Get Rec’d with Amanda – Volume 53

Welcome back! Are you read for another round of recommendations?

This time around, most of these recommendations are ones I’ve found from other readers in my personal life or those I follow on social media (namely Goodreads and Instagram). There are a couple suggestions for romance readers, but also some nonfiction and horror.

Do you have any books you’d like to recommend? Or have you received any spot-on recommendations lately?

  • Love, Ace & Monsters

    Love, Ace & Monsters by Azalea Crowley

    I’m not sure who the editor of this anthology is, as it’s not clearly marked, but if you wanted more inclusive monster romances, this is an anthology for you.

    Ready for a monster romance anthology with a new intersection?

    Love, Ace & Monsters is a collection of monster romances featuring ace identities. From Ace to Demi, this anthology hopes to explore the diverse spectrum and the different relationships through monster romance.

    Proceeds will benefit wayOUT, a nonprofit organization that works to support LGBTQIA+ youth in the United States.

    Featured authors:

    Azalea Crowley
    R.N. Barbosa
    Sula Sullivan
    Daphinie Cramsie
    Calla Claire
    Katie Skye
    Kass O’Shire

    Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

    This book is available from:
    • Available at Amazon

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    Love, Ace & Monsters by Azalea Crowley

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  • Soft Flannel Hank

    Soft Flannel Hank by Eliza MacArthur

    I feel like you all need to be aware of this one: a contemporary paranormal romance with older main characters who are out of their twenties.

    Esther MacLaren never pictured her life going so spectacularly sideways. A thirty-five-year-old witch with an art degree and no other job prospects, she took a job bartending at a vampire-owned nightclub in Savannah. But after seeing something she wasn’t mean’t to, Esther has been on the run for months. With nothing but her intuition to guide her Esther finds herself in the Pacific Northwest, careening directly into the path of Hank Dove.

    Hank Dove is as big as he is quiet. He’s forty-five, divorced, depressed, and trying therapy for the very first time. When Esther blows into his quiet, lonely life with all the subtlety of a squall, Hank is left reeling by feelings and desires he thought were long gone. Maybe, just maybe, he’s not quite as stuck as he thought.

    A one-night stand feels like so much more, but Hank discovers that he doesn’t trust as easily as he used to. All of Esther’s dangerous secrets don’t help. How can he keep her safe if he doesn’t know the truth? And how can he let himself love her if she won’t stay?

    Soft Flannel Hank is a contemporary paranormal romance with open door/explicit scenes. This book is intended for audiences 18+. HEA guaranteed.

    Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

    This book is available from:
    • Available at Amazon

    • Barnes & Noble
    • Kobo

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    Soft Flannel Hank by Eliza MacArthur

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  • Stray Dogs

    Stray Dogs by Tony Fleecs

    Got this one on an instagram story recommendation and seemed right up my alley. The description I saw was, “If Don Bluth made a horror comic.” (Which also led me down a rabbit hole of my favorite Bluth films; he’s also still alive!)

    It’s scary being the new dog.

    In this suspenseful new series, readers meet Sophie, a dog who can’t remember what happened. She doesn’t know how she ended up in this house. She doesn’t recognize any of these other dogs. She knows something terrible happened, but she just…can’t…recall…Wait! Where’s her lady? Now Sophie has to figure out where she is, what’s happening, and how she’s going to survive this.

    They say there’s no such thing as a bad dog—just bad owners.

    Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

    This book is available from:
    • Available at Amazon

    • Barnes & Noble

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    Stray Dogs by Tony Fleecs

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  • The Women’s House of Detention

    The Women’s House of Detention by Hugh Ryan

    If queer history and non-fiction is in your house of wheels, check this one out! It recounts the forty-five year history of the Women’s House of Detention in New York.

    This singular history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century.

    The Women’s House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women’s imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City’s Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it was a nexus for the tens of thousands of women, transgender men, and gender-nonconforming people who inhabited its crowded cells. Some of these inmates—Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur—were famous, but the vast majority were incarcerated for the crimes of being poor and improperly feminine. Today, approximately 40 percent of the people in women’s prisons identify as queer; in earlier decades, that percentage was almost certainly higher.

    Historian Hugh Ryan explores the roots of this crisis and reconstructs the little-known lives of incarcerated New Yorkers, making a uniquely queer case for prison abolition—and demonstrating that by queering the Village, the House of D helped defined queerness for the rest of America. From the lesbian communities forged through the Women’s House of Detention to the turbulent prison riots that presaged Stonewall, this is the story of one building and much more: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired.

    Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

    This book is available from:
    • Available at Amazon

    • Barnes & Noble
    • Kobo

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    We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!

    The Women’s House of Detention by Hugh Ryan

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Comments are Closed

  1. Laura says:

    I’m a 60 something queer who came out at 19 and am fairly well versed in Queer History but I’ve never heard of The House of D. I knew transgender folk, lesbians, and gay men were often incarcerated for being queer and poor. I just figured they were thrown into county and state facilities with the general population. In 1984 there was a proposal to round up all the “gays” and put them in a camp to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.

    It’s bullsh** like this that makes it important for us to know our history. Thanks for including this important book. I’m going to ask my library to buy it but meanwhile I’m going to buy a copy and throw ya’ll a few cents.

  2. dePizan says:

    And unfortunately @Laura, there was a historical basis for that idea of putting people in camps. A lot of the mass imprisonment of women and queer people started under the guise of the “America Plan,” which was a little-known nasty piece of work arising from WWI that let places incarcerate women without trials, solely under the guise of protecting the public (ie soldiers) from STDs.
    Women simply suspected to be sex workers or being queer, promiscuous, “bad,” etc were imprisoned under it. It didn’t even always need a positive diagnosis of a STD to be imprisoned (although a lot had them, because the flawed testing at the time produced a lot of false positives). They were then subject to horrible treatments of mercury injections and forced sterilization, and heavy manual labor.

    There’s a good book on it The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison “Promiscuous” Women by Scott W. Stern.

  3. Laura says:

    @dePizan thank you for adding this interesting albeit terrifying and sad piece from our history. Another example of why we need to know our history so we can avoid things like this from ever happening again.

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