FIVE BROKEN BLADES was the cheesy fantasy-fest that was exactly what I needed to get out of my reading slump and big heaping thanks to my friend, who bought me the "special edition" version with the sprayed edges. I feel like the best way to describe this book is that it's Asian-inspired fantasy with a fast-paced heist vibe reminiscent of One Piece or Blue Eye Samurai. In the author's note, it kind of sounded like the author wrote this book as a way of reconnecting with her Korean heritage, and I thought that was neat.
This book had SO MANY POVs, though. It took me forever to get used to all the head-hopping, especially since the chapters were so short. There's Royo, an assassin for hire (he kind of reminded me of Roronoa Zoro); Sora, a female assassin whose body is made out of poison (think Poison Ivy crossed with Cat Woman); Aeri, a ditzy thief with a dark secret (I was kind of picturing her as Saint Tail but older); Mikail, a jaded assassin; Euyn, a spoiled and indolent younger prince now on the run for his life; and Ty, a spymaster and son of a count.
The world building was pretty easy to understand and there were some nice adornments that made it feel unique, although I sometimes found myself wishing for more details. Part of my frustration with the short chapters and multi-POV format is that it made the book feel very choppy at times, and the author seemed to feel the need to end each chapter with a cliffhanger that sometimes felt a little bit like getting slapped in the face. Especially if we were at a part of the book that I thought was interesting and wanted to hear more about. The premise was great though-- who doesn't want to hear about a bunch of down-on-their-luck iconoclasts who want to hunt down and kill a god king? Especially when their summons come semi-anonymously, locked-room-mystery style. You know there's sus-nanigans afoot.
I think if you go into this book expecting really detailed world-building, you might be disappointed. It's also not as spicy or romance-heavy as FOURTH WING, despite being from the same publisher. Most of the sex scenes in here were vague or fade-to-black. I think it would be appropriate for older teens and would probably classify this as new adult, since the characters were in their early twenties. This is costume fantasy, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, as long as you're just looking for something escapist and not something semi-literary to be snobby about. And there were some great twists at the end! So I would definitely consider reading more from this author.
WHEN WE WERE MAGIC is kind of like The Craft meets Lisa Frankenstein, but delightfully queer and strangely surreal. The book literally opens with the heroine, Alexis, accidentally murdering a guy during a hookup by making his dick explode with magic. Desperate, she calls in her squad of five friends to help her. They're all kinda sorta witches, and their original plan is to bring him back to life with magic. Instead, they separate his body into pieces, including his heart.
There's a little bit of The Telltale Heart with this book, too, as the pieces of the boy haunt each girl as they're forced to dispose of the body, while also reckoning with how his disappearance/murder impacts the community, their relationships, and their magic. I think the beginning was stronger than the middle and the end, which felt a little unsatisfying to me. Especially since I know Gailey can do better. I'm reading one of their adult novels right now, JUST LIKE HOME, and it positively drips atmosphere and character development.
One of my friends said that this would make a better movie than it would a book and I see what she means. It would be a good visually arresting artsy horror movie, like Lisa Frankenstein or Velvet Buzzsaw. Not bad, though.
I thrifted this on impulse and it was just like a soap opera! It opens with a murder and everyone is cheating on everyone. There are multiple POVs, although the main one is Jakiyah, a woman who lives in New York but comes down south to be with her family after the death of her sister. Other narrators are Qua, her high school ex-boyfriend, German, her most recent ex-boyfriend who left her for Tamia (who is crazy and has an even crazier sister), and Tyhiem, Jakiyah's brother, who has a long term girlfriend he refuses to tie the knot with and is also German's best friend.
At first I thought this was going to be a romantic suspense but the mystery wasn't much of a mystery and they figure things out halfway through the book. HE USED TO LOVE ME kind of defies genre category, because it's a little bit of everything but it doesn't really commit to anything. In some ways, it feels a lot like one of those 80s potboilers-- kind of like a Jackie Collins novel, but with all Black characters. I'm not usually into cheating romances at all but this one was pretty entertaining and there was even a hair-pulling fight which is a plus. If you're going to serve up drama, commit to the dish.
Read this hot on the heels of TRADE ME. Blake and Tina are now in an established relationship and are planning to celebrate Chinese New Year with Tina's family-- but Blake wants his dad involved too, and his dad is a raging megalomaniac and a little bit of an asshole. Also he works with China and Tina's family was forced to flee China for practicing Falun Gong (considered a cult). No way this can end well.
I thought this story was really funny and cute. Tina is still helping Blake manage the recovery of his ED. Hong Mei is fucking hilarious. And we actually get some of Blake's dad's POV, Adam, which makes me sad because one of the unpublished books in this series is supposed to be about him and his love story, and if what I think happened happened, that book would probably make me ugly cry.
I'm sad that I've officially worked my way through all of the books in this series that are out. I'm guessing Milan dropped it because it wasn't doing as well as she hoped it would, but it's SUCH an amazing story set in Berkeley, CA about adults in their 20s working in tech.
If you're tired of alpha billionaires who like to dom their meek partners and want a soft boi billionaire who gets bulldozed by his outspoken and socially conscious opposite check out TRADE ME by Courtney Milan (and then check out PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT by Heather Guerre-- I read them back to back and I highly recommend it).
Blake and Tina go to the same college, but she's struggling to make ends meet and supporting her immigrant family and he's the son of one of the richest tech magnates in the world. When she shuts him down in class by calling him out on his privilege, rather than losing his shit, he offers to trade lives to show that he wants to understand what it's like and also bring her on board to help him with some of his company's secret software, given her STEM background and intelligence.
You really have to suspend your belief with the plot of this one, but honestly the characters make it. The author captures what it's like to live paycheck to paycheck, and presents a pretty realistic portrayal of the vast chasm that separates the haves from our have nots in a society where wealth disparity is constantly widening in the face of an increasingly ruthless capitalistic economy. ALSO, when have you ever read a romance novel where the male character has an eating disorder? Loved seeing that representation normalized here, and handled so sympathetically. The way another character's drug addiction was handled was also really well done. Just A-pluses all around.
I saw a lot of people saying that Tina was a bitch but I have a soft spot for prickly heroines. Especially if they're totally justified. I personally liked the sequel, HOLD ME, more, because Maria and Jay were my absolute FAVORITES, but this one was really good too. The way Milan writes about the Bay Area shows everything about what's good-- and bad-- here. I really hope she ends up continuing this series someday.
P.S. Get you a guy who goes down for cocaine possession to get you out of jail
This scratched the dark academia itch I've been touting since starting the Zodiac Academy series: girls with cut-out hearts, creepy cults, and town founders with too much time and power on their hands, Hollow Oak is not a safe place for the unwary. Luckily, Luz, a half-Puerto Rican wunderkind who speaks four languages and has a whole J. Crew-inspired closet full of dark secrets, is hardly unwary.
Why Choose? is not normally a genre I gravitate too, but I just loved the academia setting so much. I also liked all the Blackwells, especially Locke (he gives major Lance Orion vibes, so if you stan Blue x Orion, you'll probably love this book). Allister, Nixon, and Everest were all interesting too and I'm excited to learn more about them.
For some reason, I was expecting a supernatural element, but this feels more like a horror movie pastiche. I was reminded of Wednesday, Happy Death Day, Trick 'R Treat, and Scream, in particular. Most of the gore is on the DL, although there's one pretty gory torture scene towards the middle that was very hard to read. It's not integral to the plot, though, so if gore is hard for you to handle, you can totally skip over it without missing anything.
The book ends on a major cliffhanger, with a potentially large twist. I still have so many questions and I'm very excited to have them answered when I read more from this author. What a stellar debut.
Whoa. This was great. There seems to be a challenge to compare every Black horror and Black thriller novel to Get Out but this is one of the few cases where the comparison is totally on point. Sydney lives in a small Brooklyn neighborhood filled with beautiful brownstones that is slowly becoming gentrified. Her newer white neighbors are the yuppies you love to hate, and a biotech company is buying up property, ostensibly to be used as campuses for their employees.
Sydney, who grew up in this neighborhood, is suspicious of this so-called progress. Especially when long-time residents of the area begin to sell their homes in a panic and/or disappear. Theo, a white man in a tempestuous relationship with his not-quite wife, is one of the new buyers. However the house and his girlfriend are both proving to be unexpected nightmares, especially when he learns that Kim is a little too comfortable wearing her privilege like it's a new Anthropologie sweater. He's way more interested in Sydney, who is down to earth and real in a way that his girlfriend never was. When she asks for his help on a Black tourism project, it seems innocent.
But something dark is lurking in their small, idyllic neighborhood.
I don't want to say too much else, but I REALLY enjoyed WHEN NO ONE IS WATCHING a lot. The plotting is tight, the suspense is amazing, and it tells you so much about Black American history and redlining that really aren't taught in schools. Also, while not explicitly stated, there are certain events in this book that seem to be a direct reference to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. I know I saw some critics saying that the white people seemed too evil but honestly, I didn't think so. History says otherwise.
Get Out examined the literal commodification of Black bodies for coolness and clout. The Other Black Girl examined tokenism in the workplace and the weaponization of white guilt and "diversity" hires. NO ONE IS WATCHING, meanwhile, is an intense, no-holds barred call-out of gentrification and the literal erasure of Black people in history, both recent and distant.
I've been reading Cole's books since she was doing indie stuff and I just knew she was going to be big. She might actually be even better at thrillers than she is at romance, and when I saw that she had a gothic murder mystery as her up and coming effort, I nearly screamed.
The moment I heard the hook for this book, I knew I had to have it. It's told in dual POV. The first is Paula, a woman who blackmails a pop star for the return of his cell phone after finding out that he's having an affair. The second is Claire, a cop investigating a murder that occurs at a party where both Paula and the other woman were present.
Who died? And why??? The answer may surprise you.
So THE NIGHT IN QUESTION was super fun. I didn't guess whodunnit right away and I liked the two timelines. It was artfully done and kept me in suspense, wanting to find out what happened. The juciness of the murder and adultery plots was also quite fun. This had the vibes of a limited series, and I really enjoyed that.
Points off for a little bit of a lackluster ending and characters who occasionally fell flat. But overall, I'd say that if you like "beach read" style mysteries and morally gray FMCs, you'll probably love this!
I found this in a Little Free Library and decided to pick it up on a whim since it was a Goodreads Choice Award. I wasn't sure how I would feel about it when I first picked it up, but it ended up being kind of like if SUCH A FUN AGE were written by Harlan Coben. So, basically an intimate dissection of privilege, racism, generational pain, and culture shock-- with thriller elements!
There are two narrators in this book: Jasmine and Rebecca. Jasmine has come here from China illegally and is struggling to support herself while seeking the daughter who was stolen from her years ago. Rebecca is a white woman who works at a publishing firm that used to be her father's. She's trying to acquire the hottest new book written by a woman of color, but there are dark secrets dogging her past.
I liked how the two stories intertwined. I guessed most of the twists but I really liked how the author did them and I think this would translate well to the screen. My only qualm is that the last act felt rushed and a little messy, but the ending made me tear up.
Happy Hispanic Heritage Month! While you should ideally read diversely year-round, I'm trying to supporting Hispanic/Latinx authors by reading all of the Hispanic/Latinx-authored books on my Kindle that I couldn't get to throughout the rest of the year.
A TASTE OF SAGE was an impulse buy for me (aren't they always?). I'm a sucker for food-themed books, and the idea of an enemies-to-lovers romance between two rival chefs who both favor the cuisines of their childhood really spoke to me. Also, it's a bit of a workplace romance, too, because when Lumi's business goes under forcing her to job hunt, she ends up being forced to work for Julien.
I was shocked at how low the ratings were for this book... until I got to the halfway mark. You see, throughout this book, recipes are interspersed at key points so you can make the food the characters are talking about-- which is a great touch. Or it was, until one of the characters gets grievously injured in a kitchen and this horrendous accident is followed by... you guessed it. Another recipe.
Talk about tonal whiplash.
I think books like these are actually the perfect examples of situations where illustrated covers don't work. I saw a TikTok (I believe it was by chels_ebooks) that talked about how old skool romance covers were usually a pretty good indicator of the spice level (although not always). If the lady looked prim and dainty on the cover, it was a likely bet that it was going to be a "clean" regency romance. And if the lady was bursting out of her top in the aggressive embrace of the hero, the likelihood of spice (and probably dub-con) goes up in the mind of the person looking at the cover, and they can make their purchase accordingly.
When people look at illustrated covers, they picture light and sweet, so when a book has a cutesy cover but actually has really dark and depressing moments, readers can feel consciously or subconsciously cheated. I feel like a better cover for this book would have been a wooden table with photographs of food, and the table could be covered with chopped herbs. Maybe a picture of a knife in the foreground. I think that would have hinted at the food, the magic-realism, the homeyness, and also a little hint of menace (subconsciously) because of the knife. The illustrated cover here really does not work.
I actually really liked both characters and loved the recipes. I don't think this book is as bad as everyone says it is, but the tonal shift was definitely a game-changer that impacted my overall enjoyment of the book as a whole. But ultimately, the magic-realism, the ode to Dominican fusion, and the premise of two flawed and headstrong characters falling in love ended up saving the book for me. Just go into this book knowing that it gets a little miserable for a while halfway through, and if you or someone you know recently suffered from a bad burn, this could potentially be triggering.
Choo! Choo! All aboard the Unlikable Heroine Express(TM). Color me shocked-but-not-really that this has an average rating of 3.39, because it's basically CRAZY RICH ASIANS but with posh Nigerian expatriates living in Singapore and being messy AF. THE SUN SETS IN SINGAPORE revolves around three women specifically: Lillian, an ex-pianist with marital problems; Dora, a cutthroat lawyer determined to make partner, who is now forced to compete against another Nigerian: a man; and Amaka, a bastard who lives under the shadow of her dubious parentage, who compensates for every anxiety in her life with her shopping addiction... although now, she's ready to jilt her fiance and go running into the arms of the wrong man.
THE SUN SETS IN SINGAPORE was like a literary soap opera and I ate it up like it was on a silver spoon. I found this in a little free library, which felt like serendipity because I almost bought this when it was a Kindle Daily Deal but still wasn't 100% sold on the concept. Now, I totally am. I loved this book so much and even though all of the women were fully capable of being awful, they were also SO real, and the Singapore/expatriate setting and details were fascinating.
Jackie Lau is one of my favorite romance authors. I love how her heroines always have some realistic flaw, whether it's fear of commitment or clinical depression. And her heroes are the exact same way. Her books aren't about perfect people falling in love, but about people with relatable problems finding people who accept them as they are while also complementing their strengths.
HE'S NOT MY BOYFRIEND is about Iris and Alex. Iris is a structural engineer by day, party girl by night. The latest guy who receives the favors of her inner fuckgirl is Alex, a construction worker (at one of the sites she manages, no less). Iris doesn't believe in commitment, in part because of the tremendous pressure she gets from the rest of her family to settle down. Alex, on the other hand, is kind of emotionally withdrawn because he hasn't gotten over his mother's death. She always tried to matchmake for him, and since she's gone, he's started to avoid things that remind him of her.
I wasn't really prepared for how emotional this read was. It contains one of the funniest scenes I have ever read in a romance novel (I was seriously dying), but it's also gut-wrenching as well, with pretty forthright discussions about getting older, mortality, and grief. The humorous and heartfelt moments lessened the angst-factor, but if you've recently lost a parent or loved one, I could see this book being pretty triggering or traumatic.
The star of the show is definitely Iris's grandmother, Ngin Ngin. She's the best character in this book and stole every scene she appeared in. I would literally read an entire series starring this nosy, meddling, mahjong-playing, smutty Harlequin romance-reading hero of a granny. Characters like her are honestly so satisfying to someone like me, who never really had any grandparents she was close to. It's like getting to enjoy vicariously what I never had.
HE'S NOT MY BOYFRIEND would have been a five-star reading if it weren't for the 80% mark breakup that this author always does, whether it fits the story or not (thanks, I hate it), and something else really sad that happened, which I would have liked more closure on. But apart from that, I absolutely loved this book to pieces and will be reading more from this author in the future.
I've been watching The Other Black Girl on Hulu and it reminded me of how much I loved reading the book when I bought it, so I moseyed on over to the author's Goodreads page to see if she'd been working on anything new and found this Kindle Unlimited-eligible short story that she had apparently written. OMG!
HIS HAPPY PLACE is this weird and creepy little short story about a Black woman who is dating a Korean man. They've been dating for about four months and they're taking their relationship to the next level by going to a remote little cabin in his woods where he feels the most like himself, according to him. Because nothing says, "I love you, please don't kill me," like isolating yourself with a man.*
*Bad joke but you know, THE FEAR IS REAL.
Anyway, they get there and la la la, nature is beautiful but toilets w/ plumbing are iconic, and apart from the hatred of camping (same), the heroine, Ama, sort of gets into it. She and Nathan have some heart to hearts and he seems like he really wants to let her get to know the real him. Which is when things start getting REALLY FUCKING WEIRD.
Harris is so good at building tension and creating atmosphere. I noticed right away that this had the same vibes that I loved so much in THE OTHER BLACK GIRL. Also like THE OTHER BLACK GIRL, though... I didn't like the ending. Here, the author does something unusual and kind of risky: she starts the beginning of the book with the end of the book, so you already know what's going to happen as you're reading. Well, sort of. I figured if she was going to lead with an expose, she was going to take us somewhere shocking on the journey... but the whole thing just comes full circle with no closure.
I'm not going to give spoilers but if you read it, you'll see what I mean.
I will definitely be reading more from Zakiya Dalila Harris, but based on the two books of hers I've read, she seems to have a bit of a third act problem.
I have an ongoing project where I try to read every Jane Eyre retelling I can get my hands on. WILD, BEAUTIFUL, AND FREE is a very unique retelling as it is set in the antebellum South and the heroine is the biracial daughter of a slave and a plantation owner, whose doting father has left her a parcel of land as her inheritance. However, his wife doesn't truck with this, and sells the heroine, Jeannette, into slavery, where she is sent first to a plantation and then, when she escapes, to a school devoted to setting Black women up for employment, which is how she meets the intense Mr. Colchester.
WILD, BEAUTIFUL, AND FREE is a very empowering story that instills all of its flawed female characters with agency. I didn't feel like it took any easy ways out, and I feel like I learned a lot of interesting historical facts about the Civil War. As a Jane Eyre retelling, I thought this was very artfully done, although the characters of Blanche and Bertha have been combined into one person, and the antagonistic "wife in the attic" has been relegated to an entirely separate role.
This is more historical fiction than it is romance, although it has elements of both. I was also happy that in this adaptation, the author made the choice not to scar and injure "Rochester," and Jane is given a reason other than infidelity/adultery for fleeing. I love the original but both of those things were very hard for me to read, so this retelling felt way "safer" in that regard.
Overall, I really enjoyed this Jane Eyre retelling with a cast of mostly Black characters and I would say that it's a great pick for both Black History Month and for fans of Jane Eyre.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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