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Showing posts with the label five star read

Sea of Charms by Sarah Beth Durst

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Spellshop #3 Buy a copy on Amazon 🖉 Rating: 5/5 🖉 Spice: 0/5 🖉 Plot: 5/5 🖉 Primary Genre:  Cozy Fantasy Romance 🖉 Blurb:  Marin is a supply runner with her own boat that she sails from island to island, delivering whatever anyone will pay her to deliver: letters, flour, even the occasional enchanted lemur. It’s a lonely life, but it’s hers, and she wouldn’t trade the freedom of the sea for anything. Her only companion is a sea serpent, Perri, whom she saved from a fisherfolk’s net. One day, she sails to Alyssium and discovers the city is on fire. There’s been a revolution, and the empire has fallen. Marin, with Perri, begins transporting refugees, finding them new homes where they can start over. One such refugee is Dax, a composer who refuses to leave behind his instruments, no matter how much she tries to emphasize the gravity of the situation. Intrigued by his stubbornness, his passion for stories, and his charming smile, Marin discovers perhaps she isn’t saving him ...

The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth Durst

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   Spellshop #2 Purchase a copy on Amazon 🖉 Rating:  5/5 🖉 Spice:  0/5 🖉 Plot:  5/5 🖉 Primary Genre:  Cozy Fantasy Romance 🖉 Blurb:  New York Times bestselling author Sarah Beth Durst invites you to her new standalone novel nestled on a far-away island brimming with singing flowers, honey cakes, and honeyed love. The hardcover edition features beautiful sprayed edges. Terlu Perna broke the law because she was lonely. She cast a spell and created a magically sentient spider plant. As punishment, she was turned into a wooden statue and tucked away into an alcove in the North Reading Room of the Great Library of Alyssium. This should have been the end of her story . . . Yet one day, Terlu wakes in the cold of winter on a nearly-deserted island full of hundreds of magical greenhouses. She’s starving and freezing, and the only other human on the island is a grumpy gardener. To her surprise, he offers Terlu a place to sleep, clean clothes, and freshly b...

The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst

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  Spellshop #1 Buy a copy on Amazon 🖉 Rating: 5/5 🖉 Spice: 0/5 🖉 Plot: 5/5 🖉 Primary Genre: Cozy Fantasy Romance 🖉 Blurb:  Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Readers' Favorite Romantasy (2024) The Spellshop is Sarah Beth Durst’s romantasy debut–a lush cottagecore tale full of stolen spellbooks, unexpected friendships, sweet jams, and even sweeter love. Kiela has always had trouble dealing with people. Thankfully, as a librarian at the Great Library of Alyssium, she and her assistant, Caz—a magically sentient spider plant—have spent the last decade sequestered among the empire’s most precious spellbooks, preserving their magic for the city’s elite. When a revolution begins and the library goes up in flames, she and Caz flee with all the spellbooks they can carry and head to a remote island Kiela never thought she’d see again: her childhood home. Taking refuge there, Kiela discovers, much to her dismay, a nosy—and very handsome—neighbor who can’t take a hint and keeps sho...

Happy Place by Emily Henry

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  Get Yourself A Copy 🖉 Rating : 5/5 🖉 Spice: 0/5 🖉 Plot : 5/5 🖉 Primary Genre : Contemporary Romance 🖉 Blurb : Goodreads Choice Award  Winner for Readers' Favorite Romance (2023) Harriet and Wyn have been the perfect couple since they met in college—they go together like salt and pepper, honey and tea, lobster and rolls. Except, now—for reasons they’re still not discussing—they don’t. They broke up six months ago. And still haven’t told their best friends. Which is how they find themselves sharing the largest bedroom at the Maine cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade. Their annual respite from the world, where for one vibrant, blue week they leave behind their daily lives; have copious amounts of cheese, wine, and seafood; and soak up the salty coastal air with the people who understand them most. Only this year, Harriet and Wyn are lying through their teeth while trying not to notice how desperately they still want each other. Be...

Apprentice to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer

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 Assistant To The Villain #2 Get Your Copy On Amazon 🖉 Rating:  5/5 🖉 Spice: 0/5 🖉 Plot: 5 /5 🖉 Primary Genre:  Cozy Romantasy 🖉 Blurb:  Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Readers' Favorite Romantasy (2024) NOTICE TO STAFF: There has been a disturbing increase in cheeriness, sprightly behavior, and overall optimism. Please resume your former dark, ominous terrors at your earliest convenience. -Mgmt Evie Sage has never been happier to be the assistant to The Villain. Who would have thought that working for an outrageously handsome, evil overlord would be so rewarding? Still, the business of being bad is demanding, the forces of good are annoyingly persistent, and said forbidding boss is somewhat . . . out-of-evil-office. But Rennedawn is in trouble, and all signs—Kingsley's included—point to catastrophe. Something peculiar is happening with the kingdom's magic, and it's made The Villain's manor vulnerable to their enemies . . . including their nemesis, the kin...

Beach Read by Emily Henry

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Purchase on Amazon 🖉 Rating : 5/5 🖉 Spice: 0/5 🖉 Plot : 5/5 🖉 Primary Genre : Contemporary Romance 🖉 Blurb : Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Readers' Favorite Romance (2020) Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast. They’re polar opposites. In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they're living in neighboring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer's block. Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She’ll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he’ll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no one will fall in love....

Book Lovers by Emily Henry

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Purchase from Amazon 🖉 Rating : 5/5 🖉 Spice: 0/5 🖉 Plot : 5/5 🖉 Primary Genre : Contemporary Romance 🖉 Blurb : Goodreads Choice Award Winner for Readers' Favorite Romance (2022) One summer. Two rivals. A plot twist they didn't see coming....Nora Stephens’ life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby. Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters’ trip away—with visions of a small-town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a booki...

Dolly All the Time by Annabel Monaghan

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Purchase Your Copy Here 🖉 Rating : 5/5 🖉 Spice : 0/5 🖉 Plot : 5/5 🖉 Primary Genre : Contemporary Romance/Romantic Comedy 🖉 Blurb : A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK A hardworking single mom returns to her seaside hometown and stumbles into a fake dating situationship with a wealthy, workaholic scion, from the New York Times bestselling author of Nora Goes Off Script. If they start by pretending, can they end with something real? Dolly Brick has never met a problem she couldn’t solve. Not when her mom left when she was twelve, and not at thirty-nine when she moves with her son back to Whitfield, Rhode Island, for the summer to keep her dad and brother from losing the family home. So when she comes across Stewart Whitfield—annoyingly handsome scion of the Whitfield family—with a flat tire and at the wrong end of a very public, very humiliating breakup, it’s in her nature to help. But Stewart’s proposed arrangement ends up being more than either of them bargained for, because as ...

Funny Story by Emily Henry

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  Purchase on Amazon 🖉 Rating: 5/5 🖉 Spice: 0/5 🖉 Plot: 5/5 🖉 Primary Genre: Contemporary Romance 🖉 Blurb: Goodreads Choice AwardWinner for Readers' Favorite Romance (2024), Winner for Readers' Favorite Audiobook (2024) A shimmering, joyful new novel about a pair of opposites with the wrong thing in common, from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.Daphne always loved the way her fiancé, Peter, told their story. How they met (on a blustery day), fell in love (over an errant hat), and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it... right up until the moment he realized he was actually in love with his childhood best friend Petra. Which is how Daphne begins her new story: stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only person who could possibly understand her predic...

Shallow River by H.D. Carlton

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  Purchase from Amazon 🖉 Rating:  4/5 🖉 Spice:  2/5 🖉 Plot: 5/5 🖉 Primary Genre: Dark Romance 🖉 Blurb:   Shallow Hill is where souls suffer slow and miserable deaths. When River McAllister escaped from Shallow Hill, she left her innocence behind--and some of her sanity, too. Now she's rebuilding her life with her dream man and life couldn't be better. Ryan Fitzgerald is everything you'd want in a man. Attractive, rich, an aspiring lawyer, and would do anything to keep River. But that's not the only thing that attracts her. It's his attentiveness, his possessiveness... maybe not so much his temper. When her relationship takes a dark turn, Ryan's estranged brother, Mako, is the only one who sees it. He knows exactly what Ryan is capable of, and it's not the first time he had to be a knight in shining armor. River came from Shallow Hill, though. She's never needed saving before. What Mako doesn't see, is that River is perfectly capable of taking ...

My Dreadful Darling by H.D. Carlton

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  Purchase On Amazon Hollow Graves Duet #1 🖉 Rating:  5/5 🖉 Spice:  4/5 🖉 Plot:  5/5 🖉 Primary Genre: Dark Romance 🖉 Blurb:  “My darling, it is you who is dreadful.” Reverie Adams has only one goal in life: to keep her head above water with her father’s sinister legacy weighing on her shoulders. But she’s no stranger to drowning—it’s her very first memory, after all, and if her demons have it their way, it will also be her last. Even with the blood of a serial killer running through her veins, Reverie attempts a normal life at Hollow Canyon University. But there’s a ghost from her past who refuses to set her free, haunting her every waking hour, and he will not rest until he has made her suffer. Dreadful Sharpe has only one goal in life, but it’s not winning gold medals as an Olympic swimmer. The only thing Dread strives for is vengeance against the family who murdered his mother. Determined to make Reverie pay, Dread does everything in his power to ensure...

The Book Witch by Meg Shaffer

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Purchase on Amazon   🖉 Rating:  5/5 🖉 Spice:  0/5 🖉 Plot:  5/5 🖉 Primary Genre:  Fantasy Romance 🖉 Blurb:  She can hop into any novel, she just can’t stay there. Come along with the book witch in this magical and inspiring love letter to reading from the USA Today bestselling author of The Wishing Game. Rainy March is a proud third-generation book witch, sworn to defend works of fiction from all foes real and imaginary. With her magical umbrella and feline familiar, she jumps into and out of novels to fix malicious alterations and rogue heroes.  Book witches live by a strict Real people belong in the real word; fictional characters belong in works of fiction…. Do not eat, drink, or sleep inside a fictional world, lest you become part of the story. Falling in love with a fictional character? Don’t even think about it. Which is why Rainy has been forbidden from seeing the Duke of Chicago, the dashing British detective who stars in her favorite myste...

The Faraway Inn by Sarah Beth Durst

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Purchase On Amazon 🖉 Rating:  5/5 🖉 Spice:  0/5 🖉 Plot: 5/5 🖉 Primary Genre:  YA Cozy Fantasy 🖉 Blurb:  After a devastating heartbreak, a teen girl decides to spend her summer helping her eccentric great aunt manage her quaint Vermont inn--but this fixer-upper is hiding a magical secret--in this cozy and irresistable new fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of The Spellshop. Sixteen-year-old Calisa is desperate for a change of scenery after her lying ex ruins her perfect Brooklyn summer. When her parents suggest she head to rural Vermont to help her great-aunt run her cozy bed and breakfast for a few months, she jumps at the chance. But when Calisa arrives at the B&B, she's shocked to find a rundown inn with only a handful of guests. And to make matters worse, upon meeting with her great-aunt it quickly becomes clear that Calisa was not invited. Auntie Zee is determined to keep anyone from messing with her beloved inn…even if it is clear she ne...

Quicksilver by Callie Hart

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  Fae & Alchemy #1 🖉 Rating:  5/5 🖉 Spice: 3/5 🖉 Plot: 5/5 🖉 Primary Genre: Romantasy 🖉 Blurb:  Goodreads Choice AwardNominee for Readers' Favorite Romantasy (2024) Do not touch the sword. Do not turn the key. Do not open the gate. In the land of the unforgiving desert, there isn’t much a girl wouldn’t do for a glass of water. Twenty-four-year-old Saeris Fane is good at keeping secrets. No one knows about the strange powers she possesses, or the fact that she has been picking pockets and stealing from the Undying Queen’s reservoirs for as long as she can remember. But a secret is like a knot. Sooner or later, it is bound to come undone. When Saeris comes face-to-face with Death himself, she inadvertently reopens a gateway between realms and is transported to a land of ice and snow. The Fae have always been the stuff of myth, of legend, of nightmares…but it turns out they’re real, and Saeris has landed herself right in the middle of a centuries-long conflict tha...

People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry

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Purchase 🖉Rating: 5/5 🖉 Spice: 0/5 🖉 Plot: 5/5 🖉 Primary Genre: Contemporary Romance 🖉 Blurb:  Goodreads Choice Award Winner for Readers' Favorite Romance (2021). Two best friends. Ten summer trips. One last chance to fall in love. Poppy and Alex. Alex and Poppy. They have nothing in common. She’s a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart—she’s in New York City and he’s in their small hometown—but every summer for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together. Until two years ago, when they ruined everything. They haven’t spoken since. Poppy has everything she should want, but she’s stuck in a rut. When someone asks when she was last truly happy, she knows without a doubt it was on that ill-fated final trip with Alex. And so, she decides to convi...

House of Flame and Shadow by Sarah J. Maas

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Purchase Crescent City #3 🖉 Rating:  5/5 🖉 Spice:  3/5 🖉 Plot:  5/5 🖉 Primary Genre:  Fantasy Romance/Urban Fantasy 🖉 Blurb:  Bryce Quinlan never expected to see a world other than Midgard, but now that she has, all she wants is to get back. Everything she loves is in Midgard: her family, her friends, her mate. Stranded in a strange new world, she's going to need all her wits about her to get home again. And that's no easy feat when she has no idea who to trust. Hunt Athalar has found himself in some deep holes in his life, but this one might be the deepest of all. After a few brief months with everything he ever wanted, he's in the Asteri's dungeons again, stripped of his freedom and without a clue as to Bryce's fate. He's desperate to help her, but until he can escape the Asteri's leash, his hands are quite literally tied. In this sexy, breathtaking sequel to the #1 bestsellers House of Earth and Blood and House of Sky and Breath, Sarah J. Maas's ...

House of Breath and Sky by Sarah J. Maas

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Puchase Crescent City #2 🖉 Rating:  5/5 🖉 Spice:  1/5 🖉 Plot:  5/5 🖉 Primary Genre:  Fantasy Romance/Urban Fantasy 🖉 Blurb:  Bryce Quinlan and Hunt Athalar are trying to get back to normal―they may have saved Crescent City, but with so much upheaval in their lives lately, they mostly want a chance to relax. Slow down. Figure out what the future holds. The Asteri have kept their word so far, leaving Bryce and Hunt alone. But with the rebels chipping away at the Asteri’s power, the threat the rulers pose is growing. As Bryce, Hunt, and their friends get pulled into the rebels’ plans, the choice becomes clear: stay silent while others are oppressed, or fight for what’s right. And they’ve never been very good at staying silent. In this sexy, action-packed sequel to the #1 bestseller House of Earth and Blood, Sarah J. Maas weaves a captivating story of a world about to explode―and the people who will do anything to save it. 🖉 My Thoughts: Bryce gets her own lit...

House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas

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Crescent City #1 🖉 Rating: 5/5 🖉 Spice: 1/5 🖉 Plot: 5/5 🖉 Primary Genre: Fantasy Romance/Urban Fantasy 🖉 Blurb:  Bryce Quinlan had the perfect life-working hard all day and partying all night-until a demon murdered her closest friends, leaving her bereft, wounded, and alone. When the accused is behind bars but the crimes start up again, Bryce finds herself at the heart of the investigation. She'll do whatever it takes to avenge their deaths. Hunt Athalar is a notorious Fallen angel, now enslaved to the Archangels he once attempted to overthrow. His brutal skills and incredible strength have been set to one purpose-to assassinate his boss's enemies, no questions asked. But with a demon wreaking havoc in the city, he's offered an irresistible deal: help Bryce find the murderer, and his freedom will be within reach. As Bryce and Hunt dig deep into Crescent City's underbelly, they discover a dark power that threatens everything and everyone they hold dear, and they...

Skyshade by Alex Aster

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Lightlark #3 🖉 Rating: 5/5 🖉 Spice: 1/5 🖉 Plot: 5/5 🖉 Primary Genre: Young Adult Fantasy Romance 🖉 Blurb: The pulse-pounding third novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling series, The Lightlark Saga, by acclaimed author and #BookTok sensation Alex Aster. Love kills kingdoms… Back in Grim’s castle on Nightshade, Isla is reeling in the wake of a brutal battle and the devastating truths it exposed. Her future—and the fate of the world—now hinge on a heart split in two. Past Isla, who fell in love with the ruler of Nightshade, fights to resist feelings she considers treasonous. The Isla of the present, who has seen the ruin her powers can cause, will do anything to save Lightlark and its king. As the line between enemy and friend is tested, Isla is more desperate than ever to understand the oracle’s final prophecy and change her heartrending fate. But a storm is coming. And with it, a long-buried evil greater than anything the realms have faced before. With the clock ticking on her...

Brigands and Breadknives by Travis Baldree

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Legends & Lattes #2 🖉 Rating: 5/5 🖉 Spice: 0/5 🖉 Plot: 5/5 🖉 Primary Genre: Cozy Fantasy 🖉 Blurb: Fern has weathered the stillness and storms of a bookseller’s life for decades, but now, in the face of crippling ennui, transplants herself to the city of Thune to hang out her shingle beside a long-absent friend’s coffee shop. What could be a better pairing? Surely a charming renovation montage will cure what ails her! If only things were so simple… It turns out that fixing your life isn’t a one-time prospect, nor as easy as a change of scenery and a lick of paint. A drunken and desperate night sees the rattkin waking far from home in the company of a legendary warrior surviving on inertia, an imprisoned chaos-goblin with a fondness for silverware, and an absolutely thumping hangover. As together they fend off a rogue’s gallery of ne’er-do-wells trying to claim the bounty the goblin represents, Fern may finally reconnect with the person she actually is when there isn’t a jo...