Knitting, Sci-fi and other stuff...

5⭐️1🌶 I quickly read a short monster romance to get bingo on my summer reading bingo board. I've been working on this bingo challenge all summer and needed a criptid romance to finish it up.  Bingo was hosted by Aeva Vox and since I'm on her street team I felt like I really needed to finish this up.  It was fun though and I was surprised I was able to fill in most of it with the ARCs I was reading anyway. Mingling with Mothman by Eden Crowe was adorable.  I love that monster romance has so many cozy cute wholesome romances with great messages.  This was was a perfect quick read with cute spice and some really deep messaging mixed in.  I highly enjoyed the banter and the FMC, Ava's wit and tenacity.  Clay, the MMC was patient, quiet but ingenuitve and extremely caring.  It was just a sweet story.  It was the third set in this small monster haven of Mistwood.  I'm tempted to read the other two.  Ava moved away from...

5⭐️1🌶 I finished my ARC of Facade by Ilissa Busbee yesterday evening.  This was super fun, atmospheric and a twisty turney adventure of deceit.  I'll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum but its hard to describe this one without divulging some info.  The FMC, Evanee has no memories prior to the last three years.  She's a human serving the Fae Queen at the queen's castle Aurelia.  The Fae King is known to be cruel and once the queen produced him an heir she went to live in her own castle away from him.  Evanee is a bit of an outcast, she keeps to herself and tries not to associate much with any of the other human servants.  She's been bound to the grounds of the castle by the Fae Queen's witch Cressida.  One day the Fae King's Captain of the guard shows up.  Evanee is summoned to the inner portion of the castle and is told she'll be going with the captain and his men.  Cressida moves Evanee's bond from the castle grounds to ...

4.75⭐️3🌶 I finished the audio of Topping the Alpha yesterday.  It was good, a little out of my comfort zone, but still good.  Now I know I don't mind MM romances.  The narrator was Sean Crisden for this one and I really liked him.  It looks like this may be the only one he narrates though.  This one took me just a little bit to get into.  It jumps into the spice rather quickly and Jake is characterized a little differently in this book.  I felt he was being overly aggressive and a little pushy toward Nick.  Once I thought about it a little it made sense though.  In the other books we only see Jake's intereaction with female subs of his Dom teammates.  He was being about as aggressive as Ian was with Angie or Devon was with Kristen.  Once I wrapped my head around it a little I got into the book more.  I thought the spice was done well and I thought the suspense plotline was balanced well with the romance plot line....

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 audio of Not Negotiable by Samantha Cole a couple days ago.  This was a novella and takes place amongst the last bit of Waiting for Him and then goes beyond.  We get a snippet of Devon and Kristen's wedding and that where book four starts.  It was a great quick story of Shelby and Parker.  There is an interaction between Shelby and Parker's brother in Waiting for Him, this novella starts at that event and then jumps ahead a little bit.  It was sweet.  Parker is a very nice guy and Shelby has been around since book one, so it was really nice to see her get a HEA.  This book didn't have the dangerous suspense that the full length books have.  The tension in this one comes from a medical situation with Shelby.  I enjoyed it.  I'm now a little way into book four; Topping the Alpha which is about Jake and Nick.  Nick is Ian and Devon's younger brother who is still active duty on Navy Seal Team 3.  J...

4⭐️.5🌶 I finished my ARC of Umbra by Catalina Matei last evening.  It was okay.  It is being marketed as book one of a new series.  Now that I've read some other reviews, (I like to go in blind and don't read reviews prior to reading books usually.) This is more like book 4 in a series, which is why I felt so lost at first.  We as readers are dumped into the thick of it twelve months after a pivitol event happens.  Nearly the entire book is told in flash backs to catch us up to where we are.  There is a bunch of info dumping and so much internal monolog.  It wasn't difficult to follow necessarily but it was not a style of storytelling I'm used to that's for sure.  It was difficult to connect with the characters as their grief felt more like whining because we weren't given a chance to connect with them emotionally.  We were constantly being buffeted from the past back to the present.  The bulk of the story was depressing as ...

5⭐️4🌶 I finished listening to Waiting for Him by Samantha Cole.  I loved this one!  I thought the spice and thriller plot lines were much more balanced.  They were interwoven in this book and the switch back and forth was seamless and logical to the overall plot.  Kat quite literally comes back from the dead.  She and her family had been involved in a car accident 12 years prior to the beginning of the book.  Ben "Boomer" thought her entire family had died.  What in fact happened is her mother and brother had died in the accident, but she and her father had lived.  That accident was actually a hit by the Russian mob her father had gotten himself involved with.  Her and her father were put in witness protection and they had been living on the west coast under assumed names.  Kat's father had passed away a few months ago.  When her apartment was broken into and she thought she was being followed she turned to the only per...

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 ...

4.5⭐️3🌶 I finished His Angel by Samantha A Cole on my way into work.  The ending was quite sad so I'm a little depressed now.  I should say the very end was nice and sweet, it was the outcome of the spy/thriller subplot portion that was sad.  I enjoyed this audio book overall.  The narration was good.  It was a single male narrator this time and I thought he did a good job with the female voices.  These books have a BDSM romance plot then a spy/thriller subplot.  I thought this book kind of switched to the subplot more abruptly than the first book.  But it ramped up the danger the FMC Angie was in.  I enjoyed Ian's characterization.  He's not a cut and paste of his brother Devon from the first book.  I also liked that we got to know some of the other Tident team members a little more with this book, especially Jake.  I really like the dynamic set up for the series.  There are so many characters and interaction...

5⭐️1🌶 I finished the ARC of Of Bargains and Betrayal by Ashley Bresee last evening.  That ending, wow, I'm still processing it.  I'm hoping some of it is a misunderstanding, because if not, then one of my favorite side characters is a bad-guy.  This was a really fun book and I really really enjoyed it.  I will be getting a shelf trophy of this one; it instantly became a favorite.  Enora Wynn is the bastard daughter of a king.  She has, for the most part, been able to skate through life without the typical expectations of a princess.  She's in her 30s and is able to live her own life and keep her own friends.  But once her father passes away suddenly her crappy half-bother inherits the crown and promptly marries Enora off to the old king of the neighboring kingdom.  Enora and a party of Odessans depart for the long and arduous journey through the Wastes to Grimmoria.  She gets a little too sloshed one evening of the journey a...