If you are pining for 1980s tribute fare like Stranger Things, and you love books that focus on friendships between women, and you can tolerate some gross content, then I highly recommend My Best Friend’s Exorcism. It is not a romance, but it does have a great, though platonic, love story between two teenage girls who battle occult forces in 1988. And yes, the paperback cover is a perfect facsimile of a beat-up VHS tape.

Abby and Gretchen become friends after Gretchen is the only person to show up to Abby’s tenth birthday party. Gretchen’s parents are rich and Abby’s are not (her father is clinically depressed and her mother works long hours), and over time Abby spends more and more time at Gretchen’s house. Abby helps Gretchen experience all the parts of pop culture that Gretchen’s over-protective parents forbid, and Gretchen provides Abby with a shelter from Abby’s emotionally desolate household.

By the time Abby and Gretchen are in high school, they are part of a group of four friends. All four are academically high achieving and popular. Margaret, Glee, Gretchen, and Abby seem to have it all together until one day they try taking acid. Nothing happens. The LSD is a complete dud. The only person affected is Gretchen, who claims to keep having hallucinations long after taking the acid, and whose behavior becomes more and more alarming over the following weeks. Gretchen is surrounded by inexplicable events like breaking windows and bird attacks, and she goes from self-harm to manipulating her friends into hurting themselves and others. In desperation, Abby joins up with a bodybuilding priest to save her best friend from what surely must be demonic possession.

This is a horror novel from the writer of Horrorstör, which is the only book I’ve ever read in which a person has to escape death by quickly disassembling a piece of furniture with one of those Allen-wrench things. My Best Friend’s Exorcism has less humor than Horrorstör but on the other hand the characters, especially Abby, are better developed.  The book is packed with references to the 1980s and largely revolves around the obsession in the 1980s with drugs (Just Say No) and with Satanic ritual abuse.  While the book includes a lot of fun references to 1980s culture, it also includes darker elements, such as slut-shaming, victim-blaming, homophobia, and Reagan Era class dynamics and economic realities.

There were a lot of things I liked about this book, but I found it painful to read because so much of it involves the real-life horror of high school and of toxic dynamics. There are many creepy moments but nothing sucked the air out of my lungs like the moment in which Abby realizes that Gretchen has turned against her and turned Margaret and Glee against her as well. It’s a mundane moment of horror and betrayal that many of us have actually experienced without having the dubious comfort of being able to blame it on demonic possession. I can read about demonic barf and never flinch but the scene in which Margaret, Glee, and Gretchen refuse to let Abby sit with them is excruciating, and Abby comes to the following conclusion:

Turning eighteen doesn’t determine when you become an adult in Charleston; neither does registering to vote, graduating from high school, or getting your driver’s license. In Charleston, the day you become an adult is the day you learn to ignore your neighbor’s drunk driving and focus instead on whether he submitted a paint-color change to the Board of Agricultural Review. The day you become an adult is the day you learn that in Charleston, the worse something is, the less attention it receives.

At Albermarle [the high school], everyone was suddenly being very adult about Gretchen.

The book is excellent at describing class dynamics and at showing the difficulty involved in exposing hidden evil when everyone is obsessed with maintaining surface decorum – both in high school and in the very class-conscious community of adults in the town.

The other thing that sets this book above and beyond many others is its wonderfully feminist ending and the celebration of female friendship. It’s frustrating, because even with spoiler tags I don’t want to spoil how this book is resolved, or what’s revealed in the epilogue, or the lovely last line of the book. But without spoiling it, how can I tell you how awesome it turned out to be? I can’t. You’ll have to trust me. This particular horror story is a love letter to the 1980s and to the power of friendship between women. The ending is very awesome. But also very gross, so be prepared.

The transcript for Podcast 267. Recommendation Requests with Sarah and Amanda, Part the First! has been posted!

This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks.

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It’s time for Cover Snark, where we take a look at some unsettling covers in an effort to make your Mondays a little better!

From Delight: I don’t know if this particular…oddity, has been featured before but I received it in a newsletter and I just couldn’t deal. I couldn’t. His face is green. He looks like he tried a weird shade of foundation that he failed to blend. And why is he looking at her with that expression? It is not at all sexy. Or maybe that’s just him trying to keep whatever is threatening to hurl out, in.

Amanda: She’s clearly guarding her boobs.

The dude also looks suspiciously like Brandon Lee from The Crow.

Sarah: It’s also from the “If we don’t use Scriptina, how will they know it’s a romance?” school of font selection.

Elyse: His foundation is not the right color at all.

Elyse: Does he have a rash?

Redheadedgirl: Did he get bit by one of those fluke thingies for that one episode of The X-Files?

Elyse: Also dude really needs a belt.

CarrieS: And a bra.

Redheadedgirl: He has one, it’s named Adonis.

HEYOOOOOO

Elyse: And some hydrocortisone ointment. He really just needs to go to Target.

Sarah: His pants are what’s tempting fate here. What’s holding them up? Wardrobe tape?

Amanda: I don’t like this extreme close up.

Sarah: I am very not ok with models looking at me from covers. Disliked trend is disliked.

Elyse: Do. Not. Want.

Amanda: I wonder if this is the industry’s counter to man-titty. “Fine! You don’t want some aggressive nipples? Then this is what you get!”

Sarah: “Aggressive staring!” Nope. Do not want.

Amanda: Is this a new Marvel superhero? “The Neon Lawyer.”

Elyse: There’s no neon in that cover.

Sarah: If you turn off the lights, does he glow? Is that what he’s looking at? His personal glowstick?

CarrieS: Is this a noir mystery? If so, I kinda like it. If it’s a romance, all I can say is I don’t have the energy to cheer that dude up and nothing will convince me to enter that motel. The only things getting lucky in there are bedbugs.

The elevator pitch for this book is “Pacific Rim meets a K-Drama” which is basically the greatest elevator pitch ever. I saw it on Twitter and one clicked so hard I think I sprained my thumb and my phone said “OW!”

In the year 2199, there’s been a series of global wars that united the Korean peninsula and upended the global map. Because a population of a country at war is a population that is easily controlled, the current iteration of the war is fought against organized rebel groups. One of the sexiest weapons used in the war are God Machines: giant mecha robots piloted by a single person.

In Neo Seoul, high school students get placed in the military in some capacity in their senior year. Our hero, Jaewon, is assigned to a Super Secret Military project involving technologically enhanced kids. There’s also gangs, rebels, fucked up families, betrayals, exams, and a bit of romance.

There’s kind of a lot going on, but it’s mostly folded into the world building. Oh spends most of the book very slowly exploring the world of Neo Seoul and building out the history for the reader. Actual plot movement shows up very late, so it’s really difficult to give a summary.

What I liked about this book is that it’s very steeped in Korean culture and (I’m assuming) K-dramas. There’s a glossary in the back of Korean words that pepper the text and dialogue (which is handy, since the only Korean I know is Tae Kwon Do related), and there’s details about geography and food that make the world more real.

I get that there was a lot of world building to do: there’s a whole history of three wars, massive global geopolitical upheaval, and whole society to describe and populate, but it was kind of maddeningly slow at times. I wish that the history had been delivered faster, instead of in dribs and drabs among all of the other details. It wasn’t until actual things started happening at about the 75-80% mark that I went “oh, good, there’s the plot.”

And that’s my main criticism: I feel like so much time was spent building up this universe that it’s at the expense of Jaewon’s story. He’s a kid from the wrong side of the tracks trying to make it in a super exclusive high school in a military dictatorship. It’s a story we’ve had a lot, but it’s one that resonates with audiences, and seeing it through the lens of a K-drama was fun.

The romance is a little…difficult to talk about. It’s not really an afterthought, and it’s not shoehorned in. The existence of the romance is vitally important to that plot that shows up in the last 20%. But it’s decidedly not the focus of most of this story. The heroine is a super soldier that Jaewon is assigned as a partner, but she was kind of a cypher to me.

A lot of time is also spent on secondary characters that have their own stories, and I firmly believe that Oh knows the deal with all of them. I’d love to know more about the street gang culture in Old and Neo Seoul, and how that rose in the ashes of war. I want to know what Jaewon’s fashion designer classmate is up to.  Or more about how the rebels organized. All of that happens before the world changing events at the end of the book, and I also want to know what happens next!

I really hope that this turns into a series so we can see what other stories exist in this world. (Also, there wasn’t nearly enough giant robots for me, which is what I want when someone invokes Pacific Rim.) (There’s another story I want! Why did giant robots become the weapon of choice in this series of wars?)

In a nutshell: lots of world building, not really enough plot, want more in this world.

The past month has been kind of rough in terms of the number of books I’ve DNF’d. I’ve put down two brand-new historicals in a week, so while I wasn’t thrilled with The Laird Takes a Bride, I was determined to power through it just to finish something.

The problem with The Laird Takes a Bride is that it’s an incredibly uneven novel. The first half of the book is frustrating, and while it improved considerably by the second half, there was a lot to slog through to get there.  It was so uneven it actually felt as if each half had been written by two different people.

At age twenty-seven, Fiona Douglass is a spinster and content to stay that way. Her heart was broken when the man she loved and thought would offer for her, Logan Munro, married her sister instead. So Fiona isn’t thrilled when she’s summoned to Castle Tadgh to be a potential bride to Alasdair Penhallow.

On the morning after his thirty-fifth birthday party, Alasdair is made aware of an inconvenient clan decree stating:

Any chieftain of Castle Tadgh who remains unmarried by his thirty-fifth birthday must immediately invite the eligible highborn maidens of the Eight Clans of Killaly to stay within the castle, and within thirty-five days choose one to be his bride.

Failure to comply with this is punishable by being put on a pike for thirty-five days before being buried.

There are four eligible maidens available for Alasdair’s choosing, and Fiona is among them. What follows is sort of a house party (the book is set in 1811) where the women compete for Alasdair’s affection.

The problem is the other maidens were caricatures, not characters, and so poorly fleshed out and stereotyped that it was borderline offensive. We have The Delicate Princess, The Wild Child, The Social Climber, and then Fiona, who is above it all and therefore clearly Alasdair’s One True Love.

A second problem was that I didn’t particularly like Fiona. She’s industrious and a list-maker, constantly improving the situation around her, which is nice except she’s also kind of shitty about it. She’s especially unkind to her middle-aged Aunt Isobel, whom she blames for encouraging her to pursue her disastrous love affair with Logan Munro.

For the first half of the book Alasdair is just kind of there, trying to figure out why Fiona isn’t impressed with him. Then some stuff happens.

Fiona is the only one left for Alasdair to marry.

The next part of the book is Alasdair and Fiona navigating the beginning of their marriage. He and Fiona spend a lot of time sniping and snapping at each other, and it felt like hanging out with your soon-to-be-divorced relatives at Thanksgiving.

Then, finally, finally we get some light at the end of the tunnel. A little more than halfway though the book, I started getting some backstory on Alasdair that expanded his character and made him more compelling. Then Fiona mellowed into someone I liked more. Once that happened, the book was actually enjoyable and fun to read. We even get a secondary romance between Cousin Isobel and Alasdair’s uncle that’s incredibly sweet and heartwarming.

Had Alasdair’s backstory been sprinkled in earlier in the book, it would have made him a much more interesting character and driven the plot forward in a more meaningful way. As it was, he didn’t come to life for me until halfway through the book.

Personally, I would have been fine skipping the entire 19th century Scottish The Bachelor portion of the book. The decree forcing Alasdair to choose a bride from among four women could easily have been tailored to just force him to marry Fiona instead. It’s not like it made a ton of sense to begin with. The house party portion of the novel really didn’t add anything to the plot other than annoyance, and it wasn’t until those other characters left that Fiona and Alasdair were allowed to grow.

I also didn’t like the way Fiona’s character was handled; I think she was meant to be a Cinderella archetype, but it felt off. Fiona’s father is awful, her sisters are all married, and she’s stuck at home basically taking care of things. When we see her in the competition, it’s clear she’s “The One” because she’s industrious, and always doing things for other people. Tying virtue to doing work for others has always kind of irked me, because it’s an expectation of women (especially unmarried women of the time) that they take on the burdens and troubles of their family and community in order to prove their worth. As a result, most of Fiona’s personality comes from what she does for other people, not who she actually is. She likes to knit and sew in her spare time (again for others), but most of her character amounts to “busy managing things.”

Like I said, the book does start to pick up about halfway through when Fiona and Alasdair start genuinely trying to figure each other out. Fiona starts treating Cousin Isobel with the kindness she deserves. Alasdair is given a past that makes him an actual person rather than a paper-doll Highland laird. The problem is the reader has to push through about 200 pages to get there, and I’m just not sure it’s worth it.

This HaBO comes to us from Lex, who is searching for a contemporary romance or chick lit novel:

I recently remembered a book I read on holiday around 7/8 years ago (around 2010?) but I can’t think of anything beyond the cover and a few plot details – I can’t even ask my mum (who also read it) because I was reading it in secret!

I remember that the cover was a light blue/green, and it had a blonde model wearing a flowing purple dress on it; I want to say that the title font was cursive? It was almost definitely silver. My memory is telling me that the title is something like “Foxy” but I’m really not sure that that’s right.

As far as the plot goes, I remember that it was a contemporary, set in the USA, and the main character (I think she was either named Serena or changed her name to that?) was desperate to be famous. I’m sure she worked as an escort at some point? She was also very image conscious and possibly had plastic surgery done – I’m almost certain that she had breast implants and dyed her hair. I don’t remember it being an especially “feel good” book.

I’m pretty sure it was more of a chick-lit novel than a romance, there may have been a sugar daddy of some kind (or several?) but I don’t remember there being a standout hero. I want to say that the heroine possibly became pregnant at some point? I think it was set in small-town America and the heroine had a contentious relationship with her mother.

As for publication, I would guess anything between 2005-2011 at the latest – I read it in a campsite in France, and the books available there were generally ones that had been left behind by other readers, so it’s possible that it was published a few years before I read it.

Sorry for the vagueness of all these details! I suddenly remembered the existence of this book and am now desperate to find it, but so far all other methods of searching have failed me. I’m desperate to actually have concrete proof that this book actually exists and isn’t some sort of fever dream!

The cover description is pretty detailed. Anyone know this?

This HaBO is from Maggie, who wants to find a book from a few decades ago:

I have been looking for this book for years and no amount of googling has managed to unearth it so I thought I would turn to the experts as a last shot. I am fairly certain it was by an English author and from the 80’s.

The heroine is an English girl who is half Italian (I think her name was Gemma). She had an older sister (definitely called Giulia) who is dead. Her parents are also dead. Giulia was beautiful with dark Italian looks and she was the one who was frequently sent to visit their grandmother in Venice. Gemma was the one who had to get a job and take the bus.

So Giulia dies (we don’t see this) and suddenly a handsome Italian man is on Gemma’s doorstep saying she must come to Venice to take care of her grandmother who is sick. Or maybe just old. He is faintly disapproving of Gemma because he thinks she purposefully avoided visiting her grandmother.

Anyway, they go to Venice where her grandmother lives in a palazzo. Gemma loves Italy and her grandmother and falls for the handsome Italian. At some point she falls in a canal which is very gross and the hero takes her home.

Just a PSA: do not go to Europe with strange men.

Mild trigger warning for deeply negative, damaging descriptions of mental illness common during WWI.

I love epistolary novels, especially those with a solid thread of romance, so Last Christmas in Paris was a hefty dose of my catnip. While I was entirely absorbed by this novel when I was reading it, I found the ending and the finale of the emotional journey way too rushed, and not as finely wrought as the first 85% of the book.

The story opens with an elderly man looking out at snow falling over London in 1968. He’s alone, missing his wife, and he knows he is dying. A car arrives and a nurse escorts him to it, and he checks with her that she has packed his letters. All of them. He begins to reread them.

In August 1914, Evie Elliott, a wealthy young woman living in London, sees her brother Will and his best friend, Tom Harding, enlist in WWI. At first their letters are all excitement and confidence: all of them believe what the press has been saying, that the war will be over by Christmas, so this is a brief excursion, something novel and short-lived. And then the war continues and grows worse and worse. The death toll rises by the hundreds each day, bombs begin to strike London, and those who survive are injured in hideous ways from gas and massive weapons that the soldiers and their civilian families were not prepared for. Within a few years, their weaponry moves from bayonets to chemical gas bombs to tanks, and the physical and emotional cost is gruesome.

Through the war, Evie writes letters. She wants to do more to assist the war effort, and her determination and strength lead her in several directions. She writes to Tom and to Will, and as Tom has only one person to write to (his father, with whom he has a somewhat rocky relationship) he replies to Evie’s letters nearly immediately. The bulk of the story is told through Tom and Evie’s correspondence, but Evie also writes to her friend Alice, who joins the war effort as a nurse and ambulance driver in France. Evie’s role grows, first as she becomes a postal delivery person (much to her mother’s displeasure). She moves from writing letters to carrying them, including carrying the terrible letters informing a person of their loved one’s death, and the parcels containing their personal items.

Then, through her connection to Tom, whose family owns a newspaper, The London Daily Times, Evie begins writing a newspaper column under a pseudonym. The column is unique: it addresses the women left behind as the men go to France and beyond, and centers their emotional and personal experiences.

The writing is beautiful, especially Evie’s letters. Each of her letters to Tom does so much work: encouraging him, sharing images from home and bits of news, and every time trying to find meaning and purpose in the war, in what he’s doing as a soldier, in what she and other citizens are enduring as the war goes on over their heads and in their news. WWI brings her and Tom together as it keeps them apart:

We seem to dance around each other like autumn leaves, forever twisting and twirling about until a gust of wind sends us skittering in different directions.

Her columns for the newspaper are also part of the book, and they’re an emotional wallop, too, as she writes to the women of Britain, reassuring them and encouraging them that their efforts, their experiences and feelings matter. Evie and the women in her audience are unsure of how to contribute to the war effort, or how to go on now that the person or persons who left are not coming back. She writes about letters in one column:

We write words of love and support – incredibly brave, terribly proud, onwards to victory – pages and pages, never knowing if our words will be read, or any reply will be forthcoming. Those of us who are lucky enough to find a letter on the doormat devour the words inside with the appetite of a starving man. Those of us whose doormats remain empty must somehow find the courage to step over them and out into a world we no longer recognise. We smile at a neighbor, share news with the postwoman, thank the bus conductor in her smart uniform, but in quiet moments, when we’re alone, we ask the same question: What is this war without end? How much longer will it be?

The sections of letters form several parts which are framed by narration from Tom, who goes from London to Paris in December of 1968. Those brief scenes were not as emotionally vivid as their correspondence, which makes sense given that Tom is very old and ill while he narrates them. But I also found them to be jarring because I wasn’t sure who exactly he was talking to. Is he talking to me, the reader? To himself? To a diary? The writing is first person, present tense in each of the “joining interludes” between sections of correspondence, and while I wanted to be as involved in them as I was in the many letters and telegrams, I struggled to connect, in part because I felt like this narration was sort of floating unconnected to anything, while the letters are so firmly connected to a time, a date, a place, and a journey back and forth between London and France.

That said, the writing there was lovely and evocative, too:

An early morning fog lingers on the Seine, painted rose gold by the frail winter sun. Those were her favourite times: just after sunrise and just before sunset. The bookends of the day, she called them.

I particularly liked this line not only for the imagery, but also the way it reflects Tom himself, frail and in the winter of his lifetime, watching one of his last days begin from his apartment in Paris. His narration is the bookend and I suppose the bookmarks of the story, and I wish it had been stronger.

Let me talk quickly about what I didn’t like before I get back to the parts that I did. Most of this story, as I said, is very carefully developed, letter by letter and date by date, and the growth of Evie and Tom’s affections and their lack of confidence in disclosing their feelings follows that careful, deliberate pace. Tom seeks the comfort of Evie’s letters, but wants to protect her from the reality of how awful the war really is. In a clever parallel, the newspaper his family owns does the same: most of the newspapers are printing censored and largely positive news, creating confusion and anguish among those who receive letters from the war front, which report terrible losses, death, injury, illness, and futility. Evie and others around her aren’t sure what to believe or whom, and suffer greatly from that feeling of not knowing who to trust or who to believe, and worse, not knowing how to best help out.

Things get worse and continue to grow more bleak – I had to stop reading this book before bedtime and read something else before I feel asleep as the dreadful sadness of each letter increased. There’s a subtext early on of, Why, exactly, is this happening? and the way each character negotiates that question adds more dimension to the vividness of each character, revealed in their letters to and from Evie.

Evie is the lynchpin of this story: all the letters, columns, and telegrams come to and from her, or are carried by her as a postwoman. Evie grows so much in the course of the story. She finds her purpose, her drive, and her ambition in the face of a society that tells her to keep up social appearances, have tea and schedule dinner, knit and create parcels for the soldiers, but to stay out of the war otherwise.

So my biggest disappointment was the ending. I don’t want to spoil what happens with specifics, but there’s a huge rush and then, whoosh, it’s done. There is so much skipped over, so many threads left unfinished. As much as I loved the delicate and careful pace of the story, the ending made me feel frustrated and angry. What happened after the war? What happened with Evie and Tom, with the newspaper, with her life, with her writing, with her efforts to publish the truth of the war and her own experience, with Tom’s life and future. There are only hints. Everything after the war is absent, and while I understand that the story was about Evie and Tom during the war, skipping ahead from 1919 to 1968 meant that I, who was looking for the emotional satisfaction of the tension that was developed over the first 90% of the novel, was left unsatisfied. The denouement of the romance is terribly rushed, and I was left wanting more.

The pacing of the novel follows the emotional realization of the characters so carefully, and I was so fascinated by the tension created between their understanding of the war and how it contrasted with the actuality, and the way in which events they were in went on to be recorded in history. At one point, Tom falls into a deep despondency and is sent to a hospital for innovative treatment. His condition is called “Emotional Weakness.” That label gutted me as much as the descriptions of the attacks and the deaths in the story. We would now call it shell-shock, or PTSD, or an entirely normal response to seeing ghastly deaths happen in front of one’s eyes every day, the emotional toll that follows the terrible physical toll of technology allowing humans to kill one another en masse with terrible efficiency. Tom is embarrassed and ashamed, and his condition is treated by some as a weakness on his part. It reinforced my own feeling while reading this book of how much has changed, and yet how little: we’re still horribly skilled at killing swaths of people with ease, and we still too often describe mental illness and traumatic stress disorders as “weaknesses,” even 100 years later.

The letters that make up this story are achingly beautiful, elegant and absorbing, conveying both the beauty in the everyday moments, such as Evie sketching a bird for Tom and mailing it to him, and the gutted horror of what war does to individuals and families. The intimacy of Evie’s letters and telegrams recording her individual history and the larger history of the world around her made for deeply compelling and emotionally challenging reading. While I am still thinking about the book, my enjoyment was dampened by the rushed ending, and the absence of detail as to what happened to them after the war finally came to an end.

If the weather is turning colder where you are, and you’re thinking warm beverages and needlework sound like a perfect afternoon, come on over and sit with me. I have a round up of some adorable bookish and fall themed cross stitch patterns for us!

Let’s start with autumn because cross stitch pattern creators are hilarious.

At This Point, My Blood Type is Pumpkin Spice, LeXStitchDesigns, $4 PDF download

The same store also has this pattern which made me laugh:

Pizza is the Only Love Triangle I Want, LeXStitch Designs, $4 PDF download

I love the change of seasons in this pattern:

Autumn Progression Pattern, The Compass Needle, $10 PDF download

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower” Camus, ChartsandStuff, $4.81 PDF download

This adorable witch is on black aida:

Witch pattern cross stitch, The Compass Needle, $5 PDF download

The Primitive Hare has a number of beautiful and clever limited edition patterns for download, including Witch Familiar ($14), Olde Salem Broom Company ($14.90), Happy Haunting ($13.90) and my favorite, Spell Store ($13.90).

There’s also a choose-your-pattern option, with a Regency Witch, 1819.

Then there are the more involved patterns, such as:

You Say Witch Like It’s a Bad Thing, MKissa Creations, $3 PDF Download

Hocus Pocus cross stitch, Amazing Cross Stitch, $6.

I LOVE this pattern: The Modern Witches Lab, by Punochka, $5.74. Be aware – this includes half stitches, French knots, and back stitching.

And for the advanced crafting maven: this is a pattern that comes with book binding instructions to make both the cover and the book itself. Wow, huh?!

Brews and Potions pattern and book binding instructions, ElfinForest, $14.00.

And last, but not least, because I love dragons, the Autumn Dragon from Ingleside Imaginarium ($8 download):

Once I’m done with the overly-ambitious cross stitch project I started (I think it will take several years, no lie) I’m thinking seasonal dragons might be next. Or maybe seasonal dragons as a stitching intermission?

What about you? What patterns are you stitching as the seasons change? 

It’s Wednesday! Does anyone else need a nap? Because I know I do. So I think we should all just quickly read through some links and then have a bit of a lie down. What do you think?

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Enjoy binge watching but also like to be super organized? Well let me introduce you to BingeClock:

We’ve all marathonned a sitcom or two. A courtroom drama. A sci-fi anthology series. Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings. A talk show. Lost.But how long does it really take? How much time to watch them all? Use the search bars below to find out! Here you’ll find all the resources you need for your next adventure in front of the tube..

BingeClock also lets you keep track of everything you’ve watched! I’ll most definitely be using this.

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A note from Sarah: Hey! Remember the course I mentioned that I was building?

Here’s a quick recap: for the past year I’ve been working on a new project, inspired in part by a series of posts I wrote for SBTB about organizing using Google Calendar.

After a lot of research and development, I’m about to open registration for the inaugural Organization Academy online course, Menu Planning Mastery. 

Menu Planning Mastery contains step-by-step instructions to help you automate your meal planning. Specifically, I’m aiming to make sure you always know the answer when someone asks you, “What’s for dinner?”

If you’d like to be among the first to know when registration opens, please enter your email address below!  I’ll also send you weekly tips and step-by-step instructions with specific organization and time management strategies:

Please sign up if you’d like information about the course when registration opens.

My goal is to help you gain more control of your time and your schedule so you have less of that can’t-catch-up, overwhelmed feeling we all dislike so much, and instead have more time to read. (That should be the slogan on a Facebook ad or something, shouldn’t it? “More time to read? I’ll tell you how!”)

Thank you in advance!

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Big thanks to Reader Rebecca for sending us this video on “How to Care for Your Introvert”:

A pair of introverts is called an ‘awkward’. A group of introverts is called an ‘angst’. They’re generally never found together in the wild, except by accident, in which case they will apologize for making eye contact, nod politely, then run screaming in opposite directions.

Shout out to all of my fellow introverts! Or rather, a polite nod without making eye contact to my fellow introverts.

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Like pasta? Well let me introduce you to one of my new favorite blogs: Fancy Pasta Bitch.

Why is this happening?

Honestly, I can’t remember the exact impetuous for this hobby. I spend a lot of time on Amazon.com and perhaps I stumbled upon a pasta maker that way.

I do remember, following 45’s theft of the American presidency, realizing it might be good to develop another skill or hobby to kill time. Pasta likely came to mind because I fucking love pasta. Also, carbs are comforting.

On March 15th I bought my pasta machine and then I began making some pasta. Here is that pasta.

The blog also makes pasta-making incredibly approachable and is slowly inspiring me to give it try!

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Searching for more places to get your book recommendations? Meet Book Match, where you can find books by theme, representation in terms of marginalized communities, tropes, and more.

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Leah and Bea Koch of The Ripped Bodice recently released a diversity report and The New York Times did some coverage on it. I promise that it’s good this time:

Beverly Jenkins, a prolific author of historical and contemporary romantic suspense, is not surprised. “It’s indicative of every major industry, regardless of whether it’s publishing, academics, finance or government,” said Ms. Jenkins, who is black, in an interview earlier this week. “It’s a sign of how America treats people of color.”

There are some amazing quotes from people in the industry, but the whole thing is worth a read.

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And something to brighten your day. Here is the best cosplay (Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur) from New York Comic Con:

This little girl has WON #NYCC2017! #MoonGirlAndDevilDinosaur pic.twitter.com/K79C4XDNUQ

— The Comics Bolt™ ⚡️ (@ComicsBolt) October 9, 2017

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Don’t forget to share what super cool things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!

Girl Waits With Gun is a historical fiction about the first female deputy sheriff in the USA and her two sisters. It is set just before the outbreak of WWI and just after a major strike by silk-factory workers. It is absolutely delightful, with a heroine who is tall, loud, smart, and deeply protective of her family.

The narrator and protagonist of the book is Constance Kopp. She lives in a farmhouse with her older sister, Norma, and younger sister, Fleurette. Norma is cranky and introverted, and trains pigeons to deliver messages (so far, they only deliver messages from herself to herself, but she hopes to expand). Fleurette is seventeen and the baby of the family. She loves fashion, sewing, and dancing, and she craves the freedom that her protective sisters are reluctant to give her.

The story begins when Constance and Fleurette take their buggy to town and are struck by an automobile owned by Henry Kaufman. Constance bills Henry for damages, but finds that Henry, who runs a silk factory and is rich and powerful, refuses to pay up. In the course of trying to get $50 for the broken buggy, Constance finds herself under threat from Henry and his goons and trying to find the baby of one of Henry’s employees. The local police officer, Sheriff Heath, teaches Constance and her sisters how to use a revolver, and while he and his deputies take turns guarding her house Constance sets out to find the missing baby.

This book does a great job with portraying an unusual family without getting too cutesy. Their eccentricities are always grounded by real motivations and real problems. They show great affection for each other but also irritation, as befits sisters who have spent their entire lives together. Their relationships are complex, but relatable. Even their brother, who initially comes off as sexist and controlling, gets to show softer sides of his personality, largely thanks to the influence of his wife, who is blessed with both empathy and common sense. — most of the characters specialize in one or the other (that is, they are good at understanding feelings or they are good at practical issues) with all the problems one might expect to result from such an imbalance.

I am sad to say that there is no romance in the book, with the exception of some glimmers between Constance and the very married Sheriff Heath. The story is closely based on the real-life Constance Kopp. The entire story is essentially true, with the exception of the subplot involving the missing baby, and even the title comes from a real newspaper headline about the case. The real-life Constance never married, so the fictional one remains single as well, at least so far. As real-life Constance said:

“Some women prefer to stay at home and take care of the house. Let them. There are plenty who like that kind of work enough to do it. Others want something to do that will take them out among people and affairs. A woman should have the right to do any sort of work she wants to, provided she can do it.”

I loved the historical setting, and I especially loved the character of Constance. While Constance is a very different person from our beloved Miss Fisher of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, and the historical period is pre-war instead of post-war, the book gives a similar vibe as the TV show. Thanks to Fleurette there’s plenty of fashion, and Sheriff Heath’s admiration for Constance reminded me of Miss Fisher and Jack. The dialogue is fast and funny, and between Constance and Norma there’s plenty of deadpan snark.

Constance’s desire to protect the farm for her family and her simultaneous desire to make a life for herself was a relatable internal and external conflict. As a physically imposing, take-no-prisoners woman, she doesn’t fit in well in town, and as someone who craves excitement, independence, and purpose she can’t be content on the farm with her sisters. I loved her secret (and true) backstory and her determination to protect her family and to help others.

One of the elements of the story is that the sisters are grieving for their mother, who was protective to the point of keeping them very isolated. Their mother taught them not to help others on the theory that if someone asks for help it must be a trick. Much of Constance’s character development involves overcoming this and learning that “people ask for help all the time.” In a beautiful passage, Constance says that she wishes to give Fleurette

…the realization that we have to be a part of the world in which we live. We don’t scurry away when we’re in trouble, or when someone else is. We don’t run and hide.

It’s a beautiful message that was needed then and that is certainly needed now.

NB: This guest review is from Reader Tara Scott. If you want to read her previous guest reviews (and we highly recommend that you do), you can see them all here.

Tara reads a lot of lesbian romances. You can catch her regularly reviewing at The Lesbian Review and Curve Magazine and hear her talk about lesbian fiction (including romance) on her podcast Les Do Books. You can also hit her up for recommendations on Twitter (@taramdscott).

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I’ve been a fan of Lorelie Brown for a long time, so you can imagine how surprised and delighted I was last year when I heard she was putting out a romance with two female leads. And I wasn’t disappointed! Far From Home ( A | BN | K | iB ) blew me away and ended up being one of my favourite books of 2016. It stood out not only because it’s a marriage of convenience story (of which there aren’t many in lesbian romance), but also because it’s told in the first person perspective of a woman who lives with anorexia. I got even more excited this year when I saw she was releasing a runaway bride romance, and much like Far From Home, Her Hometown Girl ended up being so much more than I’d expected.

The book opens with Tansy Gavin sitting in a tattoo chair, miserable and on the verge of tears. Instead of celebrating the wedding she was supposed to have had that day, she’s getting a tattoo that her controlling ex, Jody, would hate. It’s Tansy’s first step towards independence in years, hastily made after catching Jody banging a dude from the catering staff that morning. Her tattoo artist, Cai, is kind and gentle as she listens non-judgmentally to her story, and when Tansy comes back for touch-ups six weeks later, she doesn’t hesitate when Cai asks her on a date.

Cai has her own baggage that leaves her reluctant to open up to anyone or get involved in a relationship, but when she’s around Tansy, it just feels different than her previous encounters. Tansy isn’t ready for anything serious anyway, and Cai is more than happy to be the rebound for the much younger woman, even if she’s aware that she needs to be careful with Tansy:

Campsite rules and all that. I’m older than her. If I’m willing to do this with Tansy, I have to be able to leave her better off than I found her. That seems easier said than done when I’m pretty much a hot mess at any given time.

As Tansy heals from her last relationship and begins to figure out what she wants her life to look like, she starts to feel the call to go see her family in Idaho. For reasons even Tansy doesn’t totally understand, she invites Cai to come along, making their no-strings-attached arrangement feel a little more real than either woman would have expected.

Her Hometown Girl is told in the first person, shifting between Cai and Tansy’s perspectives. This lets us quickly realize exactly how fucked up Tansy’s relationship with Jody was and its lasting effects on her because we see how intentionally gentle and careful Cai is with Tansy, and how Tansy responds very differently than someone would if they weren’t carrying the same trauma. Lorelie Brown made a brave choice to tackle abuse in same sex relationships, because it’s especially rare in romance stories between two women and yet it’s a problem that needs to get talked about.

Even with abuse as an important part of the story, Her Hometown Girl is often fun in parts and is incredibly sweet. Cai and Tansy have a lovely chemistry that makes it easy to see why they’re attracted to each other even with their respective emotional issues. My favourite moments were the ones like this, where we see how cute they are together as well as the emotional upheaval that underpins so much of Tansy’s thought processes:

I lift my hand and slowly turn my palm to the sky. The bird on my wrist travels with me until it’s standing in my palm. There’s a shaft of sunshine over both of us. I really am Sleeping Beauty or something. If only I could sing. “This is so fun.”

“I’m glad.” Cai’s hair slides like silk from her shoulder to cascade down her chest. Her neat, pleat-front shirt catches black strands. “It’d really suck if I brought you here and then it turned out you were afraid of birds.”

“Who’s afraid of birbs?” I coo at the green friend standing on my hand. “Birbs are adorabubbles. Tumblr says so.”

“Meme addict.”

“Only the good ones.”

I like the way she looks at me. I can’t put my finger on what it is, but it makes me feel . . . appreciated. Wow. That’s such a sad state of affairs. I crave being appreciated. That’s not something that I should have been missing considering I was hours away from being married.

Next time. I’m not screwing it up next time. I’ll pick someone who looks at me the way Cai looks at me.

The sex is also worth noting because it’s hot as hell and has some light kink that works really well. The sex and their kink shifts as their connection deepens, and it’s a nice complement to the relationship building as they each grow to trust each other more and more.

Her Hometown Girl is beautiful, sexy and occasionally gut wrenching. I wholeheartedly recommend it and am giving it an A- because of its difficult subject matter, not despite it. That the author managed to make it funny, sweet and hot while addressing abuse is impressive, and I hope that this book will give queer women in abusive relationships with other women the courage to seek help. It’s why I rooted for Tansy and Cai both as individuals and as a couple, and hoped very bad things would happen to Jody.

The story had my attention from the first page to the last, and I even found myself reading the last chapter ever so slowly because I didn’t want it to end. It may be the third book in the Belladonna Ink series, but it truly stands alone, and this could be a great place to start if you’ve never read Lorelie Brown before.

We are back with part two of our RecReq time! Sarah asked the Patreon supporters what types of books they’re looking for more of, and what they’d like to read next.

This time, we talk about sexually inexperienced characters, pseudo-virginity, the presence of nuts in baked goods (we are divided on this very important topic), and romances with food porn, big families, trains, and science fiction and fantasy with excellent world building.

Plus, you get to hear the very strange way in which my brain works when it’s trying to remember something. (It’s pretty embarrassing.)

This is a multi-part conversation, and last week we tackled a whole collection of historical recs. If you like historical romance, be sure to look up that episode, too.

Here are the books we discuss in this podcast:

We also discussed Amanda’s Cocktails & Covers feature. Need a drink to go with your book? Take a peek at Amanda’s Covers & Cocktails Archive!

Important Info: The recipe for chocolate raspberry martinis is right here.

If you like the podcast, you can subscribe to our feed, or find us at iTunes. You can also find us on Stitcher, too. We also have a cool page for the podcast on iTunes.

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What did you think of today's episode? Got ideas? Suggestions? You can talk to us on the blog entries for the podcast or talk to us on Facebook if that's where you hang out online. You can email us at sbjpodcast@gmail.com or you can call and leave us a message at our Google voice number: 201-371-3272. Please don't forget to give us a name and where you're calling from so we can work your message into an upcoming podcast.

Thanks for listening!

This Episode's Music

The music in our podcast is provided by Sassy Outwater.

This is from Caravan Palace, and the track is called “Dragons.” You can find Caravan Palace and their two album set with Caravan Palace and Panic on Amazon and iTunes. You can find Caravan Palace on Facebook, and on their website.

Podcast Sponsor

This episode is brought to you by Organization Academy.

Organization Academy the home of my online courses on using Google Calendar to declutter your schedule and organize your life. I did a series on SBTB about how I use Google Calendar to automate and manage every aspect of my day, including home, family, business, other business, freelance writing, podcasting, meal planning, and more.

Over the past year, I have developed a step by step instructional program outlining the method I use for meal planning, and I am about to launch my first online course, Menu Planning Mastery. It’s all about saving time, energy, and money by harnessing the power of Google Calendar to manage your meal planning.

If you feel overwhelmed sometimes by the question “What’s for dinner?” when you don’t know the answer, this course is for you. This method can save you time and reduce stress.

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I’m cutting right to the chase and skipping the chit chat because man I want to tell you about this book and this drink. A longer review will come eventually, but if I can pique your interest NOW, that’s even better.

This is Julie C. Dao’s Goodreads summary of her book, Forest of a Thousand Lanterns.

The story combines everything I love: strong women and the complex relationships that shape them; the struggle between choice and destiny; a lush palace setting and handsome, brooding men; and a powerful, dark, tortured heroine I think of as a combination of Wu Zetian (the first and ONLY *ruling* Empress of China), Anne Boleyn, and Scarlett O’Hara.

A | BN | K | iB

It also has such a striking cover and I instantly knew I wanted to do some sort of play on one of my very favorite drinks: a Midori sour. Midori is a bright green melon liqueur and I would mix it with Mountain Dew in my baby days of drinking. And let’s not forget that green, if we’re living our lives according to Disney films, is the “harbinger of evil.”

The sour mix adds an extra layer of tartness and I wanted a more sour than sweet drink because the anti-heroine Xifeng has so much bite in this book. Since the book is also a retelling of the Evil Queen (think Snow White) and her origins, I really wanted to add some kind of apple flavor. I didn’t want to go with artificial green apple, since that would add to some of the sourness. Instead, I used some sparkling cider (nonalcoholic) to add a more natural flavoring and to give it some bubbles. I used my favorite Luxardo cherries as a garnish for the bottom of the glass to give a hint to the underlying darkness in the book.

I want to say that if you love richly imagined worlds and complex characters, please read this. Dao did an amazing job building the setting and I go bananas for characters who inhabit this moral gray area. It always feels a bit wicked and naughty to root for them. The heroine is unapologetically ambitious and even though she’s an anti-heroine, I love seeing her reclaim her agency.

Shopping list:
Midori melon liqueur
Sparkling apple cider
Sour mix
Luxardo cherries

Proportions:
3 oz of Midori
1 oz of sour mix
Top with cider (about 2 oz)

Directions:

1. In a shaker full of ice, pour Midori and sour mix.
2. Shake, shake, shake, Señora. Shake your body line.
3. Pour over ice into a glass.
4. Fill the rest of the glass up with cider.

Modifications and notes:

• Okay, let me tell you about this sour mix. I went to four different stores to find it. No one had it. Normally, sour mix is liquid. As you can see, the one I finally found was not. I did not know that it’s best to “rehydrate” said sour powder with water beforehand and my first drink had a very strange aftertaste. So if you get sour mix in a powder form, mix with an ounce of water first. Also, screw all the people at the stores who told me to make my own. If possible, though, go for the liquid sour mix.
• Midori is the only melon liqueur I know of. If you have another that you like, use that instead.
• Same goes for sparkling cider. Use whatever you’d like in terms of brands.
• The cherries are totally not necessary and do nothing for the taste. They just look cool. However, I do love using them whenever I get the chance.

Cheers!

Jane is a new graphic novel that retells the story of Jane Eyre in a modern setting. The story itself gets a little wacky in places, but the art elevates it into something special. If you haven’t read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, then this comic will work for you as a solid Cinderella/billionaire romance. As homage to Jane Eyre, it’s uneven.

In Jane, Jane is an orphaned art student who moves to New York City. Her scholarship is dependent on her having a job, so she becomes the nanny of a rich, lonely kid named Adele. Adele’s mom, Rochester’s first wife Isabel, is dead. Adele’s father, Rochester, is seldom home. There’s a lurking housekeeper named Magda, and a door that Jane is forbidden to touch. Adele has had a lot of nannies, because they always get creeped out and leave. As Jane puts it to her roommate:

Clearly, Rochester is the worst father in the world. Then the apartment. No way it could be creepier. Locked doors, a strange man wandering in, all these portraits of the dead wife…the whole thing overseen by Magda the Crypt-Keeper. I’m telling you, something weird is happening in that apartment.

Jane considers quitting several times but can’t bring herself to leave Adele, with whom she identifies (because they are both orphans or, in Adele’s case, half-orphaned). Eventually, Jane falls in love with Rochester, who is brooding and cantankerous. So far, this plot is pretty much a perfect parallel to Jane Eyre, but from this point it slides off the rails into soapy territory (it does recover, though, with a lovely ending).

SPOILERS AHEAD

SERIOUSLY A LOT OF SPOILERS

I WILL HIDE MAJOR ONES BUT IF YOU KEEP READING YOU’LL LEARN MANY THINGS

Jane breaks up with Rochester when she discovers that

Anyway, everyone ends up on an island for Reasons, and Mason, Rochester’s brother-in-law, tries to kill Rochester and there’s a fire and Rochester and Mason are so busy fighting each other (dudes, what can you do, amirite) that Jane has to try to rescue poor unconscious Isabel, which sadly does not work. Jane goes her way, the now-widowed Rochester goes his, and they reunite romantically at Jane’s first art gallery showing.

So.

Various changes are both liberating and problematic. For instance, the reveal of Isabel as an innocent victim of a plot mitigates some of the slut shaming and racism of the original, but it also turns Isabel into a literal object, remembered only in the most idealized terms. In the original Jane Eyre, Rochester has a mad wife named Bertha in his attic. Bertha’s character is problematic as all heck but at least Bertha got to have a personality, and express certain desires of her own. Poor Isabel is a most egregious example of fridging. She is remembered as beautiful, perfect, and utterly without any personality.

Having Jane attempt to save Isabel instead of having Rochester try to save her (he is injured trying to save Bertha in the original novel) is interesting because it sets up a dynamic in which the women are not pitted against each other. On the other hand, Rochester trying to save Bertha is supposed to be part of his redemption. In this version, he’s a blank. His charm and magnetism don’t come through, and neither does his repentance for lying through his teeth all the time.

Jane’s roommate is gay and Latino and thankfully he not sassy, although he is a loyal sidekick. This just made me long for an m/m and a f/f Jane Eyre. Jane is aided by a Black bodyguard, which made me edgy because in the original Jane Eyre, Rochester has a very protective black dog named Pilot. The bodyguard’s name in Jane is named Ben, so it’s not an exact parallel, but it makes me uncomfortable that there is only one male character who is obviously Black (I read Rochester as being multi-ethnic) and he’s a stand in or parallel for a dog. Ben is a fine character on his own (and, for that matter, so is Pilot), so if you don’t know that little bit of trivia it’s not an issue – but I do know that bit of trivia and now so do you.

While the plot is uneven, the art is uniformly stunning. The book is illustrated by Ramon K. Perez and colored by Perez and Irma Kniivila. The fine ink drawings are reminiscent of old romance comics, while the water-colored panels are soft and romantic. In every panel, the presence or absence of color, and the tone of that color, helps tell the story. During the time that Jane is being raised by neglectful relatives, the art is completely black and white, unless Jane is thinking of her parents who died at sea, in which case there are glimpses of blue-gray. There’s a particularly stunning sequence in which Jane climbs her apartment stairs for the first time, with more color on every stair until when she opens the door it’s full color happiness. Plotwise, this book is a C+, but the art elevates it to a B-.

I adore the art in this book and will go back to it many times. I liked some of the story and disliked some of the story. I do think that this book captured the most important qualities of the character of Jane. She has a strong sense of self before she meets Rochester, she hangs onto that sense of self, and she finds professional and personal happiness before she and Rochester have their own HEA. However, I wanted Rochester to be a more fleshed-out character. He comes across as more of a billionaire fantasy than an actual person, and that weakens the story which in other respects features well-developed characters and a plausibly updated story.