KJ Charles’s The Price of Meat is a queer horror pastiche of penny dreadfuls, with several nods to Sweeney Todd. Johanna Oakley forces a devil’s bargain with a detective; she will spy on Sawney Reynard, a potentially murderous barber, in exchange for her lover, Arabella, being released from the asylum she’s trapped in. If you pickRead More
Marthese reviews Gretel and “Dragon Essence” by Niamh Murphy
”She had trusted two strangers in her house, offering them food and shelter. It was nonsense not to trust her.” – Gretel: A Fairytale Retold With GDPR the copious amounts of author newsletters were at best purgatory. The ‘please subscribe to us’ emails were really great to weed out authors that I am not so interestedRead More
Shira Glassman reviews Moon-Bright Tides by RoAnna Sylver
First of all, do I really need to say anything other than “sweet romance novella between a witch and a mermaid” in the first place? But I have lots more to say about Moon-Bright Tides by RoAnna Sylver, which rocketed to the top of my f/f fantasy recs list as soon as I read itRead More
Danika reviews The Cybernetic Tea Shop by Meredith Katz
I’ve got to say, with a title like “The Cybernetic Tea Shop,” I expected this to be a fun, silly, quick read. Instead, it was thoughtful and quiet, seeming to take up more space than the pages it occupied. This is set in a world where sentient, sapient robots were once mass-produced, but given theRead More
Susan reviews Fearless by Shira Glassman
Fearless by Shira Glassman is a short and sweet romance about a newly-out divorced woman, her crush on a music teacher at her daughter’s school, and falling back in love with music. I quite liked this one! The story takes place over two days of rehearsals for a high-school music event, where Lana’s daughter isRead More
Shira Glassman reviews Ripped Pages by M. Hollis
Ripped Pages is a cute addition to the thank goodness growing collection of YA where a fairy-tale princess’s happy ending is with another girl. I’ve said before that since for so many of us, fairy-tales are our first exposure to romance, whether it’s bedtime stories or Disney movies, and that means for those of us whoRead More
Anna reviews The Jewel Box by Alcamia Payne
Clemmie Beaumont is a just-widowed southern belle who prefers the company of women. Pearl, a recently freed slave, is her new maid. She’s described as a sensual, “exotic” creature who has been watching Clemmie from the shadows and jumps on her first opportunity to slide a well-formed and “dextrous” [sic] toe up Clemmie’s skirts. Yes,Read More
Danika reviews The Voting Booth After Dark by Vanessa Libertad Garcia
This book is a little difficult to review, because it’s not a novel. It doesn’t have a plot. It’s a collection of fragments, snippets, of different people’s lives. The description calls it a collection of short stories and poems interwoven into a narrative that follows a group of addicted gay & lesbian Latino club kidsRead More