lilibetbombshell's Reviews (2.79k)

And just like that my day is made better by one of Tea Ravine’s omegaverse romances. You’d be surprised how often that happens (or maybe not?). 

Break the Ice is the latest installment in the interconnected series of When it Raines Omegaverse books, centered around the mysterious hockey players, Raider Raines. I’d say you don’t need to read the previous books to understand this one, but you really do, including the series prequel, Spare the Bond. 

Tea’s books never fail to hit the sweet spot in every way I love an omegaverse romance to do: there’s trauma, heightened emotions, fascinating and interesting characters (both main and supporting), villains worth hating, a lot of great character work, swoon-worthy love stories that make me really dopey, and tons of spicy scenes that hit all of my buttons. Break the Ice is no different, with an FMC running from numerous demons, a pack only being held loosely together, a supportive hockey team with a questionable coach, a precarious relationship with the rest of the Raines family, a truly sinister villain working in the background, and there is red rope involved people. Heck yeah. 

As always, check the TW/CWs in the front matter of the book prior to reading, Take care of yourselves. 

🩶What to Expect🩶

🍒 No omegas

💣 A flight-risk FMC who can defend herself

🍒 An alpha who’d rather not be an alpha who designs & makes clothing

💣 Alphas with PTSD

🍒 Hockey alphas

💣 Stalker villain

🍒 Bullying of an alpha in the past & by outsiders

💣 It’s Us vs. Them

🍒 Drunk yoga

💣 So much trauma. So much. 

🍒 They fell first

💣 “I’d give up everything for you” vibes

🍒 Polyamorous pack

💣 Suspension hook!

🍒 Bonding

I was provided a copy of this title by the author. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: Book Series/Found Family/Kindle Unlimited/Kink Friendly/LGBTQ Romance/Omegaverse Romance/Polyamorous Romance/Spice Level 3/Sports Romance/Why Choose Romance

Good idea. Poor execution. 

This book means a lot to me, personally, for I am a geographer. No, seriously! My college degree is in geography. This book makes my heart soar just for existing and it made me so happy to read it because Gabriel and Elodie really do represent the two distinct sides of who geographers are: data-driven and empirical (Gabriel), and yet constantly driven to just explore what’s on the other side of that hill (Elodie). 

There’s magical mayhem, panicking accountants, disaster-making colleagues, poetry-spouting Humanities students, an angry goat, disgruntled Welshmen, a great many catastrophes, and kissing in the rain among what is sometimes a madcap (and sometimes an absolute boondoggle) race to find out the source of this magical disaster and fix it before it can’t be fixed. It made me giggle and smile and I loved the sweetness. 4⭐️

🩶What to Expect🩶

🍒 Grumpy/Sunshine

💣 Work Rivals

🍒 They’re both geography professors!

💣 Marriage of Convenience…gone wrong

🍒 Second Chance Romance

💣 Forced Proximity

🍒 Only One Bed

💣 Getting caught in the rain

🍒 Camping in the wild

💣 We don’t pine we’re British 

🍒 Kidding–So much pining

💣 Workplace misogyny (not MMC, typical of the time)

I was provided a copy of this title by the author and publisher via Netgalley. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: Action-Adventure/Folk Fantasy/Historical Fantasy/Historical Romance/Rom Com

I’ve been pining away for this book since I finished The Tainted Cup last year and of course it didn’t disappoint. Sophomore novels in an ongoing book series are not the easiest task to complete and stick the landing, but Jackson Bennett makes it look easy. 

A Drop of Corruption runs about fifty pages longer than The Tainted Cup, and I suspect it’s because ADoC has to do the double duty of intense character work on Ana and Din as well as the intricate plot work involving a murdered Treasury officer, government secrets, and a shadowy opponent who confounds Ana at almost every turn. Since Din is our main protagonist, we are always privy to his characterization developments, which shift and evolve as the plot builds and the story unfolds; but Ana’s evolution as a character is driven almost harshly by the plot and worldbuilding, like she’s being backed into a corner. They’re both put through the wringer, physically. Emotionally? Well, it’s always a little hard to tell with Ana. With Din, though? He has some revelations. 

The plot looks straightforward, but as the book goes on there is just layer after layer and the whole puzzle becomes more and more complicated. For every problem solved, three more become apparent. The thing is? I found the whole book really predictable but didn’t care. I guessed plot points hundreds of pages ahead of time. Still didn’t care. I was having far too much fun with Ana and Din and loving the journey so much I couldn’t care less if I knew how the story would end. That’s how good this book is. 5⭐️

I was provided a copy of this title by the author and publisher via Netgalley. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: 5 Stars Review/Action-Adventure/Adult Fantasy/Body Horror/Book Series/Dark Fantasy/Fantasy/Fantasy Series/LGBTQ Fantasy/Mystery/Political Fantasy

An exploration of intergenerational violence, toxic masculinity, maternal enabling, domestic violence, making excuses, and reasons why women don’t just leave, Sour Cherry seeks to ask what makes a man a monster, and how can we stop it from happening?

This book is fast-paced, a long and complicated story being conveyed from mother to child in the cramped confines of their home as they wait for help to come. They have limited time and the mother has so much to tell her young boy. It’s the story of all of the generations of men that have come before him, although she wants to conceal that fact from him. She just wants her boy to break the cycle. To not be like his father, or like any of the men of the line before him. So this story is told furtively, just between the two of them, along with the ghosts of the past. This adds a deliciously spooky appeal to both the storytelling and the overall story and a gothic feel with the claustrophobia and isolation. That isolation is echoed in the story the mother is telling, full of lonely, rotting, crumbling mansions and desperate, innumerable wives to the same line of violent men. 

This was so interesting I plowed right through it, even though I thought I might have a hard time with the writing style at first. I got over it quickly with the lovely prose and inventive story format. I came for the thought this would be weird girl lit but I stayed because it turned out to be sad girl lit with some ghost girl thrown in for good measure. 4⭐️

I was provided a copy of this title by the author and publisher via Netgalley. All thoughts, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you. 

File Under: Folklore Retelling/Ghost Fiction/Gothic Fiction/Literary Fiction/Magical Realism

The Notorious Virtues is probably the most promising new fantasy series starter novel I’ve read yet this year. It hooks you quickly with an engaging start, becomes a touch patchy for just a tiny bit, but then it takes off and I was having such a fun time reading this book I didn’t stop until far after I usually stop ARC reading for the day and picked it up again much sooner than I usually do this morning because I was eager to find out how it ended. Now I’ve got that familiar feeling: I need the next book right now. 

Had I known before I opened this book that it took place in a 1930s-ish setting, I would’ve been even more eager to read it. Had I known about the “My Girl Friday”-esque banter between former heiress-to-be Nora Holtzfall and reporter August Wolffe, I would’ve been so excited. Had I known about the awful nuns I would’ve been so happy to get to this book. And had I known just how seriously author Alwyn Hamilton was going to take the bourgeois versus proletariat debate in this book I certainly wouldn’t have just picked this book up before the others because of the page count. All of that, combined with the worldbuilding, makes this book an irresistible treat. 4⭐️

I was provided a copy of this title by the author and publisher via Netgalley. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: Book Series/Fantasy/Fantasy Series/Political Fantasy/Thriller/Urban Fantasy/YA Book Series/YA Fantasy/YA Fiction

One of the many things I love about MK Lobb is that she knows how to do enemies to lovers right. Her main characters are most assuredly fierce enemies at the beginning of these stories–the kind that will screw you over without blinking. They fight things like caring tooth and nail. The romance? It burns slow. Very slow. The attraction burns faster, but sometimes you can’t help who makes you hot. 

Anger is at the center of every interaction and every page of To Steal From Thieves, which may be a very fun read but is also a book that seethes with injustice. A fantastical story set in an alternative history surrounding the 1851 Great Exhibition that took place in London, its root plot is a jewel heist. I’m a sucker for heist plots, especially those involving jewels. It reminds me of gentleman thieves and slick female cat burglars who can navigate complex traps to get their prize. The jewel heist in TSFT is more about survival and less about pretty shiny stones, though, in a time when so many Londoners were unhoused, starving, and in debt to gangsters. Our two main characters, Kane and Zaria, each have something to live for and something worth dying for. This heist is the key to a freedom of sorts. 

Lobb never scrimps on worldbuilding, and with so many real-world details to get exactly right to match up with the overlaid fantasy world, I was so happy to see just how intensive and accurate it got (if you can spot the Karl Marx cameo, you deserve a cookie!). The magic system seems to be some sort of fictional cousin to alchemy but is no less fascinating, and is explained rather well without dumping information on the reader. 

I’m glad I knew going in this was going to be a duology, because as I approached 80% I felt the pressure of a turn coming, and I wasn’t ready. I can’t wait for the sequel. 4⭐️

I was provided a copy of this title by the author and publisher via Netgalley. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: Action Adventure/Duology/Disability Rep/Fantasy/Romantasy/YA Fiction/YA Fantasy/YA Romantasy

I loved this. Loved it. I haven’t read a memoir I felt as compulsively readable as this in a long while. 

Hannah Selinger wrote this book to invite us behind the curtain during the 2000s, when celebrity chefs were everything and the fine dining scene was exploding across the country. A Gen Xer like myself, Selinger thought she would work at night and write by day, because wouldn’t that be the dream? But being single, living in New York, working late nights at busy restaurants, and then going out for drinks with coworkers after shifts isn’t exactly conducive to any kind of morning wake-up call so you can spend some time at the laptop writing. It’s a cycle that sucks you in. 

I didn’t need to read this book to know that you can love the restaurant industry all you like but it’ll never love you back; heck, the service industry at large is like that. Heck, being a wife and mother can feel like that. Service of any kind can feel like that. But the pressure of the restaurant industry is a whole different machine. Selinger writes about her experiences with the kind of candor that only comes from someone who either has nothing left to lose or the kind of confidence that only comes from someone who has zero effs to give. I’m betting on the latter. 

The writing here is witty, honest, emotional, thought-provoking, and deliciously descriptive. I don’t like wine, but I could read Hannah Selinger writing about it for an entire book, I think. 5⭐️

I was provided a copy of this title by the author and publisher via NetGalley. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: 5 Star Review/Autobiography/Memoir