Books

Book 790: The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy

OMG ya’ll, clearly, I should be judging the next Booker Prize. First Wolf Hall and now this, I get why they choose these beautiful books as winners. I’m only partially serious. I still think so many of the books are boring old stuffy books that are specifically chosen because of the inability of large swaths of the population to comprehend or appreciate them. So, boo on that.

All kidding aside, this was an incredibly beautifully written DEBUT novel. I was floored when I found that out. The way she wrote and the way time flowed eerily (and seamlessly) backward and forward in this novel it truly felt like a master class in novels. No wonder she won the prize—I’m definitely going to have to read her only other fictional work, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, at some point because everything else she’s written is nonfiction (what?!).

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ARC, Books, Professional Development

Book 786: No Blanks, No Pauses – Shelly McNamara

When the publisher reached out to me about this I immediately knew I was going to say yes (even if it took me a few days to get around to telling them).* I’m always interested in LGBT individuals’ personal journeys to where they are today and when the subject line was “Chief Equality & Inclusion Officer at Procter & Gamble Publishes Inspiring Memoir on Living an Authentic Life”, of course I was in!

I knew nothing about Shelly McNamara and the only thing I knew about P&G, aside from all the random products of theirs I use, is that they have a big neon sign in Boston on a building (I think it’s a museum?), so I went in blind which isn’t anything new for me.

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Books

Book 785: Lonely Hearts (Love Lessons #3) – Heidi Cullinan

What was missing from Heidi Cullinan’s Love Lessons series? A fake boyfriend romance, so of course that’s what she provided and I soaked up in the third installment Lonely Hearts.

Picking up immediately after Fever Pitch, Cullinan dives right into the story of Elijah, the jaded and toying with the lines of addiction and safe sex roommate of Aaron from the last book, and Baz, life of the party big man on campus, but hiding a soft inside with a heartbreaking backstory.

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Books

Book 782: Love Lessons (Love Lessons #1) – Heidi Cullinan

It’s been quite a while since I read anything by Heidi Cullinan—and this is distinctly different from her contributions to the Tucker Springs universe. I actually lost track of Cullinan after how rude Riptide Publishing was a few years ago because I went out of my way not to read anything by them and ultimately it was my loss. Thankfully, this isn’t published by them and I re-discovered an author I truly enjoyed reading.

I grabbed this one from the library because I forgot I wanted to read Secret Admirer by D.J. Jamison and I needed to read something to align a galley for what I thought was the publication date and failed miserably so you now get to have four back-to-back unplanned MM Romance reviews, oh darn 😀

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Books

Book 776: Star Spanked (Holiday Romance #3) – Leighton Greene

And to finish off 2020 I finish off the kinky romance trilogy I unexpectedly walked into. Instead of a Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa (those are so hard to find!) or New Year’s MM Romance I read a 4th of July Independence Day novel!? Oh well, I actually ended up reading one more MM Holiday Romance after the first because I forgot I’d put it on hold at the library.

Star Spanked finds us once again deep in the kink world of Los Angeles. We find out that Jon and Connor from Winter Wonders are now engaged (or married) and Tristan and Seth from Taming Tristan play a decent sized role in this novel as Ezra, a model seeking to get out of the industry is Tristan’s roommate. The other protagonist is semi-celebrity British ex-pat Sebastian.

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