reading

Book Review: THE SECRET SERVICE OF TEA AND TREASON by India Holton

| Jessica Crawford

The Secret Service of Tea and Treason by India Holton is a 334 page novel published by Berkley in 2023. It is third in the Dangerous Damsels series, but can be read as a standalone.

Genre:

Historical Romance, Cozy Fantasy, Humor

Tropes:

Rivals to lovers, fake marriage

Opening Line:

It was the best of dress shops, it was the worst of dress shops.

Synopsis:

Two rival spies must brave pirates, witches, and fake matrimony to save the Queen.

Known as Agent A, Alice is the top operative within the Agency of Undercover Note Takers, a secret government intelligence group that is fortunately better at espionage than at naming itself. From managing deceptive witches to bored aristocratic ladies, nothing is beyond Alice’s capabilities. She has a steely composure and a plan always up her sleeve (alongside a dagger and an embroidered handkerchief). So when rumors of an assassination plot begin to circulate, she’s immediately assigned to the case.

But she’s not working alone. Daniel Bixby, otherwise known as Agent B and Alice’s greatest rival, is given the most challenging undercover assignment of his life— pretending to be Alice’s husband. Together they will assume the identity of a married couple, infiltrate a pirate house party, and foil their unpatriotic plans.

Determined to remain consummate professionals, Alice and Daniel must ignore the growing attraction between them, especially since acting on it might prove more dangerous than their target.

My Thoughts:

THE SECRET SERVICE OF TEA AND TREASON by India Holton 🫖☕️🕵️🏴‍☠️🧙‍♀️💗

A rivals to lovers, fake marriage historical romance with fantasy elements and neurodiverse main characters? Yes, please!

My Books on Tap group (we meet at a different brewery twice a month and go around the table taking turns discussing whatever book we’re reading at the time) recently had a mystery book swap night. We each brought a book wrapped up to hide its identity, then wrote a few descriptors on the front. This was the book I picked (actually, I wound up picking two because the host brought extra in case someone came empty handed). It is the third in the Dangerous Damsels series, but worked perfectly well as a standalone. I could tell which of the characters here had wound up together in previous books in the series.

Alice and Daniel are the two top agents in an underground agency that trains “the help” (maids, housekeepers, butlers, footmen, valets) in espionage. They must join a party of pirates (who, by the way, use incantations to make their houses fly) posing as a married couple in order to thwart a conspiracy to assassinate Queen Victoria. What follows is a fun and absurd romp that prioritizes humor over a sensible plot. Chapters begin with amusingly modified literary quotes from the likes of Austen.

There are pretty explicit open door love scenes, and mild comedic violence.

One complaint that is exceedingly minor in the grand scheme of things: I counted four instances of characters’ mouths shrugging. Wut?

I had been wanting to try this author and am glad the book swap gave me the opportunity. It was a fun story that managed to be fairly swoonworthy to boot.

Book Review: SERVICE MODEL by Adrian Tchaikovsky

| Jessica Crawford

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky is a 376 page standalone novel published by Tor Books in 2024.

Genre:

Science Fiction, Dystopian

Opening Line:

On activation each morning Charles’ first duty was to check his master’s travel arrangements for the day.

My Thoughts:

This book is clever and funny, but because of how grim it is, I’m not sure how much I actually enjoyed it.

A robot who finds himself no longer of use goes searching for purpose in a dystopian future in which humanity has pretty much wiped itself out, and poorly thought out programming leaves scores of inefficient robots dedicated to performing useless tasks.

..he completed two contrasting analyses of the situation using his best human-facing sophistication and decided that it was simultaneously of enormous credit to [his] ongoing fidelity and professionalism, and also that it was terribly pointless and sad.

Society collapsed thanks to a combination of factors, including climate, economics, problems with infrastructure, etc. Plus with all of the automated services provided through AI, people’s skills were not needed, and yet they were still looked down on for being lazy and idle. As civilization itself was dying:

”…I estimate that 45% were unaware of the situation or considered it fake, owing to the precisely curated news sources that they limited themselves to, whilst a further 30% were aware but did not consider it their problem and 20% were aware and actively cheering on the fact or profiting from [it]…A final 5% seem likely to have been directly and deliberately contributing to the collapse…”

Uncharles teams up with The Wonk, who wants to learn the meaning of it all. There is a moral that a kind and ordered society should be the goal.

Smart and oftentimes extremely amusing writing, but the bleakness and the infuriating absurdity of all of the situations Uncharles comes across during is journey into the world kind of canceled out some of the joy these things offered.

There is no sexual content in this book, and the only violence involving humans happens off the page.

I wish to report an error in the way that everything works. Charles, it is not an error. It is how things are.

Book Review: MARY: AN AWAKENING OF TERROR by Nat Cassidy

| Jessica Crawford

Mary: An Awakening of Terror by Nat Cassidy is a 405 page novel published by Tor Nightfire in 2022.

Genre: Horror

Opening Line:

There’s a corpse in the bathtub.

Synopsis:

Mary is a quiet, middle-aged woman doing her best to blend into the background. Unremarkable. Invisible. Unknown even to herself.

But lately, things have been changing inside Mary. Along with the hot flashes and body aches, she can’t look in a mirror without passing out, and the voices in her head have been urging her to do unspeakable things.

Fired from her job in New York, she moves back to her hometown, hoping to reconnect with her past and inner self. Instead, visions of terrifying, mutilated specters overwhelm her with increasing regularity and she begins auto-writing strange thoughts and phrases. Mary discovers that these experiences are echoes of an infamous serial killer.

Then the killings begin again.

Mary’s definitely going to find herself.

My Thoughts:

“Don’t call yourself crazy. That’s a word people use to make you small. Don’t do it for them.”

Holy moly, this book is bananas, but in the best way!

Normally I much prefer spooky supernatural horror to gory horror, but although this book is capital G Gruesome, there is so much more to it. I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything quite like it!

Mary is coming up on her fiftieth birthday and she’s not doing so great. Twice in this book she visits a male doctor and tells them each about the insomnia, the panic attacks–she even tells one of them the full truth, that she can’t look into a mirror without seeing her face in the reflection bubble up and burst in putrefication. Both doctors respond with, “And when was your last period?”

Due to an unfortunate series of events, Mary finds herself making the trip back to the isolated desert town she was born in, the town that was terrorized by a serial killer until he was killed by police nearly fifty years before. And then the killings start again.

You might like this book if you like unreliable narrators, vengeful spirits, true crime podcasts, and cults. You might like this book if you like your horror with a side of the absurd to surprise a laugh out of you now and then. You might like this book if you’re familiar with the nightmare that is perimenopause. You might like this book if you cheered when Neville Longbottom finally stood up for himself, but even moreso if your response to Stephen King’s Carrie was, “Good for her.”

Just bear in mind there is a whole lot of grisly subject matter here. If, like me, you’re able to look past that to all the amazing things about this story, then buckle in and get ready for one wild ride!

This book includes no steamy content, but all of the explicit on-page violence.

Bookshop.org

Goodreads

Bookstagram

Book Review: I CHEERFULLY REFUSE by Leif Enger

| Jessica Crawford

I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger is a 336 hardcover standalone novel published April 2, 2024 by Grove Press.

Genres: Dystopian, Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction

Opening Line:

Here at the beginning it must be said the End was on everyone’s mind.

The Synopsis: Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of Rainy, an aspiring musician setting sail on Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. An endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, he seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs, and remote islands of the inland sea. After encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, he eventually lands to find an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, a crumbled infrastructure, and a lawless society. As his guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy’s private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his wake.

My Thoughts:

This meditative dystopian story is brimming with gorgeous prose (and also a fair number of instances of turns of phrase I did not understand, prompting me to wonder if the author was not American–but it turns out that is not the case). In a bleak near future with collapsed infrastructure, a U.S. headed by a proudly illiterate president, and more and more people choosing to shuffle off this mortal coil in search of something better, Rainy and Lark have managed to make a happy life for themselves. When they let a young man board in their home, trouble follows right behind him. Rainy finds himself on the lam in a sailboat on a capricious Lake Superior. As he grieves for the life and love lost to him and attempts to evade those who would do him harm, he encounters numerous strange characters, along with a girl who needs him (and vice versa) more than either would like to admit.

It’s taken me all my life to learn protection is the promise you can’t make. It sounds absolute, and you mean it and believe it, but that vow is provisional and makeshift and no god ever lived who could keep it half the time.

But beyond the beautiful writing and the likable main character who was easy to root for, my overall feeling while reading this book was one of melancholy. So even though I appreciated the author’s skill with words (the main villain is described as a “relentless hellhound and necrotic Adonis”!), how glad am I that I set sail with Rainy on his journey? I’m still not sure myself. 3.75 stars

Bookshop

Goodreads

Bookstagram

Book Review: THE FAMILIAR by Leigh Bardugo

| Jessica Crawford

This gorgeous book, The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo (author of Six of Crows and Ninth House, among others) is a 387 page standalone adult historical fantasy novel set in sixteenth century Spain.

The opening line:

If the bread hadn’t burned, this would be a very different story.

When Luzia’s employers discover that their scullion can work small magics, “miracles”, she finds attention drawn to her from all sorts of corners. She fears catching the notice of the Inquisition for multiple reasons, but the flames of her ambition are stoked by the opportunity to compete for a place in the king’s service. Her patron’s familiar, a man made immortal through an ill-gotten bargain, is tasked with teaching her how best to wield and control her powers.

I very much liked the romance in this book, unexpected at it was to the characters involved–but the story was about so much more than that and the magic. It was about class, political machinations, being a Jew in a land that would never trust you, and more. There is one particular side character whose journey and personal growth was quite lovely. 4.5 stars, rounded up!

All that being said, I feel as though some die-hard fans of Bardugo’s YA books, or maybe even Ninth House and Hell Bent, will be disappointed in this one. It is a “quieter” book– there is some showy stuff, but it’s more about the feels and reflection on some serious topics. Which is typically more my jam.

Bookshop

Goodreads

Bookstagram

Book Review: EMILY WILDE’S MAP OF THE OTHERLANDS by Heather Fawcett

| Jessica Crawford

Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands by Heather Fawcett is a sequel that manages to be even more charming than its predecessor!

Emily, Wendell, and Shadow are back, and this time they’re joined by Emily’s niece, as well as the Cambridge dryadology department head. Professor Wilde was granted tenure after publishing her encyclopedia, and luckily for us readers, she continues the practice of keeping a journal as it helps to organize her thoughts. The story begins on campus, and so there’s a hint of “magical school” flavor at first. Then it’s off to Austria for another adventure!

The banter is just as hilarious, the romance continues to develop, and the faeries are just as enchanting and horrifying as ever. Poe is just as endearing (yes, everyone’s favorite brownie makes an appearance!) The element of two explorers trapped in Faerie, lost and confused, occasionally popping in and out of the mortal world, and continually just missing each other like ships in the night as they search for one another was wonderfully whimsical.

This book has more of a traditional structure than the first, where things started simply with a scholar doing research. Going into the sequel, we already know that there is a goal of finding a back door into Wendell’s Faerie kingdom. Pretty much straight away here, our protagonists learn that his stepmother has ordered his assassination, moving the timeline forward in an urgent way. And I was hooked!

Emily is determined that it is her turn to save Wendell, and she has learned from her past mistakes—although of course she makes some new ones, too. And with the way this book ends, it seems she will definitely have a chance to learn from those as well! Which is well and good because the parts of the resolution here felt a bit underwhelming, but did a fine job setting up the next part of the story.

Thank you to Del Rey and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and give an honest review of this eARC.

Bookshop.org

Goodreads

Bookstagram

My Top Ten Books of 2023

| Jessica Crawford

Here they are, my top ten reads of 2023!

My reading went into sicko mode this year and I read nearly twice as many books as usual. My average rating on Goodreads was 3.6 stars. My most read genre was fantasy, followed by literary and then historical fiction. I wound up reading less science fiction (I’ll have to fix that this year!) and more thrillers and mystery than has historically been the case.

According to Storygraph I “delved into dark and intense narratives, unraveled intricate mysteries, and embarked on exciting adventures”. I preferred emotional stories, which comes as no surprise!

My reading goal for 2024 is to have a higher average star rating (above 3.6) by trying to land on books that are more of a hit for me and my tastes.

What are your reading goals for this new year?

Books pictured: What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher, A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher, The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher, If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio, Our Hideous Progeny by C. E. McGill, North Woods by Daniel Mason, Trust by Hernan Diaz, Chlorine by Jade Song, Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett.

Book Review: THISTLEFOOT by GennaRose Nethercott

| Jessica Crawford

“What happens when the walls we raise outlive the dangers they were built to keep out? At what point does a fort become a cage?”

Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott is a colorful adventure steeped in Eastern European folklore. It takes place in the current day U.S., and some magical elements borne of momentous events from long ago have left marks so profound they have been passed down through generations of the Yaga family.

“Lies? Of course, lies. But what is a lie if not a story? And ah, what power a story has when whispered into the ear of a man with a gun.”

A family of puppeteers and their newly inherited house on chicken legs are running from the Longshadow Man. But who/what/when is the Longshadow Man?

“We know plenty about what he isn’t,” Rummy offered with forced optimism.

“He’s not a jelly doughnut,” Sparrow contributed.

In essence the story is about bearing witness to past injustices that have taken on a life of their own and haunt the world still.

“A mob has no ears to call to, only a single mouth, yelling. A mob has no hands to hold, only a single finger, pointing. A mob has no head, only a single body, guideless, acting as it will.”

There a several interesting characters filling this tale, with nice LGBTIA+ representation, and a story as fun as it is meaningful. The prose is rather gorgeous. Thistlefoot was born to run, but catching hold of it will be well worth your while!

Bookshop.org

Bookstagram