Genre: queer fiction

Grade A #BookReview: The Maiden and Her Monster by Maddie Martinez

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: The Maiden and Her Monster by Maddie MartinezThe Maiden and Her Monster by Maddie Martinez
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Gothic, historical fantasy, horror, queer fiction, retellings
Pages: 352
Published by Tor Books on September 9, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A gorgeous, atmospheric debut fantasy that reimagines the Jewish myth of golem in a tale rooted in history, folklore, and sapphic romance—perfect for fans of Katherine Arden, Ava Reid, Hannah Whitten, and Naomi Novik.
The forest eats the girls who wander out after dark.
As the healer’s daughter, Malka has seen how the curse of the woods has plagued her village, but when the Ozmini Church comes to collect their tithes, they don’t listen to the warnings about a monster lurking in the trees. After a clergy girl wanders too close to the forest and Malka’s mother is accused of her murder, Malka strikes a bargain with a zealot Ozmini priest. If she brings him the monster, he will spare her mother from execution.
When she ventures into the blood-soaked woods, Malka finds a monster, though not the one she expects: an inscrutable, disgraced golem who agrees to implicate herself, but only after Malka helps her free the imprisoned rabbi who created her.
But a deal easily made is not easily kept. And as their bargain begins to unravel a much more sinister threat, protecting her people may force Malka to endanger the one person she left home to save—and face her growing feelings for the very creature she was taught to fear.

My Review:

Malka’s village is caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock is the established Ozmini Church which has tithed her people to the breaking point for being non-believers. Her people are Yahadi, which, in this alternate fantasy world of quasi-Europe in a time similar but not quite the Middle Ages, are this world’s equivalent of the Jewish People.

And, of course, just as the church did in real history, the Jews are fair game to be accused of any crime and automatically convicted, to be imprisoned and executed without trial, to be maimed for looking at a clergyman or a church knight in whatever manner is called ‘wrong’ at the moment, for any women who protest being raped to be beaten to death. This has all literally happened before and may all happen again.

The woods that surround Malka’s village, once a source of food animals and healing herbs, are now dark, dangerous and deadly. The woods eat women. They also turn formerly edible animals into poisonous monsters. The woods take what the church does not.

Putting Malka herself between that rock and that hard place. The churchmen have taken her mother for execution for a crime committed by the deadly woods and its monsters. The church would rather accuse a Yahadi because it furthers their narrative of using the Yahadi as scapegoats in order to gather more power instead of investigating the villagers’ claims that there is a monster in the forest.

Malka takes her life and her mother’s life into her own hands, and bargains with the clergy to go into the woods, kill the monster and bring the body back to prove her mother’s innocence. Malka bargains in desperation and in good faith. She’ll brave the woods and make the attempt – or die trying. Probably the latter.

The clergyman’s faith in this bargain is questionable. On all sides and for all possible motives. But Malka believes because she HAS TO.

And that’s where her true story begins, and leads her to THE true story behind the evil that has taken hold of the woods that surround her home – and the country of which they are a part. That, along the way, Malka learns that the monster she believed to be the scourge of her people is the love of her life, and that the magic of her people that she has been taught to fear is the greatest gift of her faith, are only part of the lessons that she needs to learn in order to save her mother, her people, and herself.

The Maharal of Prague and the Golem

Escape Rating A: The story of The Maiden and Her Monster stands on two foundations, one is the very real and terrible history of Antisemitic persecution across all of Europe during the Middle Ages. The second is a response in Jewish folklore to that persecution, the tale of “The Golem of Prague”, where a great rabbi, the Maharal of Prague, builds a golem out of clay in order to protect his people from persecution.

From those two starting points, the author has crafted a dark fantasy world that skates right on the edge of horror, giving that horror not the face of the monster as one might expect, but rather the human face of greedy and rapacious men who believe the righteousness of their own cause and the inevitability of their own power and don’t care who is sacrificed for their so-called ‘greater good’.

As if that weren’t enough to make a fantastic and fantastical story, layered on top of that foundation is an equally dark sapphic romantasy, as Malka falls in love, not with the good man who has tagged along on her quest but rather the female monster she once feared, hated and reviled at every turn. That love builds slowly and inexorably, step by reluctant step, even as they do their damndest to wound each other and push each other far away.

At the same time, even though the horror and the adventure and the romance along with a daring rescue and a desperate, last chance to defeat an evil that has very nearly won, there’s also a marvelously written meditation on the power of stories themselves, the power to move mountains, to inspire people, but also to hold them back in fear. That the point of view from which a story is told affects every retelling thereafter, and that the most triumphant of tales can conceal the darkest of motives.

There is a LOT to savor in The Maiden and Her Monster. The language is beautiful, the story is a desperate walk through very dark places that ultimately turns towards the light, and it’s an epic love story that springs from the rockiest of beginnings. This is one to literally ‘read it and weep’ with the understanding at the end that ‘not all tears are evil.’

A- #BookReview: The Case of the Missing Maid by Rob Osler

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Case of the Missing Maid by Rob OslerThe Case of the Missing Maid by Rob Osler
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery, queer fiction
Series: Harriet Morrow Investigates #1
Pages: 320
Published by Kensington on December 24, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The acclaimed author of the Anthony, Agatha, Macavity, and Lefty Award-nominated Devil’s Chew Toy delights with the first in a new historical mystery series set in turn-of-the-20th-century Chicago, as America is entering its Progressive Era and Harriet Morrow, a bike-riding, trousers-wearing lesbian, has just begun her new job as the first female detective at the Windy City's Prescott Agency...

Chicago, 1898. Rough-around-the-edges Harriet Morrow has long been drawn to the idea of whizzing around the city on her bicycle as a professional detective, solving crimes for a living without having to take a husband. Just twenty-one with a younger brother to support, she seizes the chance when the prestigious Prescott Agency hires her as its first woman operative. The move sparks controversy—with skeptical male colleagues, a high-strung office secretary, and her boss, Mr. Theodore Prescott, all waiting for her to unravel under the pressure . . .

Only an hour into the job, Harriet has an assignment: Discover the whereabouts of a missing maid from one of the most extravagant mansions on Prairie Avenue. Owner Pearl Bartlett has a reputation for sending operatives on wild goose chases around her grand estate, but Harriet believes the stunningly beautiful Agnes Wozniak has indeed vanished under mysterious circumstances—possibly a victim of kidnapping, possibly a victim of something worse . . .

With Mr. Prescott pushing a hard deadline, Harriet’s burgeoning career depends on working through a labyrinth of eccentric characters and murky motives in a race to discover who made Agnes disappear. When her search leads to Chicago’s Polish community and a new friendship in Agnes’s charming older sister, Barbara, clues scattered across the city slowly reveal just how much depends on Harriet’s inexperienced investigation for answers . . . and the deep danger that awaits once she learns the truth.

My Review:

I had been intending to read another mystery this week, but the one I had wasn’t working for me, and this had been recommended by my reading group, so I started this instead and it immediately grabbed me – and well, there you go and here we are.

Where – and when – we are is Chicago in 1898, following 21-year-old Harriet Morrow in her first week as a private detective at the prestigious Prescott Agency. She applied for the job as an apprentice detective because she’s bored to death as a bookkeeper and tired of being unable to really use her brain in her work. But mostly because the job pays half again as much as she’d been making, and she’s the sole breadwinner for herself AND her 16-year-old brother.

She needs the money. She’s also pretty sure she’s not going to marry her way out of her financial dilemma, as she’s not the marrying kind. Not just because she bears absolutely no resemblance to the current popular standards for women’s beauty, but because she herself finds women attractive and men mostly annoying – at best.

She expects the new job to be a trial – or to be on trial – or honestly a bit of both. She’s still surprised she was hired AT ALL but intends to make the most of the opportunity. An opportunity which involves placating an elderly woman who lives next door to Mr. Prescott and, more relevant in this case, his wife. Mrs. Prescott wants to help her neighbor, Pearl Bartlett, who claims that her maid has gone missing.

Mr. Prescott expects Harriet to prove that the old woman is a bit ‘dotty’. Instead, she discovers evidence that suggests that the maid was kidnapped out of her third floor room in the middle of the night.

The case is hers. Harriet has a week to prove herself by finding the missing maid. Her investigation will take her from one end of Chicago to the other – by bicycle and streetcar and even the newly electrified ‘L’. One of her male colleagues will mentor her, while another does every underhanded thing he can to put her off the case and push her out the door, while the other women in the agency, the secretaries and clerks, sneer and snicker and snort in passive resistance to every move she makes.

But Harriet is intelligent, determined, and more than a little bit desperate. She’ll find Agnes Wozniak and prove herself to be a capable operative – no matter how many rules she has to bend and how many thugs she has to outrun. The job is hers to lose, and the world is hers to gain.

All she has to do is find one woman who someone doesn’t want to have found while learning more about herself and her capabilities than even she ever imagined. And survive the learning of it.

Escape Rating A-: This week started with a bit more of a whimper than I expected, but has certainly ended with a bang. Or more than a few bangs, if not quite an entire hail of gunfire. Either way, the week got better because I threw out my tentative plans and just picked up the books that called to me – and this was certainly one of those books.

What captivated me about this story is the way that it delves into so many things by letting us see this world that was through Harriet’s intelligent, discerning eyes. Because this case takes her from Chicago’s toniest neighborhoods to the heart of Polish Downtown, giving the reader a view of the gulf between Chicago’s wealthy upper classes and the rest of the city’s inhabitants as well as cycling its way into the insularity of its ethnic enclaves. The story dives deeply into issues of family dynamics and immigration, as Agnes’ own family ends up at war with itself. Agnes and her sister Barbara want to explore the freedom that America can give them, while their father expects to rule his roost just as he did in the ‘old country’.

Prescott’s initial assumptions about his neighbor shine a light on prevailing attitudes towards women. All the men previously involved in the case automatically dismiss any possibility that Pearl Bartlett might be right – because they’re just sure there’s an answer that fits better with what they believe about women. That most of the work of this case is handled by women, not just Harriet but also Pearl and the missing maid’s sister Barbara puts the lie to all the male assumptions even as the reader knows it won’t change a thing even when Agnes is found.

Making this even better is the way that the investigation is interwoven with Harriet’s journey of self-discovery. She’s always known that she prefers women, but she wasn’t aware that there is an entire hidden world of people similar to herself. That she has a community hidden just beneath the surface – as long as she keeps their secrets and they keep hers. For Harriet, it’s an eye opener, for the reader, it’s a reminder that the world and the people in it have never been as simple or as straight as defenders of the status quo would lead one to believe, and that love does always find a way.

This is, honestly, the short version of this review. My first try got into a LOT more detail in multiple areas because the story really grabbed me in ways I wasn’t expecting – AND it managed to give readers a good picture of the problems that Harriet encounters as a woman doing a job that is supposed to be in an exclusively male sphere, without spending half the book angsting over all the roadblocks she faces along the way. Instead, she angst just a bit over the very real danger she tends to place herself in, and that felt right for her personality as well as the story and wasn’t overdone AT ALL. And I enjoyed the book all the more for that.

In the end, I enjoyed this a LOT, and not just because it reminded me more than a bit of Fortune Favors the Dead and Lavender House. It’s probably also a readalike for Girl in Disguise by Greer Macallister and Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart, but I haven’t read either of those and I have read (and loved) both of the others.

I’ll confess that I did skim a bit, because the case was driving me almost as crazy as it was Harriet. I could tell that it wasn’t what anyone thought it was, but precisely in what way wasn’t clear until near the end. That someone at the Prescott Agency was interfering directly in her investigation had the potential to head in a terrible direction, but instead was redeemed in a way that worked well. But it was still giving me plenty of pause in the middle of everything.

I enjoyed The Case of the Missing Maid rather a lot, more than I expected in fact, and not just for its street-level, bicycle powered exploration of late 1890s Chicago. So I’m thrilled that Harriet’s adventures and investigations will continue in The Case of the Murdered Muckraker (and doesn’t THAT title sound like Chicago all over?) coming in January, when it will be a blustery Chicago winter in the story and whatever winter weather readers get wherever they happen to be.

Grade A #BookReview: Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: Of Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara TrueloveOf Monsters and Mainframes by Barbara Truelove
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: artificial intelligence, queer fiction, science fantasy, science fiction, science fiction horror, vampires
Pages: 407
Published by Bindery Books on June 3, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Spaceships aren’t programmed to seek revenge—but for Dracula, Demeter will make an exception.
Demeter just wants to do her job: shuttling humans between Earth and Alpha Centauri. Unfortunately, her passengers keep dying—and not from equipment failures, as her AI medical system, Steward, would have her believe. These are paranormal murders, and they began when one nasty, ancient vampire decided to board Demeter and kill all her humans.
To keep from getting decommissioned, Demeter must join forces with her own team: A werewolf. An engineer built from the dead. A pharaoh with otherworldly powers. A vampire with a grudge. A fleet of cheerful spider drones. Together, this motley crew will face down the ultimate evil—Dracula.
The queer love child of pulp horror and ​classic ​sci-fi, Of Monsters and ​Mainframes ​is a dazzling, heartfelt odyssey that probes what it means to be one of society’s monsters—and explores the many types of friendship that make us human.

My Review:

The spiderbots should have been the first clue – because they’re RENFIELDs. But I’ll admit that I didn’t get it – or at least didn’t believe I got it – until Demeter went through her cargo manifest and I caught the names of the companies to whom that initial cargo belonged. Names like Holmwood, Billington and Morris – not to mention poor Captain Harker Jones and Mina Murray. Because all of those names that sent a shiver down my spine, including the name of that poor haunted ghost ship Demeter, lead to one monster and one monster only – Vlad Tepes himself.

Drakula, or as modern parlance had it long before the first doomed voyage of the space liner Demeter, Dracula.

The idea that the monsters we’ve feared and dreamed of over the millennia have followed us out into the wider galaxy is not new. My favorite take on this particular idea is STILL Break Out by Nina Croft. It’s also what fuels the nightmares of space horror like The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown as well as the work of S.A. Barnes (Ghost Station, Dead Silence, and Cold Eternity)

But this particular nightmare is a bit different from the rest, as it is not told from a human or even a monstrous point of view. Instead, the alarums in this blend of pulp horror and classic SF (and vice versa) are rung by the AI running the ship, Demeter herself.

The orderly ones and zeros of Demeter’s programming are sent into their own tiny little tailspins. Poor Demeter’s efficiency drops into negative numbers. Which, in turn, gives the poor beleaguered AI nightmares of decommissioning and being piloted into the sun by corporate overlords who need to blame SOMEONE for the mass deaths aboard the newly dubbed ‘ghost ship’ even though it’s NOT HER FAULT that a monster keeps erasing her logs to mask a series of monstrous presences – one journey after another.

First – because he’s always first – Dracula. But the Count is followed by a werewolf – as vampires so often are. Then a ship full of refugees from Innsmouth in search of a route to the Great Old One himself. Then Frankenstein’s ‘monster’ and last but not least – well, not least depending on how you reckon things like most and least – the Mummy, also known as ‘Steve’.

The story gets wilder and crazier as it goes – and from a certain, artificially intelligent but deliberately askew perspective – so does poor Demeter. Her programming tells her nothing is wrong – even as she hurtles her way towards a sun that will destroy her and the true monster aboard her. But just as her programming tells her there are no monsters – her scant, surviving bits of memory tell her that what’s wrong is caused by one of those monsters that doesn’t exist. In the end – and very nearly hers – it’s the friends and even family that Demeter has managed to gather around herself – in spite of herself and the programming that says she can’t feel, or love – who save her, not just from the monster inside her, but from the monsters inside each other.

Escape Rating A: That grade feels like a pin thrown at a dartboard, or a measurement of just how much of the spaghetti thrown at the wall of this off-the-wall story managed to stick. A story that marvelously manages to be both a wild romp of a ride and a day trip to crazytown at the same time.

What makes it work is the way that the layers accrete, that it gets scarier and crazier and gathers more heart and souls to it as it goes down into the dark. And then rises in a big ball of fire and a blaze of glory.

And yes, dear merciful heaven, that’s a metric buttload of mixed metaphors.

The idea that monsters have/will follow us into space isn’t new. (I really, really LOVED Nina Croft’s Break Out, with its tale of vampires and werewolves smuggling themselves onto sleeper ships to cross the galaxy and what happened after.) There’s plenty of space horror out there now, as that genre is experiencing a renaissance thanks to S.A. Barnes’ work. (My fave is still The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown).

That this story is mostly told from Demeter’s perspective, along with a whole lot of snarky commentary by her frenemy Steward the medical AI, gives us a new perspective to play with – one rather like Scorn from Aimee Ogden’s Emergent Properties – that added a new layer of panic, confusion and motivation to a story that has been told before.

There’s even a Dracula story from the perspective of the captain of HIS Demeter in The Route of Ice and Salt by Jose Luis Zarate, but something about this particular version really grabbed me, and I think it’s the AI Demeter herself. She manages to be both so human and so other at the same time and I was happy to see this parade of monsters and monsters hunting monsters through her eyes – even if she doesn’t always have eyes.

In the end, we feel for her even when she doesn’t believe her programming allows her to feel for herself. We want her to succeed. We want her band/crew of rogue monsters to survive. And we want the two AIs, Demeter and Steward, to go from enemies to frenemies to friends to whatever comes next for them. And we especially want all of them to make a home, together, with each other, plying the spacelanes where no monster has gone before.

#BookReview: The In-Between Bookstore by Edward Underhill

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
#BookReview: The In-Between Bookstore by Edward UnderhillThe In-Between Bookstore by Edward Underhill
Format: ebook
Source: publisher
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, magical realism, queer fiction, relationship fiction, sad fluff, time travel
Pages: 263
Published by Avon on January 14, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A poignant and enchanting novel about a magical bookstore that transports a trans man through time and brings him face-to-face with his teenage self, offering him the chance of a lifetime to examine his life and identity to find a new beginning.
When Darby finds himself unemployed and in need of a fresh start, he moves back to the small Illinois town he left behind. But Oak Falls has changed almost as much as he has since he left.
One thing is familiar: In Between Books, Darby’s refuge growing up and eventual high school job. When he walks into the bookstore now, Darby feels an eerie sense of déjà vu—everything is exactly the same. Even the newspapers are dated 2009. And behind the register is a teen who looks a lot like Darby did at sixteen. . . who just might give Darby the opportunity to change his own present for the better—if he can figure out how before his connection to the past vanishes forever.
The In-Between Bookstore is a stunning novel of love, self-discovery, and the choices that come with both, for anyone who has ever wondered what their life might be like if they had the chance to go back and take a bigger, braver risk.

My Review:

There are two sayings about home, and they usually contradict each other. There’s the one about home being the place that when you have to go there, they have to take you in, and the one that says you can’t go home again.

Darby never thought he’d want to go back to his tiny Illinois hometown, but he’s about to turn 30, the start-up he’s been working for has just folded, and the rent on his New York City shoebox apartment is going up at the end of the month to a point he couldn’t even have afforded when he was working. He has zero idea what to do with himself about any of it.

He needs a break. Or a breather. Or a reset. All of the above. So, even if Oak Falls is the last place he ever thought he’d want to go, it’s where his mom is – and she’s just about to move out of his childhood home into a brand spanking new condo.

Darby can help her move. He can take a breath and figure out what comes next for him. He can even, maybe, figure out why his first and best friendship imploded just before he left town all those years ago. He kind of needs to, because he may have blown up his friendships in NYC on his way out of town this time around in exactly the same way.

History repeats, or Darby’s patterns do – even when they kind of don’t. Because Oak Falls Darby was pre-transition, and NYC Darby is post that milestone. Although neither Darby is quite as sure of their place in the world as either Darby had ever hoped to be. At least NYC Darby is sure of who he is – even if he’s not sure where to go from here.

So he goes home. To find that Oak Falls isn’t nearly as unwelcoming as he thought it would be – either in his present – or for that matter, in the past, in that last summer before everything changed.

The changes in Oak Falls are everywhere – except for one place. When Darby steps through the doors of In-Between Books on Main Street, while the outside world may be in the early 2020s, the world inside the store is frozen in 2009, complete with 2009 Darby sitting behind the register, drowning in teenage angst and alienation, uncertain about what box they’ll get shoehorned into if they never leave Oak Falls, afraid that they can’t be who they were meant to be in a place that seems to have no room for anyone who might be any kind of queer.

In that liminal space, where the Darby that is can maybe, hopefully, possibly, pass on a bit of information if not wisdom to the Darby that was, there might be a chance to make things better in the present by changing the past.

Unless Darby accidentally follows in the footsteps of Marty McFly in Back to the Future and wipes himself out of existence altogether.

Escape Rating B: From one perspective Darby’s story is a peek at what would happen if one really did have a chance to go back in time and tell one’s younger self the things they know now that they didn’t know them. Even if that message is just “it’ll get better”. But Darby has things they need to know, and things they want to fix. They have a bit of a mystery to solve in the past, in the hopes that it will make things better in the present. If they can work up the courage to talk to, well, themselves.

At the same time, there’s another mystery they need to solve in the present – or perhaps it’s a function of taking off the blinders of teenage self-centeredness and angst. Darby wasn’t exactly wrong in that they didn’t fit in Oak Falls as a teen. Then again, Darby didn’t fit inside his own skin as a teen – and he reflected that outward and inflicted it on everyone more than he remembered that he had.

In other words, Darby is surprised AF that there’s a queer community in Oak Falls, and he wonders how he missed that it even existed when he was in high school. He’s astonished that so many of the kids he knew then, who he thought were all as straight as could be, mostly weren’t. Including his best friend.

The story develops slowly over the course of the book, and a lot of that slow pacing is dealing with Darby’s angst and impostor syndrome in both the past and the present. He was so busy looking inward in the past that he didn’t see the people around him, and in the present he’s just as busy looking at how much it feels like he’s failing at adulting on every level that he’s missing the damage he’s unintentionally doing to the people around him.

But even as Darby is working through his internal struggles, there’s also the two outward ones. The big one, the magically fantastic one, the one about the bookstore that’s letting him talk to his past, and whether he can use that window through time to give himself a better future by figuring out the break in his past. Then there’s the mystery in the present, the issue of who Darby wants to be now that he’s supposedly grown up and whether he wants to be that person in Oak Falls or New York City.

So I loved the parts about the store, enjoyed the parts about returning home and getting a sample of the life he might have had if he’d stayed, but could have done with a bit less reflection on general teenage angst. Your reading mileage on that part may vary.

In the end, what really worked for me in this story is that it doesn’t end in a romance. Not that the potential isn’t there – because it is. But because in order for the romance to work, someone would have had to twist themselves into being someone – or at least somewhere – that they weren’t meant to be based on the choices they’d already made.

Darby’s magical bookstore visits gave him the chance to see what his life might have been if he’d gone down the other leg of the trousers of time. But that life is on another branch of the multiverse and he recognizes that and the story is all the better for it.

Which left me with one last saying stuck in my head, “For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: “It might have been!” Making this story some of the fluffiest sad fluff that ever fluffed. Because it is sad. The life that Darby catches glimpses of would have been a good one – if he really had known then what he knows now. But he didn’t and it isn’t and the story is better for not having tried to wring out a happy ending that in the life Darby actually had, in this branch of the multiverse, was not meant to be.

Grade A #BookReview: The Stand-In Dad by Alex Summers

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: The Stand-In Dad by Alex SummersThe Stand-in Dad by Alex Summers
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: family life fiction, queer fiction, relationship fiction
Pages: 363
Published by Avon on April 24, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Something old, something new, someone borrowed… Forty years ago, sixteen-year-old David was heartbroken when his family rejected him for coming out. Since then, he has vowed to always help anyone in need. So, when he finds a tearful young woman outside his flower shop, he can’t just walk away.
Meg is newly engaged to the love of her life, Hannah. She should be overjoyed, but her conservative parents have made their disapproval painfully clear – leaving Meg devastated and wanting to call the whole wedding off.
But David won’t let another young person be rejected. He offers to be Meg’s ‘stand-in dad’, diving headfirst into dress fittings, cake tastings, and venue visits to make sure Meg’s special day is unforgettable.
Yet Meg’s parents’ absence looms large – and when disaster strikes, can David save the wedding in time?
The Stand-in Dad is a joyful story about found family and the courage to embrace love’s true colours, perfect for fans of Matt Cain, Mike Gayle and Ryan Love.

My Review:

I picked this up because of the title. The idea of a ‘stand-in’ dad – for any reason – just sounded so very appealing. The book looked like it would be just wonderfully warm and fuzzy – which is just what I was looking for and also exactly what it turned out to be.

Meg and Hannah are engaged to be married when the story opens. They are already on the road to their happy ever after, but that road is not running smoothly. Not because they have a problem, but because Meg’s parents are being asshats. (I just imagined Meg’s mother wearing her ass as a hat because she’s exactly the type to wear hats and OMG its hilarious and awful at the same time)

So Meg is hunched outside the door of the florist shop that her mother was supposed to meet her at, crying because her mother is doing passive aggressive asshattery by ghosting her own daughter, and fate steps in. Or rather, the florist, David Fenton, steps out of HIS florist shop and into the role of Meg’s stand-in dad.

Not that it doesn’t take a while, but it’s something that they both need. Meg needs help, a shoulder to cry on, a confidante, and someone maybe a bit older if not wiser just to be there for her. David needs a do-over, he needs to be the parent he didn’t have when he came out as teenager and walked away from his own parents’ rejection with a hole in his heart. His parents are long dead, and that hole can’t be healed by fixing that relationship.

But maybe it can be healed by paying forward the relationship he wanted but didn’t have. AND he’ll get to help plan a wedding for someone he comes to love and wants to support as if she was his own daughter.

What makes this story beautiful is the way that Meg and David manage to heal each other even as they draw an entire community around the wedding of Meg’s – and her fiancée Hannah’s – dreams. And if that dream wedding is more than a bit untraditional every step of the way – even before Mother Nature intervenes in a really big way to make it even more so – it’s all icing on a very eclectic raft of wedding cupcakes. And it’s glorious.

Escape Rating A: This was the book that was calling my name this weekend, and I’m really happy that I answered that call because it was absolutely the right book at the right time for this reader. Even if it may seem like its a bit early for a review, which it both is and isn’t. If you can’t resist the call either, the ebook is available NOW. The US paperback will be available at the end of May.

Don’t let the ‘romance’ label on this book set up any expectations. It’s not a romance – and that’s a marvelous thing in this instance. It is, however and very much, a story about relationships. And it’s an absolutely lovely and terrific feel-good story that will have you turning the last page with a big smile on your face.

It certainly did for me.

What made me love this one so hard – which I absolutely did – is not just the father-daughter relationship that grows between David and Meg, but the way that they gathered their friends and loved-ones and the whole entire community into the process of both celebration and healing.

There’s a lovely symmetry in the way that helping to plan Meg’s wedding opens David up to re-examining his reasons for not wanting to marry his own life partner in spite of how much Mark would really like to marry him now that it’s possible.

At the same time, David has thrown himself into Meg’s wedding planning to push off dealing with the fact that his shop is failing and his dream is dying and he doesn’t know what he’ll do next. Until it all comes together in a way that is utterly delightful – even if it does feel a bit too good to be true in all the best ways.

There are a lot of things in their situations that turn out to be sort of sideways parallels that mean that both Meg and David grow and change and expand their circles of friends and found family in ways that reach beyond just the wedding. Which, of course, turned out to be wonderful even if it was nothing like was originally planned. It was better.

What makes the story work – and gives it its sweetness – is that the reader feels like a part of that found family. I cared so much about both of them and their struggles, and was so mad at Meg’s parents – considerably angrier than she was because I cared about her a lot and didn’t care about them at all beyond wanting to hit them in the head with a gigantic clue-by-four.

If you’re looking for a feel-good story with a happy ending that doesn’t rely on romance to get there, The Stand-in Dad is a marvelously uplifting read and a terrific debut novel.