Knitting, Sci-fi and other stuff...

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⭐️ 2🌶 In preparation for the third book in the trilogy, Winds of Ruin, to come out; I decided to re-read the first two books in the series.  I finished Born of Starlight a couple days ago and immediately began City of Snakes.  I finished City of Snakes last night. 5⭐️ 2🌶  Both these books are amazing.  Born of Starlight is a loose Rapunzel retelling and City of Snakes is Beauty and the Beast with sort of an Aladdin setting.  They are deep, emotional and tense.  I was on the edge of my seat reading them the first time.  The lives of pretty much all the characters hang in the balance and it's not certain everyone will survive.  This time through I knew who lived and died so it was slightly less tense, but they both are so well written I still was drawn into the story.  I was chosen for an ARC of the third book Winds of Ruin and I got an email notification yesterday that the release date had been moved up from the 22nd...

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...

March was an excellent month for me.  All six of my completed reads were 5 stars.  A Flickering Remnant is such a beautiful story.  It's a fantasy romance that has a Gothic feeling to it.  It's got maternal mental health representation, a curse, an elemental magic system, witches, some amazing found family, a ton of mystery and it's absolutely beautifully written as well.  I loved it so much I bought myself a signed copy.  Sheltered Fate was just plain fun.  It was book three in a series of interconnected stand alones.  It's what all monster romance should be, in my opinion.  The Troll MMC was a kind and gentle cinnamon roll.  I enjoyed this one so much I abandoned all other responsibility and read the first book in the series too.  Fresh-Brewed Fate was also just plain fun.  It was more adventurous and the world was a little bigger but again the Orc MMC was another cinnamon roll.  I rounded out my month by sta...

  I'm currently participating in the Readathon taking place in the Wicked Darlings Facebook group.  The Wicked Darlings group is the LJ Andrews fan club.  Those who have decided to participate are reading all nine books of The Broken Kingdom series and then the three books that are released from The Ever Seas series in preparation/celebration of the October release of The Stolen Crown.  There is a timeline for the reads but its really just a loose guideline.  I'm hosting buddy reads on StoryGraph for the books.  I finished Curse of Shadows and Thorns last evening and I'm already nearly halfway through book two, Court of Ice and Ash now.     Anyone who knows me knows I love LJ Andrews and these two series.  I first read these first 6 books about three years ago.  It's been great fun to revisit this world and pick out details I missed the first time around.  I know these characters and events so I can see the foreshadowing, see the li...

5⭐️ 2🌶 I finished Fresh-Brewed Fate by Aeva Vox last evening.  I really enjoying this book as well.  I started reading immediately after finishing the ARC of Sheltered Fate.  Fresh-Brewed Fate is the fist book in the Bound Across Realms series.  This book follows Essa, a human living in Thyra.  Thyra is the realm that connects all the other Realms and creatures together so its a melting pot of culture and experience.  Essa's dream of opening a coffee shop and bakery are about to be realized.  She is putting the finishing touches on her shop as the book opens.  Henker is an Orc.  He has just retired.  He's the first and only Orc who has done so.  His plan was to check into a luxurious Elf hotel and do nothing for a while.  But when he arrived at the hotel and the elves realized Henker was an Orc they canceled his reservation.  The Orcs started a war a few decades back and there is a stigma that follows them whe...

  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...

       February was a good reading month for me.  I enjoyed the majority of what I read.  Only one book wasn't a 5 star for me.  The last two "books" listed in the graphic above were prequel novellas.  Veil of Web and Ruin was 99 pages, Gold Glows the Spark was only 25 pages so it was more of a bonus chapter or teaser for the book.  Both were good introductions to their respective worlds.  Veil actually had some substance and set the stage for what it had been like for Rose in the slums.  It also pulled more insight into why Rose is so protective of her sister.  I wish I would have read both of these before the books they pertain to.        I ended up reading Bright Burns the Flame and listening to Web of Vows and Vengeance concurrently.  WoVaV was my first audio book and it was absolutely fire.  I'm looking into apps so I can listen to more.  I had a knitting project commissioned so I was abl...

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...

5⭐️ 1🌶 I finished Bright Burns the Flame by Angelina J. Steffort last evening.  This was another ARC.  This was written in the third person which sort of threw me.  Most of what I read is in 1st person.  Even with it being in 3rd person we as readers really only got the FMC, Lory's perspective.  The world building was methodical, detailed, epic but not overwhelming.  Lory lives in the slums on the street barely surviving.  She strategically picks marks from a local brothel to rob.  This time she chooses the wrong mark and after giving chase is caught.  She's taken to prison, brought before the triad and will be executed the next day.  Moments before she is beheaded she is given a choice, death or enrollment into a vicious military academy she only heard about the day before from a fellow prisoner.  She chooses Ashthorn Ward.  She's taken there by the most gorgeous man she's ever encountered the MMC Khayrivven Falcr...

5 ⭐️ 2🌶 I finished up my ARC of The Stars We Found by ES Brandon last evening.  It was very good.  I liked it even more than the first.  This book takes place about 7 years after the first one finishes.  The ship has made it to Proxima Centauri b and all the occupants are building a colony.  The environment is very harsh and there's crystalline creatures called razerbeaks that are trying to kill everyone.  The book had a little bit of a Jurassic Park feel to it. Spoilers ahead; Maya is grieving the loss of Julian's neural interface projection.  Cryosleep didn't erase or heal her experience, it just paused it.  She starts to rebuild his sensor ghost line by line on her down time.  She lives jacked into this neural interface and sets herself down a destructive path that doesn't affect just her.  She rebuilds fake Julian, that she calls Echo in this book,  by cyphoning power from the colony.  Eventually the power stea...

5 ⭐️ 2🌶 I finished The Stars We Carry by ES Brandon last evening.  I was awarded the ARC of the next book in the series so I figured I should probably read the first book, first.  This was very good.  I knew one of the plot twists from reading the book blurb of the second book.  There was a decent amount of signaling though so I think I may have figured out that part on my own.  However, there is a major plot twist in this I never saw coming and it was a whopper.  It was unlike anything else I've read, apart from say Star Trek.  So good and the ending had me sobbing.  Maya Sato is the only occupant awake on a ship bound for Proxima Centauri b.  She must keep the ship running during her two year stint while the 200 other occupants on the ship are in cryogenic storage.  Her only company is the ship's AI ARIA.  ARIA is hilarious and a wonderful side character.  I loved her snark and socially awkward interactions with ...

4.24 ⭐️ 1🌶 I just finished Of Fates and Ruin by Alaya Wells.  I received an advanced reader copy of this book from the author.  This book comes out 3/1/26. Mild spoilers ahead: Most of this book was a struggle, I didn't really really enjoy it til the last 7 to 10% of the book.  This book is long, too long, at 700 pages.  I think it could have been cut down by a couple hundred pages and it would have had better pacing and been more coherent.  There was so much exposition and so many repetitive details.  Isi is from Caldrith where magic is forbidden and if they find out you have magic abilities they kill you.  Don't worry, if you didn't catch that detail in the first couple chapters where it depicts the actual ceremony that kills a bunch of people; everytime Caldrith is mentioned again in the book that detail is repeated.   The body of Isi' sister is delivered to Caldrith by a gigantic bird so she assumes the rival kingdom of Sylla...

I read six books total in January.  I had four 5 star reads, a 4.5 star read and I read Stutter last month.   The Ever King was a re-read.  The Ever Queen was a very good follow up, but I enjoyed The Mist Thief the most out of the three.  The fourth book in the series, The Stolen Crown will be coming out in October of this year.   Moonborn was an ARC read.  I enjoyed it, but it wasn't quite a five star read for me.  It's lacking something but I can't put my finger on what exactly.  It's the first book in a series and I will be reading more when they come out. Daughter of the Pines was also an ARC and it was exceptional.  I enjoyed it so much.  I wasn't sure about it reading the blurb.  I don't usually like the urban/paranormal stuff as much as the full on fantasy but this was done so well.  I loved the FMC, she is snarky, independent and smart.  There is a mystical companion creature, a cu...

5 ⭐️ 1🌶 I just finished the eARC of Daughter of the Pines by Maria A. Eden.  It was amazing.  I absolutely enjoyed this.  This one is a bit hard to describe.  It's a historical fantasy urban legend retelling.  It takes place in a real world location called the Pine Barrens in the town of Galloway.  It's set prior to the American Revolution from what I gleaned from the description but its fantasy so I may be off on that.  The author decribes this as a retelling of the Jersey Devil story.  I have to admit I knew nothing really about the Jersey Devil nor this region, the Pine Barrens.  This story is rich and imaginative.  I was immersed in a hauntingly spectacular world.  The story follows a single family that is more or less the nobility of this town, the Ledes family.  The Pine Barrens is described as a place where the separation between realms is thin so demons and other fantastical creatures can move through these...

I said in my last post that I'd be reading Daughter of the Pines next.  Well I was awarded three  more ARCs right after I received that one.  So I decided that I'd read whatever was going to be published first.  That book was Moonborn by Annaïa Rowan.  It's a debut novel and the first in a series.   4.5 ⭐️ .5🌶 I was good, I enjoyed it.  It is first person POV and a single POV, that of the FMC Laïna.  She is property and living in a village within the Voidlands.  The Voidlands are covered in a thick mist that blocks out the moon and stars.  Magic is forbidden and anyone who is thought to have magic is burned.  There are weekly burnings and everyone lives in fear.  Laïna witnesses something she shouldn't have, tells someone she trusts and is able to escape the village with his help.  Once they get outside Laïna sees the sun, moons and stars for the very first time.  She and Llyr get separated and Laïna...

5⭐️ 2🌶 I finished The Mist Thief by LJ Andrews which is book three of the Ever Seas series.  It was amazing.  I think I liked this one the best out of the three.  It was intense, intriguing and had a few plot twists I didn't see coming.  I really enjoyed the banter between Skadi and Jonas.  I loved the bond that formed between Kase and Skadi.  It was really fun to see Skadi explore her affinity and be accepted by everyone at the Black Palace and thusly become more comfortable with herself.  This book could technically be read as a standalone.  It would help to know at least the events from The Ever King and Ever Queen, but there is enough explanation that its not absolutely necessary.  The epilog in this book ends on a cliffhanger which sets up the next book.  I knew everyone was highly anticipating The Stolen Crown, now I know why. Up next; I received an ARC for Daughter of the Pines by Maria A. Eden.  I'll be starting...

5 ⭐️ 2🌶 I finished The Ever Queen by LJ Andrews last night.  It was very good and I enjoyed it a lot.  The first half of the book had pacing similar to Reign of Stars and Fire, with Erik and Livia separated and the POV switching back and forth between them.  I loved the interactions between Valen and Erik and the relationships that formed between the earth fae royals and the sea fae.  Overall it was a great read and I can forsee this duology becoming a comfort read that I'll probably revisit every couple of years.  I'm really looking forward to reading The Mist Thief next.  Jonas is a great character, the elven story line was intriguing and I love me a good marriage of convenience trope.  Happy reading. -Q

  5★ 2🌶     I finished my re-read of The Ever King by LJ Andrews last night.  It was just what I needed to cure the book hangover still left from Until I Die.  I loved this book when I read it two years ago and first discovered LJ Andrews and her incredible world of Viking fairy tale retellings.  I picked up on a few details I had missed or forgotten.  It was a great refresh so I can go on to read The Ever Queen and the Mist Thief which hadn't been published yet when I read The Ever King the first time.  The Ever King is separate but interconnected to the Broken Kingdoms series.  The FMC Livia is the daughter of Valen and Elise who are the couple the first three books follow in the Broken Kingdoms.  The events in The Ever Seas occur about 20 years after the first book in the Broken Kingdoms.  There are enough little re-capping moments that you wouldn't need to read TBK first.  I didn't (initially) but it does help to know the ...

    I did a tiny bit of crafting on the 31st.  I needed to finish the handmade for the Hot Beverages swap and get it in the mail.  All I needed to do was embroider on the roses to the mug rug and I had put if off for a month.  The embroidery was actually pretty simple and straight forward.  Here's how it turned out. Pattern: Beverage of Choice      My knitting really tapered off at the end of the year when the reading bug hit me head on.  That's okay, I'm really enjoying reading again.  I hope I can keep it up so there probably won't be a lot of crafting posts this year.  I did make a 2025 wrap up video of all my projects I'll see if I can get it to embed correctly in the blog.  I can never seem to get it to work correctly. That's it for me, short and sweet.  Hope everyone had a good New Year.  Happy crafting. -Q

       I read four books total in December.  I have two that I'm currently reading that carry over to January.  I enjoyed Scythe & Sparrow and Shot in the Dark, but reading in December sort of dragged for me with the exception of Until I Die.  I've waxed poetic on Until I Die and I don't plan on stopping any time soon.  It gave me a book hangover which is probably why the rest of December felt like a slog.       Once I finish Stutter, which is starting to slog majorly, I plan to read the Ever Seas Trilogy.  I got myself the hardcover copies for Christmas.  I generally prefer paperback, but the books were just traditionally (re)published so the hardcovers were quite a bit more reasonable than the paperbacks.          I just signed up for the January Book of the Month.  I got a promotional offer which made the book $5.  I just have to buy one month at full price which is $17.99 fo...

     I'm going to do a big year end post with all the summaries from the reading apps I use.  But first I want to do a best and worst by month.  So here goes.   September: Best:                                                                                            The Viridian Priestess.  This is the book that got me reading again two years ago.  It was a re-read once I found out there was a sequel and a third was coming out.  It was a 5 star read both times and a series that lives in my head rent free.    Worst:   Where the Tide Meets the Sand.  It's not a bad book by any means.  It just wasn't for me.  The more I thought about the story later the more it bothered me.  Thi...