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lady_ragnell) wrote2025-04-17 11:14 pm
lady_ragnell) wrote2025-04-17 11:14 pm
2025 Books, Post 4
Another decently fast batch, thanks to one of the reading goals I've had for this year, more on that anon! I am too tired for much of an intro, so here we go.
A Midsummer Night's Duke by Colleen Kelly
High-heat Regency romance! This one was a lot of fun, with some good sex writing and a plot that moved along well and characters I enjoyed. I don't have much to say about it, a few weeks out, but I did enjoy it, it felt fun and fresh when a lot of romances have tired me these last few years.
Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross
A few things to say about this one! First, in many ways it's what I wanted The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy to be (though it does fall into at least a few of the same traps), a fantasy You've Got Mail/Shop Around the Corner where I bought the characters more. Plus, the worldbuilding was more to my taste, gods going to war and some WWI/WWII vibes were really cool. However, I did wish as I was reading that it wasn't YA, something that happens tragically often when I read YA. There should be YA books! But I feel like maybe a pair of 19-year-old professional journalists would be better served by being in their 20s. And then (spoilers, I suppose) at the end the characters got married way too fast and I suspect it's largely because the author wanted them to have sex and didn't want to have that happen unmarried? Like, maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's going to be a plot point in the sequel I'm waffling on reading, but it felt very "we can't let them have sex outside of wedlock" as I was reading it, and it made me miss the days of Tamora Pierce and her characters happily doing that.
Dancing Shoes by Noel Streatfield
Hadn't read this one in a while! I just really enjoy the way Streatfeild digs into the minutiae of life, the studying and the vacations and the boring work that goes into putting on art. And I'm terribly fond of Rachel, the heroine of this one, and am always delighted by her Cinderella ending. Just a nice reread to do!
The Kiss Countdown by Etta Easton
First off, I love that there are astronaut romances now, amazing, it's such a good love interest choice, I feel like an astronaut is a contemporary equivalent of a duke. Replace all the cops and navy SEALs and billionaires with astronauts and firefighters and journalists, thanks. Anyway, there was some good banter here, and I love a fake relationship, and some interesting family things for both characters. I do wish it had been more of a traditional romance novel, with both POVs, and I wish we'd gotten more astronaut stuff (though of course we wouldn't, in only the one first-person POV, so that's fair). Anyway, I continue to wish most of the illustrated-cover contemporary romcoms I read were instead Shirtless Man Torso contemporary romances.
The Tournament of Losers by Megan Derr
I like Derr! There's a bunch of her work on my library streaming service and I've read a few from her now, she tends to be fun and iddy. This hit less close to the center of my id than some of hers have, but was an enjoyable read nonetheless! The characters were sometimes dipshits, but it's a romance novel, that kind of comes with the territory. If you want a queer fantasy romance with a main character just trying desperately to stay ahead of his problems that hits most of the beats you'll expect and one or two that you might not as much, this one's a nice if not a deep choice.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Marvelous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, and The Road to Oz by L. Frank Baum
Remember that reading goal I mentioned above? When I was a kid, and my family would go spend evenings hanging out at Barnes & Noble back when they had a bunch of chairs you could sit and read in, I had an Oz phase, but I didn't really have any idea what order things came in, and I just kind of read I think four or five of them before moving onto other things, so I decided that I want to come back and read them all, in order! This is the first five of the 14 official Oz books written by Baum, and three of them I'd never read before including, if you'll believe it, the first (I think as a kid I decided that I'd seen the movie and knew the plot and wanted to spend my valuable reading time on books I knew less about). Anyway, I am rather charmed by these books and have been just powering through them for the past week! There are continuity errors galore and they're very silly, but they're good-hearted and the characters are all such fun and I've been having a marvelous time. Plus, Baum almost certainly didn't do it on purpose but so many parts of these books read SO queer to the modern reader, Dorothy Gale is absolutely not straight and also the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman have something going on. Plus there's Ozma and gender, and just some throwaway comments that make me feel ideologically closer to Baum than I expected (though of course I know that's an illusion, I don't know much about his life other than the wikipedia page but I don't think he was THAT ahead of his time, really). So I'm looking forward to continuing this read! Though perhaps interspersed with a few other books so I don't bore you all to tears in my next post, whoops.
That's all this time! Next time, maybe some books not written by L. Frank Baum! And maybe some epistolary, since I rather fell off on that goal.
A Midsummer Night's Duke by Colleen Kelly
High-heat Regency romance! This one was a lot of fun, with some good sex writing and a plot that moved along well and characters I enjoyed. I don't have much to say about it, a few weeks out, but I did enjoy it, it felt fun and fresh when a lot of romances have tired me these last few years.
Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross
A few things to say about this one! First, in many ways it's what I wanted The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy to be (though it does fall into at least a few of the same traps), a fantasy You've Got Mail/Shop Around the Corner where I bought the characters more. Plus, the worldbuilding was more to my taste, gods going to war and some WWI/WWII vibes were really cool. However, I did wish as I was reading that it wasn't YA, something that happens tragically often when I read YA. There should be YA books! But I feel like maybe a pair of 19-year-old professional journalists would be better served by being in their 20s. And then (spoilers, I suppose) at the end the characters got married way too fast and I suspect it's largely because the author wanted them to have sex and didn't want to have that happen unmarried? Like, maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's going to be a plot point in the sequel I'm waffling on reading, but it felt very "we can't let them have sex outside of wedlock" as I was reading it, and it made me miss the days of Tamora Pierce and her characters happily doing that.
Dancing Shoes by Noel Streatfield
Hadn't read this one in a while! I just really enjoy the way Streatfeild digs into the minutiae of life, the studying and the vacations and the boring work that goes into putting on art. And I'm terribly fond of Rachel, the heroine of this one, and am always delighted by her Cinderella ending. Just a nice reread to do!
The Kiss Countdown by Etta Easton
First off, I love that there are astronaut romances now, amazing, it's such a good love interest choice, I feel like an astronaut is a contemporary equivalent of a duke. Replace all the cops and navy SEALs and billionaires with astronauts and firefighters and journalists, thanks. Anyway, there was some good banter here, and I love a fake relationship, and some interesting family things for both characters. I do wish it had been more of a traditional romance novel, with both POVs, and I wish we'd gotten more astronaut stuff (though of course we wouldn't, in only the one first-person POV, so that's fair). Anyway, I continue to wish most of the illustrated-cover contemporary romcoms I read were instead Shirtless Man Torso contemporary romances.
The Tournament of Losers by Megan Derr
I like Derr! There's a bunch of her work on my library streaming service and I've read a few from her now, she tends to be fun and iddy. This hit less close to the center of my id than some of hers have, but was an enjoyable read nonetheless! The characters were sometimes dipshits, but it's a romance novel, that kind of comes with the territory. If you want a queer fantasy romance with a main character just trying desperately to stay ahead of his problems that hits most of the beats you'll expect and one or two that you might not as much, this one's a nice if not a deep choice.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Marvelous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, and The Road to Oz by L. Frank Baum
Remember that reading goal I mentioned above? When I was a kid, and my family would go spend evenings hanging out at Barnes & Noble back when they had a bunch of chairs you could sit and read in, I had an Oz phase, but I didn't really have any idea what order things came in, and I just kind of read I think four or five of them before moving onto other things, so I decided that I want to come back and read them all, in order! This is the first five of the 14 official Oz books written by Baum, and three of them I'd never read before including, if you'll believe it, the first (I think as a kid I decided that I'd seen the movie and knew the plot and wanted to spend my valuable reading time on books I knew less about). Anyway, I am rather charmed by these books and have been just powering through them for the past week! There are continuity errors galore and they're very silly, but they're good-hearted and the characters are all such fun and I've been having a marvelous time. Plus, Baum almost certainly didn't do it on purpose but so many parts of these books read SO queer to the modern reader, Dorothy Gale is absolutely not straight and also the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman have something going on. Plus there's Ozma and gender, and just some throwaway comments that make me feel ideologically closer to Baum than I expected (though of course I know that's an illusion, I don't know much about his life other than the wikipedia page but I don't think he was THAT ahead of his time, really). So I'm looking forward to continuing this read! Though perhaps interspersed with a few other books so I don't bore you all to tears in my next post, whoops.
That's all this time! Next time, maybe some books not written by L. Frank Baum! And maybe some epistolary, since I rather fell off on that goal.
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