New York Times bestseller Faith Erin Hicks is back with a young adult graphic novel romance about a hotheaded hockey player who asks for temper management lessons from the cool, calm boy in drama club.
It should have been a night of triumph for Alix’s hockey team. But when her mean-girl team captain Lindsay goes after Alix with her cruelest dig yet, Alix loses what remains of her self-control and punches Lindsay out. Before she knows it, their coach is dragging Alix off Lindsay, and her invitation to the Canada National Women’s U18 Team’s summer camp is on the line.
Alix is shaken. She needs to learn how to control this anger, and she is sure Ezra, the popular and poised theater kid from her grade is the answer. So she asks for his help. But as they hang out and start get closer, Alix learns that there is more to Ezra than the cool front he puts on. And that maybe this friendship could become something more?
Got approved for a galley on Netgalley and read it straight away!
More of a 3.5/5 stars – mostly because this feels very unfinished as a complete story arc. The issues with the emotional abuse from Alix’s teammates/her movement to another team with no one but Ezra to back her up really needed more of a resolution, imo. But I liked the development of Alix and Ezra’s relationship and really hope that there’s another volume in this story.
Content warnings: a lot of this book deals with Alix being emotionally abused by her teammates on the hockey team (which is not resolved to my satisfaction, imo, her coach SUCKS), biphobia
Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy is out today!
Dear FTC: I read a digital galley of this book from the publisher via Netgalley.
An epic meditation on loving oneself in the face of heartbreak, from the acclaimed author of Build Yourself a Boat, longlisted for the National Book Award.
When Camonghne Felix goes through a monumental breakup, culminating in a hospital stay, everything—from her early childhood trauma and mental health to her relationship with mathematics—shows up in the tapestry of her healing. In this exquisite and raw reflection, Camonghne repossesses herself through the exploration of history she’d left behind, using her childhood “dyscalculia”—a disorder that makes it difficult to learn math—as a metaphor for the consequences of her miscalculations in love. Through reckoning with this breakup and other adult gambles in intimacy, Felix asks the question: Who gets to assert their right to pain?
Dyscalculia negotiates the misalignments of perception and reality, love and harm, and the politics of heartbreak, both romantic and familial.
I was browsing at the local indie bookstore before a reading the other month and spotted a signed copy of Dyscalculia, which I’d been hearing great things about. And what a beautiful examination of a breakup and how treating trauma and getting the correct diagnosis/treatment reframes that breakup (all the villains are victims and all the victims are villains and it’s a vicious cycle) and also helps with healing the author’s dyscalculia (which was never actually diagnosed, but in the end seems to be more of a side-effect of untreated Bipolar II). Stunningly beautiful prose poetry, almost like song lyrics in places. Which, as it turns out, Felix is a song-writer so it makes perfect sense.
CW: childhood sexual abuse, undiagnosed mental health issues, self-harm, effects of a broken mental health care system
Dear FTC: I read a copy of this book that I bought at a local bookstore. Also, #23for2023
Summary from Goodreads: In this dangerously sexy rom-com that evokes the real-life romance between Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan Markle, a prince who wants to live out of the spotlight falls for a daring American rapper who turns his life, and the palace, upside down.
Sexy, driven rapper Danielle “Duchess” Nelson is on the verge of signing a deal that’ll make her one of the richest women in hip hop. More importantly, it’ll grant her control over her life, something she’s craved for years. But an incident with a rising pop star has gone viral, unfairly putting her deal in jeopardy. Concerned about her image, she’s instructed to work on generating some positive publicity… or else.
A brilliant professor and reclusive royal, Prince Jameson prefers life out of the spotlight, only leaving his ivory tower to attend weddings or funerals. But with the Queen’s children involved in one scandal after another, and Parliament questioning the viability of the monarchy, the Queen is desperate. In a quest for good press, she puts Jameson in charge of a tribute concert in her late husband’s honor. Out of his depth, and resentful of being called to service, he takes the advice of a student. After all, what’s more appropriate for a royal concert than a performer named “Duchess”?
Too late, Jameson discovers the American rapper is popular, sexy, raunchy and not what the Queen wanted, although he’s having an entirely different reaction. Dani knows this is the good exposure she needs to cement her deal and it doesn’t hurt that the royal running things is fine as hell. Thrown together, they give in to the explosive attraction flaring between them. But as the glare of the limelight intensifies and outside forces try to interfere, will the Prince and Duchess be a fairy tale romance for the ages or a disaster of palatial proportions?
Tracey Livesay writes Back Breakers in the Sack. UNF.
LOVED IT. Many stars, lots of chili peppers.
I keep trying to rec this to customers who liked or are interested in the Marry Me movie, but alas, this comes out in June! *womp womp* I was so sold on this two famous people who don’t really like the privacy intrusions/shit you get for being famous who are also from completely different worlds but who also fit together really well.
CW for his family being an absolute garbage fire except for his mom and she’s got some tough family history plus a shitty up-and-coming pop star internet bullying her/stalking her coattails. Also, racism bc British royalty.
I do want to talk about this cover bc she looks AWESOME and he looks nothing like I thought he did in the book. *shrug*
Summary from Goodreads: She was the face that launched a thousand ships, The fierce beauty at the heart of Olympus, And she was never ours to claim.
In Olympus, you either have the power to rule… or you are ruled. Achilles Kallis may have been born with nothing, but as a child he vowed he would claw his way into the poisonous city’s inner circle. Now that a coveted role has opened to anyone with the strength to claim it, he and his partner, Patroclus Fotos, plan to compete and double their odds of winning.Neither expect infamous beauty Helen Kasios to be part of the prize… or for the complicated fire that burns the moment she looks their way.
Zeus may have decided Helen is his to give to away, but she has her own plans. She enters into the competition as a middle finger to the meddling Thirteen rulers, effectively vying for her own hand in marriage. Unfortunately, there are those who would rather see her dead than lead the city. The only people she can trust are the ones she can’t keep her hands off—Achilles and Patroclus. But can she really believe they have her best interests at heart when every stolen kiss is a battlefield?A scorchingly hot modern retelling of Helen of Troy, Achilles, and Patroclus that’s as sinful as it is sweet.
God I fucking love Mess. And this is messy as hell.
(Maybe could have used a weeeeee bit more air in this relationship to make it workable – the timeline is very compacted – but that’s really just personal preference)
Summary from Goodreads: If you could go back, who would you want to meet?
In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee—the chance to travel back in time.Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn’t so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most important, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold.
Heartwarming, wistful, mysterious and delightfully quirky, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s internationally bestselling novel explores the age-old question: What would you change if you could travel back in time?
I was rec’d Before the Coffee Gets Cold a few times, so I decided to pick it up not really knowing what to expect.
Except…time travel. (I’m still not sure how I managed to read three books in about 4 weeks that all had time travel in some way, considering that it’s not my favorite plot-device.)
But I took it on faith that people whose taste I respect would not do me wrong, and jumped into this short novel that is almost more like a play, with several “acts” each revolving around a different person’s life and reasons for needing to time travel.
I really liked the rules of this particular time-travelling cafe chair. One of which is that nothing you do while in the past can change the future. Another is that you have to drink all the coffee in the cup before you before it gets cold. If you don’t – you become a ghost. (And there IS a ghost who occupies that cafe chair 95% of the time…until she goes to use the bathroom. If you don’t wait politely for her to get up, and try to force her to leave, she will curse you. So, cautionary tale.)
I thought this would mostly be a pretty sweet book, and it’s lovely with some pretty asides about cicadas and Tanabata festivals, but it’s also a sad book. One character is a nurse whose husband’s Alzheimer’s disease is progressing rapidly. One is a woman who avoided seeing her sister, and then the sister was killed in a car accident. Another is a woman who may not live to see her unborn child grow up. There’s a lot of grief here, in various ways, so a content warning there.
I’ve already picked up book 2. And it looks like book 3 will publish in the US in the fall. (And this looks like it’s actually a #BookTok book, too.) Although there isn’t a cafe cat, so the cover design is a fake-out.
Dear FTC: I bought my copy of this book from my store.
Summary from Goodreads: From New York Times bestselling author Claudia Gray—a summer house party turns into a thrilling whodunit when Mr. Wickham, one of literature’s most notorious villains, meets a sudden and suspicious end in this brilliantly imagined mystery featuring Jane Austen’s leading literary characters.
The happily married Mr. Knightley and Emma are throwing a house party, bringing together distant relatives and new acquaintances—characters beloved by Jane Austen fans. Definitely not invited is Mr. Wickham, whose latest financial scheme has netted him an even broader array of enemies. As tempers flare and secrets are revealed, it’s clear that everyone would be happier if Mr. Wickham got his comeuppance. Yet they’re all shocked when Wickham turns up murdered—except, of course, for the killer hidden in their midst.
Nearly everyone at the house party is a suspect, so it falls to the party’s two youngest guests to solve the mystery: Juliet Tilney, the smart and resourceful daughter of Catherine and Henry, eager for adventure beyond Northanger Abbey; and Jonathan Darcy, the Darcys’ eldest son, whose adherence to propriety makes his father seem almost relaxed. In a tantalizing fusion of Austen and Christie, the unlikely pair must put aside their own poor first impressions and uncover the guilty party—before an innocent person is sentenced to hang.
The Knightleys are having a house party at Donwell Abbey. They’ve invited some relatives and old friends: the Darcys, the Brandons, the Bertrams, and the Tilneys (who were unable to come but did send their eldest daughter Juliet for her first foray into adult society). Emma has unexpectedly added the Wentworths to the party – they had been renting the Highbury property which is now undergoing emergency repairs. Everyone has their own little secrets and worries. The Darcys are just coming out of morning for their niece and that has put a strain on their marriage. The Wentworths have had to “retrench” and it weighs heavily on Frederick. Fanny Bertram is keeping a secret from her husband. The Brandons are newly married and neither is sure of the other’s feelings, yet. The party starts out well but a sudden storm brings a most unwelcome guest.
Mr. Wickham.
And despite the intervening years (it’s been about 20 years since the end of Pride and Prejudice), he has not improved. In fact, he’s grown far more smarmy and despicable. After setting the entire house party on edge, George Wickham retires to what can only be a servant’s room (note: I love Emma and her housekeeper) only to be later discovered in the Armory lying in a pool of blood by a very unfortunate Juliet Tilney. And he is very, very dead.
Who could have done it? The storm was so fierce that it is highly unlikely that an intruder surprised him. Making the murderer one of the house party. And every, single person there had reason for wanting Mr. Wickham’s loathsome person gone. When local magistrate Frank Churchill comes to investigate, his first inclination is to look for a lower-class person as culprit (because the upper-class gentry would never do something as low-class as a murder…). Juliet Tilney and Jonathan Darcy are both quite certain he is wrong and begin their own discreet (or, about as discreet as two teenagers can be in the Regency) investigation to make certain an innocent person is not about to be hanged for Mr. Wickham’s death. In the process, more than one person is going to have to come clean before the true murderer is revealed.
In short, The Murder of Mr. Wickhamis quite a clever way to tell a locked room-esque mystery in an Austen sequel that brings together almost all the major couples from her six novels. Gray does shift some timing of the original stories to get the Austen couples at different ages and points in their marriages. There’s one shift that really doesn’t work for me, personally, but it does work within the story (Marianne and Colonel Brandon).
And yes, the book fulfills the promise of the premise. Wickham does indeed get whacked early in the book (unlike Death Comes to Pemberley, where Lydia makes everyone think Wickham is dead for about five pages but then it turns out to be Denny instead…). Although, out of the entire range of Fuckbois of Austen, Wickham is only number two on that list. In my opinion, Willoughby is probably most deserving of getting clonked on the head. (Maybe Gray can work on that for a second book?)
Gray does give some notes and content warnings about the historical use of g*psy in the book, as Austen used it at the time she was writing, but there was a surprise moment of homophobia. It involved a side character who doesn’t appear on page in the book. Although the homophobia does come from a character who would historically initially hold that view (it is Church dogma-accurate for the time period) and then subsequently work to dismantle that viewpoint, it would have been nice to have in the note as well. I will also note that Jonathan Darcy is coded as neurodivergent. I know there is a lot of discussion of whether Mr. Darcy can be interpreted as autistic or neurodivergent but Gray does make it much more explicit in Jonathan, since we are given his internal monologue. I think the representation is good, although I am not neurodivergent myself, so don’t take mine as a definitive judgment. Jonathan and Juliet do make a very nice pairing as friends, amateur sleuths, and maybe a budding courtship.
The Murder of Mr. Wickham is out on Tuesday May 3!
And if you have time, check out the review on Austenprose and follow the #murderwickham hastag for the blog tour!
Dear FTC: I was sent a finished copy of this book as part of the blog tour with Austenprose, but I kind of couldn’t wait and read a digital galley from the publisher via Edelweiss in just about one gulp.
Summary from Goodreads: An Entertainment Weekly Pick of Summer’s Best New Books
Wren’s closest friend, her anchor since childhood, is dead. Stewart Beasley. Gone. She can’t quite believe it and she definitely can’t bring herself to google what causes an aneurysm. Instead of weeping or facing reality, Wren has been dreaming up the perfect funeral plans, memorial buffets, and processional songs for everyone from the corner bodega owner to her parents (none of whom show signs of imminent demise). Stewart was a rising TV star, who–for reasons Wren struggles to understand–often surrounded himself with sycophants, amusing in his life, but intolerable in his death. When his icy mother assigns Wren the task of disseminating his possessions alongside George (Stewart’s maddening, but oddly charming lawyer), she finds herself at the epicenter of a world in which she wants no part, where everyone is competing to own a piece of Stewart’s memory (sometimes literally). Remembering the boy Stewart was and investigating the man he became, Wren finds herself wondering, did she even know this person who she once considered an extension of herself? Can you ever actually know anyone? How well does she really know herself? Through laughter and tears, Nora Zelevansky’s Competitive Grieving shines a light on the universal struggle to grieve amidst the noise, to love with a broken heart, and to truly know someone who is gone forever.
Competitive Grieving has been on my periphery since last May, when Sarah MacLean (a fave) hosted Nora’s launch event on Instagram. I picked it up on my Nook a while back, but the paperback is coming out next month this summer so I decided to pick it up (and read one of my own damn books for once, lol).
I really liked this story about a woman who gets assigned the task of sorting out her suddenly-deceased best friend’s belongings. All the weirdness, and surreal nature of missing someone so suddenly, but also finding out that perhaps there was a side of her friend she never knew. Pieces of Stewart’s life start to emerge through other mourners – a deeply depressed young woman, a fellow less-successful actor, an old acquaintance from high school. Some of these mourners seem to be out-doing themselves in displays of grief, while Wren only feels numb, watching the “vultures” pick over Stewart’s belongings as she creates funeral plans for everyone in her head as a distraction. This book is darkly funny in some places. There’s also Stewart’s lawyer, also assigned to help Wren with her task, and also, maybe, someone she could open up to (and he’s kinda cute). In between each chapter, as Wren negotiates her reactions to Stewart’s death and life, she writes him an email in her head, asking him why he never told her what was going on.
I am going to give a trigger warning for discussion of major depression and suicide. In the book, as Wren investigates the parts of Stewart’s life that he hid from her, it becomes very clear that he fought serious depression and suicidal ideation throughout his life. And it is revealed later that he did die by suicide. It’s not something that is included on the flap copy, and while I had guessed that this would be a major reveal in the book given some foreshadowing by the author, I don’t want it to be a “surprise” plot point if that’s something a reader would wish to avoid.
Competitive Grieving will be out in paperback in May August (it got pushed), but the hardcover and ebook are available now.
Dear FTC: I think I had a digital galley of this via Edelweiss, but I read my copy on my Nook since I apparently bought it during a sale.
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.)
Scuffed Slippers and Wormy Books 