Are you reading for Whatcha Reading? How are we nearly halfway through the month of May already?
If any of you are going to be in New Orleans for BookLover’s Con, we hope you’ll say hi. We will also be recoding a live podcast, which is always a blast.
Sarah: Oh my gosh. Despite having a bad cold and needing sleep, I barely avoided a Bad Decisions Book Club moment with New Ink on Life ( A | BN | K | G | AB ).
The deep POV of the two main characters is really difficult to put down, especially when they are so very different.
Amanda: I too almost pulled a BDBC with Yours Until Dawn by Teresa Medeiros ( A | BN | K | G | AB ). It was mentioned in the comments on the site and it’s a slow burn very Beauty and the Beast romance. There is dancing in a ballroom! Etiquette lessons! Well-meaning but meddling staff!
Sarah: I really liked that book. That’s an older title, too!
Amanda: I know! I found it at Half Price Books while in Austin for like $3.
Elyse: I’m finishing up When A Duchess Says I Do by Grace Burrows. It’s a regency with a beta hero and heroine who is on the run
Carrie: I am reading Amnesty ( A | BN | K | G | AB ), which is the conclusion to the Amberlough Dossier Trilogy by Lara Elena Donnelly. So good, but much stressful (I mean, the characters in the book are going through a lot).
What have you read so far? Let us know in the comments!
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, we greatly appreciate it, 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!
I just finished The Selection series by Kiera Cass (5 books, plus 1 collection of novellas.) It’s comparable to The Bachelor except the winner is crowned princess! Now, I don’t watch the Bachelor but I love ‘competition/challenges’ in my reading! And I always eagerly await Elyse’s recaps anyway because they are hilarious! So of course (!) The Selection series is *much* more tame than the show but I was really impressed with the author’s ability to ratchet up the romance even though nothing more happens than kissing. [Note: After the 3rd book, there is a time jump.]
@JJ: Mallory O’Meara co-hosts a podcast with her BFF Brea Grant called Reading Glasses and when I started listening, my reaction was, WHERE HAVE YOU TWO BEEN ALL MY LIFE? There’s an active Reading Glasses community on Facebook too. Definitely check out the podcast if you haven’t already!
@ Lisa W. : Thank you! 🙂
Wow is it the middle of May already?
The Marriage Contract – Katee Robert
I think quite a few of the Bitchery have read & recommended this novel, the first in a series about a Boston Irish mob family, so I won’t go into too much detail other than to say it’s not something I would’ve ordinarily picked up but I loved it and will read the rest of the series.
I re-read The Corinthian, by Georgette Heyer, which I’d read several years ago when I first discovered Heyer and glommed anything I could get. It was entertaining and witty, and I liked Sir Richard, the Corinthian of the title, but I hadn’t remembered that there was a squick-worthy age difference between the h/h (he’s 29, she’s a very young and naive 17).
The Austen Playbook – Lucy Parker
I loved it. I adored Freddy & Griff together, and how being together, seeing each other’s real self, helped them both to grow and to modify their relationships with others. And I liked that this entry into the series had a more convoluted plot. I did have an issue with the portrayal of Sadie, the villain of the piece – motiveless, one-dimensional and illogical in her villainy. And, although after early reviews I was expecting a Slytherin x Hufflepuff romance, I wasn’t expecting it to be overtly referenced in the text!
In honor of my Bruins making the Eastern Conference Finals I picked up the ice hockey romance On the Surface by Kate Willoughby. Heroine is a pediatric nurse who meets the hockey player hero in an autograph line where she gets in a confrontation with an obnoxious fan and the hero defends her; she later comes along to a press conference for damage control. Overall I liked it – h/h were both great characters. It was pretty low conflict though – there were a number of small misunderstandings that were quickly worked out in a refreshingly adult way, with each admitting they were wrong and apologizing when necessary – with the main conflict that the hero doesn’t want more kids (his daughter died of leukemia before the book opens and he is grieving her loss), and the heroine does. There was a tiny bit of slut-shaming in the beginning, and some of the athletes using gendered language as insults; however the hero has a hockey-playing niece who’s being bullied by the boys on her team, and the hero and some teammates stage an intervention. So, kind of mixed messages?
I liked it enough to read the sequel, Across the Line, which was a charming romance between a Chinese-American chef and hockey player. Slightly more conflict in this one, mostly because Becca, having been rejected by her parents for forging her own path (opening a restaurant instead of becoming a doctor), is fiercely independent and finds it difficult to share her life and her emotions with anyone really, but especially the hero – and that’s one of his hot buttons because he was once really close with his brother then found himself being pushed away and frozen out without understanding why (his brother was struggling with his sexuality at the time, which becomes an important subplot), and he gets more and more resentful and hurt. Across the Line has a prequel novella, On the Brink, about Calder’s brother Hart and the beginning of his relationship; it’s a sweet love story with a bittersweet ending: Jeremy, who’s out and proud, basically agrees to a closeted relationship (pretending to be roommates) for the sake of Hart’s hockey career.
I’m in the middle of Turn the Tide, an anthology of romantic suspense novellas (recommended by DiscoDollyDeb for the Adriana Anders novella; it was free when I picked it up and may still be). Katie Ruggle gets top billing but her entry into the anthology is basically a preview of her next series about bounty-hunting sisters. Even this short piece suffered from first-in-the-series-itis, introducing LOTS of characters (it seemed like there were six or seven sisters?), but the main character, Molly, was definitely a bad-ass, so if that’s your catnip you may want to check the series out. I haven’t gotten to the three other novellas yet!
Yesterday I finished two really different books:
1. Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys by Viv Albertine. Albertine is amazing – as a young woman, she was friends/lovers with key members of The Clash and the Sex Pistols and part of the emerging punk scene. She inherited £250 from her grandmother and spent it on buying a guitar she didn’t know how to play, but through determination and constant practice, she learnt enough to start composing songs and then was one of the founding members of The Slits, whose first album, The Cut is still extraordinary to listen to. This is her autobiography and she is a goddess. But it isn’t a pretty read – TW for all sorts of bad stuff.
2. Am glomming up via Kindle Unlimited backlist of Alice Chetwynd Ley. Sweet regencies owing a huge debt to Heyer, very quick, comforting and enjoyable.
I missed the end-of-April Whatcha Reading, but I’ve had kind of a nightmare month at work which is causing me to fall asleep early and read less than I would like, so at the end of the day it doesn’t seem like I’ve read that much this month. SO looking forward to summer when I work less, and do a lot more sitting at the pool and reading. I did manage to read A Wallflower Christmas by Lisa Kleypas, which was just lovely even if it’s totally not the appropriate time of year. I am such a sucker for the “working-class-girl-marries-fabulously-wealthy-dude-and-sticks-it-to-her-awful-relatives” trope, whatever the official name for that is. Also read A Week to be Wicked by Tessa Dare. This was interesting–I know a large portion of the Bitchery LOVE that book and I definitely enjoyed it but I don’t know if I would say LOVE. I loved the heroine but was a little more meh on the hero, as my daughter would say. And speaking of meh on the hero….I also read Lothaire by Kresley Cole, trying to keep up with Fated Mates. This is a villain redemption book and I get it, but I just didn’t get all the way there with Lothaire. The heroine in that book is freaking awesome. But there’s one thing he does to her that I just never got over, even though I could see that I was supposed to. Finally, I read two Harlequin Presents by Dani Collins, who is my current favorite author in that line. These were her most recent releases, a set of two books that follow the same characters. Maybe it was just a function of how I’m feeling at the moment but these did not seem like her best work to me. My work should be calming down gradually over the next few weeks and I’m really hoping that will both give me more time for reading and help me feel relaxed enough to enjoy it!