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Spoiler Alert
RECOMMENDED: Spoiler Alert by Olivia Dade is $1.99 and a Kindle Daily Deal! Shana reviewed this one in October and gave it a B+:
Spoiler Alert is tropey wish fulfillment, but at its heart, it is a quiet contemporary with a #couplegoals relationship where both characters offer comfort, create beautiful art, and help each other overcome insecurities. Spoiler Alert is also a love letter to fandoms, that will make you want to chase your romance novel with a shot of fanfiction.
Olivia Dade bursts onto the scene in this delightfully fun romantic comedy set in the world of fanfiction, in which a devoted fan goes on an unexpected date with her celebrity crush, who’s secretly posting fanfiction of his own.
Marcus Caster-Rupp has a secret. While the world knows him as Aeneas, the star of the biggest show on TV, Gods of the Gates, he’s known to fanfiction readers as Book!AeneasWouldNever, an anonymous and popular poster. Marcus is able to get out his own frustrations with his character through his stories, especially the ones that feature the internet’s favorite couple to ship, Aeneas and Lavinia. But if anyone ever found out about his online persona, he’d be fired. Immediately.
April Whittier has secrets of her own. A hardcore Lavinia fan, she’s hidden her fanfiction and cosplay hobby from her “real life” for years—but not anymore. When she decides to post her latest Lavinia creation on Twitter, her photo goes viral. Trolls and supporters alike are commenting on her plus-size take, but when Marcus, one half of her OTP, sees her pic and asks her out on a date to spite her critics, she realizes life is really stranger than fanfiction.
Even though their first date is a disaster, Marcus quickly realizes that he wants much more from April than a one-time publicity stunt. And when he discovers she’s actually Unapologetic Lavinia Stan, his closest fandom friend, he has one more huge secret to hide from her.
With love and Marcus’s career on the line, can the two of them stop hiding once and for all, or will a match made in fandom end up prematurely cancelled?
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How to Find a Princess
RECOMMENDED: How to Find a Princess by Alyssa Cole is $1.99! Shana read this one and gave it a B:
How to Find a Princess is an imaginative twist on a modern lost royal trope, and a character-driven story that made me fall in love with everyone I met, even if they occasionally frustrated me.
New York Times and USA Today bestseller Alyssa Cole’s second Runaway Royals novel is a queer Anastasia retelling, featuring a long-lost princess who finds love with the female investigator tasked with tracking her down.
Makeda Hicks has lost her job and her girlfriend in one fell swoop. The last thing she’s in the mood for is to rehash the story of her grandmother’s infamous summer fling with a runaway prince from Ibarania, or the investigator from the World Federation of Monarchies tasked with searching for Ibarania’s missing heir.
Yet when Beznaria Chetchevaliere crashes into her life, the sleek and sexy investigator exudes exactly the kind of chaos that organized and efficient Makeda finds irresistible, even if Bez is determined to drag her into a world of royal duty Makeda wants nothing to do with.
When a threat to her grandmother’s livelihood pushes Makeda to agree to return to Ibarania, Bez takes her on a transatlantic adventure with a crew of lovable weirdos, a fake marriage, and one-bed hijinks on the high seas. When they finally make it to Ibarania, they realize there’s more at stake than just cash and crown, and Makeda must learn what it means to fight for what she desires and not what she feels bound to by duty.
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Yes Please
RECOMMENDED: Yes Please by Amy Poehler is $2.99! I wrote about how this book came into my life at just the right time and if you’ve been waiting for it to go on sale, now’s your chance! It’s also great on audio.
In Amy Poehler’s highly anticipated first book, Yes Please, she offers up a big juicy stew of personal stories, funny bits on sex and love and friendship and parenthood and real life advice (some useful, some not so much), like when to be funny and when to be serious. Powered by Amy’s charming and hilarious, biting yet wise voice, Yes Please is a book is full of words to live by.
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Gentleman Jim
RECOMMENDED: Gentleman Jim by Mimi Matthews is FREE! Lara wrote a Lightning Review for this one and gave it an A:
I love a good yarn (in all senses of the word) and this book delivers a belter. This is an historical romance that feels fresh, vibrant and made me sing the Good Book Noise.
From USA Today bestselling author Mimi Matthews comes a swashbuckling tale of Regency era romance and revenge.
She couldn’t forget…
Wealthy squire’s daughter Margaret Honeywell was always meant to marry her neighbor, Frederick Burton-Smythe, but it’s bastard-born Nicholas Seaton who has her heart. Raised alongside her on her father’s estate, Nicholas is the rumored son of notorious highwayman Gentleman Jim. When Fred frames him for theft, Nicholas escapes into the night, vowing to find his legendary sire. But Nicholas never returns. A decade later, he’s long been presumed dead.
He wouldn’t forgive…
After years spent on the continent, John Beresford, Viscount St. Clare has finally come home to England. Tall, blond, and dangerous, he’s on a mission to restore his family’s honor. If he can mete out a bit of revenge along the way, so much the better. But he hasn’t reckoned for Maggie Honeywell. She’s bold and beautiful—and entirely convinced he’s someone else.
As danger closes in, St. Clare is torn between love and vengeance. Will he sacrifice one to gain the other? Or with a little luck—and a lot of daring—will he find a way to have them both?
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Ooh, I loved GENTLEMAN JIM. Solid plotting, good writing and conflict, and a super creepy villain (Matthews clearly knows a thing or two about dysfunctional/abusive relationships.) Definitely recommend.
I enjoyed SPOILER ALERT while I was reading it and then just felt SO gross afterwards for all the time I spent soaking in fat-shaming during the book. Dade is obviously critiquing the fat shaming, but its pervasiveness in the story just made it insufficiently escapist for me.
Currently free:
– Sylvie Stewart’s New Jerk in Town
– Marie Johnston’s The Dragon’s Oath
– Erika Kelly’s We Belong Together
– Cara Wylde’s Baruk the Cursed
$.99:
– Cathryn Fox’s Warm Up (hockey)
– Cathryn Fox’s Breaking the Rules series and Playing for Keeps series
Also! Very glad that the Harper Collins strike has resulted in a deal and that we are back to having their titles included in the various posts here. I appreciate SBTB’s solidarity with the strikers, but am glad to support authors (like Dade) and their writing again.
@FashionablyEvil: Agreed. I wonder if SB would be willing or able to throw up a quick post running down HC titles that released during the strike and would have been featured before if not for that.
@Rain: I know Sarah hasn’t weighed in on this, but I reset the spreadsheet every month where I collect new release data and the reviewers have been pretty diligent about not listing HC releases. We don’t have that information archived, so it’s a post that would have to be built from the ground up with us consulting the last 3 months of title releases.
Any reviews that were held will be posted.
I didn’t care for Spoiler Alert. The heroine starts out as a strong, confident, zaftig career woman and then the plot takes a hard left and suddenly she’s this emotional mess due to toxic parental relationships. I threw the book across the room at several points, muttering to myself that most parents of heavy women wouldn’t be this cartoonishly evil, and surely she would have gone to therapy by now and be better able to deal with everything (see above: strong, confident career woman).
@Amanda-Absolutely understandable if it’s not feasible to do. HC is just such a massive publisher, and I’ve seen so many upset authors in my Twitter feed whose books were basically muted because of the strike.
@Amanda, how about a rec league for delayed HC books? I’m sure there are some of your readers who would be glad to do the work for you.
NONA THE NINTH by Tamsyn Muir is on sale at Amazon US for $4.99.
I liked Spoiler Alert for the tropiness. My main issue is that her characters are written to be a certain age and they seem immature. I think this is her style, though, since I had the same problem with her other books.
just checked (& purchased) Spoiler Alert is also on sale in the Kobo Store, for those who read ebooks on non-Amazon devices.
CAN’T SPELL TREASON WITHOUT TEA by Rebecca Thorne is free on kindle. (I assume I heard about it here?)
@ReadKnitSnark
“Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea” was featured in the “Book Beat” page on 12/17/22.
@Michael I Thank you! I usually make a note in GR but apparently this time I only looked it up on Amazon…