all resembled each other from story to story so there was a monotone quality to much of my read. I’m actually still at 96% on my Kindle and will probably leave it as another DNF.
The Obsession – Nora Roberts. I enjoyed this one although I was kind of impatient with the gradual aging buildup from young childhood to adulthood for the main character. Such a buildup was necessary, though, with respect to actions and reactions to situations as the book progressed. Nora Roberts knows how to write an enticing male romantic lead, that’s for sure!
Lady of Mallow and Winterwood – both by Dorothy Eden. Gothic romance/mysteries. Indulgent, enjoyable comfort-reads.
The Elementals – Michael McDowell. Horror/paranormal suspense. I absolutely adored this one. So tense and creepy. I found his writing style disconcertingly atmospheric (which I loved) and his characters fascinated me.
Night Things – Michael Talbot. Horror/Suspense. Talbot’s The Delicate Dependency is my favorite vampire novel ever so I decided to check out some of his other writing. I really liked this one. The POV of the young son, Garrett, was wonderful, and I’m not at all inclined to reading YA or child POV based books.
The Woman in Cabin 10 – Ruth Ware. Another satisfying mystery/suspense read. Foul play is afoot on a luxury cruise liner. I found this to be a tense “stay up reading too late during the work week” sort of a book. Ware’s writing also created a believable undercurrent of claustrophobia as the main character maneuvered through various unsettling experiences, and her descriptions evoked a sense of heightening alarm once things begin to go awry on the ship.
Vanish With the Rose – Barbara Michaels. I’ve been devouring a steady stream of Barbara Michaels novels over the past two years (I’m glad she’s written so many!) This one was a fun satisfying read, and I certainly learned more than I will ever need to know about roses, ha!
Harbingers: Dark Tales of Speculative Fiction – Icy Sedgwick. I have about 24% left to go on this one. Most of the stories are quite short but they have been entertaining reads. Her writing is evocative and lightly humorous at one moment, macabre and wistfully sad the next. Delightful reading.
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins. Still (re)-reading this one off and on and savoring it.
Quiet Neighbors: A Novel – Catriona McPherson. Just barely started this one but I’m already enjoying it.
@Lucy – sadly, no word on when the third Deep 6 book from Julie Ann Walker will be released – I checked the author’s website when I finished the second book and I couldn’t find any mention of it, but the set up for the geeky talkative historian virgin heroine and the grumpy silent former SEAL in the second book is so delicious…
-Last night I finished Alessandra Torre’s Hollywood Dirt so I would be ready when it comes out on Passionflix. It amazes me how much she can move the story along with how short her chapters are sometimes. I liked it but Moonshot so far is my favorite.
-I DNF’d Jill Shalvis’ Instant Temptation. I hardly ever DNF books and I usually love Jill Shalvis but I couldn’t get into at all so I quit at 22%. One day I might go back to it but it’s not like I don’t have anything else to read.
-I finished Kristan Callihan’s Darkest London series with Forevermore. I liked that series more than I thought I would so I will definitely be looking for more Steampunk.
-I also read Lucy Parker’s Pretty Face. Sorry Sarah I liked that one more than Act Like It. But they were both really good.
-I read Jockblocked by Jen Frederick and Deep Dark Secret by Sierra Dean and liked both of those.
-And if you’ve never read L.H. Cosway READ HER! I read Hearts of Blue and loved it but I’ve loved everything she’s written. I am starting Thief of Hearts today and I would love to get completely caught up with the series but I also want to pace myself and make it last!
I’m on a romance binge that’s years overdue, and am currently working through all the ebooks that my library has by:
* Tessa Dare
* Maya Banks
* Eloisa James
* Mary Jo Putney
and now I’m catching up on reviews to add a few more to the list, tallyho!