New week, new news! (That was a lot. We won't do that again.)
The first series of Anne Bishop’s The Others ended two years ago with Etched in Bone. Since then Bishop has written two additional books in that world for her World of the Others series. In this spin off series Bishop revisits familiar themes, while expanding the world, by introducing new types of characters and introducing new perspectives. The first book in that series was Lake Silence. It took place in an Others controlled human settlement, and it takes place a little bit after Etched in Bone. That book followed new but familiar characters and could be read as a standalone, as it only lightly references prior books.
Wild Country, however, takes things a completely different direction. As a long-time fan of the Others series, I couldn’t put it down, but it suffers from and magnifies a lot of the problematic issues from the original series - chiefly, sexualized violence against women - this time, extending beyond the exploitation of the cassandra sangue. A large of percentage of the women in this book experience some sort of violence or sexual harassment at some point in the novel and one character suffers a gratuitously explicitly violent death.
Crazy Cupid Love is a goofy contemporary fantasy rom-com with some Greek Mythology thrown in. The Erosians (descendents of Cupid/Eros) told the world about themselves back in the 1960's, and joined the ranks of other highly taxed and regulated service industries. Eliza, a failed Cupid, has a gift so strong that she can enchant people without trying. It's caused her all sorts of trouble before the book starts, and doesn't stop.
This book ruined me. Even if the title was not The Earl I Ruined, I would have written that sentence, but now it’s there for posterity as some sort of dad joke. The truth is that this book hit the right chord and I couldn’t stop reading it. I whined about how I had to go to work when all I wanted to do was call in sick and finish this gorgeous story. Also, this book has one of my favorite complicated heroines too.
More mini-reviews! This time we've got a queer YA with romantic elements, an m/f contemporary, and an m/m new adult (college-set) romance.
Romance fans rejoice - a romance-only bookstore may be coming to the Midwest! Marissa and Roseann Backlin are a mother/daughter team who currently have a Kickstarter for Love’s Sweet Arrow. Their goal is to open up a romance focused bookstore in the south suburbs of Chicago with the funds raised. We spoke to Marissa and Roseann about their Kickstarter, their goals for the store, and some of their favorite romance reads.
Ernesto Vasquez might have been born in the Dominican Republic but he is a die-hard New Yorker at heart. His food truck, OuNYe’s menu expresses the special fusion of his New York city childhood, where the Afro-caribbean flavors of his heritage and that of his Puerto Rican, Cuban, Jamaican and Haitian best-friends, nourished and united them. Making his food truck a success is his driving objective because Nesto can’t live on passion alone, he needs his truck to turn a profit. Willing to try anything, Nesto has given himself six months Upstate in his mother Nurys’s new town of Ithaca, in a last ditch effort to keep his dream aflot. If he fails to find customers, he will pack it in and head back to NYC and find new dreams.
There's a lot going on in Romancelandia every week, so we're starting a new weekly feature to help all of us keep up. Happy reading!
March is supposedly the start of Spring, so let's be optimistic and welcome some sunshine along with these fabulous books. (If you're Andrea and in South Africa, hopefully March brings a bit of relief from the heat of summer!)
Sometimes the most unexpected combinations make the best pairings and no one knows this better than the residents of Romancelandia. Opposites attract is a time honored and battle tested trope that helped create the very foundation our fair city rests on. Knowing that we love our opposites-attract romances the way citizens of Shondaland love popcorn and wine, Crystal B. Bright (yes, that is her actual factual legal name) offers her unique take on the trope by pairing sultry R&B divas with good ole country boys for her Love & Harmony series.
