Knitting, Sci-fi and other stuff...

5⭐️1🌶 I finished Cast Off by Enola M Douglas last night.  This was another absolutely beautifully written book.  It was long at over 700 pages but it never dragged or felt like a 700 page book.  Honestly 700 pages still wasn't enough.  This one had darker themes than the first book.  Both the main characters had lost at least one parent at a young age and both were dealing with the circumstances surrounding those deaths.  JingYi lived a miserable existence despite being the omega daughter of the emperor.  She was reduced to servitude.  She has a large port wine birth mark on her face and she walks with a limp.  In a society where looks and perception are everything she is ostracized for her appearance.  She becomes a shadow amongst even her own family.  Alexander is attempting to restore his family name after his father's seemingly traitorous behavior and subsequent execution.  The king offers him a bride from a fo...

I just realized I did a May Wrap-Up Instagram post but I never did a blog post and it's nearly the end of June. I read 6 books total in May totalling just shy of 3,000 pages.  Two of them were ARCs and one was a re-read.  Overall it was a pretty good month, there was only one mediocre book.   I started the month out with a very spicy, low stakes, contemporary, why choose The Ex-boyfriend Agreement by Krista Wolf.  It hit the spot.   Next I participated in Mer-May with The Saltwater Curse by Avina St.Graves.  I loved that one and was not expecting what I got.  It had so much more depth than I anticipated getting from a contemporary monster Kraken-shifter romance.  It is a Hades and Persephone retelling and it was both absolutely hilarious and incredibly poignant.  It was by far one of my favorite reads this year.   Hollow Huntress by Kathryn Breaux was next and that one was my mediocre read.  The concept wa...

5⭐️2🌶 I finished Whisked Away by Enola M Douglas last night.  It was mind blowingly good.  The world building was expansive and vivid.  I could see every place, smell the foods, the markets it was really epically done.  There are nine Kingdoms in this world, we experience two of them in this book.  Aethonia, where Princess Reiyana is from is an island and one of the smaller Kingdoms.  The palace is close to the ocean.  This is an Omega verse novel.  Reiya awakened as an Omega late at the age of 20.  Omegas are rather scarce in this world and she is the only one in her family.  Overnight she became a political pawn.  Her marriage to a foreign Alpha would be a boon to her small kingdom.  The alliance it would yield is immeasurable.  Reiya is, of course, feeling like a commodity at the beginning of this book.  She sees her awakening as a death sentence.  Any chance at happiness, freedom, autonomy.... go...

4.5⭐️1🌶 I just finished The Merrow's Wrath by Mallory Wanless.  It was a good.  It's a second chance romance where the FMC is the pirate captain of The Merrow.  Cressida fled her abusive past 15 years ago and made a life for herself at sea.  Now she's stumbled across her first love the MMC Tristen aboard one of her abusive grandfather's merchant ships.  Instead of letting Tristen go with the other crew members of the ship she pillaged she decides to abduct him.  He recognizes her immediately.  After she fled her life 15 years ago her grandfather faked her death so Tristen though she was dead all these years.  He never moved on though, and is still in love with her.  He immediately wants to rekindle their relationship.  Cressida has been through a lot in that time apart and she must navigate the expectations of her crew and the all the memories her proximity to Tristen dredges up for her.  She starts having panic attacks...

5⭐️2🌶 I finished the ARC of Starfire's Heir last night.  It was so good!  It has everything a good epic fantasy should have.  Lexa is just a regular girl living in a small village, minding her own business when she decides to step across the border of her small town.  She feels something shift inside her body and the world as she knows it.  She races back home to find a stranger talking with her grandmother, the only family she has; the woman who raised her.  Well, Lexa is the lost princess to a kingdom inside the Veil and she has powerful magic and is destined to save her people; there's a prophesy and everything.  The man in her kitchen is her Champion, Griff, and he's been searching for her for years.  Her grandmother had warded the village and when Lexa stepped across the border Griff, was able to sense her and came immediately to take her "home".  At her grandmother's insistence she reluctantly goes with Griff.  Griff i...

4.5 ⭐️ I just finished To Drown Among the Stars by L.K. Frost.  It was a really good palate cleanser after A Ballad for the Broken.  It was a nice quick read at under 300 pages.  The main character is male.  Bastian has failed his trail to become a knight.  He's been training all his life to become a knight.  He takes some time to get his head right.  He decides to take leave and travel alone by foot back to the Capitol city.  On his journey he encounters a ransacked fishing village and a deaf Yvri healer named Ulla.  He also discovers that something larger is afoot.  Ulla travels with him and they quickly form a bond.  Bastian, because of his failure, deals with feelings of inadequacy and thinks he isn't good enough for her.  He spends most of the book denying whats right in front of him.  Truth be told, I think that dragged on a bit much, but there is also some racism going on between the multiple species typ...

6⭐️1🌶 I finished Ballad for the Broken last evening and needed a good night's rest to collect my thoughts on this one.  It was amazing, no question about it.  It sent me through an emotional roller coaster.  The MMC and the FMC Draven and Lyra are both complex well thought out characters.  They share similar trauma and worked through it together in book 1.  This book starts out with them separated.  Lyra was taken by *redacted* who on the surface seems like a bad guy.  Well, he is fighting his own demons and after Lyra spends a lot of time with him, she comes to understand him at least a little bit better.  Slight spoiler ahead.  Lyra and Draven are reunited, a group of them from Bethara are actually, and its looking really great at least for a little bit.  I know how these things go and I knew it wouldn't last.  I seriously contemplated stopping at the 85% mark because the band was back together and everyone had time t...