Libro.fm’s buy-one-get-one sale is happening from Sept 16-19, and you can get two audiobooks for one credit. And if you’ve been thinking of joining Libro.fm, you can get three audiobooks for the price of one if you’re a new member buying a one credit per month plan. This means if you use code SWITCH, you could end up with six audiobooks for three credits you receive on sign up.
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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The Long Game by Elena Armas is $2.99! This is part of today’s Kindle Daily Deals. I remember this being a highly anticipated release given the popularity of Armas’s other books.
A disgraced soccer exec reluctantly enlists the help of a retired soccer star in coaching a children’s team in this smalltown love story in the vein of Ted Lasso and It Happened One Summer — from the New York Times bestselling author of The Spanish Love Deception.
Adalyn Reyes has spent years perfecting her daily routine: wake up at dawn, drive to the Miami Flames FC offices, try her hardest to leave a mark, go home, and repeat.
But her routine is disrupted when a video of her in an altercation with the team’s mascot goes viral. Rather than fire her, the team’s owner—who happens to be her father—sends Adalyn to middle-of-nowhere North Carolina, where she’s tasked with turning around the struggling local soccer team, the Green Warriors, as a way to redeem herself. Her plans crumble upon discovering that the players wear tutus to practice (impractical), keep pet goats (messy), and are terrified of Adalyn (counterproductive), and are nine-year-old kids.
To make things worse, also in town is Cameron Caldani, goalkeeping prodigy whose presence is somewhat of a mystery. Cam is the perfect candidate to help Adalyn, but after one very unfortunate first encounter involving a rooster, Cam’s leg, and Adalyn’s bumper, he’s also set on running her out of town. But banishment is not an option for Adalyn. Not again. Helping this ragtag children’s team is her road to redemption, and she is playing the long game. With or without Cam’s help.
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Must Love Scones and Secrets by Maisy Magill is 99c! This is book one in the Moonshine Hollow series and is described as a cozy, fantasy romance with medium spice. I bought it out of curioisty.
He’s a prince longing for freedom.
She’s a baker yearning for the ultimate love story.
Together, they’ll discover that sometimes the sweetest magic lies in unexpected places.
Rosalyn’s enchanted scones bring magic to every bite at The Sconery and Teashop. With a glitter-sneezing caticorn and a thriving business, all Rosalyn needs is a romance as sweet as her baking. When a mysterious Rune Elf strides into Moonshine Hollow, bringing secrets and devastating charm, her perfectly-measured life crumbles faster than a day-old scone.
Bjorn is no ordinary elf. A secret prince looking for an escape, he’s determined to forge his own path far from the expectations of his royal family. When he’s tasked with helping a wild unicorn herd suffering from chaotic magic, he’s relieved to focus on creatures instead of people. That is, until a certain insistently-friendly baker and her pet crash into his carefully guarded solitude.
As Rosalyn and Bjorn work together to uncover the source of the magical imbalance in horned creatures, sparks fly in more ways than one. Her warmth and charm start to melt his icy walls, but Bjorn’s secret could shatter their fragile connection. Rosalyn dreams of the kind of love bards sing about, but will this gruff and guarded prince sweep her off her feet before it’s too late?
Must Love Scones and Secrets is a spicy cozy fantasy romance full of enchanted pastries, mischievous caticorns, and a love story that will warm your heart.
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The Ex Hex by Erin Sterling is $1.99! This is a light paranormal romance with some witchy elements. This one was…sweeter? More twee? than I had thought it’d be. I hope you get what I’m trying to say here.
New York Times bestselling author Rachel Hawkins, writing as Erin Sterling, casts a spell with a spine-tingling romance full of wishes, witches, and hexes gone wrong.
Nine years ago, Vivienne Jones nursed her broken heart like any young witch would: vodka, weepy music, bubble baths…and a curse on the horrible boyfriend. Sure, Vivi knows she shouldn’t use her magic this way, but with only an “orchard hayride” scented candle on hand, she isn’t worried it will cause him anything more than a bad hair day or two.
That is until Rhys Penhallow, descendent of the town’s ancestors, breaker of hearts, and annoyingly just as gorgeous as he always was, returns to Graves Glen, Georgia. What should be a quick trip to recharge the town’s ley lines and make an appearance at the annual fall festival turns disastrously wrong. With one calamity after another striking Rhys, Vivi realizes her silly little Ex Hex may not have been so harmless after all.
Suddenly, Graves Glen is under attack from murderous wind-up toys, a pissed off ghost, and a talking cat with some interesting things to say. Vivi and Rhys have to ignore their off the charts chemistry to work together to save the town and find a way to break the break-up curse before it’s too late.
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The Becky Chambers book is very good – a solid B for me. I have enjoyed all of her books, including the Wayfarers series. If you haven’t read her before, I would describe her writing as sort of cosy Sci-Fi.
Ooh, I loved A PSALM FOR THE WILD BUILT. A welcome antidote to the general state of the world.
Agree that THE EX HEX was somewhat twee. I found it generally amusing, but not particularly deep.
The cover of Must Love Scones and Secrets is a delight.
I also recommend Psalm for the Wild Built. It was also a solid B.
Here’s my GR review:
This is a lovely, gentle parable about seeking and finding and what it means to be. Sibling Dex, an agender monk living in a genuinely pretty great sounding utopian society, wants to hear crickets. That desire turns into restlessness and that takes them on a quest – first to become a traveling tea monk serving the villages outside their city and then to go into the wilderness.
In the wild, they encounter a robot. And not any robot. The first robot any human has encountered on Panga since the factory robots achieved sentience and withdrew from human civilization into the wilderness two centuries ago. Panga is a moon where advanced technology once was used to disrupt and exploit their ecology and now is used to allow humans to live sustainably and in harmony with nature. And without robot labor.
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.