The Raven Prince
The Raven Prince by Elizabeth Hoyt is $1.99! This book is much loved by historical romance readers, and has a 3.9-star average on GoodReads. Readers who love it especially like that the hero and heroine are both a bit unconventional: neither of them is superbly good-looking, a fact that has influenced their lives in several ways, and both are over thirty.
There comes a time in a woman’s life when she must do the unthinkable – and find employment. For the widowed Anna Wren, that means taking a job as female secretary for the Earl of Swartingham.
Secretaries are always male – never female – as Anna well knows but the real downfall of her career is the realization that she is falling in love with Edward de Raaf – the Earl. But when she realizes that he is going to visit a brothel in London to take care of his ‘manly’ desires, Anna sees red – and decides to take advantage of the opportunity to also take care of her ‘womanly’ desires – with the Earl as her unknowing lover.
But the Earl has another reason for going to London. He is formalising his betrothal and trying (with little success) to forget about a secretary that has no right being female. Unhandsome, he knows that no woman wants him.
Except for the mysterious lady with whom he spent two unforgettable nights at Aphrodite’s Grotto, the most scandalous brothel in London. But when Anna’s plan is revealed, a bit of blackmail is thrown into the mix, a proposal is rejected and even the Earl himself will be unprepared for the intrigues that ensnare them.
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From a Certain Point of View is $2.99! This is a Star Wars anthology with forty stories from some really great writers. If you’re a stickler for canon-only stuff, this might not be for you. And, if you prefer audiobooks, I’ve heard this one is fantastic as is uses a variety of voices, including January LaVoy, Neil Patrick Harris, and more.
Forty years. Forty stories.
In honor of the fortieth anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope, this collection features Star Wars stories by bestselling authors, trendsetting artists, and treasured voices from Star Wars literary history. More than forty authors have lent their unique vision to forty “scenes,” each retelling a different moment from the original Star Wars film, but with a twist: Every scene is told from the point of view of a background character. Whether it’s the X-wing pilots who helped Luke destroy the Death Star or the stormtroopers who never quite could find the droids they were looking for, Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View places the classic movie in a whole new perspective, and celebrates the influence and legacy of the unparalleled cultural phenomenon, Star Wars.
Contributors include:
Ben Acker and Ben Blacker • Renee Ahdieh • Tom Angleberger • Meg Cabot • Rae Carson • Zoraida Cordova • Delilah S. Dawson • Paul Dini • Alexander Freed • Jason Fry • Christie Golden • Claudia Gray • E. K. Johnston and Ashley Eckstein • Paul Kemp • Mur Lafferty • Ken Liu • Griffin McElroy • John Jackson Miller • Nnedi Okorafor • Daniel José Older • Mallory Ortberg • Madeleine Roux • Gary D. Schmidt • Cavan Scott • Sabaa Tahir • Glen Weldon • Chuck Wendig • Gary Whitta • And more!Add to Goodreads To-Read List →
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Calling It by Jen Doyle is $2.99! This is a contemporary sports romance with a “no strings attached” scenario. Many loved the characterization of the hero and heroine and found the romance to be really sweet. If you’re missing baseball already, maybe pick this one up.
Baseball player Nathan Hawkins needs to get away from Chicago. After a near career-ending car accident and with paparazzi surrounding his penthouse, Nate can only think of one place to go: home. But when he finds his old apartment occupied by a half-naked woman wielding a baseball bat, he’s not sure what to think…except that maybe his luck has finally changed for the better.
Librarian Dorie Donelli never thought she’d get to meet her fantasy man in person–much less while she’s wearing her bathrobe. To her surprise, her nearly naked run-in with Nate leads to more unclothed encounters. But Dorie is sure their fling is only temporary. As long as she remembers he’ll be gone once his life gets back on track, she won’t get hurt. In the meantime, she throws herself into enjoying their three weeks together before he has to report for spring training and go back to his old life.
For Nate, being with Dorie is the only time in months that he finds himself smiling. Laughing. And he has no intention of letting that go. He might even be falling in love…if only Dorie will let him say the words. What they have isn’t just a dream, but the start of a dream come true.
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The Fortune Hunter by Daisy Goodwin is $2.99! This is historical fiction with some romantic elements. Readers say that Goodwin’s writing is beautiful and detailed, but that it can bog down the forward momentum of the story at times. Have you read this one?
In 1875, Sisi, the Empress of Austria is the woman that every man desires and every woman envies.
Beautiful, athletic and intelligent, Sisi has everything – except happiness. Bored with the stultifying etiquette of the Hapsburg Court and her dutiful but unexciting husband, Franz Joseph, Sisi comes to England to hunt. She comes looking for excitement and she finds it in the dashing form of Captain Bay Middleton, the only man in Europe who can outride her. Ten years younger than her and engaged to the rich and devoted Charlotte, Bay has everything to lose by falling for a woman who can never be his. But Bay and the Empress are as reckless as each other, and their mutual attraction is a force that cannot be denied.
Full of passion and drama, THE FORTUNE HUNTER tells the true story of a nineteenth century Queen of Hearts and a cavalry captain, and the struggle between love and duty.
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Ooh, I picked up the audiobook of A Certain Point of View on sale earlier this year, but haven’t listened to it yet. Glad to know you’ve heard good buzz about it. (Just snagged the book, too.)
No time to Google ATM, but IIRC, Sisi was an incredibly unhappy woman whose MIL, the Dowager Empress (?), essentially declared her either unfit as a mother or unnecessary to her children’s lives & the raising of them and took them from her. Her husband offered her no support whatsoever – he wouldn’t gainsay his mother in any manner. She had an overall miserable life which seems rather surreal when looking from the outside in.
I picked up The Raven Prince last night after I saw the author tweet about it. The tweet made me laugh so I threw down $2. Authors that can entertain when trying to sell their books get me every time.
Overall I really enjoyed From A Certain Point of View. The stories can be a bit uneven — some are heart-tugging, some are hilarious (including a Damon Runyon style riff on the Cantina Band), some are ironic, and some I still don’t know what happened (O__O) But for me there were more hits than misses, and I hear the audiobook is a joy. This is definitely a bargain price for a great book.
@kitkat9000: I don’t know much about Sisi, but first learned of her after watching the 1968 movie, Mayerling, when I was young. (Does anyone else remember that one?) She was the mother of Crown Prince Rudolf, who murdered his mistress and then committed suicide. The movie was very romantic, with Omar Sharif, Catherine Deneuve, Ava Gardner, and James Mason as the leads, but the real event was even more complex and tragic. Thinking about it, I now want to find a good non-fiction account of it all.
I read The Fortune Hunter and enjoyed it. As I recall, Sisi is more of a side character to the main character Charlotte. It reminded me of a Heyer in that Charlotte is plucky and independent, Bay is a handsome rake, and Charlotte has a humorous sidekick. A better book about Sisi herself is The Accidental Empress by Allison Pataki, which is also very good historical fiction (though not a romance!).
“All I Want Is You” by DJ Jamison is 99 cents. It’s a friends-to-lovers second chance m/m Christmas romance with a bisexual hero. Bisexual romance? Yes, please!
I am buying so many queer Christmas romances this week. Lol
*SCREECHING TIRE NOISE* DID SOMEONE SAY SISI BC I AM HERE TO TALK ABOUT SISI
(This bit is sorta copy pasted from another project of mine but it covers most of the pertinent bits)
Elisabeth of Austria was the Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary. And she really was the most beautiful woman in the world. Just look at any picture of her! Unfortunately, the minute she met her cousin (oh, royalty)/the Emperor of Austria Franz Joseph in 1853 (at a meeting that was supposed to cement an engagement between him and her sister Helene), and he decided he only wanted to marry Elisabeth, her life was set upon a course of stifling misery and eventual tragedy. Sisi as she was known (and NOT SISSI, which she never referred to herself by), had grown up in a very relaxed, informal household under her father the Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria. (Seriously, take some time to read about it, it’s pretty wild). A shy, naive, fifteen year old country duchess from Bavaria was thrust into role of Empress of Austria in a little over eight months.
It went about as well as one would expect. Sisi was utterly isolated at the Austrian court, not comfortable around crowds and formal situations, and in general treated as an child unfit for her role. This was compounded by her mother-in-law/aunt, the Archduchess Sophie, who never hid her opinion of Elisabeth as anything more than a vessel to produce heirs and acted as Empress in official functions as well as politically more than the actual Empress. Even more unfortunately, for all Franz Joseph loved Elisabeth (and did for the rest his life, long after any chance of mutual romance was dead), he never understood her, her needs, or that he should make any sort of compromises on his end to make their relationship work. Franz Joseph was always quick to defer to his mother over his wife, including the part where Sophie essentially took Elisabeth’s first three children away from her and raised them herself. As you can guess, this not only made things worse, but engineered a huge disconnect between Elisabeth and most of her children that would have severe consequences later.
After the Crown Prince Rudolf was born, leaving Elisabeth free of the responsibility to produce any more heirs, the older, wiser, and more cynical Empress had by this point acquired the fortitude and political capital to do as she pleased. Restless by nature, she traveled constantly and avoided Vienna and her husband at all costs. The only thing that brought her back was the cause of Hungary. She had fallen for the wilder, romantic country, one very much in tune with the sensitive and dreamy Elisabeth compared to rigid, traditional Austria. Recognizing they’d have a powerful advocate in Elisabeth, who at this point was at the peak of her beauty and enormously popular in Hungary, Deák and Andrássy in particular (who she become close with to the point they were rumored to be lovers, though nothing has ever been proven) reached out to her. Acting as an intermediary between Austria and Hungary, Elisabeth was absolutely essential to making the Compromise happen and seem a legitimate deal for Hungary even in its unpopularity.
Part of this assistance was agreeing to have another child. Elisabeth quickly became pregnant after the Compromise was passed, and more significantly chose to give birth to her child at Buda Castle. It was the first time a royal child had been born in Hungary in centuries, and the notion was seriously raised that had it been a boy the child could have become king of an independent Hungary, separating it from Austria. As a girl was born, the Archduchess Marie Valerie, it was a non-issue. (Ironically, Marie Valerie, who was born in Hungary, baptised in Buda, and only allowed to speak Hungarian to her mother, grew to have a severe apathy for Hungary in part because of the persistent rumor that Andrássy was her real father. Even as she grew up to strongly resemble Franz Joseph and the rumor died, the apathy lasted. But they’ve still kept the bridge with her name on it between Hungary and Slovakia, which I guess is nice?)
After the Compromise was passed, Sisi removed herself from any political involvement. She was a gifted, intelligent woman, fluent in German, Greek, English, French, and Hungarian, but years of emotional neglect and being completely looked down upon removed any desire on her part to do more than the barest minimum required (and even then rarely) as Empress. Sisi utterly devoted herself to raising Marie Valerie, pouring her suppressed maternal feelings to the child she was finally allowed to raise to the point she practically smothered her-still more or less a stranger to her other two children. She went back to traveling frequently, throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as outside it, like England and Greece (Corfu, which she loved so much she asked to be buried there-a request that ultimately was denied by the House of Habsburg like so many others).
Sisi was obsessed with her looks, understandable given this was all she was praised for and had any semblence of control over. Tragically, this transitioned into a pretty severe eating disorder, to the point her health was at serious risk several times. (This is just one of the many reasons she’s frequently compared to Princess Diana). After she turned thirty-two she sat for no more portraits or photos, wanting to cement herself at the peak of her beauty in the public consciousness, and almost always went out with her face covered afterwards.
As mentioned, there was a big disconnect between Sisi and her two older children (her first child died at age two of dysentery, which was the first hard emotional blow in a life that would be filed with tragedy). This was especially important in regards to Crown Prince Rudolf, who was a liberal and sensitive like his mother, and could have been a serious force in reforming the Empire and keeping it intact. Suffering from frequent depression, an unhappy marriage, and a distant family, Rudolf ultimately ending up committing a murder-suicide with his lover the Duchess Mary Vetsera at Mayerling Lodge in 1889. Despite their emotional distance, Rudolf’s death absolutely devastated Sisi, who wore only black the rest of her life and completely abandoned her duties as Empress. She traveled restlessly, searching for a place of contentment and never finding it. This was how she lived the remainder of her life until she traveled to Geneva in 1898 under an assumed title. This attempt at secrecy was not enough to fool Luigi Lucheni, an Italian anarchist who wanted to kill the Duke of Orleans. Having missed his chance for the Duke, he settled on the next most convenient highly ranked royal, the Empress of Austria. Sisi was accompanied only by a lady in waiting (having sent away the Swiss police escort) when Lucheni walked up to her and stabbed her in the ribs with a sharpened file as she was about to board a boat to Montreux. The file was so sharp and Elisabeth’s corset so tightly laced she didn’t even realize what had happened at first and was able to walk on board under her own power. Once her corset was loosened to examine the wound-she had been stabbed through the heart-she swiftly bled out and died. She was only 60 years old, and at 44 years the longest reigning Empress of Austria.
Elisabeth is one of the great, tragic examples of a witty, kind, intelligent woman who was thrust into a role guaranteed to make her miserable and ultimately was consumed and destroyed by her station. For those who want to know more, I really recommend Brigette Hamann’s biography of Sisi, The Reluctant Empress. It’s a fascinating read, and really did a lot to dispel the prevalent myth of the happy and beautiful “Fairy Queen” to reveal the complex, sad woman who actually existed. (And with all due respect to people who actually liked the book, I feel Pataki’s take on Sisi doesn’t mesh with the facts of her life. At. All. ESPECIALLY the part about an affair with Andrássy. Yes, it was the Victorian age and people tended to be more subtle about these things, but through her life Sisi never really displayed any taste for the physical side of love, being far more interested in platonic admiration. Just my view, but everything I’ve read about her seriously makes me think she fell somewhere on the asexual spectrum).
And here’s Sisi giving Franz Joseph a solid (and richly deserved) burn from 1867: “I realize more and more how extraordinarily clever I am and that you have not got a sufficiently high opinion of my superior intelligence.”
You tell him, Sisi. You tell him.
Freebie alert!
Alex Beecroft’s “Trowchester In Blue: A contemporary m/m romance box set of the first three Trowchester novels” is currently free at amazon.
@fairywine: Wow! Just wow! I’m Austrian, and I’m quite sure you know a ton more about the Empress Elisabeth than I do! 😉
I feel like around here, the popular image of her is that of a beautiful but tragic figure. If you are interested at all (and haven’t already), you should look into the (hugely succesful) musical “Elisabeth” by Michael Kunze, in which Death personified plays a major role and which I believed greatly influenced popular imagination about the life of Sisi. I also once saw a musical about Rudolf and the days leading up to his and Mary Vetsera’s deaths (called “Rudolf – Affäre Mayerling”), but that one isn’t very well known.
Hannukkah romance alert! Ben’s Bakery and the Hanukkah Miracle by Penelope Peters. Sweet gay romance story set in Boston. Visiting hockey coach from Canada and a baker, obvs. I’m about half way through and loving it. Sweet as in Awwww.. not sweet as in no sex.
@fairywine: Here I was, kinda proud to have recalled as much as I had, with the exception of the MIL’s title…
And really, I can’t thank you enough for the history lesson! Knew I didn’t remember much overall but also didn’t realize just HOW MUCH I’d forgotten. Watched a program some time ago that detailed a fair amount of Sisi’s life without sensationalizing it but for the life of me cannot recall the title. Had kind of a Sgt. Joe Friday vibe, “just the facts, ma’am.”
Thanks also for the rec, I’ll definitely check that out.
Ahhhhhhh, Christmas came early! The new Tamara Allen Invitation to the Dance (historical m/m) is out and you can get it at Amazon or Smashwords for $1.99!
All mine! *cradles tablet*
@fairywine Not a topic I know anything about but this was such an interesting read. Thank you for writing it!
@fairywine I second (or third) the thanks. Your comment was a really fascinating read and I’m grateful you posted it
@Adeliza Ooo! I have missed Tamara Allen’s works. Glad to see this one.
@Katty Thank you so much! That’s flattering to hear from an Austrian. Sadly, for SOME REASON I haven’t been able to see Elisabeth das Musical in the US so I’ve had to settle for watching it on YouTube, but I’ve definitely been a fan for ages. Wenn Ich Tanzen Will is such a favorite of mine, along with Der Schleier Fällt, but I really love all the songs from the musical so much.
Hamann’s biography was such a turning point in Elisabeth’s public perspective, along with the musical (which came out soon afterwards and took cues from the biography). Before it was more the Romy Schneider take, which is so…pretty, but misleading. =___=
@kitkat9000 Sisi is my favorite historical figure (well, tied with MY DUDE Valdemar Atterdag), so I might have something of a personal investment here. I would love to see the series you mentioned, though! I’m really dreading the Pataki-based TV series (if it does ever end up actually being made) because it’s going to be so heavy on sexual and romantic drama and that ISN’T Sisi.
@GraceElizabeth @Dreamingintrees Thanks for the kind words and taking the time to read my Sisi-centric diatribes. There’s still so much I didn’t include-like she had a whole gymnasium set up in her quarters in the Schonbrunn Palace and worked out on them every day she was there, or that she took up fencing in her fifties and became a master at it. She wasn’t a perfect woman, but definitely a fascinating one worthy of intrest and sympathy.