oitb > Recent Status Updates

“She parted the blinds to peek out, saw stars strewn thick as salt against the blue-black summer sky. Sleepily, Susannah decided she’d spent her life tripping gaily from star to glittering star; perhaps it had only been a matter of time before she slipped and fell into the blackness between. It was almost a relief to have finally done it.”

🤌🏼🤌🏼

What a prologue. Freaking Julie Anne Long!!!

Omg this hero is such a doofus ❤️

Reading this on audio, but might tap out and switch to e because I’m not liking this narrator ☹️

Sarah Mayberry is so good.

I really like this book, but almost everything is identical to “Second Best” by Noelle Adams, Claire Kent’s other pen name. She’s a queen of writing literally the exact same book over and over with details switched out. She’s a good writer but she really works those formulas.

My first Psy-Changeling book and I’m BLAZING through this. Incredibly entertaining to read and the world-building is not as tricky as I feared. (I am really dumb with world-building as a general rule.)

2000s diet culture was so brutal!!!

It’s one thing when older books don’t age well because we just know now that grabbing women or forcing yourself on a woman is wrong; it’s another when contemporaries put gender and sexual politics explicitly on the page through dialogue and it just reads so dated 😅 Those convos somehow feel even more dated to me than bodice rippers do?

My first Jennifer Crusie, who gives me Nora Ephron vibes.

The romance is so, so lovely and sweet but dear god the stuff around it is boring. I remember why I stalled for three months on this (but ultimately chose not to DNF!).

Back after a three month break from this lol

How is Sherry Thomas so good? /flips table

“His opinion of her was much like a sandcastle: it stood in constant need of repair.”

🤌🏼🤌🏼🤌🏼🤌🏼

Duran’s writing 🤌🏼🤌🏼🤌🏼

This book is realllllly great so far.

Mary Jane Wells 😍

Holy hell this book has made me cry so much more than I expected, cannot handle 😵‍💫

My first Mimi Matthews! Lovely so far.

“Once upon a time, Sylvia had been admired for her velvety voice. It was low and soft. Seductive, one ardent suitor had said. Indeed, there was seldom a London party during which, at some point, she had not been begged to sing. Now, however, her voice was an exceedingly practical attribute, used daily to soothe her young charges and nightly to read or sing them to sleep.”

This book is gloriously soft 🥺

So far, so good. But I always get wary of books >300 pages long and wonder when the story starts stalling out 😬

There’s so much good communication in this book 🥲

This book is fun and zippy so far. And it’s also my first ever Tiffany Reisz?! How have I never read her before.

Picking this back up after a months-long hiatus. I could do with a snippy 174-page high fantasy with presumably little world-building 😂