Knitting, Sci-fi and other stuff...

5⭐️3🌶 I just finished Wilbound by Aeva Vox.  This was sort of a impulse read.  I'm reading a physical book but had some time but couldn't pull out the physical book.  Since book two is coming out later this month I decided I should bang out book one.  I'm glad I did because it looks like book two is going to start immediately, the last paragraph of Wildbound set it up.  This was fun.  It has fantasy or sci-fi elements but is otherwise contemporary.  This one is quite spicy but I was craving something more spicy.  Everything I've been reading just recently has hovered around a 1🌶 for me.   Lex is a English professor who's been so focused on her career she hasn't really pursued friendships or hobbies and she's a bit of an introvert.  Ben is the captain of the boat.  He took over his father's fishing business after he died, but the fishing business is struggling so he does whale sighting expeditions on the side....

I can't believe its July already!  Here's my recap of June.  It was a great month.  I liked everything I read.  I read seven books six of which were ARCs.   A Ballad for the Broken was another 6 star read for me.  I've gotten physical copies of that whole series now.  There is a Novella that falls in between the two which I will also read when I get the time.   To Drown Among the Stars was good solid fantasy.  I loved that it was from the MMCs perspective.   Starfire's Heir was amazing.  The MMC, Griff, was extra special and has become one of my absolute favorite MMCs.  He's on the list with 99th Commander and Lucas Scott.  I'm still floored that was a debut novel. The Merrow's Wrath was just plain fun.  Pirates, Mermaids, the high seas and a second chance at the love they should have both had years ago.   Whisked Away blew my mind.  The world building, the imagery, the story,...

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...

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...

6⭐️.5🌶 I have a headache as I write this because I sobbed through the last 100 pages of this book.  That is a high compliment in my world.  I received the ARC of the sequel to this book.  When I applied for that ARC I didn't know it was book 2 in a series.  I was mildly miffed that the application didn't mention that anywhere especially since book 1 is over 500 pages and book 2 is close to 800.  I take all that back, or at least half of it.  Fallen Stars was absolutely amazing and I loved it.  As long as the next book is this good or close, I'll love that one too.   There is found family, banter for days and days and a slow burn with yearning.  There is also a magic academy and trials which can be hit or miss for me, this one was a hit.  They were done really well.  The background of both the FMC, Lyra, and the MMC, Draven, is dark, deep and sad.  Both the backstories are revealed slowly, methodically over the...

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...

5⭐️2🌶 I decided to participate in Mer-May and picked a book off my TBR.  I'd been planning on reading this one for a while now so this was the perfect excuse to move it to the top.  Oh my goodness, this book was phenomenal, I absolutely loved it.  It's a Hades and Persephone retelling essentially.  It covers some very deep themes that are cut with humor and a sweet MMC.  The FMC, Cindi, escapes her abusive marriage by stabbing her husband in the neck.  She flees the US and makes it to China after stealing proprietary microchip information from her deceased husband.  His powerful rich crime family comes after her.  She keeps moving around and eventually winds up in Indonesia.  The MMC Ordus is a Kraken.  He's a mutant Kraken though who has alot of human features.  When I read the blurb for the book I assumed it was going to be fantasy, but it ended up being contemporary or urban fiction taking place in present day. ...

5⭐️4🌶 Sometimes you just need a spicy fast paced reverse harem book with no annoying tropes and a low stakes plot.  This book was perfect.  I was in the mood for some well written spice with a decently believable reason three men would want to share one woman.  When Summer learns her ex-boyfriend Aiden is back in town three years after they mutually called it quits she asks him to come over.  He does and he floats a very unconventional proposal by her.  They both regret breaking it off.  Aiden and his two business partners are super busy jet setting successful people.  The three of them realized they don't have time to devote to three women individually but they would have enough time for one if they shared her.  It would take finding the right open minded woman who could work remotely so she could travel with them.  Aiden immediately thinks of Summer.  One of Aiden's business partners is Ryker, his best friend, who also alw...

April was a record month for me.  I read 8 books total and 5 of those books were ARCs. I read over 1000 more pages this month than I did last month.  My average book length was about 100 more pages.   I doubt I'll have another month like this.  I find these statistics interesting but I'm not making this a competition.  I did find that 5 ARCs was too many.  I'm trying to be more careful about how many I apply to and when those books are being released.  I think two or three a month is doable for me.  I want to be able to put enough energy in the promotion part.  I am greatful to these authors for allowing me to read these books so its the least I can do to help launch them at release. All the books I read in April were enjoyable save one.  I didn't care for Hunted by the Demon's Vow.  I have a detailed post about so I'm not going to dwell.  Time has not really softened my opinion either....

5⭐️2🌶 I've gotten a bit behind on my reading posts.  I finished Scripted Fate by Aeva Vox a few days ago.  This one is book 2 in the Bound Across Realms series.  I read the ARC of 3, loved it then read book 1.  I've been meaning to read this one and finally got to it.  It was good.  I liked it but not quite as much as the other two books.  I think the pacing was a little wonky or the storyline didn't resonate with me quite as strongly, or it was just me.  The perils of being a mood reader.  I still very much enjoyed it and it tied the gap between book one and three very well.  They are officially interconnected stand alone books but it really makes more sense to read them in order.  They are quick at about 250 pages per book, really the perfect weekend read.  All three are a cozy fun time.   This one follows Abby and Khari.  Abby is a human living in the human realm, our realm, in California.  S...

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...