Books

Book 1,022: Kiss and Cry (Love on the Ice #2) – Keira Andrews

Book cover of "Kiss and Cry" with Amazon Affiliate linkI’m pretty sure I stumbled across this one before I realized it was part of a “series” with Only One Bed and apparently a couple other books seem to have been retconned into the series (pretty sure those protagonists are definitely mentioned in this one. At the time I was looking for more diverse protagonists on the covers of the MM Romance novels and this one popped up and here we are months and months later.

Kiss and Tell is the story of the top two men’s figure skating competitors, Canadian Henry (Sam’s older brother from Only One Bed), who is technically proficient and seemingly standoffish and rigid, and American Theo, the party boy of skating who makes up for what he lacks in proficiency with emotions and crowd engagement. So of course this is an opposites attract, grumpy/sunshine, enemies to lovers romance and yup, still here for it.

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Books

Book 1,021: Only One Bed (Love on the Ice #1) – Keira Andrews

Book cover of "Only One Bed" with Amazon Affiliate linkI’m not sure if I would say Keira Andrews is the Queen of Christmas for me, but she really does bring it when she writes holiday themed MM Romance novels. Every time I go to read one, she has a new one and if they’re always fun, relatively low angst and swoon worthy.  Only One Bed is a friends to lovers, one bed/forced proximity, bisexual awakening novel and as per usual I am here for it.

Sam and Etienne have been friends since they were children. Etienne is a competitive couples ice dancer and is trying to make the Olympic team. I can’t remember what Sam did, but he’s at a lot of the same competitions because his older brother Henry is one of the best singles skaters in Canada (and we get his novel with Kiss and Cry, I mean come on read the last quote we all knew what was going to happen).

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Books

Book 685: A Gay Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum – Bert Shrader

Book cover of "A Gay Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum" and Amazon affiliate linkThis has been sitting on my shelf for almost three years ever since I read the Rolling Stones article “How One Publisher is Rescuing 1970s Gay Porn Paperbacks”. I finally got around to this as I was looking at the shorter books already on my shelves. And after the emotional drain that was Ethan Frome I thought I should try and get a little further away and a smutty gay porn novel from the 1960s checked all the boxes plus some.

Let’s just say, not a lot has changed in erotica novels. I mean sure the large portion of MM romance/erotica novels are now written by women, but the few that I know for a fact were written by men are pretty damn similar to this one. The big things that have changed is that in general the toxic masculinity and hetero-toxicity in general seem to have been tone down in the more recent books and there are some overt racist scenes and comments sprinkled throughout the novel that were horrible.

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ARC, Books

Book 678: Blowout – Rachel Maddow

Cover art for "Blowout" and Amazon affiliate linkMy jaw legit hurt after I was reading this because my mouth kept hanging open at the sheer audacity of the companies, politicians, and countries in this book. Seriously though, let’s just say that, this is one of those books that if I used only emoji’s to review books would just be this one (link to gif of Nick from Big Mouth‘s head blowing up in amazement).

I stumbled across this book after seeing a review in the Washington Post (months after the book and review were published) and I reached out to the publisher for a review copy and they kindly sent one.* What I wasn’t expecting was for this thing to be like a spy/thriller novel. It. Was. Insanity. Just when you think something more ridiculous can’t possibly be done, Maddow gives her smirk and says, “but wait….there’s more.”

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Books

Book 589: Lethal White (Cormoran Strike #4) – Robert Galbraith

If Rowling is going to take so long between these – she may need to include recaps of the previous books. It would make life so much easier.

I didn’t realize it had been almost three years since the last Cormoran Strike book, Career of Evil. I actually ended up reading recaps of the books on Wikipedia because I knew it wouldn’t be easy to jump right back in and Rowling thankfully started right where the last book stopped, but then jumped forward a year.

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