yourbookishbff's Reviews (650)

I really enjoyed a lot in this series set-up - the meet-cute is epically hilarious (and historically authentic apparently?! incredible), and the female main character, Lady Nora, is excellent. Our male main character, Julius, was very meh for me. I love reformed rake stories, but this rake, for all his "let your actions speak for you," acted in some really absurd ways that I still can't quite make sense of. He spends a lot of on-page time with a former mistress, and while I love that Shupe isn't using the "Other Woman" as a villain, nor is she leaning too hard into creating jealousy or a love triangle, it ultimately feels unresolved and annoying. Love declarations arise out of some big third act drama and leave a pretty valid conflict unaddressed entirely, and while I think we're meant to just assume it's all fine, I'm a suspicious (and jealous) water sign who would like characters to say the thing on page if they really mean it. Therefore, points deducted for lack of explicit declaration of fidelity from Julius. Nora is perfect, no notes for her.

Well this was adorable. This is a one-night-stand-becomes-more romance that uses accidental pregnancy as the entire premise for the story (rather than as a third act conflict, where it typically finds itself). I loved this set-up, because it's clear as we get to know our two main characters, Win (Winifred) and Bo (Robert), that only an act of the universe this cataclysmic would have enabled them to choose each other at the start, when both of them are coming out of deeply traumatic life experiences and/or relationships. Their meet-cute is one of my all-time favorites, and their cozy lovers-to-roommates-to-lovers arc is so focused on the everyday moments of growing close to another person and learning how to partner with someone. This is really low-conflict (no third act breakup!) and normally that would be tough for me, but it felt really *right* for these two characters, who have so much off-page/backstory trauma that I just wanted them to be happily-ever-after from page 50. 

I read the newly released trade paperback, and I am so grateful it included the author's detailed note and content warnings at the start, particularly for a few of the heavier backstories involving suicide and cancer. Both main characters are disabled (Win was born with a limb difference and Bo had an amputation as part of his cancer treatment), and their interactions with each other provide so much affirmation and accessibility and intimacy and care. This book handled darkness with tenderness for both character and reader, and it ultimately felt safe all the way through. 

This is an excellent follow-up and expansion on the essays included in Disability Visibility. Where Disability Visibility expanded my understanding of disability justice, accessibility, and ableism, Disability Intimacy expanded my understanding of being disabled, living in community with disabled and non-disabled folks, and the many ways we experience intimacy with ourselves and others. I was pleasantly surprised by how many essays featured those with "invisible" disabilities, like ADHD, and how many reflected on the points at which they considered themselves disabled. I've not considered if I have a place within the disability community since my OCD diagnosis, and these essays were compelling and affirming. The essays I know I will take with me, though, were those by disabled parents and caregivers. A parent soothing their toddler to the sleep with the sound of their C-Pap, reveling in rest and "laziness," a resource parent/foster parent caring for an infant, providing security and comfort to a new human and adapting infant care for greater accessibility. These essays were such beautiful reflections for this time in my life as a parent of young kids, and I am so grateful for them. 

This is a compelling and diverse anthology that allows us to witness and reflect on intimacy in many forms, and whether or not you've read Disability Visibility, I highly recommend it. As a note, the full-cast audio narration was excellent.

This was such a fun Hell's Belle's installment. MacLean is killing the prologues in this series! Adelaide's wedding day was just as unsettling and exciting and adventurous as Sesily's tour through the maze in Bombshell. This romance has so many elements I absolutely love - road trip, only-one-bed several times over (to quote the Duke of Clayborn, "there is a shocking lack of beds in this country"), class difference, secret pasts, injury caretaking/deathbed confessions, and women saving men repeatedly. Truly, in this series MacLean sets every single female main character up to be her own savior, and we know from page one that our women are more capable, competent and experienced than their male love interests - it's a DELIGHT. I also felt like the pacing in this one is perfect - at times, I get frustrated when MacLean's MMC's are convinced she is "not for them" because they aren't good enough (cue "mysterious backstory they won't tell us about"). The reveals in each character's backstory happen precisely when they need to, which meant it never felt overdone and the conflict didn't depend entirely on withheld information. Can't wait for Imogen's story in Knockout!

For readers who read Trujillo's debut, Lizards Hold the Sun, we're shifting focus within the Yellowbird family to Calehan's sister, Buffy. Set a few years after the conclusion to Lizards Hold the Sun, When Stars Have Teeth is set in San Francisco, where Buffy works as a grants writer for the Urban Indian Center. Buffy is the prickliest female main character I've read outside historical romance in a LONG time. Santiago, meanwhile, is an all-star golden retriever, absolutely the most patient, resilient, open-hearted male main character I've read. The two meet when Santiago brings his abuela to the Urban Indian Center for programming, meals and community.

What I love most when reading Trujillo's romances is how beautifully she weaves in cultural foods, language, family traditions and community work into her love stories. Her writing is atmospheric and highly descriptive, and I am reminded how little of this perspective exists in the romances I read. I'm so grateful she's bringing her stories to larger audiences and building happily-ever-afters for contemporary Indigenous characters.

I was also struck in this how vividly she depicts Buffy's mental illness. While Buffy is suffering from - what appears to be - chronic depression, and my own experience is centered in OCD and panic disorder, there were moments I felt gutted by how insightfully she depicts intrusive thoughts. This, in particular, will stay with me:

"In her mind, she wrote her thoughts along the windows and doors of the shops lining the street. Once the words were etched into the building and she walked past, she left the thought behind. Easier said than done, truthfully, but there were no rules about repeating your thoughts."

I've spent so many years trying to trick my mind into releasing upsetting thoughts, using visualization and a million compulsions to distract myself, and this image - writing thoughts along buildings to escape them as you walk away - felt so real to me, and speaks to how viscerally Trujillo writes Buffy's experience with depression and anxiety.

Buffy and Santiago's romance will feel really hot-and-cold to some readers, as Buffy struggles with what she wants and deserves. The pacing in the final third - where we begin to cover longer spans of time and the two make pretty big relationship jumps - reflects the big swings that Buffy and Santiago experience throughout their relationship. That said, it's a beautiful conclusion, and once again Trujillo keeps family and community support at the heart of the HEA.

More thoughts on mental health and prickly female main characters: Buffy reminds me a bit of the female main character in After Hours on Milagro Street by Angelina Lopez, in that both are terrified of emotional intimacy and insist on physical intimacy first, and both have complicated family relationships, significant grief and trauma, and a tendency to push people away for fear of being left. Where they diverge for me is in character development. I felt like After Hours on Milagro Street brings the reader into full understanding of the character's trauma and emotional needs, and I felt like we didn't quite make it there for Buffy. Some spoilery thoughts:

I was left wishing for more resolution for her outside the romantic relationship - her mother's death, chronic depression, fear of abandonment and anxiety are incredibly raw, and I didn't see how she had a path forward independently (I get nervous when the love interest IS that path). That said, I found Buffy's struggles with mental illness compelling and relatable - her fear of being too much for anyone to love, too exhausting to commit to, her sense of futility and explicit discussion of suicidal ideation (as a callback to her mother's death), are very real and I'm grateful that her character is given space to be sad and angry, particularly by Santiago. As a side note, readers who haven't read Lizards Hold the Sun may need more context on her mother's death, which gets more explanation in the first book.

Required reading for anyone working in healthcare or academia, this memoir traces decades of the Blackstock's family alongside centuries of systemic racism, weaving these two threads into a single, universal story of anti-Black racism and an urgent call to action. Blackstock shows us her journey through medical school, residency and fellowship, and particularly her point of crisis in academic medicine. We see her experiences of interpersonal racism with patients and colleagues alongside her gradually broadening awareness of just how significantly systemic racism is harming today's patients. She elegantly brings us in close - in one chapter, identifying three specific patients who changed the course of her career, and in another, contrasting two neighboring emergency rooms - before panning out so that we can see the whole picture, centuries of abuse and untrustworthiness in our healthcare system and in our society at large.

Beyond, even, the burdens of racism for patients, we see the burdens of racism for healthcare workers and physicians in Blackstock's story. This is most evident in her time at NYU, where she exists as one of only a handful of Black physicians - at a large, leading academic medical center in one of the country's most diverse cities. She is then burdened with diversity, equity and inclusion responsibilities, and her experience shouldering this underappreciated and under compensated role - at the expense of her physical and emotional health - and the resulting futility of the role itself and her work, is maddening to witness. This is the labor Black folks in professional settings dominated by white people face routinely, and she vulnerably shows the reader the burn out she and so many others are facing.

This is urgent, timely, and compelling all the way through, and I know it's rapidly expanded my own understanding of the layers of anti-Black racism in our healthcare system and the work required for equity.

This is my first by Louise Erdrich, and I know I'll read more. As beautifully written as it is devastating, this premise is dark - a mother is brutally raped and nearly murdered, escaping - just barely - with her life at the very start of our story. With the discovery of the crime, the lives of every person in her orbit shift radically. This is written in first-person through the perspective of her thirteen-year-old son, Joe, and you can feel in every scene how he teeters between childhood and adulthood, at times falling into silly Star Trek games and juvenile inside jokes with his best friends, and at others, resenting his parents for the fall-out from the crime as he tries to unravel the mystery himself. Joe's fears, anxieties, resentment, curiosity, and growing self-awareness are deeply painful to read as an adult, as we see the aging effect of childhood trauma and the ripples of the crime in every part of his life. 

Joe's personal liminality is reflected in Erdrich's depiction of life on the reservation. We take long detours through Catholicism and the local church and see the ways in which colonizing religions have influenced various people and families in their tribe, and we sense the disharmony of these traditions and their own. In the end, as Joe journeys toward revenge, he finds himself seeking reassurance and validation in both Catholic and Ojibwe tradition, alternately leaning on stories of Sins Crying out for Vengeance and the wiindigoo. Erdrich sets the crime itself in just such a liminal space - occurring, in part, within the Round House, a sacred space for the Ojibwe, but occurring in part at an intersection of tribal and "fee" lands. This liminality becomes the crux of the injustice in our story, and Erdrich shows us how the very real lack of sovereignty for Indigenous communities undermines their ability to protect themselves and their lands, and how it has specifically betrayed Indigenous victims of sexual violence.

There is so much that can be said about how Erdrich builds the narrative - the lack of quotation marks that give it a stream of consciousness feel at times, the storytelling woven throughout, the anecdotal detours, the wide cast of characters and the decision to confine the story to Joe's point of view. Altogether, these decisions create a world haunted by many ghosts, one in which we can see the ripples of action and inaction across people and generations, and one in which justice feels illusory. 

This is one of the purest Beauty and the Beast retellings I've ever read, and I absolutely loved it. A lonely only daughter to abusive older parents, Julia Wychwood is determined to escape the confines of her home, which has become an increasingly dangerous place for her. Captain Jasper Blunt, returned from The Crimea a feared (and morally bankrupt) war hero, is desperate to find an heiress to sustain his crumbling estate and support his three illegitimate children. While initially it is the convenience of their pairing that brings them together - a fortune in her dowry for him, and an isolated remove to the country, for her - they discover true kinship in each other. Their marriage of convenience quickly becomes complicated, though, and the specter of the captain's past and the machinations of Julia's scheming parents haunt them.

What I love most is how isolated the story feels - this is Gothic and introspective and wholly suited to both its source material and the Victorian-era London it depicts. There are so many wonderful homages to popular Victorian stories - several of which are referenced on page by the characters and in specific plot points by Matthews herself - and the novel feels like the story-within-a-story of a well-told fairy tale. Matthews is known for writing deeply romantic closed-door romances, and the tension and chemistry between these two is palpable all the way through. The central mystery - the captain's backstory - is deftly alluded to, so that the reader can piece together the available clues (including many from captain's inner monologue) before Julia can, increasing the dramatic irony for the reader as we watch Julia circle the truth of her new husband. With threats to never enter his secret tower room, entreaties to ignore his past and demands to ask no questions of him, our captain is a real Beast, soothed and secured by the persistent and trusting Belle of Belgrave Square. 

This is one I will easily recommend to any and all historical romance readers! I particularly enjoyed the audiobook's dual narration by Ell Potter (one of my very favorite narrators) and Sebastian Brown. 

A sweet "extra" that takes place before the events of Beguiling the Beauty, but is truly a bonus scene/flashback sequence for Beguiling the Beauty. Short and sweet and so earnest - I love Sherry's secondary love stories.

Perfect. No notes. Must be read after Tempting the Bride to fully appreciate what Sherry pulls off in 80 pages. A story within a story within a story that is wildly hot and deeply romantic.