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.

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.

Crazy People: The Crazy For You Stories by Jennifer Crusie

We like Jennifer Crusie in these parts.   We've mentioned it here and here and here.  That probably makes us review reiterators, but we're giving you good stuff.  We can't help it if so much good stuff comes out of the voices in Crusie's head.

Don't ask me to pick
my favorite Crusie voice.

I started reading Crusie when Welcome to Temptation came out.  That was 2000, and I had a new author-crush.  I went back to the bookstore and found two previous publications, Tell Me Lies and Crazy For You.  By then, I was in full-on author-love.  The characters and dialogue were not like anything else I was reading.  I wanted more and more and more.*

* I haven't found an author yet that can write as fast as I devour their work, but at least Crusie shares quality stuff even if I can't get it at the pace I want.  Seriously, instantaneous wouldn't be fast enough. :) On the other hand, Jenny is doing some really interesting things right now, like the Writewell Academy.

Of those first three books I read, I would probably rank them from top to bottom as Welcome to Temptation, Crazy For You, and Tell Me Lies.  (Of course, that's like saying the books are completely freakin' awesome, merely freakin' awesome, and oh-my-goodness good.)  Crazy For You had a hero I wanted for myself and was set in small town that sounded like suspiciously like my own.  (If, of course, I had been cursed with being a Buckeye instead of an Illini.)

Now, Crusie is offering an inside look at how she developed her characters for Crazy For You, predominantly the woman.  This inside look comes in Crazy People: The Crazy For You Stories.  There are six short stories in this collection plus four appendices.  The stories were written as character exercises when she was working on her MFA in Creative Writing at The Ohio State.  Of the short stories, I absolutely loved The Day My Sister Shot the Mailman and Got Away With It, Of Course and Meeting Harold's Father.  Meeting Harold's Father made me melt in a totally irrational sigh.  We can call both of those completely freakin' awesome.  The other four were oh-my-goodness good.  The appendices offer even more insight in the writing and publishing processes because they include a condensed and published version of Just Wanted You To Know, her proposal to St. Martin's Press that included the first chapter of that draft of Crazy For You  and the final, rewritten and published version of the first chapter of Crazy For You.

Small towns have been known to produce this face.

If you like good stories, Crazy People is a great read.  It's funny, and a collection of short stories is great for those times when you need something to pick up and put down.  If you like to know how things are made, or if you have a personal interest in the publishing world, I would recommend Crazy People for you, too.

Witch Ever Way You Can by Deborah Blake

I don't know about you, but I need a break.

I have the world's most awesome job 48 weeks out of the year. Those other four weeks (midterms and finals) make for a bit of a mess of my office, my eating habits and my sleep cycle.  The end IS in sight, y'all.  We're almost there.

Just. Not. Quite.

Despite only having 64 total students, I swear I graded ONE MILLION papers today.

Yes, that's my office floor.
No, there's no more room
on the desktop.

It's nobody's fault but my own.  I have yet to figure out how to assign grades without actually assigning, um, assignments.

At a time like this, when I'm trying to remember if I left my brain on Spring Break or if it was an earlier time, I need a nice, easy distraction.  Nothing that makes my heart or my head hurt.  I need an HEA.*

*That's Happily Ever After for those of you who don't normally read romance.

And I have a fantastic and fun HEA for you today in Witch Ever Way You Can by Deborah Blake.  As a matter of fact, when I hit "publish" on this bad boy, I'm going to go home, collapse and re-read this one myself.  Not only is it fantastic and fun, it's also a bargain.  (And not just for me because I'm re-reading it. If you buy it now, it's only $2.99 at amazon.com AND barnesandnoble.com.)

Deirdre Connelly is a witch in real life (well, in the book, but you probably understood that.)  She's also an author who caught the eye of an eccentric corporate tycoon when she did an appearance on a popular morning show.  He wants her help, her magical help, with an ancient artifact that he's become quite obsessed with.  In order to convince Deirdre to help him, he sets up a meeting between the witch and her television crush, Robert Daniel Addison.  What starts out as a dinner date (with the actor) and a midnight meeting (with the tycoon) turns into a drawn-out, life-threatening adventure for Deirdre when the artifact responds to Deirdre's witchy ways instead of the tycoon's fervent wishes.

Deirdre is forced to temporarily abandon her home and her cats in order to pacify the tycoon and (hopefully) regain control of her own life.  On the bright side, her TV crush turns out to be a gentleman and hero, but on the downside, well, that temporary displacement is really just a thinly veiled imprisonment for both Deirdre and the TV hottie.  It takes quick thinking, teamwork, courage and determination to escape Mr. Obsession and do what's right with the artifact.  Despite fully expecting that HEA, I was left wondering how Deirdre and Robert Daniel were going to make it all happen.

(And I'm not spoiling the ending.  Read it yourself!)

I don't know about you, but I still need a break, and Witch Ever Way You Can is just the thing we all need.

The Next Always by Nora Roberts

One of the joys of reading, for me, is the discovery of new authors. This joy, though, is risky.  For every new author who's brought me delight at least three have felt like a waste of my time and money.  So one of the other great joys of reading is turning to a tried and true author whose stories I can slip into like a pair of fleece pajama pants or sink my teeth into like a toasty grilled cheese sandwich.  Warm, comfortable, easy.  A sure thing.  

(Okay.  Anyone else totally distracted by the thought of comfy pajama pants and good grilled cheese?  Yeah, me, too. Mmmm. Grilled cheese.  Ahhh.  Pajama pants.  I made this awesome taco soup last night and ate it while wearing flannel pajama pants.  That's not quite the same level of fleece-comfyness, and the soup would have totally been improved with a half a grilled cheese sandwich.  Obviously, I won't make THOSE mistakes again. Uhh, this isn't a food blog.  How did I get onto this topic?  Right.  I digress.)

Nora Roberts has written over 100 novels.  I'm pretty sure I've read 80% of them.  Any I've missed would have been the early releases written under the Silhouette label.  She first started publishing in the early '80s, and I'm pretty sure I started reading her work in the late '80s.  As writer and reader, we've been together for a long, long time. We're good together, me and Ms. Roberts, if a bit predictable.  That means that Ms. Roberts rarely writes anything that surprises me*.  Happily, I find her as consistent as she is prolific; she rarely writes anything that disappoints me.

*Ms. Roberts has three basic book types.  She has her completely fantastic, long-running Eve Dallas series written under the J.D. Robb pseudonym.  (Any author or TV writer who wants to know how to sustain a long-term, successful romance between two main characters should read this series.)  She has her "big books" that stand alone as a (usually) suspenseful romance where one of the main characters has a job or hobby that the reader learns about in great detail.  Then she has her trilogies. Families feature big in Ms. Roberts' books, so the trilogies often include a set of siblings or three friends who might as well be family (or, conveniently, both).  The trilogy characters are fairly routine after all this time.

The Next Always is the first of a trilogy, the Inn Boonsboro trilogy.  (This one will feature brothers AND three women who are close enough friends to consider themselves sisters.  Plot-wise = convenient.  Reader-wise = predictable.)  For me, at this point, the question at the beginning of each new trilogy is to see if the reiteration of the characters is engaging enough for me to read a story that, for most plot purposes, I've read before.  Is the dialogue fresh?  Are the characters believable?  Do they have interesting jobs?  Do I believe in the spark or connection between the love interests?  That's the difference between sitting down in front of a television rerun and saying "oh, look, I love this one. Don't change the channel" instead of "oh, boo, I've seen this one before." 

Not all of the trilogies hit that mark, but I'm happy to report that I really liked The Next Always.  The three brothers and their mother are renovating an old inn. That part of the story will continue through all three books.  The main characters in the first one are the architect/carpenter brother and the bookstore owner he had a huge crush on in high school.  She's now a war widow with three kids and a stalker.  The inn under renovation has a ghost.  The story of the renovation is obviously something close to Ms. Roberts' heart because that's what really drew me in.  I liked the characters, but it was their compelling purpose with the inn that made me think "oh, look, I love this one."  I finished reading it wanting to root again for my old friends**, the stock trilogy characters.

It's a romance novel, so you all know how it ends, but I think it's safe to say that you'll want to keep reading to see for yourself.  There's an inn to complete and a ghost to figure out, so I suspect you'll be back for the next two, as well--preferably cozied up in a pair of fleece pajama pants.

Want to judge romance?

Do you like romance novels?
Do you like free books? (I can't believe I asked that.)
Are you opinionated?  (That's probably why we're friends.)

Here's a link to the National Readers Choice Awards sponsored by the Oklahoma Romance Writers of America.  They're looking for judges.

I signed up!  Let me know if you did, too!

Luring A Lady by Nora Roberts

I don't know how your summer has been, but I seem to have misplaced mine. I had two leisurely weeks--one in North Carolina and one in Florida--and eleventy-seven stressful weeks. In those stressful weeks, I did manage to stage a house, pack up a household, purchase a new house, and master the art of freezer paper stencils. I did not, however, keep up on my habit of stalking the Amazon new releases list.

I usually know, week by week, when my favorite authors' books will be released. This summer, I've been clueless. It actually makes me queasy to consider the books that might have been released when I was looking.

What? It's a freely-admitted addiction.

So what's a girl to do when she's jonesing for books for eleventy-seven uninformed weeks? She re-reads one of her favorite, sigh-inducing Nora Roberts' romance from long, long ago.

I went old school with Sydney Hayward and Mikhail Stanislaski, the main characters from a time when Nora Roberts was still writing for Silhouette--those little skinny romances they used to sell in grocery stores. (Wait. Maybe they still do. I just remember the revolving rack in the Newman Grabbit. The Grabbit is no more, but perhaps the line of books is still around.) Amazon.com claims Luring a Lady was first released in 1991, but I think it's older than that. There's not much mention of computers in Luring a Lady (or any of the subsequent Stanislaski books), and the early '90s were pretty computer-intensive times. Therefore, there may be parts of this book that are a little dated, but I still slid into it like a comfortable pair of shoes.

Sydney and Mikhail have nothing in common. Honestly, Sydney and I have nothing in common. Owning two houses is not the equivalent of running a real estate empire in Manhattan. However, Sydney has a fragility and a goodness about her that makes me root for her every time. Mikhail, on the other hand, may have ruined me for all other fictional men. If I didn't like Sydney so much, I'd be fictionally jealous. Mikhail is a laborer and an artist, an immigrant living in Soho, so he's geographically and economically separated from Sydney. I don't think I'm spoiling anything by saying that despite the differences, true love wins out in the end.

Luring a Lady has all the components of a standard romance. You won't find any surprises or twists. I recommend it based on the strength of the characters and my own nostalgia. I've read so many Nora Roberts' books at this point, I sometimes feels like I can predict the plot lines. When I first read Luring a Lady all the stories seemed fresh and new.

Oh, and Mikhail is hot. If you don't agree, perhaps you'll prefer his brother, Alex, or his brother-in-law, Zach. (The Stanislaskis are a tight family featured in six Nora Roberts' books.) So if you're in the mood for some old school, sigh-inducing romance, I recommend Luring a Lady.

The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen

I'm going out of order with my review, and I'm kind of usurping a review Carrie could be doing.  Ooh! Scandal!  But I'm pretty sure she won't be too mad because she does love this author and I have her to thank for introducing me to Sarah Addison Allen.  If you take a quick peek at the right sidebar you'll see that one of Ms. Allen's books made Carrie's top five list.  That's quite an honor considering the sheer number of books Carrie has consumed in her lifetime; being in her top five is like being in the top 0.000000000000005 percent!  And because it's summer and Sean's home on R&R and I'm enjoying not being the only parent around here, I decided to review The Peach Keeper instead of the ultra-depressing book that was next in my book journal (Push by Saphire aka the movie Precious which I will review but didn't feel like crying this morning so I'm going out of order).

The Peach Keeper is a good summer read.  It has elements of romance, whimsy, and a bit of a mystery, but I wouldn't call it a romance novel, a magic story, or a whodunit.  So how's that for a non-classification?  All of Ms. Allen's books have some sort of mystical quality - not outright magic but more of a deeper superstition or legend.  In this particular book, we have a restless spirit, a peach tree that bears no fruit, and all sorts of superstitions running around. 

It's set in the hills of North Carolina (like all of her books) and also tells of growing up, becoming who you want to be despite rocky beginnings, and how true friendships will last beyond time and social classes.  The characters are all slightly nutty and they live in a small town with a long history, which always makes for some good stories. The ending is happy and the getting there is fun. 

This is actually my second or third favorite of Ms. Allen's works and I read this book in one sitting which, as a sleep-coveting, geographically single, never-in-one-place-very-long-as-a-matter-of-necessity, mother to two small children, speaks volumes.  As a matter of fact it has taken my 50 minutes to write two paragraphs thanks to my collective sixty pounds of kinetic distraction, so if I can make the time to read this all at once you know it's good enough for a summer read at the least.  But really, I'd read her books any time; especially if someone would come watch my kids.

All of Sarah Addison Allen on Amazon

Product Description

The New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Chased the Moon welcomes you to her newest locale: Walls of Water, North Carolina, where the secrets are thicker than the fog from the town’s famous waterfalls, and the stuff of superstition is just as real as you want it to be.

It’s the dubious distinction of thirty-year-old Willa Jackson to hail from a fine old Southern family of means that met with financial ruin generations ago. The Blue Ridge Madam—built by Willa’s great-great-grandfather during Walls of Water’s heyday, and once the town’s grandest home—has stood for years as a lonely monument to misfortune and scandal. And Willa herself has long strived to build a life beyond the brooding Jackson family shadow. No easy task in a town shaped by years of tradition and the well-marked boundaries of the haves and have-nots.

But Willa has lately learned that an old classmate—socialite do-gooder Paxton Osgood—of the very prominent Osgood family, has restored the Blue Ridge Madam to her former glory, with plans to open a top-flight inn. Maybe, at last, the troubled past can be laid to rest while something new and wonderful rises from its ashes. But what rises instead is a skeleton, found buried beneath the property’s lone peach tree, and certain to drag up dire consequences along with it.

Resonant with insight into the deep and lasting power of friendship, love, and tradition, The Peach Keeper is a portrait of the unshakable bonds that—in good times and bad, from one generation to the next—endure forever.


From the Hardcover edition.