RECOMMEND: The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary is $2.99 and a KDD. We had a great guest review of this one and Lisa the Librarian gave it an A-:
It was romantic, sweet, hot, funny, and original – everything I’m looking for in a romance. I can definitely see myself rereading this in the not-too-distant future.
Tiffy and Leon share an apartment. Tiffy and Leon have never met.
After a bad breakup, Tiffy Moore needs a place to live. Fast. And cheap. But the apartments in her budget have her wondering if astonishingly colored mold on the walls counts as art.
Desperation makes her open minded, so she answers an ad for a flatshare. Leon, a night shift worker, will take the apartment during the day, and Tiffy can have it nights and weekends. He’ll only ever be there when she’s at the office. In fact, they’ll never even have to meet.
Tiffy and Leon start writing each other notes – first about what day is garbage day, and politely establishing what leftovers are up for grabs, and the evergreen question of whether the toilet seat should stay up or down. Even though they are opposites, they soon become friends. And then maybe more.
But falling in love with your roommate is probably a terrible idea…especially if you’ve never met.
What if your roommate is your soul mate? A joyful, quirky romantic comedy, Beth O’Leary’s The Flatshare is a feel-good novel about finding love in the most unexpected of ways.
Drop Dead by Lily Chu is $2.24 at Amazon and $2.99 elsewhere! I’ve heard this one is really good on audio, but it seems like this one didn’t get as much love as Chu’s debut. Have you read this one?
One mysterious mansion. Two rival journalists. Three weeks to uncover the story—and love—of a lifetime.
Obituary writer Nadine Barbault doesn’t mind being called “Lady Death.” It suits the ice queen persona she’s cultivated to survive the fast-paced Toronto Herald. So when Nadine learns that famous (and reclusive) author Dot Voline has died, she doesn’t hesitate to run the obituary…only to discover that Dot is very much alive.
Nadine’s screw-up has brought Wesley Chen of the rival Spear no end of joy—she’s been a thorn in his extremely ambitious side for years. But the renewed interest in Dot also surfaced chatter about a mysterious past scandal. Intrigued, Wes goes to the source to learn more—only to discover Nadine had the exact same idea…and the infuriating woman isn’t willing to respect dibs. Typical.
At first, Dot refuses to speak to either of the squabbling pair, but then they receive an unusual request—work together, and Dot will share everything. The offer seems too good to be true…and of course, it in a bitter twist of irony, Dot dies for real before she can finish recounting her story. Not all is lost, however. The estate’s executor allows Wes and Nadine access to Dot’s sprawling wonderland of a mansion for three weeks to find their answer. That’s three weeks of working together…three weeks of endless sweltering in tight spaces…three weeks of learning there could be something more between them than a desire to win at any cost.
And maybe, just maybe, under the rubble of all those could-have-beens they’ll uncover more than the secret of Dot Voline’s long-ago scandal—and Lady Dearth will finally embrace what she’s wanted from life all along.
One Cursed Rose by Rebecca Zanetti is $3.99! This is book one in the dystopian fairy tale Grimm Bargains series. I recently reviewed this and gave it a D, but no judgement if you want to try the crazysauce for yourself.
For fans of Scarlett St Clair and Sarah J Maas, New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Zanetti explores the forbidden and the taboo in this modern twist on Beauty and the Beast – the first in a seductive new dark romance series set in a world where information is power, and those who control the flow of information live like gods…
“Sexy and utterly engrossing!” —bestselling author J.T. Geissinger
They christened me Alana—and while the name means beauty, beneath that surface is a depth I allow very few to see. I’m sole heir to Aquarius Social, a media giant about to succumb to an unseen enemy. My father’s solution is to marry me off to the son of a competing family. My reaction? Not a chance. Now I have just a week before the wedding to change my fate.
Who knew the unforeseen twist would be an assassination attempt on me and an unwanted rescue by Thorn Beathach, the head of the rival social media empire driving Aquarius under? The richest, most ruthless of them all, the Beast protects his realm with an iron rule: no one sees his face. When he shows himself to me, I know he’ll never let me go.
Thorn may think he can lock me in his enchanted castle forever, but I’m not the docile Beauty he expects. If the Beast wants to tie me up, I’m going to take pleasure from every minute of it . . .and we’ll just see who ends up shackled.
Curves for Days by Laura Moher is $1.99! This is book one in the Big Love from Galway series. This one may work for the Renovation Romance square for SBTB Summer Romance Bingo.
How is Rose Barnes supposed to build the home (and life) of her dreams when her big, burly contractor keeps scowling at her?
Rose Barnes has got curves for days—and to Angus Drummond, the big, bearded contractor working on her new house, she’s the perfect thorn in his side. Little does she know Angus is perturbed on a daily basis by his attraction to this cheery, smart-ass woman with her sunshiny enthusiasm, her kindness, and her beautiful body.
Angus feels he has a debt to pay to the world and doesn’t deserve love until he pays it. Best to keep his mind on his work and his hands to himself. But the more Rose sees of Angus’s gruff, honorable thoughtfulness, and the more rusty laughter she surprises from him, the more she wants him too.
As their unlikely friendship becomes love, antagonism turns to partnership, and Rose’s house becomes a home. But Rose is keeping a secret that could blow up everything with Angus, and sure enough, it comes to light at the worst possible time…
If you want to have a little extra fun, be a little more yourself, and be part of keeping the site open for everyone in the future, we can’t wait to see you in our new subscription-based section with exclusive content and events.
Everything you’re used to seeing at the Hot Pink Palace that is Smart Bitches Trashy Books will remain free as always, because we remain committed to fostering community among brilliant readers who love romance.
This guest review is from Crystal Anne! Crystal Anne with An E comes to us from a sunny clime, but prefers to remain a pale indoor cat. She enjoys reading, cross-stitching something nerdy, going to see live music, and playing video games. She works as an autism consultant by day, got a degree in information science for fun, and currently serves on her local library advisory board.
…
The brain is a funny thing.
My reading over the last couple of months had become, well, quite dark. I should say that I don’t necessarily find anything wrong with reading dark books. Do you, and enjoy yourself. What I find with my own brain is that sometimes, especially after a streak of primarily reading darker books, I find my brain needs to shift gears and do a Fast and Furious style 180.
Hold on!
Naturally, as one does in this situation, I decided to search out some reading that would be funny and sweet and maybe magical.
Also, very pink.
Like, PINK pink.
So, I yoinked out A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeepingby Sangu Mandanna ( A | BN | K | AB ). I had not read anything by this author previous to this, but the summary and cover seemed to promise exactly what I was after.
And, oh, it delivered.
That book was a warm hug, a cup of peppermint tea, and the stickiest cinnamon bun ever. When it finished, I immediately started her first book, The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches ( A | BN | K | AB ), because my brain was not ready to leave the worlds that Mandanna had created.
So let us break down those worlds, shall we?
Caretaking
The characters in these books are utterly caring for one another. At every turn, someone is constantly thinking of the well-being of someone they love, and working actively to preserve that person’s safety and happiness.
Dry Humor
The humor runs toward being very arch and British (which, given that Mandanna herself is British, is not super-surprising). I enjoy dry British humor, and these books do this very well. There are also nice touches of absurdity here and there (the undead rooster being my favorite), and they balance the urgency of the stakes well.
I listened to Mandanna’s appearance on the She Wore Black podcast, and I was very struck by her approach to stakes in her books. She said that cozy doesn’t mean devoid of stakes or urgency, it’s just that those stakes may not be for the world or society at large, but those stakes ARE important and critical for the characters. I liked that approach a great deal, as I think we all can understand the idea of balancing our care for the things going on in the world with the things that are important to us and our happiness and well-being.
Kindness and Acceptance
In addition to the emphasis on caring, there’s also a strong emphasis on kindness and acceptance. In The Very Secret Society for Irregular Witches, the main character, Mika, while kind and loving to those around her, finds it hard to believe that others could accept and love her as she is, and that lack of belief informs her tendency to keep others at arm’s length.
In A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping, Luke, in his protectiveness of his younger sister Posy, who is autistic and has significant communication differences, is constantly braced for people to be judgmental of her and frankly, ready to run away to keep her safe and un-judged.
Which is why, when instead of being judged or ridiculed, Posy is accepted and almost instantly loved by the residents of Batty Hole (that’s the inn, and what a fantastic name), he is caught very off-guard.
It’s alluded to that Luke himself is neurodivergent and also very possibly on the spectrum, but he learned to squash those traits and spend his entire life “masking”, because otherwise, he was punished for those traits in some way. It is part of what makes him skeptical of the idea that people could love and accept Posy just as she is, because he has never experienced that in his own life. It is when Mika accepts the love and kindness of those around her that she finds ways to extend that acceptance outward and form a community, when before, the witches in the story had always made a point of isolating themselves.
A Sensory Feast
Let’s talk about the sensory aspects of these books. You can practically smell the cinnamon buns and the tea, and you can almost see the magic glittering through the air. The writing loves to focus on these details, and they are, for lack of a better term, yummy. Mika in particular is described as a gifted potions witch, and I like to think that this is what her potions looked like.
It would be easy to take these aspects of a book, and make it too twee and sugary. These books avoid that by having some bite in that British humor. In addition, the characters in A Witch’s Guide have experienced trauma and bigotry, and that informs how they approach certain things, and they have had to reckon with and address their trauma. Sera, the heroine of A Witch’s Guide, has experienced the trauma of losing her magical abilities to save someone she loves, and it has made her grouchy and guarded, and is constantly having to do and redo the work of addressing her mental health and letting those around her carry some of the load.
I think that’s the most important thing about these books: no matter how messed up or grotesque we feel, there are people around us ready to show us how to be loved and cared for, and that we deserve love and care. Those people will likely err, but everyone will keep going, and everyone keeps doing that hard work, day after day, because the love and affection will continue.
It’s hard sometimes, especially right now, to feel okay about focusing on ourselves and our need for rest and recovery in a world that is constantly reminding us how on fire things are. It’s easy to feel powerless. We’re not, but we also cannot pour from an empty cup, and the characters in these books have to learn and re-learn that throughout these stories.
I mean, I completely agree that Georgian high society got the attention for their adulterous affairs! But that's because no one outside of the small town of —shire no one particularly would care if Mrs. Amblethorpe moved in with her kindly neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Gooding, as her husband had been called away to serve at Gibraltar and it was easier to share the work of running a household than maintain her own. Admittedly, in public, they would have to be all that is upright and decent! But what if anything Mrs. Amblethorpe got up to with Mrs. Gooding (or Mr. Gooding, sometimes) would have been their own business, save one or two nasty comments down at the pub, maybe a line said sotto voce by the crofter's wife to her daughter after church.
And true, no one needs Mrs. Brown at ton dinner parties, even when including the genteel hangers-on and the uncouthly ambitious. But I have to imagine the well-to-do-but-not-that-well-to-do stratum under that would not be so quick to throw her out. After all, if Dr. Brown appears quite content with the arrangement, and will not hear a word about Mr. Lingonberry spending so much time with (the quite young, and a little silly) Mrs. Brown? Well, then he might take offense if you don't invite Mrs. Brown to dinner. He might take offense if you don't invite Mr. Lingonberry! And we can't have that.
(What Dr. Brown and Mr. Lingonberry do one those nights when Mrs. Brown retires with a megrim and they've both had a little too much port, we shall not say.)
I come from a people who would, in many cases, rather die than ask a probing question they don't already know the answer to. We're hardly good ton, but it has given me the enduring belief that there are a lot of things people won't talk about. Or even think too hard about, unless circumstances require it. And while it's the rich, beautiful and powerful who make the cover of People magazine---I have no doubt that the same exact things have been done in much smaller, less-attractive ways by the smaller, less-attractive people who occupy so much more of the world.
not enough secret gardens and hidden passageways and bookshelves that open to a mysterious library these days. get working on that girls.
@korybing Didn’t you make a secret door behind a bookshelf a couple months back? Care to share photos with the class? Everyone who’s always wanted to do that would love to see it.
I did! It was one of the first things my husband and I did after buying a house!
It was a lot of work and not cheap but it’s something both my husband and I have dreamed about having since we were kids!
I’m attempting to tidy my office this morning (my SIL is coming to stay and look after Holly Mop while we’re gone, which is incredible, beyond amazing. Crying tears of gratitude.) and while I’m pretty sure she’d be chill with the metric shit ton of pagan paraphernalia everywhere, the same cannot be said for my MIL who passes comment on my “Halloween decor” being up year round so now I’m doing the equivalent of “we can’t let people know we SIT” but with like, ritual knives lol
Anybody want *checks notes* 5lbs of black salt?
“That’s a fun letter opener.”
Thanks, it was made from old iron horseshoes so I can tell the fae to fuck off.
Ah, lads, I found my beading supplies.
Please behold my cast iron anti fae kitty. My Irish Catholic grandma don’t fuck around.
He also helps as a door stop. He is very good at it. ❤️
What a good little guardian!
Black salt goes to kitchen surely
This black salt cannot and should not be eaten. It’s got a lot of charcoal and ashes from past firepits in it.
The problem with deep cleaning/organizing my office is that I’m finding all the half-finished projects and merchandise deals I let dwindle into nothing because unmedicated ADHD meets complex health needs = quicksand for everything that isn’t pure survival.
I’m attempting to tidy my office this morning (my SIL is coming to stay and look after Holly Mop while we’re gone, which is incredible, beyond amazing. Crying tears of gratitude.) and while I’m pretty sure she’d be chill with the metric shit ton of pagan paraphernalia everywhere, the same cannot be said for my MIL who passes comment on my “Halloween decor” being up year round so now I’m doing the equivalent of “we can’t let people know we SIT” but with like, ritual knives lol
Anybody want *checks notes* 5lbs of black salt?
“That’s a fun letter opener.”
Thanks, it was made from old iron horseshoes so I can tell the fae to fuck off.
Ah, lads, I found my beading supplies.
Please behold my cast iron anti fae kitty. My Irish Catholic grandma don’t fuck around.
He also helps as a door stop. He is very good at it. ❤️
I’m attempting to tidy my office this morning (my SIL is coming to stay and look after Holly Mop while we’re gone, which is incredible, beyond amazing. Crying tears of gratitude.) and while I’m pretty sure she’d be chill with the metric shit ton of pagan paraphernalia everywhere, the same cannot be said for my MIL who passes comment on my “Halloween decor” being up year round so now I’m doing the equivalent of “we can’t let people know we SIT” but with like, ritual knives lol
Anybody want *checks notes* 5lbs of black salt?
“That’s a fun letter opener.”
Thanks, it was made from old iron horseshoes so I can tell the fae to fuck off.
I am going to be so brave and suggest That Hamilton Woman (1941) should have done more to imply that Lady Hamilton, Lord Hamilton, and Lord Nelson had a menage e trois for a bit in there.
…..wait, were the Hamiltons + Lord Nelson menaging it up at the same time as the Cavendishes? That’s amazing. Everybody in the Georgian period was getting dangereuse with their liasons, even in the heights of polite society.
I am going to be so brave and suggest That Hamilton Woman (1941) should have done more to imply that Lady Hamilton, Lord Hamilton, and Lord Nelson had a menage e trois for a bit in there.
That Hamilton Woman is not a particularly good movie, but (a) it’s bitterly amusing that 200 years after England made Emma Hart the subject of every crass political cartoon possible, they turned around and enrolled her in their national propaganda; and (b) man is it a singularly unpersuasive and flattening look at a woman who, above all else, sounds like a hard-scrabble survivor, astute, charming in that thoroughly inexplicable way beautiful women sometimes are, and maybe a little silly underneath.
I’m attempting to tidy my office this morning (my SIL is coming to stay and look after Holly Mop while we’re gone, which is incredible, beyond amazing. Crying tears of gratitude.) and while I’m pretty sure she’d be chill with the metric shit ton of pagan paraphernalia everywhere, the same cannot be said for my MIL who passes comment on my “Halloween decor” being up year round so now I’m doing the equivalent of “we can’t let people know we SIT” but with like, ritual knives lol
Anybody want *checks notes* 5lbs of black salt?
“That’s a fun letter opener.”
Thanks, it was made from old iron horseshoes so I can tell the fae to fuck off.
I’m attempting to tidy my office this morning (my SIL is coming to stay and look after Holly Mop while we’re gone, which is incredible, beyond amazing. Crying tears of gratitude.) and while I’m pretty sure she’d be chill with the metric shit ton of pagan paraphernalia everywhere, the same cannot be said for my MIL who passes comment on my “Halloween decor” being up year round so now I’m doing the equivalent of “we can’t let people know we SIT” but with like, ritual knives lol
I’m attempting to tidy my office this morning (my SIL is coming to stay and look after Holly Mop while we’re gone, which is incredible, beyond amazing. Crying tears of gratitude.) and while I’m pretty sure she’d be chill with the metric shit ton of pagan paraphernalia everywhere, the same cannot be said for my MIL who passes comment on my “Halloween decor” being up year round so now I’m doing the equivalent of “we can’t let people know we SIT” but with like, ritual knives lol
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
thebibliosphere_feed
ALT
ALT![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timeasmymeasure
