When Leigh Bardugo’s first novel from a new series dropped in 2015 and started getting all kinds of raves, I knew I’d have to go back post haste to the ever-growing TBR and pick up the first series, which I had been intending to read for some time. The Grisha Trilogy imagines a fantasy world based out of a Russian analog country, where those possessed of magical abilities are called the Grisha, and anyone who is not Grisha is probably either a peasant or a […]
My first wish for 2016 is for Bettie Sharpe to publish more stories.
I was hooked about two pages into Ember, a romance retelling of “Cinderella” featuring a heroine who is a (mostly) benevolent witch and a prince who is literally cursed by Charm — everyone who meets him loves him, finds him salivatingly handsome, and can’t help but do what he wants. I knew immediately I would want to read everything by this author, which, I’ll mention now, is devastatingly little that is available: three novellas and one short story on Amazon and none published after 2012. […]
Good sex, meh story, sloppy feminism
Over at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, I recently read an interesting discussion about female sexuality and dating, and how well that is represented in the current climate of contemporary romance. One of the points of view discussed was that despite the explosion in popularity of online dating and, in particular, apps like Tinder that facilitate no-strings hookups, that scene is seldom portrayed in the genre. All too often, the heroine’s sex life before the hero is glossed over, minimized, or even laughably dismisssed, with authors […]
A worthwhile down-payment on a series that I am sure will improve.
3.5 stars, rounded up out of loyalty Something felt a bit *off* about Once Upon a Marquess: possibly, it is bogged down by setting the stage for the entire Worth Saga. Also possibly, and related, it was just kind of ambitious and didn’t quite pull everything together in a convincing way by the end. To wit: Treason! Judith Worth’s father and brother are guilty of it! And the evidence thereof was compiled by none other than our hero, Christian Trent, the Marquess of Ashford! Kittens! […]
A novella I didn’t quite warm up to.
What we have here, I think, is partly a novella problem, and partly a fanservice problem. Tessa Dare has written fabulous novellas — my favorites being The Scandalous, Dissolute, No-Good Mr. Wright and Beauty and the Blacksmith — but I so frequently find myself underwhelmed by novellas in general that I can’t help but believe they’re just tricky by nature. They’re so short that character development must be sacrificed, and whatever obstacle standing in the way of the characters’ HEA needs to be overcome quickly […]
The girl who has survived her creator
The Girl in the Spider’s Web was okay. I didn’t have any glaring problems with it; nor was I especially blown away by it. Lagercrantz does seem to have done a good enough job capturing the spirit of the original trilogy, and his background as a crime reporter certainly prepares him for suspenseful crime thrillers — particularly ones where one of the protagonists is himself a journalist. Here’s the Goodreads summary: “Late one night, Blomkvist receives a phone call from a source claiming to have […]
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