Category: Book Reviews

Wooing the Witch Queen, by Stephanie Burgis

Wooing the Witch Queen was an absolute delight, from its sweet, sensitive, traumatized cinnamon-roll hero to its introverted, reclusive, but decidedly not evil heroine.

On the Edge, by Ilona Andrews

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.

Mind Games, by Nora Roberts

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, by Meg Shaffer

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

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 »

Ivory Vikings, by Nancy Marie Brown (audiobook review)

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.

Dusk, Night, Dawn, by Anne Lamott

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 Wedding Witch, by Erin Sterling

The third Penhallow brother meets his match in The Wedding Witch! A delightfully funny, slightly spooky witchy romance, perfect for the season.

Treasures from the Hoard: Fortune’s Fool by Mercedes Lackey

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.

Without a Summer, by Mary Robinette Kowal

Mary Robinette Kowal makes good use of the historical “year without a summer” in the third book of her Glamourist Histories. As Britain remains locked in winter’s grip, Jane and her husband Vincent are in London to work on a glamour commission for Lord Stratton, an Irish peer. Hearing that her sister Melody is melancholic and realizing there are few marriageable men near home, the Vincents invite Melody to stay with them. Melody’s growing affection for Stratton’s son, Mr. O’Brien, is complicated by Jane’s suspicions of the young man, and by the public’s growing belief that coldmongers are responsible for the unseasonable weather. Meanwhile, Jane and Vincent must contend with his father’s relentless cruelty and ambition, as well as a shadowy plot that threatens O’Brien, the young coldmongers, Jane and Vincent’s very lives, and even the British government itself.