I'm laid off, I'm tired, I have applied to jobs, and now I'm going to tell you about some stupid books I read trying to find some dumb joy or something.
I read mostly these days from library apps, especially Hoopla. Maybe not every Hoopla from every library is like this, but mine has an amazing selection of comics from major and indie publishers, and a selection of books which has brought joy, humor, and a lot, A LOT, of puzzlement.
Hoopla in my town gives eight checkouts. After that, you have to wait to the next month. Some months, I will have an extra slot by the end of the month, which I will risk and burn on something ridiculous I have found.
Buuuuut if I run out of slots, during the final seven days of every month, there is also the Bonus Borrows.
I have no real concept of what qualifies a book, comic, movie, or whatever to be a Bonus Borrow. Some of the reads are, like, pretty normal - there'll be two or three popular lit books, some Hallmark-esque movies, a few comics... And then there's some romance novels and audiobooks which just call to me.
So, altogether, I have checked out a pile of very stupid books, some of which I could recommend as being good-bad enough to read, but now I just want to opine about the bottom of the barrel. Here's the latest list from most normal to least normal on my scale of weirditude.
Into Their Woods by Ann Denton; and Rain of Shadows and Endings by Melissa K. Roehich
These are both DNFs, but I did get over halfway on both, so I'm including these as shining examples of starting with something interesting and somehow making it the boring-est thing ever. So much promise, and then, kaput.
Into Their Woods was a promising reverse-harem Little Red Riding Hood retelling kinda deal, but every man in this book sounded EXACTLY the same. What is the point of a lady with multiple men if every dude is just a clone of the other dude?? Also, the world building was taking 15,000 years, and the number of chapters where protag was like "I don't understand!!" and refusing to, like, ask questions or listen was driving me bonkers. Sorry if this yucks your yums, but please, God, do something with your word counts.
Rain of Shadows and Endings lives in infamy in my mind, as it dragged me along for thousands of words, and only JUST started really doing anything by the time I gave up. This was just a cycle of the main characters having the exact same conversation over and over and over again, and that conversation was why the female protagonist can't choose what she wanted to eat or see her friends, and I was supposed to believe that somehow they were reaching new conclusions every time they fought when she was STILL not really allowed to decide what she wanted to eat or see anyone besides the main love interest and his very boring brother and slightly-less-boring best friend. Let the girl eat pizza, and don't lie to me that literally anything is happening when nothing was changing at all. The world building looked like it was maybe going to go somewhere, but it was taking SO LONG.
The Never King by Nikki St. Crowe; and A Match Made in Hate by Morgan Bridges
While one is a dark romance retelling of Peter Pan and the other is a mafia romance, these are basically the same vibes - sex first, talk later, weird metaphors and word choices, move on. At least these both are cooking with gas, and even if the final dish is kinda meh, there are some lines which are pure hilarity.
The Never King starts strong, but the rest of the books in the series fall off, slowing down and not really exploring its true potential. Winnie Darling, a descendant of Windy Darling who is yanked into Never Land so Peter Pan can read the memories of her ancestors locked away in her blood (yeah, it's a thing, should have been more fun than it was), is a lovely character to spend time with, but she only spends time with four dudes and their female fuckbuddy who literally disappears from the story. As much as the book keeps hounding that Winnie is here to fuck Lost Boys, she never actually does, just this specific inner circle of Peter Pan's best friends - in fact, Pan makes a point of never really caring or associating with his Lost Boys. What is the point of talking about or really trying to say it is about Lost Boys, when it is Pan, two guys who are part of a different kingdom but are exiled to Pan's lands, and Pan's moody security guard/best friend who isn't from Never Land? Minor gripe, but like, book could have had more fun with the world it wanted to be in. So. It basically is just a mafia harem romance with more bells and whistles. Ha, there was a reason I grouped these two together.
In good news, The Never King is the shortest in the series, has the best sex scenes and goofy lines (Winnie's determination to get things going is quite funny at times), and you can head-canon a better ending for Candy, the side piece who deserved better. So, if you have a spare four hours and you read the tags and are fine with it, I recommend.
A Match Made in Hate is basically the story of Emilia, a twenty something head-cannon-autistic lady who can quote entire Wikipedia pages at the drop of a hat who has been locked away for four years, and Maximus, a thirty something high ranking mafia guy who does not understand that Emilia, his now-wife, is (again, my impression) autistic and cannot read his emotionally-frozen face. The book is at least forward about what kind of sex stuff it is going to do, and Emilia and Maximus make progress in talking about how they show or don't show emotions, and while Emilia deserves, like, infinitely better, it isn't straight-up the worst thing ever. I was hooked to the cheesiness of the book when Emilia said that veil and evil were, gasp, one letter swap away! That sprinkling of purple-prose helps a ton.
This is also the first book in a series, and it in itself is, at least, mostly fun, I cannot recommend the rest of the series, like, at all. The second book drags a bit, and while the relationship is better, I refused to read the third book once I realized that it would be the BIGGEST and creepiest of age gaps between the main romantic pair (a 40 something very powerful man to an exactly-20 year-old girl) AND THE FEMALE LOVE INTEREST IS SO TRAUMATIZED SHE IS MUTE AND INCAPABLE OF SHOWING EMOTIONS. No. Bad. Bad book. I do not care how it turns out, there is going to be non-con, no, bad.
Scarlett by Shelly Ferguson
Just... just look at it. This is in that special class of its own, the small or self-published romance book that dreamed and ended up on Hoopla, and I want everyone to read at least this book. I will do a separate post on the first three Love in Somerset books once I finish the last book, but I gotta get this one out the door.
I just want to digest the cover first before we get into the text. We have baby's first photoshop of stock photos, in which the human and bear are too large for the cover, and the starry night sky tells us, like, nothing at all about where this takes place or what is going on. This is a shifter romance, but I have only seen wolf-shifter books use the-guy-in-shift-mode on the cover - having a straight-up cute-looking polar bear on the cover is just... it tickles my funny bone. Somehow the covers in the series get weirder. I will save this for future-later-post.
Naming the book after the female protagonist is... a choice. Which I do respect, but like, also tells us very little. And the way Scarlett is described in the book only has a passing resemblance to the stock woman on the cover.
The story could only be described as a fever-dream that badly needs an editor, but it isn't so choppy or messy that it is not fun to read. Au contraire, this thing is both so fun to read, and even when it is maddening, hilarious and also charming. There is vision, world building, character design, witticisms dragged from the depths of the author's brains, and just, like, possibly, too much going on, but it leads to so much weirdness and hilarity.
Our heroine, Scarlett, a thirty year old teacher, has moved to work at a small high school in a sanctuary town for magical beings, Somerset, in rural Georgia. She is from a shifter family, and had a Fated Mate, but her Mate Mark turned black before she could magically summon her mate, which she assumes means her mate is dead, and she is on her own now. She goes to the grocery store in Somerset, gets bonked on the head by someone else's cart while bending down to buy shampoo, and when she looks up to see who bonked her, voila, there is her mate! Alive! Not dead! And wearing a wedding ring! Oh no!
Scarlett runs away, drives needlessly back and forth from Atlanta to Somerset, and eventually (half the book later) has a normal conversation with her mate, Ian, about how he is actually single just wearing the ring so no one flirts with him. They plan to get married, Scarlett gets kidnapped but frees herself IN A SINGLE CHAPTER, and then they get married.
You may now be asking yourself, what does it mean to have a Fated Mate? What does a Mate Mark look like? Can Scarlett shift into anything?
The answers are the following:
Fated Mates are each other's soul-bound love, chosen for each other at birth a la magic? or something? and if the fated mates, uh, mate, they both can casually live, like, two hundred more years, but also, either Fated Mate can just turn down the other, fake-die to avoid it, or be far enough away that they can't show up... which contradicts the whole soul-bound thing??
There is no explanation on what the Mate Mark looks like in this book, just that it can turn black? Also, it can be tricked into turning black?? Who or what controls Marks?? No idea!!
Finally, in this universe, only cis-men can shift, and the only thing a cis-woman with a mate mark can do is cast ONE spell to summon her mate, and get mated. Then live 200+ more years, I guess, but also, again they could just get turned down, because...
But but but but hear me out... there is something... charming... about how this thing is written. The author is clearly from the American south, loves the nature and diversity of the area, and even though the plot veers between canned basics and repetition, she clearly cares about the fictional town she is writing about and for this to be a comfy read. She also takes time to define random magical elements from the outset, she just, uh, forgets other things to explain until later?? But so far, it does all get explained!
I want to wax poetically about some more of the hairbrained shenanigans of this series, but I will save that for later. Needless to say, NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE HAVE READ THIS BOOK! Please! It deserves love, or if not, some love-hate. Please. Please. Just. Google the covers. Go mad. Please please please. Go crazy with meeeeeeeeeeeeee
L'Héritage de Lennox Osseous T1 : Sorcière des os de Ivy Asher
Une nouvelle urban fantasy qui a du chien… et accessoirement beaucoup d’os !
Mon nom est Lennox Osseous, mais vous pouvez m’appeler la Sorcière des Os.
Je n’aurais jamais cru que les os me choisiraient. La magie était censée revenir à un autre membre de ma famille, je comptais là-dessus. Mais grand-mère Ruby est morte, et voilà que les os trônent sur la table de ma cuisine. Je pensais que les…
