I have been looking forward to KING OF THE RISING since I first finished and loved QUEEN OF THE CONQUERED back in 2019. I really enjoyed QotC because it does so many things I enjoy-- non-Western fantasy setting, morally ambiguous main character, and challenging, real-world concepts that are basically reworked as moral thought experiments with no cheap or easy answers.
KING OF THE RISING takes off exactly where QotC ends, post-coup, with Sigourney imprisoned post-rebellion. The new narrator is now Loren, who was Sigourney's slave until the uprising, and now he's one of the lead architects in furthering the revolution and getting himself and the other native islanders outside assistance from off the island. But it's not easy. His proximity to the white colonists, as well as to Sigourney, make him suspect, and his idealism is tainted by his own anger, and there is no room for such neat and clean outcomes in a world that has been sharpened by blood and oppression.
I wanted to like this book but right off the bat, I had difficulty getting into KING OF THE RISING. Loren just isn't as compelling a character as Signourney, and everything felt so slow-paced compared to the first, which had the brilliant set-up, the cutthroat tension, and the surprising twists. Also, love her or hate her, Sigourney is a one-woman powerhouse with incredibly conflicting motivations and that made her really interesting to read about. I'm not saying Loren doesn't have conflicts, but his don't stand out the way Signourney's did, and it's not all that interesting to watch people stage a rebellion only to have it flounder and fail (even if maybe that's realistic). I read spoilers for the book because I was curious to see if I wanted to move forward, and I don't think I do. I know authors don't owe us a happy ending in fiction, but as a reader, I can choose how deeply I want to venture out into misery.
I have been looking forward to KING OF THE RISING since I first finished and loved QUEEN OF THE CONQUERED back in 2019. I really enjoyed QotC because it does so many things I enjoy-- non-Western fantasy setting, morally ambiguous main character, and challenging, real-world concepts that are basically reworked as moral thought experiments with no cheap or easy answers.
KING OF THE RISING takes off exactly where QotC ends, post-coup, with Sigourney imprisoned post-rebellion. The new narrator is now Loren, who was Sigourney's slave until the uprising, and now he's one of the lead architects in furthering the revolution and getting himself and the other native islanders outside assistance from off the island. But it's not easy. His proximity to the white colonists, as well as to Sigourney, make him suspect, and his idealism is tainted by his own anger, and there is no room for such neat and clean outcomes in a world that has been sharpened by blood and oppression.
I wanted to like this book but right off the bat, I had difficulty getting into KING OF THE RISING. Loren just isn't as compelling a character as Signourney, and everything felt so slow-paced compared to the first, which had the brilliant set-up, the cutthroat tension, and the surprising twists. Also, love her or hate her, Sigourney is a one-woman powerhouse with incredibly conflicting motivations and that made her really interesting to read about. I'm not saying Loren doesn't have conflicts, but his don't stand out the way Signourney's did, and it's not all that interesting to watch people stage a rebellion only to have it flounder and fail (even if maybe that's realistic). I read spoilers for the book because I was curious to see if I wanted to move forward, and I don't think I do. I know authors don't owe us a happy ending in fiction, but as a reader, I can choose how deeply I want to venture out into misery.
Not for me. I couldn't get into the writing style and I'm not really a fan of the insta-love trope. Story-wise, this feels like a three-way cross between FOURTH WING, HUNGER GAMES, and Ilona Andrews's Hidden Legacy series, with a sprinkling of Rhysand's "darling" thrown in for good fun. I can see why this is popular because it is basically catering to every popular trope in the YA/NA fantasy market. It just feels a little... flat, for me, personally.
I found this in a cruise ship library and thought to myself, "Oho, what fun, a thriller set on a cruise ship! HOW DROLL." Going off the summary, I was kind of expecting something like Triangle of Sadness (2022), which I highly recommend, btw. This book started out that way, like it was going to maybe be a satire of cruise ships and how they work and how ridiculous the passengers can be, but then it ended up being something else entirely that wouldn't be out of place on one of the worst episodes of Lost. WHAT EVEN WAS THAT TWIST.
You might enjoy this book, so don't take my word for it. I will say that this author also wrote THE PINES and I did not realize that when I picked this up that this was by that same author. So maybe if you liked THE PINES you will like this book.
I'm surprised this was published in 2012, it feels like it was published ten years earlier. There's an emo vibe to this book that is such a perfect fit with the alt-girl aesthetics of the early 2000s. I wish I'd liked it more but the characterization of Jane was so odd. I love the idea of an underprivileged girl getting a scholarship to a weird and creepy school where people have gone missing or dead. But this book was all vibes and no explanation. Like, there's a portion where Jane is translating Latin she sees to herself... where did she learn Latin if she grew up in the "ghetto" surrounded by pimps and drug-dealers? So many things like this, that just were glossed over.
I adored the first two books in this series. JANE EYRE is one of my favorite books and I've currently been snapping up as many of the retellings that I could find so I can read them and compare them... not so much in terms of how they compare to the original, but more as how they stand as individual artistic creations. In my not-so-humble opinion, the best retellings aren't carbon copies of their original source material, but instead place their own unique spin on a story to truly make it their own.
DEATH OF A SCHOOLGIRL and DEATH OF A DOWAGER were both so fun. One had a grim dark academia vibe that I absolutely loved, and the other was like a dark spin on comedy of manners, with everything from the cut sublime(!) to royal intrigue.
CHRISTMAS AT FERNDEAN MANOR was less entertaining. It literally starts out with Jane scurrying around in the woods, gathering nuts and berries like a squirrel. From there, it takes multiple detours, like conkers and the history of using them in games, Rochester being sad about having to sell his horse, and angst about Christmas because when Jane was a young orphan, she didn't really have one.
There's a Christmas special feel to this book, which I personally am not usually a fan of, since I don't like Christmas (bah, humbug). I kept thinking about that one Beauty and the Beast movie, Beauty and the Beast and the Enchanted Christmas. You know the one that kind of disrupted canon and made everything weird in its quest to show why Christmas is the Most Important Holiday to Ever Important?
I do think this author has a lot of talent and, like I said, I LOVED books one and two. I'm not sure if I'll check out the fourth one now. At least it has "death" in the title, unlike this one.
Oh my god. I loved the first book in this series, THE WARLORD'S WIFE. It was basically almost perfect and had everything I love in a historical romance. This one was sooooo frustrating, though. The heroine of this book is the daughter of the heroine in the first book, and while I loved her character in book one, she was really irritating in this one. Because she is now a bratty teenager who is TSTL. And hey, you could argue that that's realistic, sure. But it's not fun to read about a heroine who continually puts herself in harm's way in the name of feminism. I really tried to give this a fair shot and read to the end but I just found myself getting more and more frustrated with the heroine. Hopefully book three is more of what I loved from book one. I still think this author's writing style is great and hope she writes more. This one just wasn't for me. :(
I just read another book by this author and it has a lot of the same problems. The heroine is a bit of a Mary Sue and she claims to be one thing but the text portrays her as another. It's frustrating to pick up a book that's supposed to have a strong morally gray female lead, only to get a heroine who is, well... very much not those things.
Her writing is good but I wouldn't call this a dark romance. It's basically what you would get in a Katee Robert book but with more dub-con/non-con. And while I appreciated the detailed TWs in the beginning of the book, they're a little misleading in one aspect. The author claims that the H and h never r*pe each other, but the hero literally does the hero in the butt while she's screaming at him to stop. I would consider that r*pe and not "coercion" or dub-con. It didn't particularly bother me but it might bother someone else.
Not my thing, but I could see this appealing to readers who are fans of Emily McIntire because it has a similar vibe.
Officially, I gave up somewhere around page fifty but I did some skimming in the middle and towards the end to see if the book got better. It didn't. This is such a frustrating read because I was initially super excited to find an '80s romance with disability rep. The heroine, Jessie, used to be a ballerina until she suffered an accident. Now she uses a wheelchair but is still living her best life, working as a radio DJ and trying to do marathons to prove to herself that she can still experience bodily autonomy even if in a different way. That is such a GREAT message and I loved the idea of that.
***TW: Ableism***
The hero is apparently a retired hostage negotiator and that sounded potentially interesting as well, since it seems like he probably has emotional baggage (high stress job and early retirement at age 38? Some kind of shit went down). I was all set to like this book. And then I get to the beginning of the story where the hero is like dehumanizing the heroine, calling her "inhuman" and making all these disgusting remarks about how helpless and feminine she looks in her wheelchair. And then, as a "compassionate man in full use of his limbs," he grabs hold of her chair while they're doing the same marathon and pushes her to the finish line-- without her permission-- disqualifying them both.
This was so cringe that I almost DNF-ed right there but I read on, where I was treated to all of the heroine's friends rightfully telling this POS what an invasive creep he is. She shoots down his apology and the hero's response is to GO TO HIS COP FRIEND AND LOOK UP HER ADDRESS WITH HER LICENSE PLATE. And while the cop friend gleefully does this, he joins the ableism party as well, saying that women like her probably don't get married unless they were married before their accident. WOW. And then the hero shows up to her house and is once again confronted by one of her friends, who calls him out, being like, "Oh, you want to apologize? Sounds like you're just trying to make yourself feel better." YES. SAY IT LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK. But unfortunately the friend gets suckered into the bro vibes, and is like, "You know, I like the cut of your jib."
I flipped to the back of the book, where the hero introduces the heroine to his nephews, who pepper the heroine with questions like, "Being handicapped means someone always has to take care of you, right?" and "I heard handicapped people can't have kids." The heroine is traumatized and the hero just basically sits on his hands during this conversation. So I'm assuming that the cringe is strong in this one.
Look, I understand that this was the 80s and this book was probably quite progressive for its time. The fact that it exists at all is kind of amazing since I can't think of many other romances featuring heroines with disabilities that were pre-2000s. It's easy to look back with hindsight and be like, "Wow, that is so problematic." Because part of the beauty of living in the modern age is that we have a modern vocabulary and a modern understanding that lets us unpack why things are hurtful and problematic, as well as a means of connecting with people who live these experiences every day and are therefore in a position to not just point out why this sort of representation is wrong (not their jobs, btw), but also to share their own authentic stories for the benefit of people like them, who want to see themselves in the stories that they read.
I don't get the impression that this author meant harm; there are some repudiations of the hero's behavior that read as very modern, coming from both the heroine and her supporters and friends. But this is still an infuriating read and I don't think I'll be finishing it. Yikes.
This is a sad review to write because Ania Ahlborn is clearly a very talented author. Anyone who could pull BROTHER out of their brain is clearly a twisted genius with a sadistic joy for good storytelling. I would LOVE to sit down with the author and hear how she came up with that gem, which still traumatizes me to this day.
Sadly, DARK ACROSS THE BAY was not that book. BROTHER fairly popped off its pages, but this book felt flat. There were too many characters thrown in my face all at once before I'd been given proper time to care about them. This ended up feeling like a very generic sort of airport thriller as a result.
I'd read more from this author but I can't personally recommend this book. However, if you're a fan of the domestic sort of thriller and found BROTHER too dark for your tastes, you may enjoy this one.
I feel like I'm living in a weird bizarro universe where I like Millie Adams but for some reason every time I pick up one of her books, I end up being like, no. I absolutely adored THE DUKE'S FORBIDDEN WARD but it's like every subsequent book of hers I pick up fails to live up to the mark. I can see echoes of it-- experienced older dude, young virgin heroine-- and there's attempts to make a connection, but nothing has reached that same peak of excellence. For example, in this book, the thing that connects the h and the H is, I kid you not, Swiss Family Robinson. Also, the hero spends way too much time telling the heroine that she's plain and not his type and it started to feel like gaslighting. Also how do you steal a baby that easily with no one asking questions?
I'm sorry Millie. I think your writing style is great and I want to love you but I haven't found the next FORBIDDEN WARD yet.
The prologue for this book was really good. I loved the 1970s setting with the kids and at first it was giving me IT vibes because of how much it popped. I could tell that the author had a lot of fun writing it, and the Halloween/small town vibes were EVERYTHING.
I was less enamored with the "contemporary" '90s setting. It had a fun retro feel and, again, the small town setting was REALLY well done, but everything felt way too drawn out and kind of scattered. There were too many POVs and I don't really think they were adding enough to keep the tension going. Instead, in my opinion, they kind of bogged down and convoluted the storyline. I don't think this needed to be 500+ pages and a lot of that page count felt like it was probably coming from the POV swaps and the excessive details about random things.
I do like this author's writing style though and I really liked her vampire book, CANDLELIGHT BAY. She has several other titles that I'm interested in exploring, including some haunted house ones and a culty sorority, but this wasn't it. Thanks to Heather for trying to BR this with me! Sorry this wasn't it.
This was a BR with my friend, Heather, one of my favorite people on BR. Millie Adams is one of my favorite Harlequin authors. She has an ability to instill a lot of characterization and backstory into her heroes and heroines in a very short amount of time, and I love that she isn't afraid to inject a little bit of kink into her romances. Sometimes she gets panned for it but I honestly love seeing anything that isn't just pure vanilla repped by Harlequin. It used to be quite bland.
There's some wonderful things about MARRIAGE DEAL WITH THE DEVILISH DUKE. I liked that the hero and his son were both neurodivergent (I think they're autistic). I liked that there is some D/s and S/M stuff. I liked that the heroine was utterly enthusiastic despite her inexperience. And in the beginning, I felt their backstories went a long way towards explaining why they were into what they were.
The problem with this book is that the bar of my expectations was ALLLLL the way up here and the author decided to lie on the ground. The S/M was mostly just biting and pinching and Briggs spent soooo much time mansplaining sex to Beatrice that I was getting flashbacks to FIFTY SHADES OF GREY and its pseudo-kinky ilk. Beatrice also was a little bit problematic in how she was willing to force men into marriage to escape her fate (and was never really called out for this by anyone but her brother, the quasi-villain of this book) and headbutted her way into being co-parent for an autistic child she really didn't know anything about. She's just like "Routines? Who dat?"
Millie Adams is still an auto-buy author for me and I love what she brings to the Harlequin collection as a whole, but this ended up being a miss for me. First book was okay and third book was AMAZING, but this one might have just gotten disinvited from my birthday party.
Maybe I'm just not in the right mood for this right now, or maybe it's because I've started my quest to read T. Kingfisher's books by starting with her most recent, so everything even slightly flawed and amateurish compares unfairly to her more recent, more polished works. Either way, BRYONY AND ROSES ended up being a disappointment for me. It has all of the hallmarks that make her later works great-- quirkyheroine, heartfelt humor, buddy-cop energy, fairytale magic, whimsical horror-- but I just felt so bored. I also feel like this one kind of made girly things the butt of alot of the jokes, and it gave big 2014 "I like Billie Eilish so I'm not like other girls" energy. I wanted to like this sooooo bad but it's dragging for me. Especially after SEVENTH BRIDE, TWISTED ONES, NETTLE & BONE, and HOLLOW PLACES. I saw another reviewer saying that she seems to be much more comfortable writing horror, and yeah, that's it. That's the Tweet. I think she needs horror to balance out her rambly, endearingly awkward writing style.
L.J. Shen is a very hit or miss author with me. Her writing is usually very clean and polished, but her characters, I can take or leave. I hated SPARROW, adored VICIOUS, and feel ambivalent about this book, THE KISS THIEF. I think my problem is that Francesca feels infantilized and Wolfe feels like he's trying too hard to be alpha. This is also a very fluffy mafia book, and personally, when I pick up a mafia book, I want it to be gritty. Edgy.
This isn't a bad book but it is also very much not my thing. I'll be passing it along but I'll still check out some of this author's other books.
This one isn't bad, it's just really boring. The heroine, Liz, has been jilted by her previous fiance. Then she was going to date this friend of her sister's husband, Adam, except it turns out he's not the settling down type so much as the wham-bam-and-thank-you-ma'am type. So obviously she's horrified when she finds out her new deputy director position at the theater is deputy to his director.
I liked the theater elements in this book. I was checking this author out and I think some of her other books revolve around theater as well, which makes me think she probably worked in this industry herself at some point or knew somebody who did. Liz also isn't a bad heroine for the times. She's like one of Charlotte Lamb's slightly less good heroines, right? She has a spine but she doesn't always use it.
Also, just in case someone needs to see this, there's an on-page slur where the heroine compares her frizzy hair to a g*lliw*g's.
Obviously, when I pick up a book called DEAR VILLAIN, I have high expectations as a lover of villain romances. But I think in this case we can agree that the real villain is racism. ;)
So I actually really like Daddy kink and I thought the cover of this book was really cool. Even though some of the quotes I was seeing were kind of cringe, I saw people saying that it was supposed to be satire, and I thought, okay, so it's going to be Fannie Tucker but for relationship taboos? That sounds like it could be funny. I decided to ignore the references to "sweet peaches" in the blurb that I'm pretty sure don't actually refer to fruit, and forge ahead because my friends are big meanies who pestered me into reading this book because they like seeing me stray far from God's light.
So first, the good things. I liked the cover, as I said. And the writing is... okay. And there's a playlist in the beginning that's pretty good.
And...
That's it.
I hated everything else.
I actually called it quits at a graphic scene where the heroine is thirteen and fantasizing about her foster dad. It made me SO uncomfy that I could not continue. (I was already pretty uneasy when I found out the heroine is 17 at the beginning of the book and the hero is, like, 36.) I'm not exactly sure how this is satire, because satire is supposed to make fun of things, and this just feels like any other erotic short I've read except maybe it basks in its ridiculousness a little more. But satire is not a free pass from criticism, and if this was meant to be satire, I'm afraid it's bad satire.
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.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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