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Category: 5 Stars

Review: A Song Below Water, Bethany C. Morrow

Tavia and Effie are sisters — not by blood, but in every way that matters. Both of them badly need the support and love of a sister. Like her late grandmother, Tavia is a siren. But the world, not to mention Tavia’s father, dislikes and distrusts sirens, and Tavia lives in fear of her secret being discovered. Meanwhile, Effie was long ago the only survivor of a terrifying incident in a Portland park, and she has begin to fear that the incident is coming back for her. After a few years of hearing about — but not being able to…

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Review: He’s Come Undone, Emma Barry, Olivia Dade, Adriana Herrera, Ruby Lang, and Cat Sebastian

Every romance reader has a handful of gateway drug romance novels. When a non-romance reader asks me for recs, I’ve got a few in my back pocket that I think are pretty friendly to newbies. Very high on that list is Cecilia Grant’s novella A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong, which is about a very buttoned-up gentleman that just wants to buy a falcon, and a woman who wants to go to a house party. It has many good things about it — if you haven’t read it, I recommend buying it and reading it immediately! — but one of my…

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Review: Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch

Who here has seen Harvey, anyone? The old movie where Jimmy Stewart has an invisible friend that is a six-foot-tall rabbit named Harvey, and this friendship causes some anxiety to his friends and relations? I ask because there’s a scene late in the movie where Jimmy Stewart says, “In this world, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.” A of all, I am pleased to have quoted him. Secondly, this moment from the movie Harvey exactly sums up my approach to language. For years…

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Review: Realm of Ash, Tasha Suri

Since the death of the Maha, the Ambha Empire has been breaking down. The Emperor is near death, and his sons are preparing to fight to inherit his throne. Arwa is the only survivor of a fearsome supernatural massacre that killed her husband and everyone else at Darez Fort, and she has come to make her life at the widows’ refuge in Numriha. But once she’s there, she realizes that her Amrithi blood — inheritance from the biological mother she never knew; evidence that she is not the good Ambhan noblewoman she has always claimed to be — could help…

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PODCAST, Ep. 128 – Interview with Intisar Khanani, Author of Thorn

We are back, my friends, and we have brought you a terrific recommendation for this time of quarantine: Read Thorn, by Intisar Khanani! It’s a glorious YA retelling of “The Goose Girl,” and we can’t recommend it highly enough. In case you need more convincing, we’ve done an interview with its brilliant, funny, and eloquent author, Intisar Khanani. You can listen to the podcast using the embedded player below, or download the file directly to take with you on the go! Episode 128 You can find Intisar at her website, as well as on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. The book…

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Review: Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo

Empress of Salt and Fortune slaps. I review books and I am very professional and Empress of Salt and Fortune fucking slaps. I could honestly end this post here. You would believe me, right? You would just read The Empress of Salt and Fortune based on that! Plus this gorgeous cover! Chih, a cleric from the Singing Hills abbey, has come with their ?familiar? to Thriving Fortune, where they meet an elderly woman with stories to tell about the Empress of Salt and Fortune, who once lived in exile in Thriving Fortune. The elderly woman, Rabbit, offers Chih and their…

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My Self-Care Suggestion: Medieval Persian Poetry

You know how there are certain ways in which each of us is That Bitch, and some of those things come up all the time, like how I can’t go for two minutes without talking about cheese fries? And then with others of those things, you are definitely still That Bitch and it’s not like you’re in the closet about it, but time is going by and it hasn’t happened to come up, and then all of a sudden it’s Oscar Wilde’s birthday and you are on Twitter vomiting up every fact you ever learned about him because you never…

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Review: Rules for Vanishing, Kate Alice Marshall

What, and I cannot emphasize this enough, the fuck. Kate Alice’s Marshall’s sophomore novel is the scariest book I have read in… I don’t know, maybe ever? It’s hard for me to say from my current vantage point of being huddled up under a warm blanket mumbling soft prayers for safety in a world so cold and bleak. Rules for Vanishing is fucking scary. Read it in the dark. Read it in the winter. Let it seep into your brittle bones and fuck you all the way up. Sara’s sister Becca disappeared one year ago. Probably she ran off with…

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Review: To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells, Mia Bay

To Tell the Truth Freely was published in 2009, a biography of a journalist and activist who died in 1931, and its applicability to modern-day politics is so acute that I tore through it at warp speed. Her political milieu is described as “a time when the Democrats were increasingly billing themselves as the party of white supremacy and the Republicans had largely abandoned any commitment to racial justice in favor of an alliance with big business.” I defy you not to shudder when you read that. Though Wells’s biographer repeatedly emphasizes her subject’s temper (and intemperance), it’s clear that…

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Review: Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero O’Connell

tl;dr, this is the sweetest book I’ve read all year, and I see no prospect of any book knocking it out of that spot in the back half of the year, and you absolutely must read it After numerous sightings of Mariko Tamaki’s latest, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, I broke down and bought it from an indie bookstore near the beach. Endcaps work! Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me is about a girl called Freddy whose extremely cool sort-of girlfriend, Laura Dean, keeps breaking up with her. No matter how many times Laura Dean proves herself to…

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