Victoria Janssen's Blog, page 4

#TBR Challenge 2025

TBR Challenge 2025 is a fun way to actually read all those books I’ve been accumulating over the years. “Your mission, should you choose to accept it: once a month pull a dormant book out of your TBR pile and read it. On the 3rd Wednesday of the month, talk about that book. If you’re on social media all you need to do is use the #TBRChallenge hashtag – there’s no need to sign-up and your participation can vary throughout the year. You can use this hashtag on any day, at any time – but we’re sti...

TBR Challenge – It’s a Party!: Make the Season Bright by Ashley Herring Blake

My choice for December’s TBR Challenge book is Make the Season Bright by Ashley Herring Blake, in which ex-fiancées end up stuck in the same house for Christmas holiday fun. I chose the book because it has professional musician characters; the two women protagonists play violin (Charlotte/Lola) and guitar (Brighton). Charlotte is in a string quartet whose members are also all queer, and dare I guess they will have their own books later?

Aside from the various queer relationships, this was a pret...

My November Reading Log

Fiction:
The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst is a very cozy romantic fantasy set in a world that, to me, felt very dreamlike because there were a number of fantastical creatures with magical origins. Some of these, like the merhorses, required magical upkeep, which made sense; however, making sense left me tugging more at the worldbuilding than I might have done if they’d just existed. This is clearly a Me problem. Anyway. Kiela is a librarian in an imperial city undergoing a violent revolution; s...

#TBR Challenge – It Came From the 1990s!: Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion

It Came From the 1990s!: Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion by J. Daniel Gifford and James Gifford was published in 2000, but that’s the end of the 1990s, it counts!

This is a nonfiction catalog of all the writing by Robert A. Heinlein, almost all of which I have read in the course of my life; the first straight-up science fiction I ever remember reading was a copy of his juvenile space adventure Have Space Suit, Will Travel. Heinlein was notable for his strong narrative voice, rollicking ...

My October Reading Log

Fiction:
Snowspelled by Stephanie Burgis is fantasy romance novella set in an alternate nineteenth century England (Angland) where women do politics and men do magic. Humans have an uneasy truce with the powerful Elves. The protagonist Cassandra Harwood, a unique woman who formally trained in magic until suffering an accident, has broken up with her magician betrothed, but her beloved brother and pregnant sister-in-law drag her to a house party where, you guessed it, her former betrothed is also...

My September Reading Log

Fiction:
Payback in Death by J.D. Robb is fifty-seventh in this futuristic mystery series, and I continue to enjoy, from a writerly perspective, how Robb/Nora Roberts manages to both provide enough information for new readers and reward longtime readers with running gags (the obstreperous vending machine near the interrogation rooms, for example) and ongoing secondary character events (the continuing saga of the house being renovated by Mavis, Leonardo, Peabody, and McNab). This one also had a f...

#TBR Challenge – Spooky (Gothic): All Clear by Connie Willis

October 16, Spooky (Gothic): All Clear by Connie Willis (2010) is the second half of Blackout, which I read for the September Drama theme. It actually does fit the Spooky theme a bit, as the characters navigate London during the Blitz in World War Two, stumbling through blackouts and huddling in Underground Stations as bombs drop overhead.

In Blackout, three time-traveling historians who’ve landed in different times and locations in England during World War Two are reunited and have begun trying...

#TBR Challenge – Drama!: Blackout by Connie Willis

Blackout by Connie Willis came out in 2010, the first of two books that are really one book, so it ends on a cliffhanger and continues in my next month’s book, All Clear. Does it fit the theme? Oh, yes, it does.

The book opens in Oxford, England, in 2060. For the past forty years, historians have been traveling into the past to observe events; from experience, they have figured out a few rules, such as you can’t be in two places at once, so if you’ve been to a time period, and you go there again...

My August Reading Log

Fiction:
Encore in Death by J. D. Robb/Nora Roberts is fifty-sixth in this massive series, which I continue reading not only because it’s a comfort read for its familiar characters and justice prevailing, but because I enjoy seeing, from a craft perspective, how the author walks a fine line between the formula that keeps readers returning and her own desire to mix it up; also, it has to reward new readers at the same time. This particular installment features famous actors and had a couple of go...

#TBR Challenge – Everyday Heroes: Dancing Bearfoot by Elva Birch

August 21, Everyday Heroes: Dancing Bearfoot by Elva Birch is a confection, a short paranormal romance set in Alaska between single dad Leland/Lee, who owns a construction company, and his daughter’s preschool teacher, Patricia. Lee is a big bear of a man who can turn into, you guessed it, a bear; Patricia struggles to stay afloat by working as a waitress when she’s not teaching.

Lee knows Patricia is his soulmate as soon as they meet. Patricia doesn’t get the greatest first impression of him, b...