Currently Reading
Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert came out close to a year ago, but this has been as strange a year for books and reading as for anything else, so the book seemed newer than that to me. I’m just seeing now that Take a Hint, Dani Brown – a romcom about Chloe’s academically driven younger sister – came out in June, and Act Your Age, Eve Brown is coming out in March, so I’m clearly more behind than I thought.
Get a Life, Chloe Brown is stress-free reading, as every rom-com should be, but the writing has obvious intellectual underpinnings and the characters are smart in lot of things except for romance. Chloe Brown is a web designer who suffers from a chronic, often debilitating, disease and did not include romance on her get-a-life list. She gets off on the wrong foot with her sexy new building superintendent, Redford “Red” Morgan, but that changes quickly once they stop successfully avoiding each other.
If you like Jasmine Guillory’s smart, sexy romantic comedies, you’ll want to start Talia Hibbert’s novels, if you haven’t already discovered her. A Black, British author, Talia Hibbert started out self-publishing romances to fulfill her dream of being a writer. She describes herself this way on her Web site:
Talia Hibbert is a USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author who lives in a bedroom full of books. Supposedly, there is a world beyond that room, but she has yet to drum up enough interest to investigate.
She writes steamy, diverse romance because she believes that people of marginalised identities need honest and positive representation. Her interests include makeup, junk food, and unnecessary sarcasm.
I loved V.E. Schwab‘s Shades of Magic trilogy, and have been meaning to read more by her, including her most recent book, The Invisible Life of Addie Larue (Macmillan, 2020). It finally dawned on me that I had been given a copy of The Archived a few years ago, which has been sitting on my bookshelf all this time.
A book about a teenaged girl (Mac) who inherited the task of keeping the archived histories of the dead don’t escape to mingle among the living seemed like a good choice for spooky October reading. The Archived is my bedside table this week.
I’m enjoying the supernatural story, and so far there’s more character development than horror, so it’s not too scary to read right before falling asleep!
Being a Keeper isn’t just dangerous–it’s a constant reminder of those Mac has lost. Da’s death was hard enough, but now that her little brother is gone too, Mac starts to wonder about the boundary between living and dying, sleeping and waking. In the Archive, the dead must never be disturbed. And yet, someone is deliberately altering Histories, erasing essential chapters. Unless Mac can piece together what remains, the Archive itself might crumble and fall. – From the publisher
Recently Read
Weycombe is different from the author’s other books that I’ve read, although it’s an English village mystery. It’s narrated in the first-person by an American woman who married an Englishman and moved with him into the upscale village of Weycombe. When a neighbor and former friend of hers is murdered, she somewhat dispassionately decides to solve the crime herself – hiding her thoughts and notes from her disappointing husband, the bumbling police, and her fellow villagers. (Everyone’s a suspect!)
I’ve posted about Weycombe before and recommended it to readers who like Anthony Horowitz’s self-referential, ironic village mystery stories.
Temporarily Not Listening To
My audiobook loan from the library of That Kind of Mother expired before I could quite finish. Now I’m back on the wait list for it, but I may just read the ending in print instead of waiting!
Currently Listening To
Murder at the Vicarage is the first Miss Marple mystery.
Up next:
Happy Monday! Are you reading anything you would recommend for October or otherwise? Please let me know in the comments!
This post is linked to “It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?” link-up hosted by Kathryn at The Book Date. Check out other book bloggers there for more book lists!
