Category: Book Reviews

Wonder Woman:Earth One – Volume 2  – Somehow Worse Than The First

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Note: This review contains descriptions and images of things from this book that include (but are not limited to): Nazis, sexual assault, the whole MRA and negging plots Morrison writes and Paquette illustrates, and all the misogyny that really has no place in a Wonder Woman Book

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If you thought that two years would lead Wonder Woman: Earth One creators Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette to figure out that maybe their approach to a reimagined version of Wonder Woman in the previous volume wasn’t acceptable and was in fact frankly misogynistic, well… you’d be wrong.

I talked about all of the issues in the previous volume two years ago (including a comment where I described Paquette as having a “Greg Land-esque art style, incredibly sexualized”), but there’s literally no sign of growth or an awareness of what feminism actually is in the second volume of DC’s Wonder Woman: Earth One series.Read More »

[Review] Untouchable (Ravenswood #2) by Talia Hibbert

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Untouchable Cover

Black British romance author Talia Hibbert is one of my newest favorite authors in Romancelandia.

Hibbert’s romances – which primarily focus on interracial romances with at least one main character of color finding and falling in love – are set in idyllic small towns that are full of secrets, drama, and unbelievably sweet dudes. I’ve been a fan of Hibbert’s writing from last year, but she really got me invested with her recent-ish release Untouchable. Untouchable, the second in her small-town romance series Ravenswood, is focused on the people that live in one of the most stressful towns this side of an English breakfast, Ravenswood. Ravenswood has shown up in a novel and novella so far, both stories having sweet romances between characters who’ve been hurt and could stand to do some healing with a person squarely in their corner.Read More »

[Review] The Neon Boneyard (Daniel Faust #8) by Craig Schaefer

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The Neon Boneyard Cover

We’re eight (and a half, there’s a novella) books into Craig Schaefer’s Daniel Faust series and I’m still as huge a fan as I was when I cracked open the first book a couple years ago.

Schaefer’s Daniel Faust series is urban fantasy that blends the supernatural with elements that wouldn’t be out of place in heist/gangster movies. Daniel Faust is a con-man, a practitioner, and a pain in the ass to a whole bunch of powerful people in the supernatural and mundane parts of Las Vegas.Read More »

[Review] Taste of Wrath (Sin du Jour #7) by Matt Wallace

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Note: I am going to spoil the HELL out of this novella so if you haven’t read any of the books yet… Go buy them all, pour yourself an increasingly intense series of alcoholic drinks (if that’s your thing), and alternate between Matt’s books and my tipsy reviews.

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Choose your buy link here.

Audio companion: 

When we last saw the Sin Du Jour crew in 2017’s Gluttony Bay, shit had officially hit the fan.

I’m talking “we’ve lost people and the bad guys are shaping up to kick everyone’s butts” levels of badness. Of course, I’ve loved Matt Wallace’s Sin du Jour series from the moment that I stress bought the first book right around my twenty-fifth birthday almost three years ago. Envy of Angels changed my life and honestly? So did Taste of Wrath.Read More »

[Book Review] Rafe (Loose Ends #1) by Rebekah Weatherspoon

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Rafe cover copy

After her live-in nanny bounces without warning, leaving her twin six-year-old daughters alone for several hours, Dr. Sloan Copeland finds herself in desperate need of a new nanny as she works long hours and the girls are set to start school very soon.

Enter Rafe.

A big, bearded, babe of a man, Rafe has been working as a nanny for a while and, after his most recent family heads to Australia, he’s starting to consider whether or not he wants to keep working in childcare. He loves his job and the kids he takes care of (seriously swoonworthy, y’all), but he’s contemplating changing careers… right until he sees Sloan and her cute as heck little girls.Read More »

[Review] Brooklyn Ray’s Undertow (Port Lewis Witches #2)

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Note: This review contains spoilers for the first book in Brooklyn Ray’s Port Lewis Witches series.

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Things get extra tense in Undertow, the second novella in Brooklyn Ray’s Port Lewis witches series.

Now, I seriously enjoyed my introduction to Ray’s writing in Darkling and thought it was a fantastic read, but Undertow is even better.

For one thing, Undertow introduces us to some more of the mysteries present in Port Lewis’s witch community – including a conflict between demons that shapes their lives.

Undertow is set shortly after Darkling, the novella that introduced us to necromancer Ryder Lewellyn and his friend-turned-boyfriend, Liam Montgomery, a witch whose magical affinity tends towards water. Liam is the focus of this novella and I think he’s an incredibly solid protagonist, fleshed out even more than he was in the previous novella.Read More »

[Review] Soulless (Awakening of the Spirit #3) by Montiese McKenzie

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Note: In the interest of full disclosure, I received an advanced copy of this book from the author. All of the opinions in this review are my own and entirely honest. There are no significant spoilers beyond what’s in the “Content Notes/Warning” section directly below the review.

Soulless Cover

Soulless, the third novel in Montiese McKenzie’s Awakening of the Spirit series, is an urban fantasy crime drama with expansive cast of interconnected characters, a thrilling main plot, and a frightening villain called the Darkness looming over the protagonists’ lives and manipulating the world around them.

Honestly, it kind of has a little bit of everything thanks to the book’s focus on found families, immediately aww-worthy relationships, intense action scenes, and McKenzie’s vivid writing style.Read More »

[Review] Brooklyn Ray’s Darkling (Port Lewis Witches #1)

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Note: I won an ebook copy of this novella from the author themselves in a giveaway last week. That has no influence on my enjoyment of the book and all opinions herein are my own.

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Darkling CoverDarkling, the first novella in Brooklyn Ray’s Port Lewis Witches series is a dark and delicious deep dive into a magical world unlike many I’ve seen before.

In Port Lewis, a small town in the state of Washington, magic practitioners of all types are kind of commonplace in everyday life, with different families bringing their specialties to the table.

Darkling primarily focuses on Ryder Lewellyn, a late-blooming trans dude who happens to be a necromancer with an affinity for fire, and his close friend (and future lover) Liam Montgomery, a witch with an affinity for water.Read More »

[Small Stitch Reviews] Medusa Uploaded by Emily Devenport

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BUY HERE

I stayed up until 2AM reading this book.

It’s good.

Generation ships are a staple in the science fiction genre, with the theme showing up across the genre for decades with vary levels of success. The idea of a generation ship is interesting enough, a hypothetical form of interstellar travel that’s basically a space ark for humanity (or another group of beings) traveling to a usually unnamed and partially unknown destination after the destruction of their homeworld.

Medusa Uploaded is about life on one such ship, but it’s also about a brilliant, kind of murder-prone augmented human named Oichi Angelis navigating the politics of the generation ship and the ruling class that are responsible for the death of her loved ones. I love Oichi. Seriously. Her evolving worldview, coupled with the fact that she’s literally just ready to kill at a moment’s notice, makes her one of my favorite characters in a sci-fi novel. And she was ready to kill before she got a bad ass AI suit.

Imagine what she does with it…

Medusa Uploaded is a brilliant book with beautiful writing, tons of exquisite violence, characters of color in different positions of power, and an interesting plot that opens the universe up even further.

I liked it, and I think y’all will too!

And, as always, if y’all come across any commentary or criticism on race in the book, feel free to send them my way!

[Small Stitch Reviews] May 21st

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Whatever for Hire by R. J. Blain

A paranormal romance novel with jokes everywhere and a minor enemies-to-lovers relationship between the main characters, what makes Whatever For Hire fall flat for me is the copious use of the g-slur. Yes, that g-slur. The main character Kanika is half-Egyptian and half-Rromani (but also, maybe not even that considering the hints that the literal devil kept dropping), but did this book have to be rife with the g-slur being dropped willy nilly all over the place on top of Orientalism out the butt? (Aside from Kanika, all of the Egyptian characters were evil, teenager-selling, forced-marriage-having assholes so… problem much?)

Whatever For Hire could’ve been decent but instead, it was kind of a mess where the little moments that I disliked wound up adding up fast.

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Ship It by Britta Lundin

Ship It, as you can tell from the title, is about shipping and fandom. It’s about Claire, a teenager who watches a Supernatural-esque primetime drama and ships the main characters. When she actually gets a chance to talk to one of the two leads on the show at a convention, things go pear-shaped when she brings up shipping and representation and he kind of… doesn’t react well.

I know a lot of people that liked Ship It in my group of fandom nerds who also read young adult fiction. I wanted to like it too. I even requested it on NetGalley because I thought it’d be amazing.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get into Lundin’s debut novel even though I tried my hardest. I’ve been stalled at 40% for a few weeks now and while I might eventually return to it, right now I’m not that into the portrayal of fandom or fans. While Lundin’s writing is fun and full of snappy banter between the characters, I found it incredibly difficult to care about most of them or what they were going through.

I also, honestly think that with everything I’ve been going through in fandom, this kind of book would’ve been a good read for 2013!Stitch or younger – you know, before I got in the thick of things with the discourse.

[Small Stitch Reviews] A Princess in Theory by Alyssa Cole

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Technically, there are spoilers for Black Panther in this review… Right there at the top.

A Princess in Theory Cover

If you walked out of Black Panther on your first (or third) viewing and were hit by a craving for some sweet romance in the same vein as the sweetness between Chadwick Boseman’s T’challa and Lupita Nyong’o’s Nakia, boy do I have the book for y’all.

A Princess in Theory, the first book in Alyssa Cole’s new Reluctant Royals series, is a fantastic “lost royalty” story centered on the evolving relationship between a potential princess that doesn’t know her own past (but does know her way around a lab since she’s an epidemiologist) and the prince who happens to believe in happy endings (but needs to do a bit better about his big reveals).Read More »

[Book Review] Let’s Talk About Love by Claire Kann

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Title: Let’s Talk About Love
Author: Claire Kann (Twitter)
Genre: Contemporary, Queer Fiction, Queer Romance, Ace/Aro Representation
Rating: Highly Freaking Recommended

Publisher: Swoon Reads/Macmillan

Publishing Date: January 23, 2018

LINKS: AMAZON | BARNES AND NOBLE

SYNOPSIS

Alice had her whole summer planned. Non-stop all-you-can-eat buffets while marathoning her favorite TV shows (best friends totally included) with the smallest dash of adulting—working at the library to pay her share of the rent. The only thing missing from her plan? Her girlfriend (who ended things when Alice told her she’s asexual). Alice is done with dating—no thank you, do not pass go, stick a fork in her, done.

But then Alice meets Takumi and she can’t stop thinking about him or the rom com-grade romance feels she did not ask for (uncertainty, butterflies, and swoons, oh my!).

When her blissful summer takes an unexpected turn and Takumi becomes her knight with a shiny library employee badge (close enough), Alice has to decide if she’s willing to risk their friendship for a love that might not be reciprocated—or understood.

 

REVIEW

Straight up, I wish that I’d had Claire Kann’s Let’s Talk About Love back when I was a teenager trying to figure out who I was and what the heck I was doing. Like me, Alice is the baby of her family. She’s the youngest daughter and a surprise baby to her parents who have to be in their mid to late fifties in Let’s Talk About Love.

This book seriously matches so much of my experience as a queer, Black, lady-oriented person that’s on the ace-spectrum that I kept having to put the book down in order to squish my own face.

(In case you didn’t know, face squishes are the HIGHEST sign of my pleasure when reading.)Read More »

Small Stitch Reviews – Bingo Love

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Bingo Love Cover

Title: Bingo Love
Creators: Tee Franklin (writer), Jenn St-Onge and Joy San (Art), Genevieve FT (Cover)
Genre: Slice of Life, Queer Romance
Rating: Highly Recommended

Publisher: Image Comics
Publishing Date: February 14, 2018

Preorder on AMAZON!

I can’t settle on just one adjective to describe Tee Franklin’s Bingo Love.

Beautiful.

Sweet.

Heart-breaking.

So many different words apply because in many ways, Bingo Love is the queer comic of my dreams! I signed up to support Tee on Kickstarter the moment that the comic project was announced and I finally got the chance to sit down and read my copy today.

Bingo Love is so good. It’s incredibly powerful to see a story of Black queer love told across decades and you can see just how much work Tee, Jenn, and Joy put into this book. This slice of life graphic novel holds nothing back as it focuses on Mari and Hazel’s relationship with one another across their lives (including both internalized and external societal homophobia). It made me tear up MULTIPLE times because it just hit all of the right emotional notes and that ending — oh!

Seriously, if you haven’t pre-ordered Bingo Love yet, you need get on that right now! Because Bingo Love is one of the best comics I’ve ever read and we should all be excited to see where Tee goes from here!

 

 

 

[Book Review] Meet Cute

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Meet Cute Cover

Title: Meet Cute
Authors: Jennifer L. Armentrout; Dhonielle Clayton; Katie Cotugno; Jocelyn Davies; Huntley Fitzpatrick; Nina LaCour; Emery Lord; Katharine McGee; Kass Morgan; Julie Murphy; Meredith Russo; Sara Shepard; Nicola Yoon; Ibi Zoboi
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance, Anthology, Queer Fiction, Queer Romance
Rating: Highly Recommended
Release Date: January 2, 2018

Publisher: HMH Books for Young Readers

Buy Links: AMAZON (KINDLE) | AMAZON | BARNES AND NOBLE

Note: I received a copy of this book from the publisher (via NetGalley) in exchange for an honest review.

SYNOPSIS

Whether or not you believe in fate, or luck, or love at first sight, every romance has to start somewhere. MEET CUTE is an anthology of original short stories featuring tales of “how they first met” from some of today’s most popular YA authors.

Readers will experience Nina LaCour’s beautifully written piece about two Bay Area girls meeting via a cranky customer service Tweet, Sara Shepard’s glossy tale about a magazine intern and a young rock star, Nicola Yoon’s imaginative take on break-ups and make-ups, Katie Cotugno’s story of two teens hiding out from the police at a house party, and Huntley Fitzpatrick’s charming love story that begins over iced teas at a diner. There’s futuristic flirting from Kass Morgan and Katharine McGee, a riveting transgender heroine from Meredith Russo, a subway missed connection moment from Jocelyn Davies, and a girl determined to get out of her small town from Ibi Zoboi. Jennifer Armentrout writes a sweet story about finding love from a missing library book, Emery Lord has a heartwarming and funny tale of two girls stuck in an airport, Dhonielle Clayton takes a thoughtful, speculate approach to pre-destined love, and Julie Murphy dreams up a fun twist on reality dating show contestants.

This incredibly talented group of authors brings us a collection of stories that are at turns romantic and witty, epic and everyday, heartbreaking and real.

 

REVIEW

I just love a good meet-cute, so it sure is convenient (and awesome) that I was approved for a book all about meet-cutes by some of the best authors currently writing Young Adult fiction!

Meet Cute is a delightful anthology full of well-written and frequently complex short stories. I think, honestly, that there might be something in this story for everyone. If you’re as big a fan of meet-cutes as I am, that is! Many of the stories aren’t necessarily “Happily Ever Afters”, they’re snapshots of a happy (or bittersweet) moment in a complicated life, but that’s definitely a good thing to read! Many of the stories center characters that are queer and/or characters of color and that’s awesome!Read More »