Jane Litte's Blog, page 57

REVIEW: There’s No Place Like Home by Jane Lovering

Isabel, Izzy to her friends, has got nothing left to lose when she makes the bravest decision of her life.

A month living under canvas on the Yorkshire Moors with five strangers wouldn’t normally be her idea of a good time, even if there is prize money to be won at the end of it, but she’s all out of options.

Joining her in this wild goose chase, being filmed for a TV show, are farmer Seb, whose marriage is creaking but who is desperate not to lose his family. Sheltered Ruth who needs an oppo...

REVIEW: Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

Cambridge professor Emily Wilde is good at many things: She is the foremost expert on the study of faeries. She is a genius scholar and a meticulous researcher who is writing the world’s first encyclopaedia of faerie lore. But Emily Wilde is not good at people. She could never make small talk at a party—or even get invited to one. And she prefers the company of her books, her dog, Shadow, and the Fair Folk to other people.

So when she arrives in the hardscrabble village of Hrafnsvik, Emily has...

Layla’s Best of 2022

Soul Taken by Patricia Briggs

Patricia Briggs latest’s installment in Mercy series Soul Taken was a book I anticipated because I like the author. I LOVED it.

Reviewed by Kaetrin.

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A Contracted Spouse for the Prizefighter by Alice Coldbreath

This year I did discovered Alice Coldbreath and A Contracted Spouse for the Prizefighter is her 2022 release. I love that her books are historicals but different from the rest of historicals genre now. Her heroes are regul...

What Janine is Reading: LGBTQIA+ Books in a Mix of Genres

Astrid Parker Doesn’t Fail by Ashley Herring Blake

This book had a cute start and an interesting premise. I really liked the author’s earlier book, Delilah Green Doesn’t Care, but although this book wasn’t bad, it wasn’t quite as good. Astrid, whom we met in the last book, is standoffish and proper, having had that drilled into her by her cold and exacting mother.

Early in the book the other heroine, Jordan, spills coffee on Astrid’s dress as she’s coming out of a café where Astrid is about to...

Jayne’s Best of 2022 List

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results.

But like science, life ...

Review: The Inheritance Games (books 1-3) by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Avery Grambs has a plan for a better future: survive high school, win a scholarship, and get out. But her fortunes change in an instant when billionaire Tobias Hawthorne dies and leaves Avery virtually his entire fortune. The catch? Avery has no idea why — or even who Tobias Hawthorne is.

To receive her inheritance, Avery must move into sprawling, secret passage-filled Hawthorne House, where every room bears the old man’s touch — and his love of puzzles, riddles, and codes. Unfortunately for...

REVIEW: Illuminations by T. Kingfisher

Rosa Mandolini knows in her heart that her family are the greatest painters of magical illuminations in the city. But the eccentric Studio Mandolini has fallen on hard times and the future is no longer certain. While trying to help her family, Rosa discovers a strange magical box protected by a painted crow. But when she finds a way to open the box, she accidentally releases the Scarling, a vicious monster determined to destroy the Mandolini family at any cost.

With the aid of her former best ...

REVIEW: The Rose and the Thistle by Laura Frantz

In 1715, Lady Blythe Hedley’s father is declared an enemy of the British crown because of his Jacobite sympathies, forcing her to flee her home in northern England. Secreted to the tower of Wedderburn Castle in Scotland, Lady Blythe awaits who will ultimately be crowned king. But in a house with seven sons and numerous servants, her presence soon becomes known.

No sooner has Everard Hume lost his father, Lord Wedderburn, than Lady Hedley arrives with the clothes on her back and her maid in tow...

REVIEW: They’re Watching You by Chelsea Ichaso

Dear Ms. Ichaso:

I’m not sure if I knew this book was tagged as Young Adult Fiction when I requested it. I just knew it was suspense set at a posh boarding school. It does feel YA in some way I can’t quite describe. Or at least not without seeming to be dissing it. I guess what it comes down to is though the subject matter could be viewed as dark and there are some “adult themes” (not the sexy kind; more the murdery, vast-conspiracy kind), there is something kind of unsophisticated and simple a...

What Janine is Reading: 2022 YA Fantasies

Only a Monster by Vanessa Len

This YA fantasy novel, Vanessa Len’s debut, was recommended highly by two people I trust, so I stuck with it even though it had a slow and seemingly pedestrian beginning. When Joan, a British East Asian girl, is little, her grandmother tells her that she is half-monster, but Joan doesn’t understand what that means until she accidentally time travels several hours into the future and learns that she did it at someone’s expense. In this book, which begins in modern-da...