Recent Reads: Fluke

Recent Reads: Fluke by Brian Klaas – an interesting nonfiction book about the power of chance in our lives which does itself a considerable disservice in the final (pre-conclusion) chapter. The basic premise of this book isn’t one the author had to sell me on: that the entire world functions on more sheer chance than most of us want to admit. He makes a good case for this, then discusses the flaws of the social sciences in how they dismiss it, though with thoughtful and non-accusatory commentary on WHY they…

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Recent Reads: Bitterburn

Recent Reads: Bitterburn by Ann Aguirre – I loved this, too. BITTERBURN is another Beauty and the Beast retelling, and look if I can find one more to read* in the next week or so I’ll be feeling a trifecta of joy over BatB stories. :D This one’s purely fantasy, not modern at all, and has multiple twists I ADORED, not the least of which is that our Beauty takes herself to the Beast under her own volition, which is always a thing I like to see in BatB stories.…

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Recent Reads: Rose & Thunder

Recent Reads: Rose & Thunder by Lilith Saintcrow – I loved this. ROSE & THUNDER is a modern retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and look, I’ll be honest, you have to really fuck it up for me to not like a BatB retelling. Lili is not an author prone to fucking things up, and she loves BatB as much as I do, so… yeah, I loved this. The setting is more or less the real world. It was published in 2015 and sort of feels like it’s set around…

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Recent Reads: The Keeper’s Six

Recent Reads: The Keeper’s Six by Kate Elliott – I loved this! Aside from an awareness that Kate had, at some point in the what-feels-fairly-distant-now past, taken up the mantle of the idea of writing a protagonist who was a mom, I didn’t have any idea what to expect from THE KEEPER’S SIX, and I was enthralled and fascinated by the world and story all the way through. It’s a CRAZY complex world (which, well: you do know Kate Elliott, right? :)) and lands squarely in the middle of SFF…

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Recent Reads: The Angela Marchmont Mysteries

Recent Reads: The Angela Marchmont Mysteries (Kobo || Amazon (affiliate) || B&N) God almighty, I haven’t done any recent reads posts in nearly a year, which is crazy because I’ve actually BEEN reading. I’ve burned through this entire series in the past couple of weeks. Very enjoyable, if you like 1920s-era cozies. In fact, in the past year, I’ve read almost everything Clara Benson has written, and they’re all good fun. I’d recommend starting with the Angela Marchmont books, which I didn’t. I in fact read the Freddy Pilkington-Soames Adventures…

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