#SundayShelfie + Review

You know that thrill you get when someone’s writing is just really, really good? I had it often when reading Cat Sebastian’s The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes.

Sebastian is someone who’s writing I just *delight* in, to an extravagant amount. There are so many lines in this ARC that I wanted to share as evidence of how good it is—like one about cake & religious icons—so many moments when I felt a smile growing & also greedily thought, I *H A V E* to get a copy of this for my shelves.

This book picks up action-wise during and after The Queer Principles of Kit Webb, taking Marian Hayes and Rob Brooks as its focus. After shooting her duke bigamist-husband, Marian “kidnaps” the charming Rob Brooks (formerly a highwayman who has been presumed dead for a year) & they travel to visit her sick father & prepare for any fallout from the shooting.

TPCoMH is a rich & sexy cornucopia of tropes:
🖤 Road Trip
🖤 Some Epistolary
🖤 Forced Proximity
🖤 Oops I blackmailed you to lovers
🖤 A tiny bit of the forbidden (though that’s not really a big dissuasion bc our leads have big IDGAF energy)
🖤Some Deception Plot

& a dynamic between MCs that honestly makes my wings soar & my whole reading persona lusty: she is severe & uptight & authoritative & he LOVES IT & thinks she is PERFECT. When I tell you I loved how this became part of their intimate moments...

There’s so much to love about this romance: the humor (honestly I cracked up all the time), the care (from both of them), Marian’s fierceness & what this book says about motherhood & parenting in general, the found family this group makes 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺, & what it means to choose yourself.

I loved it & adored it.

📖 Q: have you ever been to Paris?

Eight Weeks in Paris by S.R. Lane is one of those books that I just fell into—it’s a blissful (& also angsty) Paris-set trope-fest that engaged me on every level & felt like Moulin Rouge meets French Kiss.

Trope-wise, this is opposites attract, sunshine & the grumpy, coworkers, caretaking, stormed in, forced proximity. (Do you hear my heart going pitter patter?)

Nicholas Madden is a “serious actor” who gives me Richard from Lucy Parker’s Act Like It vibes. He’s got a grumpy, temper-fueled, brilliant rep & he’s very invested in the current film he’s starring in with Chris Lavalle, a stunningly attractive man mostly known as a model & influencer.

Including film scenes + real life scenes it’s easy to see the two becoming confused—something the book really makes clear—especially as both leads wrestle their feelings over the magnetism of their relationship & as Nicholas in particular considers what he might lose by publicly coming out.

The writing & plot are sublime, the emotion is so stirring, & this is the kind of book I could read again & again bc there’s so much there. I wish I could have read more past HEA, especially since the big fight hurt me so bad 😆.

I spent hours yesterday immersed in the decade between 1940 and 1950, lost in Kate Quinn’s mesmerizing book The Huntress, chasing one sentence to the next, anxious to get to the end and knowing that whatever secrets were revealed would stay with me for a long while. 

Told from the perspectives of Nina, a female Soviet pilot, Ian, a British journalist who tracks down Nazis/former Nazis who committed war crimes, and Jordan, an aspiring photographer living in Boston whose dreams are bigger than the dreams her father has for her.

Nina, Ian, and Jordan each become involved somehow in the hunt for the Huntress, a Nazi woman believed to be guilty of despicable war crimes, and whose whereabouts are unknown.

This book can’t and shouldn’t be separated from its World War II setting. What happened in World War II, what was done to innocent men, women, and children, matters to the characters in the book and it should matter to us outside the book, too. But the questions The Huntress poses, the answers it gives, are also universal. What national and individual crimes do we commit? How do we forget? How do we remember, and what burden is on us to do so? 

The Huntress is excellent historical fiction; an excellent book, period. It’s masterfully written, with suspenseful pacing and delayed revelations, characters whose hearts and hopes and fears grab at you, and writing that strikes beautifully, powerfully. Unforgettably. 

Read this book, and then let's talk about it. 

I received an ARC of this book from Edelweiss+ but all opinions provided are my own. 

There comes a time in a bookworm's life when said bookworm has to talk favorites. Maybe you're at a dinner party (jkjkjk--you don't go to parties). Maybe you're at an obligatory work function. Or maybe someone interrupts you while you're reading on a subway (or folding clothes). They ask, what's your favorite book?, and the panic is rising because you don't have one favorite book, you have a million, and you want that person to read them all and then come talk to you about them, because you have so much to say. 

That's why I made this list called "100 books." Which ones do you agree with? Which ones do you vehemently disagree with? It's all part of the fun. I tend to avoid confrontation but this is a hill (approximately 100 hills) I'm willing to die on. 

​xoxo.