Exposed by Kristen Callihan (VIP #4)

Summary from Goodreads: Brenna: There are some people in life who know exactly how to push your buttons. For me, it’s Rye Peterson. We can’t spend more than ten minutes together before we’re at each other’s throats, which makes working together that much harder. Rye is the bassist for Kill John, the biggest rock band in the world, and I am his publicist. It doesn’t help that the man is gorgeous, funny, talented, and…never takes anything seriously. Avoidance is key. But everything changes when he overhears something he shouldn’t: a confession made in a moment of weakness. Now the man I’ve tried so hard to ignore is offering me the greatest temptation of all—him.

Rye: Brenna James is the one. The one I can’t have. The one I can’t get out of my mind. Believe me, I’ve tried; the woman loathes me. I managed well enough—until I heard her say she’s as lonely as I am. That she needed to be touched, held, satisfied. And I could no longer deny the truth: I wanted to be the one to give her what she craved. I convinced her that it would just be sex, mutual satisfaction with nothing deeper. But the moment I have her, she becomes my world. I’ve never given her a good reason to trust me before. Now, I’ve got to show Brenna that we’re so much better together than we ever were apart. Things are going to get messy. But getting messy with Brenna is what I do best.

I know I talked about Managed here (which is book 2 of the VIP series, the first and third are Idol and Fall) – and now we finally have a book for Rye with Exposed!

Oh man – this book. Frenemies to friends/fuckbuddies to lovers. Callihan has been setting up Brenna and Rye in the three previous books by having them develop this icy politeness/work relationship so that she can just crack it in Exposed. I love how all the conflict in this book is internal, just Rye and Brenna working out their misconceptions and prejudices toward each other. A lot of their history has to do with how young they were when they first met and were attracted to each other and then not really being able to act on that through external pressures and events. I do wish that Callihan had done more with the subplot (there’s a thing going on with Rye’s hands – alarming, since he’s a musician) that seems to kind of drop away after a bit. I do love how Scottie keeps showing up in the books as this sneaky matchmaker, haha. Fatherhood hasn’t fazed him in the least.

Dear FTC: I had my copy pre-ordered on my Nook since I’m not fancy enough to have got a galley.

Knit, Purl, a Baby, and a Girl by Hettie Bell

Summary from Goodreads: Some people can’t wait to have babies. They’re ready for it—with their perfect lives and their pregnancy glow…

Poppy Adams doesn’t have a perfect life, and she wasn’t ready for the positive test. An unexpected baby—Poppy’s unexpected baby—won’t exactly have her family doing cartwheels. But she’s making the right choice. Right?

Poppy’s totally got this. She just needs a little encouragement, and a knitting group is the perfect place to start. Baby blankets, booties, tiny little hats—small steps toward her new life. But she feels like she’s already dropped a stitch when she discovers the knitting group is led by the charismatic Rhiannon.

It’s not exactly a great time to meet the woman who might just be the love of her life. While the group easily shuffles around to make room for Poppy, it’s not so easy fitting her life and Rhiannon’s together. With the weeks counting down until her baby arrives, Poppy’s going to have to decide for herself what truly makes a family.

I saw the description for Knit, Purl, a Baby and a Girl in Harlequin’s catalog on Edelweiss and immediately went over to Netgalley to request it (for whatever reason the galley wasn’t up on Edelweiss). It felt like the intersection of a lot of interests, particularly an f/f romance novel, of which there aren’t that many in trad pub because I have several customers I could easily sell them to, and a romance novel with a bisexual MC on page.

Let’s get this out of the way first: from a strictly “Is this a Romance Novel?” standpoint, I don’t think this book works. I didn’t feel like the romance between Poppy and Rhi – while it had good bones and some really good scenes together – was foregrounded in the story. Rhiannon is off page too much for this book to go full Romance Novel, in my opinion (FYI, for those who have preferences about POV this book is 100% 1st Person narration from Poppy, we never have Rhi’s perspective). I also don’t feel like the resolution of the book in relation to the romantic relationship between the two women is a “we did it together,” the “together” bit being important in a romance novel. So much of the emotional growth in this book is Poppy doing the work on her own; whatever growth Rhi goes through is not privy to the reader. So the marketing for this book as a Romance Novel is doing the book a disservice.

BECAUSE, because because because, Poppy’s story as a woman who learns to set boundaries and believe in herself as a fat, bisexual woman who is going to be a new mother and to stand up to her own horrible, gaslighting mother is a really good story. A GOOD story. The opening scenes at Planned Parenthood where Poppy meets Rhiannon (who is her clinic escort) and then sees the PP nurse for her appointment are wonderfully, truthfully, and very lovingly written. [Side note: I have been the friend who has accompanied someone to PP to make a decision about a pregnancy and PP nurses are the most compassionate, amazing healthcare workers.] This book takes us from the day Poppy’s pregnancy is confirmed through a few weeks after her baby is born – so we get a bildungsroman as Poppy starts to figure out her shit and realize, that maybe, just maybe, she has actually succeeded as an adult, it just looks different than what she’s been told “success” should look like. It’s such a good story. (Would have liked a little more of the knitting group, though, they were all interesting characters.)

[Trigger warnings: Poppy’s mother is AWFUL, there’s fatphobia and shaming on the page, and Rhi also relates some instances of homophobia off-page. (I didn’t pick up on-page homophobia, but there may have been some from Poppy’s mom, but she’s a walking problem, so….) There are also, kind of obviously, several discussions about abortion and personal stories related by characters in discussing how the choice you make is always the right one for you.]

Knit, Purl, a Baby and a Girl is out today!

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.

Faith: Taking Flight by Julie Murphy (Faith Herbert Origin Story #1)

Summary from Goodreads: From Julie Murphy, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dumplin’, comes the first in a two-book origin story of Faith, a groundbreaking, plus-sized superhero from the Valiant Entertainment comics.

Faith Herbert is a pretty regular teen. When she’s not hanging out with her two best friends, Matt and Ches, she’s volunteering at the local animal shelter or obsessing over the long-running teen drama The Grove.

So far, her senior year has been spent trying to sort out her feelings for her maybe-crush Johnny and making plans to stay close to Grandma Lou after graduation. Of course, there’s also that small matter of recently discovering she can fly….

When the fictional world of The Grove crashes into Faith’s reality as the show relocates to her town, she can’t believe it when TV heroine Dakota Ash takes a romantic interest in her.

But her fandom-fueled daydreams aren’t enough to distract Faith from the fact that first animals, then people, have begun to vanish from the town. Only Faith seems able to connect the dots to a new designer drug infiltrating her high school.

But when her investigation puts the people she loves in danger, she will have to confront her hidden past and use her newfound gifts—risking everything to save her friends and beloved town.

I ran across this Faith origin story by accident. I haven’t been reading much YA lately so hadn’t been checking the right catalogs. But I ran across this novelization by Julie Murphy so of course I needed to read it.

And this is fun! If you don’t already know who Faith is, she’s a plus-sized superhero psiot WHO CAN FLY ❤ from the Harbinger universe of Valiant comics. She’s a pop culture nerd and a journalist. In this book, the plot takes place the fall after Faith’s psiot abilities have been activated by the shady Harbinger Foundation and she escaped from the facility (the cover story was that she went to journalism summer camp). So now she’s back home, starting her senior year of high school, keeping the secret that she can fly from her best friends Matt and Ches, worrying about her grandma who might have developing dementia, working her after school job at an animal rescue, writing for the school paper, and her favorite show – for which she runs a major fan blog – has started location shooting in her town. And then weird things start happening and people start disappearing. Faith is the only one who can connect the dots.

Overall, this is a great way to get into the Faith-verse and Julie Murphy captured Faith’s personality really well. Faith’s world has always been very diverse and Murphy makes that very explicit in the book, both with respect to race/ethnicity and sexual orientation/gender, and Faith’s exploration of her own identity. However, every character introduced is immediately given a character description in one to two sentences, from Faith herself right down to the driver who picks her up at the TV show production parking lot and drives her to the office and is never seen again. After a while it got extremely rote, particularly because the book is narrated in the first person by Faith so the immediate descriptions felt awkwardly shoehorned in. But I enjoyed this fun look at how Faith developed her superhero alter-ego Zephyr so if you’re a comics fan, give it a try.

FYI: this is a prose novel since I keep seeing “graphic novel” coming up to describe this book; the character comes from comics but this book isn’t a comic itself.

Faith: Taking Flight is out Tuesday, July 7! (Edit: my notes previous had the release date as June 30)

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss.

Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert (The Brown Sister’s #2)

Summary from Goodreads:

Talia Hibbert returns with another charming romantic comedy about a young woman who agrees to fake date her friend after a video of him “rescuing” her from their office building goes viral…

Danika Brown knows what she wants: professional success, academic renown, and an occasional roll in the hay to relieve all that career-driven tension. But romance? Been there, done that, burned the T-shirt. Romantic partners, whatever their gender, are a distraction at best and a drain at worst. So Dani asks the universe for the perfect friend-with-benefits—someone who knows the score and knows their way around the bedroom.

When brooding security guard Zafir Ansari rescues Dani from a workplace fire drill gone wrong, it’s an obvious sign: PhD student Dani and ex-rugby player Zaf are destined to sleep together. But before she can explain that fact, a video of the heroic rescue goes viral. Now half the internet is shipping #DrRugbae—and Zaf is begging Dani to play along. Turns out, his sports charity for kids could really use the publicity. Lying to help children? Who on earth would refuse?

Dani’s plan is simple: fake a relationship in public, seduce Zaf behind the scenes. The trouble is, grumpy Zaf’s secretly a hopeless romantic—and he’s determined to corrupt Dani’s stone-cold realism. Before long, he’s tackling her fears into the dirt. But the former sports star has issues of his own, and the walls around his heart are as thick as his… um, thighs.

Suddenly, the easy lay Dani dreamed of is more complex than her thesis. Has her wish backfired? Is her focus being tested? Or is the universe just waiting for her to take a hint?

We met Danika Brown a few times in her sister Chloe’s book last year, so I was prepared for a very smart academic. But what we got in Take a Hint, Dani Brown was an amazing kinda friends-to-lovers, maaaaaybe fake relationship story about a witchy, smart, nerdy, AMAZING Black doctoral student (evolution of misogynoir post-chattel slavery), who has impostor syndrome about allowing someone to love her, and Zafir, the romance novel reading, ex-pro rugby player who brings her protein bars and loves her. Dani and Zaf know each other because he’s the security guard at her university building. Over the last several months they’ve started chatting in the mornings – now Dani brings Zaf a coffee when she picks up her green tea and he brings her a protein bar because he knows that sometimes she forgets to eat (nerdy academic, remember?). One day there’s an emergency drill in their building. When Dani doesn’t appear in the crowds during the evacuation, Zaf finds her stuck in the elevator, rescues her, and carries her to “safety.” The students, of course, get the rescue on video which goes viral (#DrRugBae) complete with myriad speculations about their relationship. So Dani and Zaf decide to have a little fake relationship. For a month. What Zaf doesn’t know, is that Dani has asked the goddess Oshun to help her find a new fuck-buddy. Her last casual relationship ended when Josephine wanted to be an actual girlfriend and Dani does not do romantic relationships. They don’t turn out well. What Dani doesn’t know, is that this cinnamon-roll, gentle giant is head-over-heels in love with her. He’s in it to win it. I had great big-ol’ heart-eyes the entire time I was reading. Dani is so awesome. I love her so much. And she’s been absolutely fried by a former romantic partner who just didn’t get her – her obsession with houseplants, how driven she is academically, how hard she works in the library (and loses track of time), how her personal hero is Inez Holly (a Black female theorist), how she just can’t seem to remember birthdays, etc. – and then used it against her. So now Dani has major impostor syndrome when it comes to relationships. In contrast, Zaf, while he’s a goner for Dani since before the book starts, has to learn to fully care for himself. He’s so good at caring for Dani, for his sister-in-law, his mother, his cousin – one of Dani’s students – but he’s doing the bare minimum for himself. He cut himself off from his former pro rugby community in the wake of his father’s and brother’s deaths when his depression became overwhelming. While romancing Dani he has to decide whether to seek help from his former teammates to grow an opportunity for his mental health outreach nonprofit. It flips the script a bit in this romance. So often it’s the hero who has to recognize that he’s the one pushing the heroine-who-loved-him-forever away because “bad at relationships” but in this instance it’s reversed. Dani is the one who has to realize that Zaf has loved her so long and that she is deserving of that love, rather than pushing it away as something she isn’t allowed to have. The mini-grovel at the end is so good. (Not to say this book is low steam – Dani and Zaf are very hawt together. I believe at one point Dani refers to Zaf as a “sex wizard.” *fans self* ) Take a Hint, Dani Brown is out today, June 23! Dear FTC: I read a galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss.

Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner (The World of Riverside #1)

Summary from Goodreads:
The classic forerunner to The Fall of the Kings now with three bonus stories.

Hailed by critics as “a bravura performance” (Locus) and “witty, sharp-eyed, [and] full of interesting people” (Newsday), this classic melodrama of manners, filled with remarkable plot twists and unexpected humor, takes fantasy to an unprecedented level of elegant writing and scintillating wit. Award-winning author Ellen Kushner has created a world of unforgettable characters whose political ambitions, passionate love affairs, and age-old rivalries collide with deadly results.

Swordspoint

On the treacherous streets of Riverside, a man lives and dies by the sword. Even the nobles on the Hill turn to duels to settle their disputes. Within this elite, dangerous world, Richard St. Vier is the undisputed master, as skilled as he is ruthless–until a death by the sword is met with outrage instead of awe, and the city discovers that the line between hero and villain can be altered in the blink of an eye.

I picked up Swordspoint a while back because it kept popping up on lists of fantasy novels with good queer rep on the page, which it definitely has. But this is also the ur-“mannerpunk” novel, a smash-up of Jane Austen, Baroness Orczy, and fantasy. I really liked the world-building and the writing. The premise is fantastic – a quasi-Georgian alternate England (where the old aristocratic system has morphed into something that thinks it’s a republic of sorts) where master swordsmen are hired to settle disputes in duels (upper class swords are only for show and it’s frowned upon to actually learn swordfighting). There’s a lot of gay and bisexual rep on the page but one question: there were a lot of male perspectives on sex but really only one woman who seemed to have agency in this area so it was hard to tell if women in this world formed non-hetero pairings or not unless I missed it.

The major drawback, for me, is that this is a book that holds the cards of its plot extremely close to its chest. It’s Politics, in the way that Kushiel’s Dart or ASOIAF are about Politics, but this is all boardrooms and bedrooms and double entendres and behind-the-back-deals instead of war and soldiers. It’s very subtle so you have to pay attention. I occasionally lost the thread of the plot – heyo, I was into this for the sword fights, of which it has many, A+ – and at the end I’m still not exactly sure what happened. This is definitely more of a character- and setting-driven book than a plot-driven one.

Dear FTC: I bought my copy on my Nook.

Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Summary from Goodreads:
This unforgettable memoir from a prize-winning poet about growing up undocumented in the United States recounts the sorrows and joys of a family torn apart by draconian policies and chronicles one young man’s attempt to build a future in a nation that denies his existence.

“You were not a ghost even though an entire country was scared of you. No one in this story was a ghost. This was not a story.”

When Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was five years old and his family was preparing to cross the border between Mexico and the United States, he suffered temporary, stress-induced blindness. Castillo regained his vision, but quickly understood that he had to move into a threshold of invisibility before settling in California with his parents and siblings. Thus began a new life of hiding in plain sight and of paying extraordinarily careful attention at all times for fear of being truly seen. Before Castillo was one of the most celebrated poets of a generation, he was a boy who perfected his English in the hopes that he might never seem extraordinary.

With beauty, grace, and honesty, Castillo recounts his and his family’s encounters with a system that treats them as criminals for seeking safe, ordinary lives. He writes of the Sunday afternoon when he opened the door to an ICE officer who had one hand on his holster, of the hours he spent making a fake social security card so that he could work to support his family, of his father’s deportation and the decade that he spent waiting to return to his wife and children only to be denied reentry, and of his mother’s heartbreaking decision to leave her children and grandchildren so that she could be reunited with her estranged husband and retire from a life of hard labor.

Children of the Land distills the trauma of displacement, illuminates the human lives behind the headlines and serves as a stunning meditation on what it means to be a man and a citizen.

I was trying to read Children of the Land at the same time I was listening to The Devil’s Highway and had to pause because I was unfortunately mixing up the two books (they aren’t the same at all except for being the stories of migrants to the US, but my brain kept swapping details between them).

It is a very poetic memoir about a poet’s childhood in the US as an undocumented immigrant contrasted with the lives of his parents and grandparents who each crossed the US border several times. There were a few sections where I think the form Castillo used muddied the story he was trying to tell but overall it is a powerful story about a family looking for a better life, the experience of being undocumented (including the experience of graduate school) then given the chance to apply for a green card, and the terror of his mother’s experience in asking for asylum at the US border in 2016. A necessary book for 2020.

Content warning: there are some depictions of domestic violence on the page.

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss.

A Delicate Deception (Regency Imposters #3) by Cat Sebastian

Summary from Goodreads:
When Amelia Allenby escaped a stifling London ballroom for the quiet solitude of the Derbyshire countryside, the very last thing she wanted was an extremely large, if—she grudgingly admits—passably attractive man disturbing her daily walks. Lecturing the surveyor about property rights doesn’t work and, somehow, he has soon charmed his way into lemon cakes, long walks, and dangerously heady kisses.

The very last place Sydney wished to be was in the shadow of the ruins of Pelham Hall, the inherited property that stole everything from him. But as he awaits his old friend, the Duke of Hereford, he finds himself increasingly captivated by the maddeningly lovely and exceptionally odd Amelia. He quickly finds that keeping his ownership of Pelham Hall a secret is as impossible as keeping himself from falling in love with her.

But when the Duke of Hereford arrives, Sydney’s ruse is revealed and what started out as a delicate deception has become a love too powerful to ignore. Will they let a lifetime of hurt come between them or can these two lost souls find love and peace in each other?

New. Cat. Sebastian. Yes!

The last time we saw Amelia Allenby, she was co-authoring a Perkin Warbeck slash-fic novel so racy she was in danger of violating the obscenity laws. Since then Amelia has voluntarily exiled herself from the upper class Society her mother worked so hard to enter. Amelia didn’t want it. Between the whispers about her illegitimate birth and her growing social anxiety the situation was growing untenable, so Amelia just…left. In the middle of a dance at a ball, so quite dramatic, but for a year she and her ex-governess-turned-companion Georgiana have been living quietly in the countryside. Amelia has been writing less-racy historical novels and taking long walks.

Once day, there’s a man in her path. He’s large and mysterious and a land surveyor – and a Quaker. And he simply won’t go away. As we, the reader, so find out, Sydney is in the neighborhood because he is the owner of Pelham Hall – Amelia’s landlord – and he absolutely does not want to be present on the property he now owns that was the site of his brother’s and sister-in-law’s deaths. However, his old friend Lex, Duke of Hereford has summoned him. Amelia’s conversation is diverting, and her inquisitive mind challenges him, so Syd allows Amelia to believe he’s only visiting in the neighborhood. He’s not planning to stay long, so why allow formalities to come between them (which also seems to be a very Quaker viewpoint). Amelia lets down her guard….which is when Lex arrives – with several surprises for Syd in store – and upsets the delicate balance of Amelia’s life.

Lesson: being unreasonably vague about the circumstances of one’s life and trying to hide from it are extremely bad for the development of trust in one’s closest relationships. This cuts both ways because Amelia hasn’t exactly been forthcoming about who she is to Syd.

A Delicate Deception is a very quiet book – Lex and his Duke-sized ego aside – about working through one’s complex social anxieties to meet your partner halfway. Sebastian seeds in bits from beloved English canon novels (you’ll know them when you read them) and also gives Amelia some really lovely things to say about how we (still) view virginity and the position of children born to unmarried parents. However, I would have loved a few more scenes between Amelia and Syd “falling in love” – I didn’t quite feel them connect like Robin/Alistair and Verity/Ash did. The resolution of the HEA is very interesting in this book and I’m glad to see Sebastian working on an ending that fits the genre but is less traditional.

This has to be the queerest non-erotica historical I’ve ever read – all the presumed straight people are either deceased (Syd’s brother and sister-in-law), in America (his parents), or very minor characters who don’t really matter (the vicar and his wife, Lady Stafford, etc). Amelia is bisexual (or pansexual, possibly, since at one point she says something about kissing interesting people) and Sydney is bisexual. Lex is Syd’s ex-lover and best friend and definitely gay (he is also blind and gets all the best lines, because of course he does, he’s the duke) and Georgiana appears to be asexual or aromantic. Keating, from Unmasked by the Marquess, is here as Amelia’s groom/handyman and apparently making the rounds of the local gay men. AND ROBIN POPS UP RIGHT AT THE VERY END. (Omg, Robin and Keating greeting each other is like the “hey, bitch” of Regency romance I never knew I wanted; but we are denied a meeting between Lex and Alistair and you will understand why when you read this book *give it, do want a short story*)

Also, PLEASE can we have the Perkin Warbeck slash-fic novel? Will read, I promise 😂

A Delicate Deception is out today, December 10!

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss and you know I had this preordered like last decade.

A Duke in Disguise by Cat Sebastian (Regency Imposters #2)

Summary from Goodreads:
One reluctant heir
If anyone else had asked for his help publishing a naughty novel, Ash would have had the sense to say no. But he’s never been able to deny Verity Plum. Now he has his hands full illustrating a book and trying his damnedest not to fall in love with his best friend. The last thing he needs is to discover he’s a duke’s lost heir. Without a family or a proper education, he’s had to fight for his place in the world, and the idea of it—and Verity—being taken away from him chills him to the bone.

One radical bookseller
All Verity wants is to keep her brother out of prison, her business afloat, and her hands off Ash. Lately it seems she’s not getting anything she wants. She knows from bitter experience that she isn’t cut out for romance, but the more time she spends with Ash, the more she wonders if maybe she’s been wrong about herself.

One disaster waiting to happen
Ash has a month before his identity is exposed, and he plans to spend it with Verity. As they explore their long-buried passion, it becomes harder for Ash to face the music. Can Verity accept who Ash must become or will he turn away the only woman he’s ever loved?

Alrighty, NEW CAT SEBASTIAN NOVEL!!!! *sends alert* A Duke in Disguise drops tomorrow on ebook, mass market May 28.

This is the second book in her Regency Impostors series, but the timing of the book puts it during Unmasked by the Marquess rather than following it. So if you’re hoping for a little Pembroke-and-Robin action, like I was, they don’t appear as characters here *womp womp*. However, Mrs Allenby and Amelia appear as wonderful additions to this story, Mrs. Allenby specifically as an ex-lover of our heroine, Verity. 

So Verity Plum is a printer, with her brother, who is pushing the boundaries of the sedition and freedom of speech (or lack thereof) at the time. Her best friend Ash, an engraver, returns to rent their upstairs room after Ash’s mentor leaves England for a warmer climate due to his health. When her brother has to hide out in the Americas after publishing a pamphlet that would definitely get him arrested, Ash promises to look out for Verity. Ash has been in love with Verity for as long as he can remember, but Verity is hesitant to potentially ruin their friendship. What actually throws a wrench into their plans comes in the form of a duke’s sister who wishes to have engravings made of her botanical specimens….

She turns out to be Ash’s aunt, meaning Ash has the opportunity to have a family and save a lot of people, but he might lose Verity, who is very much in the sans culottes camp regarding the need for class reform. (Meanwhile, there is a hilarious B-plot involving Verity printing a Perkin Warbeck historical novel – now there’s a deep cut – in parts and it turns out to be an erotic novel.)

I loved this friends to lovers romance – it’s one of my favorite tropes – with a wee bit of sedition and Perkin Warbeck slash-fic. Verity and Ash have such good conversations and Cat Sebastian brings in so much about the problems of the aristocracy, the 1 Percenters who use up the lives and resources of the lower classes and give nothing back. Also cheese. What’s not to love?

(To the cover designer: Verity would NEVER wear that gown. That’s for aristos, not seditious printers.)

(Also: Cat has said she’s thinking about finishing the Warbeck slash-fic – which is hilariously gothic and kind of terrible in an overblown way – and I hope she does. Would totally read it.)

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss and I had a copy pre-ordered on my Nook.