Categories
Romance Science Fiction

Read Deal with the Devil

Read Deal with the Devil (Mercenary Librarians, #1)

Nina is an information broker with a mission–she and her team of mercenary librarians use their knowledge to save the hopeless in a crumbling America.

Knox is the bitter, battle-weary captain of the Silver Devils. His squad of supersoldiers went AWOL to avoid slaughtering innocents, and now he’s fighting to survive.

They’re on a deadly collision course, and the passion that flares between them only makes it more dangerous. They could burn down the world, destroying each other in the process…

Or they could do the impossible: team up.

I love the premise of this story more than the actual telling. It was a little slow paced for me — I think the road trip format locked them into a less than ideal episodic format where basically every chapter is them stopping for the evening. Surprisingly a lot happened considering the format, so maybe it happened so quickly it didn’t mean that much? Speeding through them made them feel more utilitarian to the story than they needed to be?

I didn’t especially like the random scattered POVs from the other team members.

I don’t understand what her job was or how she made money off of it if she kept the information she bought rather than selling it on.

That said, I was delighted enough by the optimistic tone that I’ll probably read another book in the series. I really liked having a main character who is so active in trying to do good and build community (even if that was more tell than show since we didn’t really see their interactions with the community). This felt quite different from any other dystopian book I’ve read.

Categories
Romance Society Writing

Romance and Apocalypse

Watched Kit Rocha Dance with the Devil Virtual Event from therippedbodicela.com

Tune in to our Live Stream Virtual Event with Kit Rocha to celebrate their third Mercenary Librarians novel, Dance with the Devil. They will be in conversation with Alyssa Cole and Courtney Milan to chat about all things romance!

  • Community after the apocalypse — tool libraries, community gardens
  • It’s about not waiting for permission, but seeing what is needed and doing something that will help — like these authors organized Romancing the Vote to raise money for Fair Fight in like 12 hours
  • Hope isn’t lame — why are we all so scared we’ll be made fun of for thinking something good might happen?
  • Preppers have no long-term plan — need community, can’t just stay in your commune
  • Historical fiction actually isn’t that much more research than other genres
  • A lot of dystopias never actually consider food production and logistics — food (especially tasty food) becomes leverage / power
  • Our current food systems and supply lines are not resilient — need to grow a variety of crops as a community because no one has room to grow enough of everything
  • Interesting when writing mirrors real life — writing dystopia during dystopia sucks 😂 — Alyssa was getting dx’d with ADHD at the same time (unintentionally) she was writing A Duke by Default with an ADHD lead
  • Themes arise organically during writing… maybe before you’re ready to process a problem but getting started will work their way into the book
Categories
Fantasy Romance

Read Wilder’s Mate

Read Wilder’s Mate (Bloodhounds, #1)

Wilder Harding is a bloodhound, created by the Guild to…

The heroine was in a tough spot but I still found her attention to the hero a little self-motivated, wanting a protector so she wouldn’t have to become a prostitute, which, fair.

Kinda steampunk, kinda post-apocalyptic, kinda Weird West, kinda paranormal romance. The plot could have used a bit more, but it was a short book so didn’t have time for a lot of scenes.