This guest review is from Aidee. Aidee recently graduated from law school, where romance novels provided a much needed break from reading court opinions. She started reading romance in high school, but isn’t quite sure which was her first romance read—Jean M. Auel, Fern Michaels, or something that she has completely forgotten by now. She loves reading, writing, chocolate, tea, and listening to music, although not necessarily in that order. The books she keeps thinking … Continue reading Guest Review: Ruby Fever by Ilona Andrews →
Killers of a Certain Age is a sharp mix of heist, thriller, mystery, and the type of story where, besides all that action, the four main characters are shifting from one phase of their lives to another. There’s a lot of chemistry, both literal and interpersonal, murder, plotting, hunting, and scheming. There’s also a lot of on-page murder, but because everyone who is dispatched is quite terrible, it didn’t bother me too much, especially not … Continue reading Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn →
CW: period-appropriate homophobia and racism, raid on a gay bar at the end of episode 6 I wasn’t planning on watching A League of Their Own when I heard it was being turned into a TV series. The original film was such a foundational part of my childhood, how could I possibly enjoy an 8-episode series as much? Also, I’d heard it was super gay, which made me concerned about what traumatic events we’d see, … Continue reading Series Review: A League of Their Own →
This is a book about loneliness, about living a life when constantly dealing with death, and about being seen and heard and understood. If you like grumpy, taciturn characters with squishy, gooey insides, characters who struggle to become who they are or be recognized for who they are, and, above all, you like a major epistolary element to your stories (I have raised all my hands to that list) you will really like this. Hart … Continue reading The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy by Megan Bannen →
Nightmare Fuel: The Science of Horror Films was balm to my nerdy little heart. I got into horror much the same way I got into romance, which is to say I thought I didn’t like it, then realized I had been liking it all along somehow without noticing, and then I couldn’t get enough of it. There are some interesting intersections between romance and horror as genres, and I know we have some fans here … Continue reading Nightmare Fuel by Nina Nesseth →
Wash Day Diaries by Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith is a low-key but enrapturing graphic novel about Nisha, Davene, Kim, and Cookie, a group of Black women with deep and caring friendships. Each story lovingly depicts their hair care rituals while also revealing the soulful mundanity of the processes they engage in to care for themselves and others. Wash Day Diaries is as much about the relationship between the beauty rituals of these women and … Continue reading Wash Day Diaries by Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith →
40-Love is part of the Marysburg series by Olivia Dade. Shana and I both enjoyed this romance between a tennis player in his twenties and a forty-year-old high school assistant principal on vacation. The book glories in having a fat heroine and addresses issues including chronic pain, the challenge of reinventing oneself, inequities in the American school system, and navigating romance across an age gap. Despite all these topics, however, the book remains light and … Continue reading 40-Love by Olivia Dade →
Take the horror elements from T. Kingfisher’s novel The Hollow Places and combine them with the character dynamics and gentle, slow-burn romance of the Paladin series and you get Nettle and Bone, a fairy tale in which a princess enlists the help of a witch, a warrior, and an evil godmother in her efforts to kill a prince. I ate this book up to the detriment of several other things that I was supposed to … Continue reading Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher →
I started reading Hither, Page, finished it too quickly, immediately hunted down the sequel, The Missing Page, and read that too quickly as well. One tagline I’ve seen reads, “cozy mystery like Agatha Christie but make it gay.” It’s not so cozy that the dead have about as much impact as a dissolving dead NPC in a video game; the cozy has sharp edges. For example, there’s the bucolic setting, but around the borders are … Continue reading Hither, Page by Cat Sebastian →
I could practically hear Luisa’s song from Encanto (Surface Pressure) playing in my head as I read this book about an older sister who shoulders all of her family’s burdens. Mercy Kittinger raised her younger sister, Grace, after their mother’s death fifteen years ago. She’s managed the family farm, the household staff, and kept her family afloat even though that job was supposed to fall to her older brother, Bede. Bede is more interested in … Continue reading The Rake Gets Ravished by Sophie Jordan →
