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Books mentioned and mini-reviews:

Charm (Tales from the Kingdoms, #2) by Sarah Pinborough

I picked this Cinderella retelling up with some trepidation as I didn’t love the first in this series, Poison (I liked it but didn’t adore it), but actually massively preferred it! It isn’t as dark as I was anticipating but it was delightfully subversive and fun – I’m looking forward to reading Beauty, the third in the series.

Buy: Amazon | Bookshop.org (affiliate links)

If Every Day Was Christmas by Donna Ashcroft (review copy from NetGalley)

A lovely family drama/festive romance about a woman who runs a Christmas shop in a small town in Scotland. Her love of the season comes from the fact that Christmas day was the only time that her parents could properly get along, but this year she’s decided she is done with all of that. She’s going to have Christmas quietly by herself and not get involved in the family drama…but then her mum and sister turn up! Meanwhile there’s also a new man in the locality, a rock star who is hiding out and hoping that no one recognizes him. He hates Christmas, but our heroine is determined to help him enjoy it!

Buy: Amazon | Bookshop.org (affiliate links)

The Twelve Dogs of Christmas by Lizzie Shane (review copy from NetGalley)

Another very cute Christmas romance – this one set in a fictional town in the USA, with vibes of Gilmore Girls and Parks and Rec. She’s a fashion photographer who normally lives in New York, come to stay with her grandparents who run a dog shelter. He’s one of the local councilmen, reluctant parent to his orphaned niece, and he’s just had to cut the funding for the dog shelter.  They unite to try to find homes for the shelter’s remaining dogs before Christmas. It’s a really sweet romance which takes a long time to develop and involves the whole community having to come together to push them towards each other – plus, the dogs are a lovely, colourful bunch of characters all on their own!

Buy: Amazon | Bookshop.org (affiliate links)

Romancing the Beat: Story Structure for Romance Novels by Gwen Hayes

This is a brief guide to, as it says on the tin, story structure for romance novels, going into detail about what needs to happen at the different beats. I found it reasonably useful  with the caveat that I was planning to write a romance novel for NaNoWriMo and turned out to not be a romance novel but a novel that has a romantic plot amongst other things. It was helpful not so much for structuring my novel but more for helping me understand the full depth of the structure – some of the beats that would have been the romantic beats became high points and low points in the friendship development instead.

Buy: Amazon (affiliate link)

The Six Tales of Christmas by Anne Marie Ryan (review copy from NetGalley)

Another Christmas book  – this one is set in a small town/village (I never can keep this small town versus village thing straight) in the Cotswolds. The main characters are an older couple, she inherited the bookshop they owned and ran from her mum, and loves it, but it’s in dire financial straits. She’s been hiding this fact from her husband – that the bookshop’s under threat -because he’s had health problems and is meant to avoid stress. Meanwhile, they decide together to  send six books out to people in the local area who really need a book to cheer them up…it’s a really cute Christmas story about a local community coming together, battling isolation, and loving books.

Buy: Amazon | Bookshop.org (affiliate links)

The Windsor Knot (Her Majesty the Queen Investigates, #1) by S.J. Bennett (review copy from NetGalley)

I was extremely excited to read this as S.J. Bennett is better known as Sophia Bennett, one of my favourite YA authors (see my reviews of Love Song and Following Ophelia), but under her new pen name she’s writing mysteries for adults in which the detective is the Queen! The Windsor Knot is mostly set at Windsor Castle, after an overnight guest dies and some think it is it was a suicide but the Queen suspects it was a murder. The story is mostly from the perspective of the Queen’s assistant private secretary, a younger woman who finds herself in this strange situation, secretly helping the Queen investigate a murder, acting as her eyes and ears a lot of the time! It’s a very interesting concept, I really enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to reading the second in the series!

Buy: Amazon | Bookshop.org (affiliate links)

The Duke and I, The Viscount Who Loved Me and An Offer From a Gentleman (Bridgertons, #1-3) by Julia Quinn

With all the talk about the Bridgerton series on Netflix I decided I wanted to read the books first…or at least give them a try! I find Regency romance really moreish, and these books were no exception. My favourite out of the three was An Offer From a Gentleman – I preferred The Viscount Who Loved Me to The Duke and I but the romantic plots for both were so similar, An Offer From a Gentleman felt like a breath of fresh air, even though it’s a Cinderella retelling! I will carry on reading this series, as I’m finding it quite interesting to see how the family dynamics play out, and how the author varies the romance plot, but I preferred all the other Regency romance authors I’ve read previously  (Georgette Heyer, Courtney Milan, Scarlett Peckham).

Buy The Duke and I: Amazon (affiliate link)
Buy The Viscount Who Loved Me: Amazon (affiliate link)
Buy An Offer From a Gentleman: Amazon (affiliate link)

Weather by Jenny Offill

This is a strange kind of stream of consciousness story about a woman who works for an academic who talks about climate change. Her anxieties vary, however, she’s also a mother and a wife and someone who never quite figured out her career, falling into a job at the library arranged for her by the same academic, before being asked to go on tour with her. I enjoyed listening to the audiobook, but I wasn’t sure what I was meant to take away from it.

Buy: Amazon | Bookshop.org (affiliate links)

Books mentioned and mini-reviews:

Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I listened to the audiobook of this which was just fabulous! I have heard so much hype for this novel about the rise and fall and break-up of a band in the sixties, and it totally lived up to it. It’s essentially about how the addition of singer-songwriter Daisy Jones to the already-successful band The Six elevates them to new heights of creativity and fame, but also creates tensions and exposes tensions already there within the band, and how the pressure of touring and the rock and roll lifestyle brings it all crashing down.

The audiobook is a full cast recording and that works really well for the way that this story is told, in snippets from every member of the band, as if they are being interviewed  for this book – all the characters have different voices and convey emotion in their own way. As they take it in turns to speak and tell their side of  the story,  there’s a lot of unreliable narrators and people  remembering things differently, interpreting things differently or even perhaps not telling the truth. This leaves it up to you to decide what you think the true story is: whether someone’s lying to make themselves look better or just remembers it differently. It’s psychologically fascinating, emotionally powerful, and a great read!

Buy: Amazon | Bookshop.org (affiliate links)

The Earl I Ruined by Scarlett Peckham

This is a Regency romance novel that I bought on a whim one day after Sarra Manning posted about it on Twitter. There were some elements of the romance that weren’t to my taste but overall I thought it was really enjoyable. It’s about a woman who has inadvertently destroyed the reputation of a good man and so decides to save his reputation she must marry him. He says they can’t actually get married so she pretends like she meant to it to be a fake engagement all along…It’s a fun story with a bold heroine.

Buy: Amazon | Bookshop.org (affiliate links)

Outsiders edited by Alice Slater

This was  my favourite book of the month, and my most anticipated! I was really excited to read this because I loved the theme of the anthology, outsiders – people who don’t fit in, who live outside the norm, who have something about them  that’s extraordinary or different. I contributed to the crowdfunding campaign from 3 of Cups Press and I was really excited for this to arrive. I ended up reading it for my short story book club and we  loved it. The stories are very varied and they’re  all quite short short stories as well, which I really appreciated because I’ve been trying to write more short stories of that length myself, because that’s the length that they have to be to be entered into competitions and submitted to most magazines. I would strongly recommend you  pick this up and support a small publisher.

Buy: 3 of Cups Press

Best of Women’s Short Stories 1-3 (audiobooks)

This is a series of audio short story anthologies featuring stories from classic  authors like Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, and Louisa M Alcott, and I found it to be a very mixed bag! When they said women’s short stories I imagined and expected it feature only women authors, but actually there were  quite a few stories by men with women main characters which I thought was a bit odd – I find it very patronizing to create a book of short stories aimed at women rather than  a book of short stories by women authors!

That said, the first story in the first volume, Ladies in Lavender, was by a man (William J. Locke), and I really liked it! I overall preferred the first volume, which included two stories I’ve read before, Marriage a la Mode by Katherine Mansfield, and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to the other two. That said, it still wasn’t that good, including some very dated twee stories about children which I object to being included in a “Women’s Short Stories” series! At least make them about adult women, come on!

The second anthology included The Watsons, billed as a Jane Austen “short story”, another baffling choice as it is not actually a short story but a novel that she never finished, so it just stops without a proper ending. However I did like A Pair of Silk Stockings by Kate Chopin, another Katherine Mansfield story called Bliss and The Legacy by Virginia Woolf.

The third anthology was another weird mixed bag – I liked the Louisa M. Alcott short story, Perilous Play, but my favourite was another piece by her, Happy Women, which isn’t actually a story but is more of an essay about how women  can be unmarried and still have great, fulfilling lives. Although I liked it, I was baffled by its inclusion as it’s not a short story!

Listen to Volume 1: Audible
Listen to Volume 2: Audible
Listen to Volume 3: Audible
(Note that I downloaded all three from my library’s OverDrive catalogue)

The Truth About Lies by Tracy Darnton

This is a YA novel about a girl who remembers everything – she has a photographic memory but also remembers scenes,  events, everything that’s ever happened to her. She was the object of fascination/experimentation for a psychiatry professor from a very  young age and, fed up of it and suspicious of her benefactor’s motives, she has run away and gone to hide in a boarding school under an assumed  identity hoping that eventually she’ll be able to escape to the US. But her past catches up with her and she begins to realize that maybe things aren’t all as they seem and  maybe her memory isn’t all it seems. It’s a very interesting story, playing with themes of memory and identity and medical ethics.

Buy: Amazon | Bookshop.org (affiliate links)

Stella and Siena by Helen Eve

Stella is a sort of YA Great Expectations retelling , about (E)Stella, a girl at a really fancy posh boarding school trying to live up to the dream of her sister Siena’s potential. Siena died three years ago and Stella stepped into her shoes, almost instantly becoming the queen bee, building a group of loyal supplicants around her. To punish one of her friends who has messed up, Stella replaces her with new girl Caitlin, who’s come from the US. At first, Caitlin isn’t so sure about her place in the group, but later on decides she wants to rule it and they  end up in a bit of a mean girl battle – if you like those kind of stories then this is probably one for you!

I found it a little bit predictable (inevitable for a retelling) though I did enjoy it, but I preferred the prequel Siena (a true prequel – it was published after Stella). Even though I knew what was going to happen, I found it more interesting because it really went into the family dynamics between Stella, Siena and their youngest sister Syrena. Although the plot is similar to that of Stella – Siena’s former friend Romy comes back from France and disrupts the school’s social order – the tension between Siena and Romy was more interesting to me. I think both books present a really interesting exploration of expectations, messed up families and ambition and shallowness.

Buy Stella: Amazon (affiliate link)
Buy Siena: Amazon | Bookshop.org (affiliate links)

Aubrey and  the Terrible Yoot by Horatio Clare

This is a story about a parent’s depression from the  point of view of a child. Aubrey is a brave and  bold little boy whose dad has depression. Aubrey personifies or monsterifies his father’s depression, calling it the Terrible Yoot and with the help of some talking animals he sets out on a quest to save his dad. I thought it was handled  really really well. You should be warned that it does tackle some of the darker aspects of depression at one  point his dad considers harming himself and there is an attempt later on, but it’s very interesting to see adult depression explored in a children’s book.

Buy: Amazon | Bookshop.org (affiliate links)