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A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking
A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher is 99c and part of today’s Kindle Daily Deals! This one was mentioned in a previous Hide Your Wallet, and the SBTB team has really been enjoying Kingfisher’s books lately.
Fourteen-year-old Mona isn’t like the wizards charged with defending the city. She can’t control lightning or speak to water. Her familiar is a sourdough starter and her magic only works on bread. She has a comfortable life in her aunt’s bakery making gingerbread men dance.
But Mona’s life is turned upside down when she finds a dead body on the bakery floor. An assassin is stalking the streets of Mona’s city, preying on magic folk, and it appears that Mona is his next target. And in an embattled city suddenly bereft of wizards, the assassin may be the least of Mona’s worries…
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The Eyre Affair
RECOMMENDED: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde is $1.99! I loved this fantasy novel and highly recommend it to readers who love the classics. Admittedly, the book does take a while to get into as you try to settle into the world building, but I think Fforde eventually finds his footing and the following books in the series just get better.
Welcome to a surreal version of Great Britain, circa 1985, where time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, veryseriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem, militant Baconians heckle performances of Hamlet, and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense.
All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection, until someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature. When Jane Eyre is plucked from the pages of Brontë’s novel, Thursday must track down the villain and enter the novel herself to avert a heinous act of literary homicide.
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Wrong Bed, Right Roommate
Wrong Bed, Right Roommate by Rebecca Brooks is 99c! Elyse mentioned this one in January 2019’s Hide Your Wallet, and I appreciate the hero cover model’s chest hair. Readers found this to be a cute, sexy romance, but there were some reviews that mention being divided on the hero.
It’s not every day you wake up to a stranger getting into your bed.
Only, he isn’t a stranger at all, he’s my best friend’s hot older brother…and apparently my new roommate.
Having him in my space, driving me crazy, isn’t a problem at all. Nope.
All I need to do is keep control of the situation…But that’s easier said than done. Shawn Lassiter is the kind of distraction I don’t need.
First he accidentally gets into my bed, half-naked, the night before my first day at my new job.Hello, muscles and tattoos!
Then he’s there, in nothing but a towel, making me coffee in the morning. It’s more than any girl can resist. Right? But Shawn is off-limits, even if his eyes are saying differently.
Years ago, back when I still had my crush, he destroyed friendships with his reckless playboy antics. There’s no way I’m touching those perfectly formed abs now. I don’t care how nice and responsible he’s acting. I don’t want a boyfriend anyway. That’s what my trusty vibrator is for.
I’m the smart girl—the glasses-wearing, book-reading workaholic. I can totally do this. After all, it’s only for two and a half months.
I’ll be on my best behavior…even if Shawn isn’t.
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The Stillwater Girls
The Stillwater Girls by Minka Kent is $1.99! Elyse gave this mystery/thriller a B, as it was a little less scary than she likes:
Basically if you want to be a little scared (because the premise is weird and spooky), but also know you’re safe reading about people who will be okay and nothing violent will happen, this book will work for you.
Two sisters raised in fear are about to find out why in a chilling novel of psychological suspense from the author of The Thinnest Air.
Ignorant of civilization and cautioned against its evils, nineteen-year-old Wren and her two sisters, Sage and Evie, were raised in off-the-grid isolation in a primitive cabin in upstate New York. When the youngest grows gravely ill, their mother leaves with the child to get help from a nearby town. And they never return.
As months pass, hope vanishes. Supplies are low. Livestock are dying. A brutal winter is bearing down. Then comes the stranger. He claims to be looking for the girls’ mother, and he’s not leaving without them.
To escape, Wren and her sister must break the rule they’ve grown up with: never go beyond the forest.
Past the thicket of dread, they come upon a house on the other side of the pines. This is where Wren and Sage must confront something more chilling than the unknowable. They’ll discover what’s been hidden from them, what they’re running from, and the secrets that have left them in the dark their entire lives.
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A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking is *really* good, and for 99 cents it is a steal. I bought this recently (maybe because of your previous post on it?) and went down the T Kingfisher backlist. I think she is now an autobuy for me, and I cannot wait until she publishes her next book.
The Eyre Affair is also very good. I know some people don’t like the snark, but I liked it a lot. (It helps if you are familiar with Jane Eyre and other books in the English canon.)
Melissa Foster has a ton of her ebooks free on her amazon author page
Always With You by Barbara Freethy is free
I read the Brooks book based on the recommendation here. Didn’t love it, didn’t hate it. I was going to write a GR review, but when I got the time I couldn’t remember enough about it to do so. So, just my own opinion, but there are too many other options for me to settle for “just OK.”
I found Stillwater Girls a little disappointing; my pick’s the Fforde
I LOVED The Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking and also have been working on T. Kingfisher’s backlist. It kind of reads as YA, but there’s a dead body in a bakery on page one and it just gets delightfully weirder from there. Definitely recommend.
I’m also a big Jasper Fforde fan—Eyre Affair is a great entry point to his books. (I also enjoyed the Nursery Crimes series, Shades of Grey, and The Constant Rabbit.) That one is also with picking up.
Kingfisher is an autobuy for me. The only two books I’ve paid full price for this year is a Kingfisher and the newest Murderbot novella.
The Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking was one of my favorite covid-escapist adventures. It is kind of hard to classify–it isn’t really what I’d call YA–none of the usual teen angst romance. It reads more like a children’s book in many ways, but a bit too gruesome for me to actually recommend it to kids. I’m going to call it “old child” fiction, for those of us who will never actually grow up.
The Eyre Affair was also a book I enjoyed back when it first came out quite a while back. I eventually lost interest in the series, but the premise was fun (at least for someone who suffered through way too many grad school literature courses).
The Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking is absolutely delightful (and YA is used to having bodies scattered all over, *see* Hunger Games). I keep wondering if “Bob” happens to know “Horace” (semi-sentient cheese from the Tiffany Aching books).