Books

Book 948: Patricia Wants to Cuddle – Samantha Allen

Book cover of "Patricia Wants to Cuddle" with Amazon Affiliate linkWhat a wonderfully weird novel. When this landed in my inbox from the publisher I first thought WTF is that because the cover art screams pulp fiction and as much as I find those hilarious I’m not usually drawn to them. However, I’d decided I wanted to expand my LGBT novel repertoire, and knowing this featured lesbian/bisexual female protagonists I said sure why not.*

Billed as a satire of The BachelorPatricia Wants to Cuddle takes place in the final two weeks of The Catch‘s season with four female finalists and the catch going to the San Juan islands off the coast of Washington state. While it is that, it’s also a final girl thriller novel with murder and mystery and urban legends aplenty to keep the reader engaged.

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Books

Book 942: Shaun’s Salvation (Maine Men #5) – K.C. Wells

Book cover of "Shaun's Salvation" with Amazon Affiliate linkAnd Wells pulled me back in! Yes!!! I wasn’t sure she was going to be able to do it after the two lackluster offerings of Seb’s Summer and Dylan’s Dilemma, but she did with Shaun and Nathan’s stories.

Shaun is another member of the core group of friends that no one knows what his sexuality is. There are a couple of friends that are sort of nebulous/fluid and he’s one of them. He put his personal (and sexual) life on hold after his mom died of cancer in high school and his dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

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Books

Book 937: Burn Rate – Andy Dunn

Book cover of "Burn Rate" with Amazon Affiliate linkWhen someone in the marketing department at the publisher reached out about this because I’d positively reviewed David Chang’s Eat a Peach, I had to take a few minutes to really think if I wanted to go back into this world.*

In Chang’s book, his mental health struggles are peripheral, but in Dunn’s Burn Rate, he centers them. I spent quite a bit of time reading about bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and other mental health issues before my mom died a few years ago to try and understand what she was going through and what my sister and I were experiencing. And that REALLY hit home when the first quote Dunn uses in his book is a quote from Kay Redfield Jamison who wrote THE book (An Unquiet Mind) about brains and bipolar/manic depression/brains in general.

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Books

Book 925: Hot Wings (The Hot Cannolis #2) – Eli Easton & Tara Lain

Book cover of "Hot Wings" with Amazon Affiliate linkAfter thoroughly enjoying Hot Seat I knew I would say yes to this one the second it landed in my inbox, and I did.*

And coming out of Hot Seat I knew one of the protagonists would be the hotshot pilot, Dell, mentioned toward the end of that book, but I didn’t know who the Canali would be. My money was on Tito, but that was way off the mark (he’s totally getting his book I still think that and after reading this so is Uncle Ricky – totally see a May/December romance coming our way).

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Books

Book 892: Spiced Kisses (Kiss Me #3) – Charlie Novak

Book cover of "Spiced Kisses" with Amazon Affiliate linkAfter thoroughly enjoying the first two books in Charlie Novak’s Kiss Me series, I was most definitely going to read any follow ups, but I wasn’t expecting there to be a non-twink model on the cover. Hello, body diversity (sort of, I mean he’s still totally ripped, but there’s like actual fur on him!?).

This was a quick read picking up not long after the last book and gives Ben (Aaron’s best friend from Summer Kisses) the story he needed with Ianto, a tattooed and pierced Welshman who plays rugby with him. And I am ALWAYS here for a Welshman in a romance novel, the lilting accent even if I have to make it up in my head, yes please.

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