I’d been curious about the rest of Alisha Rai’s oeuvre since reading A Gentleman in the Street, a book that was funny and declaratively feminist. It’s also, you know, erotica — and quite an adventurous one at that — so its focus was much more on physical couplings than an emotional connection. Still, I liked Rai’s style, so I wanted to see which of her themes translated across her other books. From that, I can’t say what prompted me to start with Glutton for Pleasure, […]
The cream of the crop
Guys. GUYS. I’m pretty sure Christina Lauren, like, really listens and responds to feedback. This book would have been written too early to claim a direct line of insight from the epic post on slut shaming in romance, but I feel like the cultural tides that made way for that post influence Christina Lauren very much. 1) Luke, the male hero, out-and-out declares himself a feminist. 2) In direct contrast to almost every other book featuring a recovering rake, this one goes out of its […]
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The Language of Spells is a serviceable lite-fantasy story that I breezed through very quickly, but lacks staying power. The main character, Gwen Harper, is from a family that demonstrates magical abilities — hexes, spells, card reading, and certain individual talents manifest themselves in Gwen, her mother, and her great aunt Iris (notably not her sister, Ruby.) When Gwen learns that recently deceased Iris has left her a house in her name, in a small town that her family had lived in but left when […]
My every wish
Does Courtney Milan know how to bounce back or what? After the slight letdown that was Once Upon a Marquess, she gifts her adoring public with the practically-perfect-in-every-way Her Every Wish, the rare (for me) novella that tells a fully-realized story in its shorter framework and avoids the pitfalls of contrivance or half-baked narrative that really could have benefited from the full-length treatment to give it depth. Our heroine is Daisy, best friend of Judith Worth from the former novel. Daisy does okay for herself […]