The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal Narrator: Mary Robinette Kowal Series: Lady Astronaut #1 Published by Audible Studios on 7/03/2018 Genres: Alt-History, Science Fiction Format: Audiobook Source: my personal collection Purchase: Amazon | Bookshop | Barnes & Noble | Audible Add to Goodreads Also in this series: The Calculating… Read more »
Wooing the Witch Queen Series: Queens of Villainy #1 Published by Bramble on 2/18/2025 Genres: Fantasy, Fantasy Romance Pages: 304 Format: Kindle or ebook Source: the publisher Purchase: Amazon | Bookshop | Barnes & Noble | Audible | Chirp Add to Goodreads In a Gaslamp-lit world where hags and ogres… Read more »
It took me a little while to get into On the Edge, but once I did, I was totally hooked. This paranormal romance has great worldbuilding, compelling characters, external threats and internal conflicts that each inform and heighten the other, and a romantic pairing that I was initially dubious about and ended up loving.
I read Mind Games twice in 2024 and once (already) in 2025, which tells you something about how good it is; the book has already joined the ranks of my favorite non-fantasy Nora Roberts novels. Written with Roberts’s usual skill, Mind Games pits Thea Fox, a young woman with the sight, against the psychopath who killed her parents. . .
The Wishing Game reminds me so much of the books and series I loved as a child: the ones that made me fall in love with reading, the ones I escaped into over and over. It has the whimsy and wordplay of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (one of the author’s inspirations) without the nastiness that seemed both funny and disturbing to me even as a child. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Most Wonderful Crime Of the Year by Ally Carter Published by Avon Genres: Holiday, Cozy Mystery, Contemporary Romance Pages: 303 Format: Kindle or ebook Source: purchased Purchase: Amazon | Bookshop | Audible | Chirp Add to Goodreads Knives Out gets a holiday rom-com twist in this rivals-to-lovers romance-mystery from… Read more »
I love history, especially British and European history, but the Vikings and their era have never been one of my main areas of interest. I knew comparatively little of the history of Viking Norway, Denmark, Greenland, and (most importantly for this book) Iceland. But Nancy Marie Brown’s Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them held my interest from start to finish.
In Dusk, Night, Dawn, Lamott writes of giving and finding love, hope, courage, and forgiveness, even when we ourselves, like those we want to love and forgive, are messy, imperfect human beings. Written in 2020, during the pandemic, and published in 2021, the book touches on Lamott’s response to the many terrible things occurring in the world: climate change, wildfires, the pandemic, and the rising tide of authoritarianism
The third Penhallow brother meets his match in The Wedding Witch! A delightfully funny, slightly spooky witchy romance, perfect for the season.
The third book in Mercedes Lackey’s Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms series, Fortune’s Fool is an enjoyable if eclectic remix of a number of fairy tales. Lackey takes a wide assortment of elements drawn from Russian, eastern and northern European, Japanese, and Middle Eastern folk and fairy tales, and mixes them up, higgledy-piggledy… and it works surprisingly well.
