Tag: Recommendsday

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: March Kindle Offers

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It’s the second Wednesday of the month, which means Kindle Offers day and oh boy it’s a bumper month.

On the romance front the offers include Christina Lauren‘s The True Love Experiment, Kristina Forrest‘s The Neighbor Favor, Mhairi MacFarlane‘s It’s Not Me, It’s You, Rachel Lynn Solomon‘s Business of Pleasure and Etta Easton’s The Kiss Countdown which I still have on the to-read pile. Ali Hazelwood has a new adult book out this month but Check and Mate her YA novel is on offer for 99p

In mystery and crime it’s a good month for mysteries with vicars with both the first Grantchester book, Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death and the first Canon Clement mystery Murder Before Evensong on offer. Then there’s the third Three Dahlia’s book, Seven Lively Suspects, Nita Prose’s The Maid (the third one is out in April), Jesse Sutanto’s Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers. In classic crime, Josephine Tey‘s The Franchise Affair is on offer as is another of the seasonal Agatha Christie short story collections, this time Sinister Spring.

I already mentioned on Friday that the Lady Julia Grey series are on offer – but it bears repeating. Going further back in history, there’s PD James’s Death Comes to Pemberley at £1.79, the seventh and it looks like final Shardlake mystery Tombland is back on offer at 99p as is Philippa Gregory‘s The Constant Princess about Catherine of Aragon ahead of another joining the series in the autumn (The Boleyn Traitor about Jane Boleyn).

There’s a bunch of TV-tie in, or TV related books on offer this month too. There’s Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen which has just been turned into a TV series, as well as the first Hawthorn and Horowitz The Word Is Murder, not long after the adaptation of Horowitz’s Moonflower Murders (and not long now before the third book in that series arrives). THere’s also Enola Holmes and there are a few Julia Quinns on offer, including the final Bridgerton book, Gregory’s story On the Way to the Wedding and Mr Cavendish, I Presume,

On the non-fiction front, there are actually quite a lot of celebrity memoirs on offer too – I haven’t read these, but they all had good reviews when they came out: Pamela Anderson’s Love, Pamela, Britney Spears’s The Woman in Me, Viola Davis’s Finding Me and Lauren Graham’s Have I Told You This Already. Not quite a celebrity in the traditional sense but Anne Glenconnor’s Lady in Waiting is on offer too as is Susannah Constantine’s Ready for Absolutely Nothing.

There are also some pretty good history books on offer, like Dan Jones’s The Hollow Crown, Lucy Worsley’s Queen Victoria, and although I haven’t read this one, the Elizabeth I book in the Penguin Monarchs series – these are really good short surveys of monarch’s lives written by notable historians, in the case of Elizabeth I it’s Helen Castor.

One of my favourite Terry Pratchetts is on offer at £1.99 this month: It’s the wonderful Going Postal! GNU Sir Terry. Also on my favourites shelf and on offer are: the third Cazalet Chronicle Confusion (with yet another fresh cover, this time one that I don’t like) and the third Tales of the City – Further Tales of the City, Barbara Pym‘s Excellent Women, Daphne Du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel, the cheap Georgette Heyers continue to include Devil’s Cub,

And it was an bad month for my willpower because books I bought while writing this post included: Julian Clary’s Curtain Call to Murder, Maigret and the Wine Merchant, Very Good, Jeeves, Remember Me by Mary Balogh, BK Borison‘s new release First Time Caller, and Jilly Cooper’s The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous.

Good luck at having more will power than me!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: February Quick Reviews

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It’s the first Wednesday of the month, and I’m back with the quick reviews. And for the first time in ages I actually finished all of the books I had from NetGalley that came out last month. Who knew I was even capable of that. Anyway, here we are with a quick round up of three books – two murder mysteries and a romance – I haven’t already told you about.

Murder in the Dressing Room by Holly Stars*

This is a cozy mystery set in the world of drag performers in London. Our “detective” is Misty/Joe who discovers the body of her drag mother backstage at a club night and starts investigating because the police seem more focused on the stolen dress that Lady Lady was wearing. I really liked the setting for this – I walk around Soho quite a lot as it’s near my office, and lots of the locations were familiar to me. I liked Misty and the way you could see how her persona changed when she was Misty compared to normal life as Joe. However they were a little foolhardy/too stupid to live at times. There’s a big hanging plot thread for the next one which I’m not sure about, but overall I enjoyed this and would read more in the series if it came my way.

The Tube Train Murder by Hugh Morrison

This was another new(ish) release – that came out in early January, but that I didn’t spot straightaway. This is a new standalone mystery from the author of the Reverend Shaw mysteries, which I binged my way through last year. This sees a young woman murdered on a tube train, and the investigation taking in the residents or the boarding house where she was living while she went to secretarial college. Those residents include another student at the same college who is unhappy at the progress the police are making. The mystery is good – and the boarding house setting is well drawn. It’s in Kindle unlimited so like yesterday’s The Ten Teacups worth a look if you’re a member.

Book Boyfriend by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka*

I really, really enjoyed The Roughest Draft which I bought two years ago and was a BotW. I was then disappointed and puzzled by The Break Up tour last year – which was the husband and wife duo’s Taylor Swift inspired romance. This is set at an immersive experience based on a romantasy novel, where two work colleagues and sort-of-enemies unexpectedly encounter each other. I was hoping this would be closer to the Roughest Draft than The Break Up Tour, but sadly it’s another puzzler for me. I didn’t understand why the two leads hadn’t just had a conversation to clear the air after their initial misunderstanding, and the heroine was just really immature for how old – and established in her career – she is meant to be. Frustrating. I still have the book that came in between Roughest Draft and Break Up tour on the Kindle waiting to be read and I’m starting to worry that that first one I liked was a fluke…

And that’s the lot for this month. Given how short February is, I’m pleased with myself for even getting to free!

Happy Humpday!

Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Fairytale retellings

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So as it happens, today is Tell a Fairy Tale day, so in honour of that today’s post is about fairytale retellings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of these are romances, but as i recommend a lot of romance already, I’m sure you won’t mind!

Let’s start with Geekerella, which is the first in Ashley Poston’s Once Upon a Con series, which is a YA romance series. As the name would suggest this is a Cinderella retelling, with a heroine who is a massive fan of a classic sci fi series, and a hero who is the star of a new movie adaptation. As ever with Cinderella stories, my main issues were around the meanness of the stepfamily, but I got past that – and it has a dachshund. And it should also be noted that my least favourite of the Bridgerton series is the Cinderella story – Benedict’s book, An Offer From a Gentleman, which is the third in the series but which I was delighted when the skipped it to go straight to Pen and Colin. I don’t think I’ve ever reread it, which says something but also maybe I should to see if I reassess it now.

Eloisa James has a whole series of fairy tale reworkings that she wrote after her Desperate Duchesses books. As well as Cinderella, she took on The Princess and the Pea, the Ugly Duckling, Rapunzel and my favourite of the series: Beauty and the Beast. In When Beauty Tamed the Beast, the hero has serious Dr House vibes. He’s cranky and does doctor stuff in deepest darkest rural Wales. She’s a society beauty who has accidentally managed to ruin her reputation and decided he is the answer. There is snark. There are independent characters. Just writing about it makes me want to read it again. Talking of Beauty and the Beast, the third Once Upon a Con is Bookish and the Beast and that’s also really fun. And for all of you who fell in love with the Beast in the Disney movie when Belle found his library: this is doing a riff on that. Also I maintain the beast in the Disney animated movie was hotter before he changed back into a prince.

I haven’t read this yet – but I do have it on the Kindle I think – but Sherry Thomas has a Mulan retelling. It’s called the Magnolia Sword and as you know I do love a a story with a girl dressed up as a boy (Masqueraders, Twelfth Night, etc etc) and it’s also a perfect excuse to post a clip of another of my favourite Disney heroes in one of my favourite musical numbers

Also on the list of books I own but haven’t read (yet) is T J Klune’s Pinocchio retelling In The Lives of Puppets. I will get there soon. And if you’ve read the book of the movie Wicked, the author of the novel that inspired the movie (but is very different and much darker) Gregory Maguire has also done some work in fairytales as well as in the wonderful land of Oz – including Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. And finally there’s an Amazon shorts series that’s inspired by fairy tales called The Faraway collection, which I have read a couple of mostly because the first one is by Rainbow Rowell.

And that’s your lot today – Happy Reading!

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Recomendsday: Books set in Yorkshire

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After picking a Kate Shackleton yesterday which was particularly evocative of Yorkshire I thought I’d mention a few more books set around the county

Let’s start with one of my very favourite Georgette Heyer’s – Venetia. Most of this is set in and around Venetia and Damerel’s houses in rural Yorkshire. Venetia is feisty and independent- but Jasper is one of Heyer’s best hero’s and among the most well fleshed out. Another Yorkshire set historical romance – but with a very different vibe – is Sarah MacLean’s Ten Ways to be Adored while Landing a Lord. Our heroine is running the family estate with very little money, and the hero is escaping from fashionable society to the country. This is the second in the Love by Numbers series.

When other people were reading Rivals, I was reading Barbara Taylor Bradford. And A Woman of Substance is set in Leeds and the surrounding countryside. I think this was the first book with sex scenes I ever read but it’s mostly a big old saga as Emma Harte raises herself up from housemaid to department store tycoon. I did read the rest of the trilogy and some of her others, but I think this – which was her big breakthrough was the best.

I mentioned it in the summer when I went to see the stage adaptation at the Open Air Theatre, but a reminder that Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden is set in Yorkshire. I’m going to admit that I haven’t reread this since I was a child, so I can’t swear to how the original is aging… and of course there’s also James Heriot and his adventures in veterinary medicine.

Another book I read recently is Sovereign, the third in the Shardlake series, which sees Matthew following in the train of Henry VIII as he makes his progress to York. As well as a good murder plot it’s also really good at creating sixteenth century York – and given how much of old York still exists you can really conjure up the settings in your head. It was particularly good for me because my history supervisor at university was based in Kings Manor, which is one of the principal locations.

And finally several of the series I really like have installments in yorkshire – including Lady Julia Grey and Royal Spyness, but you really need to ahve read the others to get the most out of them.

Happy Humpday everyone!

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: February Kindle Offers

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It’s the second Wednesday of the month, so it’s time for some more Kindle offers. And I’m not going to lie, given that it’s Valentine’s Day this month, I was expecting more romances on offer than I actually found. But hey, maybe this is counter programming?

Lets star with the romances I did find though. There’s an older Katie Fforde Living Dangerously, Casey McQuiston’s Red, White and Royal Blue, Kirsty Greenwood’s The Love of My Afterlife, How to End a Love Story (which I had some reservations about), recent release (and even more recently mentioned) Not in My Book and one of the Christina Laurens I haven’t read – Love and Other Words.

There are a few intriguing looking new releases on offer – like Frances White’s Voyage of the Damned, which claims “if Agatha Christie wrote fantasy, this would be it” which is quite the claim and almost enough to get me to buy it without reading a sample for 99p. But not quite enough because I’m working on that impulse control, so I have the sample on the Kindle now.

If you want to start the Rivers of London series ahead of the next book this summer, the first book is 99p this month. There are a couple of Agatha Christies on offer too – Sparkling Cyanide and Nemesis. Also in old favourites there’s Memoirs of a Geisha, which I first read at uni and is way better than the movie of it is.

In stuff I have but haven’t read yet, there’s T J Klune’s retelling of Pinoccio In the Lives of Puppets and Stephanie Garber’s Caravel.

Two Discworld books to flag this month – I Shall Wear Midnight from the Tiffany Aching middle grade series is 99p and Feet of Clay from the Watch sequence is £1.99. There’s a Georgette Heyer murder mystery, Death in the Stocks, on offer at 99p as well as a few romances including one of my all time favourites in Devil’s Cub and short story collection Pistols for Two at £1.99.

Happy Humpday!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: January Quick Reviews

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The first month of 2025 is over and so I’m back with another whistle-stop tour through a couple of books that I read last month that I didn’t already tell you about.

Vanishing Box by Elly Griffiths

Let’s start this month with a rule breaking mid-series book. But there’s a reason for this I promise. Vanishing Box is the fourth in Griffiths’ series set in Brighton in the early 1950s. It’s been five years since I read the third book but my mum’s book club picked the first one just before Christmas and it reminded me that I had forgotten to go and read any more of them. And this is a good instalment in the series. The general premise is that Edgar Stephens is a police detective but in World War 2 he worked in a shadowy unit with Max Mephisto who is a magician. They fall back into each other’s orbit during the first book (The Zigzag Girl) and have stayed there since. This book sees Max performing on the bill of a variety show in Brighton and Edgar investigating the death of a flower shop worker who happened to be living in the same boarding house as some of the other performers on the bill with Max. You could read this without reading the rest of the series, but it will definitely work best if you’ve got the background.

Natural Selection by Elin Hilderbrand

A short story on the list this month – this is an Amazon Original that follows Sophia, a New Yorker who has finally found a man she can see herself settling down with, but who finds herself on a couples trip alone after an emergency means he has to bail on her as they’re about to board the flight. This sends Sophia on a journey of self discovery – the holiday was his choice – so Sophia finds herself the fish out of a water on a once in a lifetime trip to the Galapagos Islands – without her boyfriend, without her phone signal (most of the time) and too embarrassed to talk to anyone about what’s going on. Hildebrand packs a lot into just over 50 pages and I found it surprisingly emotional as well as satisfying.

Not in My Book by Katie Holt*

As I previewed this when it came out, I thought I ought to follow up now I’ve read it. This is an enemies to lovers romance about two writers who are forced to write a book together after they take their classroom rivalry one step too far for their professor to let slide. If New Adult was still a thing, I would say that this is squarely in that area, but it’s not really any more so I don’t really know what to call it. And I think for some people this is going to work really well. It’s being compared to Sally Thorne‘s The Hating Game in the blurb and I think that’s pretty fair, but I think these two are maybe meaner to each other than those two. And that was my problem: they’re awful to each other and although I enjoyed it once they started getting along, as soon as there is any hint of conflict they revert to saying the most hurtful things they can to each other, and that’s just not my thing. Maybe it’s the age of the main characters and I’m just too old for that now – but it ended up being the end of the trope that I find hard to get on board with.

And that’s your lot for this month – a reminder of the Books of the Week from January: White House by the Sea, Deadly Summer Nights, Dark Tort and The Paradise Problem.

Happy Reading!

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: January Blues selections

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It’s the tail end of January. It feels like a long time since Christmas. You could be forgiven for having a bit of the blues at the moment. So I’ve got a bit of a recommendsday supercut for you, of suggestions to try and help you through the gloom and towards the spring.

First of all I have a whole list of novels about fresh starts – not to be confused with the non fiction post of self help books. I’ve also got a lot of recommendations for books about house renovations- which are a sort of fresh start aren’t they? – whether it’s this recommendsday post or the Fixer Upper mysteries, the Real Estate Rescue ones or a romance with Maggie Moves On?

I find small town romances very comforting but also cheering – so how about Happily Inc or Blessings? But maybe you want to escape away to somewhere tropical. Obviously The Paradise Problem was book of the week the other week but there’s also The Unhoneymooners. And finally if you want to go completely the other way there’s ski resort action with the O’Neil Brothers.

Happy Humpday!

book round-ups, books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: US Presidents special

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As you may have noticed, the US presidency has changed hands this week, so for recommendsday this week, I have a few books – and other posts to point you at if you want a US politics fix. And I’ve even got a photo of the White House from my time in DC in 2018 to fancy it up a bit!

First of all, let me point you at my JFK adjacent post – which has got a whole lot of fiction and non fiction about the Kennedy family – and I’m currently reading even more on top of that with the White Hiuse by the Sea nearly finished and also Ask Not waiting on the pile. There’s also post I wrote for the first Trump Inauguration eight years ago, which has a bit of cross over too.

Then there’s Kate Anderson Brower who has written a lot about The White House and what it’s like to live there. There’s First Women, First in Line and Team of Five – about the wives of presidents, the vice presidents and the club of former presidents respectively – there’s a bit over overlap between them so maybe just pick the topic that interests you most.

And if you want a bit of lesser spotted presidential scandal, there’s also Rachel Maddow’s Bag Man about Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s disgraced VP.

Happy Humpday!

books on offer, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: January Kindle Offers

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It’s January. It’s incredibly cold. So you should buy books. And there are some kindle bargains to help you with that!

Let’s start with two authors who I mentioned in my anticipated books post at the weekend. Firstly Taylor Jenkins Reid whose tennis comeback story Carrie Soto is Back is 99p this month just in time for the Australian Open. Then there is Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five – also 99p and really worth reading – especially given how much it upset a lot of the so-called “Ripperologists”. If you’re interested in social history and the lives that women lead in the past (and that don’t often get covered) you will find it really interesting, even if (like me) you don’t usually do Jack the Ripper content.

We’re under a week away from another Presidential inauguration (and we just had the funeral of another former president), and Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife is on offer – this is her book that’s inspired by Laura Bush. I like it (but not as much as I like Romantic Comedy) and I am looking forward to her collection of short stories that is coming out next month. Ready Player One is back on offer – I like the book way more than the film, and I say that as someone who likes the film, although I still haven’t managed to bring myself to read the sequel.

On the non-fiction front, there is Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking – which I actually listened to on audiobook (read by Carrie herself) a few years ago (while painting the spare room at the old house), but as a tale of growing up in Hollywood it’s incredible – and really funny and well written: after all Fisher was a script doctor who punched up the scripts of movies including favourites of mine like Sister Act and The Wedding Singer. On the history front, we have Alison Weir’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII which is a good starting point if you’re interested in the wives and want to know more. Also in the historical overview section of reading is Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, which is some of the most fun you can have reading about an era where the Plague could get you if the dysentery didn’t and if a woman made it to my age she was doing well. Talking about fun historical reads: Greg Jenner‘s Ask a Historian is also on offer, I’m guessing because there’s about to be a new series of You’re Dead To Me.

Excellent news on the Terry Pratchett front: Men at Arms is £1.99 this month. It’s the second in the Watch sequence, but it’s still early enough in the series that you can read it standalone without missing too many jokes. This one is playing with all the tropes about secret kings as well as a band of misfits finding home in the city police force. Also on offer is the graphic novel The Last Hero, which was a BotW a couple of years ago. This month’s Georgette Heyer is Black Sheep, there are Agatha Raisins and Hamish MacBeth’s on offer in the form of Down the Hatch and Death of a Spy. Josephine Tey’s The Man in the Queue which is the first in the Alan Grant series is 99p

In stuff I have waiting on the tbr pile (virtual or otherwise) that is on offer, we have Beth O’Leary’s The Road Trip (now in a tie-in edition because of the Paramount+ adaptation), Frank and Red by Matt Coyne, which is about an unlikely friendship between a curmudgeonly old man and the six year old who moves in next door to him. The Socialites was my Amazon Prime reads pick last month – and is now out and 99p. It says it’s for fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid (tick), Katherine Tessaro (tick) and Fiona Davis (tick) and follows three girls from their convent school in the 1920s to their lives as actresses and writers and similar. This definitely falls into the fictionalised real people area of my reading wheelhouse.

And finally, in other stuff worth mentioning, Elusive, the second in Genevieve Cogman’s French Revolution series is on offer, ahead of the release of the third in the series later this year.

Happy Wednesday!

Christmas books, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: Christmas Novellas

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It’s the week before Christmas and I have a stack of Christmas books that I want to read – but I’ve mostly only managed novellas so far because of the fact that I haven’t finished that pesky 50 states thing. So for this week’s Recommendsday I wanted to mention a few – some that I’ve read in previous years and haven’t written about yet, and one that’s new this year!

Holiday Hideaway by Mary Kay Andrews

This one is the new this year and has a newly single – and unexpectedly homeless – woman who is using one of the vacation rentals she manages as somewhere to live in the gap before her new home is ready. Except then the house’s new owner turns up to get it ready for sale and suddenly she’s hiding in the attic while he’s staying downstairs. I was slightly sceptical about this as a premise, but actually by the end it did work. This is going to be divisive – because the new owner has a girlfriend back in the city and I know that’s a hard no for some people. But for me it was a fun slightly nonsense read that maybe isn’t quite as Christmas-themed as the cover would suggest. Oh, and I wish Andrews had specified a location in it, it would have made my life so much easier…

Missing Christmas by Kate Clayborn

This is the novella that fits in as book three and a half in Clayborn’s Chance of a Lifetime series, which features one of the side characters from the first book getting his chance at a happy ending with his business partner when the two of them are snowed in at the house of a scientist they’re trying to recruit – so forced proximity and only one bed in the festive season. I enjoyed it and if you like Claybourn’s writing – which I obviously do – this is definitely worth checking out.

A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong by Cecilia Grant

How about a historical romance novella with birds of prey? Fancy a falcon this Christmas? Yes? No? This has a hero who is trying to make a perfect Christmas for his family before his sister gets married and things change, and a heroine who is delivering the falcon he’s ordered on the way to a Christmas party. Except that there’s snow and an issue with her carriage and suddenly they’re stuck together and in the wrong place. Yes, I know another forced proximity Christmas novel – but snowed in at Christmas is a trope for a reason: it works really well! This is a prequel to a series of novels about the hero’s siblings, which I haven’t read – but Cecilia Grant says she specialises in high angst-to-plot ratios, so they may not be my thing because: angst. Anyway, if you want a historical novella this year, this worked for me.

Happy Humpday everyone!