6/12/2023 0 Comments Blonde Ops by Charlotte BennardoThe First Lady is in Rome for a cover shoot, and all hands are on deck to make sure her visit goes smoothly.īec quickly realizes that Parker's "accident" may not have been quite so accidental, and when the First Lady's life is threatened, Bec is determined to uncover the truth. But when a mysterious accident lands Parker in a coma, former supermodel and notorious drama queen Candace Worthington takes the reins of the magazine. Expelled from yet another boarding school for hacking, sixteen-year-old Rebecca "Bec" Jackson is shipped off to Rome to intern for Parker Phillips, the editor-in-chief of one of the world's top fashion magazines.
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6/12/2023 0 Comments Lieutenant nun* * * A 'Relación' of Catalina's final years, published in Mexico in 1653, places her death in 1650 in Orizava, on the road to Veracruz.". time and place written Between 16, location unknown. language Translated from Spanish by Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto. genre Memoir, historical nonfiction, Spanish picaresque. * * * Sometime between 16 - that is, between the visit to Naples, which concludes her memoir, and her return to the Americas-she wrote down in manuscript or dictated to an amanuensis an account of her life. At a Glance: full title Memoir of a Basque Lieutenant Nun: Transvestite in the New World. * * * A 'Relación' of Catalina's final years, published in Mexico in 1653, places her death in 1650 in Orizava, on the road to Veracruz." From the introduction to Lieutenant Nun by translator Michele Stepto: "She gives 1585 as the year of her birth, though records in San Sebastian indicate she was baptized in 1592. The Lieutenant Nun’s str ategy was to use heroic and violent actions in a time of conquest and under the mask of her mas culine cos tumes and appearance in order to achieve freedom, pow er and. * * * Sometime between 16 - that is, between the visit to Naples, which concludes her memoir, and her return to the Americas-she wrote down in manuscript or dictated to an amanuensis an account of her life. From the introduction to Lieutenant Nun by translator Michele Stepto: "She gives 1585 as the year of her birth, though records in San Sebastian indicate she was baptized in 1592. 6/12/2023 0 Comments Tea by Matthew J. MetzgerHonestly, the cover of this book appealed to me (I love tea!) but once I read the blurb I was intrigued, little did I know I’d be drawn into a story that was not what it seems and would break my heart, only to put it back together in the best way! Wow, just wow!! An amazing and compelling story of chance, trust, love, and hope! I couldn’t put it down! When Chris asks him out, he ought to say no. But John is badly burned from his last relationship and in no fit state to try again. All he wants, from that very first touch, is to never let go. Chris is like nobody John’s ever known, and John is caught from the start. He didn’t expect to find love at the same time.Īnd it really is love at first sight. John only went into the cafe to have a brew and wait out the storm. Tea (A Cup of John, Book One) by Matthew J. Sometimes O's suppression of self for something outside herself takes on an almost religious nature. Its not about sex its about control and need. The sex in this book is blunt but not graphic, or perhaps graphic but not detailed. She seems intelligent, stable, financially independent, and is even shown to be something of a predator herself on occasion. O isn't tricked, intimidated or emotionally manipulated into agreeing with what is done to her. I think the main difference is the consensualness of the proceedings. I mean even Fanny Hill was a difficult read for me but this was much less so. I have to say that it was a lot less uncomfortable a read than i expected. There is an entire group or society involved in this, a bit like in Ninth Gate or Eyes Wide Shut. The quintessential S&M story, although perhaps a little more theatrical than reality. 6/12/2023 0 Comments Beka cooper bloodhoundIt’s so refreshing to see a female character go unpunished for falling for and sleeping with someone, either emotionally or in society at large. We also get to see her in a relationship for the first time, and Pierce handles that relationship in a way I wish was more common in YA. While the pacing in Bloodhound is a little slow for my taste, the final scene is triumphant and action-packed, and we see Beka grow in confidence and skill. And compelling characters they are: charming Dale arrogant Pearl our first set of queer characters on the page, Nestor and Okha (HEART EYES) gamblers, street urchins, idiot nobles, the full complement. Goodwin goes with her, along with Pounce, Achoo, and Slapper, but otherwise we get a whole new crew of side characters. They’re both great reads for many reasons, but I found myself missing the very things that made me love the series so much in Terrier: Beka’s community.įirst, a quick recap: Bloodhound delves deeper into the Rogue system as Beka travels to Port Caynn, chasing down the source of the counterfeit coins flooding Corus. The first month of our informal Tortall reread is winding up, and I gulped down Bloodhound and Mastiff inside of a week. 6/11/2023 0 Comments Unwind booksIf they can survive until their eighteenth birthday, they can’t be harmed - but when every piece of them, from their hands to their hearts, are wanted by a world gone mad, eighteen seems far, far away. Brought together by chance, and kept together by desperation, these three unlikely companions make a harrowing cross-country journey, knowing their lives hang in the balance. Lev’s unwinding has been planned since his birth, as part of his family’s strict religion. Risa has no parents and is being unwound to cut orphanage costs. In a society where unwanted teens are salvaged for their body parts, three runaways fight the system that would “unwind” them Connor’s parents want to be rid of him because he’s a troublemaker. Neely Tubati Alexander, “Love Buzz”: A Mardi Gras bachelorette party leads to a chance encounter for bridesmaid Serena Khan that leads her considering blowing up the life she’s carefully built just weeks before her thirtieth birthday. For more on the writers and their book tour, visit Īvailable Now: Stream | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Stitcher | Google Podcasts MORE EPISODES THE TRUE LOVE EXPERIMENT is out from Gallery Books. “What more fun can you imagine than taking that person who thinks she knows everything about love and showing her that maybe that’s not actually true… they really became friends,” she says. The way the relationship unfolds slowly, Lauren explains, is what makes it good. “No two people complete each other, it is who is perfect for our heroine or our hero,” says Christina, and in this book it’s the divorced dad/documentary producer Conner who is clearly meant for Fizzy. THE TRUE LOVE EXPERIMENT is a stand alone novel focused on “Fizzy” aka Felicity Chen, who readers first met in their instant bestseller THE SOULMATE EQUATION. PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5) - Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, the besties and writing duo who make readers’ smiles and hearts grow with every book published under the pen name Christina Lauren, return to the podcast to talk with Olivia about this summer’s release. 6/11/2023 0 Comments The Vision, Vol. 1 by Tom KingOne of the most effective elements of Vision is the use of narrators as well as the color-coding of narrative and dialogue balloons. Vision is much more than source material for WandaVision, however this work also offers a powerful addition to science fiction’s enduring questions about what it means to be human-often explored through androids and artificial intelligence-as well as unpacking the essence of love, justice, and the frailty of life (or sentience). King repeats motifs and phrases around normalcy and the conditions of being a family member-such as Virginia’s proclivity for crying: Visions entire family, not just Vin, are obsessed to the point of existential dread with their goal of being a normal family (see also Normality in Sayaka Murata). While WandaVision expands the stereotypical nuclear family trope through pastiche, Tom King (writer) and artists Gabriel Hernandez Walta (issues 1-6, 8-12) and Michael Walsh (issue 7) ground the philosophical questions running through the narrative around Vision’s synthezoid family living in Arlington, VA with the children attending Alexander Hamilton High in Fairfax, VA in the traditional family trope. 2, 2016), award-winning and critically acclaimed, sits behind the Disney+ series WandaVision by providing important and substantial backstories for Wanda and Vision but also because the Disney+ series and the twelve-issue comic book series share a framing: The normal American Family. 6/11/2023 0 Comments Ishiguro the buried giant reviewThe characters address one another with elaborate courtesy and formality, even at times of stress or approaching violence. The dialogue, in particular, though baffling at first, beguiles through slow accumulation. In the manner of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Ishiguro has created a fantastical alternate reality in which, in spite of the extremity of its setting and because of its integrity and emotional truth, you believe unhesitatingly. Open it at any page and you will recognise the cadences of the cool, restrained, meticulous sentences and paragraphs. It’s less a case of “ Game of Thrones meets The Hobbit”, as one wag has dubbed it, than a novel of imaginative daring that, in its subtleties of tone, mood and reflection, could be the work of no other writer. Yet for all its flights of fantasy and supernatural happenings - a mist has settled over the land forcing people into a condition of forgetfulness, or so they believe - The Buried Giant is absolutely characteristic, moving and unsettling, in the way of all Ishiguro’s fiction. But I never expected to encounter a she-dragon in his fiction or, for that matter, the wizard Merlin, from Arthurian legend. Ishiguro has set novels in a parallel dystopian England in which child clones are being reared for organ donation in ignorance of their ultimate fate ( Never Let Me Go, 2005), and in an imaginary central European city in which a concert pianist finds himself lost in a kind of surrealist nightmare of coincidence, farce and mistaken identity ( The Unconsoled, 1995). One of his three recruits for the project is Eleanor Vance, an immensely lonely woman who has spent her life caring for her loathed mother. Jackson’s story follows occult scholar Dr John Montague as he decides to explore the phenomenon of the purportedly haunted house (“a place of contained ill will”). ‘Who else could terrify with the sight of a picnic on a lawn’ … Shirley Jackson in 1951. Stephen King, in his history of the horror genre, Danse Macabre, said The Haunting of Hill House is – along with Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw – one of “the only two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years”, while Ramsey Campbell called it “the greatest of all haunted house novels, and arguably the greatest novel of the supernatural”. Published in 1959, Jackson’s resulting novel has defined the haunted house story ever since. “They thought that they were being terribly scientific and proving all kinds of things,” she said, “and yet the story that kept coming through their dry reports was not at all the story of a haunted house, it was the story of several earnest, I believe misguided, certainly determined people, with their differing motivations and backgrounds.” As Shirley Jackson told it, the inspiration for The Haunting of Hill House came after she read about a group of 19th-century psychic researchers who moved into a supposedly haunted house in order to study it. |