Knitting, Sci-fi and other stuff...

5⭐️4🌶 This book was amazing!  I finished my ARC of Sharing Silence by Kayla Kyng early this morning.  I absolutely loved it.  It's part of a series but can be read as a standalone.  I read it as such and had no problem understanding what was going on.  It has,  however, hooked me on this author and I want to read her entire backlog now.  The FMC, Silence is an ER nurse and has a sarcastic sense of humor.  She's married to one of the triplet brothers Zayden.  They got married in Vegas on some kind of whim, but it has worked out for them for the last nine years.  She's best friends with one of the other brothers Yale.  The third brother Xavier and she grate on eachother so they have banter filled exchanges.  Yale and Xavier live right next door and the three brothers have always stayed close to eachother.  Zayden and Silence have discussed becoming more adventurous with their sex lives.  They've talked abou...

5⭐️2🌶 I finished the ARC of Taken by the Tide by Invi Wright yesterday evening.  I loved it!  It was a quick read at just over 300 pages.  The FMC, Sadie is snarky and sarcastic and I love that her mind is firmly in the gutter.  The opening line of the book is dialog between Sadie and Kyros.  Its her asking him “Do you think mermen have dicks?"  If you read the blurb for the book, you know that Kyros is a merman so it makes that question even more funny in my opinion.  Kyros is very quiet and grumpy while in human form on the crabbing vessel that Sadie, Sadie's father and the one other deck hand Tipper, utilize.  After Kyros throws Sadie overboard, in an attempt to kill her during a storm, she doesn't drown.  Instead she starts breathing underwater water.  This means she's a hybrid and potentially very valuable to Kyros and his people.  He whisks her away to his pod and the story really commences from here.  Kyros ...

5⭐️1🌶 I finished my ARC of A Beautifully Crafted Lie by Evelyn Ash early this morning.  It was really good.  It was atmospheric and mysterious.  It follows more traditional Irish folklore concerning seely and unseely fae.  The FMC Bryndis is a witch.  But being a witch will get you reaped by the fae.  She also has a voice in her head.  It takes the entire book to reveal what that voice really is.  The MMC, Odhran, is a bastard fae prince who is very complicated; very dark, brooding shaddow daddy.  Humans and fae shouldn't be together, fae feed off humans, so there is a forbidden element to their attraction.  This is a slow burn that goes off the rails in the last few chapters.  I'm still not sure I've fully grasped everything that happened at the end.  The world building was phenomenal.  There was a found family element and the tension is the slow burn was superb.  I loved the depth of the story and witho...

5⭐️1🌶 I finished an ARC of Waterbound by Aeva Vox.  This was a quick fun read at only 235 pages.  It moved quickly, was well paced and had a good amount of action.  It did not feel rushed and had a good story arc.  I enjoyed it.  This is book two in the Fated Shores series and immediately follows the events of book 1, Wildbound.  This book follows Natalie and Vincent.  Vincent is the actor who was thrown out of Hollywood after a scandal and was working in the theater department at the college.  Natalie is a graduate student studying art history.  They hadn't interacted very much prior to the whale watch nor once they got to the island.  Whatever is in the water hits these two.  This time though Lex, Olivia, Ben and Cody know what's happening to them, just not how, so these two get a bit of an explanation.  Natalie wanders off toward the beach to clear her head.  She has a boyfriend and doesn't want to be drawn...

5⭐️1🌶 I finished The Ties That Bind Us by Deidra Duncan at about 4:30 this morning.  It was amazing but if I'm honest, I feel scandalized by that ending.  I knew it was the first in a series; I think it's going to be a duology, so I figured it would end on a cliffhanger but holy Hannah, I was not expecting that.  The book is very heavy with fantasy lore, the magic system is also downright trippy.  It's essentially a portal fantasy.  David and Sean are raised in Viterra, the mortal realm, our realm.  They live in a tiny town in California.  But they are both important.  There is a prophesy, they are both components of this prophesy along with a couple other people.  It gets really complicated, really fast.  I will admit, this first bit of this book dragged a bit for me, but there was so much that needed to be established.  Sean and David get pulled into Luxoria separately but they both wind up there.  Sean is the pu...

5⭐️1🌶 I finished Vows of Blood and Deception by Aria Ashbrook yesterday evening.  It was a great sequel to Web of Vows and Vengeance.  It felt quite a bit different, but the banter and found family really solidified it.  I don't want to give up too many spoilers.  The events of this book immediately follow from book one.  So Rose is very angry and conflicted in the first several chapters.  I found the beginning to be a little slow, but Rose had to get her bearings and make decisions.  I will reveal this, Jonas and Khay get married and I think Jonas is committed to trying to make her happy.  Rose still possess the Issen ice magic and she can't get it under control so she decides to travel North into Issen territory.  She's hoping someone will be willing to train her.  Caz, Rubin and Benny agree to come with her.  Kyor also shows up.  Immediately there is tension between Rubin, Kyor and Rose as Kyor can immediately s...

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...

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...

5⭐️3🌶 I finished the ARC of Accidentally in Motion yesterday.  This one was amazing!  I think it's my favorite of Aeva Vox's so far.  The premise was a little outlandish but the execution was excellent.  The FMC, Whitney, is living in a beautiful Victorian house owned by her uncle.  She will inherit this house under certain conditions.  The primary one being she needs to marry.  She's been against marriage for years because her parents went through a very volatile divorce when she was a child.  The book opens with Whitney and her friends in Vegas on a long awaited girls trip.  The MMC Josh is a tennis player.  They stumble upon eachother in the hotel lobby and hit it off right away.  Whitney's friends come up with the crazy plan of Whitney and Josh getting fake married to fulfill Uncle Peter's house contract so Whitney can keep her house.  It is Vegas after all.  Josh has connections because his own father is ...

4⭐️3🌶 I just finished an ARC of Hollow Huntress by Kathryn Breaux.  It was a solid "okayish" book.  I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it.  The writing was fine, the world building was very good, the found family and banter between the characters was very very good.  The spice was good and there was quite a bit of it, thank goodness, because that was the only thing that kept me going toward the end.  This becme a spite read for me.  The two main characters were not my cup of tea.  The FMC, Mara, is a destructive self-sabotaging idiot.  The MMC, Crew, was a winey little bitch-bag.  I was more emotionally invested in the side characters Bronwyn, Damien and Locke.  Maybe I was reading this one at the wrong point in my cycle but I wanted to reach through the pages and throttle both the main characters at several points in the book.  There is so much miscommunication in this one, and I absolutely hate miscommunication so it...

4.5⭐️3🌶 I finished the ARC of The Betrothed by Vira Wade.  This one comes out 4/30/26.  It was a good solid story and I enjoyed it.  Aeryn is a half-human half-elf princess of the Unified Crown.  Her marriage to the Orc chieftain of Clan Druin seals the peace treaty.  She is forced into this situation by her father, however Khaeric has volunteered.  He believes in the treaty and wants a better way forward for his people.  The Orcs are Highlanders and speak with very obvious Scottish Highlander accents.  This gave me series Outlander vibes and I absolutely loved it.  The humans and elven have been propagating terrible misconceptions of the Orc people.  Aeryn expects primitive monsters but finds Khaeric and his people kind, patient and talented craftspeople.  She slowly begins to acclimate to her new surroundings and her new husband.  There is an undertone to this one as well.  Humans are prudes and overly conce...

5⭐️2🌶 I finished reading the ARC of this one last evening.  I stayed up too late to finish it, but it was so worth it.  This one blew me away.  I was hooked by this story from the beginning.  Elorie is a human living on a freezing cold island devoid of magic.  She tends to the dead Fae prisoners and human dead from her village.  One day during a rebel attack in the village she flees and runs into the Fae prison thinking that the Fae rebels won't chase her there, but they follow anyway.  She stumbles her way through the dark corridors of the prison and comes upon a mysterious Fae who then saves her from the rebel attack suffering a fatal wound himself.  Elorie can't just let him die.  She somehow resurrects him with powerful magic.  Magic that not only she shouldn't possess but magic that should not work where she is.  News of her impossible feat gets back to the king and she is summoned to him.  She enters into a b...

3⭐️3🌶 I finished the ARC of Hunted by a Demon's Vow by AN Caudle.  I did not enjoy this one.  I didn't hate it either but I certainly didn't love it.  I found it too gruesome and violent for my taste.  I suppose I should have picked up on how violent it would be from the book blurb but I wasn't expecting the imagery and the depictions of the sounds to be that detailed.  The plot was fairly predictable but the pacing was good.  Everything moved along nicely.  I liked the book enough to keep reading and see how the story progressed.  The spice was quite good.  The FMC Vaenah gets voted for by her town to be a sacrifice for the hunt.  The MMC is her twin brother's best friend who is a demon.  Demon's look like human men but must blend in.  There is a society that rules over the demons.  They can't reveal they are demons to human or else both the human and demon are put to death.  Daemon the MMC doesn't care ...

5⭐️2🌶 I finished Winds of Ruin by Mariet Kay a few days ago and it was so good.  I was a sobbing mess at the end but it was happy tears.  The two main characters go through so much to finally finally reach a happy ending.  This was a phenomenal conclusion to the trilogy and honestly, I'm a little sad its over.  Spoilers ahead for anyone who hasn't read the first two books: At the end of City of Snakes Emmerick has been put into a sleep curse trapping Caym with him.  This will buy more time for the others to find the relics and fulfill the Isolde prophesy.  Krait and Sybillia have had their daughter Lark and they're training her to defeat Caym.  Emmerick is fighting Caym in this mental prison.  He's subjecting Em to the memories of what he himself did while possessed and also the memories of all his other victims.  Em is starting to lose himself in this battle.  Elsedora finds the mirror on one of her early relic hunts and le...

5⭐️ .5-1🌶 The Last Guardian by Laura Collin.  This ARC was truly amazing.  This had so much yearning and tension.  Alyana the FMC is a princess.  Her mother died 5 years ago and the night before her mother's remembrance celebration a mark appears on Alyana's wrist.  Alyana has questions about the mark, she knows or feels like its some sort of bad omen and she needs to be careful about who she shows it to.  Alyana is still grieving her mother.  She was the one with her when she died and it was under suspicion circumstances.  Alyana has no memory of what actually happened.  She woke up in a pool of blood with her mother dead in her arms.  Her father is a spiteful abusive piece of crap.  She has 4 other siblings and the first portion of the book sets up the relationship she has with the rest of her family.  I actually found this very interesting.  Her older sister is betrothed and about to be married off to anoth...

  5 ⭐ 2🌶 I finished an ARC of Sheltered Fate by Aeva Vox late last night.  I read it in less than 24 hours.  It is only a 250 page book, but it was excellent.  It was a cozy funny monster smut book.  Creag the troll MMC is older and resigned to a life of bachelorhood.  He travels back to his home troll realm in search of answers about a metal shard one of his human friends found.  Instead of finding answers he stumbles into the human realm, our modern day one and finds Shelby the FMC.  Shelby has taken over her parent's inn up in the mountains of California.  There is a blizzard and Shelby encounters Creag when she stumbles down a ravine during said storm.  Her eyes are damaged by the ice of the blizzard so she can't see that Creag is a troll.  He finds them shelter in a cave and nurses her back to health.  It was a fast paced story which was just what I needed.  I've been struggling with the other eARC I'm reading right ...

5⭐️ 2🌶 I finished my eARC of A Flickering Remnant by LJ Generous last night.  I stayed up too late reading it, but it was worth it.  I know I say this about a lot of the ARCs I read but I really really loved this one.  It was so different from everything else I read.  The world building is amazing.  The author creates a huge complex world with two realms and multiple regions effortlessly.  The contrast between, Oriana, the living realm above and Iswyn, the undead world below, is really unique.  Oriana is, by all accounts, modern with cell phones, cars and city scapes.  Iswyn is Gothic feeling because the curse has prevented technology from developing.  I talked a little about this book in my last post.  Eleni wakes from a traumatic birth experience with years of her memory just gone.  She has only her best friend as a support structure.  Eleni struggles raising her daughter alone.  She's desperate to find answ...

5⭐️ 2🌶 I was lucky enough to receive both the ALC and eARC of this book from the author via The Nerd Fam.  This book was amazing on so many levels.  The audio came at the perfect time.  I needed to be in the car quite a bit last Wednesday so I decided to start the audio of this even though I was about half way through Bright Burns the Flame at the time.  Well the duet narration of this book is out of this world.  Done by Amanda Leigh Cobb and Anthony Palmini.  They do different voices and accents.  Truth be told this was my first ever audio book and I think I chose one that put the bar extremely high.  I also "eye" read along in the later half of the book when things were getting very intense and I was having a hard time putting the book down.  In fact I finished reading the book today at work because I went to bed last night with only 5% left and I couldn't stop thinking about it.  I was not ready for the end of this book and truthfull...