Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is an urban fantasy story with quite some mythology and an interesting set up. Not wanting to pass on into the afterlife, a group of Bikers travel through America, some incomprehensible feeling softly guiding them to were they need to go. But despite their companionship the need to mingle with the living is still there and when Alexis does just that and meets Lauren, a hot biker girl, her afterlife gets quite a bit more complicated.

This story is quite hard to understand at first, but in the end it will make a bit more sense. The mythology is only explained quite late, which made it hard for me to keep up at times. There was a lot of talk about an itch (the urge to find the place where something will happen) and the grey (a special after-life place where the chosen bikers spend some of their time), but it takes quite some time to actually understand what these things are about and how they quite work. I definitely wish there had been some more world building.

Alexia is an interesting character and her fellow bikers are also quite well portrayed. I also liked Lauren and even though I know very little about bikes, the descriptions were quite nice and I enjoyed reading it.

I didn't necessarily like the lack of information and the speculative fiction part didn't always work that well for me, but it was still interesting. There was also some parts were Lauren describes her sexual activity, calling herself a d*ke, yet she likes to sleep with men and they were quite crude and I didn't like them at all. Especially since the author is male I wasn't at all comfortable with the way these things were described.

Overall I found the story nice, but it didn't really work for me that well.

Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Love and Latkes is a short story about a man who seems to be following Murphy’s Law perfectly. His apartment is old, his breakfast yogurt had gone off, his neighbor keeps falling asleep in the bathtub causing it to overflow and leaking into his, his car is broken after a hit-and-run and as if things couldn’t get worse, he is also fired that day. But thankfully he has got a good friend, David whose currently pregnant and invited him to stay with him and his husband until he manages to get back onto his feet again. And maybe his life will finally start to take a positive turn during Hanukah.

Allen is a character you just can’t help but feel sorry for. His entire life seems to work against him and nothing he does works out for him.

I absolutely adored the side-plot featuring David, a pregnant transman, and his husband Ahmed. Generally, the diversity in this book was quite well done and I enjoyed it.

I also enjoyed the Hanukah parts of the story and while it was not the most important part of the story it still played a nice role.

However especially the beginning felt forced and over the top and since it wasn’t really fleshed out it was just bad event after bad event in a nearly comical manner. I have the same problem with the main romance, I didn’t really see that much of a connection between Lana and Allen as it all happened really fast and was not given much depth. The story could have been way better if it had been fleshed out a bit more.

All in all it was still an enjoyable read though and there are some really nice scenes. If the author would ever decide to turn this novella into something a bit longer, I’m sure I would enjoy it a lot.

Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

First off all I want to start this off by saying that I am a member of the LGBT+ community and raised Catholic. I'm also not American, so I can generally not really relate to the evangelical us-centrist point of this book.

While this book is nothing new (or at least not for me, as I already have read about some people trying to "unclobber" these passages f.e. in Matthew Vines - God and the Gay Christian or Fr. Shannon T.L. Kearns - Queer Theology) it is still kind of interesting since it came from the viewpoint of an ally christian. Especially from the viewpoint of one that did not personally know any LGBT+ people when he realized that maybe his church's treatment of them was wrong.

UnClobber is actually two books in one. One part of the book dissects the clobber passages in the bible and shows while pointing to mistranslations or different interpretations logically and clear why the bible does not actually condemn LGB(T)+ people in monogamous same-gender relationships. The arguments are logically sound and biblically grounded, and they are definitely a good starting point for Christians who are wondering about what the Bible says about LGBT+ people. However they are not necessarily comprehensive enough to convince people who disagree heavily with Colby Martin.
The second part of the book shows Martin's journey from questioning to fully affirmative pastor, his struggles with a church where he was excluded for not condemning LGBT+ people, finding an affirmative church and finally opening his own church that's affirmative and very centered in Evangelism.
These two stories are written very accessible and understandable. However I am not very comfortable with Martin using words like "coming out" or other terms that are heavily associated with the LGBT+ movement. I can see what he's trying to achieve there and while his struggles as an affirmative Christian are definitely real, they are not comparable to the struggles of LGBT+ people, especially those of us who are religious.

Despite my problems with it is definitely an important book and I hope that unsure Christians can find a good starting point there.

Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Disclaimer II: I'm a cis girl, so I do not experience transphobia like Trin or Alex do.

Outside the lines has an interesting premise. Alex is a young social worker in training, who works for a local LGBT homeless shelter, while he finishes his education. He finds a scared teenager with no name on the street and decides to take them to the shelter with him. That person chooses Socks as their name as they just got a pair of socks from the shelter. With lots of care Alex slowly manages to coax Socks out of their shell, but when Socks turns 18, Alex turns them away, not wanting to live with them, and they loose contact. When they meet again Socks has changed their name to Trinity, the name of the youth shelter. Some things are different, but not all. They slowly have to find their way back to each other again.

Socks'/Trin's history is definitely hard to stomach. They were abused as child and there is a quite detailed description of that later on in the book. There is also a little girl who was also sexually abused, so if this triggers you please stay away from this book. There is also an age gap of 9 years between Trin and Alex, but they only get involved after Trin turned 24.

The story was incredibly sweet and I loved the beginning and the end, however I have quite a lot of problems with the fact that most of Trin's adolescent years in the youth shelter and their time in college were simply skipped with only a few moments shown. But ten years past and we got barely any insight in them. This annoyed me a bit, especially since we have chapters from Trin's point of view, so it really confused me that this was just left out. It also felt quite jarring, as I would have loved to get to know more about the characters and how they grew close. Left like this it felt very rushed and the character didn't really get as developed as I had hoped.
Despite this, the reunion of Trin and Alex was great. I loved that Trin found someone who loved them, even though their romance was great rushed,

Spoiler

after their second date and their first time being intimate, they already decided to move in with each other, including Trin's roommate Andy, and a patient of Alex.

I loved the incredible diversity in this book with Alex, a gay man, Trin, a bisexual nonbinary person and Andy, a pansexual transguy. This story is incredible diverse in this matter and I loved it.

In the end I did enjoy the story quite a bit, but I would have loved for it to be extended. As the story wasn't that long I'm sure that could have been done, but it was still a lovely novel.

Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Actually 3.5 Stars

This story is about family and dealing with your past. Katya has a lot of that to do. Growing up her father was a renowned pest-exterminator, but not a good person. Still she decided to follow into his footsteps, but instead of killing the insects she captures and relocated them. She thought she was done with her past, that she had dealt with it (mostly at least), but her childhood days still haunt her. Nineveh, a luxury estate in work, has been invaded by the mysterious "gogga" (an afrikaans word for all types of insects and bugs). This insect however knows how to make itself rare and on her search for the insect, Katya has to search her past as well.

While I've read a couple of books set in South Africa already, I've never read one about pest-extermination, nor about pest-relocation. This was definitely a very interesting book.

My first thought was that I really liked the cover and it fits the story nicely.

Katya is a fascinating main character. She is very complex and interesting. She hates change and is glad to have found a place to stay, after her father kept moving with his children when she was young. She prefers to be alone and doesn't have many attachments. Her house is bare. Her relationship with her sister is barely existent, the strongest bond they have is through Katya's nephew, who helps Katya with her work sometimes. She prefers insects over people. Because of this not much time is spent with human interaction and rather focused on her thoughts, feelings and discoveries of her past (for example that her father, who she as kid just thought of as strikt, was actually abusive towards her sister and her.)
At times this was too much for me and took away from my enjoyment of the book. However Rose-Innes built a fascinating world with lovely landscapes, so I could enjoy it. I normally don't mind character centric stories but in this case it sometimes felt too much. There also were some scenes that dragged quite a bit, so despite it being a very short book I took a while to read it (and even longer to writer this review). The characters however stayed with me and the writing was truly wonderful.

Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Actual rating is 1.5 Stars


I honestly don't know where to begin. I guess I'll start with the few positive parts?

I love the fact that this story is set in Mexico. I also enjoy the mixed-in spanish and the descriptions of Mexico. Alex' deafness plays a huge part in her story, which is great. She often has to ask Colton to speak slower so she can actually read his lips. Her deafness is never forgotten, but she manages to make a DJ career despite it. She is definitely a strong fighter girl, who won't let the world get her down and I loved it. Her storyline was definitely the most interesting one, and her character the most fascinating one, I really enjoyed her. Even the estranged rich overprotective father-route was interesting and the ending is lovely.

But I disliked the rest of the story. I disliked the lesbophobia, that came with Miranda's storyline. No scratch that, I hated it. A lot. You see, Miranda is Colton's high school crush, but when he finally asks her, it turns out she in love with someone else. And not just anyone else, no, she's in love with Chloe, the hot blonde cheerleader. This breaks Colton's heart, but he still agrees to bring her Miranda's letter in which she confessed her love. Nice, right? Lesbian girls exist after all... or not. Because after her first date with Chloe she realizes that she's actually the straightest. Very straight. Hardcore straight. Straight as fuck. One kiss told her all that, after ages of wanting to be with her. Now she wants to be with Colton. But oh no, he's on his way to a holiday in Mexico. She immediately hates him. And this continues. She loves him, she tells him he's the best, she tells him she thinks of him as a brother, she loves him, he can die. Throughout. the. entire. novel. She is literally the most annoying, stupid and pointless character's I've ever read about. She's only there to cause strive between Alex and Colton and to be sexualized by Coltons vato, Martin, because of course, two girls in love are only good if they can be seen as hot.

This brings me to Martin. He's the mexican player, dark-skinned, tall and good-looking (unlike pale, blonde, not-hot main character which he constantly emphasised, at least until all the girls are literally falling all over him, bc he is so good-looking *yawns*), but he's also really gross. I hate the way he talked about girls, especially about Miranda and Chloe. He has a bit of character development and yes, of course, he's only 17, 17-year-old boys can be really gross, but I found his behaviour really annoying.

Then there's the instalove between Alex and Colton. On their first meeting he can't think about how hot she is (after he thought she was a guy and was terrified at the prospect of a guy giving him a kiss on the cheek, bc yes, there is latent homophobia a lot in the beginning of the novel!), after spending two days with her he already loves her, but he can't act on it because her father has forbidden it.

I also found a few phrases quite weird ("he says no with his head." is this some slang I don't know or just a weird, convoluted way of saying somebody shook their head?) Anyway I found it really weird.

The DJ parts at least where quite interesting and well done, Alex really deserved her ending, but sadly I couldn't connect with any of the character's except her.

Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

When I requested this book I was instantly intrigued. A lady's maid/mistress relationship set in England just before WWII sounded interesting. However the story let me down quite a bit.

Hester is a maid with big dreams. When she gets her first job as the maid of Lucy, the daughter of the Fitzmartins, she can already see herself climbing the social ladder and traveling the world with her mistress. Now the Fitzmartins are not the family she would choose for this, as they are relatively poor and unable to finance the travels Hester dreams of. She decides to work for Lucy for a couple of years and then leave for better employment. But then she falls in love with Lucy and the two girls start a secret affair. All could be well. But the rise of fascism and Lucy's interest in them could easily tear the two girls apart.

Lucy is a rich Lady, living on her family's estate, but also earning her own money with journalism. She is, however, not interested in writing about garden party's as the newspaper's expect her to. She would much rather write for the Blackshirts' or support Herr Eugen von Frenzel, a german archaeologist, in his attempts to forge a union between Germany and England in order to prevent a war.

While I found the premise very interesting, the story dragged a lot. For it's length actually very little seemed to be going on, which is sad. There are also a bunch of grammar mistakes. Plus in the e-copy that I received most of the punctuation marks were missing, which made it really hard to read at time, but I didn't count that towards my rating. However I could see that if there had been quotation marks, a lot of the punctuation would have been placed outside of it as there were a lot of empty spaces between the end of a sentence and the punctuation.

The politics of the story are interesting and very well researched, as is the rest of the novel. You really feel as if you're experiencing it. You can also see that Fielding is definitely passionate about this time and did a lot of research.

Lucy fascinated and repelled me both, she was definitely an interesting character, but a very terrifying one too (especially in times like these). I really liked Hester though, even if she choose the rose-tinted glasses a lot due to being so in love. Their relationship was very interesting, sweet at first and growing more and more bitter towards the end.

I enjoyed the storyline a lot, but I also had some problems with it, mainly the weird and abrupt jumps in time and point of view which made it hard to follow the story. They bothered me a lot and I had to reread sequences to realize what was going on.

I found Lucy's villain story interesting and I like stories about what might make a woman a villain, but sadly this story did not convince me in the end.