[Book Review] Midtown Masters by Cara McKenna (+ Giveaway)

Stitch

midtown-masters-coverTitle: Midtown Masters (Sins in the City #3)
Author: Cara McKenna (Twitter)
Rating: Recommended
Genre/Category: Contemporary Romance, Erotica, Queer Romance, Queer Fiction
Release Date: February 21, 2017

Publisher: Berkley Publishing Group: Intermix

Pre-Order Here: AMAZON (KINDLE)  | BARNES & NOBLE

Note: I received an ARC (Advance Reader Copy) of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. All opinions expressed here are my own. This review has some spoilers for the book but they’re not major ones that you couldn’t guess from reading McKenna’s other books or the book blurb.

It’s Valentine’s Day folks and that’s kind of the perfect time to talk about the third book in Cara McKenna’s steamy Sins in the City series. Midtown Masters, comes out in a week which gives you plenty of time to read the other two standalone novels in the series if you’re a fast reader.

Out of the three books in the series so far, Midtown Masters is my favorite. Starring a pair of close friends who cam together for well-paying customers and the mysterious client that winds up sparking a deeper connection with one half of the duo, Midtown Masters has so much to it that was genuinely enjoyable.Read More »

Urban Fantasy 101 – Weird Ass Werewolf Tropes

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Content warnings: This installment of Urban Fantasy 101 contains references to or descriptions of racism, homophobia, heterocentrism, sexual assault, childhood abuse, domestic abuse, other forms of discrimination. There are also tons of footnotes.

urban-fantasy-101-weird ass werewolf tropesWerewolves are everywhere in the urban fantasy genre.

Most major series – film and otherwise – count lycanthropes as a staple creature and always throw in some funky in-world backstory to make the furry beasts fit into their worlds.

There are werewolves in Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lost Girl. The Underworld franchise – which is like Romeo and Juliet taking to a logical werewolf-y extreme – had its fifth installment (Underworld: Blood Wars) come out in January 2017.Teen Wolf, MTV’s adaptation of the Michael J. Fox film, is only now wrapping up its final season while the television adaptation of Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten just ended its final season in April 2016.

The paranormal romance genre (the flipside of the more “action oriented” urban fantasy genre where romance is supposedly supposed to be incidental to the plot) is so full of lycanthropy that you can’t shake a stick without hitting a werewolf.

Honestly, it’s more surprising to find an urban fantasy series without werewolves.

Which makes sense because werewolves are cool.Read More »

[Book Review] Marvel’s Black Widow – From Spy to Superhero edited by Sherry Ginn

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Title: Marvel’s Black Widow: From Spy to Superhero
Editor: Sherry Ginn
Authors: Malgorzata Drewniok, Heather M. Porter, Samira Nadkarni, Valerie Estelle Frankel, Jillian Coleman Benjamin, Sherry Ginn, Lewis Call, David Kociemba, and Tanya R. Cochran
Rating: Yeah, No Thanks
Genre/Category: Nonfiction, Superheroes, Feminism, Popular Culture, Comic Books
Release Date: March 1, 2017
Publisher: McFarland and Company

Order Here: AMAZON

Note: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher (via NetGalley) in exchange for an honest review. All of the views in review are my own.

This collection of essays first came to my attention last semester when I looking for sources I could use in a paper for my Cold War literature class about the position the Black Widow held when it came to Anti-Cold War propaganda in comic books. This essay collection is both a celebration of Black Widow (Natasha Romanoff) and a criticism of the cultural environments that led to her creation and subsequent (frequent) reimaginings/reinventions as a second-string to male heroes in Marvel’s various universes.

Out of the volume’s nine essays, I thought maybe three or four had serious worth and didn’t make me want to pitch my kindle.

Read More »

How my island upbringing inspired “The Carnival That Comes After”

Stitch

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This is a little backstory post about my story “The Carnival That Comes After” in Dirty Birds Press‘ Undercities anthology which has two weeks left on its Kickstarter campaign. (So go pledge!)

When I was a wee teenager, my mother would go shopping at this one mall and she’d leave me in the bookstore for hours. I’d dive right into the romance and urban fantasy genres, pouring over books that I probably shouldn’t have read (but were still more appropriate than Anne Rice’s everything or Flowers in the Attic).

One of my earliest memories of this period in my life is reading this ridiculous selkie romance novel. I can’t remember anything about the book except that it was historical fantasy set on an island off the coast of Scotland and had a gorgeous, red-haired woman on the cover, but I think that was the book that sparked my special-interest in selkies.

Boy do I love selkies.Read More »

[Book Review] Making Love by Aidan Wayne

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Tmaking-love-coveritle: Making Love
Author: Aidan Wayne (Twitter)
Rating: Highly Recommended
Genre/Category: Contemporary Romance, Urban Fantasy, LGBTQIA Romance, Demons & Angels
Release Date: January 30, 2017

Publisher: Riptide Publishing

Order Here: RIPTIDE PUBLISHING

Note: I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. All opinions expressed here are my own.

 

Aidan Wayne’s Making Love is literally the cutest book I have on my kindle.Read More »

[Book Review] Idle Ingredients by Matt Wallace

Stitch

idle-ingredients-coverTitle: Idle Ingredients: A Sin du Jour Affair
Author: Matt Wallace (Twitter)
Rating: So Freaking Highly Recommended
Genre/Category: Urban Fantasy, Demons & Angels, Food, Politics
Release Date: February 7, 2017

Publisher: Tor.com

Pre-Order Here: AMAZON | AMAZON (KINDLE) | BARNES AND NOBLE

Note: I received an ARC (Advance Reader Copy) of this book from the publisher (but I have also preordered the book on my own). All opinions and thoughts expressed, however drunkenly, in this review are my own. There are also some spoilers for the upcoming book so if that’s not your thing, come back after February 7th when you’ve read the book!

When we last left the Sin du Jour crew at the end of June 2016’s Pride’s Spell, everything was coming up roses. Everyone was alive, the crew got to see an angel in action, and my OTP was finally hooking up (I say as if we’re farther along than halfway through the series…).

So why is it that I found myself making ugly noises before I even finished the first chapter of Idle Ingredients?Read More »

[Fanwork Recommendation] Hermione Granger and the Quarter Life Crisis

Stitch

Hermione Granger and the Quarter Life Crisis is a new fan-made series that looks at Hermione’s life post-Hogwarts. It’s incredible, relatable, and funny as hell for the most part (but don’t let your guard down like I did because HGatQLC will hit you in the feels before the first episode is done).

This first episode has me super excited to see what they’ll do next! The series has a racebent Black Hermione Granger, a Draco Malfoy that I kinda don’t want to fight, and some really well-written characters that I’m excited to see more of and the potential for incredible tension.

If, like me and many others, you were disappointed with Rowling’s nigh unbroken focus on white characters and the fact that everyone’s life goal was to be married off in neat M/F packages with babies on the way, give this webseries a try because it embodies the fandom mantra of “Epilogue? What Epilogue?”

To find out more about this series, check out the first episode and follow the awesome creative team on:

Their Website

Twitter

Facebook

YouTube

Tumblr

 

Let’s Talk About “Alice”: The Fragility of White Womanhood in Grad School Spaces

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AKA “There’s a fragile white woman in my class who doesn’t seem to handle criticism very well and we’re probably going to fight by the end of the semester… or next week”.

There’s this woman in my Wednesday night grad school course who is going to hate me by the end of the semester if she doesn’t already.

Let’s call her Alice.

Alice has had some bad opinions over the past two weeks of our classes. Near the end of our first class after I’d already given this passionate defense of audiobooks as another valid way of reading, Alice looked me dead in the face and said “No offense, but… I still don’t think audiobooks count as reading.”

I let it slide because it was the first class of the semester and her first literature class. I told myself that Alice would be better the next class.

Alice was not better the next class.Read More »

[Book Review] Finding Your Feet by Cass Lennox

Stitch

finding-your-feet-coverTitle: Finding Your Feet
Author: Cass Lennox (Twitter)
Rating: So Freaking Highly Recommended
Genre/Category: Contemporary Romance, LGBTQIA/Queer Romance, Dance
Release Date: January 16, 2017

Publisher: Riptide Publishing

Order Here: AMAZON | BARNES AND NOBLE | RIPTIDE PUBLISHING

Note: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher (via NetGalley) in exchange for an honest review. All of the views in review are my own.

I absolutely requested a copy of Cass Lennox’s Finding Your Feet because I took one look at the cover copy and felt like my desire to get to know Lennox’s characters hit me like a punch to the gut.

I’m always making noises about my desire for representation in the media I consume and when I saw that the book centered the relationship between an a-spec character and a Black transdude character, I was basically on the edge of my seat and bouncing with excitement hoping that I’d get a chance to read and review the book. Because at first glance, this book was exactly what I wanted to read and I was not disappointed at all.Read More »

The Bride’s Choice – Original Fiction

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Promised to a being that lives in the waters between her village and the rest of the world, a young woman walks to what will surely be her doom.

❧❧❧❧

I walk until I see the shoreline, the hem of my white wedding dress turning darker and darker with every step that I take dragging it through the mud and silt that line the path down to the sea.

Every single step that I take reminds me that I am not doing this for myself. I am not striding towards my death and doom because I want to find myself carried away or crushed by whatever it is that lives in the murky waters between my village’s land and the outside world.Read More »

[Book Review] UnWritten by Chelsea M. Cameron

Stitch

unwritten-coverTitle: UnWritten
Author: Chelsea M. Cameron (Twitter)
Rating: Recommended
Genre/Category: Contemporary Romance, Families/Kid-fic , Body Positive, Happy Endings, New Adult
Release Date: July 6, 2014
Order Here: AMAZON

Note: A version of this review is up on Goodreads/Amazon. The changes between the two versions are mostly minor!

❧❧❧❧

Chelsea Cameron’s UnWritten is basically the Single Dad AU of my dreams.

I follow the author on Twitter and she’s an actual peach. When she tweeted about this book being on Kindle Unlimited, I basically leapt to attention because everything about it is my kind of thing. UnWritten stars a curvy secret romance novel writer, a gorgeous single dad, and the cutest fictional three-year-old I’ve seen in a book in a long time.

I made high-pitched, eager noises for my first full hour of reading because this book is literally almost everything I’ve ever wanted.Read More »

2017 Resolutions (A Day Late)

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  • To be better at deadlines for work and school and to get comfortable communicating when a deadline isn’t going to work before it hits.
  • To go after the things I want (jobs, writing opportunities, friendships) without talking myself out of it.
  • To finish at least one short story a month and either post them or submit them to websites/magazines/anthology calls.
  • To be more confident in my writing as I go about improving. I don’t have to change my style to fit anyone but myself. Getting better at writing is different from changing how I write so I need to focus that.
  • To read more and to review more. I have this thing about making my reviews perfect but that means I don’t get as many out as I want or should. So 2017 will be the year I review more of the things I read right after I’m finished reading them
  • To remember to disengage from situations or behaviors that aren’t helpful or healthy. I love critiquing fandom and media as much as the next nub, but I need to remember to step back. Hurting people (myself included) is never going to be something I want to do here so I need to keep that in mind.
  • To lose a little weight. I feel fine and healthy, but it’s still something I want to do.
  • To be better with Patreon or shut that shit down. This goes hand in hand with me sticking with deadlines, obviously.
  • To bake macarons!
  • To learn how to drive!
  • To get an actual adult job and an apartment of my own.
  • To be a better, more engaged friend. It’s hard for me because I prefer to be alone most of the time, but that’s not fair to my friends.
  • To spend less time on things I hate and people I don’t like.
  • To read 60 books! And review them (at the very least, on goodreads).

Aaaah?

Hopefully this goes well!

Stitch’s Top Fantasy Reads of 2016

Stitch

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Note that this list isn’t in any particular order. They’re all books I either enjoyed a ton or that stuck with me even after I was done reading. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive list as I read a lot of amazing books but had to pare this down to ten books so I could actually manage to get the dang thing out before Christmas.

Note also that I was mad tipsy when making the accompanying podcast and so my scatterbrain is at an all time high. If you’re looking for something where I remember character names and heck, even basic plot points, um… please don’t listen to the audio and just read the descriptions instead!

1 The Castle Doctrine – Craig Schaefer

craig-schaefer-the-castle-doctrineKINDLE 

The sixth book in Craig Schaefer’s Daniel Faust series, The Castle Doctrine is one of many urban fantasy novels that legit left me messed up by the time I was done reading them. Schaefer’s writing style is incredible, full of descriptions that left me cringing (but still flipping the pages on my kindle).

The way the man writes violence is like… out of this world. Daniel Faust reminds me a lot of Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden only you know… not a misogynist and with a clearly defined moral code of his own (like Deathstroke but with magic and broke all the time). Start out with The Long Way Down and work your way to this book because it’s so worth it.

Read More »

[Book Review] Red Sonja: The Falcon Throne

Stitch

red-sonja-falcon-throneTitle: Red Sonja: The Falcon Throne
Author: Marguerite Bennett (Twitter)
Artists: Aneke and Diego Galindo
Colorists:  Jorge Sutil and Morgan Hickman
Letters: Erica Schultz
Covers: Marguerite Sauvage
Rating: Recommended
Genre/Category: Swords and Sorcery, Fantasy
Release Date: October 2016

Publisher: Dynamite Entertainment

Order Here: AMAZON | AMAZON (KINDLE) | BARNES AND NOBLE | DYNAMITE

Note: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. All of the views in review are my own.

Red Sonja: The Falcon Throne is really good.

I mean.

Really freaking good.Read More »