For the first time, I did the Kobo Plus Read and Listen subscription, which presumably turns this from a K+ month to a K++ month. There’s some great audiobooks on there, including Murderbot, Gideon the Ninth and the Expanse. Aside from Guy Windsor, swordfighting guru for background research, I mostly read in the historical/fantasy/horror genres, as well as a few good non-fics. Straight to it: ## _Fiction_ ### The Boy Bride by AJ Demas Lill’s an assassin sent to kill a warlord by posing as his bride, but the world he finds on the other side of the fortress wall is very different to what he imagined. I tried very hard to wait to read this until 30 September so I could binge both books back-to-back. Of course, I failed. This manages to be both darker than Demas’s usual fare (both MCs have the usual past trauma, but one of the MC is an actual warlord, he has done actual warlord stuff, including sexual assault) and yet still have her trademark lovely, warm, charming feel, excellent worldbuilding/sense of place and things not going quite how you might expect. In particular, the found-family vibe of the characters in their little makeshift village was beautiful, and I loved the slow dance of the two MCs circling each other and getting closer and closer. And I of course read the second book the instant it came out and loved it too. I’m so glad there’s another book coming, I love spending time in this world and with these characters. ### Mr Milner Gets Divorced by Jane Hadley I do complain about the Kobo algorithm, but sometimes it’s dead on. Stephen is stuck in a dead-end job and still hung up on the highschool crush who ran off and got married after one drunken encounter. Naturally that’s who shows up at his local hang-out, and from there it’s all slowburn gay awakening. Unusually for me, it’s a pure romance (I tend to prefer romance-with-other-plot) but because it’s set in the 1950s it held my interest. I particularly liked the friend group, again more so because it was the 1950s rather than contemporary, and Hadley does a really good job showing how important safe people and places were (and are). The impact of ending a marriage is not sugarcoated, though I didn’t feel the effect on Mrs Milner was fully explored – but there’s a sequel for that (free with newsletter subscription). ### The Lipstick Flip by Gregory Ashe OK, yes, contemporary romance (not even a murder to add sideplot, surely a first for this author), painfully generic cover, part of a long-running series that I’ve dipped out of – but I do like Gregory Ashe1 and I really rate this one. It takes a very flawed character from the main series of books, and gives him a standalone butch/fem second-chance romance with his (not-actually-)ex-husband. Howie has already done a lot of work on himself, but he has not dealt with his internalised homophobia, and you know what? You really don’t see a lot of gay romances tackling that either2. Noah is very sweet and their banter and the way they take care of each other is lovely; I was braced for Howie to backslide, which he does, but he’s justified, it’s not a shoehorned conflict. It works as a standalone but Howie gets a Hail Mary from a main-series character which might seem to come out of nowhere if you’re not familiar with the wider Hazardverse. ### Death and the Courtesan by Pamela Christie A Regency, shockingly not a romance 🙂 In fact, this historical murder-mystery is beautifully unusual, because it follows a Regency courtesan, one of the women you would barely know were the era’s superstars (in the trashy Kardashian reality-TV sort of way) if you judged solely by the Regency Romance genre. Things go wrong when a fellow courtesan is murdered and Arabella is implicated and, left without her protector, must solve the murder herself. It’s earthy (sex jokes galore, she actually is a courtesan) and funny with lots of great characters. There’s two more to follow up. ### The Wrong Dead Guy by Richard Kadry Master thief Coop, railroaded into working for a secret government organisation to control supernatural outbreaks, is sent to steal a mummy. Which he does. And then it comes to live and steals itself, and he’s stuck trying to track it down while avoiding its curse; it takes several twists and turns along the way, all in enjoyable, fast-moving fashion. Weirdly, a sequel where the first book is not on K+3. Still, you don’t need to have read the first book to enjoy this comedy romp. ### The Stone Road by Trent Jamieson Ah, my kryptonite, a 12-year-old girl getting herself into strife. Jean is the granddaughter of a Walker, a kind of witch who walks the boundaries of her town to keep monsters out, and fights them if and when they get through. Nan has been too overprotective of Jean, but when danger comes calling on her birthday, her initiation into monster-fighting can no longer wait. This was dangled by the algorithm and I picked it up because it had won an Aurealis4 and the first few pages grabbed my attention: it has that deceptively simple and straightforward style that is so hard to do well. It is classed as Horror; I didn’t find it particularly graphic, but Jean does make mistakes that have a true irrecoverable cost. I loved the worldbuilding, because it seemed like the town was part of a much bigger world with subtle mentions of other places and events…and then I was slightly disappointed when it turned out this is a standalone set in the same world as a trilogy, I just really liked the notion of a whole world, unexplored and left to imagination. [also available as a K+ audiobook] ## _Non-Fiction_ ### Women’s Lore by Sarah Clegg This is the book I got that extra + on my K+ subscription for. I’d already loved the brilliant The Dead of Winter by the same author, and have been waiting for her new one, Perilous Enchantment, to come out, so seeing this one as an K+ audiobook made it a no-brainer. It’s the history of the demon seductress, a long tradition stretching back to our very earliest tales from Mesopotamia and centred in that great and universal threat to mothers (which almost all women were, throughout history): childbirth and infant mortality. Absolutely fascinating, including the origin of the mermaid (not, as it turns out, a direct descendant of the Greek sirens after all). ### The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr A really interesting merging of the latest research in psychology and neuroscience about how our brains work (our inbuilt instinct for storytelling) and the best advice from expert storytellers (how to tell a good story) and how the one reinforces the other. I particularly liked the focus on character and character flaws (so many “how to write a book” books are all about plot, but as Storr points out, that often gives you fairly generic, or at least predictable, books unless the writer puts deep work into the characters as well). ### Conundrums for the Long Week-end by Robert McGregor and Ethan Lewis I suppose you have to either be a Dorothy L Sayers fan or a Lord Peter Whimsey fan to really enjoy this biography of both set within in the context of the between-the-wars era, but I AM so I DID. But it’s niche enough that I mainly only included it here so I could repeat this quote that Sayers wrote in a letter to a friend as fascism darkened the horizon of Europe: “I have seen the eyes of the men who ask for leadership, and they are the eyes of slaves.” Preach it, Dorothy. ## _And_ NO NEWS ONLY PUPPY (This is Luna, our new Maremma livestock guardian, all ready to be trained up by Max) Fine: writing-wise, I’ve slow-and-steadied myself to 25,000 words for the new WIP, which makes me on track to finish the first draft before we head off on holiday in January. I have also, for the first time ever, commissioned cover art! More on that front later. 1. And this is how much: I don’t like to read long series, but I picked up _Pretty, Pretty Boys_ figuring I’d just read that one. Then I was like, fine, I’ll read until they get together. And then, fine, I’ll read till this first series ends. Then FINE, I’ll read the next Hazard series but Ashe needs to stop torturing Hazard physically. Then: oh my god Greg, go back to torturing that poor man physically, I can’t take the mental torment you’re putting him through. And then I read all the other couples, and and then at some point I lost track, and now there’s so many more in the Hazardverse I feel like I can’t catch up which is _exactly why I don’t like to commit to long series_! ↩︎ 2. Or I’ve just missed an entire sub-genre, of course, which makes sense because it’d be a Contemporary theme, and I hardly ever read Contemporaries ↩︎ 3. Not as weird as the trilogy where only the third and final book is on K+ ↩︎ 4. Australian spec-fic awards, equivalent in concept, if not in weight, to the Hugo and Nebula ↩︎ 5. We wanted a Roman name to go with Max (whose nickname is, of course, Maximus Dogicus), and she was born in June, so Juno was the obvious choice, promptly vetoed by the teen, so she was downgraded from Queen of the Gods to mere Moon Goddess ↩︎ ### Share this: * Share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon * Share on Bluesky (Opens in new window) Bluesky * Share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest * Like Loading... ### _Related_