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Wicked Saints
RECOMMENDED: Wicked Saints by Emily A. Duncan is $2.99! The sequel also just came out this month! I really enjoyed this book and gave it a B+:
Wicked Saints is a young adult fantasy debut and it’s a goth kid’s dream. Seriously, if you have a thing for anti-heroes, dark magic, and things that are simply metal as fuck, this book is for you.
A girl who can speak to gods must save her people without destroying herself.
A prince in danger must decide who to trust.
A boy with a monstrous secret waits in the wings.
Together, they must assassinate the king and stop the war.
In a centuries-long war where beauty and brutality meet, their three paths entwine in a shadowy world of spilled blood and mysterious saints, where a forbidden romance threatens to tip the scales between dark and light. Wicked Saints is the thrilling start to Emily A. Duncan’s devastatingly Gothic Something Dark and Holy trilogy.
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The Kiss of Deception
The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson is $2.99! This is a YA fantasy with romantic elements and sounds pretty awesome. A princess bails on her wedding day and tries to start a life elsewhere under another identity. Some readers felt that nothing truly happened in the book, while others loved the writing and detail. Anyone interested?
A princess must find her place in a reborn world.
She flees on her wedding day.
She steals ancient documents from the Chancellor’s secret collection.
She is pursued by bounty hunters sent by her own father.
She is Princess Lia, seventeen, First Daughter of the House of Morrighan.
The Kingdom of Morrighan is steeped in tradition and the stories of a bygone world, but some traditions Lia can’t abide. Like having to marry someone she’s never met to secure a political alliance.
Fed up and ready for a new life, Lia flees to a distant village on the morning of her wedding. She settles in among the common folk, intrigued when two mysterious and handsome strangers arrive—and unaware that one is the jilted prince and the other an assassin sent to kill her. Deceptions swirl and Lia finds herself on the brink of unlocking perilous secrets—secrets that may unravel her world—even as she feels herself falling in love.
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Somebody Like You
Somebody Like You by Lynette Eason is 99c! This is the first book in the contemporary western Maverick Junction series. This was first published in 2012 with a different cover and seemed to have been re-released in 2016, so make sure you haven’t read this one already.
From the “talented writer” (Kirkus) of the Must Love Babies and Magnolia Brides series comes a charming, small-town romance between a cowboy and a heiress on the run.
Cash Hardeman thinks he’ll have all the time in the world to find the right woman . . . until he discovers he might lose the family ranch if he’s not married by his thirtieth birthday. So when Boston beauty Annelise blows into town on her Harley, Cash can’t help wondering if she’s the sexy, leather-clad answer to all his problems.Giving her bodyguards and the paparazzi the slip, heiress Annelise Montjoy comes to Maverick Junction on a mission to help her ailing grandfather. But keeping her identity hidden in the small Texas town is harder than she expected-especially around a tempting cowboy like Cash. He’s the kind of man who makes her want to spill all her secrets. Soon Annelise starts to wonder if she’s finally found the man who can love her for herself rather than her money. But will the secrets they both keep ruin their plans to ride off into the sunset together?
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Women Talking
Women Talking by Miriam Toews is $1.99! I bought this on a recommendation from a trusted reading friend and wow. This is haunting and harrowing and by no means an easy read. Several Goodreads reviews mentioned DNF-ing because of the writing style and I totally get it. Definitely read a sample before buying if you can.
One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm.
While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women—all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in—have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they’ve ever known or should they dare to escape?
Based on real events and told through the “minutes” of the women’s all-female symposium, Toews’s masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.
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GIDEON THE NINTH by Tamsyn Muir is $2.99. I was expecting the Tor Book Club to give it away closer to the sequel’s release in August(?), but this price was too good for me to wait and see.
For word nerds, THE GLAMOUR OF GRAMMAR: A GUIDE TO THE MAGIC AND MYSTERY OF PRACTICAL ENGLISH by Roy Peter Clark is $1.99. From the writer of what I call “the sentence-writing book” (WRITING TOOLS: 50 ESSENTIAL STRATEGIES FOR EVERY WRITER), which I gift to everyone whose words I want to flourish.
Middlegame by Seanan McGuire is also 2.99 on Amazon.
Aaargh, I just bought Middlegame in trade paperback.
And so is A Memory Called Empire by former SBTB podcast guest Arkady Martine.
“Wry, politically-engaged humor” in a book about the wholesale rape and abuse of a community of women by the men of the same community? I just couldn’t with that.
The picture on the cover of Somebody Like You is also the cover for a truly terrible book I DNF’d at some point, but it’s not this one. I feel like I’ve actually seen that exact same cover on several books, but the problem is I’m reluctant to try them because every time I see it I think of the one terrible, alpha-hole, slut-shaming jerk of a main character.
Gideon the 9th, Memory Called Empire, and Middlegame are all Hugo novel nominees. Fellow nominee City in the Middle of the Night is also $2.99 today. Only one I can’t find on sale is Ten Thousand Doors of January.
@harthad Here it is- https://smile.amazon.com/City-Middle-Night-Charlie-Anders-ebook/dp/B07FJZDJ8Y/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=City+in+the+Middle+of+the+Night&qid=1588027110&s=digital-text&sr=1-2
@Leftcoaster Sorry, I meant at a reduced price! It’s for sale, definitely, but at its regular $9.99 ebook price (at least for me).
Oh man I DNF’d Wicked Saints and then just read last 3 pages. I don’t remember too much why I didn’t like it except that I remember I had to suspend my belief way, way too much when it came to character actions (& it’s a fantasy; suspending belief should be easy!) & that the book came across as very 9th grade fanfiction-y?
For Kiss of Deception, I also remember not being a big fan of the book, but yet really enjoyed the 2n & 3rd book. If I didn’t like the 1st book, why did I continue reading? Could not tell you bc I don’t remember. Should I be commenting on books I have fuzzy memories on? I got nothing but time! *getting a bit stir crazy*
@DiscoDollyDeb I’m with you. I was interested in the book, thought it could be something to check out, but ugh. The women are too vulnerable for humor to work in my opinion.
@DiscoDollyDeb and @Alexandra: I haven’t read Women Talking, but I looked at some reviews. Toews is a lapsed Mennonite herself and it sounds like she takes the events of her book – which is based on rapes that happened and are probably still happening – seriously. I expect the “wry humor” is similar to the kind Offred uses in her narration of The Handmaid’s Tale, and that book/series doesn’t exactly downplay the horrors its women characters go through. The fact is, you need at least a little humor in a bleak story or it will be too unbearable to finish. But perhaps I’m off-base. Could someone who has read the book weigh in?
I read it and didn’t find anything “humorous” at all. I’d say there’s some deadpan moments, if anything, but the blurb is overstating any perceived lightness of the subject matter.
Hope that helps!
@Amanda: I just checked the free sample and the “deadpan moments” remark bears out. The narrator – a sympathetic man who’s keeping the minutes for the women – remarks that he doesn’t mind living in a shed because “It’s bigger than a jail cell and large enough for me and a horse.” That joke is so dry I need a drink of water, and I think that’s an appropriate tone to set for a book about a serious subject. I wasn’t going to buy it, but the sample convinced me.