Chaos Reigning by Jessie Mihalik

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

They had to postpone a rocket launch today because of weather. Which is sad, but, safe.

And I know this because my family loves all things space.  Did you know that NASA allows educators with decent social media followings to be onsite for launches through #NASASocial ?  It's a program that's meant to leverage educators' existing social media audiences to get NASA news and experiences in front of new people. You can read about it here.

I WANT TO DO IT.

(But I need to build up my social presence first.)

In the mean time, I love reading about space and following the Mars Rover on Twitter, and I love a good space opera, too.  

(Think Star Wars and Star Trek with stronger romantic story lines.)

Love the cover of Chaos Reigning

Right now, Jessie Mihalik has three AMAZING space operas for you.  I finished the third one, Chaos Reigning, over the weekend. So, yes, I'm basically recommending a series.  You could start with the first one, Polaris Rising, or jump right in the middle with Aurora Blazing. I think all three stand alone pretty well.  There might be a BIT of the space technology better explained in Polaris Rising, but otherwise you'd be missing too much if you don't have a compulsion to start at the beginning and read in order.

All three books are about a von Hasenberg sister.  Chaos Reigning is about the youngest, Cat.  She's young and bubbly, and she knows that means a lot of people underestimate her.  Which is usually fine, because she's spying on behalf of her family to figure out who was behind an earlier kidnapping of her brother, the heir to House von Hasenberg.  One of her sisters knows what Catarina is up to, so she sends Cat with two bodyguards, Aoife (EE-fa) and the smoking hot Alex.  So that one of the guards is always with her, they pretend that Alex is her new, secret lover when the three leave Earth to go to a house party on Honorius.

(Remember, space opera so there are space ships and intergalactic travel.)

While at the house party, Cat and her friend Ying of House Yamado are both attacked, and it takes Aoife, Alex, Ying's bodyguard Cira, and all of Cat's supersecret abilities to get them both safely away.

Once free, Cat realizes that most of the High Houses have been attacked on Earth, and all the residents are being threatened by The Syndicate, a criminal organization run by the Silva family.  Cat, Ying, Alex, Aoife, and the injured Cira formulate a plan to sneak back to Earth and save the day.

Somewhere along the line, the romance between Cat and Alex becomes more than pretense, and they figure out how to trust each other and be together in this action-packed fight against betrayal and the old guard.

Want to know how it all ends?  You'll need to get your own copy to see.  You won't be disappointed.

Girl Gone Viral by Alisha Rai

Do you remember this when it happened?

A passenger on a plane watched two people in front of her interact and decided this would make a great "meet cute".  (That's a staple in romance novels and movies.). She chronicled her version of the exchange during a plane ride (cross-county, maybe?  I forget.), and the tweet thread garnered serious interest.  The first tweet had over 800,000 likes and 300,000 retweets.

That's a lot. Consider this: when Lin-Manuel Miranda tweeted that Hamilton would stream on Disney+ on July 3, that tweet received 92,300 retweets and 238,000 likes. And he has over 3 MILLION followers on Twitter.

So, again, a LOT.

And many people were swept up in the potential romance of it without considering what an invasion of privacy that really was or that not everyone involved wanted that kind of attention for merely being politely friendly in the forced confines of an airplane.  In fact, the female passenger who was being tweeted about eventually shared a statement through an attorney that pointed out all the not-so-cute elements of the situation.

And, that, my friends, is the set up for Alisha Rai's Girl Gone Viral. Katrina King reluctantly shares her table in a crowded coffee shop with a handsome man.  They have a seemingly benign conversation about cute pets and local pizza places.  When the man turns the conversation into a gambit to ask Katrina out, she turns him down.  He's handsome, but he doesn't make her "zing".  THAT guy, the one that makes all her parts zing is sitting in the cafe, too, working as her bodyguard.

What Katrina doesn't realize is that a woman sitting nearby is sharing the whole experience (including pictures) on Twitter with a salacious twist.  And like the real world story from the plane, this Twitter thread goes viral.

The woman who tweeted it all out, her husband, and the handsome guy who was sitting with Katrina all lean into the story; they lap up the attention.  

Katrina does NOT, for multiple solid reasons, and she and her zing generator, Jasvinder, the aforementioned bodyguard, take off to hide away on his family farm. While they're there, it becomes clear that Katrina's longing for Jas isn't unrequited.  

But they both have family, professional, and up, up-close-personal issues to deal with with before they can find their happily-for-now together.  Like always, Alisha Rai provides that for her characters through heat, affection, amazing friends and family support.  I basically read this in one sitting--annoyed when I needed to pause to do basic things like eat and answer nature's call.  I want to be part of Katrina's friend group and have her cook for me!

Alisha Rai is a one-click auto-buy for me, and if you like contemporary romance, she'll be one for you, too.

wow, no thank you by Samantha Irby

One of my younger colleagues posted about getting grey hair the other day.

As an official Old (TM), I felt justified to warn her that finding grey in the hair on your head was actually one of the least rude places she was gonna get grey hair.  

I mean, I have them in my eyebrows!  I'm a brunette; there is no way to hide that without make-up or tweezing.  So rude.

The depressing part? Of all the rude places grey hair can show up, eyebrows are actually the least rude.

Aging is not for the weak, and no one can make you laugh about this the way that Samantha Irby can.

So, yes, when I pondered on this very blog what book to read next at the end of April? Yeah, I went with wow, no thank you.

It was a good choice.

Samantha is funny.  

She's 40-ish, and she catalogs the many ways her body continually betrays her (autoimmune disease, heart condition, seborrheic dermatitis, creaky knees, etc.).  She also has an amazing perspective on how her formative years did NOT prepare her for adult things like home maintenance, tax forms, and making friends when you move to a new city.

She's not scared of talking about the topics that make many of us stammer like unreliable bowels and bad credit.

wow, no thank you  is a collection of essays, so it's a great read for those time when you might need to read in chunks.  I think Hello, 911? and A Simple Guide to Home Repair were my favorites--possibly because I could relate so well.

If you like to read semi-autobiographical humor essays, you're not squeamish about topics like Crohn's Disease, and you comfortable with the salty language, treat yourself to wow, no thank you.  

You will thank me.

Deal With The Devil by Kit Rocha

A couple of weeks ago, I had the BEST news from NetGalley--approval for an ARC for a book that I was CRAVING.

In 6 B.C-19*, I wrote my first review of a Kit Rocha story.  You can read it here.  It's fair to say I'm a straight-up Kit Rocha Fan Girl.  So you can imagine my response when I found out that I'd been approved for an ARC of the first book of the new Kit Rocha series, Deal With The Devil, in exchange for a review.

It was VERY dignified. *cough* Very.

Deal With The Devil is a Mercenary Librarians novel, and it's set in the same post-apocalyptic timeline that the O'Kane books are set, but the location is different.  So far, there are no character connections, but everyone is dealing with the same "how do we live now that everything is broken" situation.  (There was a nice Easter egg mention of the whisky from Sector Four from their last series, though.)

The Mercenary Librarians are actually quite more benevolent than their name sounds.  They're not hoarding knowledge and texts (remind me to review Rachel Caine's Great Library series soon, would ya?), but they do need to support themselves and help a few neighbors while they're at it.  So when the leader, Nina, gets an offer to go after a rogue Library of Congress bunker, she gathers up her team and heads out with The Silver Devils--a team of elite soldiers formally employed by the local tech giant--despite the possibility that this offer is too good to be true. She wants to save all the knowledge that's been lost and find a way to make is accessible to the people around her.

Garrett, the leader of the Silver Devils, doesn't have quite that altruistic of a goal in mind.  He's actually setting a trap for Nina; he's desperate to trade Nina for another woman who can stop the Silver Devils from dying. Their former tech giant employer has been augmenting its soldiers for years, and once the Silver Devils left the company they were cut off from the upgrades and necessary maintenance to keep their hearts and brains functioning correctly.

So the two teams set off toward the rogue bunker, and have some adventures, and get to know each other better.  And Garrett is in a bind.  He likes Nina, and, oh, man, does he want Nina, but he's about to betray Nina.  So there's interpersonal tension to go along with the post-apocalyptic danger, and there's just a lot of really compelling stuff going on.

Which I liked and will probably love on the re-read.

Why didn't I love it the first time through?

Because I HATE hate hate hate books where the inevitable betrayal is baked into the plot.  While I was all *Kermit arms* about getting the ARC, I also speed read the whole thing like this: 

I mean, I trust Kit Rocha to make everything work out in the end, but Garrett was taking TOO LONG to tell Nina what was going on.  And then there was this TWIST that I did not see coming, and, oh, yeah, Garrett was screwed.  It was also pretty unclear how it was going to all work out in the end.

Because, as I said, there was a lot of really compelling stuff going on.

So, if you want to know how it works out for Nina and Garrett, and you're more comfortable with sturm und drang than I am, you should definitely read Deal With The Devil.  Even if you're wimp like I am, you should read it.  It's good, and finishing it just made me greedy for the next one.

*Six year before COVID-19, or 2014.