All Folked Up
All Folked Up is the third story in Penny Reid’s Good Folk series, which is a spinoff of her highly successful Winston Brothers series. The current series features secondary characters that were introduced with the Winstons and live in the fictional town of Green Valley, Tennessee. Each story is written as a standalone but there is definitely more of an emotional kick if you’re familiar with everyone and you’re a fan of the earlier books. I’ve been waiting for years (since 2016 anyway) for Isaac Sylvester, shunned outsider and sister of Jennifer Sylvester (Beard Science, married to Cletus Winston) to be redeemed and to reunite with his sister and to find his own happy ending. At last it’s arrived! And just a note, if you haven’t read the other books, there may be spoilers in this review.
Isaac Sylvester is back in Green Valley, though no one in town knows why. Several years earlier, he joined the Iron Wraiths motorcycle club – to the dismay of his sister Jennifer – and cut off all contact with his family. What they hadn’t known (incoming spoiler) is that he was working undercover for the FBI and that he’d joined the club to protect Jennifer and their mother. With any luck he’ll be able to leave town again soon, though he hopes to be able to let Jennifer know that he’s not the bad guy she thinks he is before he leaves.
Hannah Townsen is a local dancer who took to stripping to pay off her mother’s medical debts. It’s her last day on the floor as she’s taking over the strip joint business (the Pink Pony) from her former boss, Hank. While doing lap dances and stripping, the performers often talk about their stand-in, the person they think of while they’re working to make the task more pleasurable. For Hannah, that man has always been Isaac Sylvester. So when Isaac shows up at the club to speak with her in private, Hannah thinks he’s there for a lap dance as a parting gift from her co-workers (who all know that he’s her stand-in). And she gives in to temptation, going a little further than she ever would have done with a client, and definitely going against the rules. But Isaac stops her suddenly and hauls her out of the club to his car with threats of arrest for prostitution if she doesn’t help him with his current case. Isaac isn’t there as her fantasy after all. He’s there on his last case for the FBI, looking to take down his target, who happens to be one of Hannah’s longtime regular customers, a man involved in human trafficking.
Hannah is mortified. The worst misunderstanding of her life, and it happened with Isaac. Her crush has been swiftly doused with ice water. If she could, she’d erase what happened and never think of Isaac again. But Isaac wants this case solved so he can retire in peace, which means he’s going to stick around. And even worse Hannah’s going to have to pretend that he’s her new boyfriend so the staff at the club don’t get suspicious about the new hire. And she’ll have to postpome her ‘retirement’ for another month to draw in Isaac’s target. Having Isaac around every day sorely tests Hannah’s nerves and patience, at least at the beginning, but as they begin to really know each other their feelings thaw. And when Isaac finds out that he’s Hannah’s stand-in, it puts their initial private encounter into a new light. Now Isaac can’t stop thinking of Hannah and wondering – would she be willing to give him another chance?
Oh, Penny! Thank you for bringing Isaac back into the fold! It was cathartic to witness Isaac go from a hardened criminal (or so we all thought) to a man just trying to make the best of a bad situation and giving up his normal life to protect others. While he and Hannah admittedly get off on the wrong foot, it’s enjoyable (with a bit of schadenfreude) to watch him realize how wrong his assumptions of Hannah are as he gets to know her. He gives good grovel, repeatedly trying to help her in her daily job as the business manager and making it up to her for his misconceptions. While a strip club is not usually the setting for a romance novel, it takes pride of place here, a reminder that while we can be quick to judge someone, every person there has a story, a reason for doing what they do, and Penny gives them the humanity that is often lacking.
As Hannah and Isaac start to form a real relationship, Isaac is also in the process of mending fences with his sister Jennifer. At first, he just parks outside of her bakery, watching her go to work, but he eventually makes the move to talk to her. Their reconciliation is slow and sometimes painful, but lovely to witness. The other Winstons also make appearances, including some second generation children, which for long-time readers is icing on the cake.
All Folked Up is sexy and emotional and sweet, and does justice to Isaac’s redemption arc. I’m not sure if this is the end of the series, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see more come out of Green Valley.
Recent Comments
I had sworn off Penny Reid because she could do with a ruthless editor but this was in KU and the premise looked interesting so I gave it a go. I enjoyed the first part of the book but I was never really convinced about Isaac and Hannah falling in love. Fellow stripper Tina Patterson has to do an awful lot of fairy godmothering to get these two together. And as always Cletus steals every scene he’s in. Overall it was OK but still too long.
I think it definitely appeals to long time fans who wanted to find out what happened to Isaac. It’s interesting to see that she’ll be republishing the Winston Brothers in print with Sourcebooks!
The last of those books just came out five years ago–it feels like publishers are recycling old books with such frequency these days. It makes me sad for those authors trying to write new works.
Many of the big publishers are picking up successful self-published books and reissuing them or issuing them as paperbacks (as Bloom is doing). So the authors do all the hard work of marketing their work and getting it out there and the publishers come along and scoop up the paperback rights without needing to spend a lot of money on marketing. Obviously there’s something in it for those authors and I imagine the increased visibility is great for them. But it just shows that nobody in trad. publishing is willing to take chances on something new.
Personally, I’m excited to see some of these self-pubbed authors getting picked up by publishers willing to put them into paperback format and make them more widely available. It means that libraries will have an opportunity to stock them and people who do not have the resources to own/manage an ebook reader will have access to them. I look at the romance shelves in bookstores and do not see many of the great authors I love (and who are frequently recommended here at AAR) who just are not in stores because they are “self-published.”
That’s the kind of thing I meant when I said that the authors get something out of it. But I can’t help being cynical and feeling like the big publishers are swooping in once all the real work is done. If the books are that good, they should’ve picked them up in the first place and nurtured those authors.
Oh, I definitely agree!
That’s fair.
But Penny Reid’s books have been in bookstores and on Amazon big time. I guess I don’t think of her as a struggling indie author.
She isn’t – not now. But the publishers don’t pick up struggling indie authors, do they? They wait until someone like Reid (Zapata, Liese and others) has worked hard to build an audience and then ride on their coat-tails because they don’t have to make such a big investment.
Again, I agree. Self-publishing is a double-edged sword: it has given people an opportunity to be published even when the established publishers have rejected their work. It has also left new authors with no choice but to give away their work for free – at least in the short term – while they try to build an audience. But I’d love to see Reid and Gregory Ashe and CS Poe and Josh Lanyon and Michelle Diener and JL Merrow and so many others on store shelves next to all the authors I’ve never heard of and/or the ones I whose work I don’t really care for. It was such a thrill the first time I saw Alexis Hall’s and KJ Charles’ first titles on store shelves.
Agreed.
As someone with a background in publishing and marketing, I completely understand why an author might want to find a traditional publisher for their work, even with the way publishing appears to be going now (nobody is really investing for the long term and instead, they’re just chasing whatever trend BookTok tells them to).
As a consumer, I honestly don’t care about physical books – I can’t read them anymore and even if I could, UK bookshops (in my experience) don’t tend to stock much romance.
I agree, especially about libraries getting access to more indie author books. I don’t buy physical books anymore, but I use my library. I try to make sure they don’t have something before getting it in ebook. Interestingly, there are some authors they tend to have as many or more on audio (usually through Hoopla) than in print or e-format (also through Hoopla). At least in the queer romances I tend to read. For example, my library system has 59 audiobooks by N.R. Walker, but none in print or ebook formats. Josh Lanyon has 27 ebook and 47 audiobooks. Kiera Andrews, Hailey Turner, Jay Hogan only have audiobooks. Others have a mix, but are still heavy on audiobooks.
This is all great for me since I prefer to listen, but I still find it interesting. FYI, I don’t get ebooks from the library because I can no longer download them to my Kindle, and I can’t read for very long on backlit screens, like my iPad Mini. That makes me sad because I was absolutely get them through the library otherwise.
Last I checked, my (as in the county) library had one book by KJ Charles ( a mid-series one) and one – maybe two? – by Alexis Hall. And that was it for m/m romance, so the library isn’t an option for me.
Penny Reid is always terrific!