Books
Finished reading: You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian 📚
Full review coming soon but y’all, this is so great. It’s out May 7. Olivia Waite says if you only read one romance this spring, it should be this one, and she’s right.
Finished reading: The Witch Queen of Halloween by Kresley Cole 📚
This is a super fun romance novella, inspired by horror movies. Might become an annual Halloween re-read for me.
Finished reading: The Player by Kresley Cole 📚
A con artist falling in love with her tech billionaire mark? Sign me up.
🔖📚📝 Read Mothering and Writing Are Both Undervalued Labor, so How Do Women Do Both? .
An excellent excerpt from the book The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity.
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“…publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.” Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
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“One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore.” Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Finished reading: The Master by Kresley Cole 📚
Finished reading: The Professional by Kresley Cole 📚
I finished this in just a couple of days. Definitely read the info on the author’s website before picking this one up.
Finished reading: Munro by Kresley Cole 📚
The heroine in this one is a time-traveling Transylvanian knife-throwing carnie so, you know, she’s awesome.
Finished reading: Wicked Abyss by Kresley Cole 📚
This is a banger of a Beauty and the Beast retelling, with an ending I radically prefer to the Disney version. Highly recommend.
Finished reading: Shadow’s Seduction by Kresley Cole 📚
It took me a long time to get into this one and it’s not as strong as a lot of the other Immortals After Dark books, but I still ended up liking it.
Finished reading: Shadow’s Claim by Kresley Cole 📚
I really liked this one, the way the main characters interact with each other is both sweet and hot. I’ve only got 4 books left before I’m caught up on the Immortals After Dark series.
Finished reading: Sweet Ruin by Kresley Cole 📚
“She’d thought there was no greater connection than destiny decreeing them joined. But there was—the choice they’d made to love each other.”
Loved it.
Finished reading: Dark Skye by Kresley Cole 📚
Other people seem to hate this one but I like it pretty well. Lanthe and Thronos’s story is epic, spanning years and continents. Lives ruined. Blood shed. Worth a try if you’re making your way through Immortals After Dark.
📚 When I’m catching up on a long-running series, I sometimes forget that there are people who, for example, couldn’t read 19 Immortals After Dark books in a row and, in fact, had to wait a year or more for the next one to come out, and that I, too, can wait.
Finished reading: Suddenly You by Lisa Kleypas 📚
A lovely historical about an author and a publisher who fall in lust and then love. Her body is described as voluptuous, bountiful, abundant, generous. It’s clear that these are attractive things for her to be. Quite spicy. Content warning: miscarriage.
Finished reading: The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang 📚
A lovely romance novel with an autistic heroine. I highlighted a lot.
Finished reading: Matilda by Roald Dahl 📚
We went to see Matilda the Musical and I loved it. I’d watched the Netflix movie of the musical and years ago the movie with Mara Wilson, but I’d never actually read the book. It’s a lovely book but I think the musical is even better.
Finished reading: MacRieve by Kresley Cole 📚
This one is beautifully done as always. There’s a traumatic backstory of childhood sexual abuse for the hero and the way it impacts his relationship with the protagonist broke my heart. But of course there’s a happy ending because romance. ♥️
Finished reading: Lothaire by Kresley Cole 📚
Of course if you’re reading Immortals After Dark you must read this one. You simply must.
📚 Baby’s First Author Event
Let me be clear, when I say “baby,” I mean “big kid.” We took M to his first author event a couple weeks ago. It was awesome. Adam Gidwitz has a new book out. It’s called Max in the House of Spies. It’s about a German Jewish kid whose parents send him to London in 1939 and he falls in with British spies while he’s there. Also a dybbuk lives on one of his shoulders and a kobold lives on the other.
We first encountered Adam Gidwitz because of his amazing podcast, Grim, Grimmer, Grimmest. (M’s favorite episode is Hans, My Hedgehog.) Gidwitz is a former teacher who now works as a storyteller and author. He’s written the A Tale Dark and Grimm series and the book The Inquisitor’s Tale, and he is the co-author of the Unicorn Rescue Society series. In that series, kids travel around the world saving different cryptids. For each book, Gidwitz teams up with an author who is a member of the culture that the kids are visiting. They’re super fun and a great way to learn about folklore around the world.
Gidwitz talked about a family friend who had been one of the children sent away from Germany ahead of World War II and how the story of that friend inspired him to write this book. He said he felt it was an important book to write now because he thinks it’s an important time to look at Germany before the Nazis came to power and ask, what is it that makes the people of a country vote for leadership they know is wrong? What makes them willing to sacrifice justice for the promise of security? I think he’s absolutely right that these are key questions for our time.
Gidwitz shared the story of how he became a writer: he wanted to teach his students about ancient Egypt and couldn’t find a book to go with the lessons, so he started to write one. He’d write a chapter, share it with his students, and then they’d say, “Then what happened?” He’d tell them, “I don’t know!” and go home to write the next chapter. With a lot of positive reinforcement from his students, Gidwitz decided to quit teaching and write full-time. He didn’t get an agent with the Egyptian book. (He called it a “burner book,” explaining that many authors have at least one book they write and learn a lot from but don’t get to publish.) But he did when he started digging into Grimm’s fairytales.
Gidwitz is super entertaining and a great storyteller and doesn’t look anything like I imagined him. (I imagined him looking like Joshua Malina’s character, Jeremy, from Sports Night. I have no idea why.)
After he talked about his books and answered questions for an hour, there was a signing. When we got up there, he told M., “You’re a lot younger than most of the kids here and I wasn’t sure how you would do while I was talking, but you did great.” (M. is average height but tiny with giant eyes so it’s easy to mistake him for younger than he is.)
Finished reading: Preferential Treatment by Heather Guerre 📚
Read this billionaire romance because it’s the next Fated Mates read along. It’s very well done & deflates the billionaire fantasy without taking all of the fun out of it. Definitely check the content warnings before reading.
Finished reading: Dreams of a Dark Warrior by Kresley Cole 📚
This one took me a little while to get into but once I was in, I couldn’t put it down.
Finished reading: Demon From the Dark by Kresley Cole 📚
I really enjoyed this one and tore through it. Give me a sad, traumatized couple of people who find a new family in each other and I’m happy. 😍
Finished reading: Pleasure of a Dark Prince by Kresley Cole 📚
I really liked, maybe even loved this one. The back half is all adventure, super cinematic.