I love modern-day witches. I love queer romance. I love mysteries. I’m not typically a huge YA reader, but I like the first three things enough to give queer YA witch romance mystery These Witches Don’t Burn a try. While this book was not without its flaws, there was something quite fresh-feeling about These Witches Don’t Burn that I appreciated. It took a lot of common YA tropes, such as “I’m trying to be a … Continue reading These Witches Don’t Burn by Isabel Sterling →
This book is kind of a weird read. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I think I mean it in a good way? It’s mostly charmingly bizarre. This book puts a lot of plates spinning in the air, and while some of them end up crashing to the ground and breaking, the show is fun while it lasts. The basic premise is that Grace and Sebastian are two scholarly nerds who are friends. … Continue reading My Fake Rake by Eva Leigh →
I keep reading books that are very hard for me to grade, because I have conflicting reactions to them. The Bridge Kingdom started out incredibly strong, but things that happened in the last 15% or so of the book soured the reading experience for me. The fact that I enjoyed the book quite a lot until that point made my disappointment even more intense. I’ve been a fan of Danielle L. Jensen since her debut … Continue reading The Bridge Kingdom by Danielle L. Jensen →
There is nothing I adore more than a grovel in a romance novel. Flirting, sexual tension, meet-cutes, meet-disasters, declarations of love… you name it, I love it. But none of those things are better than an epic groveling scene, especially when it has an alpha protagonist brought down to their knees and desperate beyond measure. It’s when you can really feel how much one protagonist (usually the one who has screwed up royally) loves the … Continue reading The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams →
CW/TW: Kidnapping, murder, stalking, the usual myriad evils of a serial killer. You know those paint by numbers pictures where number-by-number you recreate the Mona Lisa? The result is an imperfect version of a masterpiece. It’s not high art, but it’s still a satisfying exercise and, when framed, makes a lovely addition to a wall, even if only a bathroom wall. This novel is an imperfect version of a masterpiece, with a few wildcards thrown … Continue reading Safety Breach by Delores Fossen →
Esme Brett reviews romance on Instagram as @Feminist_Romance. She lives in New Zealand and is a devoted cat mother to Franklin. Her areas of expertise involve Buffy the Vampire Slayer, winged eyeliner, and red wine that’s less than 9 dollars. … Little Bridge is an idyllic island in the Florida Keys. Unfortunately, it’s also in the direct path of a category 5 hurricane. Most of the island population evacuate except for Bree Beckham, hottie Drew … Continue reading Guest Review: No Judgments by Meg Cabot →
Wooooow. This is a book with some serious “absinthe + Yeats” energy. I don’t know what happened, but it was certainly operatic. I liked the imagery but must post a STRONG TW: The Absinthe Earl is a fantasy romance set in 1882. I’ll let the publisher set everything up for you: Miss Ada Quicksilver, a student of London’s Lovelace Academy for Promising Young Women, is spending her holiday in Ireland to pursue her anthropological study … Continue reading The Absinthe Earl by Sharon Lynn Fisher →
The Grace Year is described as a “haunting, feminist YA speculative thriller,” and I mostly agree with that assessment. It’s twisted, memorable, and eerie (there is a tree from which severed fingers and other body parts hang). It’s a book you’ll be thinking about for days after you’ve finished reading, but it does struggle with being overly ambitious in subplots and when it comes to a satisfactory ending, it doesn’t stick the landing. There is … Continue reading The Grace Year by Kim Liggett →
My experience of The Library of the Unwritten was one of disappointment. However, there’s no such thing as an unbiased review, and I struggled through this book during the worst possible time for me to be reading a book with complicated angst. So even though I wasn’t crazy about this book and will explain why, I think some of you might enjoy it anyway. This book, which is one of several “library” themed fantasies out … Continue reading The Library of the Unwritten by A.J. Hackwith →
I love road trips (as long as I don’t have to drive or navigate or really do anything other than eat snacks and sing early 2000s pop music). But I really love road trip books: the forced and shared isolation, the constant of the interior space against the changing of the external, the stops along the way, and the road itself: what it means and what it makes possible. So with all my love of … Continue reading Along for the Ride by Mimi Grace →
I really struggled with how to grade this book, mostly because I appreciated what it was trying to do even if I think it did not succeed. I mean, a lot of the ingredients are there: a teenage babysitter’s club that’s actually a coven of witches is a bomb-ass premise, the secondary characters were intriguing, and there were some genuinely funny jokes. So what’s the problem? The primary issue, craft-wise, was that this was a … Continue reading The Babysitters Coven by Kate Williams →
