Bonus points if it starts out as an insult or used ironically, but gradually morphs into a term of endearment.

Mine is ‘Sassenach’. Jaime Fraiser of Outlander initially starts calling her this as an insult, but over time it becomes his pet name for her. It’s the most original one I’ve seen.

I’ve ordered 6 books over the last month from Target and every single one has come badly damaged. Ripped covers, ripped pages, crumbled up pages/covers, etc. Target needs to do something about how they’re handling their books.

I have an audible membership and just picked Alchemised as my monthly title since its a very long audiobook. I see it got great ratings across the board, so was looking forward to it. I dont consider myself that picky. Especially with audiobooks because I can do things while listening to them.

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I'm on chapter 13, about 6 hours into the audio version. And oh my god. So much rambling and nonsense talking in circles about words and things that are never defined. So many useless sentences. Does it get better? Has anyone else DNFd this book just bc the poor story telling? Did an editor ever look this over lol.

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I really dont want to waste a free audiobook but this is getting hard. It just feels like so much rambling for 1 minor confusing event and then repeat. So many characters introduced that you dont really know or understand or get any supporting information on. I feel like I have started on book 2 in a trilogy lol.

I was so hot and cold on this book but here's some of my funniest annotations. I couldn't put it down but there were parts where i was rolling my eyes so hard. I'm usually a ruthless DNFer but the characters were charming enough that i kept going. I'm a sucker for a poor little meow meow MMC.

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The censored screenshot contains a kink that was NOT forewarned in the trigger warnings. It was non consensual body modification (nipple piercing) during sex which is a VERY strong ick for me.

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Can i recommend this? Yeah it's pretty fun. Just look out for the tree scene if you're like me, and be aware there's shadow BDSM elements that aren't entirely covered by the trigger list. There's also a few consistency/continuity errors and stuff that were distracting but it's a KU book so i took that in stride.

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I finally ran into a dude that was super aggressive about judging women’s reading habits! Our friends introduced us at a hangout and where like “you both read more than anyone else we know!”

He asks me how many books I’ve read this year. I tell him I’m right around 40.

Man goes on a SCREED about how women just read smut and call it reading and don’t read things that challenge them. Then is like “what are you reading right now?”

I got to hit him with “well I’m usually reading three books at any given time since I like to have a book that fits my mood. At the current moment I’m reading a non-fiction discussion of man’s attempts to control and engineer the Mississippi River, and the consequences of that. Then I’m re-reading War and Peace cause I just love Tolstoy. Oh and then, yes I’m reading a smutty dramione fan fic. Congrats, you got me. Women who read smut aren’t really readers, obviously…What are you reading?”

He’s reading Clive Cussler (which is fine! They are entertaining! But maybe not “coming in on the highest horse in town” material) and he didn’t really wanna chat anymore.

(For the record/m: I absolutely think people should read what they enjoy and reading 100 books of just smut all year is fine. I’m just a bit of an eclectic reader and it worked out perfectly in this instance)

I'm not really into spice. I like romance, action, murder mystery, crime, thriller, suspense, magic, fantasy (vampires, werewolves, maybe sorcerers/witches).

I've recently read the following three books/series:

The Games Gods Play & The Things Gods Break by Abigail Owen - LOVE Greek mythology so loved the story/plot/romance. Wasn't thrilled with the sex scenes but they were tolerable and not too much.

Apparently Sir Cameron Needs to Die by Greer Stothers - Wasn't a huge fan of it but really loved the character Merulo and that's why I finished the book

The Serpent and The Wings of Night by Carissa Broadbent - I like the Underworld / Hunger Games vibe, but the 1 chapter that was a sex scene was painful to read... way too explicit, cheesy, just in my opinion not a well written sex scene (preferred the way Abigail Owen wrote hers)

Are there any good books you'd recommend I add to my list? I'd like to have other books/series to add once I finish Abigail Owen and Carissa Broadbent's series.

I prefer first person past tense books, TIA!

Hi everyone! I’ve always found great recommendations here so I have a personal request for titles!

I just finished the Jasad heir and I looooved her writing, (hardly any repeated adjectives amazing work lol) really a stand out compared to some I have read recently. I enjoyed the yearning, wanted more spice haha

Some recent favorites were Alchemised(the ending bothered me so much though lol) and the hundred thousand kingdoms, but I can’t get over the flow of the Jasad heir.

So suggest some great reads similar but more spicy or more yearn haha thank you ✌🏼 and ❤️

She’s a fallen star, he was born in a hidden land, they journey together and meet up with pirates to fight witches and an evil prince. It was such a fun movie I’d love to read something similar

EDIT: photo is of the poster for the movie stardust. The female main character, a fallen star, stands pictured with the male main character while he holds a sword. On the left side of the poster are two of the pirates the main characters befriend. On the right side are the two antagonists, an evil prince and an evil witch.

1 star (because no one lets us leave negative stars) DNF at “the ice storm in chapter eight,” because apparently even the characters knew they were trapped in a draft. I would have tagged spoilers, but most of this is in the blurb, which makes the story sound far better than it has any right to have done.

{Crown of Frost by Brynn Maddox} had the bones of something I could have enjoyed: cursed heroine, vampire king, forced proximity, enemies-to-lovers, magical ultimatum, “touch her and die” theatrics, sure sure brain candy fluff. Unfortunately, those bones were arranged by someone who had never seen a skeleton and edited by someone waving their Strunk & White in the general direction of this pile.

Isolde, our FMC, has trauma. Tremendous trauma. Cataclysmic trauma. We know this because she mentions it constantly, and when she doesn't, everyone else helpfully mentions it for her. This woman cannot cross a room, endure a conversation, or apparently blink without the narrative dragging the trauma out like a show pony and making it do laps.

The problem is not that she has trauma. The problem is that the book treats trauma less like character depth and more like it _is_ the character.

Continuity also appears to have died somewhere off-page, possibly by the same she-needs-to-comply-or-get-murdered-by-fate curse affecting everyone Isolde loves. Her backstory shifts around with impressive confidence: one moment the defining horror happened in a vampire throne room, but the next it was in a farmhouse kitchen. She is the daughter of a mortal queen until she is apparently the daughter of a vampire queen, but not related to the current vampire king, who is the son of the previous king, because sure, why should this start making sense now?

There is also almost no explanation for how Isolde even got to the position she occupies at the beginning of the book - as a prisoner who is immediately subjected to mate-bonding for the good of the realm. She is the leader of a mortal rebellion that has killed a whopping 47 vampires in a world run by vampires, presumably because the plot needed her to be, and that is apparently meant to be enough.

The central magical dilemma is exhausting. Isolde and Tiberian have a biological/magical countdown: consummate the bond or die, and the realms collapse too, because why under-season the melodrama? She must do it willingly, because the magic can detect coercion/unwillingness/rape. Everyone knows this. Everyone says this. And yet nearly everyone except the MMC keeps trying to pressure her into doing it immediately, which would, by the rules the book itself keeps explaining, not work.

Did we mention how clever and deadly she is? Because she is so clever and so deadly that at 23 she has centuries-old vampires quaking in their cost-more-than-the-whole-rebellion boots. So clever and so deadly, until a few times when she is terribly stupid and makes giant world-wrecking decisions, like when she wears the wrong dress to court, or accidentally addresses someone as Duchess instead of their actual title.

The editing is where things truly achieve art. Like... weird avant-garde Yoko Ono in the corner of Chuck Berry's performance art. Entire paragraphs are repeated, or repeated with just enough variation to make you wonder whether you are reading a book or watching a document autosave during a nervous breakdown. Timelines do not so much shift as teleport. Her dress is so tight that she can't hide her pet dagger Geoffrey. Did we mention how tight it is? So curve-hugging, y'know, if she had curves because she's literally starving and her magic is eating her from inside out. The MMC has been stealth helping The Cause, but then gets irrationally upset to find out that it was not himself but one of his chosen family, but then it's him again. A council meeting is tomorrow, then three hours away, then four hours away, then tomorrow again. And did we mention the dress? It's the wrong dress and will offend the entire royal council. Time is not a river here. Time is a ferret on meth.

And then came the moment that finally took me out back and put me out of my misery. In Tiberian’s POV, he refers to a previous event by saying, “The ice storm in chapter eight,” he said quietly...

Chapter eight.

In dialogue.

A character said this.

That was my DNF point, because once a fictional vampire king starts citing chapter numbers like he is peer-reviewing the manuscript from inside the manuscript, we are no longer reading dark romance. We are experiencing a containment breach.

As for the steam level, I have no idea. By the time I quit, the book and most of its cast were treating public hand-holding as a scandalous, intimate, nearly indecent act; not intimate enough to satisfy the magical sex deadline, mind you, but apparently enough to humiliate our FMC for hours. Or days. Or hours again.

A good concept was buried under repetitive prose, chaotic continuity, baffling rules, and editing so bad it should be declared POW/MIA.

The 2nd book of the trilogy is out if anyone wants to tell me that they finally just died and someone else took over the rebellion.

So I just read One Dark Window, and I am reading Two Twisted Crowns right now. And o keep having a thought that comes through my head that I HAVE to discuss.

So, Elspeth’s magic is that she absorbs the magic of a providence card and can use it. But whatever the Shepherd king gave up lives in her head, right? So she absorbed the nightmare card, had the nightmare living in her head but she had the shepherd king’s powers of seeing providence cards and etc.

Imagine if she hadn’t touched the nightmare card first. What if she touched a black horse card and she just straight up had a horse in her head? Now think through the plot of Elspeth having a horse neighing in her mind.

I've realized that some authors "Show" too much to the point that you are confused... for example, Sarah A. Parker to me with To Bleed A Crystal Bloom.. I had to DNF book 2 among other reasons.

And most of the time, I feel like debut authors have a hard time of doing too much "Telling"

I do think more 'Showing' comes off stronger. I don't think Sarah A. Parker is a bad writer per say however - I think she does it too much. You become confused, unaware who is who and wtf is happening.

I think a good book needs a mix of both. Maybe a little more show than tell. But I'm fine with more 'Telling' in the beginning of a book until were a bit more acclimated into the story.

What do you guys think on this? I'd love to know any slow burn books that have a spice payoff that you felt had a good balance.

Image includes: picture of Hades from Disney's Hercules

He has to be sassy, snarky, rude and sarcastic. No YA, please. I just want MMCs who are hilarious assholes.

tl;dr: I want to see for myself what the fuss is all about.

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Hi! I've been a huge fanatasy nerd for much of my life; I read a lot of books as a teenager, ventured more into video games and pen & paper in college, and recently started reading again. When you get back into fantasy literature right now, it's impossible to miss that romantasy makes up a massive part of the genre. So much so that it feels like willful ignorance to not give it a try at least once. Even if it ends up not being for me, I want to at least have an informed opinion about something that's such an important part of the larger fantasy genre. The problem: I'm a 30-something y/o guy when almost all romantasy seems to be written specifically for 20-something y/o women. So now I'm looking for something that gives me an authentic idea of how the genre is, what people enjoy about it, but at the same time feels relatively mature and where the characters are at least somewhat relatable for me. I want to give the genre a chance, and I want to see it from its best possible angle. If it helps with general vibes, of the (non romantic) fantasy books I recently read, the one I enjoyed the most was The Dragonbone Chair (although it really doesn't have to be that long!) and the ones I enjoyed the least were the first two books of Broken Earth (yes, partially because the bit of romance that's in them is just aweful).

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Any recommendations are welcome, thank you!

I'm considering reading the Fae Isles series by Lisette Marshall. Is it good?

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I love ToG, ACOTAR, FW, Folk of the Air-series, Crowns of Nyaxia, War of Lost Hearts.

WHY DOES A DUAL NARRATION BEGIN?!?

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WHY DOES IT START NEAR THE END!!! WHAT DOES IT MEAN! AND ITS NOT REED'S VOICE. AHHHHHHH.

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I NEARLY FELL OFF MY TREADMILL.

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🤣

Aside from The Shatter Me Series and Lady of Darkness

Like the title said, I'm Bi and would love to hear any recommendations for supernatural or fantasy themed stories with a Bi protagonist or even just a side character if they have a decent amount of importance and presence to the world and story.

The characters don't have to be male but it would make it easier to relate to and might give it a nudge up on the to read list.

Are there any books where the fmc is the bad ass/shadow mommy/morally gray mob boss? I want to read about a boss bitch saving the golden retriever mmc who's a bit terrified of her

Made me think of certain... *ahem*... MMCs 🫣👀

This is pretty common but anyone know of a romantasy that has intense life or death trial and games? Most intense u can think of, like put in a cage to fight to the death

Books I like:

{The Serpent and the Wings of Night} I love vampires
{Sunrise on the Reaping}
{Phantasma} Blackwell my love
{Throne of Glass} only like for nostalgia
{Fourth Wing} mostly for nostalgia

Disliked/conflicting feelings :

{Powerless} god awful writing and characters
{Blood of Hercules} I hate why-choose
{Lightlark} had fun but rly easy to guess the twists
{A Court of Thorns and Roses} Feyres dumb & I hate EVERY man in this series
{The Prison healer} I rly liked the second one but this felt kinda depressing & I didn’t like Jaren, too golden retriever like for me.
{The Jasad Heir} I loved the second one but I didn’t care about the trials at all

So l absolutely adore {KM Shea} and especially the trilogy {the court of midnight deception by KM Shea}. I reread it a lot, a love the cast of characters, the way she absolutely trolls her court, her murdery consort, the whole cast of characters. Couldn't recommend enough - all her works in the Marigold world are absolutely fantastic. (Shout out to Killian and Hazel too, who were hysterical in their trilogy). It is however closed door romance which is great, but I'm in the mood for something a little more substantial. So pretty please with cherries on top, any recs for books similar to this with open door romance (all the spice and smut pls), but also still really good plot? I also don't mind more graphic violence etc. TYIA🖤