Devil’s Daughter by Lisa Kleypas, read by Mary Jane Wells (The Ravenels #5/The Ravenels Meet the Wallflowers #2)

Summary from Goodreads: Although beautiful young widow Phoebe, Lady Clare, has never met West Ravenel, she knows one thing for certain: he’s a mean, rotten bully. Back in boarding school, he made her late husband’s life a misery, and she’ll never forgive him for it. But when Phoebe attends a family wedding, she encounters a dashing and impossibly charming stranger who sends a fire-and-ice jolt of attraction through her. And then he introduces himself…as none other than West Ravenel.

West is a man with a tarnished past. No apologies, no excuses. However, from the moment he meets Phoebe, West is consumed by irresistible desire…not to mention the bitter awareness that a woman like her is far out of his reach. What West doesn’t bargain on is that Phoebe is no straitlaced aristocratic lady. She’s the daughter of a strong-willed wallflower who long ago eloped with Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent—the most devilishly wicked rake in England.

Before long, Phoebe sets out to seduce the man who has awakened her fiery nature and shown her unimaginable pleasure. Will their overwhelming passion be enough to overcome the obstacles of the past? Only the devil’s daughter knows…

After reading Hello, Stranger I jumped back for a re-read of Cold-Hearted Rake, because I was having trouble squaring how we got Devon and West. And this was very helpful when reading Devil’s Daughter because now West Ravenel gets his own Happily Ever After with Phoebe, daughter of Sebastian, Duke of Kingston, formerly Devil in Winter, and the widow of Lord Clare.

The competence pr0n exuded by West Ravenel in this book is bananas (even if he is the only person who can’t see it because toxic childhood). I’m not usually a fan of bully romances, but this one really makes it clear fairly early in the book that he knows he did bad and is trying to make amends for how he behaved as a child/teenager. Although, I’m not quite sure this works well for the reader unless you’ve read Cold-Hearted Rake and have seen on-page Soused!West to compare with on-page Competent!West. I also really liked how this was a historical romance with a widow who did not have a traumatic first marriage experience and was happy in it, despite the care and emotional work she did caring for a husband with a terminal illness, and has already considered what she might want in a future marriage. (And there are so many call backs to small moments in Devil in Winter, the shaving scene especially.)

I did today, however, have to sit in the car for about 15 minutes once I’d got to work with the audiobook speed kicked up to 2x because there was only 30 minutes left in the entire book and we’d had our black moment and good Lord how was Lisa Kleypas going to fix this situation? (She fixed it with “Deus Ex Sebastian, Duke of Kingston,” that’s how, oh my god.)

Dear FTC: I borrowed the audiobook from my library via the Libby app.

Hello Stranger by Lisa Kleypas (The Ravenels #4), read by Mary Jane Wells

Summary from Goodreads:

A woman who defies her time: Dr. Garrett Gibson, the only female physician in England, is as daring and independent as any man—why not take her pleasures like one? Yet she has never been tempted to embark on an affair, until now. Ethan Ransom, a former detective for Scotland Yard, is as gallant as he is secretive, a rumored assassin whose true loyalties are a mystery. For one exhilarating night, they give in to their potent attraction before becoming strangers again.

A man who breaks every rule: As a Ravenel by-blow spurned by his father, Ethan has little interest in polite society, yet he is captivated by the bold and beautiful Garrett. Despite their vow to resist each other after that sublime night, she is soon drawn into his most dangerous assignment yet. When the mission goes wrong, it will take all of Garrett’s skill and courage to save him. As they face the menace of a treacherous government plot, Ethan is willing to take any risk for the love of the most extraordinary woman he’s ever known.

Continuing on my Ravenels read on audio – I really dug this romance between the doctor and the spy from the previous book, Devil in Spring. The medical research Kleypas did for Dr. Gibson – who was practicing at a time when technical advancements in medicine were really starting to jump forward – was excellent. And who could resist Ethan and his sexy Irish brogue? (sorry, Welshman Rhys still wins the sexy accent competition) I loved how they trapped the villain in the end.

A weird note in the audiobook production: Mary Jane Wells is spectacular as usual, but there was an odd moment (in the trainyard, when Garrett is escaping London with Ethan to the Priory) where I would swear the speaker was West Ravenel, who is voiced as a very blustery/jolly-ish English toff, but Rhys’s Welsh accent pops in for about two paragraphs. And he was present earlier in the scene, but I had thought the character left the scene prior to this conversation. I rewound and listened a few times, but I couldn’t figure it out.

The next book in the series is Devil’s Daughter but I’m thinking I might have to pause and jump back to Cold-Hearted Rake because I can’t quite remember how we got to this competent, very capable version of Devon, Lord Trenear.

Dear FTC: I borrowed a copy of this audiobook from the library via Libby.

Rules for Being a Girl by Candace Bushnell and Katie Cotugno, read by Julia Whelan

Summary from Goodreads: It starts before you can even remember: You learn the ‘RULES FOR BEING A GIRL’

Marin has always been good at navigating these unspoken guidelines. A star student and editor of the school paper, she dreams of getting into Brown University. Marin’s future seems bright―and her young, charismatic English teacher, Mr. Beckett, is always quick to admire her writing and talk books with her. But when “Bex” takes things too far and comes on to Marin, she’s shocked and horrified. Had she somehow led him on? Was it her fault?

When Marin works up the courage to tell the administration what happened, no one believes her. She’s forced to face Bex in class every day. Except now, he has an ax to grind. But Marin isn’t about to back down. She uses the school newspaper to fight back and she starts a feminist book club at school. She finds allies in the most unexpected people, like “slutty” Gray Kendall, who she’d always dismissed as just another lacrosse bro. As things heat up at school and in her personal life, Marin must figure out how to take back the power and write her own rules.

Overall, I liked Rules for Being a Girl. In the beginning, the book felt very over-described but then that writing quirk fell away – it was almost like the authors had to “set the scene” and then it was mostly unnecessary after that so only differences were noted. But plot-wise, it was interesting and I really got into what Marin was going through. Although 43 year old me immediately sniffed out the creeper teacher when it was noted very early in the book that the book Becks wanted to loan Marin was The Corrections. Like, my dude. NO.

Content warning for obvious sexism and misogyny that Marin takes on throughout the book.

A note on the audio: I normally bump up the speed on an audiobook, but usually to only about 1.25 or 1.5x speed because almost all narrators read too slowly for me. But this audiobook I had blown up to almost 3x speed by the end. Which is odd, because usually I don’t have to do that with Julia Whelan’s narration. So ymmv on this one.

Dear FTC: I borrowed the audiobook from the library via Libby because we picked it for April TBG at the store.

(If you’re noticing a lot of gaps between posts, it’s because I’ve been re-reading. A lot. Like, I’ve re-read Love Lettering, among others, back to back on audio. It’s rough out here.)

What Happened to Paula: On the Death of an American Girl by Katherine Dykstra, read by Nan McNamara

Summary from Goodreads: A riveting investigation into a cold case asks how much control women have over their bodies and the direction of their lives.

In July 1970, 18-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling left her house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and never returned. A cold case for 50 years, Paula’s story had been largely forgotten when Katherine Dykstra began looking for answers. A woman was dead. Why had no one been held responsible? How could a community give up and move on? Could there ever be justice for Paula? Tracing the knowns and the unknowns, Dykstra discovers a girl who was hemmed in by the culture of the late 1960s, when women’s rights had been brought to the fore but had little practical bearing on actual lives. The more she learns about Paula, the more parallels Dykstra finds in the lives of the women who knew Paula, the lives of the women in her own family, and even in her own life. Captivating and expertly crafted, ‘WHAT HAPPENED TO PAULA’ is a timely, powerful look at gender, autonomy, and the cost of being a woman.

Eh….What Happened to Paula definitely could have been a better book. There is an incredible amount of self-insert filler from the author that just draws everything out to the point I started not caring. It’s much-less a work of true crime investigation, than a look at the mores and culture of the time and place that would allow the disappearance of a young woman to be bungled so badly, which would then terminally hamper the subsequent murder investigation.

In addition, the author pretty much lost me by implying that Cedar Rapidians – Cedar Rapids is my hometown, I grew up there, so now I just want to fight – consider themselves to be Chicagoans because that’s the closest big city. You cannot even begin to tell me that a single person she interviewed for this book said anything even remotely close to that. Chicago is well-over three hours away at modern Interstate speeds, and would have been an even longer drive at the time Paula Oberbrockling died, with lower highway speed and yet-to-be-opened sections of Interstate. All that research for this book, and she just tanked much of her credibility with approximately three paragraphs that should have been removed in editing.

Dear FTC: I read an audiobook from the library via Libby.

Bombshell by Sarah Maclean, read by Mary Jane Wells (Hell’s Belles #1)

Summary from Goodreads: New York Times bestselling author Sarah MacLean returns with a blazingly sexy, unapologetically feminist new series, Hell’s Belles, beginning with a bold, bombshell of a heroine, able to dispose of a scoundrel—or seduce one—in a single night.

After years of living as London’s brightest scandal, Lady Sesily Talbot has embraced the reputation and the freedom that comes with the title. No one looks twice when she lures a gentleman into the dark gardens beyond a Mayfair ballroom…and no one realizes those trysts are not what they seem.

No one, that is, but Caleb Calhoun, who has spent years trying not to notice his best friend’s beautiful, brash, brilliant sister. If you ask him, he’s been a saint about it, considering the way she looks at him…and the way she talks to him…and the way she’d felt in his arms during their one ill-advised kiss. Except someone has to keep Sesily from tumbling into trouble during her dangerous late-night escapades, and maybe close proximity is exactly what Caleb needs to get this infuriating, outrageous woman out of his system. But now Caleb is the one in trouble, because he’s fast realizing that Sesily isn’t for forgetting…she’s forever. And forever isn’t something he can risk.

Ok, so I tried to start the galley for Bombshell several times and kept getting frustrated. I think I might have been mad at Caleb – not Sesily, never Sesily, because she’s awesome – and also 2021 was a raging garbage fire and I was mad about a lot of things (still am) and I had very bad pudding brain. However, I finally came up on the hold list for the audiobook, read by the awesome Mary Jane Wells who also reads Marrying Winterbourne and all sorts of other things by Lisa Kleypas, and I just TORE through it this time. So, who knows? Reading brains are weird.

Sesily is a bit like an old friend by now – we met her first in The Rogue Not Taken and the next two Scandal and Scoundrel books (where she barfed on Haven’s boots in The Day of the Duchess – he totally deserved it). It’s several years later and Sesily is part of an awesome, injustice-fighting secret Lady Gang headed up by the Duchess of Trevelyan, rescuing women from bad engagements, abusive husbands, and harassing employers. She’s best friends with the other members of the gang, a con-artist (Adelaide) and a chemist/bomb-maker (Imogen). She’s the “fun Auntie” to her many nieces and nephews. She’s a proper scandal and enjoys it…but the one man she absolutely wants beyond all reason has run all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to stay away from her. Caleb says it’s because she’s his business partner Sera’s sister, but something else must be up.

On the night she has to do some Gang business under cover of the Duchess’s ball, Caleb appears in London. He’s only there because Sera’s going to have another baby and he’ll need to oversee The Singing Sparrow for a while. But then straight back to Boston, do not pass GO, do not think about Sesily Talbot, and don’t even THINK about kissing her in a dark garden let alone actually do that…whoops.

And so begins a back and forth between Sesily and Caleb. Caleb realizes that Sesily is up to something dangerous, underscored by an attack by an unknown group of heavies on the pub Sesily and her friends attend which seems to be part of a larger, coordinated effort to scare off businesses owned by people other than cis, white men (the same group is at work attacking Grace’s establishment in Daring and the Duke). However, Sesily really won’t tell Caleb what she’s up to, because he just keeps sticking his nose in her business and getting in the way. (Sometimes he gets in the way in a very good way…he can make excellent use of a closet and whenever he and Sesily banter until they kiss and then some it is A+. Really, he just keeps showing up because he doesn’t want her to get hurt and she’s Sera’s sister, it’s not like he has feelings for her, squishy warm feelings because those are Very Inconvenient, but wow, does this man want Sesily in all the right ways, despite all his denials.) And it turns out Caleb has a secret of his own, one that could have lethal consequences if made public.

I loved this book. Sesily, Adelaide, Imogen, and Duchess (fyi, not her real name, but Sarah hasn’t given it to us, yet – I envision a Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover reveal at the end of Imogen’s book) are such good characters, warm, witty, sarcastic, supremely intelligent, and loving. The scenes where the four of them are just talking – and maybe giving Sesily shit about Caleb – are the best. And the work that they are doing, to protect vulnerable people in an era where those who were not cis-gendered, heterosexual, upper-class, rich white males had incredibly little institutional power to protect them, is satisfying to read on the page. And if you can get the audiobook, Mary Jane Wells is fantastic, an absolute genius when it comes to accents – her voice as Sesily with that North country accent really brings to the fore Sesily’s determination to rub her scandalous self in the faces of everyone who disapproves of her: she won’t even give them the satisfaction of raising her accent to acceptable ton levels.

I do still think that the narrative remained a little unbalanced – the reader already knew so much about Sesily, she had almost no secrets, but we knew very little about Caleb until later in the book and that threw the character balance off for me. That might have been it. Otherwise, great start to another series.

I’m a little annoyed that we have another book to wait before we get Imogen and Tommy (omg, I think Imogen might be my new favorite? I want her and Pippa to be friends. In the meantime, we can follow the #tommygoboom hashtag with some flash fanfic Jen Prokop makes up about them) but Adelaide and Clayborn ought to be good.

Dear FTC: I started with a digital galley but finished by borrowing the audiobook from my library via Libby (I’ll probably buy one, too).

Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film by Patton Oswalt, read by the author

Summary from Goodreads: Between 1995 and 1999, Patton Oswalt lived with an unshakable addiction. It wasn’t drugs, alcohol, or sex: it was film. After moving to Los Angeles, Oswalt became a huge film buff (or as he calls it, a sprocket fiend), absorbing classics, cult hits, and new releases at the famous New Beverly Cinema. Silver screen celluloid became Patton’s life schoolbook, informing his notion of acting, writing, comedy, and relationships.

Set in the nascent days of LA’s alternative comedy scene, Silver Screen Fiend chronicles Oswalt’s journey from fledgling stand-up comedian to self-assured sitcom actor, with the colorful New Beverly collective and a cast of now-notable young comedians supporting him all along the way. “Clever and readable…Oswalt’s encyclopedic knowledge and frothing enthusiasm for films (from sleek noir classics, to gory B movies, to cliché-riddled independents, to big empty blockbusters) is relentlessly present, whirring in the background like a projector” (The Boston Globe). More than a memoir, this is “a love song to the silver screen” (Paste Magazine). 

I rolled this up to a 4 star read because Patton reads the audiobook and I love the way he reads the footnotes. But overall, it felt little short in length. I wish that it had more about the films he watched and loved not just in those 4 years but in general. It had almost more about his work in the stand-up circuit in California at that time – which I actually knew nothing about, so that was interesting – than about film.

Dear FTC: I borrowed this audiobook from my library via Libby.

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz, read by Chloe Cannon

Summary from Goodreads: In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes listeners on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today. Newitz travels to all four sites and investigates the cutting-edge research in archaeology, revealing the mix of environmental changes and political turmoil that doomed these ancient settlements. Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers–slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers–who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia. Four Lost Cities is a journey into the forgotten past, but, foreseeing a future in which the majority of people on Earth will be living in cities, it may also reveal something of our own fate.

I originally started Four Lost Cities with the digital galley, but had trouble trying to figure out pronunciation of cities and place names so switched over to the audiobook. That was much better.

This is a really interesting pop archaeology/history of four “lost” cities, moving roughly forward in time from pre-history Central Turkey, to turn-of-the-millennium Pompei, to 11th-12th century Cambodia, to pre-colonial Southern Illinois. It’s kind of interesting to consider how each of these cities was abandoned, some for the same reasons, some for different reasons, and then think about how our current cities grow and contract. 

Dear FTC: I started with the digital galley but then flipped to an audiobook borrowed from my library via Libby.

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

Summary from Goodreads: The highly anticipated portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, by the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing.

The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions: Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing OxyContin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis. Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling.

Did Bad Blood piss you off? You need to read Empire of Pain then – it will totally piss you off some more! The level of deceit and shady dealing is galling. Plus, you have even more despicable rich people to loathe, like three generations worth of them. This was a riveting audiobook – even at 18+ hours (although, full disclosure, I had the speed kicked up to 2x because while Patrick Radden Keefe was an OK narrator, it was a little slow for me).

Dear FTC: I borrowed the audiobook from my library via Libby.