As beautiful in book form as it is in film. This book does a lot of background work and gives us POVs that makes some characters more likable and others more terrible. I think it captures a lot of what the film said in words the film couldn't. Also I just love women falling in love with monsters where the monsters are metaphors for marginalized people, particularly when there are other marginalized people in the story to drive the point that what makes us human is kindness, not violence. Del Torro is just *chefs kiss* honestly.

This book felt like a warm blanket. I needed it right now. I needed a young Russian Jewish girl discovering magic and friendship and home. I needed the hope that covers these pages, I needed the adventure that talks about loving others different from ourselves. This book makes my heart leap! I adore it so much. I might do a longer review of it later but it is just SOOOOO good. 

A longer review can be found here: https://bookedwithgrace.wordpress.com/2021/02/25/its-all-fun-and-games-until-it-isnt-in-the-thursday-murder-club/

Oh I just LOVE this. It is a great mix of funny and heart wrenching and cleaver. I was shook by the ending and I loved all the different trails the story took and how each plot resolved. It was such a solidly built story from start to finish. I want to read ten more of these. It felt like watching a really solid british mystery series which I guess is mostly what this is!

Have I mentioned how much I love K.J. Charles lately?? I'm such a big fan! She does great job of combining romance, mystery, and action. She builds great characters and even better worlds for those characters to play in. I may post a longer review later but for now please please just read this series!!!

Oof. I really didn't care for this one. Maybe it's because I grew up with a sibling who suffers from schizophrenia and has been told he can "pray it away" or maybe it's the overly descriptive vomit scenes or maybe it's that the writing isn't fantastic but it is more likely a combination of all of these and a plot that didn't do it for me. This is probably trying to say a lot more about how mental illness is vilified in the Catholic Church but it doesn't do so successfully.  I wanted a good spooky possession story but this one wasn't it.

I think I'm gonna let myself think on this more before I go too deep into a review. I liked most of it, thought it is particularly hard to read in the wake of the events of Jan. 6th 2021. I was literally in the middle of this book when the storming of the capital happened so you can imagine the emotional whiplash. There was a lot of interesting things in here and I really liked the parts that let us see into his family and personal life. I also appreciated some of the things he admitted about US military involvement over the decades. I thought there were places where it dragged and IDK how he can write so calmly about so much horrible racist shit, tbh. But beyond that... I wanted to like this a lot more than I did and I think that I need to think about why.

Find my full review here: https://bookedwithgrace.wordpress.com/2021/02/11/surviving-and-thriving-in-a-game-of-fox-and-squirrels/

This is a cute story with some interesting characters. I'm a sucker for "sex first, catch feelings later" which this one does nicely. I liked the secondary characters a lot but the leads were interesting as well. I thought the plot got kind of stale in the middle there and the ending went on a little too long. I also took off points because I really hate conflict that arrives only so long as the characters don't talk to each other about things they could just as easily solve with a simple conversation. Very "Bridgerton but make it gay" so there's that going for it. Overall I liked it I just didn't love it. So far no one is able to beat K.J. Charles for historical queer romance for me. Except, maybe, Olivia Waite...

So I've discovered that "Indigenous Horror" is high on my list of favorite genres. This is only the second one I've read but I am FULLY obsessed with it. This story had so many interesting things to say about: race, white supremacy, forced religious conversion, love, family, and more. The only reason it isn't a five star for me is that I thought some of the character work was a little weak (which is a criticism I've had of this particular author before). The world building, the tense, the horror aspect, all of that worked really well for this story. So much of it hit for me and left me breathless. It could have been a littttle stronger on the horror elements, too, but I loved what there was. 

Simple, beautiful, powerful. A reminder to young people that the horrible things their parents have done, that the history of racism that exists, can end with them. And a reminder to adults to do better, to be the change we want to see in the world so that the next generation may benefit.