Honestly I think I’m allowed to squeal about this one – you all know how much I love Sittenfeld at this point. I’ve reviewed a bunch of them here, and I got excited about this arriving only a few weeks ago. I’ve got a hard copy ordered and I’ve got an advance via NetGalley – which of course I’ve started – and it’s so good I’m trying to ration myself…
Anyway as the title suggests this is a romantic comedy where a writer of a comedy show that is Definitely Not Saturday Night Live falls for one of the guest hosts. It’s only a week since I wrote about Funny You Should Ask and a few weeks since Nora Goes Off Script and I’m hoping this follows them in the famous people and normal people romance stakes, rather than another couple I’ve read hunting for the magic but which haven’t worked as well.
And this months quick reviews are all books that came out in the last month or so, which is a record for me I think, and conincidentally several are books that I flagged to you on release day that I’m now reporting back on, which is also a record for me. Savour it for it may never happen again!
Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen by K J Charles*
Well this is really good. Smugglers! Marshes! Beetles! Recovering legal clerks! A big noisy family! Awful family! Genuine peril! If you ever read The Unknown Ajax and thought “well this is good but I want more of the smuggling, less rich people problems and lots of walking on the very atmospheric marsh” then this might be the very thing – as long as you don’t want closed door of course, because maybe don’t read this on public transport. Gareth and Joss have plenty of issues to work through but they both grow and come into their own as they find a way though everything. Lovely.
No Life for a Lady by Hannah Dolby*
From one extreme to the other in some ways – in the KJ Charles there is a lot of… bedroom action whereas in Hannah Dolby’s debut our heroine is delightfully clueless about sex and the like as she tries to figure out what happened to her mother who disappeared a decade earlier. This is charming as well as witty and I’m hoping that it’s going to turn out to be the first in a series. Hopefully enough people will buy it to make that happen because we have Savvy lady sleuths but not so many of the slightly bewildered by the the range of human behaviour ones and I would like more!
What Happens in the Ballroom by Sabrina Jeffries*
Like the Hellions of Halstead Hall series, this has a mix of high society and earning money. In this case the series is based on a trio of women who have started a party planning business to avoid being governesses. I’ll leave you to decide how realistic you think that is, but I’m happy to go with it, because I like my heroines independent and finding ways to have some choices and control over their lives. Anyway, this is the second book in the series and our heroine is Eliza, a military widow who is building herself a future after the death of her husband. Our hero is her husband’s best friend, who asks for her company’s help to help another young widow find a new husband. Eliza is puzzled about why Nathaniel is taking such an interest in the young woman and her child, but goes along with it. She is burned from the way her marriage unfolded (as well as her parents marriage) and he has secrets that he’s hiding. Can they find a happily ever after? Of course they can. This is a fun and easy read – I guessed a few of the secrets that were going on, but not all, and I enjoyed watching Eliza and Nat grope their way towards a happily ever after. Steamy, but in line with what you would expect from Jeffries. I think.
And that is your lot – what a great month of reading March was. Really and truly I read some really, really good new stuff as well as revisiting some favourite authors and series.
It may be a new month, but for the second week in a row I’m picking a contemporary romance with a then and now strand to it. Admittedly I did finish this in March, so maybe it’s not the start of a trend, but hey, it’s nice to imagine that there’s some rhyme or reason to my reading!
Katrina and Nathan used to be writing partners. But three years ago after they had finished their second book together, their partnership broke up for reasons neither has ever spoken about. Since then, they haven’t spoken and have moved on with their lives – including Nathan writing a novel on his own. But it didn’t sell as well as the books they wrote together – and now his publisher has passed on his next novel and says they want the third book on his contract with Katrina. And so the two of them end up in the same house they wrote the last book in, trying to write another best seller. But it’s hard to write a romantic novel when you hate the person you’re writing with and the two of them will have to try to work through their differences to get it done.
The book jumps backwards and forwards to show you what went wrong between Nathan and Katrina as well as them in the present day. So it’s sort of friends to enemies to lovers. The reasons for the break up are sort of what you expect they might be – or at least what I was expecting – and the pace of it all is quite slow. It’s very close focus on the two of them – but also manages not to give you much detail about either of their personalities beyond that they are writers. Emily Wibberley and Austin Sigemund-Broka are a married writing duo and have written a few YA romances – which perhaps explains some of the above. And I know that sounds like I didn’t like it, but I actually really did. I read it in less than 48 hours and bought the next book from them to see how they handle something that’s not writing about a couple writing! Given that this was their debut rom com and only came out in October, I was surprised they already have a second out but who knows the mysterious ways of publishing in the TikTok algorithm era.
If you are only going to read one of the picks from the last two weeks, I would probably go with Funny You Should Ask, but if you like YA or New Adult romances then this might be the one for you. I read this on Kindle, but it’s also on Kobo. I haven’t spotted it in a bookshop yet, but that doesn’t mean you won’t.
Oh my goodness. I’m making progress on the long runners! Two finished and more progress on the others. I will get there. I will. Anyway we’ve reached the end of the first quarter of the year – and as you can see from the stats I’m on track with the bookshelf challenge, even if the books come from the pile in front of the shelf! And considering how busy last week was, it’s a good list really. Go me. I’ve reached the point in the Alleyn’s where I’m past my favourites and I don’t already own the audiobooks so to conserve my credits I’ve started to re listen to Peter Wimsey as well as given myself permission to skip any Alleyns that I fancy – like the weird one with the kidnapping and the smugglers. Even if it does have some Troy in it. But I make the rules so I can break them too!
Read:
The Roughest Draft by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka
The Final Revival of Opal and Nev by Dawnie Walton*
Two books bought – one is the new Lady Sherlock which I’ve finally been able to order in paperback and the other was another book by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka because, well that’s the way I roll isn’t it…
Bonus photo: after Tuesday night at Darren Hayes, it was Sunday afternoon at the Rugby – for England’s win over Italy in the women’s Six Nations.
*next to a book book title indicates that it came from NetGalley. ** indicates it was an advance copy from a source other than NetGalley.
Favourite book this month: Hard to chose between Funny You Should Ask and The Cricket Term, which are very, very different books but both of which I loved.
Most read author: Diane Mott Davidson – six Goldy Schulz mysteries
Books bought: 13, including 3 preorders
Books read in 2023: 93
Books on the Goodreads to-read shelf (I don’t have copies of all of these!): 700
A really good and fun month in reading. Lots of good books, progress made on lots of fronts and a happy reader too.
Bonus picture: the tbr shelf tracker, which is actually on track! A miracle. Although to be fair some of these haven’t come from the shelf, they have come from the pile in front of the shelf, because that’s how bad the situation is right now..:
*includes some short stories/novellas/comics/graphic novels – including 1 this month
Happy Friday everyone, and happy pay day for those of you who get paid on the last day of the month. I hope you’re enjoying getting spammed with payday offer emails! Anyway Sabrina Jeffries has a new historical romance out this week and I’m taking the opportunity to talk about one of her older series.
So the premise to this series is five siblings, who lost their parents in a carriage accident when they were children, who are told by their grandmother that they must marry within a year or lose their inheritance from her. Her parents started a brewery business, which she still owns and runs and it is her money that is keeping them all afloat, so it’s not an ultimatum that they can easily ignore. Each book can be read standalone, but obviously they are linked by the sibling relationship so that the other siblings will pop up in each others books. There is a sixth book in the series, which features a character who appears in two of the previous books in the series.
The first book in this series came out in 2009 and when I read them starting in 2016, it was one of the first historical romance series I read with a family a business. Obviously there are quite a few of them now – and also a lot of historical romances set among the “middling sort” rather than the aristocracy – but at the time I remember it being a bit of a novelty. And obviously because all the five siblings are being told they have to marry the tropes lean towards the fake engagement and marriage of convenience tropes, which as you know I really love. My favourites are the first two in the series but they are all very easy to read and enjoyable.
In terms of how to get hold of them, I own the first one in paperback and the last one on Kindle but I read the rest of them back in the day on Scribd – which I had forgotten existed until I looked back at my good reads tags, but which I had a subscription to in its early days before it started introducing metering and restrictions on popular titles and so its value to me dropped. They are all available on Kindle and Kobo but as they’re all older (and American) I suspect they’ll be hard to find in the UK in paperback. If you’re in the US you may be luckier – maybe even in your local library.
I only found out about this book earlier this week and now I need to read it. This is the era of pop music that I grew up with (which you’ll hear more about in the near future) and I really want to read about the behind the scenes of it. Of course as you know my physical tbr is huge at the moment, so it may be a while before I can justify buying it but I know I’ll get there in the end. In the meantime – if anyone else has read it let me know in the comments!
Okay, this is an American thing, but there was also International Women’s Day this month. And yes, I know, I know. It’s nearly the end of March so this is super late but I’m sneaking this in under the wire because I can. And I’m going to work my way back in history, because for some reason that seems like the most logical thing to do!
Girls of Atomic Cityby Denise Kiernan
This is really really good. A fascinating insight into the “normal” women behind the development of the Atomic Bomb. It’s the story of a pop up city built around a project so secret that you weren’t told what you were doing, and didn’t ask what other people were doing either. A few of the chemists put two and two together, but they were a handful out of tens of thousands. Really worth reading.
Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley
There are a lot of books about Jane Austen, but this is a well researched look at Jane Austen’s home life, framing it in the wider world of expectations for women in Georgian England, the restrictions on their lives and how they subverted that. When Lucy Worsley is at her best, her books are very readable and accessible. At other times, she is very dense and scholarly and it’s hard work. This is much more the latter than the former, or at least it was for me. I had thought that the readability was an experience thing, because her first book was very scholarly, but the next one – Courtiers – was incredibly easy and yet informative. I still have her Agatha Christie biograohy on my shelf – I wonder which Worlsey we will get there!
She Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England before Elizabeth by Helen Castor
And finally, lets go back to the Middle Ages, for a group biography of four women who ruled England (or tried to) between the Twelfth and the Fifteenth Century. If you’ve never come across Matilda, the daughter of Henry I and granddaughter of William the Conqueror, then you have a treat instore – especially as the period she was trying to claim the crown in is known as The Anarchy. The other women are Eleanor of Aquitaine (wife of two kings, and ruler of Aquitaine in her own right), Isabella of France (daughter of a French King and married to an English one) and Margaret of Anjou (who ruled on behalf of her mad husband and key figure in the Wars of the Roses). It’s really, really interesting – and looks at some parts of history that don’t really get taught in schools in the UK.
This time last year I did a post about Interesting Women – do go and check that out for some more reviews, including Hidden Figures, but I also wanted to flag TheRadium Girls which was in a Recommendsday post a couple of years back, and Janina Ramirez’s Femina which was in a Recommendsday last year
It’s only a few weeks since I recommended Nora Goes Off Script, but I’m back with another romance that features a movie start – and I don’t care because it is so, so good. This is the book I was talking about yesterday when I talked about trying to cure a book hangover!
Ok, this plot is a little complicated – because the narrative is split between now and then. The then is the start of Chani Horowitz’s career. She’s graduated from her writing course, but instead of writing novels like her fiancé, she’s writing magazine articles. Then she’s asked to write a profile piece of Hollywood heartthrob Gabe Parker. He is her celebrity crush – and he’s just been cast as James Bond. The weekend she spends with him for the piece changes her life – it launches her career and also sets the tabloids buzzing. The now is ten years on. Chani is asked to revisit the subject of her most famous piece to do a second interview. After a decade being asked about that profile, and fresh from a divorce, Chani knows she should say no. But she has never forgotten that weekend – and it could be a chance to finally turn the page.
I loved this so much. So, so much. It’s got a long slow pine and so much yearning. And two people trying to figure out what is going on between them. There is a lot of drinking in the before part of the story – and the Gabe of the now section is fresh from rehab and newly sober. And unlike one of the books I read after this last week as I tried to get over my book hangover, you get to see that Gabe has grown and changed and is a different (and better) version of himself. And Chani is a great heroine. She’s smart and clever and fed up of her career being defined by one piece when she wants to do different things.
I bought this in my haul from Foyles earlier in the year – you can see it in the February Books Incoming – I started reading it in the shop and knew it was going to be good, which is why I’ve read it so soon (for me!). I finished it and immediately ordered Elissa Sussman’s next book which comes out later the year.
You should be able to get hold of this fairly easily – I’ve seen it all over the place since I bought it, and it’s in kindle and Kobo too. The only thing I couldn’t find was the audiobook on Audible but there does seem to be one on Goodreads so it may yet turn up.
A really good week in reading, helped by dog sitting my parents’ dachshund for three nights – a very silly dog who wants no more than to sit on your lap, or next to your lap, or maybe trying to eat your ears – but anyway a very nice excuse to spend some time reading. And I’ve made some very good progress on some of the long runners too. Fingers crossed on that front too. And I can’t believe we’re nearly at the end of March though. Where has the month gone?
