Books

Book 906: Black Cake – Charmaine Wilkerson

Book cover of "Black Cake" with Amazon Affiliate linkWhen someone from the publisher reached out to me about Black Cake, it wasn’t an immediate yes or an immediate no.* I honestly had no idea what I was going to do, I thought it was a beautiful cover (even if I didn’t notice the woman on it for ages) and the multi-generational story drew me in.

What ultimately decided for me was that it was a debut novel, love those most of the time, and my reading list is seriously lacking authors of color and I’ve been saying for years I’m going to expand my reading list. And holy shit y’all I’m so glad I did, this book took me for so many rides.

Continue reading “Book 906: Black Cake – Charmaine Wilkerson”

Books

Book 899: Year One (Chronicles of the One #1) – Nora Roberts

Book cover of "Year One" with Amazon Affiliate linkWHOA. So, I’m really glad I didn’t read this book two years ago this time or I would’ve been freakin’ the f*** out as coronavirus took over the planet! Thankfully, I didn’t discover the fibercast Needles at the Ready (Instagram link) until late 2021 where one of the hosts, Ray, recommended this series.

It was bad enough when I read The Names We Take in May 2020 (or even Severance back in late 2019) where a virus wiped out huge swaths of the world’s population, but Roberts takes it to an entirely different level! The opening chapter is gut-wrenchingly dark and I actually stopped reading it in bed the first night I started because it was seriously creeping me out.

Continue reading “Book 899: Year One (Chronicles of the One #1) – Nora Roberts”

ARC, Books

Book 746: Best Laid Plaids (Kilty Pleasures #1) – Ella Stainton

Book cover of "Best Laid Plaids" with Amazon Affiliate linkIf you don’t know this about me, I very much enjoy a pun. Unexpected, unplanned puns are the best, but any pun will do. So when Ella Stainton reached out to me about her debut novel, a book set in Scotland titled Best Laid Plaids as part of the Kilty Pleasures series, I of course said yes.* And then, when I finished it and saw the title of book two, Where There’s a Kilt, There’s a Way, clearly I was in pun heaven.

For a debut MM romance novel, it was pretty good. There were definitely some parts that could use some work, but overall, I enjoyed the read.

Continue reading “Book 746: Best Laid Plaids (Kilty Pleasures #1) – Ella Stainton”

ARC, Books

Book 658: The Children of Harvey Milk – Andrew Reynolds

Cover art of "The Children of Harvey Milk"I’m not sure how I stumbled across this one, but when I did back in May I requested a copy from the publisher and they kindly obliged.* I was interested because of the subject matter, but also because Reynolds is based at UNC Chapel Hill (my undergrad) and his name rang a bell because he’d chaired the Sexuality Studies program there at some point in the recent past. And then with my master’s degree focusing on the Civil Partnership Act (2014) in the UK, of course I was going to want to read this book and see what he had to say.

Continue reading “Book 658: The Children of Harvey Milk – Andrew Reynolds”

Updates

July Recap 2018

We are done traveling (long haul at least) for the summer! I know most people would not be as excited about this as I am, but it is exhausting.

I put a photo recap down below under books and bookish things because most everything we saw was connected to books, except for my friend’s wedding. We drove over 24 hours in total while we were visiting and it was awesome because we saw parts of the country I’ve never seen except by train or plane. The above photo is our full trip with a photo of our northern post point Ben A’an and our southern most point Brighton.

We did so many bookish things that I’ll just include a slide show below and put a caption explaining what they are rather than write them all out. We didn’t even set out to do that many it just happened (mostly because Tim told me this was our last trip to the UK for some time). Continue reading “July Recap 2018”