Sunday Soup - February 7

In The Soup This Week... Avon, Portland RWA, Anna Richland, and Thea Harrison. Maybe a little snark.

Soup Dish:  on my mind
✽This documentary. If I play my cards right, I might get to go to a screening on my actual birthday. That would be pretty awesome!  I should probably finish making the arrangements to attend the wRomance event in Portland.

✽A really nice write-up of Avon's recent 75th anniversary in genre and popular fiction. Blogging for the Avon Addicts has been a terrific experience for me. Everyone I have interacted with at Avon has shown the highest professional standards, while still sharing a profound and sincere love of the genre.

✽While I am not much of a gamer, my husband has been in the industry for decades and my daughters also love playing RPG games (RP games?). The game industry has been looking to capture women's interests forever and the link between storytelling and women's preferences is not new, but here is a specifically-romance oriented entry to the field. I'm still not particularly hooked by this game's premise, but it's interesting to watch gaming and storytelling fall in love. Perhaps someday they'll have a beautiful magical baby.

✽Facebook's "show 'em what they want" algorithm is starting to understand me. The promoted posts in my feed are now about 80% book posts, and mostly romance of one sort or another. One thing it does not purport to do is to assess or filter on any kind of quality dimension. So those of you who are promoting books on Facebook, here is a little example of how to do it very, very badly:

Let's break it down, shall we?

1. First, your image is a hot guy. Fair enough. But you distorted the aspect ratio. C'mon now, that is seriously amateur hour.
2. That text box. Really?
3. "Kidnapped and thrown in the trunk" -- I'm not here to judge your fantasy, but so far there is zero sexiness about this book.
4. No author name and no title. What are you even doing?  I did not click through to Amazon to find out what I was dealing with. I don't know who this author is. I hope whoever it is finds some better PR help, stat.

What I'm reading
So I skipped the soup not once but twice, and it's mainly because I didn't have much to talk about. My reading brain has just not been terribly engaged, for whatever reason. I've spent a lot of my normal evening reading time playing mindless solitaire games, and lunches have involved a lot of working and networking meetings rather than me in a corner with a sandwich and my kindle. I think most of that is symptomatic rather than causal, though; not much has really caught my attention.

✽I read Liam Takes Manhattan and it was awesome, but quite a bit shorter than I had hoped. Really a short story, not a novella. Fun though. It's interesting to watch a supernatural character develop from infant to full grown within a year or two, and Thea Harrison is handling it beautifully.

✽The one full length book that got me from beginning to end was Anna Richland's The Second Lie. Although these are PNR stories, about immortal Viking heroes, there isn't a lot of magic and paranormal foo; the only paranormal element is that these dudes can't die. The rest is fairly straightforward thriller-style fiction. I do want to do up a full review on this one, but the short version is, well done, great pacing, good characters, possibly a wee bit too many threads going on for a perfect rating. Perhaps it's understandable, if you've been around for 15 centuries you have more than the usual amount of baggage following you around...

✽I'm still working on getting through The Big Switch for my non-fiction book. Clearly I'm not executing too well on this goal, but it's early in the year, I'm optimistic that I can catch up.

Sunday Soup, January 3

In The Soup This Week... Thea Harrison, Alyssa Day, Kristin Higgins, Robin D. Owens, and Aaron Michael Ritchey

Soup Dish:  Happy New Year!
✽I hope everyone out there in RomLandia had a happy and safe holiday, however you choose to celebrate.  Ours was very low-key, just the four of us in my nuclear family. I think my kids are getting pretty bored with low-key though, so next year I might need to plan more.

✽There are so many lists out there! So many. I spent several hours yesterday sifting through "best of" lists, and I don't know about you guys, but I'm a little burned out on lists. I have three goals for 2016 around reading and blogging though:

1. Read twelve non-fiction titles. I am seriously so oppositional about this. I have the hardest time reading non-fiction where there are no emotions and no dialog and, idk, just everything I love about reading is missing from non-fiction. But there are topics that I am interested in and I need to train my brain a little better. I'm too young to stop learning stuff.

2. Burn down my enormous pile of physical books. Not literally. I'm going to try to make a rule for myself to read two physical books from my stash for every new book I acquire, electronically or physically. I just seriously do not have room for what I've got and it's becoming a bit of a problem. I bought Thea Harrison's Shadow's End and read it yesterday, so next up is two physical books. I've had this series for some time, and seems like the right time for it now:

Oh no! I'm missing #2! so I have to buy it, right? Right.

3. Post two real review posts per month. I'm pretty comfy in my mini-review groove with these Sunday Soup posts, and I'm glad that I've been able to talk about the books I've been reading in a way that doesn't feel like work. But I get a good sense of accomplishment from writing a real review too, even though it's a little more effort.

✽As a consolation for not posting a list of lists, here's a great article about a list.  Hmmm. I love spreadsheets; isn't it kind of weird that I don't track my reading that way?  Hmmm.

What I'm reading
December for me is 3 weeks of increasingly frantic activity and then a week of laziness. And by "lazy," I mean, I read a whole bunch.

✽I went on a small Thea Harrison binge this past week, starting with the three novellas in the Dragon Family Album, and then I really really wanted to read Liam Takes Manhattan, but it said in NO UNCERTAIN TERMS that I needed to read Shadow's End first, so I ask you, what could I do? I mean, I really had no choice. So I downloaded and read Shadows' End for my New Year's Day read. It was fantastic. Harrison's paranormal highs are so high, and the lows so low. There may have been a few tissues involved in this read. I haven't gotten to Liam yet, but I'm glad I read Shadow's End first.

✽OK, in keeping with my 2:1 goal, since I bought Shadow's End, I picked up a stash book next, which was HeartMate, by Robin D. Owens.  It was OK. I'm not sure I really want to binge on the whole series though. The beginning was a little clunky, but I liked it better by the end. The worldbuilding... some of it was really interesting; I liked her treatment of the Passages (a physically demanding dreamquest sort of experience), but not being a cat lover, I found her talking cats to be not-quite-equal-parts irritating/endearing. I am probably in a minority here, so that might be the thing that other people love the most. I'll give it one more book before I decide about the series as a whole, since I have them already (I bought 4 books for about a dollar at a thrift store awhile back).

✽Before I started on Thea Harrison, I had already pre-ordered Alyssa Day's new shifter novel, Dead Eye, so it showed up for me like a Christmas present. First in a new series, it has wonderful characters, Day's trademark wisecracky irreverent humor, and plenty of paranormal action. Quick, fun read.  Looking forward to the next one, already available for pre-order. I'm going to have to get cracking on my stash books to earn this purchase.

✽I read three paranormals for the March RT edition, and I liked them all quite a lot, but looking for a change of pace, I bought Kristan Higgins If You Only Knew and loved it. Higgins is a bit of a Sure Thing for me, and this was no exception. A little different than most contemporaries, it makes a strong statement about what marriage should be, and reads quite a bit more like traditional "women's fiction" than romance for at least the first half of the book. The romance element is more unsure than usual, more like real life, and the hero is really quite remote. I connected immediately with the characters, which was good because I had to overlook the first-person present tense--a huge turnoff for me.

✽Lastly, I got an ARC from RUDC author Aaron Michael Ritchey that is well out of my usual reading but OH MY GAHD it was an incredible read. I don't want to give much away here as I'll be doing a full review on it but it's kind of like Jules Verne meets Calamity Jane meets Little House on the Prairie and whoa. I loved it a lot.

January Stash Reads: 1
January Bought Reads: 1*
January Non-Fiction Reads: 0

*I'm only counting the Thea Harrison full length here. Everything else I already owned as of 12/31/2015.

Sunday Soup - November 8

In The Soup This Week... Julie Wetzel, Thea Harrison, Vivi Andrews, and Alyssa Cole

Soup Dish:  on my mind
✽I have really tuned out of online RomLand lately, by which I mean Twitter. I have a vague notion that the #NotChilled thing heated up again, and it seemed like there was a bit of an uproar over a tweet from Bobbi Dumas that sort of went all over the place.  Other than that, I've been unplugged and mostly just reading like crazy. Am I missing anything good?

What I'm reading
✽I picked up Radio Silence by Alyssa Cole this week based on Sarah MacLean's recommendation for a later book in the series and my growing obsession with post-apocalyptic fiction. It was OK, with plausible world-building and good characters. Sort of a twist on the classic "cabin romance," with three siblings plus the heroine cooped up in a well-stocked remote house while they wonder what is happening in the outside world.  I didn't love it, mostly due to the voicing which just sounded a bit juvenile to me. This is an example of a perfectly fine book that just didn't suit my personal taste.

✽On the Accidental Wings of Dragons, by Julie Wetzel. This was a BookBub freebie, which turned out to be much better than the awkward title. Imaginative and fun; combines the beautiful-princess fairy tale tradition with a modern military special-ops hero. I found the internal narration, again, a little juvenile, but the plot carried it more so than the Alyssa Cole for me. Maybe I'm just having a Get Off My Lawn week.

✽Or maybe it's a week for dragons, because I couldn't resist the novella from Thea Harrison, Dragos Goes To Washington. Really more of a mystery than a romance, but featuring a favorite romantic couple. I can't say their HEA was ever in question in this story, but their ongoing passion for each other forms the context for the political whodunit. Loved it, but then I always love Thea Harrison. I do sometimes get behind on the novellas, so I was happy to see that the last three (before this one) are on offer as a bundle: A Dragon Family Album, for a nice discount.

✽The big surprise this week was an RT thumbdrive offering from Vivi Andrews, titled "Spinning Gold."  I correctly assumed this would be a Rumplestiltskin-based re-told fairy tale, and incorrectly assumed that it would be terrible. I totally loved it. Andrews' story of the lost Golden Fae, with Midas-like abilities, turns the old tale on its head and delivers a hot paranormal romance with all the elements that a modern fan of the genre could ask for: a sensible, beautiful heroine with agency; creepy magical villains, complex magic, and a white-hot hero who helps the heroine save the day. I'm definitely going to check out Andrews' extensive backlist.

Midnight's Kiss, by Thea Harrison - Review

Information
Title: Midnight's Kiss
Series: Elder Races
Author: Thea Harrison
Publisher: Berkely
Release Date: May 5, 2015
Reviewing: advance eARC
Reason for reading: I received an invitation to download the eARC in exchange for a review, and because it's Thea Harrison, I couldn't resist.

The Short Answer:
Another installment in a consistently, relentlessly fabulous PNR series.

The Blurb
From Harrison's website:

Ever since their scorching affair ended years ago, Julian, the Nightkind King, and Melisande, daughter of the Light Fae Queen, have tried to put the past behind them—and distance between them. But when a war breaks out between Julian and Justine, a powerful Vampyre of the Nightkind council, they find themselves thrown together under treacherous circumstances…

Kidnapped as leverage against Julian, Melly is convinced that her former lover won’t be rushing to her rescue. But when Julian gives himself up to save her, they both end up Justine’s captives. Armed only with their wits and their anger, Melly and Julian must work together to escape. But will they be able to ignore their complicated history, or will the fiery passion that once burned them blaze again?

Series Handicap:
On a scale of one to five, where one is "it isn't even a series" and five is "don't even think about starting here in the middle", I'd rate this at a two or three.  Although the series is well along, the Elder Races stories stand alone pretty well.  In my case, I happened to read the last two back to back, and they work really well as a two-fer.  If you haven't read anything in the series, I would suggest backing up just one book to Night's Honor, which is the story of Julian's most successful progeny; and the climax of that story serves as the catalyst for Midnight's Kiss.  Chronologically, they are very tight, with Midnight's Kiss picking up right at the end of Night's Honor. There is a bit of reference in both books to Julian's sire, Carling, but I think if you don't mind rolling with it, you won't be missing anything in plot points and only a bit of background in the way of Carling and Julian's relationship. (Her story is in Serpent's Kiss, novel #3 in the series, but if you're going to go back that far, you might as well start at the beginning.  You won't regret it.)

The Whole Scoop
Well, I totally loved it. It starts out feeling very much like a "damsel in distress" story, but Harrison has a way of boomeranging these kind of things.  Melly is doing OK, in some pretty dire straits, but just when it becomes clear that she's probably not going to be able to extricate herself on her own, Julian finds her. However, this is not a "white knight swoops her off and they ride into the sunset" sort of scenario.  He zooms straight into a big mess, and what I liked best is that it takes both of them to get themselves out of it.  It's one of those excruciating scenarios where they each have to watch the other get pushed to painful limits... on each others' behalf. 

At the risk of exposing myself as a dork on a whole different level than my readers already know, I want to interject a little bit of dorky philosophy that I have found to be pretty useful in my adult life.  The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey, is one of the few, if not the only, self-help books I've found to be really resonant and really applicable.  One of the things he posits is that interdependence is a higher state than independence (which is higher than dependence; interesting in terms of Covey's framework by not my point here).  Western culture and in many ways, romance protagonists of both genders prize their independence above nearly all else in their lives, and finding their way to interdependence is a key theme in romance.  The entire first half of Midnight's Kiss is an object lesson in the protagonists -- both of them-- coming to terms with their interdependence.

Beyond the heart-pounding suspense of the mutual rescue adventure which comprises the first two thirds or so of the story, the remainder will appeal to fans of epic fantasy in the political sense.  Melly and Julian are members of two different, very powerful factions in this world, and their union must be handled delicately.  And those that would challenge their position are dealt with ruthlessly.

I really liked the maneuvering around the power and the politics in this book.  There are big stakes (heh, NPI for this vampire story), and Melly and Julian find their personal and political HEA in a most satisfying way, with a good handful of unexpected twists in the process.

On the meta side, I very much enjoyed the way Harrison gave a nod, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, to the current craze for motorocycle club stories and perhaps THE original romance trope, The Big Mis, in delightful and respectful ways.  Now, if she can work in a secret baby, a MMA fighter, and maybe a sheikh into her next book, we'll have to award some kind of TropeMaster (TropeMistress?) honor.

Bottom Line:
I love this series and everything I've read by Harrison.  There is no series sag here, and the books in general stand along better than many paranormal series.  So if you're already a fan, run don't walk to your bookstore or e-shopping cart; and if you haven't started the series yet, your biggest decision should be whether you want to start at the beginning of the series, or right here with this one.  It's a can't-lose choice.

Around the Blogosphere
If you have reviewed this story, feel free to leave a link in comments or let me know by email, and I'll be happy to edit it in.
Harlequin Junkie -- a new convert to Harrison's series
A Book Obsession gives it four out of five
a mini-review from BadAss Book Reviews (I'm not really sure if "Badass" is one word or two... filed under things I didn't know I needed to know...)

Sunday Soup, March 29

Sunday Soup is... Girl Scout camp & lots of reading

Soup Dish:  on my mind this week
✽So before the cookie madness even got all the way done, I had planning underway for the annual multi-troop spring camp-out.  This year it was earlier than ever (we have a lottery for dates) and we were in an outdoor unit, so I had some extra anxiety about all the girls staying warm enough.  It went off ok, and really the best thing about campouts is that first shower afterward.  Steamy.


 
What I'm reading

✽I got caught up on Thea Harrison's next-to-last release, Night's Honor, and then read the ARC for Midnight's Kiss.  I just love that whole series. I think it's getting better and better, honestly, and I love how distinctive the heroines in particular are.  Nothing cookie-cutter about these characters.

✽My favorite read this week was Jeffe Kennedy's Under His Touch. Stop me if you've heard this before: powerful, wealthy businessman dom; young ingenue girl working in the building falls for him-- OK, I'm stopping you, because this one is different. She actively pursues him, and he doesn't abuse his economic power position, and actually has ethical pangs over the whole thing. Weird, amirite?  Beautiful balance of sexual tension and "payoff" (heh) scenes, which are hot, hot, hot.  Confession: I read it twice.

✽I also read Julie Moffett's No One Lives Twice, which I got from the RT14 Carina thumbdrive. It turned out to be a non-romance but a pretty fun mystery, and apparently the first in a series of a Girl Hacker/Spy sort of thing. Not quite what I was expecting, but overall I couldn't complain -- great twisty plot, good pacing, liked the characters.  Plenty of romantic potential -- sexy options abound for the Girl Hacker, but no HEA as of this volume.

✽I just finished slogging through a paranormal romance called My Familiar Stranger, by Victoria Danann. It was totally uneven with some of the klunkiest damn narrative, and I can't figure out why I liked it, but I kept on turning pages and I mostly liked it.  There was a completely unsupported twist at the end that might've made it a wallbanger, but it was literally like the last paragraphs, so whatever and WTF.

Outlander Watch... Och. I canna wait for Jamie and Claire onscreen.

✽Only a week left!  There are some teasers on the Starz site if you want to whet your appetite.

Sunday Soup - March 16

Sunday Soup is... a little of this, a little of that, not too much work, and hopefully a tasty result.

Soup Dish:  book people are talking about...
At my house, March madness doesn't have anything to do with basketball:  it's all about the Girl Scout Cookies. Starting in late February, my house becomes the Cookie Depot for our troop, which is quite large-- we have about 30 girls this year.  I got the last of the cookies out of my house yesterday, and now just need to square up the accounting -- also, super fun!  Anyway, it's all for a good cause.

Then there's St. Patrick's Day.  Our family is not in the least Irish, nor are we in a particularly Irish community, but this year we decided to decorate a little bit, which entailed power tools and spray paint... I'm exhausted just thinking about it.  I put up a little faux mantel on one wall and my younger daughter and I decorated it.  It's probably kind of lame that that took up as much brain-space as it did, but it is what it is.

Anyway, on to Book Things!

✽How Public Libraries Are Solving America's Reading Problem Really good article, with really good news, IMO. How the publishing revolution is offering libraries a new life. Via the twitter feed of Seattle Book News.  

✽Anonymous reviews -- Two items in the news recently; first a petition endorsed by Anne Rice to remove the ability to leave anonymous reviews at Amazon.  Her endorsement can be found on her public Facebook page. Second, a major Australian paper announced that they will be publishing their professional reviews pseudonymously. Good summary article here.

My thoughts are mixed here.  Mostly I do not attempt to keep my reviewing identity secret, because I am just paranoid enough and just tech savvy enough to know that if someone really wanted to out me, it's just not that hard to do so.  Therefore, I started from the very beginning with the decision that I would not put anything online that I am not willing to have my name attached to, for any reason.  (The one place that this really inhibits me--heh-- from posting is discussions about erotica.  I would say things anonymously that I'm not really willing to have out there in front of the world.)

Amazon's review system is troubled, for sure.  I don't pay much attention to reviews or average stars.  I go more by word of mouth and reading an excerpt for myself, but there's no doubt that those ratings and reviews influence sales, for better and for worse.  It's a shame that some people have nothing better to do than to game the system.

✽Do you use photos in your blog? then this is BIG NEWS: Free Use of Images from Getty. If you read the fine print, you may find that once again, there's no such thing as a free lunch:

once the images are embedded, Getty has much more control over the images. The new embeds are built on the same iframe code that lets you embed a tweet or a YouTube video, which means the company can use embeds to plant ads or collect user information.

To be honest, that pretty much seems worth it to me, but your mileage may vary. Via Dear Author's Twitter feed.

Author News
Interesting stuff from some of my favorites!

✽Charlotte Stein's newest release is with a new Avon line -- I'm gonna need to check out both.

✽Ilona Andrews announces new book, new series, and new publisher -- very exciting.

✽Chloe Neill also has a new series beginning.

What I'm reading

✽Apples Should Be Red, a subversive, salty little novella by Penny Watson.  This is a second-chance romance, with characters edging into senior citizen territory. I have more to say about this one, but bottom line is -- I liked it, and you should read it.

✽Clean Sweep, by Ilona Andrews.  I read a little bit of this when it was published as a serial for free, and adored the world premise. Really loved it, and the full book!  Great story, but it felt like the beginning of something that might not get finished.  I'm getting spoiled about long-running series, I guess.

✽Crazy, Stupid Sex by Maisey Yates. How can you resist a title like that?  Another winning nerd-girl heroine.

✽Fury of Desire, by Coreene Callahan.  Book 4 in the Dragonfury series, and not bad on the adventure and series arc fronts.  I found the hero's character resolution to be a little jarring and not quite on target though.

 ✽Kinked, by Thea Harrison.  Good grief, I really, really loved this one. This is the story that I wanted for J.R. Ward's Vishous.  It's the story of two extreme entities, who have waited a long time to meet their matches.  When they do, sparks fly, and nobody has to give up who they are.

Outlander Watch... Och. I canna wait for Jamie and Claire onscreen.


Delightful photo via Outlander Life's Twitter feed:

 

Sunday Soup - February 22

Sunday Soup is... a little of this, a little of that, not too much work, and hopefully a tasty result.

Soup Dish:  book people are talking about...
✽I'm getting all revved about RT14! I confess, I've been stalking the hashtag a bit.  Are you a Karina Cooper fan? I thought I had reviewed her ... but I guess that's another one that never made it out of the "thinking about" stage and onto the actual blog.  Anyway, if you're going to RT, check out the plan Ms. Cooper is hatching, if for no other reason than that she always has the most FABULOUS boots.  And either way, if you haven't sampled her St. Croix series, you really should. Creepy and dark; it really brings the horror element.

✽A friend posted this article about women's voices and it's kind of amazing.  [Ironically] I can't really articulate my response to it, but it has me thinking thinking thinking.

✽Adventures in Reading! I had lunch at Panera the other day, with my book of course, and I kept sort of eavesdropping on these two women sitting near me.  I can hardly be blamed though, because they kept dropping tantalizing words like "genre" and "literary" and "urban fantasy" and I couldn't quite catch what they were actually talking about, but it was clearly a business conversation.  Finally I couldn't stand it any more and butted in. We talked books and genre and social media for at least half an hour before I had to run and tend to the rest of my real life schedule. In the process, I learned about Curiosity Quills, a very cool new(ish) publishing house. It's always a great day when I can nerd out with someone new!


What I'm reading
✽I finished the Alexa Egan title I mentioned last week.  I think I liked the second one a little bit better, but it's definitely a series I'll stick with.

✽Blazed through Thea Harrison's Lord's Fall.  I know, I'm way behind.  I've already started Kinked.  I love this stuff.  I'm probably due for a contemporary pretty soon though; I'm thinking probably something from Victoria Dahl.

Outlander Watch... Och. I canna wait for Jamie and Claire onscreen.

✽Interview with Ron Moore; nice chunk of discussion about adapting the book to film.

One of the very first notes that [Starz CEO] Chris Albrecht told me was to trust the book. He said, "We love the book. Make the show for the fans of the book and believe that anyone who doesn't know this material, when they see it, they'll be swept into the story like everyone else is.

What a great thing to hear!

✽Ron Moore and Sam Heughan in kilts.  Although I searched diligently, out of the generosity of my heart for you, my readers, all for you... the photographic evidence is sadly minimal AND owned by Getty Images, so you'll need to click through for a look.

Sunday Soup - November 10

Sunday Soup is... a little of this, a little of that, not too much work, and hopefully a tasty result.

Soup Dish:  book people are talking about...

✽To be honest, this week's kerfuffle about what authors are allowed to say and what reviewers are allowed to say just makes me go:

I feel like the same thing just gets re-hashed over and over again, and the line is not clear and never will be. If people criticize you or your work, take from it what you find useful and move along. Honest reactions should be respected.  Personal attacks are best ignored, IMO, but if you must respond, I would suggest limiting your response to ONE interaction, along the lines of "I saw what you wrote and felt it was uncalled for. I welcome honest critique of my work, but your attack on [ ] was out of line."  Then mute, block, ignore, step away.  Because if you're going to fling shit, no matter how much your target deserves it, you're going to end up smelling bad too.

Notice that I have suggestions, not prescriptions, for what Everyone Should Do, because everyone has a different tolerance for debate, flames, and what I would term negativity. Also, I have been at this internet thing long enough to know that my odds of changing anyone's behavior is vanishingly small, and I prefer not to waste my energy.

✽On a related note, if we could agree on a book bloggers' motto, what would it be?  Something short and pithy... I rather like: "I read, therefore I blog."  I was trying to get some kind of play on "veni, vedi, vici" with something like "I read, I opined, I blogged," but I don't think I can get that to work. :D  What do you think? do you have a motto?

✽Amazon has floated an offer to independent bookstores to carry Kindles. Reaction has been mixed:

• Melville Publishing House reports
• International Business Times.
• Publishers Weekly
• And my favorite, McNally Jackson's very succinct response.

OK, no, it hasn't been mixed at all. 

✽New to me: Bloggers Recommend - a bit more litfic/generalized that works for me, but if you're looking for a small number of standout titles, it looks like a good blog to check out.

What I'm reading
✽I was in the mood for a contemporary, so I picked up Kristan Higgins' The Next Best Thing, which fit the bill perfectly.  Light and sweet, Higgins ramps up the poignancy with a story of a young widow falling for her deceased husband's brother.

✽I hit the bookstore last week, as I imagine most of us did, with so many big names releasing the same week.  It's boggling really.  Have a look at Jackie's roundup, if you don't believe me. The new acquisition that has me hiding from my children this week is Devon Monk's Hell Bent, a new series spun off from her popular (and beloved by me, anyway) Allie Beckstrom series.  It truly is a different series though, as the Allie Beckstrom climactic ending broke up and changed all the magical rules.  A few years later, one of my favorite characters becomes the focal point for the subsequent fallout and realignment of power structures.  I'm about halfway through and loving it. I also came home with Thea Harrison's last two full length Elder Races books, which I'm just so behind on but adore.

✽On the electronic front, I had pre-ordered Nora Roberts' Dark Witch, and ordered a Laura Kinsale title (Prince of Midnight) that I somehow missed in my original Kinsale binge. Many of her titles are being released in electronic and e-format, so now is a good time to re-read or catch up. Shout out to Blithely Bookish for her review last September that I finally dug out of my feed reader. I also nabbed Driven by Eve Silver - it was on a discount price and I've been on a post-apocolyptic kick recently thanks to Joss Ware and Kit Rocha.


On Tap... what soup isn't a little better with a slosh or two?

I've decided I need to watch my calories a bit closer, so I have to strategize a bit with my beer consumption. So for Friday's happy hour, I decided to go with a stout, which is heavy enough to slow down my drinking. Young's Double Chocolate Stout was just the ticket - it's rich and sweet; it's basically an alcoholic brownie in a glass.