Check another one off the NPR Summer of Love list. Texas Destiny is first in a trilogy about cowboy and rancher brothers living in an as-of-yet uncivilized West Texas. Preciously, they are named Dallas, Houston, and Austin. (“Our parents just named us after wherever they were living at the time,” Houston explains, which doesn’t alleviate my raised eyebrows considering Texas is huge, frequent travel in the Wild West is not something one does for fun in this era, and in the pre-birth control 19th century […]
Early CBR8 popularity front-runner?
I can see why they recommended this at SBTB: it’s a clever, succinct romance between two characters who share obvious charisma. The prose is witty and sophisticated, and Lucy Parker struck a remarkable balance in writing dialogue that demonstrated the characters’ intelligence while also remaining casual, which made everyone on the page seem much more realistic than I often encounter in contemporary romance. (This, in fact, is a hidden pet peeve of mine: authors bend over backwards to inject “cleverness” in banter between characters, but […]
Light and dark are exactly what they seem
When Leigh Bardugo’s first novel from a new series dropped in 2015 and started getting all kinds of raves, I knew I’d have to go back post haste to the ever-growing TBR and pick up the first series, which I had been intending to read for some time. The Grisha Trilogy imagines a fantasy world based out of a Russian analog country, where those possessed of magical abilities are called the Grisha, and anyone who is not Grisha is probably either a peasant or a […]
My first wish for 2016 is for Bettie Sharpe to publish more stories.
I was hooked about two pages into Ember, a romance retelling of “Cinderella” featuring a heroine who is a (mostly) benevolent witch and a prince who is literally cursed by Charm — everyone who meets him loves him, finds him salivatingly handsome, and can’t help but do what he wants. I knew immediately I would want to read everything by this author, which, I’ll mention now, is devastatingly little that is available: three novellas and one short story on Amazon and none published after 2012. […]