More mini-reviews!  Within These Wicked Walls, Dirty Plays, If This Gets Out, Smash & Grab, The Belle and the Beard and Uncommonly Verdant. That's a YA f/m fantasy, two f/m contemporaries, a YA m/m contemporary, an m/m paranormal contemp, and whatever you want to call an f/m tree romance.

Rating refresher! Categories are based on whether or not I recommend them to fellow readers -  DNF (Did Not Finish), Pass, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary), Read it Eventually, Read it Soon.

I'm glad a couple of my reviewer friends read Julie Tieu's The Donut Trap before I did, because I went into this novel with the expectation that it's more a coming-of-age story than a romance. The romance between Jasmine and Alex is definitely a big part of the plot, but the novel is told from Jasmine's point of view and Alex is missing from chunks of the book. Instead, the relationship between Jasmine and her parents and Jasmine's overall post-college funk is the focus of the story and if you read it with the right expectations, it's a really solid debut.

The Ex Hex is the book I needed during the Spooky Season. I read a couple horror novels and considering the amount of horror in the real world, I was struggling to pick up just about anything. The Ex Hex to the rescue! This book has some flaws, but I ended up liking it quite a bit and look forward to more from Erin Sterling/Rachel Hawkins.

I've read a pretty random assortment of books recently that made me wonder "how much does my mother really need to know about my reading preferences?" Eventually, I decided that 1) my family's pretty open about things and 2) people don't have to read my blog if they don't want to know things. And then I danced around my barren field of f*cks and wrote this post.

Lakesedge is everything I hoped it would be: a romantic dark gothic fantasy novel with an intriguing magic system. 'Tis the Spooky Season and this is a great pick for those of us who want something horror-lite. Lakesedge pairs an anguished boy who feeds his blood to a cursed lake once a month and a girl who's haunted by the lord of death and desperate to save her brother from said anguished boy. If that's the right level of spooky for you? Read on.

I adore the Primas of Power and Alexis Daria's writing, so it's no surprise that A Lot Like Adiós was a quick, fun read for me.

Gena Showalter starts a new series with Heartless, a paranormal romance that gave me the Immortals After Dark vibes I've been missing.

The Love Hypothesis pairs a 26 year-old grad student/researcher with a 34 year-old faculty member/researcher in a fake dating relationship for the ages. I flipping loved this book. Everyone told me I'd like it, but I couldn't stop picturing the male love interest, Adam Carlsen, as Adam Driver (this book started as Reylo fic) and I knew, just knew I wouldn't like it because of that. I was so wrong.

I'm going to join the chorus here and say that I should have loved Witch Please and instead I found it to be "fine." The setup is fun! A bisexual baker who's chronically unlucky in love and the fix-it witch next door who's sworn off relationships fall for each other. If this had been a sweet novella, I would have loved it, but apparently there wasn't really enough plot here to keep the story going for a whole novel without Aguirre throwing in an evil grandmother and an inadvertently harmful mother.

More mini-reviews! Reviews of Phantom Heart, Fables & Other Lies, Too Good to Be Real, Not Your Average Hot Guy and A Touch of Darkness. This is a YA gothic romance, an adult gothic romance, a contemporary romance and two paranormal romances (sort of?).

Rating refresher! Categories are based on whether or not I recommend them to fellow readers -  DNF (Did Not Finish), Pass, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary), Read it Eventually, Read it Soon.