Blood Like Magic is filled with richly-plotted worldbuilding and complex magical hierarchies. Overall it’s quite a satisfying and engrossing read, with a few minor issues that kept it from getting a full-on A grade. It’s a full-tabled banquet loaded with treats – most of them of a rather chilling flavor. This book opens with our…
Mariana Zapata is very well reviewed here, so I was excited to try her new book, All Rhodes Lead Here. But with its clumsy heroine, rude but ultimately gold-hearted hero, and bland first person narrator, this book reads as run-of-the-mill YA, with only the swearing and sex scenes making it an adult novel. Aurora de…
Sisters in Arms follows the lives and loves of two fictional characters in the Six Triple Eight, the real all-Black battalion of the Women’s Army Corps during WWII. Telling the story of our heroines from when they first receive the letters inviting them to join the unit until war’s end, this tale reveals all the…
The Reading List is a sweet, simple and tender story about the power words have to heal and the joys that books can bring. It’s a bit cheesy, but it’s just the right sort of cheese – like a toasty sandwich filled with melting gouda. Mukesh is a widower of two years, still in mourning…
Faking Reality is a sprightly and fun romance about a girl trying to avoid love – and the way love finds her anyway. It feels very young though, so older readers might not enjoy it, especially because the characters feel a little underwritten, and the way the heroine’s parents react to the machinations of others…
Andie J. Christopher’s Hot Under His Collar begins with event planner Sasha Finerghty in St. Bartholemew’s Catholic Church, making sure the wedding she’s coordinated is proceeding as planned, and mooning over Father Patrick Dooley. Sasha is the disappointing daughter in her family because she has yet to get married and start a family of her…
My feelings in regard to Happy Endings are a bit complicated. I really liked the feisty heroine and the more responsible hero. But some readers are going to find his choices a bit irritating. Reader discretion should be applied, but I still had fun with the book’s humorous, spunky spirit. Trixie Nguyen is a sales…
How to Find a Princess is one of Alyssa Cole’s more lighthearted books – but it’s also the weakest romance I’ve read from her so far. I don’t think it’s bad by any stretch of the imagination – its warmth earns a B and a recommendation from me – but pacing problems keep this one…
Last Guard is the fifth book in the Psy-Changeling Trinity series and the twentieth book overall in the Psy-Changeling universe. Due to the sequential, highly connected nature of the two series, this book contains spoilers for the previous novels. This review will, consequently, also contain spoilers. Payal Rao is in a desperate situation. Her father,…
While periodicals like Salon and The Atlantic sounded the death knell on chick lit back in the 2010s, I’ve been noticing a mild resurgence of the genre via reprints and new releases. The Rules of Arrangement is one of the latter, a modernized iteration of the classic formula of a young woman juggling familial expectations,…
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