Brontë Lovers by Angela Pearse

 

I grabbed BRONTE LOVERS during a Stuff Your Kindle Day event. I am obsessed with the Brontes and even have a series of videos on TikTok about random Charlotte Bronte trivia and reviews of Jane Eyre retellings. The heroine of BRONTE LOVERS, Lizzy, is dating a guy named Klint, who is doing his thesis on 19th century steam engines. She wants to do hers on the Brontes but isn't fully sure where to begin, although being in the town of Haworth, where the Brontes grew up and were inspired to write their books, is sparking her imagination.

When she meets Dain, who works at the parsonage, she's immediately attracted to him. Not only does he dress up in period attire to do tours, he's just as obsessed with the Brontes as she is, and he has the emotional warmth and availability that her boyfriend lacks. Klint also is moody and temperamental and he has a parasomnia where he actually bites(!!) her in his sleep, causing bruises that she can't explain away. Even though she's still invested in her relationship with Klint, she can't resist the attraction she has for Dain. DRAMA ENSUES!

So I didn't realize when I picked this up that this was a cheating romance or I probably wouldn't have read it, since that's not really my thing. I loved the Bronte trivia, though, and I think the author did a great job of showing why Klint and Lizzy were wrong with each other without resorting to extremes. What made the book a little bit of a hard sell for me was the pseudo paranormal elements and the fact that the heroine freaks out over the hero being bisexual and says some really biphobic things. Up until that point, I kind of got why she emotionally cheated on Klint, and could see why she and Dain worked together, but the biphobia just felt like a total breach of his trust. I do think she felt remorseful about her reaction, and the HEA works... but it was hard to come back from that.

Overall, though, I really enjoyed BRONTE LOVERS and can't wait to read more from this author. There's a very 2000s-era chicklit vibe to this book that made me feel nostalgic, and she totally brought the small English village setting to life. It's hard not to love that, flaws and all.

3.5 to 4 out of 5 stars

Hemlock Island by Kelley Armstrong

 

Oh my gosh, that was actually so amazing??? I don't understand why this has such low ratings because it is literally everything I want out of gothic horror. In fact, it actually reminded me a lot of T. Kingfisher's horror novels, in the sense that no matter how chilling or gory it got, there was something almost cozy about it because of how likable the heroine was, and how great (most of) the side characters were.

The premise is pretty simple. Laney got Hemlock House after her divorce from her rich CEO husband, Kit. She adores it and looks forward to living there whenever she can, but in order to keep it, she has to rent it out to people who are often assholes. Lately, said renters have been even more assholish than usual: someone is leaving behind creepy symbols and sick pranks. Her most recent batch of renters fled after demanding their deposit back when they found blood.

Laney goes down to the island to find out what's going on, accompanied by her niece/ward, Madison, and finds that she's been beaten to the punch by her ex-husband, his sister, Jayla, and two other people from her past: Sadie and Garrett. They agree to spend the night on the island but things quickly become tense, because all of them have reasons for growing distant from one another. And when creepy things start happening and escape becomes impossible, Laney realizes that maybe the "pranks" weren't pranks after all.

Someone might be sending her a message.

I loved this so much. I literally had no idea what was going on and even though the ending was a little cheesy, I still loved it because it worked for the story and definitely passed the vibe check. Also, as with other works I've read by this author, she's effortlessly diverse. Heroine has anxiety (never related to a character as much as I did when she said that having people in her house made her want to reach for the weed gummies). Her ex husband and ex-best friend, Jayla, are Black. Trigger warning for references to SA and pretty descriptive gore, but apart from that, there's nothing too horrific (I'm a wuss lol).

Can't wait to read more from this author. This book slapped.

4.5 out of 5 stars

Five Broken Blades by Mai Corland

 

FIVE BROKEN BLADES was the cheesy fantasy-fest that was exactly what I needed to get out of my reading slump and big heaping thanks to my friend, who bought me the "special edition" version with the sprayed edges. I feel like the best way to describe this book is that it's Asian-inspired fantasy with a fast-paced heist vibe reminiscent of One Piece or Blue Eye Samurai. In the author's note, it kind of sounded like the author wrote this book as a way of reconnecting with her Korean heritage, and I thought that was neat.

This book had SO MANY POVs, though. It took me forever to get used to all the head-hopping, especially since the chapters were so short. There's Royo, an assassin for hire (he kind of reminded me of Roronoa Zoro); Sora, a female assassin whose body is made out of poison (think Poison Ivy crossed with Cat Woman); Aeri, a ditzy thief with a dark secret (I was kind of picturing her as Saint Tail but older); Mikail, a jaded assassin; Euyn, a spoiled and indolent younger prince now on the run for his life; and Ty, a spymaster and son of a count.

The world building was pretty easy to understand and there were some nice adornments that made it feel unique, although I sometimes found myself wishing for more details. Part of my frustration with the short chapters and multi-POV format is that it made the book feel very choppy at times, and the author seemed to feel the need to end each chapter with a cliffhanger that sometimes felt a little bit like getting slapped in the face. Especially if we were at a part of the book that I thought was interesting and wanted to hear more about. The premise was great though-- who doesn't want to hear about a bunch of down-on-their-luck iconoclasts who want to hunt down and kill a god king? Especially when their summons come semi-anonymously, locked-room-mystery style. You know there's sus-nanigans afoot.

I think if you go into this book expecting really detailed world-building, you might be disappointed. It's also not as spicy or romance-heavy as FOURTH WING, despite being from the same publisher. Most of the sex scenes in here were vague or fade-to-black. I think it would be appropriate for older teens and would probably classify this as new adult, since the characters were in their early twenties. This is costume fantasy, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, as long as you're just looking for something escapist and not something semi-literary to be snobby about. And there were some great twists at the end! So I would definitely consider reading more from this author.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Sanctuary of the Shadow by Aurora Ascher

 

I almost preordered this as soon as they dropped the cover and the gorgeous sprayed edges, because I loved THE FOURTH WING, and I figured that they had gone out and acquired a bunch of really similar stories to chase the smashing success of the dragon romantasy series. Plus, I saw some early reviews comparing this to THE NIGHT CIRCUS meets Avatar: The Last Airbender and someone (a liar, as it turns out) put it on a list of WUTHERING HEIGHTS retellings. So the marketing was marketing, and I was ready to be obsessed...

...Except, for a hyped-up fantasy romance from a BIG publisher with a successful release, this had incredibly mixed advance reviews.

So I didn't preorder and basically was only tangentially aware of this book's existence as a pretty cover in my orbit housing a book that I might or might not want to read-- until one of my friends bought it for me as an early birthday present. Now that I've read it, I'm both surprised and also not surprised that it did so badly with its audience, because this feels like it's trying very hard to emulate Sarah J. Maas: it's got a bat boy shadow daddy, everyone purrs with pleasure and rolls their shoulders, and the smut smuts like a 1980s bodice-ripper that's got Fabio on the cover. SJM might not be my taste, but she's very popular, and I'm kind of surprised her fans weren't more into this, especially the HOUSE OF BREATH AND BLOOD people.

I personally felt like the world-building was way too shallow. I didn't understand how these various Elementals were really tied to their elements and why they looked the way they did, and I felt like the big war between the feuding queens was seriously underplayed, especially since it's partially responsible for the main conflict of the book. Every time there is a big conflict, it's resolved almost instantly, which doesn't feel interesting and didn't leave me feeling very invested. Also, the heroine tells the hero she loves him after five days, two of which he is in a cage, barely talking and suffering from amnesia, and I think the remaining three, they're just banging nonstop (over three fairly long chapters). I was kind of surprised, since it didn't seem like they had much chemistry and I seem to recall that his soul was compared to a child's because it was so pure and empty, so that was weird and a little uncomfy. I feel like the author was trying to subvert the trope of experienced man/naive and childlike woman by reversing the genders, and in that sense, I get what she was trying to do, but I don't like that trope between an EM and N&CW, and I didn't like it with an EW and a N&CM.

Overall, this kind of ended up being a disappointment for me, which makes me sad because I really wanted to love it and be this book's champion, because I often feel like when a book has a Goodreads average rating this low, that usually means they weren't able to find their target audience. That still might be the case, because, like I said, this really had strong HOUSE OF BREATH AND BLOOD vibes, if it were written as one of those fantasy Harlequins, so I think if you read it as a cheesy romance with the understanding that the world-building and fantasy elements are mostly just window dressing, you'll probably like it more than people who picked it up expecting another FOURTH WING.

2 out of 5 stars

Once Upon a Broken Heart by Stephanie Garber

 

DNF @ p.108

I loved CARAVAL and liked LEGENDARY, so even though I ended up not liking FINALE, I was still excited about the spinoff series about Jacks, Once Upon a Broken Heart. The beginning starts off super promising, with Evangeline making a deal with a Fate to stop her stepsister from marrying the man she thinks she's in love with-- only for it to turn into a Curse of the Monkey's Paw sort of situation where sometimes the resolution is worse than the curse.

Here's the thing about Stephanie Garber: her books feel like the stories we all wrote in our bedrooms when we were sixteen. There will be people with names like Morning Glory and Neptunia, and kisses will taste like vanilla ice cream and all the men will smell like candles. I say this without any malice in my heart because I do think there is a certain charm to this style of writing-- one of my guilty pleasure reads is ENCHANTED PARADISE by Johanna Hailey, which is basically a Sarah J. Maas book if it were written in the 1980s. It worked for me in CARAVAL because I think there was a better danger to whimsy ratio, but here, everything just felt a little too fluffy and frothy for me to take seriously. I got really bored and kept putting it down. I don't think I'll pick it up again.

2 to 2.5 out of 5 stars

The Wicked and the Willing by Lianyu Tan

 

One totally valid criticism about both dark romance and erotic horror is that they tend to be heteronormative, and finding a sapphic variant of either can be a chore. Therefore, I was super excited to find out that THE WICKED AND THE WILLING is a sapphic work of erotic vampire horror set in Singapore during the roaring twenties.

Our cast of characters are Gean Choo, a young and desperate girl who needs employment to pay off her father's debts; Mrs. Edevane, a British colonialist reaping the benefits of her beauty and privilege while feasting upon the locals; and Po Lam, Mrs. Edevane's gender queer estate manager, who she bought as a slave when she was a child. There are other players but these are the three main ones, who revolve around each other's orbits like toxic little doomed stars.

I really appreciated how vampirism was an allegory for colonialism (and I confirmed this with the author-- it IS canon). Mrs. Edevane literally consumes the locals, and she is blind to their plight or their culture, exotifying her Asian lovers, indulging in casual racism when it suits her, and devouring the people whenever it suits her. She is a destructive force, using a foreign country as her refuge and playground. But, as a woman, she is also a victim to a man who hunts her footsteps. Which shows how someone can be an oppressor but still a victim of infrastructural prejudice, even within a colonial structure. The complexity and nuances were brilliantly done.

This is a very violent book-- sexually, emotionally, and physically-- and I had a hard time reading some of the graphic rapes and torture scenes. It starts out so slow and unsettlingly, but by the end of the book, it's a blood bath. None of the characters are particularly likable and I don't think they're supposed to be, although I loved Po Lam's character and I really empathized with Gean Choo's desperation as the motivator for so many of her actions. Even some of the almost humorous scenes, like Gean Choo fleeing a nest of East Asian folkloric monsters when her period comes during a party, are couched in dread and horror. This is like intellectual grindhouse, which I feel is probably the vibe the author was going for, and I think extreme horror fans will probably like it, especially if they have been hungering for queer and diverse entries in the canon that aren't Eric Larocca.

Interestingly, this story has a "choose your own ending" ending. There are three endings: two are in this book and apparently there's a third ending you can get by signing up for their mailing list. I'm not sure how I feel about this-- I read both endings and I think the author made both work, and suit the characters, but it also felt like a lack of commitment to the story. THE WICKED AND THE WILLING has a very strong beginning and I loved the portrayal of vampires and the gays-behaving-badly themes of the work, as well as the anti-colonialist narrative, but the ending petered out a bit and became far too violent for my own personal tastes, and even though I appreciated the uniqueness of this ending, I didn't really like it. I did ultimately like the book, though, and would definitely read more from this author.

3 out of 5 stars

After the Shut Up Ring by Cate C. Wells

 

I'm kind of shocked that this has such mixed reviews because I thought it was fantastic. This is the first time I can remember seeing a romance heroine with herpes represented in a book, and I thought the way the author handled her insecurities, without coming across as insensitive or judgemental in the metatext, was really well done. The research seemed accurate too (although I'm not a doctor, so, like, don't quote me on that). I was just really impressed with this narrative choice.

Angie breaks up with her boyfriend-turned-fiance AT THEIR WEDDING after he reads aloud a series of incredibly humiliating vows that belittle and berate her in front of all their family and friends. Brandon, her childhood friend who has been in love with her for all of these years, witnesses this and it makes him very angry-- but part of him is also pleased, because this is his chance to get Angie for himself. But he doesn't know that Angie has an STD and she's terrified to tell him, even though she knows that it isn't really her fault.

I loved so much about this book. Nobody writes strong simp daddies like Cate C. Wells. I love all of her heroes, they're so dreamy. And the fact that he's been in love with her for years? LOVE TO SEE IT. Angie was also a great character. We love to see a single mom who would do anything for her kids, and I thought her character arc of recovering from her would-be husband's emotional abuse was really done. This isn't usually my go-to genre of romance but I love the way she does characters and how they feel so real, like people I could meet right on the street.

Still an autobuy author, for sure!

4 out of 5 stars