I am a reader, and I am happy that there are so many of us out there. I am totally part of the You Do You category of reading, where I expect you to like what you like and leave the rest for the ones who like it. I know that there are people who…
Sparks and Tarts Review Edition: The Sumage Solution
The Sumage Solution (San Andreas Shifters #1) G.L. Carriger Gail Carriger, LLC July 18,2017 Disclaimer: A copy of this book was provided by the publisher for an honest review.
Something Terrible Happened: Roxane Gay’s Hunger
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body Roxane Gay HarperCollins June 13, 2017 Content warning: rape. “There are so many things I hunger for.” Statistics say that 34.9 percent of Americans are obese and 68.6 percent of Americans are obese or overweight. Going into Hunger, and knowing what Gay looks like, you know that there will…
Sparks and Tarts: With Romance, Your Mileage May Vary…and That’s Okay
Did you try a romance once and put it down, never to pick up another? Did you ever wonder why that was? Maybe the plot didn’t work for you or the writing was bad. Maybe it was just boring. Maybe the author wrote a piece of sexist, racist garbage. Maybe there were elements that hit…
Sparks and Tarts: A Romance Primer
What constitutes a romance? When is something Capital R Romance vs. a story in another genre with romantic elements? When does the line fall so thin that Capital R Romance lovers don’t really care? There’s been a lot of talk on the bookish interwebs recently about the nature of romance—romance novels in particular. Essays have…
Saying Their Names: A Review of THE HATE U GIVE
The Hate U Give Angie Thomas Belzer + Bray February 28, 2017 Long ago, in the days when we bought CDs, we also bragged about who got whose new CD and learned the words to all the songs. We used liner notes to help us understand the lyrics the first time and then learn them…
11 Romance Authors of Color You Should Be Reading
For many non-romance readers, and honestly, probably a large portion of romance readers, romance is a monolithic tower of white women writing about courtship and society in the time of Jane Austen. And while Regency Romance is a pretty big part of the romance machine, and some of it is pretty fantastic, it’s not the…
Dogears: My Best Friend’s Exorcism and Diabolic Angels
My Best Friend’s Exorcism Grady Hendrix Quirk Books May 16, 2016 The power of Diet Coke compels you! My Best Friend’s Exorcism is a nostalgic, sweet, and disgusting story about friendship, high school, and demons. There are a few tiny gaps in the narrative and plot, but I enjoyed this book more than I expected….
Hermione Granger’s Got Her Own New (Web)Series
A couple weeks ago, I was scrolling through Facebook, and I caught three captivating words followed by another three captivating words: Black Girl Nerds, New Series Alert. BGN is an awesome site and if they’re sharing something, I trust them to not lead me wrong. But it was the words that followed that stopped me…
Love in the Laboratory: Gail Carriger’s Romancing the Inventor
Romancing the Inventor Supernatural Society #1 Gail Carriger November 1, 2016 Romancing the Inventor is the first book of the Supernatural Society, an LGBTQ+ focused novella series set in Gail Carriger’s Parasolverse. Note: A review copy was provided at no charge by the author. Imogene Hale is young(ish), more than averagely pretty, and so not interested…
Dogears: An Unfinished World of Unrequited Love
The Unfinished World Amber Sparks Liveright January 25, 2016 The Unfinished World invites readers into the slightly off-center realities characteristic of Amber Sparks’ fabulist short stories. The stories are quirky and interesting, proving that the only thing readers can expect from Sparks’ work is that the stories will be unexpected.
Fell in Love with a Dream: Calista Lynne’s We Awaken
We Awaken Calista Lynne Harmony Ink Press July 14, 2016 Disclaimer: A review copy was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.