Not going to lie, I’m really feeling it after getting up to watch the England match in the middle of the night and my brain’s not really working right now. So this might be a shorter than usual post because of the brain fade but basically the top line is that I finally finished a long runner and because I was writing the offers post I may have bought some things…
Happy Tuesday, it’s book of the week day again. and I think maybe the Deanna Raybourn was my favourite-favourite last week – but that’s the eighth in the series and the given that i’s nearly the end of June and thus the end of Pride month, it’s maybe fitting that the last BotW of the month is a queer romance.
Dream On, Ramona Riley is both a small town romance and a normal person and famous person one. When Ramona’s mum ran away, teenage Ramona helped her dad with her baby sister until Ramona left for college. Then when her dad was involved in an accident, she dropped out and gave up her dreams of a career in costume design to come home and help her family again. But now Olive is about to leave for college and Ramona’s best friend wants her to give up her job in the local diner and pursue her dreams again. And it just happens that this summer there is a big budget Hollywood rom-com coming to film in town, that might give Ramona the chance to kickstart her dreams. The only problem is that one of the stars of the movie is Dylan Monroe, the actress daughter of two 90s rock stars and also Ramona’s first kiss, one magical night back when she was a teenager, and now Ramona has to teach her to waitress and other Normal People things.
I realise that that seems like it’s already quite a lot of plot, but actually it really is just the set up and there’s loads more that happens after that and I’m not spoiling anything. This has got the same sort of witty dialogue that Ashley Herring Blake’s previous series Bright Falls has – and actually in a delightful crossover between the old series and the new, the movie that is being filmed is based on one of Iris’s books. It’s got a culture clash between the small town life and the famous people one, Dyland has got a lot of issues about her upbringing that she’s working her way through and the two heroines are keeping so many secrets from each other it’s a wonder they manage to sort it all out satisfactorily at the end, but they do, and I’m almost convinced that they’re going to manage to make it work despite their very different life experiences. It’s got quite a lot of sex scenes in it – more I think than the Bright Falls series and some language in them that I don’t love, but hey, each to their own, at least nothing was described as oozing or dripping…
I’ve already got the second in this series, Get Over It, April Evans, on the shelf after my trip to Gay’s the Word, whcih was actualyl the catalyst for reading the first one, and there is a third (and maybe final?) book in the series, Take a Chance, Sasha Sinclair, coming out in September, so you never know by the end of the year I may even have read the whole series! I definitely enjoyed this one enough that I won’t delay reading the next one too long.
I bought this in Saucy Books back at the end of last summer, but I’ve seen it in a bunch of other bookshops since then too. And it’s available on Kindle and Kobo too.
Well as you can see, I didn’t get any of the long runners ticked off, but also the heat was even worse than I was expecting it to be. Honestly. The office was fine – but getting there was not, and sleeping at night was terrible. I feel like I need to sleep for a couple of days to recover. Apparently this week is going to be better until we get to the weekend. Thoughts and prayers everyone…
Happy Tuesday everyone, and possibly not a surprise that I’ve picked the new Annabel Monaghan this week, but it is so fun and I enjoyed reading it so much that I couldn’t help myself.
Dolly is a problem solver. When her mum left when she was a preteen, now her family needs her and she’s 39. She’s back in her home town with her son for the summer to try and help save the family home. And that’s why, when the scion of the Whitfield family (so prominent the town is named after them) asks her to pretend to be his girlfriend after she helps him with a flat tire, she says yes. Except that the more time they spend together, the more she likes him – and the more she thinks he likes here, even though his world of galas and charity dinners is usually one she only sees when she delivers the seafood from her family store. But can Dolly bring herself to put her trust in someone else for once?
If I was doing the 50 states challenge this year, this would be the book for Rhode Island and it would not have been a hardship at all. I love a summer people and year round people clash of cultures story (it’s sort of rich people problems adjacent really isn’t it) and also a hero who can come in and make life easier for the heroine by throwing some cash around in a nice, non-skeevy way. A rich hero could be a little fraught in the current climate, but Monaghan deals with that pretty well, by making Stewart the guy who wants to pivot his family property business towards renovating historic buildings (rather than strip malls) and he’s not a billionaire so it was fine for me.
I read this in double quick time and really, really enjoyed it. It’s a satisfying romance with a great cast of characters and a lovely setting, which does some of the things I like about Pretty Woman, but without the sex work, rude sales ladies and opera! It’s not quite Nora Goes Off Script (but what is!) but I think it may be my favourite Monaghan after that.
This should also be pretty easy to get hold of – I’d preordered the paperback but it’s also on Kindle and Kobo.
Morning everyone and welcome to the (extreme) heatwave. Houses in Britain aren’t made for this sort of weather and I’ve found myself researching portable air conditioning units more than in the last week! Anyway on the reading front, we’re just over a month out from Book Con and so I’ve started clearing out my shelves for the sale table – which lead to three Lorna Hills in 24 hours rather than finishing any of the still reading books. Because of course it did. Lets see if I can concentrate enough in the heat this week to get them read shall we (I doubt it).
Happy Tuesday everyone and for this week’s post I have picked a light humorous romance that’s also a pastiche of Golden Age Crime novels. Which is obviously very much something in my wheelhouse.
It’s the 1930s and Georgiana has become an accidental detective after a spate of murders in her cute Cotswold village. You’d think after four murders in a year they would have had enough death, but then the parish council chairman drops dead of a heart attack. Or at least that’s what the police say. Georgie isn’t so convinced though and writes to a famous London detective for help given that the village now has murder tourists visiting. Except it’s not the detective that arrives, but his secretary. Sebastian is posh, frivolous and flirtatious, and not at all the sort of person that Georgie thinks can help.
As I said, this is a romantic mystery – where our heroine is perfectly aware of the fact that charming English villages shouldn’t be hot beds of murder and is determined to solve the crime. And this has got plenty of witty banter between the characters as well. Where it didn’t quite work for me was the romance elements – because I really didn’t know what Georgie and Sebastian saw in each other and so that bit worked less well. That said I read it in pretty short order (about 36 hours I think) so it’s very readable, even if not entirely satisfying. A bit like a dessert that doesn’t quite taste as good as it looks.
I have a bit of a mixed record with Martha Waters – I really enjoyed Christmas is All Around the other year (more than this I think) but I had significant issues with the second in her Regency Vows series, although I kept forgetting that when acquring some of the others in the series. And this is another slightly mixed review I guess but this doesn’t have anything as problematic as To Love and To Loathe did.
As you may remember from the offers post, this one is 99p this month on Kindle – and it’s the same price on Kobo. I’d been waiting for an offer on it and it’s definitely worth a punt at the current price.
Happy Monday everyone! This list is shorter than I would like given the fact that I added six physical books to the pile this week and another five ebooks, but my excuse is a theatre trip and a concert, the start of the World Cup, the Le Mans 24 hours, an F1 race and grass court tennis season. I did also visit four bookshops so that’s why the purchasing happened! Anyway, onwards to this week…
It’s Tuesday again and I’m back with another BotW post – but this time it’s a new release that came out last week. It’s also the first non-fiction pick of the year – just a few weeks off the mid-way point but we can gloss over that bit.
Receipts from the Bookshop is a year in the life of Katie Clapham’s real life actual bookshop in St Annes on Sea, which is in Lancashire and near Lytham and also the (probably) better known Blackpool. It’s based on her Substack of the same name which I used to read faithfully until substack changed the way they send their emails (or I changed something in my settings on substack who can tell) and then got a bit behind. But that’s ok because now there is a book! And the fact that I didn’t remember reading much of it before suggests that that substack change happened longer ago than I thought – or that I was less faithful than I thought!
If you’re a book person – and I assume from the fact that you’re reading this that you are – then this is a wonderful insight into what it’s like to own your own bookshop and as a bonus it will also give you plenty of ideas for books to read. I concluded (and told Him Indoors this) that I could not own a bookshop because I would buy myself too many books and/or crack the spines in the stock and turn them into secondhand books before they’d even been first hand. It’s a delightful soothing read with plenty of regular characters popping in and out of the shop through the year. Personally I would like to emulate the person who has a list of their required books (new hardbacks) on a personalised piece of stationery. That’s the sort of vibes that I would like to have. I mean I don’t – because although I love hardbacks I am bad at reading them because they’re not as portable as my other options.
Anyway, this is delightful. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it on the commute and it would make a lovely gift for the bookish person in your life. And you can even buy it straight from Katie’s shop Booksellers Inc via Bookshop.org or by emailing the shop direct if you want a signed one. I have definitely ordered from her in the past – but I can’t for the life of me remember what the book was except that it may have been a Curtis Sittenfeld because I’ve pre-ordered several of those from indie at least two of which (Rodham and Romantic Comedy) were to get Indie bookseller bonus swag (a tote bag and a key ring) iirc and I think one of the swag ones was from here (the other was likely to from Fox Lane Books in Yorkshire). My copy came from NetGalley – even if I didn’t manage to post about it before release day I had actually finished it before release day for once) and it’s also available in Kindle and Kobo. And I’ll throw in another link to the Receipts from the Bookshop Substack here just in case you want to go and have a read of that before committing yourself.
A fairly solid week in reading all things considered, helped by commuting for the four days that I was working and some miserable weather as well. Having (finally) finished the first Heated Rivalry book last week, I then proceeded to binge through the next four, but managed to distract myself away to read some other things too so that I have some things to write about this week. Less good on the NetGalley front, but given the orgy of early June releases, the rest of the month is a little quieter for me on that front so hopefully I’ll catch up a bit this week. Still need to work on that long runners list.
Amidst all the Marilyn Monroe of yesterday, I forgot to mention that June is Pride Month and I’ve got some bits and bobs planned for that – so keep your eyes peeled on that front as we head through the month. And I’m also coincidentally starting the month off with a m/m romance pick so that’s somewhat serendiptious too. This was also one of the books in my Anticipated new releases post at the start of the year, so I’m really pleased that it lived up to my expectations for it!
Star Shipped is Cat Sebastian’s first contemporary romance and it’s a slow burn enemies to lovers story about two co-stars on a sci-fi TV series. It’s told entirely from the point of view of Simon, who has spent seven years hating his co star Charlie even as the fans analyse their every move on screen to try and work out if their characters are (secretly) in love. Now he’s leaving the show and can get away from it all. Except that there’s a chance that people might think he’s been forced to leave the show because he’s difficult to work with (which he knows he kinda is) and that could cause him problems down the line. Charlie is also worried that he might catch the blame for Simon’s exit because of what happened during his first season on the show. So they agree to stage a public friendship to try and quash any rumours. And then when Charlie needs to leave LA in a hurry, somehow Simon finds himself joining him. Thus begins a road trip that should be everything that Simon hates, but he’s actually sort of enjoying. And maybe they actually don’t hate each other after all?
I read this in less than 24 hours from getting my grubby hands on it (it was delivered to my parents house for *reasons*) and when I was on a family holiday away in Wales and probably should have been being more sociable (sorry family) because it was just so good. I’m going to have to take some time to think about why Simon – a hero with an actual anxiety problem that he’s not really dealing with that well – worked for me when some other anxious main characters have really not, because I’m not sure how I could have enjoyed it more. It also fell exactly on the right side of the enemies part of the enemies to lovers spectrum – mostly Simon’s “hatred” of Charlie consists of being snarky to him (off page, before the book starts) rather than pranks or things that actually affect Charlie’s career, and Charlie never really hated Simon to start with. Then you add in a road trip (love a road trip) with some Only One Bed scenarios and a bit of found family and it’s really my thing. Additionally this is quite low angst on the external front – and none of the angst comes from fear of being outed or homophobia in it’s many forms and I really like that too.
This came out in paperback at the end of April – I had mine pre-ordered from Waterstones in their pre-Christmas discount offer and what has turned up appears to be an American edition but I’m not complaining. I spotted this in Gay’s the Word when I was in there a week or two back, but I’m not 100 percent sure if I’ve seen it anywhere else yet. It’s £1.99 on Kindle and Kobo this month, which is annoyingly a pound more than it was lat month, but it’s not often that Cat Sebastian is on offer at all, so don’t necessarily rely on it dropping back down. That said there are a few of Sebastian’s back catalogue at £1.99 at the moment, so if you have gaps in your library you want to fill in this may be the time.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 