Book Review

Damned If I Do by Alexandria Bellefleur

Posted on No Comments

Damned If I Do by Alexandria Bellefleur is a paranormal romance where a centuries-old demon discovers she is still technically married to the husband she left behind in sixteenth-century Scotland, which is a problem considering she’s now engaged to a prince from Hell. To fix it, Effie has to track down Finn, who has been reincarnated over and over again with no memory of their marriage, and convince him to renounce their vows. Except Finn takes one look at this strange woman who has walked into his bar and feels immediately, inexplicably drawn to her. Effie, meanwhile, has the slightly bigger problem of Finn looking exactly like the man she has spent centuries trying not to mourn.

Book cover for Damned If I Do by Alexandria Bellefleur.

Just like heartbreak was death by a thousand cuts, love was a million little moments that together made the feeling what it was.

Alexandria Bellefleur, Damned If I Do

This was such a fun, sexy read, but I think what I liked most was the melancholy underneath all of it. I have a soft spot for stories about the afterlife (especially ones that get into what it might actually mean to exist beyond the life you were supposed to have). Effie made a deal with the devil, and now she’s had centuries to live with that choice. She’s prickly, resigned, and fully avoiding her feelings about everything she lost to get where she is. As a result, she has this sad goth girl energy to her that’s actually perfect for a spooky season read.

Finn exudes his own version of that loneliness. He’s spent lifetime after lifetime searching for connection without ever understanding why nothing quite fits. His soul is tied to someone who isn’t even on the mortal plane, so of course he can travel and meet all kinds of people, yet still feel like he’s looking for something he can’t name. The book also contains an interlude chapter showing us more about his background, and I have to say I love the placement because it comes right when you think you know how all the pieces on this chessboard are arranged. We also find out just how desperately he’s sought connection all his life. We love a lover boy, but more importantly, we love a man who yearns, and Finn has apparently been yearning across multiple lifetimes.

Everyone talks about sparks, but he’s holding out for a love that sets his soul on fire.

Alexandria Bellefleur, Damned If I Do

That also made the way Effie and Finn are reluctantly pulled toward each other incredibly satisfying. On top of that, their chemistry and banter are great, the spicy scenes will have you melting because they’re so deliciously sexy, and it was just ridiculously easy to root for them. Also worth noting is that the book explicitly states Finn is bisexual! It comes up naturally through his history, but the book names it clearly rather than leaving his attraction to men somewhere in subtext, so I really appreciated the intentional bi visibility.

I also loved the small-town setting around Effie and Finn. There’s something weirdly charming about putting all the eternal bureaucracy, demons, soul bargains, and general badness of Hell next to a lovable little Georgia town (the Devil went down to Georgia, yall!). Somehow that combination gives the story an almost cozy quality despite, y’know, Hell. I also enjoyed that this story picks up from events at the end of The Devil She Knows by Alexandria Bellefleur. You don’t need that story for this one to work, but it is a fun little Easter egg for anyone already familiar with this universe.

She’d hardly known she was starving until she wasn’t.

Alexandria Bellefleur, Damned If I Do

Mostly, I’m just very into what Bellefleur is doing with this world. Damned If I Do has soulmates, demons, small-town charm, some very delectable spice, and several centuries’ worth of unresolved romantic yearning. I don’t know about you, but that’s an extremely effective combination for me. Fingers crossed Bellefleur treats us to more stories from this universe. (I’d love to see one for Belphegor and the mess that he is…just saying!)

Thank you to NetGalley and Berkley for sharing an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review

The Gods Will Sing Our Song by Autumn Krause

Posted on No Comments

The Gods Will Sing Our Song by Autumn Krause is a YA historical fantasy romance about two Japanese American teenagers, Ren and Violet, who are imprisoned in an internment camp during World War II. Against this devastating backdrop, they find themselves drawn to one another while confronting uncertain futures and a strange magic tied to their cultural heritage. Both are living through a moment that has stripped away so much of their freedom, dignity, and safety. And yet, they are still teenagers who fall for each other, dream about what comes next, and find moments of beauty within circumstances designed to deny them exactly that.

Book cover for The Gods Will Sing Our Song by Autumn Krause.

Magic, in this city of oranges and opportunity, is like that big black dot you see after looking at the sun. It’s the aftereffect of something brilliant, a negative image that’s dwindled over time.

Autumn Krause, The Gods Will Sing Our Song

One of the things I appreciated most about this book is how approachable it makes this history without ever making it feel less horrific. I knew about the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, but I realized while reading that I couldn’t think of another novel I had read centered on it. Whether that says something about my own reading or about how few of these stories reach a wide audience, I’m not sure. Either way, this feels like such an important entry point. Krause gives us a story we can move through within the covers of a single novel while still asking us to sit with how something this unconscionable was allowed to happen at all.

Part of what makes all of this work so well is Krause’s prose. Her writing is so vivid and distinctive that there were moments I had to stop just to appreciate the images she created. At one point, Ren thinks, “I’m going to punch him in the mouth and watch his teeth drop like autumn leaves,” and I have genuinely not stopped thinking about it. The gruesomeness of that potential violence juxtaposed with something as beautiful and inevitable as falling autumn leaves? What an image! And that’s just one example. That kind of unexpected juxtaposition happens again and again, giving the writing this gorgeous sharpness even when the story itself is painful.

If you understand only your own side and cannot grasp the other, I fear you can’t say you know either one, yours or theirs.”

Autumn Krause, The Gods Will Sing Our Song

I also loved the yearning between Ren and Violet. Their romance is incredibly sweet, even as they live through something so dehumanizing and terrifying. They’re teenagers who want to flirt, fall in love, spend time together, and imagine what their lives might look like in the future. There’s something important about how familiar those desires feel. History can flatten people into what happened to them, especially when we’re looking back at an atrocity from decades ago. But we understand what it’s like to have a crush, to wonder if someone likes us back, to imagine a future we haven’t lived yet. And that recognition closes some of the distance between reader and history. Alongside the profound violations of freedom, dignity, safety, and autonomy, the novel reminds us of all the ordinary, deeply human parts of a life that internment disrupted, too.

Knowing that Krause drew from her own family’s experiences made the story even more affecting for me. There is something so powerful about taking an inherited family history this painful and turning it into a story that can carry those experiences forward. These histories deserve to be remembered, especially when forgetting makes it easier to distance ourselves from how something like this was even allowed to happen in the first place. I thought Krause honored the people who lived through internment while still asking difficult questions about the fear, racism, and failures that made it possible.

Some people go to war out of hate. But some people go to war out of love.

Autumn Krause, The Gods Will Sing Our Song

My one real wish is that we had gotten more of the fantasy and mythology. The gods, relics, and culturally rooted magic were such a compelling way into Japanese traditions, and I would have loved to see that part of the story developed even further. At the same time, I understand how much the novel is already balancing between its historical, romantic, and fantastical elements. Mostly, I wanted more because I was so interested in what was already there.

Overall, The Gods Will Sing Our Song is a triumph! It finds beauty without romanticizing its history, hope without diminishing the horror, and tenderness in a story about people whose humanity was so profoundly disregarded. It makes this history approachable without making it easy, and I’m incredibly glad I got to read it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Delacorte Press for sharing an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review

That Night by Gillian McAllister

Posted on No Comments

That Night by Gillian McAllister is a psychological thriller about three adult siblings whose vacation in Verona takes a horrifying turn. When Frannie calls her siblings, Joe and Cathy, in the middle of the night and tells them she’s killed a man, they make a choice that binds them together in a secret that will slowly unravel their lives: they help conceal the death. Once they return home to England, the lies begin multiplying, the police investigation takes off, and the siblings start questioning how well they actually know one another. A deliciously stressful premise that turns familial devotion into its own kind of trap.

Book cover for That Night by Gillian McAllister.

It was an accident. A terrible coincidence. This is the hand they’ve been dealt, and now they need to play the cards.

Gillian McAllister, That Night

I am such a fan of Gillian McAllister’s thrillers! She is exceptionally good at sustaining suspense even after revealing the crime at the center of the story. I’m usually pretty good at predicting twists in the thrillers I read, and here, I occasionally suspected what might happen, but I could never quite figure out why things were happening. Every new piece of information altered the logic behind what I thought I understood, which kept me turning pages because I just had to see how the full picture would eventually take shape. The tension in this book comes as much from waiting for the family to fracture as it does from wondering whether the police will uncover what they’ve done.

The premise also creates a fascinating moral thought experiment. Joe and Cathy make an arguably appalling decision to help Frannie hide a body, but McAllister carefully establishes the emotional reasoning that makes it feel like the only rational choice in the moment. It leads to the core question that this story dismantles: How far would you go to protect your sibling? At what point does loyalty become complicity, and can you recognize that line before you’ve already crossed it? Anyone with siblings, or even a friendship close enough to feel like family, will probably find themselves considering what they would do in the same situation. It’s what makes this plot so utterly relatable and horrific and thrilling!

The beginning of the crime doesn’t matter, because of the ones they have committed along the way, like a train that just goes all night, on a loop, with no end or beginning, so nobody remembers where it came from.

Gillian McAllister, That Night

Most of the novel unfolds in the past, right after the crime has happened, while chapters from an unidentified perspective in the future appear sporadically throughout the story. Initially, we don’t know who is speaking or what has happened in the intervening time, and I had so much fun trying to identify the narrator and determine what these glimpses were telling us about the ultimate consequences of that fateful night. I love how this structure adds yet another mystery to the plot without distracting from the tension already building in the main timeline.

The siblings themselves are deeply flawed and frustrating, but their almost claustrophobic closeness is one of the novel’s most compelling elements. A childhood trauma has shaped them into a unit that can feel impenetrable to everyone outside it, including their partners, but as guilt, suspicion, and resentment begin exposing the cracks in their relationship, That Night becomes more than a story about whether they will get caught. It’s also an unsettling exploration of what unquestioning loyalty can cost, and whether a family can survive the things its members do in the name of protecting it.

Thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for sharing an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review

Embrace by Bal Khabra

Posted on No Comments

In Embrace by Bal Khabra, hockey player Kian Ishida joins a study group led by Scarlett Kilner in the hope of completing the credits he needs to graduate before beginning his professional career. He doesn’t initially know that Scarlett is his coach’s daughter, and Scarlett has no intention of pursuing the crush she once had on one of her father’s players. But as their study sessions turn into an unexpectedly meaningful friendship, both characters find someone capable of seeing beyond the versions of themselves the rest of the world has come to expect.

Book cover for Embrace by Bal Khabra.

When you start allowing other people to dictate your actions… that’s when you start to lose your power. You can dress how you want. Do whatever you want, and you’d still deserve the same respect as anyone else.

Bal Khabra, Embrace

Scarlett’s story is particularly compelling because her struggle extends far beyond the particulars of her past. She’s trying to grow into a new understanding of herself while remaining surrounded by people who have formed their own narratives about her and expect her to behave according to a version of herself she wants to leave behind. There is something painfully familiar in that tension. So many people spend their lives contending with the gap between who they’ve become and who others still believe them to be.

Khabra allows Scarlett to challenge those perceptions without suggesting that growth requires she become an entirely different person. Her development isn’t about erasing the past so much as refusing to let it have the last word. That distinction gives her arc a surprising amount of depth and makes her relatable even if some readers might not directly identify with her circumstances.

He talks fast, like I’ll stop listening. As if there’s a time limit. I think I’d be happy listening to him talk about the things he loves forever.

Bal Khabra, Embrace

Kian, meanwhile, is the greenest of green flags. He’s funny, charming, and such a golden retriever! And beneath the easygoing personality is someone remarkably attentive to what other people need. Scarlett is such a good partner for him because she clocks this quality several times and provides that same emotional generosity to him in return, which allows Kian to feel safe enough to confront the grief he’s always dealt with alone.

The slow burn romance between the pair works so well because Khabra gives their friendship enough time to become meaningful in its own right. Kian and Scarlett don’t simply banter and flirt until the plot permits they kiss. They talk, confide in one another, learn each other’s vulnerabilities, and become people the other can rely upon. Even stripped of the romantic conclusion promised by the romance genre, they’ve built a relationship that stands on its own. By the time the friendship deepens into love, the romance feels almost effortless, like a natural extension of the trust and affection they’ve already built.

I think you deserve easy. You don’t have to break your back proving yourself to me. I already know.

Bal Khabra, Embrace

As the final installment in the Off the Ice series, Embrace offers a lovely sense of closure. Familiar characters and couples remain part of Kian and Scarlett’s world, reinforcing the found family that has developed across the series, while the epilogue’s leap ten years into the future provides an especially satisfying glimpse of the lives they have continued to share. Sweet, emotionally perceptive, and grounded in genuine friendship, Embrace is a fitting farewell to the series and a thoughtful exploration of what it means to be loved by someone who sees not only who you have been, but who you are still becoming. In that sense, it also reflects the experience of reaching the end of the series: looking back fondly on who these characters once were while appreciating how much they, and the world they share, have grown.

Thank you to NetGalley and Berkley for sharing an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Book Review

Dearly Departed by Chip Pons

Posted on No Comments

Dearly Departed by Chip Pons is a gay reimagining of the Hades and Persephone myth, centered on Hayden, a former god of the underworld now working as a funeral director, and Levi, the sunny flower shop owner who ends up tangled in his carefully controlled life. It’s such a fun premise…and I really wanted to love it! And parts of the book do feel fresh, tender, and specific in a way I really appreciated. I especially loved the idea of turning Hades into someone who now tends to grief in such a practical, human way. I also adored the characters, which made it all the more frustrating that, for me, the execution didn’t fully live up to the premise.

Book cover for Dearly Departed by Chip Pons.

Maybe love isn’t about outrunning grief but learning to live beside it.

Chip Pons, Dearly Departed

The beginning was easily my favorite part of the novel. Hayden needs lilies for a funeral, but Levi delivers sunflowers instead. The playful back-and-forth that follows their meet-cute, where flowers essentially do all the talking, is incredibly charming and a perfect setup for this story. You’re reminded that the language of flowers applies to both their worlds, and that it’s not so far-fetched for these wildly different characters to be compatible. I just wish the novel had stayed in that courting stage a little longer. Their relationship turns physical and emotionally intense very quickly, and I don’t think the story fully ferries the reader from curious mutual attraction to you’re my whole universe. The leap in emotional intensity feels abrupt, especially given how little time the story spends developing that transition on the page.

Once the relationship moves forward, the romance starts to feel too one-note. Hayden and Levi have chemistry in theory, and I liked the basic shape of their grumpy-sunshine dynamic, but their conversations often felt repetitive. They would talk through fairly simple ideas, then react as if they had just uncovered some massive truth about life or love. The numerous sex scenes also didn’t always work for me, largely because I never felt a strong enough emotional foundation underneath them. Instead of deepening Hayden and Levi’s connection, many of the intimate scenes felt like a Mad Libs version of romance and spice, where a grab bag of genre tropes, dirty talk, and kinks were randomly dropped in without enough context to make them feel specific to these characters. And don’t even get me started on “Good boys get the helm,” where the helm of Hades randomly shows up for a spicy scene only to never be mentioned again. What was the reason?! So much felt driven by novelty, and I think we just needed more focus on what Hayden and Levi actually wanted or needed from each other during at least some of the intimate moments because I think the physical side of their relationship can be fun and sexy while also strengthening their emotional bond.

Holy shit. Am I Bella Swan? If anyone starts talking about ‘the cold ones,’ I’m packing my pothos and leaving town.

Chip Pons, Dearly Departed

Hayden’s work as a funeral director was the part of the book I found most compelling. A former god of the underworld choosing to stay close to death, not through power or mythology but through the practical care of grieving families, is such a thoughtful and fitting direction for a Hades retelling. Those scenes gave Hayden dimension beyond the familiar brooding love interest archetype and grounded the story in something tangible and emotionally resonant. I found myself wanting more of that side of him, more time in the funeral home, and more insight into how he approaches grief and the responsibility of helping people through loss. It felt like the place where Hayden’s past and present could have intersected most meaningfully, but the novel only briefly explores that potential. Beyond a few touching scenes, much of Hayden’s time at work is reduced to paperwork and brooding, instead of the emotional and thematic richness of his profession.

I also wanted more from the paranormal side of the story. The book gestures toward a much larger mythological framework, especially with the contract that stripped the gods of their powers, Hayden’s long and storied history, and the artifacts scattered throughout his apartment, but those pieces never fully come together. I didn’t need an exhaustive Greek mythology lesson, but I did want enough context for the world to feel more intentional. Hayden has lived through centuries, witnessed history, and carried the identity of Hades into a very different life, yet so much of that background stays just out of reach.

You showed me how to love the things I never thought I was allowed to. Even myself.

Chip Pons, Dearly Departed

The third-act breakup also felt unnecessary to me. By that point, the book already had plenty of tension to work with: Hayden’s guardedness, Levi’s vulnerability, the Greek mythology, and the question of what a relationship between them would actually look like beyond the initial rush of attraction. Instead, the conflict escalates for no real plotty reason, then resolves so quickly that it doesn’t add much to their development. The saving grace amid all the strife and drama is Levi’s best friends, Dominic and Elijah. They’re delightful, and everyone deserves a found family as supportive and loving as they are.

Even with my frustrations, I think Dearly Departed is worth checking out if the premise immediately grabs you, and particularly if you’re looking for a modern, gay mythological romance with plenty of spice. For me, though, the best ideas in the book needed more room to grow.

Thank you to NetGalley and Putnam for sharing an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.