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Waiting for the Flood by Alexis Hall
Introductory note: So many thanks to Alexis Hall for asking for my family’s pierogi recipe to be included at the end of the novella Chasing the Light, Part II of Waiting for the Flood! WFTF is one of my fave AJH books ever, I was honoured to contribute to it in this small way, and…
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The Politics of Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue
Spoilers ahead for the entire novel. There are brief mentions of being outed against one’s will and a sexual abuse plotline. Casey McQuiston’s 2019 novel Red, White & Royal Blue is obviously not meant to be a serious commentary on the current political state of affairs in the U.S.A. It is over-the-top outlandish wish-fulfillment for…
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Dissecting a Dragon: Laura Kinsale’s For My Lady’s Heart
This book pulled off the near-impossible: making me fall in love with a couple who are not forthcoming with their emotions. Ruck and Melanthe struggle to communicate with each other for the entirety of the novel. They are not tender-hearted, and their relationship is characterized by lust and uncertainty. Right until the end, it seems…
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The Sex Life of Saint Augustine: Spiritual Ecstasy and Sierra Simone’s Priest
This is more of an heretical sermon on the novel than anything else! Beware of spoilers for the entire book. This essay starts off as a review of Priest, discusses an historical example of sexuality and salvation in Augustine’s confessions, contrasts that with the idea of sex as spiritual transcendence in the novel (along with…
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Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid
This…wasn’t it for me? And I’ll get into why shortly. Be warned that this contains a LOT of rambling about tennis. If you’re not into that, this review is unlikely to be for you, and that’s totally fine. I focus on why it didn’t totally work for me, but I didn’t hate it. This is…
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Strange Love by Ann Aguirre (with a brief aside on The Leopard King by the same author)
THIS BOOK IS JUST 😭😭😭 I’m serious, that’s the majority of my notes, weeping faces at Zylar being adorable. So I wrote some mild criticisms to start with in my initial rave. Admittedly, Strange Love is not perfect despite my five stars and its permanent place in my romance hall of fame. I mean, what…
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A Seditious Affair by K.J. Charles
At the heart of this story is the idea that love changes you, but true love cherishes ideological difference rather than suppressing it. The novel is about finding a way to be true to your ideals while surviving in an unjust world. Dominic, a government official and a gentleman, believes in an England guided with…
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Wicked Beauty by Katee Robert
I really enjoyed Wicked Beauty. How much one loves either this book or Electric Idol might come down to your personal mileage for Katee Robert stuff that isn’t characters flirting, banging, or working through their feelings. What I mean by this is that in books 2 and 3 in this series, there’s a lot of…
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Learn my Lesson by Katee Robert
I picked up this book because I needed a really fluffy read for my tired eyes, and because the fanfic-ish premise, based on my favourite Disney movie, sounded so fun. This novel astonished me by being so genuinely good and emotionally complicated. First I have to lay out what its premise is -an AU multiverse…
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Bared to You by Sylvia Day
CW for NSFW discussion of sex and rape. I enjoyed certain aspects of this book in my own peculiar laughing-at-50-Shades-metacommentary way, and was deeply troubled by certain other aspects of it. There are some serious issues if you take the book seriously, and at a certain point, it kind of insists that you do take…
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Planetfall by Emma Newman
Planetfall seems to be polarizing when it comes to sci-fi reader expectations. But I was completely hooked, and then completely obsessed with thinking about its rich themes and painfully real character study. This is, so far, one of my favourite reads of 2021, and I hope other readers like me – who love sci-fi but…
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