Want to read: Overdue by Amanda Oliver 📚

If you make a purchase through a link in this post, I may earn a commission.

Do you wish Dan Brown books were sexy and full of pop culture references? Do you like your religious artifact stories with comedy and kissing? Have I got the books for you!

Gwenda Bond’s books are always The Most Fun and her madcap fantasy romance duology is no exception.

First up, NOT YOUR AVERAGE HOT GUY:

Callie is a recentish college grad with no particular direction in life but a great love of books, learning, and creepy religious lore. She also works at her mom’s escape room. When Callie designs an immersive culty room and puts a book in it that is ACTUALLY an arcane artifact, cultists come to claim it and try to use it to release a demon on earth to bring about the end times. But instead they summon Luke, the super sexy prince of Hell. Wackiness ensues as Callie and Luke must team up to find the Holy Lance (that’s the Spear of Destiny for you The Librarian fans) and keep it from the cultists (who don’t actually know that Luke isn’t the demon they were trying to summon). To do so, they travel through painful demon magic, bopping around the world in a way that would make an Indiana Jones map look like Charlie Kelly’s conspiracy board:

Because you know how romance works, you know that they figure it out and get a Happy For Now. It’s important that it’s a HFN because a Happily Ever After wouldn’t leave room for the sequel:

THE DATE FROM HELL

Callie and Luke are happily dating now and they have an amazing date planned. But they also have a bit of a revolution planned: Callie wants to petition Lucifer to reconsider the damnation of people like Agnes, a 12-year-old girl who really probably should not have been sent to hell and certainly isn’t an adult by modern standards. Lucifer agrees to a meeting — on the day Callie and Luke are scheduled to have their big date. Which also happens to be the same day Callie is supposed to be helping her mom with a big escape room event to raise the money to make repairs after the mess she and Luke got into in NOT YOUR AVERAGE HOT GUY. Lucifer says that Callie and Luke have 72 hours to prove that they can redeem someone who deserves to be released from hell. The person he chooses is Sean, a lost-Hemsworth-brother-type/international art thief who oh, by the way, is a Grail seeker. More wacky hijinks ensue, more traveling by map, and more Arthuriana than you can shake Excalibur at. (Excalibur isn’t in the book to my recollection, by the way.) I briefly found myself thinking for a moment, “How wild is all this Arthuriana just happening in Callie’s real life?” before remembering that OH YEAH HER BOYFRIEND IS THE PRINCE OF HELL.

Because it’s a romance, it ends with a tidy Happily Ever After (leaving Gwenda free to work on other romances like MR. & MRS. WITCH). Callie figures a lot of stuff out, so does Luke, and they get to be together, yay. (And if you consider that a spoiler, romance probably isn’t the genre for you.)

What I loved

So many things! But here’s a partial list:

• The meticulous attention to detail with respect to all the mystical artifacts
• Callie’s supreme nerdiness
• Detailed Escape Room stuff
• Pop culture references aplenty (Wondering if you share Callie’s opinion on Season 4 of Veronica Mars? Read THE DATE FROM HELL to find out!)
• The love that radiates from Luke whenever Callie Callies all over the place - seriously, I haven’t read this much warmth in a romance novel since I don’t know when (because warmth is different than heat)
• Lilith. I just love her, okay?
• Porsoth, a polite Owl Pig Demon who is a bit stuffy but can get scary when necessary
• The affection Callie has from her mom, her brother Jared, and her bff Mag (who uses they/them pronouns and nobody ever makes it a thing)
• What Gwenda does with Arthur and Guinevere, can’t say more or it’ll spoil you but big ONCE AND FUTURE graphic novel vibes

I can’t think of them all. If this isn’t a ringing endorsement, I don’t know what is: My whole family is going through a rough time right now and it makes it hard for me to immerse myself in a book. I would often read a chunk of THE DATE FROM HELL and then step away from it for a few days, but I ALWAYS CAME BACK. There are a lot of non-mandatory things I’m abandoning in life right now, but this book kept me returning.

What I need to warn you about

I really can’t think of much. I guess if you don’t like people being playful in stories about holy artifacts maybe skip these?

What I wanted more of

I can’t think of anything here either. Everything was exactly what it needed to be.

Who should read this

People who like Indiana Jones AND Sabrina (the Harrison Ford version). People who don’t know what to do with themselves and want to see somebody who also doesn’t know what to do with themself succeed at stuff. People who want a romance that is hot but not explicit. People who wished their were more badasses who were badass for reasons other than their ability to engage in combat (Callie is a badass and no one will convince me otherwise). People who need more fun in their lives.

Highly recommend.

Book: Not Your Average Hot Guy
Author: Gwenda Bond
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication Date: October 5, 2021
Pages: 320
Age Range: Adult
Source of Book: Library Book

Book: The Date from Hell
Author: Gwenda Bond
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication Date: April 5, 2022
Pages: 336
Age Range: Adult
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley

Finished reading: The Date from Hell by Gwenda Bond 📚

Review coming soon!

Want to read: The Wastewater Gardener: Preserving the Planet One Flush at a Time by Mark Nelson PhD 📚

Want to read: Water 4.0 by David Sedlak 📚

Finished reading: “So What Are You Going to Do with That?” by Susan Basalla 📚

🔖📚 Read After the Green Ribbon (Catapult) by A. E. Osworth

The Green Ribbon is a favorite of mine. I love Osworth’s discussion of how it marks gender and symbolizes vulnerability. I want a world where masculinity embraces vulnerability.

Finished reading: Winterkeep by Kristin Cashore 📚

Cashore’s GRACELING was the book that fixed me after THE NAME OF THE WIND broke me (because I love it so). This is the 4th book in the Graceling Realm series and while it took me a while to get into, I ended up loving it.

🔖📚 Read “The Invisible Kingdom” Shines a Light on Women’s Chronic Pain.

Another great interview with Meghan O’Rourke. Here are some quotes that stood out for me this time:

I used to say to one of my doctors that I didn’t care that I was in pain. The thing that undid me was the brain fog and the fatigue, because they subsumed my entire being. They washed away any effort of will that I might have. And so they made it impossible for me to write.

This is so true for me. I can tolerate a lot of physical pain. I didn’t know how much until with health coaching, hard work, and a good doctor I started to feel better. But I couldn’t, still can’t, push through fatigue and brain fog.

[With invisible illness] there’s no one coming to your bedside, there’s no meal chain organized.

I didn’t think about this just now but I have absolutely seen this play out with my mom. She’s been dealing with autoimmune disease for about 30 years. I don’t think she or my dad felt it was reasonable to ask for help with that, and so often when anyone in our family has talked about it, we’ve been met with advice about going gluten-free, doing acupuncture, meditating… These are all good and valuable things, but the contrast with the outpouring of questions about how people could help after her leukemia diagnosis is striking. Instead of “Oh you should try this” it’s “What can I do for you?” I suspect there were days when my mom was at her worst with Hashimoto’s that she was as low energy and could use as much help as she needs now.

🔖📚 Read Back Draft: Meghan O’Rourke.

O’Rourke’s making the rounds to promote her new book, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness which I want to read so much. (I’ve got it on hold from the library.)

There are a couple of key quotes from the interview I want to share:

when I was at my sickest, I couldn’t write anything much longer than a sentence. Not a paragraph, and definitely not a chapter.

On my worst days, I feel this way. The difference between days when my brain is zipping along in clarity and wheh it’s slogging through fog is hard to communicate. It is vast.

I was talking about this with a student the other day, and she made a great point. Writers are always being told that you need to be at your desk every day, that you have to push through. And for writers like herself — she has several chronic illnesses — that’s just not feasible. It’s an unreasonable expectation, and an unhealthy one.

Yes! I sometimes scold myself for not writing every day but this is important to remember. It’s also important to capitalize on the good days when we have them.

I wanted the book to be readable for people like me. When you suffer from brain fog, it’s tough to sustain your attention for so long. That’s also why I wanted the chapters to be relatively short and digestible.

This is awesome. I turn to essays when my brain is foggy but I want to read. I’m going to think more about what accessible literature means with respect to cognitive capacity.