Not Here to Make Friends

She’s the reality TV villain everyone will love to hate. He’s the producer tasked with making it happen. What could go wrong? A hilarious, heartfelt rom-com from Australia’s leading romance expert.

Reality TV producer Murray O’Connell is used to being in control. He’s the showrunner for reality dating show Marry Me, Juliet, and that means he’s the he controls the cast, the crew and the story. Until Lily Fireball turns up.

Lily is everything viewers love to she’s feisty, dramatic, and not afraid to cause a stir. Her villain narrative on the show should be the cherry on top of the cake of Murray’s perfect season, but what no one knows is that Murray already knows Lily. Not as Lily Fireball, but as Lily his former best friend.

Now Lily has thrust herself back into Murray’s life, and into the most stressful season he’s ever worked on. Why is she here? What is her agenda? And why can’t Murray just concentrate on his job, instead of fighting to shield her from hateful viewers – and keep her with him forever?

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Snake-Eater

Snake-Eater by T. Kingfisher is $2.49! This was recently featured on a Get Rec’d post of recommendations that came from a convo I had with KJ Charles.

From New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award–winning author T. Kingfisher comes an enthralling contemporary fantasy seeped in horror about a woman trying to escape her past by moving to the remote US desert—only to find herself beholden to the wrath of a vengeful god.

With only a few dollars to her name and her beloved dog Copper by her side, Selena flees her past in the city to claim her late aunt’s house in the desert town of Quartz Creek. The scorpions and spiders are better than what she left behind.

Because in Quartz Creek, there’s a strange beauty to everything, from the landscape to new friends, and more blue sky than Selena’s ever seen. But something lurks beneath the surface. Like the desert gods and spirits lingering outside Selena’s house at night, keeping watch. Mostly benevolent, says her neighbor Grandma Billy. That doesn’t ease the prickly sense that one of them watches too closely and wants something from Selena she can’t begin to imagine. And when Selena’s search for answers leads her to journal entries that her aunt left behind, she discovers a sinister truth about her new home: It’s the haunting grounds of an ancient god known simply as “Snake-Eater,” who her late aunt made a promise to that remains unfulfilled.

Snake-Eater has taken a liking to Selena, an obsession of sorts that turns sinister. And now that Selena is the new owner of his home, he’s hell-bent on collecting everything he’s owed.

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Love’s a Witch

Love’s a Witch by Tricia O’Malley is $1.99! This is book one in the Scottish Charms series, which is set in Scotland and has some cozy paranormal elements.

From the New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Tricia O’Malley, a cozy romantasy about a Scottish witch returning to her ancestral village to break a family curse—only to clash with one stubborn warlock determined to protect his town from her haywire magic.

She’s hexed. He’s vexed. And for Scotland’s most magical small-town, their feud might just spell disaster.

Sloane MacGregor swore she’d never return to Briarhaven, but with her twenty-fifth birthday looming—the day witches come into their magic—her grandmother summons her and her sisters back for one tiny task: break the centuries-old curse haunting their bloodline.

Knox Douglas, Briarhaven’s grumpy mayor, has worked tirelessly to make his town a haven for magical folk. The last thing he needs is a cursed MacGregor wreaking havoc. It doesn’t matter he once crushed on her. For the sake of Briarhaven, Sloane has to go.

But magic has other plans—and in Briarhaven, love really is a witch.

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The Musician and the Monster

The Musician and the Monster by Megan Van Dyke is $2.49 at Amazon! This is the first book in a duology but also the fourth book in the Reimagined Fairy Tales series. It’s a Gothic Gaslamp fantasy romance with elements of Beauty and the Beast and Phantom of the Opera.

Music says things words never can. I love you. I miss you. I’m sorry I killed you.

Every night, Ceridwen Kinsley plays music on her rooftop for the spirit of her dead mother. A peaceful if odd ritual, until she witnesses a murder by something not quite human. The monstrous encounter earns her notoriety within the city and a visit from the reclusive Lord Protector Drystan Winterbourne.

Charged with protecting the backwater city of Teneboure by the king, Drystan is failing at his task, and he can’t afford another slip up. But when fate and the very monster he means to conquer bring Ceridwen to his notice, he seizes the opportunity and presents her with an offer: play music for him at his manor in exchange for the money her impoverished family desperately needs. Music eases the strain of his magic, and who better to hire than the woman whose tunes he secretly listens to at night?

At first, Ceridwen is put off by Drystan’s unkempt appearance and harsh demeanor, not to mention the odd ailment that plagues him. But as he embraces her passion for music and she draws the recluse out of his lonely tower, the two develop an unlikely attachment. Class lines begin to blur as fearful indifference shifts to unexpected desire, and Ceridwen yearns to help Drystan subdue the monster as well as provide for her family. However, the monster prowling the night isn’t their only enemy, and as terrible secrets come to light, protecting those they love may risk their lives and their hearts.

This retelling of Beauty and the Beast incorporates themes and motifs from Phantom of the Opera, and is set in a gaslamp fantasy world with strong gothic vibes. It should appeal to fans of romantic and atmospheric retellings and fairy tales by authors such as Hannah Whitten, Tessonja Odette, and Stephanie Garber.

While this is book 4 in the Reimagined Fairy Tales series, it can be read as a standalone.

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It’s a recent book. Contemporary, possibly set in NYC or Boston.

He’s a tech genius or businessman with a speech impediment that he feels makes him unlovable. She’s the charming barista/waitress he’s pining for. She’s injured in a hit and run (possibly?) or ill and he takes her to the hospital and says they’re either engaged or married.

Help a bitch out, it’s on the tip of my brain and soooo frustrating.

This one is definitely ringing some bells for me.

Welcome back!

There’s quite a few books on our radar this week: sports romance, historical mysteries, and more.

Which new releases are you looking forward to this week? Let us know in the comments!

Advice No One Asked For

Author: Jenny Hagel
Released: June 2, 2026 by Gallery
Genre: Nonfiction

From the Emmy–nominated comedian who created “the best segment in late night” (Vulture) comes this hilarious and practical collection of advice for how to live your best life in love, at work, and in comedy. You’d think with a résumé like Jenny Hagel’s—being a writer/performer for Late Night with Seth Meyers, and head writer/EP of The Amber Ruffin Show—she would describe her greatest accomplishment as something like sharing the stage with Hillary Clinton, or the six times she was nominated for an Emmy. Yet, for Jenny, landing a joke or going to a fancy award show pales in comparison to her true passion: giving people advice. Jenny is so obsessed with (addicted to?) offering unsolicited wisdom that she runs a sold-out live show in New York City called, appropriately, Jenny Hagel Gives Advice. With her debut essay collection, Jenny sets out to backseat drive for as many unwitting strangers as possible. The result is a heartfelt and funny journey through a list of life-changing recommendations, like: wear black when you travel, buy an analog watch, and just because you can go into the monkey enclosure while visiting Honduras doesn’t mean that you should.

Sarah: Essays from a comedian about giving unsolicited advice – it’s like a car made of book catnip just pulled up to my house.

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An Artful Dodge

Author: Karen Odden
Released: June 2, 2026 by Soho Crime
Genre: Historical: European, Mystery/Thriller

Victorian London comes to vivid life in this riveting heist novel about an all-female thieving gang and one young woman’s heroic plan to escape a life of crime.

She’s stolen gems, purses, and hearts—but can she steal her life back from the ring of thieves that’s claimed it?

London, 1879: Twenty-year-old Kit Jimeson has fingers so nimble she can nick a necklace off a lady in a crowded theater without raising alarm. Kit and her dodge partner, Mary, are the highest earners in the notorious all-women thieving ring in South London’s Elephant and Castle district.

Kit, whose mother had been a thief before her, dreams of a different life, one where she’s not constantly on the lookout for constables and plainclothes detectives, and where a mistake or pure bad luck won’t land her in the hangman’s noose. She has been saving her earnings so her younger sister, a maid for a wealthy Mayfair family, might have a shot at respectability.

Kit is very close to leaving the life entirely when the legendary former thief Maggie O’Connell brings her plans to a halt. Beautiful, charismatic Maggie has returned to reclaim leadership of the ring after twenty years in a brutal Australian penal colony. But Maggie desires more than mere wealth or power: She longs for revenge against those who sent her away. Kit, with her quick mind and dangerously clever hands, is Maggie’s best weapon. If Kit wants to walk away with her life, she must carry out a heist that will demand every skill she possesses.

This historical mystery seems like it’d be right up the Bitchery’s alley.

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For the Bride

Author: Becca Grischow
Released: June 2, 2026 by Penguin Books
Genre: Contemporary Romance, LGBTQIA, Romance

From the author of I’ll Get Back To You, a sapphic enemies-to-lovers romance that follows a Type-A maid of honor setting out to do the most and a Type-B bridesmaid with her life only just put-together, who must put aside their animosity to plan the wedding of the summer

On the surface, Alice has her life together. She’s got a job in music she loves; she’s firmly sober; and she’s grateful to be back in the good graces of her ex-girlfriend-once-best-friend-now-literal-only-friend Gin. Just in time, too, because Gin’s getting married this summer! And Alice gets to be a bridesmaid.

If only the maid-of-honor wasn’t Renee Type-A, the opposite of her in every way, and a long-time Alice-hater who’s clung to her animosity like a leech. Every second Alice spends around Renee makes her feel like who she used to be, rather than the person she’s spent years trying to make herself into—and she doesn’t want to be reminded of her younger self any more than she wants to be thinking, more constantly than she wants to admit, about her hair, her lips, her wit…. No, Alice has her own stuff to figure out. She still loves music, but her career feels directionless. She’s grieving the loss of her father just a year ago, to alcohol. And then she finds out that her mother’s started to date her father’s ex-bandmate, which sends her reeling…and with the wedding just around the corner, she doesn’t want to bother Gin about any of it.

It’s pure chance that Renee runs into Alice, just when she needs someone the most—and suddenly, everything shifts. Neither of them are what they assumed the other to be. Over the days and nights they’re spending helping Gin throw a DIY summer wedding of epic proportions, Alice and Renee discover that though they have nothing in common—that might be precisely what each of them need. Heartfelt and hopeful, For the Bride is a banter-filled sapphic romance with deep emotional resonance about found family, second chances, and finding love in the unexpected.

Tara: I enjoyed this author’s debut, so I was excited to see she has another one out. I started reading it yesterday and am digging it so far!

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The Guest Book

Author: Mae Marvel
Released: June 2, 2026 by St. Martin's Griffin
Genre: Contemporary Romance, LGBTQIA, Romance

A romance on an epic, generation-spanning scale, Mae Marvel’s The Guest Book delivers the authors’ signature heart, sapphic steam, and humor in a book you’ll curl up with and never forget.

The whole world believes Cosima Frank’s life has been a fairytale. Now she’s trying to live up to the overwhelming legacy left to her by her late mother, the Queen of Hollywood. As the pressure begins to build, Cosima does the only thing she can think run straight to the inn where her parents met and fell in love, intent on finishing her mother’s bucket list.

Edie Whitelock isn’t like anyone Cosima has ever met. She’s persistent enough to march up to Cosima’s door and provoke her to get out of bed and follow the disarming woman through the charming English village. Edie’s also on the run from her past, but she finds that she relishes bickering with the pretty Los Angeles princess a whole lot more than she expected. The two women couldn’t be more different, but they find themselves inexplicably drawn to each other.

Trapped indoors by thunderstorms, Cosima and Edie discover the inn’s guest book, whose entries date back more than fifty years—and inside it, a romantic treasure hunt left behind by a long-ago guest whose clues unexpectedly send them across England, Spain, and France on an adventure they hope will change both of their lives.

But sometimes the treasure you seek isn’t the one you find.

Sarah: Treasure hunt, lesbians, inn, inheritance, daughter of famous person and a LOT of travel. Ok!

Dahlia: Mae Marvel is such a fun author duo, and I love seeing the fun premises they come up with. The combination of travel and opposites attract in particular sounds like a really fun time.

Tara: I don’t think I’ve seen a premise like this before! I like that a character is Hollywood adjacent and I want to know what the mystery is all about.

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The Open Era

Author: Edward Schmit
Released: June 2, 2026 by Berkley
Genre: Contemporary Romance, LGBTQIA, Romance

Love evens the score between two tennis players in this stunning debut romance.

Recently-turned-pro tennis player Austin Hardy has been out since high school and it’s never been a big deal. That is, until he becomes the first openly gay man to compete in a Grand Slam tournament. Suddenly, being gay is a huge deal, with headlines to prove it.

Unprepared for this new spotlight, Austin’s anxiety disorder hits a breaking point, and he trips and falls at practice. Right next to the very attractive, very talented, and probably straight Diego Cruz, ranked second in the world.

The two professional rivals start a friendship off the court. But between their flirty banter, mixed signals, and looming showdown, Austin is thrown further off his game by Diego.

With the eyes of the world on Austin, the weight of history on his shoulders, and Diego across the net, he must decide whether love means nothing or if it means everything as he battles for the trophy during an electric two weeks at the US Open.

Elyse: It’s giving Heated Rivalry vibes.

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Puck

Author: Samantha Allen
Released: June 2, 2026 by Zando
Genre: Contemporary Romance, LGBTQIA, Romance

In this A Midsummer Night’s Dream-inspired romcom, Puck is a reality show producer and agent of chaos with a talent for bringing people together . . . and tearing them apart.

Meet the nonbinary, thirty-year-old mastermind behind Homewreckers, a dating show that puts troubled couples through hell—with a little help from their exes. Used to being the one pulling the strings, it shocks Puck when their life undergoes a plot twist of its own and their college roommate Mia announces her engagement to her ex’s best friend, Damon. Having only recently broken up with longtime-boyfriend Zander, and never having had much in common with Damon (who lovesick Lena has always pined after), Mia’s news leaves her friend group reeling—and Puck’s mind whirling.

When they arrive for a week of wedding festivities at an upscale resort in the Appalachian forest, Puck immediately sees that Mia’s marriage will lead to misery, and takes it upon themself to save their friends by rearranging the couples—without anyone finding out. But as Puck comes up against a type-A maid of honor hell-bent on making this wedding happen, it becomes clear that they will have to deliver the greatest stunt of their career. If only they can take their eyes off the bridesmaid. After all, the course of true love never did run smooth…

Written with Samantha Allen’s signature charm, wit, and an irresistible dose of Shakespearian mischief, Puck is the ultimate romcom for our chaotic era, and a celebration of the friendships that carry us through it all.

Tara: Contemporary retelling of Shakespeare, nonbinary lead, set around a wedding? I’m so ready.

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Shattered Gods

Author: Katee Robert
Released: June 2, 2026 by Sourcebooks Casablanca
Genre: LGBTQIA, Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy
Series: Dark Olympus #10

She was Olympus’s Queen. Its sacrifice. Its savior. Its destruction.

Long ago, Circe was Hermes’ entire heart. The two women lived on the outskirts of Olympian society, content with a quiet life away from the spotlight. Then Circe caught the eye of Zeus…and was forced into a marriage that would take her freedom, her future, and in the end, her life. In the wake of the tragedy, gossip swirled about the woman Zeus married and (allegedly) murdered…but in time, everyone forgot about beautiful, tragic Circe.

Everyone but Hermes, who vowed on that day to bring Olympus to its knees.

Now, fifteen years later, a new Zeus rules the city, a new Hades protects his people, a new hope dawns…and Hermes has begun to think there may be things about Olympus worth saving. With Atalanta by her side—and slowly rebuilding her heart—Hermes may finally be ready to set aside her fury and seek the city’s rebirth instead of its total annihilation. But there is a beautiful devil on Hermes’ other a devil who rose, blood-soaked, from where Zeus left her for dead years ago. A devil who has waited all this time to have her revenge.

And no matter their past, no matter the desperate love they once shared, no matter the complicated triad forming between the three women, Circe will not rest until all of Olympus lays shattered at her feet…and the gods help anyone who gets in her way.

A scorchingly hot modern retelling of Hermes and Atalanta and Circe.

Book ten in the Dark Olympus series!

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Sublimation

Author: Isabel Kim
Released: June 2, 2026 by Tor Books
Genre: Mystery/Thriller, Science Fiction/Fantasy

Doppelgängers, corporate intrigue, heartbreak, betrayal, and the harsh permanence of the border: Sublimation is a thrilling and provocative debut for fans of Severance that asks what you’d sacrifice for a different life from award-winning author Isabel J. Kim.

The border cuts you in two.

When you immigrate, you leave a copy of yourself behind, an instance. One person enters their new country; the other stays trapped at home.

Some instances keep in touch, call each other daily, keep their lives and minds in sync in the hopes of reintegrating and resuming a life as one person. Others, like Soyoung Rose Kang, leave home at ten years old and never speak to their other selves again. Rose, in America, never imagined going back to Korea until her grandfather died and her Korean instance called her home for the funeral.

She doesn’t know that Soyoung plans to steal her body and her life.

How far would you go to live the choice you didn’t make?

Elyse: This is described as a cozy sci-fi romance which presses all my buttons.

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The Unicorn Hunters

Author: Katherine Arden
Released: June 2, 2026 by Del Rey
Genre: Historical: European, Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy

With her country’s future and her own life at stake, an orphaned duchess must journey into a world of myth and there discover a power that may be her salvation—or her demise—in this enchanting new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of the Winternight Trilogy and The Warm Hands of Ghosts.

Anne of Brittany was a child when her realm was invaded, her home besieged, and her royal father driven to his death.

Now her treasury is empty, her land occupied by her enemies, and she is ordered, under threat of renewed war, to become queen of her conquerors and marry the King of France.

This marriage means her country’s annexation. But Anne promised her father that Brittany would never be conquered.

Defiantly, she betroths herself in secret to France’s greatest enemy. But in a world where courts may spy on each other by magic, there is only one way to solemnize this illicit union.

Anne takes her court deep into a legendary forest, where the court diviners’ skill cannot reach. The world thinks they are only a hunting party, coursing after unicorns. But that is a lie, a trick, a feint. No one in living memory has seen a unicorn. All Anne wants is this secret wedding, which is her only hope of salvation.

But when against all hope a unicorn appears and a stranger out of legend stumbles from the trees and falls at her feet, Anne is plunged into a world of enchantment where a doomed sovereign might find the power to change her own and her country’s destiny—or be lost in the shadows forever.

A historical fantasy with unicorns and a gorgeous cover. 

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The transcript for Podcast 720. RT Rewind: December 2012 Ads & Features has been posted!

This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks.

❤ Click here to subscribe to The Podcast →

Swept Away

Two strangers find themselves stranded at sea together in this epic new love story by bestselling author Beth O’Leary.

What if you were lost at sea…with your one-night stand?

Zeke and Lexi thought it would just be a night of fun. They had no intentions of seeing each other again. Zeke is only in town for the weekend to buy back his late father’s houseboat. Lexi has no time for dating when she needs to help take care of her best friend’s daughter.

Going back home with a stranger seems like a perfect escape from their problems. But a miscommunication in the dark, foggy night means no one tied the houseboat to the dock. The next morning, Zeke and Lexi realize all they can see is miles and miles of water.

With just a few provisions on the idle boat, Zeke and Lexi must figure out how to get back home. But aside from their survival, they’re facing another challenge. Because when you’re stuck together for days on end, it gives you a lot of time to get to know someone—and to fall in love with them.

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Half a Soul

Half a Soul by Olivia Atwater is $2.99 and a KDD! This is book one in the Regency Faerie Tales series and subsequent books in the series were listed in latest Hide Your Wallet.

“Whimsical, witty, and brimming over with charm” (India Holton), Olivia Atwater’s delightful debut will transport you to a magical version of Regency England, where the only thing more meddlesome than a fairy is a marriage-minded mother!

It’s difficult to find a husband in Regency England when you’re a young lady with only half a soul.

Ever since she was cursed by a faerie, Theodora Ettings has had no sense of fear or embarrassment—an unfortunate condition that leaves her prone to accidental scandal. Dora hopes to be a quiet, sensible wallflower during the London Season—but when Elias Wilder, the strange, handsome, and utterly ill-mannered Lord Sorcier, discovers her condition, she is instead drawn into peculiar and dangerous faerie affairs.

If her reputation can survive both her curse and her sudden connection with the least-liked man in all high society, then she and her family may yet reclaim their normal place in the world. But the longer Dora spends with Elias, the more she begins to suspect that one may indeed fall in love even with only half a soul.

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Neon Gods

Neon Gods by Katee Robert is $1.99 and a Kindle Daily Deal! This is the first book in the Dark Olympus series. Book ten in the series is out tomorrow!

He was supposed to be a myth.
But from the moment I crossed the River Styx and fell under his dark spell…
…he was, quite simply, mine.

Society darling Persephone Dimitriou plans to flee the ultra-modern city of Olympus and start over far from the backstabbing politics of the Thirteen Houses. But all that’s ripped away when her mother ambushes her with an engagement to Zeus, the dangerous power behind their glittering city’s dark facade.

With no options left, Persephone flees to the forbidden undercity and makes a devil’s bargain with a man she once believed a myth…a man who awakens her to a world she never knew existed.

Hades has spent his life in the shadows, and he has no intention of stepping into the light. But when he finds that Persephone can offer a little slice of the revenge he’s spent years craving, it’s all the excuse he needs to help her—for a price. Yet every breathless night spent tangled together has given Hades a taste for Persephone, and he’ll go to war with Olympus itself to keep her close…

A modern retelling of Hades and Persephone that’s as sinful as it is sweet.

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Snacking Cakes

RECOMMENDED: Snacking Cakes by Yossy Arefi is $1.99! I absolutely love this baking book. It’s great for beginners and if you don’t want to buy super specific ingredients for a one time use. I also like the mix and match elements that let you pair cake types with topping types. I made a spice cake roll with vanilla, brown sugar frosting from this and it was so good.

Find sweet satisfaction with 50 easy, everyday cake recipes made with simple ingredients, one bowl, and no fuss.

In Snacking Cakes, the indulgent, treat-yourself concept of cake becomes an anytime, easy-to-make treat. Expert baker Yossy Arefi’s collection of no-fuss recipes is perfect for anyone who craves near-instant cake satisfaction. With little time and effort, these single-layered cakes are made using only one bowl (no electric mixers needed) and utilize ingredients likely sitting in your cupboard. They’re baked in the basic pans you already own and shine with only the most modest adornments: a dusting of powdered sugar, a drizzle of glaze, a dollop of whipped cream.

From Cornmeal Peach Upside-Down Cake and Sweet Potato Cinnamon Sugar Cake to Salted Caramel Peanut Butter Cake and Nutty Pistachio Yogurt Cake, these humble, comforting treats couldn’t be simpler to create. Yossy’s rustic, elegant style combines accessible, diverse flavors in intriguing ways that make them easy for kids to join in on the baking, but special enough to serve company or bring to potlucks. Whether enjoyed in a quiet moment alone with a cup of morning coffee or with friends hungrily gathered around the pan, these ever-pleasing, undemanding cakes will become part of your daily ritual.

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It is no secret. I love. This. Series. With each book that is released, I wonder, can this one reach the same heights as the preceding ones? Each time, I am shown in no uncertain terms that it absolutely can.

Gabriel runs a gambling establishment in London. Ginny’s brother loses his entire, newly inherited fortune while gambling at that establishment. As the older sister who stepped into the breach when her parents died, Ginny travels to London to talk to this Gabriel and try find a resolution.

That first conversation Gabriel and Ginny have is electric and I don’t use that word lightly. There is so much tension and nuance and emotion. It thrilled me. During this conversation, Gabriel says that he’ll forgive the part of the debt owed to the house if Ginny spends a night in his bed. Obviously, Ginny refuses. She leaves, feeling bested by the man.

The nature of this conversation – its depth, insight and interest – sets the tone for all the conversations that Ginny and Gabriel share. There is a quality to the writing that lifts it up out of the superficial and into the extraordinary. I include an extended excerpt here from their opening salvos:

‘Oh, I see. The way it’s a bit ironic that your first name is Gabriel, the name of an angel usually referred to as heaven’s messenger, while you run a gaming … ”

Ye gods, his light eyes could and did get colder. They were downright arctic now.

“Hell?” he completed almost silkily.

Which is when she sensed it was wisest not to confirm or deny that that was what she had been about to say.

“Look around you, Miss Woodville.””He swept out a hand. “Does this establishment resemble hell?”

“I cannot truthfully say, since I haven’t personally visited the actual underworld. I’ve only ever read third-person accounts.”

Something at last flickered in his unblinking regard. She could not be certain, however, whether it was amusement, or surprise, or incredulity. Or whether she ought to be worried.

“Your ferns are spectacular,” she soothed.

“My-” He stopped and drew in what sounded like a patience-siphoning breath.

“Miss Woodville, since you were raised the daughter of a viscount, I suspect you’ve been sheltered from such distinctions, but Lucifer’s Fall is a gentlemen’s gaming club. Like White’s, only I daresay more exclusive. Hence its popularity. It bears little resemblance to establishments often referred to as hells.” Lest she feel comforted by this claim, he added “I assure you, I would know.”

This didn’t surprise her in the least.

“I hope you’ll forgive me if I inadvertently trod upon a sensitivity, Mr Marchand”

“I have precisely zero sensitivities.”

She would have loved to argue this point in other circumstances. “How singularly blessed you are in that regard.”

By chance, Ginny and Gabriel are both staying at the Grand Palace on the Thames, the location for all the books in this series. So they interact a lot. And it’s delightful.

Where can the plot go from here? Initially, the indecent proposal by Gabriel is pushed aside as an impossibility. They are adversaries and in no way would Ginny sell her body. So Ginny tries to find other ways to solve the problem. There are two debts that the brother ran up: a debt to the house and a debt to a mystery man. Ginny needs to puzzle out the mystery man’s identity and then see if he’ll forgive the debt. It’s a huge amount of money so she has only a tiny glimmer of hope. Gabriel sticks by her side to protect his gambling establishment. He can’t have his patrons harangued and harassed into forgiving debts that were established fair and square.

You could put me in the stocks, and I wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the moment the enemies became more interested in being lovers. There is a soft sinking into love in this story. Each delicious tendril of accord forms while they talk to each other. The changes are minute and so easy to miss, but you FEEL the change, you drift where the story takes you, until you look around and realise everything is now different, our foes are perhaps falling in love.

Gabriel is such a strong character. Not the silent type. Not the brooding type. The confident type. The assured type. The type with sincere charm that is not at all smarmy. He has an edge of danger to him (he brought himself up in St Giles, after all) because he has worked as hired muscle in the past. But the man has untold depths and Ginny plumbs those depths with her insight and her curiosity and her drive. Ginny, who has led her family for nigh on eight years since her parents’ death, finally feels like she can put down her burdens when she’s with Gabriel. She feels safe with him. Not that Ginny gives her problems to Gabriel to solve – she has a strong drive to solve them herself, but the temptation to just surrender to the protection that Gabriel offers is tremendous.

Every romance novel has a scene where the lovers declare their love for one another. I won’t give you even a hint about what this one is like, but it is one of my favourites of all time.

This is technically an age gap romance – he’s 36 and she’s in her early 20s. Often age gap romances give me the ick, but it conformed to the stereotypes in only the most superficial sense – he has more experience and she has less. But otherwise they are equals, each as powerful and impactful as the other (on each other, at least)

As with all the books in this series, lighter moments come from the side characters – the permanent residents at the Grand Palace on the Thames. I have genuinely come to appreciate them. Initially I found them a bit tiresome, but I have mellowed in my views on that score now.

If you need a book with a huge amount of emotional depth and breadth, and you’re craving something mature, considered, and breath-taking, give this book a chance. In fact, I recommend the entire series, and I hope you’ll tell me what you think. As for me, when this series ends, I think my heart will break.

I have now read a grand total of two dark romances. The first was so utterly shit that I didn’t attempt the genre again for a few years. While it was a very popular book, it was not at all appealing, and afterward I wasn’t sure what were hallmarks of the genre and what was just bad writing. I see now how wrong I was. It was plain bad writing. Butcher and Blackbird is the second one I’ve read. I realise it is on the lighter side of dark, but darker than an ordinary contemporary certainly.

What surprised me the most about reading a dark romance is not the things I assumed would take me aback, like sexual assault or violence, but how incredibly vulnerable reading this book made me feel. It really felt like some of my most deep-seated, primal needs were brought out into the light and spoken to directly. Things that I had long ago forgotten about or dealt with. I almost want to submit this review anonymously because to speak about Butcher and Blackbird is to allow myself to be really seen – which is scary.

Rowan and Sloane are serial killers who avenge the deaths of innocents by murdering serial killers. They meet by chance at a murder scene gone wrong and from there have an annual murder competition. Of course it is also a romance, so they fall in love. Rowan is reckless and falls in love quickly. It takes Sloane a long time to make peace with falling in love with Rowan.

Rowan is passionate about his career (being a chef and restaurateur) and murdering bad people. Sloane doesn’t have the same career ambition as Rowan. She’s an artist that has been stifled by her childhood. She’s more focused on wondering if she’s lovable or not. She only has one friend and she isn’t at all close to her family. Both Rowan and Sloane had terrible experiences in childhood. Despite Sloane’s insecurities, she’s a dangerous killer herself, but she still needs rescuing (from physical danger, but also emotionally) by Rowan. As I write this now a few days after finishing the book, I’m confused by how much I enjoyed the damsel-in-distress stuff. There is evidently still an insecure little girl somewhere inside me that wants to be adored, protected and cherished and saved from Bad Stuff.

My primary sticking point was the plot arc. I do not know if it is just the way dark romances are structured or if it was just this book (please let me know in the comments) but at around 75% in, things had resolved. They were in love and happy. But there was 25% of the book to go?

This puzzled me.

As to my secret tendencies, the possessive love Rowan has for Sloane spoke to me. I could feel myself reacting on an elemental level to the overwhelming possessiveness, the rough sex, the murderous tendencies. But once the book was done and I returned to my normal life, I was genuinely puzzled by the impact those things had on me while I was reading.

Reading Butcher and Blackbird has made me even more curious about the genre, and where my limits are in terms of content warnings. I was truly absorbed into the plot and also by my reaction to the characters and their dynamic. I shall certainly be reading more dark romance. It’s fascinating to me how this book affected me while I was reading it.

Am I alone in experiencing dark romances like this? Is your experience with them different?

1. A Marriage of Undead Inconvenience by Stephanie Burgis Amazon | B&N | Kobo
2. Delay of Game by Ari Baran Amazon | B&N | Kobo
3. Definitely Maybe Not a Detective by Sarah Fox Amazon | B&N | Kobo
4. Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett Amazon | B&N | Kobo
5. I Think We Should Kill Other People by L.M. Chilton Amazon | B&N | Kobo
6. Skye O’Malley by Bertrice Small Amazon | B&N | Kobo | GooglePlay
7. Stone and Sky by Ben Aaronovitch Amazon | B&N | Kobo
8. Sally’s Baking Addiction by Sally McKenney Amazon | B&N | Kobo
9. The Dressmaker’s Secret Earl by Susanne Dunlap Amazon | B&N
10. Dire Bound by Sable Sorensen Amazon | B&N | Kobo

I hope your weekend reading was super fun!

I went to The Devil Wears Prada 2 hoping to get some feel-good nostalgia, but found the movie to be so disconnected from the present moment that I had a hard time investing in the conflict or characters. The acting is great, but the plot doesn’t stand the test of time.

Set 20 years after the original, the movie addresses the death of print journalism when award winning journalist Andy (Anne Hathaway) loses her job when the newspaper she works for folds. She’s hired to be the features editor of Runway to help give them credibility after they publish an inaccurate piece about a fast fashion brand.

Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) is still the editor-in-chief, although she’s been somewhat defanged due to HR complaints. She has to hang up her own coat–the indignity! Nigel (Stanley Tucci) is still in his role as Miranda’s second in command, which (given the two decade time jump) is depressing in itself. You deserve more, Nigel.

Runway gets new ownership and is looking to be gutted and Miranda removed from her role. Andy has to help save the magazine to save her job and, problematically, Miranda’s position as an icon and industry leader.

A huge problem with the movie is that Miranda is still terrible and I do not care even remotely if she remains the boss of pretend Vogue. She’s out of touch and mean-spirited, and we know from the last movie (and this one) that she’s only Andy’s ally as long as it benefits her. Even if she loses her job she’s still super rich and can presumably still influence the world of fashion from wherever she winds up. Or, you know, retire. It doesn’t matter to me.

The other problem is that we’re living in a world that is so remarkably different from 2006 (when the first movie is set) that the stakes mean nothing to me. There’s a scene where the characters are at a dinner at Italian fashion week, seated under Davinci’s Last Supper, dressed in couture, and I almost said out loud “I do not care about any of these people.”

When the original movie premiered, chick-lit like Confessions of a Shopaholic and TV shows like Sex in the City were incredibly popular. Being a young woman in The Big City and scoring high fashion at a sample sale was very much in the zeitgeist. The idea of blowing an entire paycheck on a pair of luxury shoes was a funny quirk. This was before people had Go Fund Mes set up to pay for healthcare crises.

Since the movie’s release we’ve had The Great Recession, Brexit, the #MeToo movement, multiple mass shootings, Black Lives Matter, a pandemic, and an insurrection (and I bet I’m forgetting things). It cost me $86 to put gas in my car today, and the thought of spending a ton of money on a handbag feels like conspicuous consumption, not aspiration. I do not have time to worry about Miranda Priestly when healthcare and basic essentials are on the verge of being unobtainable by the middle class (if not already there). At one point Nigel jokes that he once styled Ruth Bader Ginsberg and I thought “Oh yeah, she died and so did our right to abortion.”

In the first movie we were told that if you were plucky and resilient and survived that first terrible boss, you could make it anywhere, girl! You were on your way up! Th sequel is a reminder that no matter how hard you work and what you overcome, things may not get better. There’s a reason that we’re getting new installments of The Hunger Games and Veronica Roth is releasing a new Divergent book.

Basically, this movie did not read the room at all.

I still like the original Devil Wears Prada and I still watch it as a comfort movie. I do this because it reminds me of when I was just starting out and the world felt full of promise. The second movie falls flat because it’s a reminder of all the times that promise didn’t materialize. The rich are richer (there’s a Jeff Bezos-esque character in the movie and the fact that he can buy literally anything is treated as a funny joke that comes across totally tone deaf) and the idea of drooling over luxury couture feels too far fetched in our current economy for the movie to be escapist.

The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive is a great book for people who are interested in the Romantics (in this context, I’m referring to artists who were part of the artistic movement known as Romanticism). Author Nabugodi assumes that you are already at least somewhat familiar with this movement and with the lives and works of William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Mary and Percy Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron. It’s not an introductory work. However, for readers with an interest in the movement and for those interested in the intersections of Race, history, and art, this is an invaluable resource.

Nabugodi uses specific items as her entry point into each of the authors mentioned above. My only substantial complaint about this book is that it doesn’t include pictures. However, the internet is a thing so it’s not as though it’s difficult to find pictures of, for instance, Wordsworth’s teacup or Shelley’s baby rattle.

Each of these objects in some way demonstrate the ways in which the lives and the works of the Romantics intersected with slavery and racism in both conscious and sub-conscious ways. Nabugodi is not interested in seeing things through a “fair for its day” lens although she is rigorous about historical, social, and economic context. She is unflinching and both academic and personal in her approach. Nabugodi has many deeply intellectual things to say, but my favorite line remains:

Having spent several months thinking about the Boat Sonnet in all its versions and contexts, I conclude that Wordsworth has an issue with Black women and that I have an issue with Wordsworth. This is an occupational hazard. Every now and then I reach a point where I simply cannot take any more racist bullshit from the Romantics.

The Romantics talked about freedom, but their lives were impossible to unwind from the issue of slavery and concepts of white supremacy. Some were vocal abolitionists, but all of them were steeped in, and unable to fully reject, the ideas of white supremacy that were universal among white people of the era.

For instance, Percy and Mary Shelley refused to use sugar in their tea as a protest against the slave trade in Jamaica, yet they maintained a friendship with slaver Matthew Gregory Lewis. Sometimes the Romantics wrote intentionally and explicitly about Black people, real or otherwise.

But other times their writing simply reflected the world they lived in:

For what it is worth, I do not believe that Keats spent a second thinking about contemporary Africans when he endowed his Hyperion with curly locks and Aethiopian associations. Nor do I think that he set out to write a white supremacist epic…my point is that his Hyperion demonstrates the extent to which Romantic-era ideals about beauty and grandeur are impossible to disentangle from the period’s white supremacist worldview.

I found myself especially fascinated (and sickened) with the chapter “Byron’s Boot.” While I detest Lord Byron (ask me why!) I do find sympathy with him over our mutually dreadful feet. Both of us went through a variety of special shoes and braces and I recently had an ankle fusion. So while I detest him in various ways, I can’t help but feel a certain kinship that only those of us with crappy feet can share.

This chapter looks at, among other things, the “historical link between disability and Blackness…by putting Black people’s ability to think and feel into question, enslavers implied that we are better off enslaved; that our stunted lives would be destroyed by a freedom that we do not have the ability to handle.”

In the epilogue, Nabugodi states,

Discussing my work on the book with friends, colleagues, and sometimes strangers, I have encountered a sense of incomprehension that the poets who wrote so beautifully about freedom would hang out with slave owners in their spare time. The fact is they clearly did not mind. For them, the existence of race-based slavery was part of everyday life. There was no question of cancelling anyone over their Caribbean connections. Perhaps this also explains the silence: slavery was so ordinary to them that they had nothing to say about it.

The Romantics lived in a time that is very similar to our own. I find myself daily living within a system that hurts people in ways that are both old (the same terrible ‘isms’ still apply) and new (the Romantics would not have been able to conceive of the way ICE uses AI in surveillance – even Victor Frankenstein would not have imagined the sick alliance between ICE and AI services such as Palantir).

Even when the Romantics spoke out against slavery, they couldn’t shake the underlying attitudes of white supremacy. The book made me very, very angry and deeply sad, but also better equipped to discuss the people who lived during this time period. The book has given me a new way to read the Romantics, and it also reminds me to question the damaging foundational beliefs of my own society and how I might unintentionally support them.

Not Quite a Lady

Irresistible Force

Darius Carsington is a spectacularly handsome rake with a rare intelligence and no heart, a man who divides his time between bedding loose-moraled women and writing scholarly papers. He finds society’s “perfect darlings” exceedingly boring. But there’s something intriguing, and not quite perfect, about faultless Lady Charlotte Hayward. He senses a crack under her polished surface, and finding it is a challenge he can’t resist.

Immovable Object

Lady Charlotte is so beautiful, charming, and gracious that no one has noticed what an expert she is at Not Getting Married. Early on, she learned a painful lesson about trust… and temptation. In the years since, she’s devoted her life to being all she ought to be—and she’s not about to let a man like Carsington entice her to do everything she shouldn’t.

A Splendid Collision

But the rules of attraction can easily overpower the rules of manners and morals, and sometimes even the best-behaved girl has to follow her instincts, even if it means risking it all.

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Conventionally Yours

Conventionally Yours by Annabeth Albert is $2.99 and a KDD! This is a gay and geeky romance set at a convention (I miss those sometimes!). It was also a summer release that Elyse picked for Hide Your Wallet. Have you read this one?

When two “big name fans” go head-to-head at a convention, love isn’t the only thing at stake.

Charming, charismatic, and effortlessly popular, Conrad Stewart seems to have it all…but in reality, he’s scrambling to keep his life from tumbling out of control.

Brilliant, guarded, and endlessly driven, Alden Roth may as well be the poster boy for perfection…but even he can’t help but feel a little broken inside.

When these mortal enemies are stuck together on a cross-country road trip to the biggest fan convention of their lives, their infamous rivalry takes a backseat as an unexpected connection is forged. Yet each has a reason why they have to win the upcoming Odyssey gaming tournament and neither is willing to let emotion get in the way—even if it means giving up their one chance at something truly magical.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

The Golden Spoon

The Golden Spoon by Jessa Maxwell is $2.99! This is a murder mystery set on a Great British Bake Off type competition. It was mentioned in Hide Your Wallet. Did any of you read it?

A killer is on the loose when someone turns up dead on the set of a hit TV baking competition in this darkly beguiling debut mystery that is perfect for fans of Lucy Foley, Nita Prose, and Anthony Horowitz. Soon to be a limited series on Hulu.

Production for the tenth season of Bake Week is ready to begin at the gothic estate of host and celebrity chef Betsy Martin, and everything seems perfect. The tent is up, the top-tier ingredients are aligned, and the crew has their cameras at the ready.

The six contestants work to prove their culinary talents over the course of five days, while Betsy is less than thrilled to share the spotlight with a new cohost—the brash and unpredictable Archie Morris. But as the baking competition commences, things begin to go awry. At first, it’s merely sabotage—sugar replaced with salt, a burner turned to high—but when a body is discovered, everyone is a suspect.

A deliciously suspenseful thriller for murder mystery buffs and avid bakers alike, The Golden Spoon will keep you guessing until the very last page.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Spy Fall

Spy Fall by Diana Quincy is $1.99! The heroine is a French paratrooper spy. Carrie gave this book a C grade because it was all over the place. Here’s Carrie’s ultimate ruling on the romance:

I was let down by the end and the sex scenes veered wildly from sexy to awkward to appalling (DAD IN ROOM!), but boy, the verbal spying and the plot crazysauce was entertaining. It’s so sad that the end was rage inducing. In fact, if you skip the last chapter it’s a much better book. I’m giving it an even C for being all over the place in terms of quality – parts were an A, parts were an F, and there was whole lot of WTF in both good and bad ways. If you skip the last chapter, it’s a B.

When a fiery French parachutist lands on a drunken Lord Cosmo Dunsmore, he surmises she’s an angel sent from above. But is she a spy after something far more sinister than his debauched soul?

A fearless parachutist is out of her depth …

Mari Lamarre is gaining fame for her daring aeronautic endeavors, but her riskiest adventure begins when she collides with the darkly charismatic son of the Marquess of Aldridge. If her mission succeeds, Cosmo’s father will be ruined.

A rakehell falls for a dangerous woman …

Surrendering to a fierce passion, the two embark on a torrid affair, even as Cosmo vows to protect his family at all costs. But in doing so, will he risk losing the captivating beauty who’s swept into his life and made off with his heart?

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

I first heard this in the 90s, on a cassette someone had recorded from the radio (remember that?) and then heard it years later online, when online was kinda new.

This song was allegedly by Krasswerk, but according to a comment from 13 years ago, “This song was created in Shoreditch in London by a friend of mine called Pete. He released it under the name of Very Important Music and it got to number 6 on Kiss FM.

As the Gulf war broke out an embargo was issued to prevent anything with any political references being played on the radio. This song stopped getting played then. Pete made this song by sampling hours of Margaret Thatcher speeches and making the song on his synthesizer in his studio.”

Pete himself shows up in the comments and seems to confirm it, but I remain in awe of the project scope. There wasn’t YouTube or editing software; this was so much sampling and I would honestly watch a documentary about how it was made. The end result: V.I.M. – Maggie’s Last Party. 

Because of this song, we also joke that our cat, Kate, aka Lady Katherine Megatron, Princess of Tails, has two modes: Rave, and Murder.

I hope your weekend is full of the correct balance of each one!

This episode features a high amount of extreme zany. We’ve got so many treats for you this week, including the Steeple Hill Drinking Game, the reverse Colonel Sanders, Jude Deveraux’s thoughts on modern romance heroes of the time, shifters and more.

Read the transcript →

Here are the books we discuss in this podcast:

We also mentioned:

• Pod Save America Farts
• Lyss & Kat custom embroidery and beadwork

This episode is brought to you by Hatch.

You know how you finish a romantasy and you just need the next thing immediately? Hatch made that thing.

It’s called Ophelia — an original audio drama, inspired by Hamlet, where Ophelia finally gets to be the main character.

Forbidden magic, a crumbling kingdom, a slow-burn love triangle with a prince and his very guarded, very intriguing, best friend. The kind of love triangle where you will absolutely pick a side and you will not be quiet about it.

Book one of the three part series is now available for free wherever you stream, with new chapters dropping every Tuesday. For books 2 and 3, check out hatch.co/Ophelia.

Visual Aids? Of course visual aids! 

Nothing about this image makes sense: the sleigh didn’t make those tracks, and the books are stacked in a fan, and it’s all very weird the more you look at it.

Every title reads differently – the last one looks like Banished Shreads?

Remember when Thriller = Heroine’s hair is in her face on the cover?

Also, that predecessor to a QR code is fascinating. Alas, it doesn’t work for me.

We had so many questions about this cover. First, what’s with the kid’s tie?

This is the source of “the Reverse Colonel Sanders” because that’s kinda what he’s wearing.

Also that looks like Jonathan Bailey, right? Or if Jonathan Bailey and David Boreanaz had a baby?

I love the boots; I have questions about the title and the pose.

Look what she found!!!

We had some questions about this cover, too. Why so many arm bands? Whose hair is that, or was that before it was put on his head?

And his abs remind Amanda of this:

The dog, the angel, the devil – it’s all quite a vision.

These are some (not great) pictures I took of a party celebrating the launch of Tiffany Reisz’s book The Angel, a party which was featured in this issue.

And this was the back cover image:

That guy’s expression and posture was giving us the jibblies.

If you like the podcast, you can subscribe to our feed, or find us at iTunes. You can also find us on Stitcher, and Spotify, too. We also have a cool page for the podcast on iTunes.

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What did you think of today's episode? Got ideas? Suggestions? You can talk to us on the blog entries for the podcast or talk to us on Facebook if that's where you hang out online. You can email us at sbjpodcast@gmail.com or you can call and leave us a message at our Google voice number: 201-371-3272. Please don't forget to give us a name and where you're calling from so we can work your message into an upcoming podcast.

Thanks for listening!

Podcast Sponsor

Support for this episode comes from The Undergrads: Student Union by #1 New York Times-bestselling author Julie Murphy–a sexy new rom com about a college marriage of convenience that goes way beyond chemistry 101…

Clover Rowan Walsh knows The Plan:

1. Get a full ride to her dream school, Wexley University.
2. Conquer the school of business.
3. Say goodbye to the paycheck-to-paycheck life she and her mom have known for years.

There’s just one hiccup. With the first semester rapidly approaching, Clover learns her housing grant has fallen through. But a loophole presents itself: Married couples can live in the dorms for the price of one student. Clover is willing to sacrifice the sanctity of marriage…even if it means proposing to the one person she swore she’d never speak to again: Bennett Andrew Graves.

Bennett can’t refuse Clover, the girl he grew up with (and whom he completely devastated years ago). He owes her this, but that doesn’t change the fact that these two can barely carry on a conversation without getting at each other’s throats. Forget about sharing a dorm—much less one bed.

But as Clover and Bennett hide the true nature of their marriage, they find that playing house isn’t all that bad–especially with certain marital benefits in the mix. In fact, Clover and Bennett are soon forgetting the most important part of their fake marriage of convenience . . . that it’s supposed to be fake.

With tropes like forced proximity and friends to enemies to lovers, you won’t want to miss this first book in a new trilogy of romance novels that follows a group of girls as they navigate love, friendship, and new adulthood.

Ali Hazelwood calls The Undergrads: Student Union “one addictively swoony book.”

Available now wherever books are sold!

Remember to subscribe to our podcast feed, find us on iTunes or on Stitcher.

Wolfsong

Ox was twelve when his daddy taught him a very valuable lesson. He said that Ox wasn’t worth anything and people would never understand him. Then he left.

Ox was sixteen when he met the boy on the road. The little boy who talked and talked and talked. Ox found out later the little boy hadn’t spoken in almost two years before that day, and that the little boy belonged to a family who had moved into the house at the end of the lane.

Ox was seventeen when he found out the little boy’s secret and it painted the world around him in colors of red and orange and violet, of Alpha and Beta and Omega.

Ox was twenty-three when murder came to town and tore a hole in his head and heart. The boy chased after the monster with revenge in his bloodred eyes, leaving Ox behind to pick up the pieces.

It’s been three years since that fateful day—and the boy is back. Except now he’s a man, and Ox can no longer ignore the song that howls between them.

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I’m Waiting for You

I’m Waiting for You by Kim Bo-Young is $2.99! I featured this book on an early edition of Get Rec’d. It features four stories, with each pair being connected. My favorite pairing is about a couple of time traveling agents who need to arrive back on earth on the same day and within the same timeline to make it to their wedding.

“Her fiction is a breath-taking piece of a cinematic art itself. Reminiscent of the world we experienced in Matrix, Inception, and Dark City, still it leads us to this entirely original structure, which is a ground-breaking, mystic literary and cinematic experience. Indeed, powerful and graceful.”—Bong Joon-ho, Oscar-winning director of Parasite

Two worlds, four stories, infinite possibilities 

In this mind-expanding work of speculative fiction, available in English for the first time, one of South Korea’s most treasured writers explores the driving forces of humanity—love, hope, creation, destruction, and the very meaning of existence—in two pairs of thematically interconnected stories.

In “I’m Waiting for You” and “On My Way,” an engaged couple coordinate their separate missions to distant corners of the galaxy to ensure—through relativity—they can arrive back on Earth simultaneously to make it down the aisle. But small incidents wreak havoc on space and time, driving their wedding date further away. As centuries on Earth pass and the land and climate change, one thing is constant: the desire of the lovers to be together. In two separate yet linked stories, Kim Bo-Young cleverly demonstrate the idea love that is timeless and hope springs eternal, despite seemingly insurmountable challenges and the deepest despair.

In “The Prophet of Corruption” and “That One Life,” humanity is viewed through the eyes of its creators: godlike beings for which everything on Earth—from the richest woman to a speck of dirt—is an extension of their will. When one of the creations questions the righteousness of this arrangement, it is deemed a perversion—a disease—that must be excised and cured. Yet the Prophet Naban, whose “child” is rebelling, isn’t sure the rebellion is bad. What if that which is considered criminal is instead the natural order—and those who condemn it corrupt? Exploring the dichotomy between the philosophical and the corporeal, Kim ponders the fate of free-will, as she considers the most basic of questions: who am I?

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Heartstone

Heartstone by Elle Katharine White is $3.99! Redheadedgirl gave this one a B+ in a Lightning Review:

If I told you, “Pride and Prejudice BUT WITH DRAGONS” how fast should I throw the book and then run from the stampede?

A debut historical fantasy that recasts Jane Austen’s beloved Pride & Prejudice in an imaginative world of wyverns, dragons, and the warriors who fight alongside them against the monsters that threaten the kingdom: gryphons, direwolves, lamias, banshees, and lindworms.

They say a Rider in possession of a good blade must be in want of a monster to slay—and Merybourne Manor has plenty of monsters.

Passionate, headstrong Aliza Bentaine knows this all too well; she’s already lost one sister to the invading gryphons. So when Lord Merybourne hires a band of Riders to hunt down the horde, Aliza is relieved her home will soon be safe again.

Her relief is short-lived. With the arrival of the haughty and handsome dragonrider, Alastair Daired, Aliza expects a battle; what she doesn’t expect is a romantic clash of wills, pitting words and wit against the pride of an ancient house. Nor does she anticipate the mystery that follows them from Merybourne Manor, its roots running deep as the foundations of the kingdom itself, where something old and dreadful slumbers . . . something far more sinister than gryphons.

It’s a war Aliza is ill-prepared to wage, on a battlefield she’s never known before: one spanning kingdoms, class lines, and the curious nature of her own heart.

Elle Katharine White infuses elements of Austen’s beloved novel with her own brand of magic, crafting a modern epic fantasy that conjures a familiar yet wondrously unique new world.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Stone and Sky

Stone & Sky by Ben Aaronovitch is $1.99 and a KDD! This is book ten in the Rivers of London series, which Sarah really enjoys. If you’ve been keeping up and looking to collect the whole series, snap this one up.

“This isn’t London. The rules are different up here…”

All Detective Constable Peter Grant wanted was a nice holiday up in Scotland.
He’ll need one once this is over…

check.
some.
sort of – but that’s not the only thing in the sky…

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Dolly All the Time is set in the fictional seaside town of Whitfield, Rhode Island. The Whitfield family are the big, rich family in town and yes, the town is named after one of them. Stewart is the eldest son and desperate to prove to his family that he can be the new CEO and have a successful romantic life. As it is a family business, this is an important consideration for the board (made up primarily of family). So he pays Dolly to be his pretend girlfriend for the summer.

Dolly is a single mom of a 13-year-old boy, Gus. Her dad lives in Whitfield and she’s there for the summer to help out. As a family, they only just scrape by financially and they’ve just found out that the roof of the family home needs to be replaced or the place will be condemned. That’s why Dolly says yes to this crazy scheme that Stewart proposes.

Stewart and Dolly, despite having the same hometown, only met for the first time that summer. Dolly changed Stewart’s car tyre for him when he was stranded without a phone to call for help. He had no idea how to change his own tyre, which Dolly ribs him for, shamelessly – which delighted me.

In fact, that is probably my favourite part of Dolly All the Time: the conversations that Stewart and Dolly have. There’s teasing and flirting and some big emotionally brave moments. There’s honesty and vulnerability and it’s wonderful to read. So often I’d kick my feet happily or giggle out loud to myself in glee while reading. Usually I’m physically pretty still when I read, so this is noteworthy.

Stewart is rich, hot, a bit inept with ‘normal’ things and desperate to prove himself capable as CEO, but that’s not going to make him a swoonworthy romantic lead. The key to Stewart’s charm is that with Dolly, he seems to be trying out his emotions for the first time since a medical situation in his family when he was a teen. From that point on, he just shut down his emotions and focused only on work.

With Dolly, he slowly lets his guard down and invites her in, allowing his vulnerabilities to show. This growth is particularly obvious in how he learns to communicate through touch, especially with Dolly (in a loving way, not a sexual way). He holds her hand (side note: the scene where Dolly shows him the best way to hold hands is very romantic), he touches her back, he puts his arm around her when they’re sitting next to each other. These are not things that he has done with other girlfriends (not that there have been many). His increasing ease with touch is a physical manifestation of his emotions blossoming.

Dolly’s primary growth points are accepting help and learning to be vulnerable again after Gus’s dad did her dirty. I adored how self-sufficient Dolly is, but also the relief of being able to lean on someone else for a change. And it doesn’t hurt that with Stewart, her money problems belong in the past. I’m not ashamed to admit that the fantasy of my money worries evaporating is a compelling one.

I’m deeply skeptical of children in romance novels as I don’t have great luck with believable portrayals of children in romance. So often I get duds. This one was not that at all. Gus is an important character and immersed as we are in Dolly’s POV, we get to see first-hand what it is like to try and parent a 13-year-old who is navigating a tough time. Gus meets Stewart early on in the book and while Dolly is open with Gus that this is all pretend, Gus sees them falling in love. Gus and Stewart form their own bond (separate from Dolly, with Dolly’s blessing) and that connection remains intact as we hit the bleak moment. I really appreciated that Gus was not thrown into turmoil by the bleak moment. I think this was really well done.

So that bleak moment. It’s a doozie and it’s the reason that I had a grumble with the ending.

Just as sometimes children in romance novels come across as wooden or not believable, I sometimes have similar gripes with the heroine’s friendships. I’m frustrated by romance novels that place the heroine in less-than-ideal friendships to allow the romantic connection to be the only whole-hearted one in the story. That is not the case with Dolly All the Time: Naomi, Dolly’s best friend, is FANTASTIC. She’s loyal, supportive, encouraging and deeply committed to Dolly’s happiness and growth. It is the kind of friendship that lasts decades and sustains life. Dolly deserves to have a friend like that, no matter what is in the cards romance-wise.

I was so happily swept away by the romance of this book. Stewart and Dolly fall so deeply in love and reading about it made my own world (and its attendant troubles) completely disappear. So enamoured of this book was I that I managed to read it in a day despite needing to run errands and parent my toddler. I MADE time to read (with the help of my village). I strongly recommend this book to the Bitchery. While it is being marketed as a summer read, I think that undersells the power of it. In my little town in South Africa, we are enjoying a bright, chill autumn with leaves just starting to turn, but for the duration of this book, I enjoyed a Rhode Island summer with boat trips and lobster tails and deep, abiding love.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen this topic covered and a lot of books have been published in the meanwhile, so:

I’d like a rec league post for romances with at least one bisexual MC, preferably not in a college/university setting (because I’m over 40 and college students are mostly babies at this point).

Required: if a bi awakening romance, the MC’s bi awakening does NOT involve cheating (especially on the partner they start the book with, if they start with one).

Some bi romances from my Keeper Shelf include Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston, Faith & Fidelity by Tere Michaels, and Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid.
My TBR currently has Futbolista by Jonny Garza Villa.

And remember, folks, Heated Rivalry is not a “gay hockey book/show”, it is a queer hockey book/show”, because we do not erase bi consent king Ilya Rozanov in this house.

Amanda: I’d recommend You, Again by Kate Goldbeck. ( A | BN | K ) The hero and heroine meet because they’re dating the same woman. The characters are either in their 20s or 30s, but are out of college.

Elyse: If you’re into fantasy, The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi qualifies.

The heroine is 40ish and bi, although romance is not the main focus of the story.

Tara: I recently read a beautiful one called The Second Draft by Carrie Byrd. ( A | BN | K | AB ) Two best friends, one of them is 56, the other is turning 60. One of them is bi, the other goes through a late-in-life realization that she’s a lesbian.

Shana: The Stand-up Groomsman by Jackie Lau. It’s a m/f romance that I described on Goodreads as “extremely bisexual.” It’s one of my favorites.

Sarah: I’m going to guess that HeatherS (hi!) knows about The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes by Cat Sebastian. I think they’re both bisexual, though that’s historical. With Love, from Cold World by Alicia Thompson ( A | BN | K ) would work!

Oh – Hold Me by Courtney Milan!

In Count Your Lucky Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur I think one FMC is pan, and the other FMC is bi.

What romances would you suggest? Let us know in the comments!

Crazy Spooky Love

A plucky medium, her fame-chasing ex, and an infuriatingly handsome skeptic reporter make for a complicated love triangle—and that’s before the ghosts get involved. From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of One Day in December comes the first novel in a ghost-hunting series full of romance and humor.

In the leafy, charming town of Chapelwick, the Bittersweet family has been a fixture on High Street for as long as anyone can remember. Their rambling black-and-white building houses all three generations of ghost-sensitive Bittersweet women and their business, Blithe Spirits.

On her twenty-seventh birthday, Melody Bittersweet converts the disused back storeroom into her office and opens her own business. Unlike the rest of her family, she’s not taking down messages from ghosts—she’s taking them out.

Soon, the Girls’ Ghostbusting Agency takes on its first a grand old house that won’t sell because a trio of incumbent ghost brothers raise merry hell whenever prospective owners arrive to view it.

It soon becomes clear that there’s a whole heap of unfinished business between the Scarborough brothers—including murder—and Melody isn’t the only one trying to unravel the mystery. Leo Dark, her rakish ex and business rival, is also on the case, along with the TV crew that trails him.

To make matters worse, the sarcastic and skeptical (and annoyingly good-looking) local reporter Fletcher Gunn has his nose in the story as well. Sniffing out a way to publicly discredit the Bittersweets is his favorite assignment—and has absolutely nothing to do with his inability to resist Melody.

With her business on the line, it’s up to Melody to work out the brothers’ issues, but can she protect her own very susceptible heart from Fletcher’s charm? Does she even want to?

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With This Ring

With This Ring by Amanda Quick is $1.99! This is book one in the Vanza historical romance series. I feel like I discover new to me Quick backlist titles on a monthly basis.

Leo Drake, the “Mad Monk of Monkcrest,” is notoriously eccentric and unquestionably reclusive.  But he is also a noted antiquities expert, which is why Beatrice Poole has demanded his reluctant assistance.

The freethinking authoress of “horrid novels,” Beatrice is searching for the Forbidden Rings of Aphrodite, a mythic treasure she suspects played a role in her uncle’s death.  Beatrice finds Leo every bit as fascinating as one of the heroes in her novels–and she’s convinced he’s the only one who can help her.  But after only five minutes in her company, Leo is sure he’s never met a woman more infuriating…and more likely to rescue him from boredom.

Yet the alliance may well prove to be the biggest mistake of their lives.  For a villain lurks in London, waiting for the pair to unearth the Forbid

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Definitely Maybe Not a Detective

Definitely Maybe Not a Detective by Sarah Fox is $1.99! This is a mix of mystery and contemporary romance, where the heroine convinces the hero to pose as a detective only for their fake detective agency to be hired for a real case.

In this delightfully charming rom-com mystery, a woman becomes accidentally entangled in a murder investigation (and with a handsome stranger) when her fake detective agency is enlisted to solve a real homicide—from the bestselling author of the Pancake House Mysteries.

Emersyn Gray is definitely not a detective.

Really, she’s an unemployed twenty-eight-year-old raising her beloved niece in the only place she can afford after her ex-boyfriend ran off with her life a run-down, seniors-only apartment complex that was desperate for tenants. But never fear—her wild best friend has the perfect plan to get Emersyn back on her feet and stick it to her thieving scare him into returning her money by hiring a private investigator to prove he stole it. Only, there won’t be an actual detective, just a fabricated business card from Wyatt Investigations. . .and a ridiculously hot stranger who steps in to play the part—a stranger whose name is, coincidentally, Wyatt.

Emersyn can’t help but notice the real-life Wyatt is capital H-O-T hot, even though she’s wary of his intentions. But her ex does seem flustered, and if she can get her money back and regain control of her life, maybe it’ll finally prove to her parents that she can be a responsible caregiver to her niece.

But the day after they set their plan in motion, the superintendent of Emersyn’s apartment building winds up dead, and her neighbors turn to her fake detective for help after finding one of the phony business cards. With so many eyes on them—or maybe just their eyes on each other—Emersyn and Wyatt agree to take on the case. Now the question Can they solve the murder without getting tangled up in their own fictions—or each other?

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Trying to Score

Trying to Score by Toni Aleo is $1.99! This is the second book in the Nashville Assassins sports romance series and features a second chance romance. Readers seemed pretty divided on whether the heroine wasn’t good enough for the hero or vice versa. Have you read this one?

In a captivating novel of second chances and healing hearts, the newest member of the Nashville Assassins pulls a power play to make things right with the one that got away.
 
Fallon Parker’s dream has always been to turn her family’s wine company into a runaway success and eventually start a cellar of her own. Since graduating from college, she has worked relentlessly to make that dream a reality, especially after taking a chance on love—and losing. By the time Fallon becomes an official sponsor of the Nashville Assassins, she feels like all her hard work is finally paying off. And then the man who broke her heart skates back into her life.

On the ice, Lucas Brooks is the NHL’s leading scorer—at least when he’s not in the box. Off the ice, he’s a mess, with all his anger and misery bottled up inside. He threw away the most important person in his life and has regretted it ever since. But when Lucas returns to Nashville in a trade, he’s determined to convince Fallon that he’s a changed man. The attraction is still there. The tension is electrifying. But the odds are stacked against them—especially after Lucas finds out that Fallon has been keeping a devastating secret.

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My brother and sister-in-law are visiting for the next few days and I’m so excited to see them. (Even if my brother, who is in his 30s, is very much learning into little brother energy right now.) I think anyone who is an older sister with a younger brother gets what I mean.

I also had a lovely little girls staycation over the weekend.

That being said, I’m already dreading my inbox and I’ve been on vacation for a day.

…

Author Piper J. Drake passed away on May 18th. Her Facebook page posted a lovely tribute.

The Duke at Hazard

Don’t miss the second thrilling Regency romance in the Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune series by KJ Charles…

The Duke of Severn is one of the greatest men in Britain.

He’s also short, quiet, and unimpressive. And now he’s been robbed, after indulging in one rash night with a strange man who stole the heirloom Severn ring from his finger. The Duke has to get it back, and he can’t let anyone know how he lost it. So when his cousin bets that he couldn’t survive without his privilege and title, the Duke grasps the opportunity to hunt down his ring-incognito.

Life as an ordinary person is terrifying…until the anonymous Duke meets Daizell Charnage, a disgraced gentleman, and hires him to help. Racing across the country in search of the thief, the Duke and Daizell fall into scrapes, into trouble-and in love.

Daizell has been excluded from polite society, his name tainted by his father’s crimes and his own misbehaviour. Now he dares to dream of a life somewhere out of sight with the quiet gentleman who’s stolen his heart. He doesn’t know that his lover is a hugely rich public figure with half a dozen titles. And when he finds out, it will risk everything they have…

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Once Upon a Broken Heart

Once Upon a Broken Heart by Stephanie Graber is $2.99! This is a YA fantasy romance and the first book in a series of the same name. I’ve heard good things!

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Caraval, the first book in a new series about love, curses, and the lengths that people will go to for happily ever after.

Evangeline Fox was raised in her beloved father’s curiosity shop, where she grew up on legends about immortals, like the tragic Prince of Hearts. She knows his powers are mythic, his kiss is worth dying for, and that bargains with him rarely end well.

But when Evangeline learns that the love of her life is about to marry another, she becomes desperate enough to offer the Prince of Hearts whatever he wants in exchange for his help to stop the wedding. The prince only asks for three kisses. But after Evangeline’s first promised kiss, she learns that the Prince of Hearts wants far more from her than she’s pledged. And he has plans for Evangeline that will either end in the greatest happily ever after, or the most exquisite tragedy…

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Call Me Maybe

Call Me Maybe by Cara Bastone is 99c! Bastone’s romances have been previously recommended in the comments. This one was originally released as audio only. This is also on the shorter side at a little over 200 pages.

The audio bestseller, available for the first time in ebook! True love is on the line in Cara Bastone’s charming, laugh-out-loud rom-com, perfect for fans of Netflix’s Love is Blind, Jo Watson, Lauren Layne and Hannah Orenstein!

Paint your toes. Pick up the wrong coffee and bagel order. Drive from Brooklyn to Jersey in traffic so slow you want to tear your hair out. It’s amazing all the useless things I can accomplish while on hold for three hours with customer service. Three hours when I should be getting the Date-in-a-Box website ready to launch at the big business expo in a few days. Except my shiny new website is glitching, and my inner rage-monster is ready to scorch some earth…when he finally picks up. Not the robot voice I expected but a real live human named Cal. He’s surprisingly helpful and really knows his stuff, even if he’s a little awkward…in an adorable way.

And suddenly I’m flirting with him? And I think he’s flirting back.

And suddenly it’s been hours, and we’re still on the phone talking and ordering each other takeout while he troubleshoots my website.

And suddenly we’re exchanging numbers and sending texts and DMs every day, leaving voice mails (who even does that anymore?!).

And suddenly I’m wondering if it’s possible for two people to fall in love at first talk.

Because I’m falling…hard.

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For My Lady’s Heart

For My Lady’s Heart by Laura Kinsale is $2.99! Several of the book descriptions I saw mention that the ebook has two versions of the book. According to a comment last time this was on sale, both versions are included.

In medieval Europe, vows and laws are as inflexible and confining as a suit of armor. For Ruck, a noble and honest knight, those rules provide an unwavering path. Even as his wife leaves him for the Church, taking his money and his steed, Ruck’s life is one of devotion and mission.

For the beautiful widow, Princess Melanthe, those same laws and traditions conspire to consume her land and her independence. Her husband’s death has left her kingdom an inviting target for neighboring territories. Where Ruck sees a clear path, Melanthe must navigate through twisting alleyways, using shrewd deceit and devious strategy.

Can these two help each other overcome the powers conspiring against them? Will the passion in their hearts escape the constraints of their station? Is devotion enough?

With her classic romance FOR MY LADY’S HEART, author Laura Kinsale has crafted a rich, sensual portrait of life during the Middle Ages. And, now for the first time, readers can choose between two versions of the story. Both are included in this same ebook.

The first is the original published novel filled with authentic Middle English dialogue and deep period detail. The second (included only here in the ebook version) had been painstakingly reworked by the author to include a tighter read and more modern words for dialogue. Whichever you decide to read, you’ll be richly rewarded with a story of love and honor for the ages.

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There is a book that I read a while ago and cannot remember the name of but really want to reread it.

Here’s everything I remember:

There is a set of female twins in college. One of the twins goes on a date or two with this guy (think he’s an athlete) but doesn’t want to keep dating him so she has her twin go for her to break up with him.
The other twin goes to break up with him for her sister, but when she starts talking to him she ends up liking him. He can tell there’s something different about her but doesn’t realize she had a twin.
Eventually he finds out and they end up together in the end.

That’s pretty much all I remember, so any help would be greatly appreciated!

Let’s HaBO!

Happy Tuesday!

It’s the last release week in May before we gear up for an exciting June. This week gives us a new Nora Roberts, sci-fi, and more.

What new releases are on your radar this week? Let us know in the comments!

A Dark and Wild Wood

Author: Sarah Nicole Lemon
Released: May 26, 2026 by Harper Voyager
Genre: Gothic, Horror, Science Fiction/Fantasy

Inspired by the tale of Bluebeard, A Dark and Wild Wood is the lush and atmospheric story of a maiden with dark magic who becomes the apprentice to Lord Death—for a price. Perfect for fans of Juniper and Thorn and The Year of the Witching.

“No one writes like Sarah Nicole Lemon. She is a poet with knives for teeth. Her language will leave you carved out, and her sense of story is its own kind of witchcraft.” — Roshani Chokshi, New York Times bestselling author

Ever since she was a child, Salomé has been plagued by visions of spirits and dangerous powers she can’t control. After watching her foster mother burn as a witch, she and her beloved sister Rochelle are raised together in a convent, a grim and dreary existence. Until one day, Rochelle vanishes.

Determined to find a way to save her, Salomé first to a brothel, and then, after a terrible accident, away from the village and into the woods. Deep amongst the trees of the wild Black Forest, she comes face-to-face with Lord Death.

Rather than taking her life, he brings her to his home at the heart of the woods, a strange manor full of locked rooms and mysterious corridors, crumbling one moment, magnificent the next. He promises to make her his apprentice and teach her how to harness her mind and magic. His words are as seductive as his presence—but should one trust Death?

A swirling mirage of dark fairy tale, gothic romance, and historical fantasy, A Dark and Wild Wood is a novel best devoured all at once. But proceed with caution, as everything is not what it seems…

Amanda: I’ve been a fan of Lemon’s gritty books for awhile and I’m excited for this one.

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Dolly All the Time

Author: Annabel Monaghan
Released: May 26, 2026 by G.P. Putnam's Sons
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance

From The New York Times bestselling author of Nora Goes Off Script, a romance about a single mother who’s offered a Pretty Woman-type deal that’s too good to refuse.

If they begin by pretending, can they end with something real?

Dolly Brick has never met a problem she couldn’t solve. Not when her mom left when she was twelve, and not at thirty-nine when she moves with her son back to Whitfield, Rhode Island for the summer to keep her dad and brother from losing the family home.

So when she comes across Stewart Whitfield—annoyingly handsome scion of the Whitfield family—with a flat tire and at the wrong end of a very public, very humiliating breakup, it’s in her nature to help. But Stewart’s proposed arrangement ends up being more than either of them bargained for, because as public dinners and high society benefits turn into sunset boat rides and swinging on the porch, Dolly starts to feel something more than helpful. She’s never relied on anyone besides herself, can she really start now?

The latest from Monaghan and I believe Lara has a review coming up!

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The Final Target

Author: Nora Roberts
Released: May 26, 2026 by St. Martin's Press
Genre: Romantic Suspense, Romance

A young author becomes the object of a fan’s desire―and rage―in the gripping new thriller by the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Hidden Nature.

He showed up at Arden Bowie’s debut author appearance with a copy of her novel and an eager smile. He showered her with compliments and got her autograph. Then he came to her next event. And the one after that.

Dustin was just an aspiring writer who wanted advice, Arden reassured herself. But after giving in to one of his incessant invitations and chatting with him over coffee, she discovered that ignoring her inner alarm bell had been a terrible mistake…

An introvert at heart, Arden had long craved solitude―but now, after a harrowing assault, she finds herself hiding behind locked doors and startling at every sound. And her relief at his imprisonment is tempered by anxiety when Dustin’s wealthy mother helps to get him a paltry five-year sentence at a psychiatric facility.

Arden decides to write a new story for herself, moving to a tiny Oregon town and befriending Gideon, an ex-LAPD detective. But while she learns to thrive, Dustin remains his delusional, twisted self, as fixated as ever and now seething with anger. He still believes Arden’s purpose on earth is to serve and please him. And his job is to protect her. But who will protect her from him?

New standalone Nora! 

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Henry and Kate

Author: Laura Kneidl
Released: May 26, 2026 by LYX
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance
Series: The Darlingtons #1

An opposites-attract, slow-burn billionaire romance set in a world of London luxury and scandal, featuring exclusive character art and sprayed edges.

He can’t afford distractions. She can’t afford to get caught.

Twenty-year-old Kate Hamilton has lost her family, her job, her home. For months, she’s been surviving alone on London’s streets. Henry Darlington, on the other hand, seems to have it all—wealth, privilege, and his family’s luxury hotel empire. But beneath The Darlington’s glittering facade lies a darker a scandal involving Henry’s father has tainted the hotel’s reputation, and as the eldest son, Henry is left to pick up the pieces.

When desperation drives Kate to steal Henry’s phone, their worlds collide in an unexpected confrontation. Instead of calling the police, Henry makes a surprising a job at The Darlington, and a chance for Kate to escape the dangers of the street.

What begins as a fragile truce soon deepens into something neither of them anticipated. Within the hotel’s opulent walls, Kate glimpses a life she never thought possible, while Henry is drawn to the resilient, sharp-witted woman who refuses to be cowed by his world. But as their connection grows, both must face the can love survive the secrets, scandals, and social divides that threaten to keep them apart?

Amanda: I’m always curious about translated romances!

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Ode to the Half Broken

Author: Suzanne Palmer
Released: May 26, 2026 by DAW
Genre: Science Fiction/Fantasy

Forty years ago, the world nearly ended.

Be is an old robot who was there, and doesn’t want to think about what happened, or what role they played in that conflict. They have settled into a life of isolation in the abandoned ruins of an old mill in the former New York Botanical Gardens, disinterested in what has happened in the outside world since they stepped away from the war. Someone out there, though, has not forgotten about them, and when they are attacked, their person vandalized, and one of their leg stolen, they set out to find the thief accompanied by a cyborg dog and a human mechanic.

The world has changed, but the recovery from the war is uneven and faltering, and Be begins to suspect a malicious hand trying to rekindle the old conflict and finish what was started. In order to stop them, Be needs to come to terms with both their own past and who they have become, and how everything and everyone else they knew has changed in their absence. Being left alone is no longer an option, and peace may be impossible.

This is a story about coming to terms with your past, with who you’ve become and who you still want to be: a tale of resilence and hope, an ode to those struggling to become whole in a world half-broken.

Elyse: The summary is giving me Brave Little Toaster vibes. Like I might cry over robots.

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Teddy Bears Never Die

Author: Yeeun Cho
Released: May 26, 2026 by Run For It
Genre: Horror, Romance

The horrormance genre mash-up you’ve been waiting for – from the award-winning Korean author Cho Yeeun comes a new novel where a young girl and a teddy bear team up to enact revenge!

Yamu, pop. 200,000 – A coastal town that has seen better days. A massive redevelopment plan is in place, including that for a luxury apartment complex dubbed Sea View Park. One day, a delivery of rice cakes is made to the building supposedly from one of the new neighbours. The rice cakes are laced with cyanide, however, resulting in a lethal mass poisoning.

Hwa-young’s mother, who works as a live-in housekeeper at Sea View Park, is one of the victims. Hwa-young, turned out on the streets, lives in a flophouse for runaways at the mercy of landlord Young-jin, who regularly extorts money from her. Hwa-young refuses to believe that her mother, who never touched rice cakes in her life, died from eating them, and suspects foul play. Swearing to find the true culprit and avenge her mother’s death, Hwa-young is determined to save 20 million won in order to place a hit on the suspect, and does whatever work she can find.

One day, Hwa-young is bullied into playing bait for one of Young-jin’s scams. Left in a motel room alone with the mark, she is alarmed when he begins to unpack one lethal weapon after another. She signals Young-jin for help, but when no one comes she realizes that she has been tricked, and that Young-jin has sold her to the would-be murderer. Just when the man is about to attack Hwa-young, he collapses in pain, bleeding. Hwa-young is about to escape when a teddy bear speaks to her. It’s a grubby Happy Smile Bear doll.

And thus begins the extraordinary journey as a Happy Smile Bear, possessed by the spirits of a murdered young boy, and Hwa-yeong, an orphaned young girl, join forces enact vengeance and bring the true culprit to justice.

Amanda: I feel like Korean fiction has been killing it lately with really fun stuff.

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Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands

When mysterious faeries from other realms appear at her university, curmudgeonly professor Emily Wilde must uncover their secrets before it’s too late in this heartwarming, enchanting second installment of the Emily Wilde series.

Emily Wilde is a genius scholar of faerie folklore—she just wrote the world’s first comprehensive of encylopaedia of faeries. She’s learned many of the secrets of the Hidden Folk on her adventures . . . and also from her fellow scholar and former rival, Wendell Bambleby.

Because Bambleby is more than infuriatingly charming. He’s an exiled faerie king on the run from his murderous mother, and in search of a door back to his realm. So despite Emily’s feelings for Bambleby, she’s not ready to accept his proposal of marriage. Loving one of the Fair Folk comes with secrets and danger.

And she also has a new project to focus a map of the realms of faerie. While she is preparing her research, Bambleby lands her in trouble yet again, when assassins sent by Bambleby’s mother invade Cambridge. Now Bambleby and Emily are on another adventure, this time to the picturesque Austrian Alps, where Emily believes they may find the door to Bambley’s realm, and the key to freeing him from his family’s dark plans.

But with new relationships for the prickly Emily to navigate and dangerous Folk lurking in every forest and hollow, Emily must unravel the mysterious workings of faerie doors, and of her own heart.

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The Princess Stakes

The Princess Stakes by Amalie Howard is $1.99! This is a KDD and right now, I’m not seeing it price-matched. This is a historical second chance romance with a princess heroine.

There’s tension brewing on the high seas between a stowaway Indian princess and a British sea captain in this “vivid, sensual, and beautifully written” historical romance (Lisa Kleypas, #1 New York Times–bestselling author).

“Star-crossed, swoony, steamy love. . . . A unique and truly resonant read.” —Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times–bestselling author

Princess Sarani Rao is on the run. In her best disguise, she stows away on the next British ship out of India. But her secret won’t be safe for long. As the port fades in her wake, Sara takes her first salty breath of relief when a handsome old flame discovers her.

The Duke of Embry has enough on his plate. Considering his troublesome new dukedom and his oath to queen, country, and crew, the last thing Captain Rhystan Huntley wants is to help the woman who broke his heart. Still, he cannot deny his lingering desire for her.

With rough waters ahead, the two clash even as forgotten passions flare, but their journey to love has spanned years, continents, and countries, and will be their greatest adventure of all.

“Amalie Howard is the fresh voice historical romance needs right now. She deftly marries a classic trope to an original plot and the effect is superb! Her prose is delightful, her writing masterful, her characters unforgettable.” —Kerrigan Byrne, USA Today–bestselling author

“Readers looking for historical escapism will be swept up in Sarani and Rhystan’s high-seas adventures.” —Library Journal

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

The Honjin Murders

The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo is $1.99 and another KDD! This was originally published in the 1940s and is a Japanese police procedural and murder mystery. I also mentioned this one in a previous edition of Get Rec’d.

One of Japan’s greatest classic murder mysteries, introducing their best loved detective, translated into English for the first time.

In the winter of 1937, the village of Okamura is abuzz with excitement over the forthcoming wedding of a son of the grand Ichiyanagi family. But amid the gossip over the approaching festivities, there is also a worrying rumour – it seems a sinister masked man has been asking questions around the village.

Then, on the night of the wedding, the Ichiyanagi household are woken by a terrible scream, followed by the sound of eerie music. Death has come to Okamura, leaving no trace but a bloody samurai sword, thrust into the pristine snow outside the house. Soon, amateur detective Kosuke Kindaichi is on the scene to investigate what will become a legendary murder case, but can this scruffy sleuth solve a seemingly impossible crime?

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Skye O’Malley

Skye O’Malley by Bertrice Small is $1.99! If you’ve been needing some Old Skool crazysauce in your life, look no further. Redheadedgirl gave this one a read and gave it a B-:

So the important thing to remember about Bertrice Small is just what Sarah said in her tribute last month: all those taboos the erotica writers are thinking they’re the first to break? Someday, they will find Ms. Small, and she will laugh gently and say, “Oh, darling, these butt plugs? They’re vintage.” There quite a lot of kinky sex in this book, and there are strengths and weaknesses to that. 

There has never been a woman like luscious, raven-haired, hot-tempered Skye O’Malley. She is the courageous seafaring captain of her own mighty fleet, and intelligent enough to win a battle of wits with Queen Elizabeth herself. Follow along as Skye O’Malley is swept up in a journey filled with romance and passion that takes her from glittering Ireland, to lush Algeria, to the heart of London in pursuit of a unique and eternal love…..

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

From Maeve: Her bra sheath slipped. The angle’s also wrong to go through her heart. And no arms? The longer I look at this, the more wrong it feels.

Sarah: I know what I’m looking at but everything looks slightly…off.

Amanda: An accurate depiction of my acid reflux.

Sarah: Gosh, mine, too. Yikes.

From Jen: Not sure what’s wrong with this cover but it’s just wrong.

Sarah: That is some terrible photoshop. I’m appalled on behalf of rabbits everywhere.

Tara: Sir, step away from that bunny.

Sarah: I think the face was photoshopped in and it’s giving me the jibblies with a level 10 ick.

From Syntha: What in the horrible photoshopped hair is this?

Sarah: Who stole the armor off an armadillo for that guy’s head? What a photoshop crime!

Susan: Should – should we tell him his armour’s crooked? He’s got to know, right

Elyse: His hair looks like a 3D printed fidget toy.

From Tara C: I opened my Audible app this morning to see Molly Harper’s Pasties and Poor Decisions being sold to me. I love Molly Harper, and the title has a lot of potential. But my brain is having trouble processing the color choices and the poor woman’s face. And her skirt and the sample-sized tool box.

Sarah: MORE ICK. What is with the faceless folks with lips and/or beards? It’s kinda creeping me out.

Also, the part where the letters don’t line up is making me twitchy.

Elyse: Beard no eyes is a look.

Sarah: Beard and Brows. The only look you need.

Shockingly, only one non-fiction title and three–THREE–romances! I can hardly believe it.

Do you have any book recommendations to pass along? Let us know in the comments!

Because I Killed Him

I spotted one of my mutuals on Goodreads reading this one and compared the main character dynamics to Jude and Cardan from The Cruel Prince. Definitely buying for myself.

The wrong ally is deadlier than an enemy.

In the Civilized World, everyone is rich, yet money doesn’t buy safety. It only buys a gold coffin. The real currency is having the right allies. Low-citizens survive by joining high-citizens’ exclusive inner circles, trading loyalty for protection from laws that govern speech, dress, and posture—and punish mistakes with public beheading.

Low-citizen Loredana Waldsten already knows the cost of breaking the rules. Once a rising fencing prodigy, she lost the right to carry weapons after killing a high-citizen in a brutal locker-room attack. The courts erased his death to preserve his family’s honor. Now she’s unarmed, legally defenseless, and enrolled at the elite Grandmaster University, where champagne spills into the gutters and reputations are built on death duels.

When Loredana’s father, a low-citizen politician, publicly challenges the high-citizens, she becomes a target. Some classmates demand her execution. Others hunt her for sport. And by law, she’s forbidden to fight back.

Her only chance of survival lies with Edmund Prew, a charming yet ruthless high-citizen student she’s been warned against. Edmund’s family has been locked in a bitter feud with Loredana’s for years, and he wants nothing to do with her until a lost bet forces him to protect her within his inner circle. What begins as a scandalous, strategic alliance turns perilous as they fall for each other.

Because the man Loredana killed wasn’t just a high-citizen. He was Edmund’s cousin.

Loving Edmund means living a lie.
Telling the truth means certain death.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

The Dressmaker’s Secret Earl

This one came from another one of my mutuals on Goodreads and I know many of you are always on the lookout for new historical romances. I believe the books in this series feature two romances happening concurrently.

A Marriage of Convenience? Not for Augusta—She’s Determined to Choose Her Own Fate.

Book 1 of an interconnected Regency romance series, where each love story stands alone—yet characters, secrets, and consequences echo from book to book.

The impoverished daughter of a baronet, Augusta knows what it means to be powerless. When her aunt arranges a marriage to a scoundrel, she refuses to become a pawn in a transaction. Instead, she flees to London, her dreams pinned on building a life as a modiste—designing gowns for society’s elite.

But freedom comes with unexpected risks. On her first day in the city, Augusta crosses paths with Lord Bridlington, a brooding earl whose clubfoot and scandalous reputation have made him an outcast. Yet beneath his gruff exterior is a man grappling with hidden pain and longing for acceptance.

Drawn into the orbit of Lord Bridlington’s captivating sister, Mariana—a woman whose secret ambition is to marry the one man society deems entirely unsuitable—Augusta is swept into a world of whispered intrigue, midnight masquerades, and suppressed passions. Disguises, daring schemes, and reckless escapades soon become the fabric of her new life.

Yet as her heart begins to race for a man she never meant to care for, Augusta’s past catches up with her, threatening to shatter the freedom she fought so hard to claim. And Lord Bridlington’s secrets may be more dangerous than she ever imagined.

Will Augusta find the courage to seize the life—and the love—she truly desires?

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Femina

If you like a feminist history deep dive, perhaps give this one a peek. 

A groundbreaking reappraisal of medieval femininity, revealing why women have been written out of history and why it matters

The Middle Ages are seen as a bloodthirsty time of Vikings, saints and kings; a patriarchal society that oppressed and excluded women. But when we dig a little deeper into the truth, we can see that the “Dark” Ages were anything but.

Oxford and BBC historian Janina Ramirez has uncovered countless influential women’s names struck out of historical records, with the word FEMINA annotated beside them. As gatekeepers of the past ordered books to be burned, artworks to be destroyed, and new versions of myths, legends and historical documents to be produced, our view of history has been manipulated.

Only now, through a careful examination of the artifacts, writings and possessions they left behind, are the influential and multifaceted lives of women emerging. Femina goes beyond the official records to uncover the true impact of women, such as:

• Jadwiga, the only female king in Europe
• Margery Kempe, who exploited her image and story to ensure her notoriety
• Loftus Princess, whose existence gives us clues about the beginnings of Christianity in England

In Femina, Ramirez invites us to see the medieval world with fresh eyes and discover why these remarkable women were removed from our collective memories.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Princeweaver

For all my Winter’s Orbit or A Taste of Gold and Iron fans out there! 

Their marriage is to save a warring kingdom. But in the process, it might destroy them both…

Born with forbidden, nature-infused magic in an occupied land, anxious apothecary Meilyr survives by keeping his head down. Until he ends up engaged to invading prince Osian in order to save his brother’s life. Now, he is in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse to hide his true self.

When nobles in Osian’s court are gruesomely murdered by the same magic that flows through his veins, Meilyr realises someone is seeking revenge for his homeland. As suspicion towards him grows, he and the prince work together to uncover the killer, or risk losing the crown – or their lives.

Between court politics, unwieldy magic and a murderer on the loose, Meilyr must keep his wits about him. Especially as his feelings for Osian grow deeper with every passing day…

Combines the court intrigue and slow-burn yearning of A Taste of Gold and Iron with the folkloric grounding and lore that readers of Naomi Novik and Stephanie Garber will enjoy.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Lara: Candice Proctor released only seven historical romances and I’m on my second already. The books are phenomenal and have given me a great deal of food for thought.

Elyse:  I just read There Is No Place for Us by Brian Goldstone. ( A | BN | K | AB ) It follows five Atlanta families who make up part of the increasing number of homeless (the author uses homeless not unhoused) in America who also work full time or more than full time. It’s a really eye opening book, especially when you learn that these families (usually depending on predatory extended stay motels or sleeping in their cars or crashing on friends couches) don’t actually contribute to the people officially counted as homeless. It’s a hard book to read but really important.

Sarah: I finished Romantic Hero by Kirsty Greenwood ( A | BN | K | AB ) and I actually factually laughed aloud and also cried.

And I just started I Think We Should Kill Other People, ( A | BN | K | AB ) which is starting off zany.

Whatcha reading? Let us know in the comments!

The Strawberry Patch Pancake House

As a renowned chef, single-dad Archer never planned on moving to a small town, let alone running a pancake restaurant. But Dream Harbor needs a new chef, and Archer needs a community to help raise his daughter, Olive.

Iris has never managed to hold down a job for more than a few months. So when Mayor Kelly suggests Archer is looking for a nanny, and Iris might be available, she shudders at the thought. But in need of money she reluctantly agrees.

As Archer and Iris get used to their new roles, is it possible that they might have more in common than they first thought, or is Olive just determined to play match-maker…

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Mrs. Nash’s Ashes

Mrs. Nash’s Ashes by Sarah Adler is $1.99 and another KDD! This was mentioned on a couple podcasts, including one with Mara Wilson! Did any of you read this one?

A starry-eyed romantic, a cynical writer, and (the ashes of) an elderly woman take the road trip of a lifetime that just might upend everything they believe about true love.

Millicent Watts-Cohen is on a mission. When she promised her elderly best friend that she’d reunite her with the woman she fell in love with nearly eighty years ago, she never imagined that would mean traveling from D.C. to Key West with three tablespoons of Mrs. Nash’s remains in her backpack. But Millie’s determined to give her friend a symbolic happily-ever-after, before it’s (really) too late—and hopefully reassure herself of love’s lasting power in the process.

She just didn’t expect to have a living travel companion.

After a computer glitch grounds flights, Millie is forced to catch a ride with Hollis Hollenbeck, an also-stranded acquaintance from her ex’s MFA program. Hollis certainly does not believe in happily-ever-afters—symbolic or otherwise—and makes it quite clear that he can’t fathom Millie’s plan ending well for anyone.

But as they contend with peculiar bed-and-breakfasts, unusual small-town festivals, and deer with a death wish, Millie begins to suspect that her reluctant travel partner might enjoy her company more than he lets on. Because for someone who supposedly doesn’t share her views on romance, Hollis sure is becoming invested in the success of their journey. And the closer they get to their destination, the more Millie has to admit that maybe this trip isn’t just about Mrs. Nash’s love story after all—maybe it’s also about her own.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Anna and the French Kiss

Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins is $1.99! Many reviews on Goodreads mention becoming a member of the Bad Decisions Book Club in order to finish it. However, some found the heroine a bit too cutesy for their tastes. I know Sarah loved this one.

Anna can’t wait for her senior year in Atlanta, where she has a good job, a loyal best friend, and a crush on the verge of becoming more. So she’s not too thrilled when her father unexpectedly ships her off to boarding school in Paris – until she meets Etienne St. Clair, the perfect boy. The only problem? He’s taken, and Anna might be, too, if anything comes of her crush back home. Will a year of romantic near-misses end in the French kiss Anna awaits?

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Sally’s Baking Addiction

Sally’s Baking Addiction by Sally McKenney is either $3.99 or 99c depending on the vendor! Sally’s runs a popular baking blog/website under the same name. Do you have any favorite recipes?

Updated with a brand-new selection of desserts and treats, the fully illustrated Sally’s Baking Addiction cookbook offers more than 80 scrumptious recipes for indulging your sweet tooth—featuring a chapter of healthier dessert options, including some vegan and gluten-free recipes.

It’s no secret that Sally McKenney loves to bake. Her popular blog, Sally’s Baking Addiction, has become a trusted source for fellow dessert lovers who are also eager to bake from scratch. Sally’s famous recipes include award-winning Salted Caramel Dark Chocolate Cookies, No-Bake Peanut Butter Banana Pie, delectable Dark Chocolate Butterscotch Cupcakes, and yummy Marshmallow Swirl S’mores Fudge.

Find tried-and-true sweet recipes for all kinds of delicious:

Breads & Muffins
Breakfasts
Brownies & Bars
Cakes, Pies & Crisps
Candy & Sweet Snacks
Cookies
Cupcakes
Healthier Choices
With tons of simple, easy-to-follow recipes, you get all of the sweet with none of the fuss!

Hungry for more? Learn to create even more irresistible sweets with Sally’s Candy Addiction and Sally’s Cookie Addiction.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

We were not paid to promote them, but we did receive free samples and they are delicious.

You can get 10% off of Tropetails drink mixes with code SBTBTROPES!

And! The transcript is already in! Enjoy!

Read the transcript →

Here are the books we discuss in this podcast:

We also mentioned:

• Manta: Flower of Allure aka Flowers are Bait 
• Game: Winter Burrow
• Game: Librarian – Tidy Up the Arcane Library
• Elyse’s review of Yesteryear
• My review of Platform Decay

Don’t forget: you can get 10% off of Tropetails drink mixes with code SBTBTROPES!

This episode is brought to you by Hatch.

You know how you finish a romantasy and you just need the next thing immediately? Hatch made that thing.

It’s called Ophelia — an original audio drama, inspired by Hamlet, where Ophelia finally gets to be the main character.

Forbidden magic, a crumbling kingdom, a slow-burn love triangle with a prince and his very guarded, very intriguing, best friend. The kind of love triangle where you will absolutely pick a side and you will not be quiet about it.

Book one of the three part series is now available for free wherever you stream, with new chapters dropping every Tuesday. For books 2 and 3, check out hatch.co/Ophelia.

If you like the podcast, you can subscribe to our feed, or find us at iTunes. You can also find us on Stitcher, and Spotify, too. We also have a cool page for the podcast on iTunes.

Thanks to our sponsors:

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What did you think of today's episode? Got ideas? Suggestions? You can talk to us on the blog entries for the podcast or talk to us on Facebook if that's where you hang out online. You can email us at sbjpodcast@gmail.com or you can call and leave us a message at our Google voice number: 201-371-3272. Please don't forget to give us a name and where you're calling from so we can work your message into an upcoming podcast.

Thanks for listening!

Podcast Sponsor

Support for this episode comes from The Undergrads: Student Union by #1 New York Times-bestselling author Julie Murphy–a sexy new rom com about a college marriage of convenience that goes way beyond chemistry 101…

Clover Rowan Walsh knows The Plan:

1. Get a full ride to her dream school, Wexley University.
2. Conquer the school of business.
3. Say goodbye to the paycheck-to-paycheck life she and her mom have known for years.

There’s just one hiccup. With the first semester rapidly approaching, Clover learns her housing grant has fallen through. But a loophole presents itself: Married couples can live in the dorms for the price of one student. Clover is willing to sacrifice the sanctity of marriage…even if it means proposing to the one person she swore she’d never speak to again: Bennett Andrew Graves.

Bennett can’t refuse Clover, the girl he grew up with (and whom he completely devastated years ago). He owes her this, but that doesn’t change the fact that these two can barely carry on a conversation without getting at each other’s throats. Forget about sharing a dorm—much less one bed.

But as Clover and Bennett hide the true nature of their marriage, they find that playing house isn’t all that bad–especially with certain marital benefits in the mix. In fact, Clover and Bennett are soon forgetting the most important part of their fake marriage of convenience . . . that it’s supposed to be fake.

With tropes like forced proximity and friends to enemies to lovers, you won’t want to miss this first book in a new trilogy of romance novels that follows a group of girls as they navigate love, friendship, and new adulthood.

Ali Hazelwood calls The Undergrads: Student Union “one addictively swoony book.”

Available now wherever books are sold!

Remember to subscribe to our podcast feed, find us on iTunes or on Stitcher.

The transcript for Podcast 718. RT Rewind: December 2012 Reviews has been posted!

This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks.

❤ Click here to subscribe to The Podcast →

Red City

The Godfather meets The Magicians in the sweeping adult debut from #1 New York Times bestselling author Marie Lu. Perfect for fans of V.E. Schwab, Red City is a dark and deadly contemporary fantasy of magical warfare, star-crossed ambition, and the pursuit of perfection at any cost, set in a glittering alternate Los Angeles.

Alchemy is the hidden art of transformation. An exclusive power wielded by crime syndicates that market it to the world’s elites in the form of sand, a drug that enhances those who take it into a more perfect version of more beautiful, more charismatic, simply more.

Among the gleaming skyscrapers and rolling foothills of Angel City, alchemy is controlled by two rival syndicates. For years, Grand Central and Lumines have been balanced on a razor’s edge between polite negotiation and outright violence. But when two childhood friends step into that delicate equation, the city—and the paths of their lives—will be irrevocably transformed.

The daughter of a poor single mother, Sam would do anything to claw her way into the ranks of Grand Central in search of a better life. Plucked away from his family as a boy to become a Lumines apprentice, Ari is one of the syndicates’ brightest rising stars. Once, they might have loved each other. But as the two alchemists face off across opposite sides of an ever-escalating conflict, ambition becomes power, loyalty becomes lies, and no transformation may be perfect enough for them both to survive the coming war.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

The Frame-Up

The Frame-Up by Gwenda Bond is $1.99! This is a mix of romance, mystery, and magical realism. One of the chief criticisms about this one is that is was surprisingly boring giving all the interesting elements.

A magically gifted con artist must gather her estranged mother’s old crew for a once-in-a-lifetime heist, from the New York Times bestselling author of Stranger Suspicious Minds.

Dani Poissant is the daughter and former accomplice of the world’s most famous art thief, as well as being an expert forger in her own right. The secret to their success? A little thing called magic, kept rigorously secret from the non-magical world. Dani’s mother possesses the power of persuasion, able to bend people to her will, whereas Dani has the ability to make any forgery she undertakes feel like the genuine article.

At seventeen, concerned about the corrupting influence of her mother’s shadowy partner, Archer, Dani impulsively sold her mother out to the FBI—an act she has always regretted. Ten years later, Archer seeks her out, asking her to steal a particular painting for him, since her mother’s still in jail. In return, he will reconcile her with her mother and reunite her with her mother’s old gang—including her former best friend, Mia, and Elliott, the love of her life.

The problem is, it’s a nearly impossible job—even with the magical talents of the people she once considered family backing her up. The painting is in the never-before-viewed private collection of deceased billionaire William Hackworth—otherwise known as the Fortress of Art. It’s a job that needs a year to plan, and Dani has just over one week. Worse, she’s not exactly gotten a warm welcome from her former colleagues—especially not from Elliott, who has grown from a weedy teen to a smoking-hot adult. And then there is the biggest puzzle of why Archer wants her to steal a portrait of himself, which clearly dates from the 1890s, instead of the much more valuable works by Vermeer or Rothko. Who is her mother’s partner, really, and what does he want?

The more Dani learns, the more she understands she may be in way over her head—and that there is far more at stake in this job than she ever realized.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein

The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White is $1.99! This is a YA re-imagining of Frankenstein and has a 3.8+ rating on Goodreads. Readers say the first two-thirds of the book are great, but then it kind of goes off the rails. Have you read this one?

Elizabeth Lavenza hasn’t had a proper meal in weeks. Her thin arms are covered with bruises from her “caregiver,” and she is on the verge of being thrown into the streets . . . until she is brought to the home of Victor Frankenstein, an unsmiling, solitary boy who has everything–except a friend.

Victor is her escape from misery. Elizabeth does everything she can to make herself indispensable–and it works. She is taken in by the Frankenstein family and rewarded with a warm bed, delicious food, and dresses of the finest silk. Soon she and Victor are inseparable.

But her new life comes at a price. As the years pass, Elizabeth’s survival depends on managing Victor’s dangerous temper and entertaining his every whim, no matter how depraved. Behind her blue eyes and sweet smile lies the calculating heart of a girl determined to stay alive no matter the cost . . . as the world she knows is consumed by darkness

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Jim Henson: The Biography

Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones is $1.99! I know the Bitchery has many Dark Crystal and Labyrinth lovers, so I thought this biography might be of interest to some of you. Some readers felt that the biography carried some bias, but others said they had such a feeling of nostalgia while reading.

For the first time ever—a comprehensive biography of one of the twentieth century’s most innovative creative artists: the incomparable, irreplaceable Jim Henson.

He was a gentle dreamer whose genial bearded visage was recognized around the world, but most people got to know him only through the iconic characters born of his fertile imagination: Kermit the Frog, Bert and Ernie, Miss Piggy, Big Bird. The Muppets made Jim Henson a household name, but they were just part of his remarkable story.

This extraordinary biography—written with the generous cooperation of the Henson family—covers the full arc of Henson’s all-too-brief life: from his childhood in Leland, Mississippi, through the years of burgeoning fame in America, to the decade of international celebrity that preceded his untimely death at age fifty-three. Drawing on hundreds of hours of new interviews with Henson’s family, friends, and closest collaborators, as well as unprecedented access to private family and company archives, Brian Jay Jones explores the creation of the Muppets, Henson’s contributions to Sesame Street andSaturday Night Live, and his nearly ten-year campaign to bringThe Muppet Show to television. Jones provides the imaginative context for Henson’s non-Muppet projects, including the richly imagined worlds of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth—as well as fascinating misfires like Henson’s dream of opening an inflatable psychedelic nightclub.

An uncommonly intimate portrait, Jim Henson captures all the facets of this American original: the master craftsman who revolutionized the presentation of puppets on television, the savvy businessman whose dealmaking prowess won him a reputation as “the new Walt Disney,” and the creative team leader whose collaborative ethos earned him the undying loyalty of everyone who worked for him. Here also is insight into Henson’s intensely private personal life: his Christian Science upbringing, his love of fast cars and expensive art, and his weakness for women. Though an optimist by nature, Henson was haunted by the notion that he would not have time to do all the things he wanted to do in life—a fear that his heartbreaking final hours would prove all too well founded.

An up-close look at the charmed life of a legend, Jim Henson gives the full measure to a man whose joyful genius transcended age, language, geography, and culture—and continues to beguile audiences worldwide.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

She works as an autism consultant by day, got a degree in information science for fun, and currently serves on her local library advisory board, which she’s written about for SBTB. 

…

Sometimes you get to see your hobbies collide.

It happens more often with my cross-stitch and books (I think we all know that the number of bookish patterns are legion) but it’s less common with my video gaming and book habits.

Enter Tiny Bookshop.

I think I first heard about this game on one of the several video game podcasts I listen to, and of course, my ears perked up.

The premise of the game is fairly straightforward. You, the player, have decided to say “I’m out” and have moved to the seaside town of Bookstonbury with only your car and the tiny wooden trailer that you are towing, and have decided to try your luck as a bookseller.

So, fun fact about me, I actually HAVE been a bookseller in my life (I know, shocking). Back in college, I worked part-time in a couple of bookstores. I was good at the work, as I knew a lot about books, enjoyed the process of arranging and organizing the shelves, and of course, liked interacting with customers and talking to them about books. I also got to “check out” new releases and take them home and read them, which was VERY fun. We weren’t supposed to read on the job, but let’s be real, I did that too.

I also have daydreamed about opening up my own tiny pop-up type bookstores, and noodled around figuring out the process, but it’s not a dream for this moment in my time. That said, I even had a name for the place: The Dragon’s Hoard.

So, finding out about this game is a bit like finding a way to make my little dream bookstore a real thing, even if only in this virtual space.

I mentioned it to my mom (a former librarian) with all attendant enthusiasm, and she went “That sounds like work.”

BUT ALSO, YES, THAT’S THE POINT, THIS IS HOW I LIVE THE DREAM.

I started playing it last night, after I wrested the Switch 2 out of my daughter’s hands (she’s fully ensconced in Pokemon Pokopia, and boy, do I mean ENSCONCED).

I was not sure how it would go, since I’m not overly experienced with management sims. I’ve played a few, with Two Point Campus and Two Point Museum being notable favorites (with my interest in them being very similar to why I would pick up something like Tiny Bookshop: who wouldn’t want to run a college campus or a museum?) and just finished up Dave the Diver, which is part fishing sim and part management sim.

Yeah, I ended up playing Tiny Bookshop for the next 3 and a half hours.

The gameplay loop is fairly simple: you start your day by perusing the local newspaper. The newspaper will give you an idea of today’s weather, if there are any events happening, and will also have a classified section of people selling boxes of used books that you can buy to fill out your stock. Once that’s done, you start filling out your shelf, which initially allows you 40 books at any given time.

The books are classified into different genres:

• Crime (which can include your thrillers and your horror)
• Fantasy (which includes sci-fi)
• Kid’s Books
• Facts
• Travel
• Drama (this can be plays and your romance novels)
• Classics.

Then, once you have gotten that filled out, you choose a sale location, such as the local cafe, a local waterfront market, or the beach, among others. The farther you get into the game, the more locations open up to you.

This is where things get interesting, on both the sales and inventory management front. You want to get a feel for what sells best where.

You want to spend the day at the beach? Better stock up on Crime and Fantasy, because those two genres sell particularly well at the beach when people want something to read while sunbathing.

Plan on posting up at the local university during orientation? Stock up your Classics and Facts, because you might just be able to save some of those students money on their textbooks and English 1101 reading lists (and keep them some fiction available for pleasure reading because they deserve joy).

During your sales times, you will, of course, meet and get to know several of the townspeople, and get to help them, both by completing tasks and helping them find the right books.

In what I think is one of this game’s most charming conceits, most of the books in the game are real books from real authors. The game contains over 1000 real titles, as well as 42 in-game titles that cover topics like local history.

You can’t tell specifically what books are available until you’re in the sales mechanism. Customers will ask you for recommendations based on certain criteria, and it’s your job to help them find the right title for them – and if you’re successful, they’re more likely to buy more books at one time, because you can never have just one!

A | BN | K | AB

It’s a low-key and soothing loop, with fairly low stakes. The art is pretty, with soft, somewhat muted colors, and a tranquil feel. And for the decorating mavens among us, you can decorate your trailer and car with plants and lights and pictures, and buy decorations from other vendors if you’d like to establish a theme. I just unlocked the goth vendor, and now I’m noodling on how to do a pastel/goth aesthetic, and can see myself getting very into that. I believe that I will also be able to get a dog and cat somewhere in the game as well, and I love in-game pets (ask me how much I pet all the babies in Assassin’s Creed games).

My little shop on a lovely spring day at St. Bookston University

If you need ideas, there’s a lovely Reddit thread in which people talk about their favorite in-game items.

This game is the very definition of cozy. There’s a strong focus on integrating into this community, which makes a point of being as welcoming and helpful as possible. I heard one podcaster describe it as being the perfect game to play under a weighted blanket.

I am also looking forward to future updates and DLCs, since I’d like to see them add books released since the game’s release, and I’d also like to see future events and collaborations. Weirdly, and it might be recency bias, but I could honestly see a crossover with Dave the Diver, of all things (Dave’s a reader; we know this because of the cutscenes in his time skips).

In conclusion, this is a good game when you need something stress-free and comforting to the brain. You’re not saving the world or romping through outer space, but you will find that the sense of accomplishment in this game feels oddly sweet.

And who knows? It may just give you ideas for a neato library display.

Tiny Bookshop Display
byu/Prettykitt473 inCozyGamers

Tiny Bookshop is available from Steam, Nintendo Switch, Playstation, XBox, and in a physical edition from the game’s homepage.

I picked this book up for the following reasons:

1. The colours on the cover – hello neon!
2. The title – what could a ‘safari murder party’ be?
3. The use of ‘safari’ in the title. I am a Zimbabwean/South African and while I have been on plenty of game drives and visits to nature reserves, I’ve never considered any of that a ‘safari’ even though they’re marketed as safaris outside of my region.

Fletcher is an executive assistant to the CEO of a media company. The company owns a travel magazine for which Fletcher longs to be a photojournalist. She took the assistant job to try and get closer to that dream role. Each year, there is a company retreat to the CEO’s private island near Madagascar where a massive collection (and I use that term advisedly) of wild animals are kept (hello safari!).

At that retreat, promotions are handed out freely and Fletcher wants one. The problem is that it is only a select handful that are invited and, yet again, she’s not on the invite list. She manages to convince her boss, last minute, to let her join.

Also at the retreat is her sworn enemy, Waylon, the CEO’s son. After an incident at a charity gala hosted by the company, the two detest each other.

On their first night in Madagascar, the CEO dies and leaves a will saying that whoever survives the next five days will inherit the company. The rescue team will be back then to take the survivor or survivors back to New York. Chaos ensues.

The fighting between our two intended lovers only starts to ebb after the 50% mark, when the inciting incident in their animosity is revealed and discussed. It is alluded to before then, but not more than that. If you need more ‘lovers’ and less ‘enemies’ in your enemies-to-lovers, this might frustrate you. Things only really soften between them at around 60% in and even then, there’s hesitation.

Perhaps because of their slow reconciliation, and perhaps because there is just so much action in the book, there wasn’t as much emotional development in the romance as I would have liked. This book is more ‘plot’ than ‘character’ with one exception: Fletcher. She has to grow a lot and learn to say out loud to herself and to those around her exactly she wants.

It is an action-packed, suspenseful story. I don’t always do a good job of following action choreography when I’m reading. I just let it wash over me and get the general gist. (Am I alone in that?)

The descriptive elements of the writing are really interesting to read because the figurative language used is often quite original and always vivid. For example:

The truck chugged into the jungle canopy, aiming down a narrow trail through the thicket. Instantly the sun faded into a soupy green, determined to shine through the leafy mosaic. The air temperature plummeted enough to raise a chill on Fletcher’s arms as they carved through the undergrowth.

There is also some wonderful dark humour which I really enjoyed, such as when, Fletcher and Waylon are running through the bush and they hear a mysterious animal cry:

“It sounds like a lion had a baby with a super venomous snake.”

Waylon stayed close on her heels, a hand on the small of her back propelling her forward. “That’s biologically impossible.”

Fletcher sighed, “Okay, Steve Irwin. What do you think it is?” The grass growled again, and he pressed closer to her. “Maybe a lion or a snake, but not both.”

She had her mouth open to argue that after everything they’d witnessed this week, a lion-snake hybrid hardly seemed outrageous. There was a whole rebuttal on the top of her tongue about how his dad could have very well hired private zoological geneticists to create the first mammal-reptilian crossover species. A useless vanity project for the sake of playing god. The Tesla Cybertruck of predators. A slion.

The commentary on corporate America is not subtle (see: the title). In fact, the smattering of corporate lingo used at this death match prompted me to reflect on the kinds of people that I work with in my normie corporate job. I hear a lot of that terminology. It made an unfamiliar situation (a corporate death match) feel relatable and I hadn’t anticipated feeling that connection. At the pinnacle of my organisation, is the competition as cutthroat as this? (Perhaps not literally)

Once I started that reflection, it was a train I could not stop. I started to wonder if corporate South Africa is even somewhere I want to work and invest my energy. It felt a bit like when I read Lord of the Flies for the first time and reflected on who we (specifically for that book, men) are as people at our most basic. It had that kind of impact on me.

Right, the bleak moment. If one person keeping an integral secret from the other person drives you around the bend, then this one will frustrate you. And it is a BIG secret that this person has AMPLE opportunity to confess to the other person. So big, in fact, that between the limited development on the romance front and this secret, their HEA wasn’t as impactful on me as I would have liked.

If the romance wasn’t quite what I wanted it to be, why still a B-? I DEVOURED this book. As a thriller, it really worked. There were twists and turns, suspense and action: it was absolutely the thriller element that propelled me through Safari Murder Party. I did not put it down except when the suspense was really intense and I realised I’d been holding my breath while reading. The adventure elements are compelling, the premise is interesting, the writing is darkly funny and engaging.

But as a romance? Hmmm, not so much. I would say that the romance was more of a subplot than a main plot. Yes, our protagonists spend a huge amount of time together, but most of that time is spent trying not to die, not necessarily building intimacy and connection. As it is tagged as mystery/thriller/romance and the romance doesn’t deliver for me, I’m landing on a B- because even with the disappointing romance, the thriller elements are so utterly readable.

Delay of Game

Two polar opposite teammates battle their rivals—and their own issues—in this friends-to-lovers hockey romance.

Nate Singer is one of the good guys.

As team captain, Nate’s whole deal is sticking to the playbook, supporting his team and keeping his own issues buried. Especially since the team is finally winning, in no small part to his chemistry with one particular hotshot teammate.

Zach Reed has a bad boy reputation.

And it’s cost him. Zach’s past exploits landed him on the worst team in the league. But that also gave him the best friend he’s ever had. For three years, his friendship with Nate has grown, making them an intimidating duo on the ice—and forming an intense bond off of it as well.

When the team hits a skid, Zach and Nate go out with one thing in finding someone for a quick roll in the sheets to get back to their winning ways. Only they end up in each other’s arms—and each other’s heart.

And realize that could be exactly what they’ve always needed to win it all.

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A Marriage of Undead Inconvenience

A Marriage of Undead Convenience by Stephanie Burgis is $2.99! This is book one in The Unexpected Adventures of Lady and Lord Riven series. I’ll also note that this is a novella.

Margaret Dunhaven may have been forced into marriage with the sinister vampire lord of Shadowcroft Manor to fulfill a family obligation, but she’s not about to stay trapped there for long. The beastly man doesn’t even have any decent tea leaves in his kitchen!

However, when she realizes that she’s not the only one who’s been forced into this marital union, it’s time to join forces with her unwanted new husband. If they can combine her scholarly skills with his ancient history, then, working together, they might just manage to reclaim her inheritance, break his curse, and find their freedom.

…Just so long as they don’t fall in love along the way.

A witty and sparkling gothic fantasy novella that puts a new twist on Beauty and the Beast in an alternate-history version of late 19th century England.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

In Her Spotlight

In Her Spotlight by Amy Spalding is $1.99! This is book four in the Out in Hollywood series and it came out in February. I did an event with Amy for this release and she was amazing to talk to.

For fans of Casey McQuiston, Alexis Hall, and Meryl Wilsner, an actually hilarious, sweetly sexy, gloriously relatable, second chance, sapphic rom-com from the acclaimed author of For Her Consideration, starring a franchise Hollywood actress aims to prove her chops in a theatrical production directed by her ex whose heart she broke a decade earlier.

Hollywood actor Tess Gardner is not the kind of famous she set out to be. She’s ready to show she’s more than Princess Platinum of the Vindicators series, a pretty face with CGI superpowers that literally sparkle. Tess wants to prove herself as an actor and that means theatre—the true calling of her thespian heart. But just when Tess lands a part working with an acclaimed stage director, a brewing scandal forces him out. His replacement? None other than hip, buzzy director Rebecca Frisch. The same Rebecca Frisch whose heart a firmly closeted Tess broke over a decade ago during summer stock . . .

As Tess wrestles with her lingering guilt and attraction to Rebecca, she also finds herself struggling to rein in her superstar status backstage. When things unexpectedly reignite with Rebecca, Tess bristles even more against the walls of her A-list life. Since the industry’s made it clear that girl-next-door superheroes can’t also be gay, coming out isn’t realistic for Tess. And ultimately, Rebecca will head back to New York and likely seek out a less complicated relationship anyway.

Will the curtain close on her chance for happiness or will Tess finally take a leading role in her own life?

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

From a Certain Point of View

From a Certain Point of View is $1.99! This is a Star Wars anthology with forty stories from some really great writers. If you’re a stickler for canon-only stuff, this might not be for you. And, if you prefer audiobooks, I’ve heard this one is fantastic as is uses a variety of voices, including January LaVoy, Griffin McElroy, and more.

Forty years. Forty stories.

In honor of the fortieth anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope, this collection features Star Wars stories by bestselling authors, trendsetting artists, and treasured voices from Star Wars literary history. More than forty authors have lent their unique vision to forty “scenes,” each retelling a different moment from the original Star Wars film, but with a twist: Every scene is told from the point of view of a background character. Whether it’s the X-wing pilots who helped Luke destroy the Death Star or the stormtroopers who never quite could find the droids they were looking for, Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View places the classic movie in a whole new perspective, and celebrates the influence and legacy of the unparalleled cultural phenomenon, Star Wars.

Contributors include: 
Ben Acker and Ben Blacker • Renee Ahdieh • Tom Angleberger • Meg Cabot • Rae Carson • Zoraida Cordova • Delilah S. Dawson • Paul Dini • Alexander Freed • Jason Fry • Christie Golden • Claudia Gray • E. K. Johnston and Ashley Eckstein • Paul Kemp • Mur Lafferty • Ken Liu • Griffin McElroy • John Jackson Miller • Nnedi Okorafor • Daniel José Older • Mallory Ortberg • Madeleine Roux • Gary D. Schmidt • Cavan Scott • Sabaa Tahir • Glen Weldon • Chuck Wendig • Gary Whitta • And more!

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

How are things going? We’ve hit the unpredictability of New England spring weather. I have family visiting soon and they keep wanting weather updates. I have to caution them that sunny, beachy weather is not a guarantee. Especially not in May.

As a reminder, if you’re free this evening, come say hi! I’m in conversation with May Berman for her debut novel Until Death. Tickets available here!

…

I cam across this historical romance author spectrum chart on Reddit and thought it’d spark some interesting discussion here! The thread on Reddit is also pretty lively with readers’ thoughts. What do you think of the placements?

…

Christy left a comment on last week’s links about this event and I didn’t want anyone to miss it. The Central Library on Ontario is hosting a Rom Con on June 20th. You can learn more here.

…

Sarah shared this post from notable librarian Kelly Jensen on the Blink YA imprint. Jensen is a prominent voice against book bans and censorship, especially when it comes to young readers.

…

And now, watch in awe at this tap dancer tapping along to DragonForce’s “Through the Fire and Flames.”

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Ariel Hyatt (@arielhyattstepdance)

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Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!

Weather Girl

A TV meteorologist and a sports reporter scheme to reunite their divorced bosses with unforecasted results in this charming romantic comedy from the author of The Ex Talk.

Ari Abrams has always been fascinated by the weather, and she loves almost everything about her job as a TV meteorologist. Her boss, legendary Seattle weatherwoman Torrance Hale, is too distracted by her tempestuous relationship with her ex-husband, the station’s news director, to give Ari the mentorship she wants. Ari, who runs on sunshine and optimism, is at her wits’ end. The only person who seems to understand how she feels is sweet but reserved sports reporter Russell Barringer.

In the aftermath of a disastrous holiday party, Ari and Russell decide to team up to solve their bosses’ relationship issues. Between secret gifts and double dates, they start nudging their bosses back together. But their well-meaning meddling backfires when the real chemistry builds between Ari and Russell.

Working closely with Russell means allowing him to get to know parts of herself that Ari keeps hidden from everyone. Will he be able to embrace her dark clouds as well as her clear skies?

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The Fifth Season

RECOMMENDED: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin is $2.99!  Elyse loved this book and gave it an A:

If you like immersive, action-driven fantasy and if you want a fantasy world that’s not Euro-centric–or if you just love a really, really good story–I cannot recommend The Fifth Season enough.

This is the way the world ends. Again.

Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze — the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization’s bedrock for a thousand years — collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman’s vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.

Now Essun must pursue the wreckage of her family through a deadly, dying land. Without sunlight, clean water, or arable land, and with limited stockpiles of supplies, there will be war all across the Stillness: a battle royale of nations not for power or territory, but simply for the basic resources necessary to get through the long dark night. Essun does not care if the world falls apart around her. She’ll break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Change of Hart

Change of Hart by Bailey Hannah is $1.99! This is book three in the Wells Ranch series and features a second chance romance. Have you read this series?

In this spicy romance from the author of Alive and Wells and Seeing Red, a jaded woman reluctantly returns to her hometown—and to the cowboy who broke her heart and drove her away.

She spent years trying to forget. He’ll do anything to make her remember.

Wells Canyon is the last place Blair Hart wants to be. Yet when her mother falls ill, she has no choice except to return to the hometown she’s avoided for over a decade. In a town so small, she knows there’s no way she can avoid the cowboy who tore her life to pieces all those years ago, but that doesn’t mean she’s prepared for the way Denver Wells can turn back time with a single smile.

Since Denver’s world came crashing down thirteen years ago, he’s somehow managed to keep his demons at bay…that is, until Blair Hart’s return knocks him from his saddle. But if he wants her back, he’ll have to prove he can be the man she needs—the same one she used to love.

Throwing herself into the role of caregiver, Blair doesn’t have the time to sift through their messy history even if she wanted to. And Denver’s going to need a lot more than his usual cowboy charm to convince Blair he’s worth a change of heart.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Never Seduce a Scot

Never Seduce a Scot by Maya Banks is $1.99! This is a historical romance with (you guessed it) a Scottish hero! The heroine is deaf and in an arranged marriage. There was a great discussion last time this was on sale about the nature of the heroine’s disability, as the description is slightly misleading.

Eveline Armstrong is fiercely loved and protected by her powerful clan, but outsiders consider her “touched.” Beautiful, fey, with a level, intent gaze, she doesn’t speak. No one, not even her family, knows that she cannot hear. Content with her life of seclusion, Eveline has taught herself to read lips and allows the outside world to view her as daft. But when an arranged marriage into a rival clan makes Graeme Montgomery her husband, Eveline accepts her duty—unprepared for the delights to come. Graeme is a rugged warrior with a voice so deep and powerful that his new bride can hear it, and hands and kisses so tender and skilled that he stirs her deepest passions.

Graeme is intrigued by the mysterious Eveline, whose silent lips are ripe with temptation and whose bright, intelligent eyes can see into his soul. As intimacy deepens, he learns her secret. But when clan rivalries and dark deeds threaten the wife he has only begun to cherish, the Scottish warrior will move heaven and earth to save the woman who has awakened his heart to the beautiful song of a rare and magical love.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

I cannot remember the title/author of one of my favorite historical romance novels.

Lead female was supposed to marry an older man and then he was murdered. She was accused and they were about to hang her, walking her through a courtyard, people throwing rotting food at her etc. Highland warrior and his clan save her, take her to his castle. She is Irish, he’s a feared Scottish warrior. I believe it was her step brother who murdered her fiancé. She was always trying to escape.

Ring any bells?

Happy Tuesday!

A short and sweet release week. Mostly contemporaries on our radar, plus some fantasy romance and a mystery.

What new releases are you excited for? Let us know in the comments!

Fever Dream

Author: Elsie Silver
Released: May 19, 2026 by Elsie Silver Literary Inc.
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Western, Romance
Series: Emerald Lake #1

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Elsie Silver comes a small-town, forbidden, rivals-to-lovers romance, the first book in the brand-new Western romance series Emerald Lake.

Professional bull rider Emmett Bush is not looking for love. He’s looking for a paycheck to save his family’s farm from bankruptcy. So, when he agrees to be the leading man on a hot new reality dating show, Romance Ranch, he’s already decided it’s all one big performance.

Until Julia Silva walks onto his property. Smart, snarky, beautiful, and off-limits in more ways than one. As the location consultant on set and the little sister of his most bitter professional rival, she’s the last woman who should pique his interest.

Julia has been warned about Emmett. She knows better than to fall for his cocky swagger, broad shoulders, and smoldering good looks. Plus, she’s sworn off relationships.

But as Julia and Emmett work together, mutual distaste grows into an unexpected connection and then… something more.

Soon, they find themselves searching for excuses to spend time together and out of reach of the cameras. Knowing glances. Stolen kisses. Secret rendezvous.

Still, Emmett signed up to play the role of an eligible bachelor searching for the one. His family’s land and legacy depend on him completing the show.

The problem is, he’s already fallen in love.

Just not with a contestant.

Author Elsie Silver has a new series with a reality TV show twist. 

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Want this book? Here are helpful buy links..

 

 

 

Safari Murder Party

Author: Rachel Moore
Released: May 19, 2026 by Berkley
Genre: Mystery/Thriller

In this darkly funny, slightly unhinged, heart-pounding thriller, two office rivals must team up to escape wild animals and even wilder coworkers on a corporate retreat gone wrong.

Fletcher Spence is dying for a promotion. And her colleagues are more than happy to oblige.

After three years working seventy-hour weeks as assistant to the most terrifying CEO in the magazine world, Fletcher finally finagled a spot on Cartwright Media’s annual corporate retreat—a famously luxurious week on the Cartwrights’ private island, where promotions are handed out like party favors. And her plan to snag her dream job as a travel magazine photographer was going great…until her boss’s dramatic death reveals his last will and Whoever survives the week will inherit the company.

So now she’s stuck on her billionaire boss’s safari park island, surrounded by wild animals and on the run from coworkers who’ve swapped coffee cups for machetes and briefcases for hunting rifles.

To Fletcher’s dismay, her only ally might be her boss’s insufferably gorgeous son, Waylon Cartwright. Despite their hostile history, Fletcher is at least 80 percent sure he won’t try to kill her this week. Plus, his experience on the island might come in handy while they fend off lions and tigers and…marketing executives? Oh my.

While Fletcher battles her own ambitions and her unexpected attraction to Waylon, her power-hungry, bloodthirsty colleagues will do anything to stop them from escaping with their lives. Everyone knows the media industry is cutthroat, but in this safari party, it’s never been more true.

Amanda: This sounds so much fun.

Lara: In this case it is both the title and the cover that drew me in. No I haven’t read the blurb, but I fully intend on reading the book.

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Want this book? Here are helpful buy links..

 

 

 

The Shippers

Author: Katherine Center
Released: May 19, 2026 by St. Martin's Press
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance

One of the hottest, fastest-rising rom-com stars delivers her latest swoon-worthy novel about a destination wedding on a cruise ship.

After a whole lifetime of being bad at love, JoJo Burton decides to solve her intimacy issues once and for all at her sister’s destination wedding on a cruise ship. With the help of a little pop psychology, she diagnoses herself with a fixation on the neighborhood guy who was her first crush and first kiss (and who just happens to be a newly-divorced wedding guest ), and she decides to woo him during the cruise for some long-delayed closure. Only problem is, her sister’s a little busy being a bride at the moment—so JoJo ropes in her childhood bestie, Cooper Watts, to be her wing man. Cooper: who RSVPed no, but then showed up, anyway. Cooper: who left town without a word four years earlier and moved to London. Cooper: who was, if she’s honest, the worst heartbreak of JoJo’s life. It’s bliss for her to see him again, and it’s agony, too—and the more they team up for Project Conquest, the more she obsesses over questions she can’t bring herself to ask.

Shipboard antics ensue in this witty, heart-tugging, childhood-friends-to-lovers romance—as JoJo and Cooper fake flirt, slow dance, share a cabin, sing duets, treat sunburns, get jealous, rescue each other over and over, and finally, at last, figure it all out in the most blissful, swoony, romantic way.

No one does summer romance quite like Katherine Center. THE SHIPPERS will take readers on the cruise of a lifetime in a story awash with romantic longing, top-notch banter, long-held secrets . . . and true love rediscovered.

A forced proximity, friends to lovers romance by Katherine Center!

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Want this book? We can help: buy links ahoy!.

 

 

 

Soon by You

Author: Dahlia Adler
Released: May 19, 2026 by St. Martin's Griffin
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance

27 Dresses meets The Intimacy Experiment in this sexy, emotional, opposites-attract rom-com set in New York City’s Modern Orthodox community.

If Arielle Becker has to serve as a bridesmaid one more time, she’s going to scream. Between the expense, the collection of dresses she’ll never wear again, the shower planning, the Spanx, the bridezillas, the family time, the heels, and a certain judgmental wedding singer she can’t stop bumping into, she is exhausted, burned out, and seriously beginning to hate romance and all its celebrations. Besides, it’s not like any of these girls are ever gonna turn around and do the same for her; Ari is not the kind of girl a good Jewish boy is looking to marry.

Judah Klein may be the tri-state area’s most in-demand Modern Orthodox wedding singer and eligible bachelor, but after years of uninspiring setups, he’s just about to give up on looking for his own Happily Ever After. Then a fiery, infuriating bridesmaid steps on his foot at a wedding, and before long, trading heated barbs turns into trading hotter kisses…and a realization that maybe he’s been looking for the wrong life all along.

For the first time, Judah can finally get on board with a romance, and of course it’s thanks to the one woman who has no interest in settling down – especially not with a guy who lives in the spotlight and has a professional reputation to uphold. But when neither one seems able to move on from a relationship that wasn’t meant to go anywhere, they’ll have to figure out whether there’s a possible future for two people who’ve already given up on love.

Our own Dahlia Adler has a contemporary romance coming out today! 

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Find buy links for this book here..

 

 

 

Strange Familiars

Author: Keshe Chow
Released: May 19, 2026 by Ace
Genre: Fantasy/Fairy Tale Romance, Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy
Series: The Seamere College Duology #1

All’s fair in love and magic.

Gwendolynne Chan just needs to get through her final year. At Seamere College of Magical Veterinary Sciences, she spends her days using her powers to heal companion animals while her nights are spent studying for exams. As the top student in the magical familiars stream, she is on track to be awarded Dux of the entire school – as long as the pretentious twat Harrisford Briggs doesn’t beat her to it.

Harrisford Briggs was born into privilege. His father, the Chief Financial Officer of Magecorp, a major global distributor of magic, expects him to come top of the year. Harrisford, though, can’t help but notice that his father has been acting odd. Really odd. And there are strange whisperings, too. Rumours of uncontrollable surges of excess magic, which Magecorp has been trying to cover up, as well as rampant corruption within the Magical Ministry itself.

When these magical surges begin to rock their way through London, causing chaos and explosions and familiars going feral, Gwen and Harrisford find themselves without a reliable source of magic, putting both of their academic careers at risk. To fix this, they must put aside their duelling feelings of lust and loathing, and – along with Gwen’s snarky cat familiar – team up to diagnose the problem. If they fail, not only is their education at stake, but also the fate of the magical world.

Amanda: Probably my most anticipated title this month!

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Want this book? Here are helpful buy links..

 

 

 

Long Live Evil

This adult epic fantasy debut from Sarah Rees Brennan puts the reader in the villain’s shoes, for an adventure that is both “brilliant” (Holly Black) and “supremely satisfying” (Leigh Bardugo). Expect a rogue’s gallery of villains including an axe wielding maid, a shining knight with dark moods, a homicidal bodyguard, and a playboy spymaster with a golden heart and a filthy reputation.  

When her whole life collapsed, Rae still had books. Dying, she seizes a second chance at a magical bargain that lets her enter the world of her favorite fantasy series.

She wakes in a castle on the edge of a hellish chasm, in a kingdom on the brink of war. Home to dangerous monsters, scheming courtiers and her favourite fictional the Once and Forever Emperor. He’s impossibly alluring, as only fiction can be. And in this fantasy world, she discovers she’s not the heroine, but the villainess in the Emperor’s tale.

So be it. The wicked are better dressed, with better one-liners, even if they’re doomed to bad ends. She assembles the wildly disparate villains of the story under her evil leadership, plotting to change their fate. But as the body count rises and the Emperor’s fury increases, it seems Rae and her allies may not survive to see the final page.

THIS IS A TALE FOR EVERYONE WHO’S EVER FALLEN FOR THE VILLAIN…

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Work in Progress

Work in Progress by Kat Mackenzie is $1.99! This is an enemies to lovers romance with forced proximity and set in Scotland. I think this sort of setup has been more popular lately, where the main characters have a bad first meeting only to realize they’re stuck together on some sort of travel arrangement.

A warm, sexy, laugh-out-loud rom-com about a woman who, desperate for a fresh start, books a literary bus tour across the UK that consists of a lively group of elderly ladies plus one infuriatingly handsome Scottish driver.

Falling in Love was not on her to-do list.

The last six months of Alice Cooper’s life have been, in her own words, “a poop tornado.” So, in a desperate attempt to pull herself out of the emotional quicksand threatening to swallow her whole, she books a three-week bus tour of literary and historical British sites.

Alice arrives in Edinburgh after a hellish trip involving multiple layovers, crushed luggage, and an epic row with an insolent Scotsman at the lost baggage counter. After a mad dash to catch the tour bus, she discovers that instead of globe-trotting thirtysomethings, the bus is full of cheerful octogenarians, and that the aforementioned arrogant Scot is the bus driver. Alice is sure he will make the nonrefundable trip a misery.

He is arrogant and rude. He also has beautiful blue eyes and dotes on his elderly charges. The ladies are vivacious and full of stories. The historical sites are entrancing. The book club chat is on fire. And, it’s possible that Alice’s battered heart is starting to beat again.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Any Trope But You

Any Trope but You by Victoria Lavine is $2.99! This is a standalone contemporary. To be a little grumpy for a second, I really dislike the plots of “romance author who doesn’t believe in romance” or “wedding planners who don’t believe in love.” Okay then why are you here?

A bestselling romance author flees to Alaska to reinvent herself and write her first murder mystery, but the rugged resort proprietor soon has her fearing she’s living in a rom-com plot instead in this earnestly spectacular debut by a stunning new voice.

Beloved romance author Margot Bradley has a dark secret: she doesn’t believe in Happily Ever Afters. Not for herself, not for her readers, and not even for her characters, for whom she secretly writes alternate endings that swap weddings and babies for divorce papers and the occasional slashed tire. When her Happily Never After document is hacked and released to the public, she finds herself canceled by her readers and dropped by her publisher.

Desperate to find a way to continue supporting her chronically ill sister, Savannah, Margot decides to trade meet-cutes for murder. The fictional kind. Probably. But when Savannah books Margot a six-week stay in a remote Alaskan resort to pen her first murder mystery, Margot finds herself running from a moose and leaping into the arms of the handsome proprietor, making her fear she’s just landed in a romance novel instead.

The last thing Dr. Forrest Wakefield ever expected was to leave his dream job as a cancer researcher to become a glorified bellhop. What he’s really doing at his family’s resort is caring for his stubborn, ailing father, and his puzzle-loving mind is slowly freezing over—until Margot shows up. But Forrest doesn’t have any room in his life for another person he could lose, especially one with a checkout date.

As long snowy nights and one unlikely trope after another draw Margot and Forrest together, they’ll each have to learn to overcome their fears and set their aside assumptions before Margot leaves—or risk becoming a Happily Never After story themselves.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

The Earl Who Isn’t

The Earl Who Isn’t by Courtney Milan is $4.99! I don’t think we’ve featured this one on sale before, though there are other Milan books available at a steeper discount. This is book three in the Wedgeford Trials series.

Nobody knows that Andrew Uchida is the rightful heir of an earl. Not his friends, not his neighbors, not even the yard-long beans growing in his experimental garden. If the truth of his existence became public, the blue-blooded side of his family would stop at nothing to make him (and anyone connected with him) disappear. He shared one passionate night with the woman he loved…and allowed himself that only because she was leaving for Hong Kong the next morning.

Then Lily Bei returns, armed with a printing press, her irrepressible spirit, and a sheaf of inconvenient documents that prove the very thing Andrew wants that he is actually the legitimate, first born son of the Earl of Arsell.

What’s Andrew to do, when the woman he’s always desired promises him everything he’s never wanted? Andrew’s track record of saying no to Lily is nonexistent. The only way he can avert impending disaster is by stealing the evidence… while trying desperately not to fall in love (again) with the woman he shouldn’t let into his life.

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Lucynka is a long-time lurker, who has occasionally commented under a couple different names in the past. Over the last few years, she’s become really interested in the history of the romance genre, particularly those forgotten or oft-overlooked parts. You can find her on Bluesky @lucynka.bsky.social, or else over on her WordPress, where she blogs about “obscure bullshit,” including a lot of romance pulp magazines from the 1920s-’40s.

…

While my last guest post showcased some genuinely good pulp romances I’ve come across, today’s post features…well…something from the other end of the spectrum, let’s say. Today I bring you the so-bad-it’s-good 1931 novella, “ ’Neath Tropical Skies” by Mollie Donovan Maule, serialized across the May 23rd, May 30th, and June 6th issues of the popular romance pulp magazine, Love Story.

It seems the jury’s out on whether “Mollie Donovan Maule” was the pseudonym of British wife-and-husband duo Mollie Maule (née Shiells) and Donovan Maule, or whether it was just the name Mollie chose to use for her fictional output—different sources point to different answers. In any case, the couple would relocate to Kenya after World War II, establishing a repertory theater in Mombasa. (The more you know~)

The first part of “ ’Neath Tropical Skies” has actually been available through the Internet Archive for a number of years now, which is how I discovered it. I read that first part, went, “LOLWTF?” and have been casually trying to hunt down the other two parts ever since, just to satisfy my perverse curiosity. To my great delight, I finally succeeded, and come to you now, bearing the fruits of my labor.

This cover (by artist Modest Stein) is honestly way too placid, and doesn’t at ALL match the tone of the story. There should at least be a boat exploding in the background.

In many ways, “ ’Neath Tropical Skies” is quintessential pulp in that it’s fast-paced, full of drama/adventure, and racist as hell. It’s also not particularly well-written, purely on a technical level (lots of stilted dialogue ahoy). It is, however, extremely entertaining in its badness, and extremely propulsive in its own, weird way. There’s a definite trainwreck quality to it, is what I’m saying. So without further ado, let’s dive in.

The story opens with our heroine, Glorine Barker, coming home to find her apartment a mess and her roommate, Chloris Desmond, nowhere to be found. (As an aside, the name “Glorine” is bad enough, but the fact that her roommate’s name is “Chloris” just makes me want to mash the two together into the portmanteau, “Chlorine.” Anyway.)

Glorine initially thinks burglars, but a cryptically apologetic note from Chloris (“Forgive me, but I dare not face him,” etc.), along with her share of next month’s rent, puts that fear to rest, at least. Still, it’s a hell of a situation to come home to, and Glorine is left wondering if this might have something to do with Chloris’s mysterious long-distance boyfriend, when who should come calling but—you guessed it—said boyfriend. He takes one look at Glorine, is all, “Darling!” and then immediately kisses her.

Chloris, it turns out, used Glorine’s photo to catfish this guy who’s been doing colonialism working in Brazil, and when he unexpectedly arrived in New York that morning to finally meet her in person (and marry her, as it so happens), she was like, “OH SHIT, I GOTTA GTFO.”

Glorine tries to explain this, but the guy, Stanton Fraser (one of the WASPiest names I have ever come across), refuses to believe it because he is, in short, a maniac of alpha proportions.

“Look here, Chloris,” he said curtly.

“My name is Glorine Barker,” she interrupted.

“I don’t know what your game is,” he went on, ignoring the interruption, “but it is evident that you’re either trying to play a particularly foolish practical joke on me, or else you’ve got some scheme on that I haven’t yet fathomed. Whatever it is, out with it! I warn you, I’m not the type of man to be played with!”

Stanton gets all manhandley with her, and while he eventually concedes that her name might actually be “Glorine” and not “Chloris,” he still fully intends to marry her, having previously fallen in love with her photograph, and now believing her to be an “adventuress” (read: con artist) who needs to be taught a lesson, essentially.

To her credit, Glorine literally tries to shove Chloris’s note in his face to prove she’s telling the truth, but unfortunately the only logic Stanton Fraser subscribes to is the Insane Troll variety. He starts making out with her, and then Glorine straight-up punches him, “str[iking] with all the force of her clenched fist upon his face.” Glorine is kind of a wet rag of a heroine, overall, but a part of me will forever love her for that.

There’s some problematic talk about how being in the tropics for so long has made Stanton a “brute” with no self-control, and then he pins her arms, covers her mouth to keep her from screaming, and orders her to get her coat. As it’s clear arguing with him is useless, Glorine reluctantly does so, and—in true damsel-in-distress fashion—faints just as he forces her into a taxi.

When she comes to, she’s in the apartment of Juan Castro, Stanton’s assistant, and we immediately know Juan is bad news simply because he’s Spanish (no, really). Stanton brought her there because Juan has a sister, Martita, so it’s a relatively appropriate place to keep Glorine prisoner safe until tomorrow, when they’ll all set sail back to Brazil.

Martita is clearly just as villainous as her brother, but she also clearly has the hots for Stanton, so when Glorine tries to appeal to her for help, she’s actually willing, purely because she wants to get rid of the romantic competition. Juan, however, has developed insta-lust for Glorine, and is like, “Whoa, whoa, hang on a minute.” The two siblings share a Meaningful Look, and then Martita changes tack, all, “You know what, Juan is right—you’re tired and should stay here for the night.”

Realizing she’s to be a pawn in whatever dastardly plans they have, Glorine tries to throw herself out the window in desperation, but Juan catches her before she reaches it. She struggles in his arms, and then this bitch faints again, just as Juan kisses her. My first time reading this, I couldn’t help but be reminded of “Roofie Kisses” from The Boss’s Virgin, by Charlotte Lamb. I mean, it’s either that, or Glorine clearly has some blood pressure issue that needs looking into.

In another aside, this is partly why I find these old romance pulps so fascinating—because reading them is like doing genre archaeology. Like, the plot, characters, and overall vibe of this story (including how the heroine is apparently irresistible to every male character she comes across) wouldn’t be out of place in, say, an Old-Skool bodice-ripper from the 1980s.

About the only thing that would be different, had it actually been written in the bodice-ripper era, is that Stanton and Juan would doubtlessly be trying to outright rape Glorine, not just kiss her.

Well, part two opens, and we learn it really was roofie kisses! Turns out Martita drugged the brandy she gave Glorine, back in part one! Glorine also dreamt (or did she???) that Juan was again getting all handsy and possessive with her. She wakes up to find Stanton next to her, who’s all, “Well, are you going to marry me willingly or not?” and Glorine is like, “OMG, WHATEVER, JUST GET ME OUT OF HERE.”

Now, lest we forget, Stanton has literally kidnapped her with the intention of forcing her into marriage (and has similarly kissed her without her consent and grabbed her hard enough to cause physical pain), so why she looks to him as some sort of savior here can really only be chalked up to the fact that he’s of Anglo descent and not some icky Spaniard.

Stay classy, Glorine.

Stanton is thrilled because it seems Glorine has finally come around to the idea of becoming his wife, but she’s all, “Wtf, no!” There’s some back and forth, and Glorine is like, “Ugh, if only we’d met under different circumstances, I could see myself actually liking this guy.”

I don’t get it, but you do you, girl.

In the end, Glorine gets dragged along with Stanton, but he at least has the decency to say that they can be married later, on the ship, as opposed to forcing the issue before they disembark.

On the way to the docks, Glorine is stuffed in the backseat with Juan and Martita, and—owing to her having conveniently studied Spanish when she was younger—she can understand enough of what they’re whispering to each other to know that something bad is going to go down.

Realistically, you’d think Stanton would also know Spanish (or perhaps Portuguese?), considering how he’s been living and working in South America for god knows how many years, but I guess he could never be bothered to learn any other language besides English. I’d say White Patriarchy strikes again, but it’s also entirely possible that Stanton is just determined to be an idiot.

Anyway, long story short, Stanton has been hired to find some “lost city of the Inca,” supposedly rich in gold and silver. (This was a mere twenty years after Machu Picchu was “rediscovered” by Westerners, so this sort of thing was still all the rage in the cultural zeitgeist.) Juan, however, plans to double-cross him and steal all the riches for himself, at which point Martita will be able to force Stanton into marrying her, lest he be killed.

Again, I don’t see how Stanton is worth it—earlier, he was even specifically described as “not handsome”—but he’s tall and broad and tanned, and would appear to have a rugged attractiveness about him all the same, and the heart wants what it wants, I guess.

Things come to a head when they’re on the Amazon (a mutiny breaks out and Glorine almost gets choked to death), but then they reach a stalemate of sorts: Stanton’s faction is outnumbered but in possession of the ship’s ammunition, while Juan’s faction is biding their time, just waiting for Stanton and co. to be starved out.

We’re at the beginning of part three here, but then everything goes to shit when the native “Inca warriors” attack. A truce is hastily declared on the yacht, as Stanton and Juan now have an enemy greater than each other to contend with, but I’d personally be okay if the natives (referred to as “savage(s)” no less than ten times by the text) killed all of these fuckers, Glorine included.

Our intrepid hero and heroine hole up in the cabin with the telegraph machine, but—when Stanton tries to use it to send out a distress signal—he discovers it’s long-since been sabotaged by Juan. Glorine then notices Martita stuck up on deck (her countrymen refuse to give her shelter), and is like, “Omg, we need to help her!”—because Glorine, unlike all Spaniards apparently, isn’t a selfish asshole.

I haven’t indulged in many excerpts in this post, but I feel now is a good time for one, if only to really demonstrate the kind of tone we’re working with here:

“The cowardly brutes!” he exclaimed, and moved quickly to the door. “Remain here, Glorine, while I go and bring her in here with us. Put those headphones over your ears, and keep tapping on this key. Try to establish contact.”

Glorine stood, an agonized look in her eyes, fear clutching at her heart, as she watched the figure of the man who meant more to her than life itself, going to meet an almost certain death!

(In case you were wondering, yes, Glorine has officially fallen in love with Stanton by now. It’s an emotional turn that feels extremely unearned, and is seemingly based on little more than his being the lesser of two evils. Whatever.)

Stanton runs out while Glorine continues to try the telegraph machine, and lo and behold, a message finally comes through!

But oh no, Glorine doesn’t know Morse code, so all she can send is gibberish!

Then she looks out the cabin window and the yacht is now on fire!

Then an electrical shock from the telegraph machine somehow blasts her across the room?
Part of me wonders if this would make more sense to a contemporary audience, but another part of me can’t help but suspect that they’d be just as confused about the action here as I am.

But that’s not all! It’s then that Juan shows up, and his desire for pussy overrides his sense of self-preservation! (Such are the powers of a romance heroine, don’tcha know.) Glorine futilely calls for Stanton, then decides to take her chances up on deck, figuring that burning to death is better than succumbing to a Spaniard’s wiles.

BUT THEN.

Her foot gets caught in the telegraph wires, and this bitch gets electrocuted AGAIN.

That’s twice in one page! Readers, I LOL’d.

Well, this shock throws her to the floor, where she hits her head and blacks out, and thus we begin the last chapter (chapter six) of the story:

Glorine comes to in the bottom of a canoe, with Juan paddling. He somehow managed to flee the yacht, with her in tow, and is all like, “Shut the fuck up and help me row, unless you want the natives to hear us and kill us.”

He forces another kiss on her in the midst of all this, and we’re also told that the water around them is full of “gigantic alligator[s].” Muah, chef’s kiss, I love it.

BUT THEN! Glorine takes a third option, is all, “Fuck this, I’m out,” and STABS HERSELF WITH A DEADLY POISON DART SHE FOUND IN THE BOTTOM OF THE CANOE. She slips into unconsciousness AGAIN, just as shouts are heard, but OH NO, it’s American sailors, not those “primitive savages”! Did Glorine just kill herself for naught???

The icing on the cake here is that even the illustrator gets in on the insanity: The interior artwork for all three parts was done by Constance Benson Bailey (the go-to staple for Love Story serials, and basically a bargain-bin Nell Brinkley), and though the author never indicates Juan has any facial hair, Bailey nevertheless consistently depicts him with a mustache—except in his last appearance, that is, where he’s suddenly, inexplicably clean-shaven:

Idk, maybe the mustache burned off in the aforementioned boat fire?

Anyway, in the final scene of the story, Glorine wakes up safe in a cabin with Stanton. It turns out her telegraph gibberish was still enough to concern a nearby ship, who thankfully came to the rescue. We’re informed that Martita unceremoniously died off-screen (a predictable end, particularly as she was shown willing to throw her own brother under the bus) and that the yacht full-on blew up.

And then that whole bit where Glorine dramatically stabbed herself and was on her way to certain death? Yeah, that’s just hand-waved away with a mention of the rescue ship’s doctor being an expert in native poisons and antidotes. No mention of Juan, no mention of whether Stanton is going to resume his colonialist search for this “lost city,” but he and Glorine get to declare their love for each other and kiss, so hooray, happy ending.

As you probably suspect, I can in no way genuinely recommend this story. It’s wildly offensive (in multiple ways!), the dialogue is sometimes downright painful to read, and the romance isn’t organically developed so much as forcibly demanded by genre conventions.

That said, it is entertainingly bonkers (that scene in the telegraph cabin, omg), and Stanton does give a heartfelt grovel at the end, where he takes responsibility for everything that’s happened to Glorine and berates himself for his frankly demented behavior back in part one. I still don’t understand why these two fell in love with each other, but I do actually trust that they’ll make it work, going forward, so…yay?

It could be a lot worse, I guess is what I’m saying, and might make for an unintentionally hilarious read, provided you can stomach all the racism and whatnot.

Alas(?), the story was never reprinted and is damn near impossible to find, even if you’re willing to shell out the money, so heads up that I’ve collected all three parts here, for anyone who’s really curious. (I obviously spoiled the shit out of the story, but there are still a lot of details, particularly from the middle, that I glossed over.)

Thank you, Lucynka! What pulp romance stories have you read? Were they as truly unhinged as this one?

1. The Marriage Method by Mimi Matthews Amazon | B&N | Kobo
2. Duchess Material by Emily Sullivan Amazon | B&N | Kobo
3. Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid Amazon | B&N | Kobo
4. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson Amazon | B&N | Kobo
5. Deep Dark by Laura Griffin Amazon | B&N | Kobo | GooglePlay
6. Him by Elle Kennedy, Sarina Bowen Amazon | B&N | Kobo
7. Something Wilder by Christina Lauren Amazon | B&N | Kobo
8. Dark Succession by Katee Robert Amazon | B&N | Kobo
9. Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood Amazon | B&N | Kobo
10. The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer Amazon | B&N | Kobo

I hope your weekend reading was spectacular!

…

I’ve always had a yen to visit a real-life romance bookstore. I wanted the whole experience: the books, the merch, and the feeling of being somewhere feminine joy was being celebrated as important and vital. I always figured that I would have to travel at some point.

Then, two years ago?

One opened up, right in my backyard. Well, not RIGHT in my backyard, more like in Panama City, Florida, which is 10 minutes from my house. I read of the grand opening, and roped in my mom and sister, and we went. I remember not being sure what kind of response to expect from the community.

The community apparently was READY for the Bookish Boutique. I remember my sister Amanda looking around wonderingly as she said “The Book Girlies came OUT.”

Photo taken from their Facebook page

Enjoy some opening day pics from my Instagram.

The store is, to start with, seems to be entirely woman-run. They have curated a very feminine aesthetic within the store itself. It is very, very pink, with feminist slogans posted throughout the store, and on much of the merchandise. Since the opening, they have added a wine bar as part of the experience as well.

The new book selection leans heavily on romance, romantasy, and young adult, with a heavy focus on female authors. They did open a small children’s section, to accommodate mothers that might be in there shopping with their children. There are some male authors in there, but they are the minority, and feature more in the Used Books section.

There’s also a very entertaining selection of bookish merchandise. I tend to be particularly partial to their t-shirts (I’m wearing one as I write this, it’s bright pink and says “It’s too non-fictiony outside”). I’ve also gotten some nice stickers for my iPad case.

They host author signings, and will also allow other small businesses to use space within the shop itself. The day I visited, there was a table that offered handmade bespoke Kindle cases (they were very pretty).

I bought this hat:

Bookish Boutique has made a point of offering many events and coordinating with other downtown businesses to give customers experiences that allow them to really experience the atmosphere of a historic downtown district.

Among other things, they have offered romance book club meetings, crafting meetings, poetry readings, and on one particularly entertaining afternoon, a cat rescue event. Just baby kitties running all over the store. My daughter had a good time sitting on their couch snuggling a little orange kitten.

I happened to be in there the day after Sarah J. Maas announced the next two books in the ACOTAR series, and had an animated discussion with the staff member on duty about the possibility of a release party while my husband looked on bemusedly (he’s always found it entertaining when I start discussing books with others, especially when he has no idea what we’re talking about).

In the event that you may be traveling to this area of Florida, I would highly encourage you to check them out. And in the event you’re not, they have an online store. Right now, I believe it to be more important than ever that we support small businesses, especially those that are woman-owned.

We’re living in a time where equality and diversity are dirty words, especially when used by a very particular kind of person. When you find a business that is so focused on fostering an inclusive environment and promoting feminine power, you make a point of giving them your money. Heaven knows they’ve gotten quite a bit of mine.

Thank you for the trip report, Crystal Anne! You can find the Bookish Boutique at 456 Harrison Avenue in Panama City, Florida.

If you’d like to write a trip report about your visit to a romance-focused bookstore, I would LOVE to hear from you.

Book Beat aims to highlight other books that we may hear about through friends, social media, or other sources. We could see a gorgeous ad! Or find a new-to-us author on a list of underrated romances! Think of Book Beat as Teen Beat or Tiger Beat, but for books. And no staples to open to get the fold-out poster.

Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die

Author: Greer Stothers
Released: February 3, 2026 by Titan Books
Genre: Fantasy/Fairy Tale Romance, LGBTQIA, Romance

In this hilarious, off-the-wall queer fantasy romance, a reclusive sorcerer is forced to protect a cowardly knight after a prophecy ties their fates together.

Funny, touching and inventive, this book is perfect for fans of Mortal Follies, A Marvellous Light and Dreadful.

All his life, Sir Cameron has stayed as far away from danger as possible. He is, quite frankly, too handsome to die a violent and pointless death in battle. But when the Church hands down a prophecy to his fellow knights predicting that the only way to defeat their nemesis, the mad sorcerer Merulo, is to kill Cameron, he finds himself in a situation too sticky for even his considerable wiles. Short of ideas, Cameron throws himself on the mercy of the one person who now actually wants him to survive: the mad sorcerer.

Merulo isn’t thrilled to be babysitting a spoilt, attention-seeking knight, but fate has tied them together. And transmogrifying Cameron into a vulture is at least a great source of entertainment. Cameron, meanwhile, is on a voyage of self-discovery. It turns out he’s really, really into surly sorcerers who lock him up and tell him what to do. Who knew?

As a legion of knights surround their stronghold, the sorcerer’s poisonous ambitions draw ever closer to fruition. Cameron is quite invested in not dying, but he finds he’s also invested in Merulo. And sometimes, supporting the sorcerer you care about means taking an interest in their hobbies. Even if that hobby is trying to kill God.

Even if it might get you killed, too.

A himbo knight seeks protection from a reclusive sorcerer in this gay fantasy romance.

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The Secret Lives of Murderers’ Wives

Author: Elizabeth Arnott
Released: March 3, 2026 by Berkley
Genre: Mystery/Thriller

A remarkable trio whose lives have been cracked wide open by their husbands’ crimes unite to catch a serial killer in this dazzlingly captivating novel.

Beverley, Elsie, and Margot are not your average housewives. They are all wives of convicted killers. During the sun-drenched summer of 1966, the three women form an unlikely friendship after the discoveries of their husbands’ brutal crimes. With their exes—some of California’s most infamous murderers—dead or behind bars, they are attempting to forge a new future for themselves.

Headstrong Beverley tries compulsively to maintain control of everything around her, all while raising two children. Bookish Elsie fights to make a name for herself in the newsroom, working among men who sneer at her career goals. Glamorous Margot prefers partying to homemaking and devotes all her energy to upholding the appearance that everything is fine—anything to quell the shame from her husband’s deceit.

They know people look at them and think only one  How could they not have known what their husbands were doing? How much are they to blame? And yet when a string of local killings hits the news, the three women—underestimated, overlooked, shrewd—decide to get to work.  After all, who better to catch a killer than those who have shared their lives and homes with one?

At once a riveting portrayal of shattered trust and a story of gripping suspense, The Secret Lives of Murderers’ Wives is a testament to the intricacies of women’s lives and how the deep bonds of female friendship can empower, uplift, and lead us to endure.

Three women who are married to convicted killers attempt to solve a string of killings in their community. 

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Vile Lady Villains

Author: Danai Christopoulou
Released: May 12, 2026 by Union Square & Co.
Genre: LGBTQIA, Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy

With the consequences of her murderous actions closing in, Lady Macbeth turns to the three witches for help, who give her a potion that transports her to an unknown realm. Desperately lost, she opens a door and comes face to face with a beautiful woman drenched in blood.

Klytemnestra, Queen of Mycenae, is exacting bloody vengeance on her husband. Yet as she revels in her triumph, an otherworldly door appears and a strange woman steps in. Thinking this stranger a spirit, she chases Lady Macbeth into the realm of stories.

Hunted by screaming wraiths into worlds that are hell bent on their demise, this murderous pair are forced to form an alliance or perish. Yet the realm’s goddess, The Mistress of the House of Books, claims to hold the key to saving them.  As every threat brings our vile lady villains closer, turning ill intentions into fiery attraction that no author dare write, they have a remain within the confines of their original tales. . . Or burn down the world to pen a new story together. . .

I’m getting such What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? vibes from the cover here. Anyone else?

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Wonderfully Wicked

Author: Kamy Lavin
Released: November 18, 2025 by Fairytales, Facts & Fables Publishing
Genre: Fantasy/Fairy Tale Romance, Young Adult

Sixteen-year-old Annalie thought life couldn’t get worse after her father was enchanted into marrying Elzbeth, a bewitching socialite. But when Annalie’s newfound magic reveals her stepmother’s true form-green skin and sinister illusions-she uncovers a deadly pattern: a trail of wealthy husbands, all dead-including her father.

Annalie sets out to uncover the truth of her stepmother’s murders before she strikes again. As she races to unravel the truth about Elzbeth’s agenda, she discovers that good and evil aren’t always what they seem.

Wonderfully Wicked is a YA Fantasy retelling of the Cinderella fairytale chock-full of magic, deception and twists that you never saw from the princess’s POV.

Do not be fooled. This is not a f/f YA romance. Instead, it’s a mash up of The Wizard of Oz and Cinderella, where the wicked witch is the heroine’s stepmother.

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Find buy links for this book here..

 

 

 

Dire Bound

Fourth Wing meets The Hunger Games in this spicy, page-turning romantasy where humans and direwolves forge unbreakable bonds and fight for survival at all costs.

Only the worthy survive the Bonding Trials.  She’ll risk her life—and her heart—to be one of them.

Meryn Cooper has always hated the Bonded, elite warriors who form mental links with the massive, vicious direwolves they ride. While they live in luxury, Meryn struggles to keep her family out of poverty. When her little sister, Saela, is kidnapped—stolen across the border by the immortal monsters her country has spent centuries fighting—Meryn’s world falls apart.

Desperate to cross the front and save her sister, Meryn enlists in the army and is thrown into the deadly Bonding Trials, where any mistake will cost her life.

Now Meryn must survive four months of training at the castle. She is bound to a feral direwolf who refuses to communicate. The other trainees would love to spill her common blood. And her cold and beautiful instructor, Stark Therion, is eager to punish any weakness.

Everything is a competition, and everyone is out to get her—everyone except the dangerously handsome crown prince, whose attention adds another target to her back. In the castle, every smile hides a knife…and the halls hide dark secrets.

It’s bond or bleed. Duel or die. Failure is ruin.

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Enchanted to Meet You

Enchanted to Meet You by Meg Cabot is $1.99! This is book one in The Witches of West Harbor small town paranormal romance series. Have you read this one?

It’s Magic When You Meet Your Match

In her teenage years, lovelorn Jessica Gold cast a spell that went disastrously wrong, and brought her all the wrong kind of attention—as well as a lifetime ban from the World Council of Witches.

So no one is more surprised than Jess when, fifteen years later, tall, handsome WCW member Derrick Winters shows up in her quaint little village of West Harbor and claims that Jess is the Chosen One.

She’s the Chosen One

Not chosen by West Harbor’s snobby elite to style them for the town’s tricentennial ball—though Jess owns the chicest clothing boutique in town. And not chosen finally to be on the WCW, either—not that Jess would have said yes, anyway, since she’s done with any organization that tries to dictate what makes a “true” witch.

No, Jess has been chosen to help save West Harbor itself . . .

As Summer Ends, Her Power Grows

But just when Jess is beginning to think that she and Derrick might have a certain magic of their own—and not of the supernatural variety—Jess learns he may not be who she thought he was.

And suddenly Jess finds herself having to make another kind of choice: trust Derrick and work with him to combat the sinister force battling to bring down West Harbor, or use her gift as she always has: to keep herself, and her heart, safe.

Can she work her magic in time?

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

How to Date Your Dragon

How to Date Your Dragon by Molly Harper is 99c! This is book one in the Mystic Bayou small town paranormal romance. Harper’s paranormals are often over-the-top and a little goofy. Sometimes I’m in the mood for that. Sometimes I’m not.

The first book in Molly Harper’s uproariously funny, sinfully sexy new Mystic Bayou series!

Anthropologist Jillian Ramsay’s career has taken a turn south.

Concerned that technology is about to chase mythological creatures out into the open (how long can Sasquatch stay hidden from Google maps?), the League for Interspecies Cooperation is sending Jillian to Louisiana on a fact-finding mission. While the League hopes to hold on to secrecy for a little bit longer, they’re preparing for the worst in terms of human reactions. They need a plan, so they look to Mystic Bayou, a tiny town hidden in the swamp where humans and supernatural residents have been living in harmony for generations. Mermaids and gator shifters swim in the bayou. Spirit bottles light the front porches after twilight. Dragons light the fires under crayfish pots.

Jillian’s first assignment for the League could be her last. Mystic Bayou is wary of outsiders, and she has difficulty getting locals to talk to her. And she can’t get the gruff town sheriff, Bael Boone, off of her back or out of her mind. Bael is the finest male specimen she’s seen in a long time, even though he might not be human. Soon their flirtation is hotter than a dragon’s breath, which Bael just might turn out to be…

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Quicksilver

Quicksilver by Amanda Quick is $2.99! This is part of the Arcane Society series, but is also book two in a trilogy within that series, if that makes sense. I assume this works as a standalone, but there may be an overarching trilogy plot.

In the New York Times-bestselling author’s latest Arcane Society novel, a paranormal killer pushes an unlikely duo’s powers and passions to the limit.

Virginia Dean wakes at midnight beside a dead body, with a bloody knife in her hand and no memory of the evening’s events. Dark energy, emanating from the mirrors lining the room, overpowers her senses. With no apparent way in or out, she is rescued by a man she has met only once before, but won’t soon forget.

Owen Sweetwater inherited his family’s talent for hunting the psychical monsters who prey on London’s women and children, and his investigation into the deaths of two glass-readers has led him here. The high-society types of the exclusive Arcane Society would consider Virginia an illusionist, a charlatan, even a criminal, but Owen knows better. Virginia’s powers are real-and they just might be the key to solving this challenging case.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Also: did you know the first live stream cam was about coffee?

The first webcam was the Trojan Room coffee pot at the University of Cambridge computer lab in the UK, and was created in 1991.

1991!

The camera was set up purely to monitor the amount inside the coffee pot because obviously it was because that’s vital info, and was later made available to the entire internet in 1993.

Remember when everything looked like this?

Ah, the 90s internet, when you could have whatever color you wanted as long as it was grey and black.

Nowadays, I love looking at different webcams of animal habitats to see what they’re up to.

NB: I’m using screenshots because I can’t embed all the live stream images. So click the image for the live view. 

Meerkats at the Miami Zoo?

Sometimes you can watch the giraffes at the San Diego Zoo!

Or have a visit with Qing Bao and Bao Li, the pandas at the Smithsonian National Zoo:

I think the image above is of Qing Bao.

Elephants? ABSOLUTELY YES.

Also otters at the Seattle Aquarium:

Or, if you like underwater cams, how about the sharks at the Monterey Bay Aquarium? 

Sometimes when I’m on a Pomodoro-mandated break, I try to find web cams of every animal I can think of.

What about you? What webcams do you love to visit?

May your weekend be full of unique things to look at!

We’ve got “multicultural” books, beefy paragraphs, big thorns, Schroedinger’s baby, and “charming vulgar nonsense.” Plus, we ask a very important question: if you were suddenly the heroine of an Inspirational romance, how would you know?

TW/CW for the erotica section at the end. It was a time, y’all.

If you want to watch this episode with images of the covers and Amanda and I cracking up a lot, head over to our YouTube page.

Read the transcript →

Here are the books we discuss in this podcast:

We also mentioned:

• SNL: Dylan McDermott or Durmot Mulroney?
• Goodreads: The Folly of the World review

This episode is brought to you by Hatch.

You know how you finish a romantasy and you just need the next thing immediately? Hatch made that thing.

It’s called Ophelia — an original audio drama, inspired by Hamlet, where Ophelia finally gets to be the main character.

Forbidden magic, a crumbling kingdom, a slow-burn love triangle with a prince and his very guarded, very intriguing, best friend. The kind of love triangle where you will absolutely pick a side and you will not be quiet about it.

Book one of the three part series is now available for free wherever you stream, with new chapters dropping every Tuesday. For books 2 and 3, check out hatch.co/Ophelia.

If you like the podcast, you can subscribe to our feed, or find us at iTunes. You can also find us on Stitcher, and Spotify, too. We also have a cool page for the podcast on iTunes.

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What did you think of today's episode? Got ideas? Suggestions? You can talk to us on the blog entries for the podcast or talk to us on Facebook if that's where you hang out online. You can email us at sbjpodcast@gmail.com or you can call and leave us a message at our Google voice number: 201-371-3272. Please don't forget to give us a name and where you're calling from so we can work your message into an upcoming podcast.

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Support for this episode comes from Labyrinthine by CJ Holmes, a dark, myth-inspired romantasy—where love is dangerous, desire is a risk, and monsters don’t always look like monsters.

Princess Azhara was born cursed. Marked by ancient magic. Promised in an unholy bargain sealed in blood, she is the prize. When the Reaping begins, suitors will descend into the labyrinth beneath the palace—each one fighting to win her hand or die trying.

She’s never had a choice. Not in the Reaping. Not in her future. Not even in the power buried beneath her skin.

Until now.

The golden prince arrives with charm too slick to trust and eyes that gleam with secrets. Her quiet guardian—once her only constant—has begun to keep dangerous truths from her. And as the labyrinth trials unfold, Azhara realizes the maze isn’t her only trap.

It’s the men.

One lies. One loves. One kills. And she’s not sure which is which.

As suitors fall and secrets surface, Azhara must choose what’s worth saving—her kingdom, her heart, or herself.

KA Riley, bestselling author of The Conspiracy Chronicles, says there are, “addictive twists and turns, a main character who knows her own mind and her worth, with a dollop of feminine rage….and a deep, dark magic system steeped in power, passion, and the bonds that tether people to one another.”

And readers are saying they couldn’t put it down. One reader said they re-read a chapter twice, giving it an “undiluted 6 stars.” And another said, “I finished it and immediately stared at the wall because my brain was still wandering the maze.”

A “beautifully woven tale of love, magic, and sacrifice,” Labyrinthine is available now in paperback, ebook, and audio, wherever books are sold. Learn more at CJHolmesWriting.com, or check the link in the show notes to find your copy today!

Remember to subscribe to our podcast feed, find us on iTunes or on Stitcher.

The transcript for Podcast 717. Archangel’s Finale with Nalini Singh has been posted!

This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks.

❤ Click here to subscribe to The Podcast →

The Sun Down Motel

Something hasn’t been right at the roadside Sun Down Motel for a very long time, and Carly Kirk is about to find out why in this chilling new novel from the USA Today bestselling and award-winning author of The Broken Girls.

Upstate New York, 1982. Viv Delaney wants to move to New York City, and to help pay for it she takes a job as the night clerk at the Sun Down Motel in Fell, New York. But something isnʼt right at the motel, something haunting and scary.

Upstate New York, 2017. Carly Kirk has never been able to let go of the story of her aunt Viv, who mysteriously disappeared from the Sun Down before she was born. She decides to move to Fell and visit the motel, where she quickly learns that nothing has changed since 1982. And she soon finds herself ensnared in the same mysteries that claimed her aunt.

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First Love, Take Two

First Love, Take Two by Sajni Patel is $1.99! This is a contemporary romance where two exes become roommates. We featured this one on a previous edition of Cover Awe. Shana gave this a B-:

Readers who like to root for a couple who are up against a closed-minded community, and who sympathize with an anxious, and occasionally strident heroine, would enjoy First Love, Take Two. If you’re looking for a standalone romance, low angst, and a couple with stellar communications skills, this might not be for you. Either way, my fellow foodies will want platters of buttermilk biscuits and tacos at hand while you read.

On the verge of realizing her dream of being a doctor, Preeti Patel should be ecstatic. But between the stress of her residency, trying to find a job, and managing her traditional, no-boundaries family, Preeti’s anxiety is through the roof. Relationships and love aren’t even an option. Fortunately, Preeti’s finally found a new place to stay . . . only to discover that her new roommate is her ex.

Preeti never quite got over Daniel Thompson. Super-hot, plenty of swagger, amazing cook—the guy is practically perfect. And if it weren’t for their families, there might have been a happily ever after. But it’s hard to keep her sanity and libido in check when the man of her dreams is sleeping mere feet away. Can Preeti and Daniel find a way to stand up and fight for each other one last time . . . before they lose their second chance?

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Unholy Ghosts

Unholy Ghosts by Stacia Kane is $1.99! This is an urban fantasy that has been recommended by readers quite a few times! It was mentioned in the comments in a GS vs STA post about heroines who don’t want kids (which I know many people like to read).

THE DEPARTED HAVE ARRIVED.

The world is not the way it was. The dead have risen, and the living are under attack. The powerful Church of Real Truth, in charge since the government fell, has sworn to reimburse citizens being harassed by the deceased. Enter Chess Putnam, a fully tattooed witch and freewheeling ghost hunter. She’s got a real talent for banishing the wicked dead. But Chess is keeping a dark secret: She owes a lot of money to a murderous drug lord named Bump, who wants immediate payback in the form of a dangerous job that involves black magic, human sacrifice, a nefarious demonic creature, and enough wicked energy to wipe out a city of souls. Toss in lust for a rival gang leader and a dangerous attraction to Bump’s ruthless enforcer, and Chess begins to wonder if the rush is really worth it. Hell, yeah.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

I Kissed a Girl

I Kissed a Girl by Jennet Alexander is $2.99! This is a contemporary F/F romance with both heroines working in different aspects of the entertainment industry. I thought we reviewed this one, but I think it just had a mention on Book Beat instead.

Can an up-and-coming horror actress and the makeup artist for her newest “creature feature” turn on-set chemistry into the romance of a lifetime?

Lilah Silver’s a young actress who dreams of climbing out of B-list stardom. She’s been cast as the lead in what could be her breakout performance…but if she wants to prove herself to everyone who ever doubted her, she’s going to need major help along the way.

Noa Birnbaum may be a brilliant makeup artist and special effects whiz-kid, but cracking into the union is more difficult than she imagined. Keeping everyone happy is a full-time job, and she’s already run ragged. And yet when the beautiful star she’s been secretly crushing on admits to fears of her own, Noa vows to do everything in her power to help Lilah shine like never before.

Long hours? Exhausting work? No problem. Together they can take the world by storm…but can the connection forged over long hours in the makeup chair ever hope to survive the glare of the spotlight?

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

While looking ahead at upcoming releases, I came across The Body in the Kitchen Garden, the sequel to The Potting Shed Murder. The sequel sounded intriguing and from time to time I’m quite partial to a cosy mystery and it has been a while since I read one. Why not see if I still enjoy them? So off to the library I went.

Daphne, her husband, and her three children move to the English countryside after a close call with their safety in south London. They settle in Cranberry Farmhouse and after about ten months in the village of Pudding Corner, there is a murder in the adjacent village.

The murder only happens at 18% in, but the exposition building up to that point is rather lovely. It didn’t set my world on fire, but I found it so soothing. In fact, that is my overwhelming feeling for most of The Potting Shed Murder: I was soothed. More on that later.

Initially, the dialogue is a bit stilted and awkward, but that isn’t something that affects the rest of the writing. The narrative is smooth, tight and really invited me in. After the murder, the dialogue becomes a lot more convincing and enjoyable to read.

As an unapologetic curious/nosy person, I appreciated the gradual reveal of village secrets. While the narrative is told from multiple points of view, it’s always a third person narrator that often reveals salacious details. I loved it.

I also really enjoyed how well-rounded the secondary characters were and how often they avoided being stereotypical residents of an English village as often appear in cosy mysteries. Yes, there are familiar characters: the local doctor, the principal of the village school, the local shopowners, etc., but they have rich internal lives that are explored thoroughly.

Daphne is a Black woman, and a second generation immigrant. There are frank discussions of race and her experience, and of her feelings about raising biracial children in a predominantly White area. There is also mention of Black History Month and Black Lives Matter, which provide a specific context that I appreciated.

I realise this is a bizarre thing to say about a book centred on death but if you’ve read a cosy mystery I think you’ll get what I’m saying: this is a mostly restful story. It would often send me to sleep at night before my usual bedtime, not because it was boring but because it was just so calming and I could feel my whole body relax when I read it. Because of this it took me ages to finish.

It was so calming that I wondered if I shouldn’t rely on an old trick and read multiple books at once. But each time I opened my e-reader, I would see The Potting Shed Murder there and the curiosity would get me. What would happen next? And so I was a one-book woman for the duration.

Overall, I enjoyed how the story unfolded. The plot was clear, logical and – towards the end – quite thrilling. I say that because at around 70% things speed up A LOT and become more intense from that point on. I had to take little breaks from reading because the suspense was stressing me out. As calming as the first 70% was, the last 30% was suspense-filled. This plot structure really worked for the story. I was delighted by the arrival of each clue and how it unfolded for our amateur sleuth.

When secrets start to unravel in full, I really felt the emotional impact of the victim’s death. I would say this differs from the other cosy mysteries that I have read in which the deaths didn’t have much of an emotional impact on me. This one did. I felt despair and loss as I read about lives half lived and lost too soon. So keep that in mind if you’re feeling particularly fragile.

I recommend this book to anyone in the Bitchery looking for a cosy mystery that finds its own lane while still being a very good example of the genre. I will absolutely be reading the sequel, The Body in the Kitchen Garden, when it is released on May 29th. I want more time in the village of Pudding Corner.

The Monsters We Defy

A woman able to communicate with spirits must assemble a ragtag crew to pull off a daring heist to save her community in this timely and dazzling historical fantasy that weaves together African American folk magic, history, and romance.

Washington D. C., 1925

Clara Johnson talks to spirits, a gift that saved her during her darkest moments in a Washington D. C. jail. Now a curse that’s left her indebted to the cunning spirit world. So, when the Empress, the powerful spirit who holds her debt, offers her an opportunity to gain her freedom, a desperate Clara seizes the chance. The task: steal a magical ring from the wealthiest woman in the District.

Clara can’t pull off this daring heist alone. She’ll need help from an unlikely team, from a jazz musician capable of hypnotizing with a melody to an aging vaudeville actor who can change his face, to pull off the impossible. But as they encounter increasingly difficult obstacles, a dangerous spirit interferes at every turn. Conflict in the spirit world is leaking into the human one and along D.C’.s legendary Black Broadway, a mystery unfolds—one that not only has repercussions for Clara but all of the city’s residents.

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The Seventh Bride

The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher is 99c at Amazon! This is a Bluebeard retelling and is just shy of 250 pages. Last time this was on sale, comments mentioned that this isn’t a YA book and while it isn’t their favorite work by Kingfisher, it’s still pretty damn good.

Young Rhea is a miller’s daughter of low birth, so she is understandably surprised when a mysterious nobleman, Lord Crevan, shows up on her doorstep and proposes marriage. Since commoners don’t turn down lords—no matter how sinister they may seem—Rhea is forced to agree to the engagement.

Lord Crevan demands that Rhea visit his remote manor before their wedding. Upon arrival, she discovers that not only was her betrothed married six times before, but his previous wives are all imprisoned in his enchanted castle. Determined not to share their same fate, Rhea asserts her desire for freedom. In answer, Lord Crevan gives Rhea a series of magical tasks to complete, with the threat “Come back before dawn, or else I’ll marry you.”

With time running out and each task more dangerous and bizarre than the last, Rhea must use her resourcefulness, compassion, and bravery to rally the other wives and defeat the sorcerer before he binds her to him forever.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

A Proposal They Can’t Refuse

A Proposal They Can’t Refuse by Natalie Caña is $1.99! This was Caña’s debut and features rivals to lovers and fake dating. Lots of good food and drink descriptions!

Natalie Caña turns up the heat, humor and heart in this debut rom-com about a Puerto Rican chef and an Irish American whiskey distiller forced into a fake engagement by their scheming octogenarian grandfathers.

Kamilah Vega is desperate to convince her family to update their Puerto Rican restaurant and enter it into the Fall Foodie Tour. With the gentrification of their Chicago neighborhood, it’s the only way to save the place. The fly in her mofongo–her blackmailing abuelo says if she wants to change anything in his restaurant, she’ll have to marry the one man she can’t stand: his best friend’s grandson.

Liam Kane spent a decade working to turn his family’s distillery into a contender. Now he and his grandfather are on the verge of winning a national competition. Then Granda hits him with a one-two punch: he has cancer and he has his heart set on seeing Liam married before it’s too late. And Granda knows just the girl…Kamilah Vega.

If they refuse, their grandfathers will sell the building that houses both their businesses. With their futures on the line, Kamilah and Liam plan to outfox the devious duo, faking an engagement until they both get what they want. But soon, they find themselves tangled up in more than either of them bargained for.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

A Dish Best Served Hot

A Dish Best Served Hot by Natalie Caña is $2.99! This is book two in the Vega Family Love Stories series. It was also featured on Hide Your Wallet. Have you read this one or its predecessor?

“From a comedic cast of supporting characters to an emphasis on the importance of community… A vibrant second-chance love story about repairing community and romantic connection.” — Kirkus Reviews (STARRED)

Santiago “Saint” Vega gets a second shot at love with Lola León, but when duty to his family forces him to do something she’ll never forgive, will everything he’s built come crumbling down?

Years ago, Saint walked away from the girl he loved to fulfill his duty. Now he’s struggling to build bridges between his drifting family, take on more responsibilities at his uncle’s construction company, figure out why his daughter refuses to talk at school and curtail his mischievous abuelo’s escalating pranks. Then she walks back into his life.

Social justice advocate Lola León has returned to Humboldt Park for two to help care for her dear abuelo and to serve the community center she loved, particularly the shelter for unhoused LGBTQIA+ youths. When she finds out that the Vegas are responsible for endangering both, she is more than ready to go to war—even if the boy she never forgot is standing at the front of the battlefield.

Neither of them expects to become allies in saving the shelter, helping Saint’s daughter or ending the decades-long feud between their grandfathers. They definitely don’t expect all of their old feelings to come rushing back. As Saint and Lola enter combat, they can’t help but wonder where the other’s true allegiance lies, and whether they’ll win these battles only to lose each other.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

The allergies have started! I was honestly surprised. Normally, I can tell when they’re coming on, but I think it’s all taken us by the surprise (at least in my office).

As a reminder, I’m doing this event at Lovestruck next Wednesday. If you attend, please come up and say hi after the chat.

…

Ever wanted to LARP as AI? Now you can on Your AI Slop Bores Me. Essentially, YOU are the Chatgpt. Or, if you’re seeking answers to a question, real humans are responding. No promises on the answers being helpful. You can see how it works here.

…

NPR interviewed the voice behind many popular romantasy heroes.

…

My husband loves finding quirky new browser games. Enjoy Cursor Camp!

…

Lastly, what if Jake Peralta from Brooklyn 99 was in the game Detroit: Become Human?

…

Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!

The Marriage Narrative

A love just for show grows into something more in this swoonworthy romance from the author of The Romantic Agenda.

Zinnia is an ambitious, successful businesswoman who is not about to wait around for her One True Love. She turns her dating profile into a marriage-merger a few strategic meetings, move in together, get married—all within thirty days. Her friends think it will never work… until she meets Jordan, a near-perfect applicant with a big secret.

Jordan’s family has spent the last decade starring in a massively popular reality show about their lives. He has finally agreed to join the cast, but production wants him to marry an actress (his ex) in a romantic storyline to boost viewership.

Convinced Zinnia is perfect for the role instead, Jordan proposes a mutually beneficial marriage she gets her business partner husband, and he gets to help his family on his terms. Together they face strict schedules, wild plot twists, and behind-the-scenes hostilities, all while acting like besotted newlyweds—an intense performance that evolves into a relationship they never expected.

As the line between reality and show blurs, Zinnia and Jordan must choose between a clean contract or a beautifully messy love story.

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A Vow in Vengeance

A Vow in Vengeance by Jaclyn Rodriguez is $1.99 This one released in January of this year, so it’s relatively new. I mentioned it in Hide Your Wallet because I heard it marketed as a “coming of rage” story.

Deadly tarot, wicked schemes, dangerous alliances . . . can you survive the Forge?

Sexy, action-packed, and brimming with magic, A Vow in Vengeance is an unputdownable romantasy debut.

Rune Ryker has nothing left to lose. Everything’s been stolen by the Immortals—her family, her home, her freedom. But she’s done playing by their rules.

Each year, humans are forced to journey into the Immortal Realms, but twenty-year-old Rune orchestrates her own selection, determined to find her family and destroy anyone who stands in her way. Rune is used to doing whatever it takes to survive, and now she must endure the Forge, a cutthroat college for the Immortal druids’ elusive tarot magic. When Rune’s magic reveals itself to be the rarest and most powerful, she must live with its only other wielder—Prince Draven. As arrogant as he is ruthlessly ambitious, he’s the last person she can trust.

Rune’s abilities also draw the eyes of the most dangerous druids in the realms. Some want to use her. More want her dead. Draven offers to train her . . . for a price. As Rune becomes ensnared in Draven’s dangerous games, she learns there are secrets at the heart of the kingdom that some will kill to protect.

And Rune and Draven’s growing attraction may be the spark to ignite a brewing war.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

The Five Year Lie

The Five Year Lie by Sarina Bowen! This mystery released in May 2024 and I believe it’s the first time we’ve found it on sale.

She thought it was love. Then he vanished.

On an ordinary Monday morning, Ariel Cafferty’s phone buzzes with a disturbing text message. Something’s happened. I need to see you. Meet me under the candelabra tree ASAP. The words would be jarring from anyone, but the sender is the only man she ever loved. And it’s been several years since she learned he died.

Seeing Drew’s name pop up is heart-stopping. Ariel’s gut says it can’t be real. But she goes to the tree anyway. She has to.

Nobody shows. But the text upends everything she thought she knew about the day he left her. The more questions she asks, the more sinister the answers get. Only two things are clear: everything she was told five years ago is wrong, and someone is still lying to her.

The truth has to be out there somewhere. To safeguard herself—and her son—she’ll have to find it before it finds her. And with it, the answer to what became of Drew.

With a heart-stopping romance that only Sarina Bowen can execute, The Five Year Lie is a page-turning, spine-tingling thriller that will have you guessing until the very end.

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You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

The Murder of Mr. Wickham

The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray is $2.99! Sarah mentioned this one in a previous Hide Your Wallet and it definitely fits within the Bitchery’s interests.

From New York Times bestselling author Claudia Gray—a summer house party turns into a thrilling whodunit when Mr. Wickham, one of literature’s most notorious villains, meets a sudden and suspicious end in this brilliantly imagined mystery featuring Jane Austen’s leading literary characters.

The happily married Mr. Knightley and Emma are throwing a house party, bringing together distant relatives and new acquaintances—characters beloved by Jane Austen fans. Definitely not invited is Mr. Wickham, whose latest financial scheme has netted him an even broader array of enemies. As tempers flare and secrets are revealed, it’s clear that everyone would be happier if Mr. Wickham got his comeuppance. Yet they’re all shocked when Wickham turns up murdered—except, of course, for the killer hidden in their midst.

Nearly everyone at the house party is a suspect, so it falls to the party’s two youngest guests to solve the mystery: Juliet Tilney, the smart and resourceful daughter of Catherine and Henry, eager for adventure beyond Northanger Abbey; and Jonathan Darcy, the Darcys’ eldest son, whose adherence to propriety makes his father seem almost relaxed. In a tantalizing fusion of Austen and Christie, the unlikely pair must put aside their own poor first impressions and uncover the guilty party—before an innocent person is sentenced to hang. 

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Okay, this has been driving me crazy for a decade! Pretty sure it came out in the 90s.

Main character is an American woman living in England with her husband, Griffon. He had an affair with Claire. She thought it was over, but no, she runs into a very pregnant Claire at (Barnaby’s?) Claire loses the baby. Griffon comes home super drunk and rapes his wife. She leaves, taking her jewelry and some clothes, and flies to NY. She buys a cottage through the classifieds, sight unseen, in a little New Jersey town she stopped in once with her parents as a teen.

She has a scrappy little car (I think a bug), the house needs a roof, so she sells the jewelry. Gets a job at the local diner. Other waitress has a teen son, Mark, whose dad, Brian is a huge jerk, and also the main love interest’s brother. (I also don’t remember his name, but he smokes). His beagle pup is Bailey, his dad is Eddie. Eddie is suffering from dementia. The town is dying and being bought up by a developer (we find out later it’s Brian’s company). Someone is trashing the fishing boats.

Heroine ends up pregnant, scared it’s Griffons. It’s not. Ending: happy wedding with baby girl in tow.

Also, the cottage was fully furnished as the old woman who owned it died or moved to a home.

Let’s HaBO!

Happy Tuesday!

There are a handful of books on our TBR piles this week, include a much anticipated sequel.

Which releases are on your radar this week? Tell us in the comments!

Dangerously Ours

Author: Krista Ritchie
Released: May 12, 2026 by Berkley
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance
Series: Webs We Weave #3

In the thrilling conclusion to the Webs We Weave series, ex-con artist Phoebe Graves must pull off the biggest grift she’s ever devised to keep her friends and family safe.

Conning the rich and fleeing to new cities is all ex-grifter Phoebe Graves has ever known—until she started building real relationships in a small but wealthy Connecticut town. But she’s worried these new bonds won’t hold fast as more than one big bad wolf threatens to blow down those she loves most.

And now more than ever, she has a reason to stay in one place. Among them is Brayden “Rocky” Tinrock, her best friend’s older brother, who’s been a partner to Phoebe during every daring and exhilarating con. And then of course there’s Hailey Tinrock, her best friend, whose precious secret they’ll do anything to protect. . . .

As Phoebe and her family team up with the Tinrocks to fight for a chance at a home, they confront the demons of their pasts and must do the impossible . . . deceive the most cunning con artist they’ve ever known.

Elyse: A best friend’s older brother romance with the twist that the heroine is a con artist.

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First and Forever

Author: Lynn Painter
Released: May 12, 2026 by Berkley
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance

A football star and a diehard fan entangled in a PR stunt—that only one side knows is fake—might be the right play in this new romantic comedy by #1 New York Times bestselling author Lynn Painter.

Duffy Distefano loves three things: her dad, the family cat, and Minneapolis Coyotes football. So when she gets booed out of a game and becomes the internet’s villain, she is distraught—and disgruntled. All she did was shove Coyote Carl away when he made a move on her, but everyone else just saw a woman attacking their team’s beloved mascot. Eager to clear the air, Duffy agrees to an interview on a hit morning show. She doesn’t expect a co-guest to join her—especially not the Coyotes’ star tight end.

When MVP Connor Cunningham gets tasked with damage control to help his team out of their PR nightmare, he thought that meant saying a few words on the team’s behalf. Instead, he finds himself in a highly amusing verbal sparring match with a recently wronged fan on live TV. Duffy pelts him with fiery jabs but is also clearly diehard about the Coyotes—color him intrigued…and attracted.

The interview instantly goes viral, and the public is obsessed with them. A strong push from the Coyotes’ PR team to ride the wave results in Connor asking Duffy out. Despite his distaste for PR stunts, he’s surprised to discover being with Duffy is much easier than he thought, and somehow it doesn’t feel fake to him. Harboring this secret can only blow up, but all he knows is that if he messes things up with Duffy, it’ll be the greatest fumble of his life.

The latest Lynn Painter and it’s a sports romance!

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The Last Lady B

Author: Eloisa James
Released: May 12, 2026 by Gallery Books
Genre: Historical: European, Romance

Lady B may have married Bluebeard; she may have fallen in love with a gorgeous, grumpy solicitor; she may have met a ghost and survived to tell the tale! New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Eloisa James delights with witty historical romance with a gothic twist.

In the depths of winter, Lady Genevieve Hughes, her pet piglet, and her septuagenarian husband travel to a haunted abbey in the Scottish Highlands. Evie is excited to meet a ghost (perhaps one of her husband’s three previous wives), but didn’t expect the funny, quirky guests to become the friends she’s never had. And she certainly didn’t imagine meeting Sir Godric Everly, a sardonic, witty solicitor who loathes her husband.

Yet as secrets and lies turn Evie’s world upside down, Sir Godric becomes the one person whom she can trust.

When ghosts, multiple wills, and a shocking marriage certificate bring Lord Burnsby’s past crashing into his present, Burnsby promptly dies, leaving Evie free to remarry…though as a virgin wife, now a virgin widow, she is more unnerved by the marriage bed than a spectral visit.

More importantly, she has to figure out whose identity is false, whose vows are dishonorable, whose truths could destroy her reputation—and where her heart belongs.

A new Eloisa James, and this one is part of Julia Quinn’s special historical romance edition subscription box.

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Love Beyond Reasonable Doubt

Author: Swati Hegde
Released: May 12, 2026 by Dell
Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance

In this second-chance workplace romance, two lawyers find themselves working in the same office after a steamy vacation fling a year and a half ago, from the author of Can’t Help Faking in Love

Naina Shetty is a proud workaholic, and she is gunning for a promotion at her law firm. No distractions will get in her way this time, not even the bad breakup that happened over a year ago. She brushed off her pain with a long vacation and a no-strings-attached fling with a handsome stranger, but now Naina is back to business.

Unlucky-in-love Tejas Rajput hasn’t stopped thinking about the brown-eyed beauty he met on the beaches of Goa two summers ago. He’d been looking for a rebound to get over his ex—which is why he’d agreed to keep things strictly casual, use fake last names, and respond to all personal questions with “wrong answers only.” But he didn’t think he’d fall for her, hard, only for her to get on a plane and leave.

When they cross paths again—this time working at the same office—Naina is adamant that her no-relationships policy won’t change, especially not for Tejas, whose disarming smile and easygoing charm could spell trouble. Her career will always come first.

But as they team up for a case that could make or break their firm’s reputation, they discover that there’s something more than just sparks between them—and it might turn out to be true love.

Amanda: I enjoyed Match Me If You Can and I’m getting the sense that Hegde enjoys writing green flag heroes.

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Seek the Traitor’s Son

Author: Veronica Roth
Released: May 12, 2026 by Tor Books
Genre: Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy
Series: The Burning Empire #1

A new epic romantic, dystopian fantasy begins in Seek the Traitor’s Son, from #1 New York Times bestselling author Veronica Roth

Elegy Ahn did not ask for destiny to find her.

She is happy with her life as a soldier, defending her small country from the Talusar, a powerful nation who worships a deadly Fever. A fever that blesses half of its victims with mysterious gifts.

But then she’s summoned to hear a prophecy–her, and the most ruthless of Talusar generals, Rava Vidar. Brought face to face, they learn that one of them will lead their people to victory over the other…but they don’t know which. And at the center of both of their fates: a man. A man that, Elegy is told, she will fall in love with.

In just one day, Elegy’s old life–her job, her purpose, and her future–is over. She and Rava are destined to collide, with the fate of their nations hanging in the balance. And when they do, only one will be left standing.

Elegy intends to make sure it’s her.

A dystopian fantasy by Veronica Roth. I’ve heard the romance in this one is more a subplot (I think?). 

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The Tapestry of Fate

Author: Shannon Chakraborty
Released: May 12, 2026 by Harper Voyager
Genre: Science Fiction/Fantasy

New York Times bestselling author Shannon Chakraborty sets sail into the second adventure of pirate Amina al-Sirafi as her quest to track down magical artifacts brings her to the island lair of a sorceress whose woven enchantments are impossible to flee.

Amina al-Sirafi thinks she’s struck gold. Tasked with hunting down arcane artifacts for the council of immortal peris, she can savor the occasional rollicking adventure on the high seas with her cherished criminal companions while still returning home to raise her beloved daughter, Marjana. But when Raksh, the spirit of discord with whom she is reluctantly wed, provokes the council’s wrath, Amina is charged with a seemingly impossible quest: steal a spindle capable of rewriting fate from a mysterious sorceress on an island no one can escape.

Forced to leave Marjana—who is increasingly frustrated at being peddled what are clearly lies about her mother’s life and her own past—Amina finds her mission almost immediately thrown into peril. But deadly storms, an erratic poison mistress, and old enemies are the least of her worries. For the peris’ story is unraveling, hinting at a far deadlier game whose rules Amina must swiftly puzzle out. A game that sets her against an adversary more cunning and powerful than she has ever faced.

A game that not everyone on her crew wants her to win.

Elyse: The first book in this series is my favorite fantasy book of all time.

Lara: I’ve been following the author on Instagram during the writing of this book. Because I adored the first one so much, I’m desperate for Amina to have some good luck in this book. I’m going to wait for Elyse to read it and then give me the spoilers so I’m emotionally prepared!

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Accidentally Engaged

Reena Manji doesn’t love her career, her single status, and most of all, her family inserting themselves into every detail of her life. But when caring for her precious sourdough starters, Reena can drown it all out. At least until her father moves his newest employee across the hall–with hopes that Reena will marry him.

But Nadim’s not like the other Muslim bachelors-du-jour that her parents have dug up. If the Captain America body and the British accent weren’t enough, the man appears to love eating her bread creations as much as she loves making them. She sure as hell would never marry a man who works for her father, but friendship with a neighbor is okay, right? And when Reena’s career takes a nosedive, Nadim happily agrees to fake an engagement so they can enter a couples video cooking contest to win the artisan bread course of her dreams.

As cooking at home together brings them closer, things turn physical, but Reena isn’t worried. She knows Nadim is keeping secrets, but it’s fine— secrets are always on the menu where her family is concerned. And her heart is protected… she’s not marrying the man. But even secrets kept for self preservation have a way of getting out, especially when meddling parents and gossiping families are involved.

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Twice in a Blue Moon

Twice in a Blue Moon by Christina Lauren is $2.99! Elyse read this one and I think her review could be parsed down to “needs way more grovel.” If you read it, would you agree?

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Unhoneymooners and the “delectable, moving” (Entertainment Weekly) My Favorite Half-Night Stand comes a modern love story about what happens when your first love reenters your life when you least expect it…

Sam Brandis was Tate Jones’s first: Her first love. Her first everything. Including her first heartbreak.

During a whirlwind two-week vacation abroad, Sam and Tate fell for each other in only the way that first loves do: sharing all of their hopes, dreams, and deepest secrets along the way. Sam was the first, and only, person that Tate—the long-lost daughter of one of the world’s biggest film stars—ever revealed her identity to. So when it became clear her trust was misplaced, her world shattered for good.

Fourteen years later, Tate, now an up-and-coming actress, only thinks about her first love every once in a blue moon. When she steps onto the set of her first big break, he’s the last person she expects to see. Yet here Sam is, the same charming, confident man she knew, but even more alluring than she remembered. Forced to confront the man who betrayed her, Tate must ask herself if it’s possible to do the wrong thing for the right reason… and whether “once in a lifetime” can come around twice.

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Deep Dark

RECOMMENDED: Deep Dark by Laura Griffin is $1.99! Elyse read this one and gave it an A-:

Fans of cyber-thrillers or readers looking for a hacker heroine should definitely check Deep Dark out. Those who prefer their romantic suspense without explicit violence may want to steer clear.

The moment detective Reed Novak steps onto the crime scene, he knows the case is going to rock his world. A beautiful young woman murdered at home. No sign of forced entry. No motive. She’s obviously not the killer’s first victim, and Reed’s instincts tell him she won’t be his last. Reed’s first clue comes via a mysterious text that links to a dating profile, but even more intriguing than the clue is the person who sent it.

As a white-hat hacker in the Delphi Center’s cyber investigation unit, Laney Knox sneaks into some of the deepest, darkest corners of the Internet looking for predators. Laney would prefer to stay away from Austin PD’s most recent murder case, but she can’t ignore the chilling similarities between that crime and her own brutal attack years ago. Laney offers to help the sexy lead detective, but he wants more from her than just a promising tip—Reed wants her trust. Laney resists, but as their relationship deepens she’s tempted to reveal the closely guarded secrets that could make her a key witness…or the killer’s next victim.

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Big Chicas Don’t Cry

Big Chicas Don’t Cry by Anette Chavez Macias is $2.49 at Amazon! This seems like it leans more toward women’s fiction with some romantic threads. It has a 4.2-star rating on Goodreads.

Four cousins navigate love, loss, and the meaning of family over the course of one memorable year in this heartfelt family drama.

Cousins Mari, Erica, Selena, and Gracie are inseparable. They aren’t just family but best friends—sharing secrets, traditions, and a fierce love for their abuelita. But their idyllic childhood ends when Mari’s parents divorce, forcing her to move away. With Mari gone, the girls’ tight-knit bond unravels.

Fifteen years later, Mari’s got the big house and handsome husband, but her life is in shambles. Erica’s boyfriend just dumped her, and her new boss hates her. Selena can’t seem to find her place in the world—not Mexican enough for her family, not white enough for her colleagues. And Gracie is a Catholic school teacher with an all-consuming crush, but she can’t trust herself when it comes to romance.

As rocky as the cousins’ lives have become, nothing can prepare them for the heartbreaking loss of a loved one. When tragedy reunites them, will they remember their abuelita’s lessons about family and forgiveness—or are fifteen years of separation too much to overcome?

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Quinn Audio is a paid app that offers immersive erotic short stories that, IMO, are organized by trope and archetype in a way that will appeal to romance readers (enemy to lover, forbidden work relationship, etc). You can pay by month or by year.

One of the draws to Quinn is that some of the narrators are famous actors that listeners might be familiar with, like Jamie Campbell, Hudson Williams, and Connor Storrie.

I started with Yes, Chef narrated by Shawn Hatosy from The Pitt. It took a minute for me to get the hang of things because I’m used to listening to audio books. This is different: the narrator reads a story (in this case released in chapters) from their point of view. There’s no dialogue or voice from a second party. In the scenes where the narrator is supposed to be talking to another party we gauge what is said based on their responses.

For example, the narrator might say, “What do you mean I didn’t follow you back on instagram? (pause) Oh, I didn’t know I was supposed to do that.”

We never actually hear the other character say anything like “Hey why didn’t you follow me back on Instagram?” We inuit that from the response.

It’s kind of weird, listening to half the conversation and while I think some listeners will adapt like I did, others might hate it.

The story was also told as if the narrator, in this case Grant Reilly, is recounting the story of meeting “you,” a sous chef named Iris Adams. It’s kind of like a [Y/N] fanfic where the listener occupies the space of the second character.

This achieves a lot of intimacy in the narrative because it sounds like another person is speaking directly to you about events that have occurred. It’s an intimacy that could absolutely sell the app to some listeners, while turning off others completely.

This is not something I want to listen to in public spaces. I’m not comfortable listening to something this intimate while at work. I could absolutely see myself accidentally connecting to some bluetooth device while Jamie Campbell Bower purrs “Good girl” throughout the office forcing me to fake my own death and move to another country.

That said, it does work for me in cases where I want an immersive story, but I don’t have the attention span for more than a short story. Because the stories are brief and the plot is relatively simple, there isn’t a lot of room to get lost.

It’s also extremely immersive. Behind the narration is background noise appropriate to the scene. For example, a scene narrated by a chef working in a restaurant had all the appropriate kitchen sounds like clinking dishes. As the scene progressed to the restaurant being closed with the narrator cleaning up, you could hear the spritz of squirt bottles and the soft sound of sweeping. That background noise really pulled me into the audio and made me feel like I was present in the story.

This feeling of immersion can flip the opposite direction depending on how you feel about “moist” sounds. I don’t know if I have misophonia or what but the wet sounds of people kissing make me gaggy (see my Bachelor recaps) so I Did Not Like the kissing sounds that show up in the erotic scenes. There are other moist sounds, too, associated with thrusting or oral sex, so just beware. These stories are very explicit.

I listened to a couple of the multi chapter Quinn Originals. The Trials narrated by Jamie Campbell Bower is very Dramione coded.

The one-shot offerings were less my thing. It’s a single chapter offering that’s basically just a sex scene. There’s no real background or story to get into. The one I listened to was an aftercare and tender sex scene taking place after a rough sex session. You don’t need to know anything to jump into it, but it also felt less transportive because of that lack of background.

Overall, this app isn’t for me. There aren’t that many multi chapter originals, which is the offering I enjoy, and I can’t listen to it everywhere. That means I’m not really getting my money’s worth. I can see this working really well for other listeners though, so I’m giving it a middle of the road grade.

Elyse: I read this as The Earl Train

Choo-choo!

Sarah: First I saw Carl Frain, then Carl Train. I had to look for the middle arm in that E because it looks like a ribbon off her dress.

Maybe the Earl’s name is Carl?

Train also has a few meanings which makes this rather interesting to ponder.

Elyse: Now I have logistical questions

Is the Earl running the train or is he receiving the locomotive as it were

Sarah: A query I had as well!

From Denise: At first, it might appear as cover awe, ethereal with the flowers and the pink, but then the skirt of the dress doesn’t make sense–it doesn’t flow the way it should. Her body is strangely contorted at the waist–I don’t think Barbie can even twist like that. But four fingers on each hand? Maybe one is hidden on her right, but her left clearly only has four.

Sarah: I was thinking this was AI but now I’m not so sure. She definitely only has 4 fingers. And I don’t know what’s going on between her knees and her hips but it isn’t good.

Claudia: The proportions are all wrong too. Like her upper body is too long/lower body too short

Sarah: I know this is the least confusing aspect of this image but I cannot get over the hair. SO MUCH HAIR.

Amanda: I think it’s just bad digital editing. But as someone with a lot of hair…my brother was married in Korea in a traditional ceremony and the hair stylist kept referring to my hair as “Bridgerton hair” when they were trying to style it.

Sarah: That’s adorable.

Amanda: This particular hairstyle on the cover, though, is giving Toddlers & Tiaras.

From Pam G: I give you. . . .

NapAlien Boneyparts and the Blast from the Ass

Bonus points if he’s conducting Holst’s The Planets.

Sarah: NapAlien Boneyparts. HA!

Why does it look like he is wearing pantyhose over his head? Also, his arms look like challah.

Amanda: Is Chux his Christian name?

Sarah: Ok first I have a question about his neck and that question is, “What?”

Second, how do you say that? Choo? Is this the plural of Churu, the kitty gogurt my cats are obsessed with?

Wilbur! Katie! Time for your Chux!

Also Chelsea Cameron is a bestselling sapphic romance author so SHENANIGANS upon that name.

Elyse: Chucks (not Chux) are the name of those disposable pads they put under patients in the hospital.

Susan: I thought they were shoes, so this changes some things I’ve read.

Sometimes Get Rec’d sneaks up on me. The books this week are split between fiction and non-fiction. Two of each!

What recommendations would you like to pass along? Let us know in the comments!

Gather

This is part of the Norton Shorts collection, which I find to be pretty interesting in terms of offerings and topics. Anthropologist Ashanté M. Rees takes a look at the relationship between Black communities, food, and gathering. 

A vibrant new vision of food justice that celebrates Black food and recognizes the power of gathering to create sustainable, systemic change.

Food justice is defined as the understanding that our food system is unequal and that something needs to be done about it. But how can we create a world where everyone has enough? What does it mean to truly nourish ourselves and our communities?

In Gather, anthropologist Ashanté M. Reese argues for a vibrant new vision of food justice that places Black communities at the center and offers us a visionary, delicious path forward. Reese reveals that to truly create equity in our food systems, we must embrace the abundance that already exists around us—and recognize that the social body is as important as our individual health

Gather presents rich, on-the-ground stories of gathering around food in four spaces—gardens, family reunions, repasts, and protests. Blending rich storytelling with analysis, these chapters argue for the political power of food and invite us to learn from the tactics Black communities have long used to create sustainable, systemic change.

There are no simple solutions to the problems of acute need. But by recognizing that food justice is already all around us, we can start working together to create a more nourishing, joyful world. Gather is an intimate and urgent invitation to embrace local power, build better food systems, and nourish ourselves, body and soul.

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Grand Slam Romance: Book 1

Magical girls meets a sports romance in this queer graphical novel romance! There are three books in total in this series. 

Storytelling team Ollie Hicks and Emma Oosterhous’s first Grand Slam Romance is a queer, full-color graphic novel that’s equal parts romance, softball, and drama, where the balls are fast, the smooches are spicy, and the girls . . . magical—now in paperback

Mickey Monsoon is the hotshot pitcher for the Belle City Broads, and their team is poised to sweep the league this season. But Mickey is thrown off their game when Astra Maxima shows up to catch for the Gaiety Gals, the Broads’ fiercest rival. Years ago, Mickey and Astra were best friends . . . and maybe more. That was until Astra unceremoniously dumped Mickey to become a softball wunderkind at a private girl’s school in Switzerland. Now, Astra is flirty, arrogant, and reckless on the field—everything the rule-abiding Mickey hates.

Astra thinks Mickey’s cute and wants to fool around, despite their rocky history and the trail of jilted softballers that Astra leaves in her wake. Too bad the only thing Mickey wants is vengeance for their broken heart and wounded pride! But even they have to admit—Astra is a certified babe. And that’s not Astra isn’t just a softball superstar, she’s a full-fledged magical girl.

Full of wet mitts, hard hits, and a bevy of softball-playing babes, Grand Slam Book 1 is a flawless home run that is sure to knock readers out of the park.

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Humankind

If you’re looking for non-fiction that won’t leave you terribly depressed, this book showcases ways in which humankind has come together. 

From New York Times bestselling author of Utopia for Realists comes a “bold” (Daniel H. Pink) and “extraordinary” (Susan Cain) argument that humans thrive in a crisis and that our innate kindness and cooperation have been the greatest factors in our long-term success on the planet.

If there is one belief that has united the left and the right, psychologists and philosophers, ancient thinkers and modern ones, it is the tacit assumption that humans are bad. It’s a notion that drives newspaper headlines and guides the laws that shape our lives. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Pinker, the roots of this belief have sunk deep into Western thought. Human beings, we’re taught, are by nature selfish and governed primarily by self-interest.

But what if it isn’t true? International bestseller Rutger Bregman provides new perspective on the past 200,000 years of human history, setting out to prove that we are hardwired for kindness, geared toward cooperation rather than competition, and more inclined to trust rather than distrust one another. In fact this instinct has a firm evolutionary basis going back to the beginning of Homo sapiens.

From the real-life Lord of the Flies to the solidarity in the aftermath of the Blitz, the hidden flaws in the Stanford prison experiment to the true story of twin brothers on opposite sides who helped Mandela end apartheid, Bregman shows us that believing in human generosity and collaboration isn’t merely optimistic—it’s realistic. Moreover, it has huge implications for how society functions. When we think the worst of people, it brings out the worst in our politics and economics. But if we believe in the reality of humanity’s kindness and altruism, it will form the foundation for achieving true change in society, a case that Bregman makes convincingly with his signature wit, refreshing frankness, and memorable storytelling.

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Not Quite Dead Yet

A woman has a week to solve her own murder. If you love mysteries that are high on tension, consider this one!

In seven days Jet Mason will be dead.

Jet is the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Woodstock, Vermont. Twenty-seven years old, she’s still waiting for her life to begin. She’ll do it later, she always says. She has time.

Until, on the night of Halloween, Jet is violently attacked by an unseen intruder.

She suffers a catastrophic brain injury. The doctor is certain that within a week, she’ll suffer a deadly aneurysm.

Jet never thought of herself as having enemies. But now she looks at everyone in a new light: her family, her ex-best friend turned sister-in-law, her former boyfriend.

She only has seven days, and as her condition deteriorates she has only her childhood friend Billy for help. But nevertheless, she’s absolutely determined to finally finish something:

Jet is going to solve her own murder.

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What Angels Fear has been mentioned positively a few times on the site but never reviewed. I became aware of the series when I received a marketing email for the 19th book in this series. When a series reaches that kind of number, there’s usually something special about it so off I went to the library for the first one in the series.

It was initially slow going for me to get into but I think that’s because it’s been so very long since I read anything that wasn’t a romance. Once I adjusted mentally, I found the writing immersive and compelling. Scent, in particular, is used in evocative ways to communicate the atmosphere.

Sebastian St Cyr is a remarkably interesting character. He’s part of the aristocracy and he worked in army intelligence for five years before selling out of the armed forces and returning to London. At the start of the story, he’s only been back for 10 months. He is quick (in all possible senses) and carrying a certain amount of baggage and disillusionment from his time in the war. This is a man (and a story) that is not scared to face and then dig into the horrors humanity can perpetrate. Despite the fact that Sebastian would deny this, he believes that justice should be equal and fair.

I enjoyed the multiple points of view present and the well-rounded secondary characters, particularly the magistrate Sir Lovejoy. I haven’t looked ahead in the series at all, but I do hope that this magistrate makes a return. In general, the secondary characters are interesting, dynamic and stand apart from each other in distinct ways, so it’s a pleasure to read.

To my delight, there seems to be a romantic subplot which I’d like to leave as a surprise for my fellow readers. .

I found the mystery gripping. It’s tightly plotted and as with all good mysteries, at the end, the culprit is a genuine surprise, but when you look back at the clues, they all align with that suspect. I particularly enjoyed the detailed Regency London I got to know through the various clues dug up and followed by Sebastian.

If you can stomach the content warnings and you don’t mind romance playing second fiddle and you enjoy a self-aware hero with baggage, then you might enjoy this book as much as I did. Once I mentally adjusted to the genre of the book, I found myself so immersed in the story that my actual life was forgotten while I was reading. I’m going to have to pace myself with this series. While I’ll definitely continue reading it, I’m going to space out the books so I can savour them.

Lara: After reading Dolly All The Time by Annabel Monaghan ( A | BN | K | AB ) (and LOVING it with one tiny caveat – full review coming), I’ve decided to delve into her back catalogue and this morning I started Nora Goes Off Script. Of course I only got 20 minutes in before my daughter woke up and the pre-school morning routine kicked in, but I’m looking forward to it. (edited)

Claudia: I am in some circle of hell where nothing is sticking!!

Shana: Oh no! That sounds so hard, Claudia.

A | BN | K | AB

Sarah: I’m reading Platform Decay for the 2nd time, and a book called Murder at Gulls Nest, a mystery set in the 50s featuring a former nun who leaves her convent after 30 years to figure out what happened to her missing friend, a former novitiate.

Susan: My brain is very smooth this week, so I’m basically switching between D-Genesis  ( A | BN | K | AB ) (researcher accidentally kills a dungeon boss in a car accident and unlocks the stat window, decides to research how levelling up works) and The Other World’s Books Depend on the Bean Counter ( A | BN | K | AB ) (very fun; an accountant gets summoned to a magical world, attempts to solve the national budget, and falls into a very respectful fuck or die).

Sarah: Update: I’ve now started the audiobook of Platform Decay, narrated by Kevin R. Free, AND am still reading Murder at Gull’s Nest.

Whatcha reading? Tell us in the comments!

The Marriage Method

The Academy always comes first . . . which makes marriage to its most formidable adversary an exceedingly inconvenient arrangement.

Well removed from London’s more curious eyes, the Benevolent Academy for the Betterment of Young Ladies strives toward one clandestine goal: to distract, disrupt, and discredit men in power who would seek to harm the advancement of women—by appropriate means, of course.

When intrepid newspaper editor Miles Quincy starts to question the school’s intentions, the Academy appoints Penelope “Nell” Trewlove, one of their brightest graduates, to put this nuisance to rest. An easy enough mission, she supposes. Or it would be, if Miles wasn’t so fascinating—too fascinating to resist—and if Nell’s visit to London didn’t perfectly coincide with the murder of one of Miles’s reporters.

When the inexorable claws of fate trap Nell and Miles in a compromising situation, they agree to an arrangement that will save their reputations while enabling them to investigate the story that led to a man’s death, as well as the surprising chemistry between them . . .

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The Heart Principle

RECOMMENDED: The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang is $1.99! This is the third book in The Kiss Quotient trilogy, which I loved. I liked this one a lot. However, I’m not sure if or when I’ll do a re-read as it deals heavily with caring for a parent, especially one with which the heroine has really complicated dynamics. I had to do that over the pandemic and it was a very personal and emotional read for me.

A woman struggling with burnout learns to embrace the unexpected—and the man she enlists to help her—in this heartfelt new romance by USA Today bestselling author Helen Hoang.

When violinist Anna Sun accidentally achieves career success with a viral YouTube video, she finds herself incapacitated and burned out from her attempts to replicate that moment. And when her longtime boyfriend announces he wants an open relationship before making a final commitment, a hurt and angry Anna decides that if he wants an open relationship, then she does, too. Translation: She’s going to embark on a string of one-night stands. The more unacceptable the men, the better.

That’s where tattooed, motorcycle-riding Quan Diep comes in. Their first attempt at a one-night stand fails, as does their second, and their third, because being with Quan is more than sex—he accepts Anna on an unconditional level that she has just started to understand herself. However, when tragedy strikes Anna’s family she takes on a role that she is ill-suited for, until the burden of expectations threatens to destroy her. Anna and Quan have to fight for their chance at love, but to do that, they also have to fight for themselves.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

A Demon’s Guide to Wooing a Witch

A Demon’s Guide to Wooing a Witch by Sarah Hawley is $1.99! This is book two in the Glimmer Falls series, which didn’t work for me as I prefer my paranormal romances to be a little darker. The heroine is a gym rat witch and the hero is a snarky demon with amnesia.

Calladia Cunnington curses the day she met Astaroth the demon, but when he shows up memoryless, why does she find him so helpless . . . and sort of hot?

Calladia Cunnington knows she’s rough around the edges, despite being the heir to one of small-town Glimmer Falls’ founding witch families. While her gym obsession is a great outlet for her anxieties and anger, her hot temper still gets the best of her and manifests in bar brawls. When Calladia saves someone from a demon attack one night, though, she’s happy to put her magic and rage to good use . . . until she realizes the man she saved is none other than Astaroth, the ruthless demon who orchestrated a soul bargain on her best friend.

Astaroth is a legendary soul bargainer and one of the nine members of the demon high council—except he can’t remember any of this. Suffering from amnesia after being banished to the mortal plane, Astaroth doesn’t know why a demon named Moloch is after him, nor why the muscular, angry, hot-in-a-terrifying-way witch who saved him hates him so much.

Unable to leave anyone in such a vulnerable state—even the most despicable demon—Calladia grudgingly decides to help him. (Besides, punching an amnesiac would be in poor taste.) The two set out on an uneasy road trip to find the witch who might be able to restore Astaroth’s memory so they can learn how to defeat Moloch. Calladia vows that once Astaroth is cured, she’ll kick his ass, but the more time she spends with the snarky yet utterly charming demon, the more she realizes she likes this new, improved Astaroth . . . and maybe she doesn’t want him to recover his memories, after all.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Her Time Traveling Duke

Her Time Traveling Duke by Bryn Donovan is $1.99! This is a standalone romance with a duke who travels to modern times. Have any of you read this one?

Magic meets science and sunshine meets grumpy when a love spell whisks a Regency-era duke to modern times.

Rose Novak, a free-spirited museum employee who dabbles in magic, has had her share of disappointments. So when she tries a little spell for a romance with an “old-fashioned gentleman,” she doesn’t really expect it to work…especially literally. And yet, the duke from a painting she admired at the museum is now standing in her apartment, demanding to know who abducted him.

A man of science and truth, Henry Leighton-Lyons, the Duke of Beresford, has searched tirelessly for a way to turn back time and be with his late wife again. Instead, just as he’s about to pose for his portrait, he’s ripped centuries forward by a feckless, scantily dressed—and utterly bewitching—woman who believes in nonsense like magical crystals and astrology.

Unable to immediately reverse her spell, Rose vows to help Henry return to his own century, even though disguises and high jinks are required to get their hands on an enchanted astrolabe and master the art of time travel. But it’s hard not to fall for the irritable yet honorable duke.

Little does she know that he’s starting to did a reckless love spell get it right, after all?

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

I have been Chroniquelly Onlinne since forever, but there were some mysteries that to me seemed like magic.

Like Photoshop.

To be honest, Photoshop remains a bit of a mystery to me, and the skills I do have with it probably amount to .00001% of its capabilities.

So when I first saw this video ages and ages ago (2001??! 25 years?) I could not believe how road signs and awnings and whatnot were all altered and looked so real. Ah, what an innocent time for me.

Even a random Ziggy sighting? This is quite a time capsule.

I hope your weekend contain all your base that belong to you.

We’ve got questions from readers and listeners, and some behind the scenes details about how Nalini organizes the massive worlds she’s built in her series.

Plus she teases some major surprises for the next Psy-Changeling book, and what she’s working on right now.

You can find the video of this episode on our YouTube channel if you’d like to watch us!

Read the transcript →

Here are the books we discuss in this podcast:

You can find Nalini Singh at her website, NaliniSingh.com, and on Instagram and Facebook as AuthorNaliniSingh.

Do not miss the chance to sign up for her newsletter!

We also mentioned:

• Nalini’s virtual event with the Ashland Public Library on Wednesday, June 10!
• The next Psy-Changeling book is Cold Redemption, coming out in December 1, 2026.
• Nalini’s prior episodes:
  • 676. Exploring Atonement Sky with Nalini Singh
  • 489. Archangel’s Light with Nalini Singh
  • 409. Alpha Night and Alpha Women With Nalini Singh
  • 361. Playing Verbal Poker with Nalini Singh
  • 356. Our Book Club Discussion of Rebel Hard by Nalini Singh
  • 24. An Interview with Nalini Singh

This episode is brought to you by Hatch.

You know how you finish a romantasy and you just need the next thing immediately? Hatch made that thing.

It’s called Ophelia — an original audio drama, inspired by Hamlet, where Ophelia finally gets to be the main character.

Forbidden magic, a crumbling kingdom, a slow-burn love triangle with a prince and his very guarded, very intriguing, best friend. The kind of love triangle where you will absolutely pick a side and you will not be quiet about it.

Book one of the three part series is now available for free wherever you stream, with new chapters dropping every Tuesday. For books 2 and 3, check out hatch.co/Ophelia.

Stay tuned to the end of the episode for a sample of Ophelia, brought to you by Hatch.co! 

If you like the podcast, you can subscribe to our feed, or find us at iTunes. You can also find us on Stitcher, and Spotify, too. We also have a cool page for the podcast on iTunes.

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What did you think of today's episode? Got ideas? Suggestions? You can talk to us on the blog entries for the podcast or talk to us on Facebook if that's where you hang out online. You can email us at sbjpodcast@gmail.com or you can call and leave us a message at our Google voice number: 201-371-3272. Please don't forget to give us a name and where you're calling from so we can work your message into an upcoming podcast.

Thanks for listening!

Podcast Sponsor

Support for this episode comes from The Undergrads: Student Union by #1 New York Times-bestselling author Julie Murphy–a sexy new rom com about a college marriage of convenience that goes way beyond chemistry 101…

Clover Rowan Walsh knows The Plan:

1. Get a full ride to her dream school, Wexley University.
2. Conquer the school of business.
3. Say goodbye to the paycheck-to-paycheck life she and her mom have known for years.

There’s just one hiccup. With the first semester rapidly approaching, Clover learns her housing grant has fallen through. But a loophole presents itself: Married couples can live in the dorms for the price of one student. Clover is willing to sacrifice the sanctity of marriage…even if it means proposing to the one person she swore she’d never speak to again: Bennett Andrew Graves.

Bennett can’t refuse Clover, the girl he grew up with (and whom he completely devastated years ago). He owes her this, but that doesn’t change the fact that these two can barely carry on a conversation without getting at each other’s throats. Forget about sharing a dorm—much less one bed.

But as Clover and Bennett hide the true nature of their marriage, they find that playing house isn’t all that bad–especially with certain marital benefits in the mix. In fact, Clover and Bennett are soon forgetting the most important part of their fake marriage of convenience . . . that it’s supposed to be fake.

With tropes like forced proximity and friends to enemies to lovers, you won’t want to miss this first book in a new trilogy of romance novels that follows a group of girls as they navigate love, friendship, and new adulthood.

Ali Hazelwood calls The Undergrads: Student Union “one addictively swoony book.”

Available now wherever books are sold!

Remember to subscribe to our podcast feed, find us on iTunes or on Stitcher.

Duchess Material

When her student goes missing, an independent bluestocking must seek the help of the arrogant duke who spurned her in this sizzling tale of romance and intrigue, perfect for fans of Netflix’s Bridgerton series

Phoebe Atkinson is what society might call unconventional. Instead of marrying well like other women born to wealth, she chose to be a schoolteacher. Not to mention she lives in a leaky flat in an unfashionable part of town rather than stay in her parents’ mansion. But when her most promising pupil goes missing and the police ignore her, she has only one beg her sister’s best friend, the powerful Duke of Ellis, for help. If sending him a message from the police station doesn’t get his attention, nothing will.

The last thing William Margrave ever expected was to inherit a dukedom. But now that he has it, he’s determined to act the part perfectly—and that includes marrying the perfect duchess. A bluestocking Bohemian schoolteacher is decidedly not duchess material. But he can’t resist her plea for help regarding her missing student. As they fall further into the mystery, William discovers two that he never really got over his childhood crush on Phoebe, and he doesn’t really want to.

A “rising historical romance star.” –Booklist, starred review

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

Done and Dusted

Done and Dusted by Lyla Sage is $1.99! This is book one in the Rebel Blue Ranch. Here are my very brief thoughts from Goodreads:

Cute with very good spicy scenes and a lovely primary friendship between women.

I don’t love a “best friend’s sister” trope, though, and I feel like that element and Emmy’s residual trauma wrapped up so quickly.

She’s off-limits, but he’s never been good at following the rules.

For the first time in her life, Clementine “Emmy” Ryder has no idea what she’s doing. She’s accomplished everything on her to-do list. She left her small hometown of Meadowlark, Wyoming; went to college; and made a career for herself by doing her favorite riding horses. But after an accident makes it impossible for her to get back into the saddle, she has no choice but to return to the hometown she always wanted to escape.

Luke Brooks is Meadowlark’s most notorious bad boy, bar owner, and bachelor. He’s also the unofficial fifth member of the Ryder family. As Emmy’s older brother’s best friend, Luke spent most of his childhood antagonizing her. It’s been years since he’s seen her, but when she walks into his bar and back into his life, he can’t take his eyes off her. Despite his better judgment, he wants to do a whole lot more than just look at her.

Emmy’s got too much on her mind to think about romance. And Luke knows he should stay away from his best friend’s younger sister. But what if Luke is just what Emmy needs to get her spark back? Or will they both go up in flames?

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Witches Get Stuff Done

Witches Get Stuff Done by Molly Harper is $1.99! This is a small town paranormal romance between a witch and a librarian. Sounds a little too twee for me, but it could be right up your alley.

Juggling newfound witchy powers, a house full of ghosts, and verbal battles with the handsome local librarian is almost too much for a new witch to manage. A new witch with a coven, however, can get so much more done…

From the moment Riley Everett set foot in Starfall Point, magic bubbled inside of her. But with only her late aunt’s journals and a cantankerous live-in ghost butler to instruct her on all things witchy—including her newly inherited Victorian haunted house—Riley seeks out a coven for sisterhood and support. The last person she expects to be drawn to is the town’s frustrating, yet ridiculously attractive head librarian.

Edison Held knows almost everything there is to know about Starfall Point, but Shaddow House was always off-limits, thanks to its elusive owner. If he can convince the new owner, Riley, to let him take a peek inside, there’s so much he could learn. But as he gets closer to Riley, he’s fascinated by her dazzling wit and fiery spirit. Edison will do whatever he can to help Riley keep her family legacy alive, especially if it means spending more time with the captivating new witch in town.

Bestselling author Molly Harper wields a magical pen in this hilarious, delightful witchy romcom perfect for readers of The Ex Hex and Payback’s a Witch.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Red Mars

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson is $1.99! I mentioned this on Get Rec’d because Kelly Faircloth pitched this book as:

What if your midlife crisis was moving to Mars? An underappreciated facet of this novel is that everyone is middle-aged and a hot mess, emotionally.

Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel • Discover the novel that launched one of science fiction’s most beloved, acclaimed, and awarded trilogies: Kim Stanley Robinson’s masterly near-future chronicle of interplanetary colonization.
 
“A staggering book . . . the best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written.”—Arthur C. Clarke

For centuries, the barren, desolate landscape of the red planet has beckoned to humankind. Now a group of one hundred colonists begins a mission whose ultimate goal is to transform Mars into a more Earthlike planet. They will place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light onto its surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. And massive tunnels drilled into the mantle will create stupendous vents of hot gases. But despite these ambitious goals, there are some who would fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

My experience with The Bachelor franchise is as follows:

I edit the recaps from Elyse, which she’s been faithfully recording since 2017. That’s it.

Now, I have watched two (2) episodes to fill in for Elyse, prompting the following questions:

1. Why are they four hours long?
2. Why are they on two subsequent nights sometimes?
3. Why on sequential nights or on four hour nights are they stretching out TWENTY FIVE TOTAL MINUTES OF FOOTAGE into an interminable length of time?
4. Will my acute secondhand embarrassment survive this? (Answer: Barely)

I’m familiar enough through cultural osmosis and editorial work that I can converse about the show, but what I really love is listening to other people who are fans talk about why they love it – and what makes them want to scream.

So when I received an email from Ilana Masad and Stevie K. Seibert Desjarlais introducing this anthology, I was EXTREMELY ON BOARD. Why?

As they put it:

In 2020, we realized that although the fandom of The Bachelor is the entire reason the show–with its historically retrograde politics and lack of diversity–continues to exist, relatively little had been written about or by the fandom. We set about correcting that and filling that gap and the result is an anthology with nearly 30 contributors–longtime fans, cultural critics, and fellow Bachelor Nation members–writing about the messy, emotional, funny, and sometimes frustrating reasons why viewers keep showing up season after season.

Like the romance genre, romance reality TV (like a lot of media consumed primarily by women) is stereotypically considered to be trashy and/or for airheads–technically, there’s nothing wrong with trash TV or airheads. However, the fact is that millions of people engage with reality TV in meaningful and diverse ways. The Bachelor franchise, as one of the longest-running dating shows, has amassed fans from all corners of life who hold a plethora of identities and have a multitude of reasons for watching the show….

The Bachelor franchise’s fandom is a rich space for discourse on culture, race, sexuality, gender, human behavior, and community.

FINE. JUST EMAIL ME WITH A PILE OF MY CATNIP WHY DON’T YOU.

My episode with Ilana and Stevie is up now, but I also wanted to review this anthology to make sure you (hi!) know about it.

Holy crap is it good.

The essays are like scalpels equipped with magnifying glasses, dissecting and examining at The Bachelor franchise from every possible angle. Each contributor brought a fascinating perspective and pretty much made my brain explode as if someone put Pop Rocks on hot popcorn and drank a Diet Coke spiked with Mentos. It was a mess – a very enjoyable mess. I took so many notes. 

Amanda and I have discussed on the podcast the challenge of reviewing an anthology, and this is no exception. I want to mention every essay, and share what I learned from each contributor, but that would be overkill and honestly, what I want to talk about may be very different from what you discover in this collection. These are writers who discuss media literacy skill development, tensions about gender, race, and hierarchical expectations, and beauty standards.

And much like romance lately, The Bachelor franchise and discussions thereof have become very mainstream, especially with the cross-pollination of other reality tv programs and the disastrous casting of Taylor Frankie Paul. This collection does for The Bachelor what we try to do with romance: explore and explain its importance as a cultural entity, while also offering criticism and condemnation when warranted.

Jeanna Kadlec’s essay “White Picket Cage,” which I am still thinking about, examines the evangelical Christian coded messages within the show:

Watching that first night of limousine arrivals and catfighting over cocktails, I had a strange out-of-body sort of experience, like I was watching an alternative version of my former life. I was stunned at how Christian-coded the show was in its treatment of gender roles and relationship expectations, and how hypocritical; for example, the show is belligerently insistent on ignoring the fact that contestants are in an open relationship with the lead while professing traditional values. (emphasis mine)

Apparently I’m one of the last people to recognize the polyamorous construction of the show; Ilana Masad emailed me a link to her March 2018 article in Playboy Magazine titled, “How ‘The Bachelor’ Franchise Celebrates Polyamory.” (Web archive link)

Kadlec’s essay also locates the growing popularity of the show within the evolving political and historical contexts of the time, and writes,

“I’ve come to treat The Bachelor properties as a temperature check of where the white evangelical movement is, and I take heart that, while reactionary Trump policies are flourishing, this show and others like it are dying.”

This concept of a ‘temperature check’ is echoed in other essays; in our interview, Ilana Masad said that for her, the show is a measure of “where heterosexuality is at in this country.”

Other essays I am still thinking about include Alana Hope Levinson’s “Pick Me (Or Don’t)” in which she explores the idea of being ‘chosen’ (or, conversely, not chosen to leave the show), and what that means for some of the contestants in terms of fame, wealth, status, and relative security. One unspoken “reason” for many contestants’ participation is upward social and economic mobility, especially for the women. Some former contestants have married professional football players, billionaire pastors, or other wealthy individuals:

“…it pays to not get picked; these rejected pick-mes actually ended up winning in the long run. There’s a lesson in there somewhere—that being picked by a shitty guy is actually worse for you.”

I love how this echoes Elyse’s repeated assertion that none of the contestants actually want to win The Bachelor; they want to last long enough to go on a cool vacation paid for by the network, and establish enough of a following on IG that they can parlay their Bachelor experience into an influencer career.

Prior podcast guest Sophie Vershbow’s essay, “Falling Out of Love with The Bachelor” focuses on her own relationship with the show, and with on the online community of Bachelor Nation that would watch and tweet about the show while it aired, an example of a live monoculture community event, now increasingly rare.

She parallels her own evolving perspective about relationships against the stubbornly unchanging format of the show, chronicling the growth of her own perspective from “I wanted a man to choose me so my life could begin, even if that man was so obviously the wrong one” to realizing that The Bachelor is “…a franchise peddling the uninvestigated marriage fantasy, often among people too young to have fully-formed prefrontal cortexes.”

“These are people who want to get married, not who want to marry each other as an expression of their love, which is the only kind of marriage I now have any desire for.

I only got to see how full my adult life could be without a romantic partner because circumstance gave me the time and space needed to build a happy life on my own, and I’m often left thinking of all the women whose circumstances turned those bad relationships into worse marriages that stole far more than four years from them. The women who go on The Bachelor shows seem primed for the latter….”

There are so many compelling essays and perspectives in this anthology, and I am still pondering most of them. Like, all the time.

If you’ve ever thought about how The Bachelor continues to have a strange hold on American culture after over 25 years, you’ll find really smart people talking about many, if not all, of the fascinating reasons why.

Ed.note: thank you!

While I am a reviewer on the site, I’m also a reader of the site. I recently started working my way through Sherry Thomas’s historical romance back catalogue. I listened to the Lady Sherlock stories on audio a couple years back and really enjoyed them, so I was curious about her more romance-forward books.

I started with The Luckiest Lady in London. Once I finished the book, I searched the site for past reviews to see what had been said about it as I thought about my own experience with this romance. There were five reviews! Three RITA reader reviews, one guest review and one by Carrie. A wealth of thoughts for me to devour!

Four of the five reviews gave the book an A while Carrie landed on a C+.

Shari, one of the reviewers, made a salient point here: “Sometimes a book can go from just good to fantastic because of the particular state of mind you are in when you read it”. Good reviews are able to push past that simple ‘love’ into the nitty gritty of ‘why’, and our reviewers certainly do that.

Before I dive into a review of the literature, dearests, the blurb:

Felix Rivendale, the Marquess of Wrenworth, is The Ideal Gentleman, a man all men want to be and all women want to possess. Felix himself almost believes this golden image. But underneath is a damaged soul soothed only by public adulation.

Louisa Cantwell needs to marry well to support her sisters. She does not, however, want Lord Wrenworth—though he seems inexplicably interested in her. She mistrusts his outward perfection and the praise he garners everywhere he goes.But when he is the only man to propose at the end of the London season, she reluctantly accepts.

Louisa does not understand her husband’s mysterious purposes, but she cannot deny the pleasure her body takes in his touch. Nor can she deny the pull this magnetic man exerts upon her. But does she dare to fall in love with a man so full of dark secrets, anyone of which could devastate her, if she were to get any closer?

Although be warned, Pam G alerted that “prospective readers will need to ignore the cover copy as it is kind of misleading if not downright deceitful.” A personal bug bear of mine – misleading cover copy.

But on to the meat of the reviews …

Several reviews commended the writing (brava, I agree!) Patricia described herself as a “sucker for a really well phrased sentence, a bon mot of a sentence” and Thomas delivers that in spades. Pam G agreed, saying ‘There is just something so clean, controlled, and precise in her use of language. Even her prepositions are perfect. That is not to imply that her writing is stodgy or overly formal. Her descriptions are sumptuous without being wordy, she uses imagery and metaphor like a poet, and her work never seems to contain any repetitive verbal junk.”

The premise is pretty simple and straightforward. Pam G described the story as “deceptively simple”. Lulu concurred saying, “Sherry Thomas is a master at creating beautiful things from simple ingredients. She begins with rather ordinary themes and characters, in this case a rich man meeting and marrying a poor girl … Thomas then adds great dialogue and human frailty, and creates entrancing stories that are completely addictive.” Note, the great dialogue came up in all five reviews!

For Lulu, as Louisa and Felix interact with one another, “so commences an interchange of forward and feint, nuance and coercion. Thomas builds the relationship between Louisa and Felix brilliantly. They are loveable, imperfect creatures brought to life through their actions.”

Lulu’s claim of ‘lovability’ is one of the hot topics in these reviews. I was asking myself a similar question: are both characters lovable? Louisa, certainly. But Felix?

For Carrie and Pam G, Felix was a sticking point. Pam G said, “At more than one point the reader will want to reach into the pages and beat the crap out of Felix. After the initial piece of cruelty, the relationship recovers in a superficial manner, but, later on, another time bomb explodes and demolishes the fragile understanding they manage to reconstruct” For Carrie, she “felt distressed, and frustrated and worried, and never did believe the happy ending.” And it all hinged on Felix’s cruelty: “Felix is so horrified at the realization that he has fallen in love with Louisa that he gives her all kinds of confusing signals and at one moment treats her with absolutely unforgivable emotional cruelty. I’m not past that moment, as a reader. I don’t believe Louisa is past it, as a character. I think Sherry Thomas made Louisa get past it.”

Why were our other reviewers able to get past Felix’s cruelty while for Carrie it was a dealbreaker? Carrie herself has the answer, “I have no personal trigger greater than the idea of someone treating another person with great warmth and then suddenly, with no warning or explanation, becoming utterly cold, while maintaining that nothing is wrong.”

This is by no means an exhaustive comparison of the reviews of this story. A lot more could be said about just the dialogue!

But that isn’t my purpose. I wanted to look for similarities between the reviews and where there were differences, I wanted to see how they were handled by the reviewer. I wanted to see where I fell on the spectrum of these reviews. Certainly there had been moments for me where Felix’s cruelty made me flinch IRL. It’s unspeakable, some of it.

Like the reviewers, I was enamoured with the dialogue and the description and the writing in general. I adored Louisa and even liked Felix. Partly because I so WANTED to see the good in Felix and WANTED to like him, I was able to put to one side those flashes of cruelty and instead focus on the rest of his character. I think in the end, I land at about a B+.

Reading and comparing reviews for a book I’ve just finished was a good reminder of the importance of ‘why’ in a review: why did the reader assign that grade? Why did they like or dislike certain elements? It’s fair and well to love or hate a book, but if I don’t know why the reader felt that way, I have no idea whether the book will be a good fit for me or not.

I’m often frustrated by superficial reviews that don’t articulate the reasoning for an opinion about a book, and the exercise of looking in the SBTB archives brought home for me just how important sites like these and the longer narrative reviews are for readers like me who need more in-depth reviews. I want nuance. I want discernment. I want REASONS.

TL;DR Long may sites like this one live on to serve readers thoughtful, considered reviews.

What about you? What do you want in a review? A lot of detail? A short summary? Are you as obsessed with REASONS for opinions as I am? What reviews do you gravitate toward?

The reviews for The Luckiest Lady in London by Sherry Thomas

Patricia M’s review

Lulu’s review

Pam G’s review

Shari’s review

Carrie’s review 

Amanda and I have discussed many times on the RT Rewind podcast episodes that reviewing a book that’s deep into an existing series is a fraught proposition. The potential for spoilers is significant, and the question of audience can be a puzzler, too. Am I writing for new readers who might enter the series with this book (TL;DR, don’t do that, you deserve the whole Murderbot series!) or am I addressing folks who already love the series and want to know how this book fits into the larger story arc?

In this case, it’s the latter. I know that most of y’all know about the series, and that it is one of my major comfort re-reads, especially for middle-of-the-night anxiety insomnia.

So here are a few non-spoilery things to know about the latest book in one of my favorite series.

It starts out slow and confusing.

The opening dropped me into the middle of a moderately tense moment with no understanding of what is happening, why, and where they are aside from ‘space, somewhere? What’s a torus?’ The development is deliberately slow in the initial chapters.

The cover copy is deliriously sparse, too:

Everyone’s favorite lethal SecUnit is back in the next installment of Martha Wells’ bestselling and award-winning Murderbot Diaries series.

Having someone else support your bad decision feels kind of good.

After volunteering to run a rescue mission, Murderbot realizes that it will have to spend significant time with a bunch of humans it doesn’t know.

Including human children. Ugh.

This may well call for… eye contact!

(Emotion check: Oh, for f—)

The sparseness works because the most you need to know is there’s a rescue mission, and Murderbot is really pissed off about it.

The story trajectory follows a slow acceleration until the plot is racing, kind of like a mammoth jet on a runway.

I was worried I didn’t like this book until I got to about chapter 5 or 6!

Me?! Not like a Murderbot book? WHAT THE HELL. IS MY BRAIN BROKEN.

Nah, the story is a bit of a tease, dropping pieces until I saw the full picture and had an “OH SHIT” realization of the stakes and the operation in progress. Then I couldn’t stop reading.

There are little moments that I had to re-read because I needed to experience their emotional significance a second (or third) time.

In fact, I started the book over the minute I finished it and have now read it twice. Well, no, twice and a half because I re-read even more while writing this review.

One of my favorite aspects to Murderbot’s character is how it remains surprised at its own capacity for generosity, observation, care, and creative lateral thinking, and gets SO ANNOYED when it notices said capacities. There’s a lot of that disgruntled kindness, and I definitely re-read those sections on repeat to savor my emotional reaction.

I highlighted a lot, too, and I will share one tiny clip:

(It’s weird how meal and sleep breaks fix a lot of the annoying things about humans.) (Maybe that’s how you restart an organic brain?)

Excuse me. I didn’t need to be called out like that.

Not spoiling is difficult.

The major themes of this story are how comprehensively a corporation with no fucks and much money can interfere with the lives of determined humans who are committed to helping one another get to safety:

…if they aren’t bothering to hide anymore, it basically meant whoever was in charge didn’t care about any kind of plausible deniability….

Sounds familiar, huh? As usual with this series, the exploration of the decay caused by unfettered power, wealth, and aggression is relevant and chilling and familiar. I think that’s part of what makes this series so reassuring for me: the only option is to keep trying to help produce a better outcome for everyone.

And the more Murderbot becomes emotionally stable and enters fair relationships with humans, other constructs, and bots, the more it learns how much power and leverage it has to better assist in creating those outcomes.

The other theme is about trust, and I won’t say more because there are way too many components to the theme and I really don’t want to do anything but encourage you to read through the first slightly confusing chapters to the point where the plot takes off.

I hope you enjoy the flight as much, if not more, than I did.

Problematic Summer Romance

What is wrong meets what feels right in this romance set in Italy by the New York Times bestselling author of Deep End.

Maya Killgore is twenty-three and still in the process of figuring out her life.

Conor Harkness is thirty-eight, and Maya cannot stop thinking about him.

It’s such a cliché, it almost makes her heart implode: older man and younger woman; successful biotech guy and struggling grad student; brother’s best friend and the girl he never even knew existed. As Conor loves to remind her, the power dynamic is too imbalanced. Any relationship between them would be problematic in too many ways to count, and Maya should just get over him. After all, he has made it clear that he wants her gone from his life.

But not everything is as it seems—and clichés sometimes become plot twists.

When Maya’s brother decides to get married in Taormina, she and Conor end up stuck together in a romantic Sicilian villa for over a week. There, on the beautiful Ionian coast, between ancient ruins, delicious foods, and natural caves, Maya realizes that Conor might be hiding something from her. And as the destination wedding begins to erupt out of control, she decides that a summer fling might be just what she needs—even if it’s a problematic one.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

Atmosphere

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid is $2.99! This is set during the 1980s space shuttle program. I’m not sure if you’d classify Reid’s books as romances or more fiction with romantic subplots. Sound off in the comments!

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easygoing even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warmhearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.

As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.

Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, it all changes in an instant.

Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, creating complex protagonists, and telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love—this time among the stars.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

A Feather So Black

A Feather So Black by Lyra Selene is $1.99! This is a Kindle Daily Deal and this fantasy novel was mentioned in a previous Hide Your Wallet. Love the cover on this one!

Set in a world of perilous magic and moonlit forests, this seductive romantic fantasy tells the story of a defiant changeling, her cursed sister, and the dangerous fae lord she must defeat to save her family.

In a kingdom where magic has been lost, Fia is a rare changeling, left behind by the wicked Fair Folk when they stole the High Queen’s daughter and retreated behind the locked gates of Tír na nÓg.

Most despise Fia’s fae blood. But the queen raises her as a daughter and trains her to be a spy. Meanwhile, the real princess Eala is bound to Tír na nÓg, cursed to become a swan by day and only returning to her true form at night.

When a hidden gate to the realm is discovered, Fia is tasked by the queen to retrieve the princess and break her curse. But she doesn’t go alone: with her is prince Rogan, Fia’s dearest childhood friend—and Eala’s betrothed.

As they journey through the forests of the Folk, where magic winds through the roots of the trees and beauty can be a deadly illusion, Fia’s mission is complicated by her feelings for the prince…and her unexpected attraction to the dark-hearted fae lord holding Eala captive. Irian might be more monster than man, but he seems to understand Fia in a way no one ever has.

Soon, Fia begins to question the truth of her mission. But time is running out to break her sister’s curse. And unraveling the secrets of the past might destroy everything she has come to love.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Under Her Skin

Under Her Skin by Adriana Anders is $2.99 and a KDD! This is a dark contemporary romance and was Anders’ debut. Be sure to check Goodreads or another resource for all of the triggers – the heroine has experienced some harrowing abuse.

Battered by a life determined to tear him down, this quiet ex-con’s scarred hands may be the gentlest touch she’ll ever know.

…if only life were a fairy tale where Beauty was allowed to keep her Beast

Ivan thought the world was through giving him second chances. Who’d want a rough ex-con with a savior complex and a bad habit of bringing home helpless strays? Everyone in Blackwood, Virginia knew he wasn’t good enough for the fine things in life; they knew he was too damaged to save. He just needed to keep his head down, work himself to the bone, and pretend he was content with the lot he was given.

Until she came into his life. Until she changed everything.

Until he realized he would do anything, fight anyone, tear the world apart if it meant saving her.

Add to Goodreads To-Read List →

You can find ordering info for this book here.

 

 

 

Have I complained yet about how busy this month is for me? I’m already looking forward to Memorial Day weekend. A friend and I are doing a staycation to just read and relax, and then my brother and sister-in-law visit!

Keeping my fingers crossed for a very chill summer.

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The Women’s Game Fest is running now through Halloween on Itchio.

As an aside, I totally understand those that may not want to support the site.  Almost a year ago, Itchio started deindexing NSFW/adult games, which we discussed on the site, I think in a Wednesday Links post. I’m kind of unsure what became of that (did it fully stick? did they restructure how they handle adult games?) and couldn’t find a clear answer while googling.

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I’ll be in conversation with author Mary Berman at Lovestruck Books on May 20th! We’ll be discussing her debut Until Death, which is Gothic horror meets wedding planning. Come say hey!

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From EC Spurlock: This site is fascinating – it shows where your current location originally was in terms of the ancestral continent Pangea, as well as what your original altitude was. TIL Atlanta was originally 15 feet below sea level!

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Lastly, did you hear there’s going to be a Spaceballs sequel? Only a teaser, so far, has been shared.

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Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!