Book Review: Bride by Ali Hazelwood

Bride (Bride #1) by Ali Hazelwood
Genre: Adult Fiction (Paranormal Romance)
Date Published: February 6, 2024
Publisher:  Berkley

A dangerous alliance between a Vampyre bride and an Alpha Werewolf becomes a love deep enough to sink your teeth into in this new paranormal romance from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love, Theoretically and The Love Hypothesis.

Misery Lark, the only daughter of the most powerful Vampyre councilman of the Southwest, is an outcast—again. Her days of living in anonymity among the Humans are over: she has been called upon to uphold a historic peacekeeping alliance between the Vampyres and their mortal enemies, the Weres, and she sees little choice but to surrender herself in the exchange—again...

Weres are ruthless and unpredictable, and their Alpha, Lowe Moreland, is no exception. He rules his pack with absolute authority, but not without justice. And, unlike the Vampyre Council, not without feeling. It’s clear from the way he tracks Misery’s every movement that he doesn’t trust her. If only he knew how right he was….

Because Misery has her own reasons to agree to this marriage of convenience, reasons that have nothing to do with politics or alliances, and everything to do with the only thing she's ever cared about. And she is willing to do whatever it takes to get back what’s hers, even if it means a life alone in Were territory…alone with the wolf.

Bride by Ali Hazelwood was a really good read. I’ve never read anything by this author before, but I liked the cover and the premise, so I decided to give a try. I fell in love with Misery and Lowe. I loved watching them get to know each other and get over each other’s prejudices. This marriage is an important and fragile thing for both the Vampyres and the Weres, and not everyone wants it to be a success. These characters and their World were so well built. It could easily be made into a series. And while it’s nice to have  an excellent stand alone story to read with all the series' out there, this is one I really want more from!! 

I'm Ali, and I write contemporary romcom novels about women in STEM and academia. I love cats, Nutella, and side ponytails. I'm also currently learning to crochet, so as you can tell I'm a super busy gal with an intense and exciting life!

To learn more about Ali Hazelwood and her books, visit her website. You can also find her on Goodreads, Facebook, & Instagram. 

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Book Review: Sworn by Emma Knight

Sworn (The Vampire Legends #1) by Emma Knight
Genre: Young Adult Fiction (Paranormal Romance)
Date Published: September 7, 2011
Publisher: Self

When her dad is transferred, Rachel Wood is uprooted from her home in Pennsylvania and forced to enter a new high school, in 10th grade, in an affluent suburb in Westchester, New York. She finds herself in way over her head, as she struggles to come to grips with meeting new friends, finding a boyfriend, avoiding the cliques of mean girls, and figuring out how to survive in such a hostile new world. She has trouble navigating this new world, where drinking and drugs seem the norm, and where social pressures build on her from every direction. Everything seems to go wrong for Rachel, until salvation comes in the form of Rob, a football player who takes a liking to her. But just as there romance is about to blossom, she finds herself confused by his actions. As things reach a low point, Rachel meets a mysterious boy from her school, Benji, a loner who keeps apart from the other kids, and who takes her on a ride on his motorcycle. They have an unforgettable night together in an amusement park-until something goes horribly wrong, and Benji shocks her by saving her life. Rachel knows that Benji is different from everyone else, and she knows that he is the love of her life. And as their romance deepens, she has to decide if she is willing to give up everything to find out his secret...

Sworn is the first book in the Vampire Legends series by Emma Knight. I’m not sure about this series yet. I need the main character to be a bit more likable. She falls for one guy without knowing him. Then falls for another guy practically a blink later. There was no “get to know you” of any kind with either guy. She makes bad decisions all around. Her friends are pretty awful. And, the vampire aspect doesn’t show up until the very end. I’ll give it another chance by seeing if things get better in the next book. We shall see.

Emma Knight is author of the bestselling vampire series THE VAMPIRE LEGENDS, consisting of six books and counting: SWORN, TAKEN, BITTEN, CHOSEN, AWAKENED and RISEN.

To learn more about Emma Knight and her books, visit her website. You can also find her on Goodreads & BookBub.

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Book Review: The Other Sister by Jessica R. Patch

The Other Sister by Jessica R. Patch
Genre: Adult Fiction (Phychological Thriller)
Date Published: April 1, 2025
Publisher:  Love Inspired Trade

She thought she was the only one lying about her identity. Until she stepped into her sister’s life.

Charlotte Kane has always dreamed of a different life, one where she isn’t living paycheck to paycheck. An existence worlds away from the chaos of her own. Then her estranged mother dies, and Charlotte makes a stunning discovery—she has an identical twin who was given up for adoption.

Acelynn Benedict is polished, successful and seems to have everything Charlotte yearns for—a wealthy, doting family in Savannah, a handsome boyfriend, a great career. She’s just as surprised as Charlotte to learn she has a sister. But when tragedy hits and Charlotte is forced to assume Acelynn’s identity in a desperate moment, she uncovers something altogether darker…

No one in her sister’s life is quite who they seem to be. And every discovery leads Charlotte deeper into a web of deadly secrets. Charlotte may have wanted Acelynn’s life, yet now that she’s living it, she wants out. But if she reveals the truth about herself, it will mean returning to her old life—and she’s already a dead woman there.

The Other Sister by Jessica R. Patch is a phychological thriller full of twists. There are a lot of characters within this story, and you can’t trust most of them. They have something they’re hiding or ulterior motives. Even the main character... You find out some surprising stuff as the story progresses. The only thing I really expected was the epilogue. I just knew it from the start. It ends in a way that leaves room for a sequel. I’m not sure there’d be enough for a sequel though, and I’m happy with how it ends. I kind of hope it’s left as a stand alone with its little bit of mystery left to keep you wondering.

The ARC of  The Other Sister by Jessica R. Patch was kindly provided to me by the publisher through NetGalley for review. The opinions are my own.

I’m Jess Patch, a wife of over thirty years to my real-life hero, a mom of two grown adults with my first grand on the way! I’m a dog-lover and have a super spoiled Shetland Sheepdog (sheltie). Now that my kids are grown, when I’m not writing inspirational romantic suspense and dark twisty thrillers that explore the darker parts of human hearts yet offer a hope-filled ending, you can find me binging audiobooks at my pool during the summer or on my daily walks. If I’m not doing that I’m avoiding household chores with lunch dates over tacos and copious amounts of cheese dip and tortilla chips and the discussion usually surrounds true crime and how we could solve cold cases so easily if given the chance (we do love our delusional state)!

To learn more about Jessica R. Patch and her books, visit her website. You can also find her on Goodreads, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, BookBub, YouTube, Pinterest, and Twitter.

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Book Review: My Plain Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, & Jodi Meadows

My Plain Jane (The Lady Janies #2) by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, Jodi Meadows

Genre: Young Adult Fiction (Historical Fantasy Romance)
Date Published: June 26, 2018
Publisher: HarperCollins

You may think you know the story. After a miserable childhood, penniless orphan Jane Eyre embarks on a new life as a governess at Thornfield Hall. There, she meets one dark, brooding Mr. Rochester. Despite their significant age gap (!) and his uneven temper (!!), they fall in love—and, Reader, she marries him. (!!!)

Or does she?

Prepare for an adventure of Gothic proportions, in which all is not as it seems, a certain gentleman is hiding more than skeletons in his closets, and one orphan Jane Eyre, aspiring author Charlotte Brontë, and supernatural investigator Alexander Blackwood are about to be drawn together on the most epic ghost hunt this side of Wuthering Heights.

My Plain Jane is the second book in the Lady Janies series by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, Jodi Meadows. This was an alternate version of Jane Eyre… or should I say, This is how it really happened? I loved the idea of the first book taking actual history and twisting it, so I wasn’t sure if I would like this just as much being based on a fictional book, but it ended up being a lot of fun. It took real life characters and mixed them up with fictional folks. Very clever! I think I still enjoyed the first one a smidge more, but this one kept me entertained with its fun characters! 

You may think you know the story.
Oh, heard that one, have you? Well, we say again: you may think you know the story. By all accounts it’s a good one: a penniless, orphaned young woman becomes a governess in a wealthy household, catches the eye of the rich and stern master, and (sigh) falls deeply in love. It’s all very passionate and swoonworthy, but before they can be married, a—gasp!—terrible treachery is revealed. Then there’s fire and despair, some aimless wandering, starvation, a little bit of gaslighting, but in the end, the romance works out. The girl (Miss Eyre) gets the guy (Mr. Rochester). They live happily ever after. Which means (sigh) everybody’s happy, right?
Um… no. We have a different tale to tell. (Don’t we always?) And what we’re about to reveal is more than a simple reimagining of one of literature’s most beloved novels. This version, dear reader, is true. There really was a girl. (Two girls, actually.) There was, indeed, a terrible treachery and a great fire. But throw out pretty much everything else you know about the story. This isn’t going to be like any classic romance you’ve ever read.
It all started, if we’re going to go way, way back, in 1788 with King George III. The king had always been able to see ghosts. Sometimes he even had amusing conversations with long-deceased courtiers and unfairly beheaded queens who were floating about the palace grounds.
Then disaster struck. One particular day the king was without his spectacles. As he was walking in the garden, a mischievous ghost rattled the branches of a nearby tree and said, in its most stately voice, “Hey, look at me! I’m the King of Prussia!”
George, who had been expecting a visit from the King of Prussia, immediately bowed and exclaimed, “I am most pleased to meet you, Your Highness!” and tried to shake the tree’s hand.
From that moment on, George was referred to as “Mad King George,” a title he greatly resented. So George assembled a team made up of every kind of person he thought could help him be rid of these irksome ghosts: priests who specialized in exorcisms, doctors with some knowledge of the occult, philosophers, scientists, fortune-tellers, and anybody, in general, who dabbled in the supernatural.
And that’s how the Royal Society for the Relocation of Wayward Spirits was established.
In the years that followed, the Society, as it came to be called, functioned as a prominent and well-respected part of English life. If there was something strange in your neighborhood, you could, um, write the Society a letter, and they would promptly send an agent to take care of it.
Fast-forward right past the reign of George IV, to William IV ascending England’s throne. William was practical. He didn’t believe in ghosts. He considered the Society to be nothing more than a collection of odious charlatans who had been pulling the wool over the eyes of his poor disturbed predecessors for many years. Plus it was a terrible drain on the taxpayers’ dime (er, shilling). So almost as soon as he was officially crowned king, William cut the Society out of the royal budget. This led to his infamous falling-out and subsequent feud with Sir Arthur Wellesley, aka the Duke of Wellington, aka the leader and Lord President of the RWS Society, which was now underfunded and under-respected.
This brings us to the real start of our story: northern England, 1834, and the aforementioned penniless, orphaned girl. And a writer. And a boy with a vendetta.
Let’s start with the girl.
Her name was Jane.

Have you read the first book? 

We're the authors of the young adult novels MY LADY JANE, MY PLAIN JANE, MY CALAMITY JANE, MY CONTRARY MARY, MY IMAGINARY MARY, and MY SALTY MARY. 

Our group is made up of Brodi Ashton, Cynthia Hand, and Jodi Meadows—all authors of our own separate young adult books. We met on a group book tour back in 2012, became fast friends, and initially came up with idea for the Lady Janies books as a way for us to be able to spend more time hanging out and traveling together. 

Between the three of us we've written thirty novels, a bunch of novellas, a handful of short stories, and a couple of really bad poems, but we have the most fun working on our books together. 

We're friends. We're writers. We're fixing history by rewriting one sad story at a time.

To learn more about The Lady Janies and their books, visit their website. You can also find them on Facebook, and Instagram.

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Book Review: Stay in the Light by A.M. Shine

Stay in the Light (The Watchers #2) by A.M. Shine
Genre:  Adult Fiction (Horror)
Date Published: October 22, 2024
Publisher: Head of Zeus

After her terrifying experience at the hands of the Watchers, Mina has escaped to a cottage on the west coast of Ireland. She obsessively researches her former captors, desperate to find any way to prolong the safety of humankind.

When Mina encounters a stranger near her home, she fears the worst - for she knows the figure is not what it seems. Soon, people she has encountered start to disappear.

Mina knows the Watchers' power is growing. She flees for her life, but when she reports her fears she finds her sanity questioned. Can she convince people that the Watchers are real, and ready to strike - or will she suffer the fate she has dreaded since she first encountered those malevolent beings?

A chilling modern twist on the Gothic horror novel, perfect for fans of Kealan Patrick Burke, T. Kingfisher and classic horror.

Stay in the Light is the second book in The Watchers series by A.M. Shine. This time we get some more information about the lore involving The Watchers. I enjoyed getting that information as much as what was going on in the story itself. There are interesting brothers. I’m so glad there was a sequel to The Watchers, because it was a needed thing, and I’m hoping there will be even more to come. I feel like there could be. Will there be more books in this series? I'm not sure, but I'd definitely read them.

The tide had retreated late that evening, laying a ledge of grey sand in its wake where all else now sparkled in the dusk like a desert of broken glass.
For too long, this was all she’d dreamt of – a sky pruned of black branches and a sun whose departure wasn’t chased into the night by a thousand screams. But nowhere was safe. Not anymore. The darkness, the light, even those grey areas in between reminded her too much of the coop’s cold concrete and those still, twilit moments before the light clicked on.
Mina’s growing repertoire of anxieties kept her tethered to the cottage’s open door. But she’d stretched her leash over time, leaving longer trails of footprints with each passing day. The sand was nothing like the soil. Its silver grains left no stain that she couldn’t dust away with her fingers. And when the sun shone, the shore resembled some magical seam holding the last threads of her sanity together.
She touched the mug to her lips, breathing in more warmth than she drank as her wary eyes scanned the whole beach; from its southern caves to where the rocks beetled out into the bay like a bed of black broken teeth on the far side. Mina had the good mind to drape a blanket over her shoulders; the massive, tasselled one that she toasted by the stove before the sun and the temperature began their nightly nosedives into the ocean.
It had become a ritual of hers to face the night, to force down those memories that were forever tearing their talons around every moment. In the woodland there’d been an echoing list of chores and duties to keep her mind occupied. Here, however, her fears grew restless. And though the waves washed ashore with the calmest whisper, the world as she knew it never ceased to tremor.
Mina swallowed back a mouthful, wincing as it passed her throat. She’d come to loathe the taste of it. But the whiskey hit her like a hard slap, and sometimes – on those nights when she upped her dosage – it’d even knock her into a dreamless sleep, though these blessings were rare and often too hazy in mind and memory to really be appreciated. Either way, she sure felt the impact the following morning; that familiar bruise on the brain, pulsating like a beating heart about to break.
Mina’s phone performed a nervous jolt in her pocket. She rooted it out as she padded her bare feet along the sand, taking care to keep in the dry.
‘Do I need to ask what you’re up to?’ Ciara asked, her voice on loudspeaker.
‘You should see the sky. It’s beautiful this evening.’ ‘It’s always been beautiful, Meens,’ she replied.
‘We just forgot.’
Ciara was the only one who understood what Mina saw when she closed her eyes at night, when the silence was at its most fragile and the softest breeze sang like a scream. She’d asked her countless times to call an end to her impromptu exile and come live with her in the house that she and John had built – the home she refused to abandon, like an altar to the dead man’s memory. But the watchers had been following her in the city. And Mina knew without being told that they were following her still.
‘How are you holding up?’ Ciara asked.
‘Could be worse, I suppose.’ Mina sighed wearily through a smile.
‘Still alive. Though my neck aches from looking over my shoulder.’ Ciara chuckled as a steel pan clamoured down the line.
‘What are you making?’ Mina asked.
‘I’m stir-frying some vegetables. What have we got here? Peppers, some red onion, those baby sweetcorn things, and a few tomatoes.’
‘Oh, wow, very healthy.’
‘I know, right? I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them.’
‘You eat them, Ciara.’
‘You know what I mean.’ She giggled.
Her voice washed over Mina like a balm; cooler and more comforting than any wave the ocean could offer. The implicit purpose behind their nightly conversations was to soothe and support and to help the other process the past into something that would someday crawl into a pit and die. But there were too many groggy mornings when Mina couldn’t recall a single word shared between them. Alcohol made the nightmares more tolerable, but it didn’t exactly make her the most riveting of company. She was meant to be an emotional crutch for Ciara to lean on, but there were times when Mina could barely stand herself up, never mind support another.
‘How’s the yellow one?’ Ciara asked.
‘Yeah, he’s good,’ Mina replied.
‘I brought his cage outside earlier but some of the seagulls started having a go at him, so we went back in.’
‘And I take it there’s still no sign of Madeline?’
Mina detected that familiar diffidence to her voice; the reluctance to ask a question that she’d already guessed the answer to. It’d been over a month now since she’d fled as far west as she could without getting her feet wet.
‘Not yet. But she knows where I am, kind of.’
Ciara chuckled. ‘Do you even know where you are?’
‘No idea.’
That last day in the city had yet to find its focus. It was though Mina’s mind had intentionally flicked a switch; some failsafe to keep her from revisiting those horrors before eventually there’d be no way to escape them.
They’re everywhere. They’ve been watching you.
Madeline’s eyes – once so stark and secretive – had burned with an eerie uncertainty as she’d gripped Mina by the shoulders, seeming in that second more human than ever before. For the first time, the woman looked terrified, and Mina remembered the feel of her long fingers trembling like tender, windswept stems.
She still couldn’t cleanse her dreams of the sight of them, watching her in broad daylight, breaking the one rule that she’d learned to live by. As Madeline had told her once – they were leaner and they were longer. But on that street, standing amidst the unknowing crowd, they were also so terrifyingly convincing. It was as though they wanted to be seen. Worse still, Mina was sure that one of them had smiled at her; the slyest curl of the lip, so effortlessly sinister, as if they had perfected it – the face, its form and utility.
Madeline had raised back her shoulders, standing tall so as to shield Mina in the shelter of her shadow. It was jarringly uncanny to meet her in the eye, for they were Madeline’s; two jewels she knew so well, set into a different face.
‘Mina,’ she’d snapped, drawing her closer, making sure the message delivered, ‘You can’t stay here.’
Words were vague, soundless letters in Mina’s mind. Her mouth opened, but it was more likely to expel the contents of her stomach than anything resembling sense.
‘I don’t know how many there are,’ Madeline said, peering back over her shoulder. ‘They’ve been following you.’
‘How did they…’ was all she managed to utter before her jaw tensed up.
‘How did they what, Mina?’
‘Find me?’
‘It doesn’t matter. You need to leave the city now.’ 

Check out the first book!!

A. M. Shine is an author of Literary Horror from the west of Ireland. It was there that at a young age he discovered a passion for classic horror stories, and where he received his Masters in history, before ultimately sharpening his quill to pursue a life devoted to all things literary and macabre. His writing is inspired by the trinity of horror, history, and superstition, and he has tormented, toyed with, and tortured more characters than he will ever confess to.

To learn more about A. M. Shine and his books, visit his website. You can also find him on Goodreads, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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