Category: Recommendsday

books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Romances with grovelling

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After reading At First Spite last week I started thinking about other romances where one of the couple has to do some serious grovelling to redeem themselves. Because as I said yesterday At First Spite has an absolutely epic grovel in it – but it also has some mental health issues that may mean that some people want to avoid it. So here are some other options.

It also turns out that maybe romances with grovels are my thing – because a lot of the books that I came up with were already books of the week! Let’s start with Sarah Maclean because she is maybe queen of the grovel – in most of her series there is a man who has done something awful and who you think is irredeemable and then in the final book of the series, she pulls it off. I could only pick one though so I’ve gone for Day of the Duchess because it is so good – but also because I know some people have had issues with Daring and the Duke because they don’t think Ewan is redeemable – so I think Day of the Duchess is the more reliable recommendation. Of course it’s going to work best if you read the whole series, but it does work on its own as well.

Next up, another historical romance and it’s Sherry Thomas’s Luckiest Lady in London. I can’t really explain this book any more than I did in that book of the week review but trust me, it’s good. A much more recent BotW is Devil in Winter – which is a classic of the historical romance genre and is totally worth reading if you like this sort of thing. And finally in the historical section there’s Romancing Mr Bridgerton by Julia Quinn – which is about to be the third season of Bridgerton and you can read now to get ahead. And if you want to know what he’s got to grovel for, just watch the trailer for the new series…

And now because At First Spite is a contemporary romance, I have to offer a few of those. But I did find this tricky. There are a couple of grovels in the Chicago Stars series, but they tend to be in the earlier books in the series with the most alphahole-y heroes and that’s not necessarily my thing at all. There is also Love Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood, which continues to come up in my posts despite the fact that I have reservations about Tiny Heroines and Giant Heroes (and tell you about that every time!). Then there is Glitterland by Alexis Hall, which I should say I have only read the original version of, so may have changed a bit since I read it but hey. This has a depressed former literary golden boy and someone who Hall describes as a sunshiney glitter pirate. I really enjoyed it a couple of years ago and I really should go back and check the new version. Maybe this is the push I needed? We’ll see.

And finally it’s sort of cheating but I think Olivia Dade’s Shipwrecked also sort of counts for this – although the hero in that hasn’t so much done something wrong as much as waited a long time to prove to the heroine that he’s the guy for her.

Happy Reading!

books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Girl’s Own career books

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Yes, this is a thing. Seriously it is and I’ve read an increasing number of them and they start to form into patterns. Yes it’s slightly niche and I’m not expecting many of you to go out and buy these, but I have thoughts to share.

Firstly, lets be clear – my beloved Drina books are not career books. Yes, across the series Drina trains as a ballet dancer – which then becomes her career, but ballerina is not a realistic career for most young women. These are books that were written to give young women ideas of what they might want to do when they left school and what the training and actual job might entail. But the author of the Drina books did write some career books – Jean Estoril aka Mabel Esther Allan wrote Judith Teaches, which is one of a slew of books about becoming a teacher. What makes it interesting is that Judith becomes a teacher at a secondary modern – rather than a grammar school – and that gives a window onto mid twentieth century English society. It’s been reprinted recently, so worth a look if you can get a cheap copy.

Another popular job to get the career novel treatment is nursing – the Cherry Ames and Sue Barton series are the ones you’re most likely to have heard of, and I’ve read a couple of each of those, but I’ve also read Jean Tours a Hospital which is I mentioned in Quick Reviews last summer and is definitely emphatically not a great work of literature, but it is a fascinating look at nursing in the 50s and the attitudes around it.

There are a few with journalist heroines too – which is fun for me given my day job! There’s the Sally Baxter: Girl reporter series but also few weeks back I read A Press Story which has a plucky school leaver securing her first trainee job at the (very) local paper and you follow her as she learns the ropes.

Then there are some with more exotic jobs – I read June Grey: Fashion Student a couple of months back – which follows the titular June as she completes her course at fashion and design college and undertakes some work experience with a view to getting a job. Haute couture designers a plenty – and she gets a love interest (of course). In fact in most of these there is a romantic subplot as well – just to make sure that they all know that if they get a job it’s not going to stop them getting married. June’s is a fellow designer, a year or two ahead of her in career terms but also with some connections to the business which are revealed late on so we know that June won’t be struggling for cash when she bags her bloke.

I think the first career book that I read – way back when I was about 8 or 9 years old – was my mum’s copy of Shirley Flight: Air Hostess, which I blame for my crushing disappointment on my first ever plane flight when I discovered that the cabin crew no longer cooked a four course meal for the passengers in the plane’s galley during the flight. Luckily my disillusionment was assuaged by the fact that my sister and I were taken into the flight deck (I think my dad had told the crew it was our first flight – thanks dad!) and we got to see the Alps poking through the clouds below us. Anyway, at the time I had no idea that this was part of a series but as a grown up I’ve picked up most of the others for cheap at various points. They have all the issues that you might expect when it comes to books written in the 50s and and dealing with far flung parts of the world, so if you do ever pick one up, make it that first one or one of the North American or European set ones to avoid the worst of that.

And finally my most recent discovery is that we also had evangelical career books – last week I read Linda Learns to Type where our heroine wants to be a private secretary to an important man and so throws herself into her secretarial classes at her secondary modern. Linda’s sister passed the eleven plus and goes to grammar school – and Linda is jealous of that, but her sister has also Found God and by the end of the book Linda does too – and a nice boy too, who isn’t the first one you meet in the book for once, because that one doesn’t like Linda’s new interest in the chapel youth group. Linda’s job is at a chocolate factory – most of the chocolate manufacturers in the UK seem to have been Quakers so that scans – and there’s plenty of detail about all the secretarial work that needed doing in the pre-computer era.

Through all of this my guide is Kay Clifford’s Career Novels for Girls – the copy I have is my friends (as to be fair is Press Story!) but I also heard Kay talk at Book Conference a few years back. It’s an encyclopaedic guide to the genre, but written with a sense of humour and an eye to the truly outdated madness that some of these are peddling. But then there’s some really bonkers stuff in a lot of Girls Own books – not for nothing do my sister and I have a running joke about people being sung out of comas after all.

Happy Reading!

books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: January Quick reviews

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Just the three this month to mention – and three very different books. Well sort of. I read quite a lot last month but many of them you have already heard about – like eleven novellas in the Real Estate Rescue series…

Breathless by Beverly Jenkins

There was a big sale on Beverly Jenkins books in December and this was one of the ones I picked up. It’s the middle book in her Old West Trilogy and the one of that series I hadn’t already read. The heroine of this is Portia, an educated and independent woman who runs some of her family’s business interests. The hero is a cowboy rancher who worked for Portia’s family in the past and has just ridden back into town. He knows he’s in love with her straightaway, she’s not interested in marriage and men and this features one of my favourite romance things – kissing (or more) to try and get it out of (one of their) system(s). It doesn’t work of course and so it’s a lot of fun watching them work towards their happy ending.

It Happened One Fight by Maureen Lee Lenker

So this is a romance set in Golden Age Hollywood, which we all know is a particular favourite setting for me. It features Joan and Dash, two movie stars who are a double act – think Fred and Ginger, Hepburn and Grant etc – but who don’t get on behind the scenes. Just as Joan is finally about to get what she wants – freedom to make movies without Dash – a gossip column exposes that they’re married because: romance novel reasons. I really, really wanted to like this more than I did, but early doors I was struggling to work out how Dash was redeemable – but by the end it was Joan who was doing the awful stuff. And now you see why it didn’t end up as a Book of the Week!

Two Women Walk into a Bar by Cheryl Strayed

This Amazon Original story looks at Cheryl Strayed’s relationship with her mother in law and more particularly at the end of her mother in law’s life. I haven’t read Wild – with deals with Strayed’s trek to try and get over the death of her mother, but this has made me really want to – even though I don’t usually do grief related memoirs that much. Short but impactful.

Happy humpday!

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Recommendsday: Cozy Crime Round up

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As ever I’m on the hunt for new cozy crime series, this week I thought I would finally publish this Recommendsday – which I have been working on for a literal year. Why has it taken so long? Well it’s been a bit hit and miss – I went on a bit of a request spree on NetGalley in 2023 looking for more series that way, I’ve been borrowing stuff from Kindle Unlimited. I’ve read a lot – and some of them… did not make the cut. And others of course started a total binge on the series – and I’ve written about them elsewhere!

Death Knells and Wedding Bells by Eva Gates*

This is the tenth in the series (although it’s the first of them I’ve read and also the first by the author) and it is an enjoyable murder mystery set around the wedding of the heroine and the murder of one of the guests in the aftermath. I felt it was a little heavy handed at times and I had the culprit pegged pretty early on – but I liked the setting and the set up and there were enough details filling in the backstory that I didn’t feel lost or like I was missing out. I would read more from this series.

In Farm’s Way by Amanda Flower*

This is the third in a series set in Michigan, where our heroine is Shiloh who has recently returned (at the start of the series) to try and save her family farm. I liked the setting and the characters, the mystery was well set up but I thought the solution was a bit rushed and surprising although it did make sense if you know what I mean. I found the characters’ dialogue a bit weird in places – some stuff gets contracted, but other stuff isn’t and there’s no pattern to it that I could find. But that may be because I’m a Brit and not from Michigan or the Mid West! It was nice to have a cozy set somewhere different though – this has ice fishing and lots of talk about the super cold winter weather.

Murder Served Neat by Michelle Hillen Klump*

This is the second in a series about a reporter-turned-mixologist (yeah, I know) and in this she stumbles across a murder while catering an event at This is the first book by this author that I have read and although the heroine’s love triangle gets quite wearing, the mystery portion is for the most part good. It could have used a little more wrapping up at the end – in terms of the other suspects and the reasons they were suspected (without giving too much away!) but it managed to tread the line between the heroine being too stupid to live and walking into danger quite well.

And that’s your lot. Fingers crossed that I find some more in the near future – whether it’s enough for another Recommendsday, or series to talk about on a Friday!

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Recommendsday: Low Angst Second Chance Romances

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This whole post was inspired by the first book – which I’ve already mentioned on the blog so I’m breaking my own rules again, but hey, who cares!

Knowing Me, Knowing You by Jeevani Charika*

This is a second chance romance with a sciencey twist: Alex spent a perfect New Year’s Eve in a bar together five years ago – but for what we shall call Romance Reasons it went no further and now New Year’s Eve guy is the one who got away. Until he turns up in her lab as the man charged with trying to get the medical tech start up she works for out of trouble. There was a little bit of “a simple conversation have solved all this” air to some of the conflict in the novel. That said, it’s charming and because you have sections from both the hero and heroines point of view it’s pretty low stress for the reader (even if maybe not always for Alex!) and as a bonus if you’ve read the previous two books from Charika you get to see some of the characters from those again.

The Ex Hex by Erin Sterling

Cover of The Ex Hex

This one has magic and a curse – but actually turns out to be less dramatic and angsty than you would expect from a plot like that. Rhys comes back to his old town because the key lines are running out of magic – but once he gets there the curse Vivienne put on him when he broke her heart. This has banter and is really quite sweet – much less angst and violence than you usually get in paranormal romances.

Count Your Lucky Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur

This was a BotW back in 2022 (you can read that review here) but this is a second chance romance between two former high school best friends who meet again a decade after their friendship turned into something more for a week and then end up temporarily living together for some more of those Romance Reasons. This suffered a bit from Just Have A Conversation syndrome and One Too Many Conflicts, but it also has wit and warmth and is a lot of fun to read.

And that’s your lot for today, but I’ve realised I have a ton of second chance romances still on the tbr pile – so you never know, I may be back with this trope relatively soon!

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Recommendsday: 50 States Mop-up

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For today’s Recommendsday I’m taking the opportunity to talk about a couple of books from last years read the USA that I hadnt got to yet!

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

This is the story of an aviatrix in the first half of the twentieth century but intercut with the story of the Hollywood actress who is playing her in a biopic. Given my reputation with award winning bond, it may not surprise you that this was a slog for the first half. It has took me literal months to read this despite having bought it on Kindle to try and get it finished because I wasn’t prepared to lug the paperback around everywhere with me. The early stages of Marion’s story are so depressing and such hard work it made it hard for me to spend too much time with it at once. But once we got to the Second World War it really came alive and I read the last couple of hundred pages in a few days and the end was more satisfying than I had feared it would be.

Wild Dances by William Lee Adams

So this one is a little unusual because I know the author. William is one of the preeminent Eurovision bloggers but also someone u work with in my day job. This is his memoir about growing up in Georgia with a profoundly disabled mother and an undiagnosed bipolar mother, and that’s only the half of it. William discovered learning as his escape and it took him to Harvard and then eventually to the UK. It is a brilliantly written and almost heartbreaking in places, but I know that because I know William I might be biased. Anyway, even though it’s sold as how Eurovision helped him, it’s actually about much more than that, and if you know him as a Eurovision figure, don’t go into this expecting lots of ESC info because it’s mostly about William and his life from childhood onwards.

When in Rome by Sarah Adams

This is another famous person and normal person romance – in this case a slightly Taylor Swift- y popstar and a small town baker. This was my first Sarah Adams and I quite liked it although it was more New Adult than I was expecting I think, but I can’t quite put my finger on why. I liked the small town vibe, I liked famous people and normal people romances (go read Nora Goes Off Script if you haven’t already, it’s wonderful) and I liked the twist of it being the heroine that’s famous and the guy that’s normal. But something just didn’t click to tip it over into great for me. Hey ho.

And there you are, three more books and we’re done. If I was going to put links to all the other books from Fiftyt States that I’ve already talked about I’ve been linking all day, so I’m just going to point you at the wrap up post which had them all there’s for you already.

Happy Reading!

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Recommendsday: January Kindle Offers

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Hello! It’s that time of the month again, hide your wallets because I’m back with a stack of Kindle offers and if you can resist all of them you’re a better person than I am! I’m not sure this month is quite as good as last month, but there were still a few interesting things at prices to tempt.

I’ve recommended Ali Hazelwood’s adult romances a couple of times, but her YA debut is 99p this month – so if you want a story about chess rivals, then maybe Check & Mate is what you need this January. The sequel to Nita Prose’s The Maid is out in the UK in about a week now, so that probably explains why the original story about Molly the Maid is 99p at the moment.

One of the Taylor Jenkins Reid novels from before she went massive is on offer this month – I haven’t read After I Do (yet!) but it’s got a fairly good average on Goodreads for what that’s worth (and for older books it tends to be worth more than the newer ones). Another older book on offer is Amor Towles Rules of Civility, which I read back in 2016 and really, really liked it – if you’ve read his newer stuff but not this, then go and read this about a woman trying to make it in Jazz-age New York.

The discount Terry Pratchett is The Light Fantastic at £1.99. If you’re adding to your Georgette Heyer collection, it’s the Gothicky and creepy Cousin Kate at 99p this month, with Devil’s Cub and a couple of others at £1.99. As I’ve said a couple of times now, Peter Wimsey (and Heyer actually) are emerging from copyright restrictions so there are a lot of very cheap editions of some of the books available now, but I can’t vouch for the quality of them. However, The Nine Tailors is the “proper” edition of a Peter Wimsey that is 99p this January. I’m on a bit of an Agatha Christie kick at the moment as well, and there’s a similar issue with hers – I’m deeply tempted by 49p French editions of some of her Poirot novels, but slightly dubious if the translations will be ok. Anyway, in English one of her non-series books The Sittaford Mystery is 99p, as are a lot of her short stories – although I’m not sure how you work out what are in the various anthologies and what aren’t.

I bought a couple of books while writing this (what’s new!) but also added a few more to the Kindle Unlimited list. All I need to do now is finish some of the other KU books I have borrowed…

Happy Reading!

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Recommendsday: Twixtmas reading

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I’m already back at work, but as I’m still trying valiantly to cling to the Christmas spirit, for today’s recommendsday here’s what I’ll be reading (or listening to) between now and the end of the year – once I’ve got my fifty states challenge finished (why are West Virginia and the Dakotas always so hard?) and some ideas for you too.

If you turn on the TV in the afternoon at this time of year, chances are you’ll stumble across a movie version of an Agatha Christie novel – Death on the Nile was on on Christmas Day, Mirror Cracked this afternoon and Murder on the Orient Express is coming up too in the next day or too. And the novels make a pretty good choice for this time of year too – there are some Christmas-set stories, but my pick is always Orient Express – something about being stuck in a snow drift just makes it Christmassy to me.

You also could do worse than a Christmas Meg Langslow, the only reason I haven’t read the new one yet is because I haven’t read the summer one yet because the kindle edition is eye wateringly expensive and I’ve even reading them in order from the very start and I refuse to change that now after more than thirty books! There’s also a Christmas book in Jenn McKinlay’s Cupcake Bakery series that came out this autumn that I can’t read yet because: Reading in order and a book or two behind, but if you’re not bothered about reading in order they’re a pretty reliable series.

In fact most of my favourite series have Christmas books – I’ve mentioned most of them ad nausem (Royal Spyness, Daisy Dalrymple, Phryne Fisher etc) but I might actually reread one of my favourite Drina books this year – ballet at Christmas is such a thing and in Drina Dances Again she’s in Edinburgh, playing Little Clara in the Nutcracker (although not at Christmas!) and it’s a pivotal moment in the series for reasons that are a bit spoilery. If I want a boarding school story, the Chalet School series is full of Christmas plays – I usually pick one from the early days of the series so maybe I’ll go later this year.

Once I’ve got the last few states ticked off my 50 states challenge I’m planning on reading another of the Christmas stories from the British Library Crime Classics series – I think I have The Christmas Egg on the actual to-read shelf but there’s bound to be one in Kindle Unlimited too.

And finally, it’s not strictly festive, but I’ve been listening to the Radio 4 serialisation of Miss Buncle’s Book on BBC Sounds this week, and it’s just such a lovely cozy book, if you’ve never read it before, this time of year would be perfect to discover it for the first time. You can find my review of the trilogy here.

Happy Wednesday everyone (yes, it’s Wednesday!)

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Recommendsday: Not New Festive Books

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It’s starting to feel proper Christmassy now, so it’s time for the festive reading recommendations. And I’ve broken it down into two again this year – the new releases for Christmas 2023 and books from previous years that I’ve read this year.

So lets start with Jeevanki Charika’s Picture Perfect, which has a heroine who needs to find her inspiration as a photographer again after a bad break up and a hero who needs someone to take on a group holiday to make his ex jealous and try to win her back. This is a fun and festive (New Year not Christmas!) fake relationship romance that sees the two characters become better versions of themselves as they pretend to be in a relationship. I found Vimal’s perspective to be quite stressful to read because of his issues with reading social cues (I was going to say social anxiety but I’m not quite sure that is quite what it is) but I really liked Niro as a character and I loved her passion for photography and the way that pretending to be Vimal’s girlfriend gave her the confidence to stand up for him and to come out of her shell. You might remember that Charika’s previous book Playing for Love was a BotW in 2022 and this has characters in common with that.

I did a series post about Susan Mallery’s Happily Inc series a couple of weeks back, and Home Sweet Christmas this is a twin storyline Christmas romance set in another one of Mallery’s quirky small towns – this time Wishing Tree, the Christmas themed-town which is frankly bonkers, but still seems to work some how. One storyline has Camryn, who has moved back to the town that she grew up after the death of her mum and is newly responsible for her younger half sisters and the family’s gift wrapping business (just go with it). She’s trying to work out what her life and future looks like now and whether she wants to risk a relationship again. She starts a definitely temporary relationship with Jake, whose family own the local resort. The other has River, new to town and trying to find her place and put down some roots. Her friends persuade her to put her name in the hat for the town’s Snow Queen – and soon she’s doing events with Dylan, a hot local carpenter. Some of this really worked for me, but Jake’s mom crossed the boundary from strangely well informed and well placed and into manipulative and meddling and it really messed with my enjoyment of the rest of the book. I think there was probably too much plot on each story for them to both go into one book, but it was still a fun, easy Christmas read.

And finally let’s go for some classic crime, with another British Library Crime Classic holiday collection – this time A Surprise for Christmas. It’s got G K Chesterton, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham along with several other names you might recognise from other BLCC books. I’m not usually a big short story reader, but at Christmas I do quite like them, and it’s a nice way to find new authors to watch out for in the BLCC collection – I think that’s how I found Christiana Brand, but I wouldn’t swear to that.

Anyway, that’s your lot, happy festive reading!

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Recommendsday: December Kindle Offers

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I’m messing with the schedule a bit this month to get all the Christmas recommendations in in good time along with the regular features, so today in a friday twist, it’s the December Kindle offers!

Let’s start with the Christmas books on offer – like Christina Lauren’s Groundhog-Christmas-day romance In a Holidaze, and Sweet Mercies – which only came out a few weeks back. Much much older, but still my favourite Trisha Ashely, A Winters Tale is on offer too.

Moving on, and recent BotW To Swoon and to Spar is 99p as is the Neighbor Favor, which was a pick back in July. Before Your Memory Fades, the third book in the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series is 99p – and was one of my purchases while writing this post!

One of this years big book adaptations was Daisy Jones and the Six and the book is on offer again this month – reminding me that I still need to watch the streaming series. Maybe a dose of California sunshine is what I need for Christmas viewing? Also adapted this year, and also one I haven’t watched yet, is Red, White and Royal Blue which seems to be basically 99p all the time at the moment, which makes a change from when it was new and it was really, really expensive on Kindle! Also now a movie is the Judy Blume classic Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, which I first read when I was about 10 years old.

Richard Coles’ second Canon Clement A Death in the Parish is 99p as is Katy Watson’s The Three Dahlias, which as you know I love, The Windsor Knot, if you want to try the HM the Queen Investigates series, Robin Stevens’ Mistletoe and Murder from the Wells and Wong middle grade series, and T J Klune’s Under the Whispering Door. On the historical fiction front, Gill Horby’s Godmersham Park and Elizabeth Macneal’s The Doll Factory are 99p, as is Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle, if you want a really epic read for this Christmas season.

This months’ Terry Pratchett is Small Gods, for £1.99 you can read about competitive religion on the Disc – perfect as we’re coming up for a major religious holiday… The 99p Georgette Heyer is The Tollgate, which is one of I haven’t reread in a while, so I might go back for again now! The Julia Quinn is What Happens in London, which was actually the first book of hers I bought, more than a decade ago, in Waterstones Southend!

Enjoy!