Behind These Doors is unlike any other historical romance I've read. Perhaps there are dozens of polyam feminist Edwardian romances out there, but I'm missing out if so. It would be easy to say that the romantic arc follows Lucien and Aubrey, two men from different classes who begin a relationship in the book, but it's also a bit of a Marriage in Trouble romance, with a strained relationship between an existing triad. It's a complicated book, with lots of moving pieces and complex relationships, but Lucens handles it with nuance, grace, and gorgeous prose.
Suzanne
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The Christmas season, which starts in October in the world of publishing, is packed with romance novels. But sometimes you see one that makes you go "GIVE ME NOW," even if you've got twenty on your TBR already. Adriana Herrera's upcoming f/f romance novella, Mangos and Mistletoe, is that book.
It's been a while since we did this! Two months, eeep. Anyway, here are short reviews of Hard Chrome, These Witches Don't Burn, Blitzed, and The Bromance Book Club.
Rosiee Thor's debut YA sci-fi novel, Tarnished Are the Stars, is excellent. She combines several classic sci-fi themes, fresh environmental elements and a whole lot of Queer Feels to make an action- and emotion-packed story of oppression, grief, love and hope.
We're getting into the time of year when publishers slow down their release schedule, so this month is a little lighter than usual. Gird your loins for January, when they open the flood gates again.
Now's a great time to stock up on winter reading and catch up on all those October books!
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Every fall, when the days turn gray and windy and the leaves fall from the trees to cast their skeletal shadows across dark roads, I crave a Gothic romance. Give me the ghosts, murder and events that could be paranormal or the result of sinister humans. Give me a protagonist fleeing their One Safe Place in terror. Give me characters who don't know who to trust but still need to work together to solve a mystery and defeat evil. And please, please give me an HEA at the end of all this. Otherwise I will throw your book against the wall.
At long last, I have read The Queen of Ieflaria! I'll admit, backlist (already released, out for a while) books being on audio increases my chance of reading them by about 90%, and that's definitely the case here. I bought it from NineStar ages ago, but it's languished on my Kindle ever since. The first two in the series, The Queen of Ieflaria and Daughter of the Sun are both out on audio, the third is currently in eBook and I have hopes of audio.
I have a lot of complicated feelings about Twice in a Blue Moon. A couple of them involve spoilers, so I'll stick that at the end. This is a second-chance romance that begins when Sam and Tate meet in London while on vacations with their grandparents. She's with her cafe-owning, over-protective grandmother, and he's with his step-grandfather who turns out to be terminally ill. This last bit is revealed early in the book, so don't be mad at me. Anyway, they're staying at the same hotel and end up eating breakfast together every day. The vacation is two weeks long and Sam and Tate, ages 21 and 18, fall into a whirlwind romance. Vacation is cut short, however, when Sam presumably tells the press that Tate is the long-hidden daughter of a mega-famous movie star, a secret she, her mother and her grandmother have worked to hide for over a decade. Then she doesn't see him again and doesn't have any way of contacting him. Fourteen years later, the two are reunited when she's cast as the lead in a movie adaptation of his novel, Milkweed.
The Beautiful was the perfect October read for me. A murder mystery, a forbidden romance, unexpected twists, and immersive world-building. The book is set in an alternate history New Orleans, shortly after the Civil War. The protagonist of the story, Celine, grew up in Paris, where her white father raised her to hide her Asian heritage. After killing the young man who was attempting to rape her at the dressmaker's shop where she worked, she flees to a convent in New Orleans. Arriving in the city is a revelatory experience for her.
