Warning: The following review contains spoilers and feminist rallying cries I’ve read a handful of historical romance novels, including a weird period in my life where I was briefly into pioneer-era mail-order-bride stories, of which there are a surprising number. (Less surprising, however, than the number of “Earth woman becomes mated to a pair of sexy alien warlords who are sometimes also brothers” stories, which is apparently a genre that exists.) It’s not that I think love stories are inherently bad, or that enjoying them […]
Magic & Manners
The Cecelia and Kate books, set in an alternate-history Regency England where magic is commonplace, chronicle the lives of two cousins as they find love and foil a dastardly plot (Sorcery and Cecelia), travel the Continent while foiling an even more dastardly plot (The Grand Tour), and wrangle a number of children and dogs while foiling a slightly less dastardly plot (The Mislaid Magician). I adore the first book in this series. It’s an epistolary delight. Wrede and Stevermer wrote the story via “The Letter […]
Basic Witch
The first in Juliet Blackwell’s Witchcraft Mystery series, Secondhand Spirits reminded me a lot of a cluttered antique shop–appropriate since the main character runs a vintage clothing store in San Francisco. There were a few quality pieces, a couple of unexpected treasures, and a whole lot of random crap that it made it difficult to find what I was looking for. What’s it about? Lily Ivory (I just can’t with that name) is a powerful witch with a troubled and lonely past. After years of […]
Ashes to Ashes
If Texas Gothic is Scooby-Doo meets Nancy Drew, then the companion novel, Spirit and Dust (Ember, 2013), is Harry Dresden: Girl Detective. As I was reading this YA paranormal romance, I began to realize that it was really similar to Dresden Files #3, Grave Peril. Like, really similar. Like, “let’s weaponize the spirits of the dead in Chicago and then unleash Sue the T. Rex during the book’s climax” similar. (This is not a spoiler; like Chekhov’s gun, if you introduce a dinosaur skeleton in […]