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A Psalm for the Wild Built
A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers is $2.99! Sarah loved this one and gave it an A-. It was also her favorite read of 2021:
Thinking about that book brings back the feeling of awe and stillness and gratitude I had when reading it. It’s so peaceful and kind. I almost miss it (which is fixable because I can re read).
Hugo Award-winner Becky Chambers’s delightful new series gives us hope for the future.
It’s been centuries since the robots of Earth gained self-awareness and laid down their tools.
Centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again.
Centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend.
One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of “what do people need?” is answered.
But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how.
They’re going to need to ask it a lot.
Becky Chambers’ new series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter?
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How to Fail at Flirting
How to Fail at Flirting by Denise Williams is $1.99! This is a contemporary romance and a standalone. It was featured on a previous Hide Your Wallet. Warning for this one as the heroine has left an abusive relationship and it plays a significant part of the romance, with the heroine working through her trauma.
One daring to-do list and a crash course in flirtation turn a Type A overachiever’s world upside down.
When her flailing department lands on the university’s chopping block, Professor Naya Turner’s friends convince her to shed her frumpy cardigan for an evening on the town. For one night her focus will stray from her demanding job and she’ll tackle a new kind of to-do list. When she meets a charming stranger in town on business, he presents the perfect opportunity to check off the items on her list. Let the guy buy her a drink. Check. Try something new. Check. A no-strings-attached hookup. Check…almost.
Jake makes her laugh and challenges Naya to rebuild her confidence, which was left toppled by her abusive ex-boyfriend. Soon she’s flirting with the chance at a more serious romantic relationship—except nothing can be that easy. The complicated strings around her dating Jake might destroy her career.
Naya has two options. She can protect her professional reputation and return to her old life or she can flirt with the unknown and stay with the person who makes her feel like she’s finally living again.
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The Wedding Party
The Wedding Party by Jasmine Guillory is $1.99! I feel like at this point, all of Guillory’s romances have been on sale at least once. I hope you’re collecting them all! Do you have a favorite Guillory?
The new exhilarating romance from The New York Times bestselling author of The Proposal!
Maddie and Theo have two things in common:
1. Alexa is their best friend
2. They hate each other
After an “oops, we made a mistake” night together, neither one can stop thinking about the other. With Alexa’s wedding rapidly approaching, Maddie and Theo both share bridal party responsibilities that require more interaction with each other than they’re comfortable with. Underneath the sharp barbs they toss at each other is a simmering attraction that won’t fade. It builds until they find themselves sneaking off together to release some tension when Alexa isn’t looking, agreeing they would end it once the wedding is over. When it’s suddenly pushed up and they only have a few months left of secret rendezvouses, they find themselves regretting that the end is near. Two people this different can’t possibly have a connection other than the purely physical, right?But as with any engagement with a nemesis, there are unspoken rules that must be abided by. First and foremost, don’t fall in love.
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The Invisible Library
RECOMMENDED: The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman is $1.99! This is a fantasy novel that Carrie really enjoyed. She graded it a B+:
While I genuinely loved the characters and concepts of the book, it’s played strictly for fun adventure. It’s basically just an excuse to have smart people fight cyborg alligators in a ballroom and werewolves in a museum. It’s smart, well-written fluff and I ate it up with a spoon.
Collecting books can be a dangerous prospect in this fun, time-traveling, fantasy adventure from a spectacular debut author.
One thing any Librarian will tell you: the truth is much stranger than fiction…Irene is a professional spy for the mysterious Library, a shadowy organization that collects important works of fiction from all of the different realities. Most recently, she and her enigmatic assistant Kai have been sent to an alternative London. Their mission: Retrieve a particularly dangerous book. The problem: By the time they arrive, it’s already been stolen.
London’s underground factions are prepared to fight to the death to find the tome before Irene and Kai do, a problem compounded by the fact that this world is chaos-infested—the laws of nature bent to allow supernatural creatures and unpredictable magic to run rampant. To make matters worse, Kai is hiding something—secrets that could be just as volatile as the chaos-filled world itself.
Now Irene is caught in a puzzling web of deadly danger, conflicting clues, and sinister secret societies. And failure is not an option—because it isn’t just Irene’s reputation at stake, it’s the nature of reality itself…
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A Psalm for the Wild-Built is indeed a lovely story. I am sending a copy to my adult daughter.
The Invisible Library is fun and fluffy, I agree with the B+ grade. Not A Romance. I stuck it out until book 5 of the series which is like 2 books more than usual for me. There’s some overarching mysteries about the characters and world that the author is doling out with a teaspoon and I’m tired of being strung along. Check your local library, since the series has been out for a while.
See, I’m super intrigued by A Psalm for the Wild-Built, but I’m wondering how something with so much technology can be soothing. Usually I associate that with lower-tech societies (hello, Jane Austen). Guess I will have to read it and see. Thanks!
This trilogy might interest some here ~
The Dragonriders of Pern: Dragonflight, Dragonquest, and The White Dragon
by Anne McCaffrey (US Kindle Edition)
is $2.99.
@HeatherS, the story is really about a post-tech society. The robots gained sentience and left civilization, and the society abandoned the technology due the ethical dilemma.
I read How To Fail at Flirting a few weeks ago from the library. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and particularly liked the relationship between the H and h, and the h and one of her best friends who is a straight guy – I appreciated the depiction of a deep friendship like that. I have put a library hold on Denise Williams’ next book, The Fastest Way to Fall, and am looking forward to reading it. Recommend.
I also read the Jasmine Guillory and generally recall liking it, but don’t remember much else. The winner here is The Psalm for the Wild Built — that was great (although not a romance),
@HeatherS – it’s set on a moon where advanced technology once was used to disrupt and exploit the ecology and now it’s used to allow humans to live sustainably and in harmony with nature.
Here’s a little from my GR review:
This is a gentle, meandering novella. There’s not a lot of plot. There’s a lot of tea and conversations and ideas. You get a sense of what it’s like to live in this utopia where the buildings are built to last only so long and then decay and where everyone gets a pocket computer that’s expected to last a lifetime. It’s delightful, if you like this type of thing. I’ve been wanting to read more hopeful books about a possible green future and this fit the bill pretty well.
One of my few complaints is that the robot (named Splendid Speckled Mosscap) read a little too human to me. It has human-like facial features and a lot of the descriptions of it ascribe human emotions to it. For example: “the robot beamed” and “Mosscap nodded happily” and Mosscap laughed.”
This is not a good book for a literal type reader, who will wonder how it’s possible that a moon in an unnamed system evolved an ecology so exactly like Earth, down to the humans and crickets and mycelium in the forest soil. Or one who will wonder how it came to be that this culture exploited their natural resources so aggressively in the past but didn’t seem to exploit each other. Or why this robot is shaped like a human when there doesn’t seem to be a good reason for it.
I would like to not be that literal reader – I know that this is an exploration of ideas, not a scientific or anthropological treatise – but once I had those thoughts it was hard to turn them off.
And despite that, I still found it delightful and entertaining.
Re: Kareni – I read most of Anne Mccaffrey Pern novels ages ago and I adored them (dragons! romance! Win!). However, the early ones haven’t aged so well. If I remember right, there was a great reread in tor.com a while ago. In short: proceed with caution and prepare for some crazysauce.
Had an ARC for Invisible Library. It’s a kitchen sink novel; the author threw everything at it to see what stuck. I think I’d give it a B or B-. I didn’t like it enough to go looking for one of the sequels, though I’d probably read one if I somehow ended up with it.
@Kareni & @Jiobal, I have said on more than one occasion that, if someone wants them, they’ll have to pry my Dragonriders books from my cold dead hands.
@Jiobal
The Pern books meant a lot to me when I was young. I revisited a while ago and found the Suck Fairy had hollowed them out pretty badly.
I really enjoyed the Invisible Library books, though some are much better than others. Cogman’s just brought the series to a close.
APsalm to the Wild Built was just nominated for a Nebula Award! I want a physical copy.
Another vote for A PSALM FOR THE WILD BUILT. It’s lovely.
I also enjoyed THE INVISIBLE LIBRARY—I read books 1, 2, 3, and 5 because, for reasons that escape me, that’s what my library had in ebook. They’re fluffy and enjoyable, though I think I prefer Jasper Fforde’s take on magical libraries.
Still Team Pern. The first books I read were the Menolly/Harper Hall trilogy, so those always had a special place in my heart. I was never as fond of the original/first two Dragonriders books, and I’m not sure I’d have been as invested in the series if I’d started there, tbh. Even at that time and at my age there was an ick factor that people now note, but that was only part of the problem for me. (Honestly, SO many things back then were permeated with ick that it barely stood out as exceptional.) No, my biggest issue was that so many of the characters were simply unlikable.(cough*Lessa*cough)
A couple of years ago, I started listening to the audiobooks and it was pretty interesting how my opinions of the individual books had changed. A number didn’t hold up, of course, but there were others that I’d barely remembered that I now thoroughly enjoyed. There were a lot of nuances and details that I’d either missed or forgotten that fleshed out the worldbuilding/history. My binge listen ran out of steam and I didn’t finish, but now I have a hankering to jump back into Pern.
The Jasmine Guillory book is very fun. This is one of my favourites.