A loose retelling of Beauty and the Beast, A COURT OF THORNS AND ROSES is set in a land where humans and faeries have been at odds for centuries. After years of barely scraping by with her family, Feyre finds herself taken captive by High Lord Tamlin, and in order to free herself she is forced to explore the dark secrets of the faerie world while trying not to fall in love with her captor.

I feel like every review of Maas' books starts something like "I know this isn't fancy literary fiction" or whatever and I have to say WHO CARES? This book is great! It's been awhile since I've read any high fantasy and I'd forgotten how much fun it can be to lose yourself in a world. Prythian is fully populated but not too complex for casual reading. Amarantha is a great, excellently hateable villain. And the riddles and trials are clever and exciting.

Shalini, a young woman from Bangalore, feels lost following her mother's death. She decides to abandon her life to travel to Kashmir and search out a traveling salesman who once had a tumultuous relationship with her mother when Shalini was a child.

Even if you, like me, know only the vague details of Indian politics, THE FAR FIELD is a gripping, gorgeous read full of complicated, frustrating characters battling a range of issues both within and outside their control.

The book is in no hurry to take us through Shalini's journey, but the masterful way Vijay unspools the plot - through the converging timelines of Shalini's childhood and her current day - kept me turning the pages.

I think many readers will find Shalini infuriating. She's a privileged woman who barges into the lives of strangers who are just trying to get through the day and stay alive, and she stays almost completely unaware of this through the majority of the book. She's essentially trying to Eat Pray Love her way through a war zone. She makes terrible decisions and has a lot of obviously unfinished business with herself and her mother, and yet I continued to hold out hope that things would click into place for her. Whether they did or not...come talk to me in the comments if you've read it!

Thanks to Ecco Books for the free copy of this book.

Katherine is a young mathematician who has struggled her whole life to be taken seriously as a woman of color in her field. While attempting to solve a famous theorem, she travels not only across Europe but through her own mysterious family history, discovering secrets buried in wars and links across generations of women.

THE TENTH MUSE is a story about the many kinds of love - love for family, for work, for friends, for romantic partners, for yourself. And about how women are forced to choose between them, or sometimes given no choices at all. It's about a woman trying to carve out her own place in a world that isn't sure it wants her, that keeps shifting around her.

Please don't let the idea that this book is math-based scare you away from it. You don't need to know anything about any kind of math, and I want all of you to read this book. It is so beautiful and so heartbreaking. I felt literal, physical pain when THE THING happened with Peter.

I feel like I can't adequately explain it - it's just one of those books I want to clutch to my chest while also pushing it into everyone's hands.

The fourth book in Parker’s London Celebrities series, THE AUSTEN PLAYBOOK features Freddy, a theater ingenue trying to make her own name apart from her family’s storied West End history. When she’s cast in a play being staged at the estate of London’s most notorious theater critic, sparks and secrets fly.

This is one of my favorite romance series and I think THE AUSTEN PLAYBOOK blows the other books in the series out of the water. It’s a similar setup - young woman looking to be seen for who she is falls for grumpy older man - but everything is balanced just right. He isn’t too grumpy, she isn’t too flighty. They get to know each other! With conversations! The plot tension comes from outside forces rather than a will-they-won’t-they or a series of miscommunications.

And I desperately want to see this play! All of Austen’s characters thrown into a murder mystery and the audience votes on how the plot proceeds, choose your own adventure style? Sign me up!

The romance itself is practically a secondary plot in this book, but the story of family secrets everything is built on is good enough to stand on its own.

Available April 22, 2019. Thanks to Harlequin and Carina Press for the free advance copy.

MRS. MARTIN'S INCOMPARABLE ADVENTURE is a novella within Courtney Milan's THE WORTH SAGA series. It stars Bertrice and Violetta, two single, older women who are brought together when Violetta seeks Bertrice's assistance in exacting revenge on Mr. Cappish, aka Bertrice's terrible nephew and Violetta's tenant.

This novella is sweet and funny. For such a short story, it really gets into fine-grain details about class and gender. Often in historical novels the varying social pressures are talked around, while in this book, Bertrice and Violetta hash them out directly, given that Violetta is working class and Bertrice is extremely wealthy.

Also, did I mention that not only is this a f/f romance, but they are both elderly women? Even as someone decades younger than these characters, I can already relate to the feelings of being overlooked and underestimated due to my age and gender.

I think there's no need to have read the other WORTH SAGA books if this one piques your interest, and you can certainly read it in one sitting if you want a cheerful story about taking back some power.

DOPESICK traces the course of America's opioid epidemic from its origins in Appalachian factory and coal towns to a full-blown nationwide crisis. The bulk of the book is about how one dealer in Virginia led to an explosion of heroin addicts in the region, but the narrative branches in many directions, showing the reader the vastness of the problem, how it began, and how activists and doctors hope to end it.

Although this book was only released in 2018, since its publication much of the information in it has become public knowledge. So, while I wasn't particularly shocked by the stories of many of the addicts (though that may also be due to my own familiarity with Roanoke, Virginia, as I went to college there and in fact share an alma mater with the author), I still feel like I gained a better understanding of the crisis' underlying causes.

As laid out in the book, a major roadblock to reversing this crisis is a lack of public understanding about how addiction works on a chemical level. Before reading this book, I only had a vague understanding of withdrawal symptoms, but wasn't really aware that so many long-term users aren't really chasing a high anymore, but rather simply trying to avoid dopesickness.

DOPESICK also shows us the gaps in the medical and law enforcement systems when it comes to intervening and caring for addicts, and how so many private, for-profit companies have popped up to fill those gaps - if you have the cash. Even if an addict and their support network are ready to submit to the current best standards of care, the average user is probably not able to afford the treatment, especially not for the long run, and we're right back where we started.

In THICK: AND OTHER ESSAYS, writer and professor Tressie McMillan Cottom dives into a series of topics concerning black womanhood in America, ranging from healthcare to op eds to R. Kelly. Each essay is deeply researched while remaining razor sharp and readable: there's no dry dissertation-style writing here.

I, like many, first encountered Dr. McMillan Cottom on Twitter, and her blend of internet instant takes and thoughtful academic musings are perfectly showcased in THICK. She uses her personal experiences to set the framework for each essay, then filling them in with extensive data and other anecdotes.

Many of these topics we've seen covered by other writers, but here, they've each got an angle that made me think about them from perspectives I hadn't seen before. I'll never know what it's like to try to move through the world as a black woman, but THICK has helped me gain a better understanding of these women's experiences.