Publisher: Amazon Original Stories

A- #AudioBookReview: Trap Line by Timothy Zahn

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: Trap Line by Timothy ZahnTrap Line by Timothy Zahn
Narrator: Greg D. Barnett
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: science fiction, space opera
Pages: 49
Length: 1 hour and 21 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on March 25, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

An engineer’s groundbreaking solo mission is rudely interrupted when he stumbles into an interstellar trap. The New York Times bestselling author of the Thrawn trilogy is back with a wholly original short story of first contact.
En route to far-off stars, Toby’s consciousness has a crucial mission: inhabit his clone long enough to repair a spaceship, then zip back to Earth. He’s done it a million times, more or less. OK, twelve times. It should only take a few hours.
Until he wakes up in jail. And he’s not alone.
His fellow prisoners: a cadre of alien soldiers. His prison: an ethereal boundary that will imprison their spirits until their bodies die. His jailers can’t even see him. But their pet cat (er, iguana cat?) can—and it’s got a serious case of the zoomies.
With humanity’s place in the odd and ever-widening universe riding on Toby’s choices, it’s time to saddle up for a ghostly game of cat and mouse.

My Review:

What Toby Collier comes to appreciate when his ‘astral’ manifests in an alien trap instead of aboard the Terran FarJump ship Janus out in the far flung galaxy is something attributed to poet William Butler Yeats centuries before Toby was born, that “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met.”

Certainly neither Toby, nor anyone from Earth, has ever met anyone similar to the vaguely avian-like Hyfisk, the soldiers with whom Toby is trapped in a small, family-operated space ship in the middle of the great, wide galaxy that all of them were traversing.

The family, Porpou, his wife, their daughter Ibbi and her ‘iguana cat’ Bisqitty, make their living by trapping astrals like Toby and the Hyfisks and reporting them to the ‘Overmasters’, whoever or whatever THEY are. For the family, it’s a living – if not necessarily a luxurious or even steady one.

But the trap is a roadblock for the astrals, an interruption that will lead to Toby’s death when he doesn’t complete his job out on the far reaches of human-discovered space and return in a reasonable time frame. Because his bosses will cut their losses along with the life-support of his physical body.

The Hyfisks’ situation is more dire – they are soldiers on the way to defend an important colony from an aggressive enemy. Not that they also won’t die when their life support is cut, but their duty is more important to them than their individual lives.

Except that they have been stuck in that trap long enough to give up. Toby, freshly trapped, hasn’t. And is determined not to. He’s also an engineer rather than a soldier, and he hasn’t yet met a puzzle that he’s not going to at least attempt to solve.

The Hyfisk can’t solve the problem with the knowledge they have. Toby, on the other hand, brings fresh – if non-corporeal – eyes and mind to the same problem and figures out that if they share their knowledge, they can escape. If they trust each other enough.

And if they can get the iguana cat to cooperate – which might be the most difficult part of the whole thing. Her name isn’t pronounced ‘BisKITTY’ for nothing.

Escape Rating A-: Trap Line turned out to be a whole lot of fun and I’m very glad I listened to/read it. Even though I initially picked it up because I was having a difficult time getting into anything. Monday’s book seriously did a number on my concentration, but this little story turned out to be the cure.

I picked this up through Kindle Unlimited – a subscription I get happier about all the time. It was fun, it was quick, the audio narrator did a great job portraying Toby AND the Hyfisks and it all just made for the reading pick-me-up I was desperate for.

For an SF story, Trap Line was surprisingly cozy. It’s a small cast in an even smaller setting, just ten Hyfisks, three insectoid aliens, an iguana cat, and Toby. It’s also small in length, but it sets itself well AND gives the reader just enough to get why and how Toby and Irion, the commander of the Hyfisks, manage to come to (mostly) trust each other in this “enemy of my enemy is my friend’ scenario. Particularly as Toby and the humans aren’t aware of the Overmasters enough to BE their enemy – at least not yet – AND Toby manages to convince Irion that the trap-keeping family are not really an enemy to either of them. They’re all just trying to get by – like everyone else.

That this is also a story about the cleverness of humans and the inventiveness of our species instead of any attempt to win by domination or violence – and not just because it wouldn’t work in this situation AT ALL – made this a whole lot of fun, with a comforting layer of competence over the whole thing.

It broke my reading slump – and I’m incredibly grateful for that!

Even though Toby, the Hyfisks, and Porpou have no ability to communicate all together (Toby and the Hyfisks can communicate because they’re all astrals), they still manage to concoct a mutually beneficial plan that has the wonderful added benefit of sticking it to the Overmasters for all of them without the Overmasters being aware that they’ve been shafted. Toby, the Hyfisks and Porpou have made friends, even if they haven’t managed to share a single word in ANY language – and their quiet rebellion makes for a glorious – and friendly – ending to this delightful short story.

Grade A #AudioBookReview: The Knight and the Butcherbird by Alix E. Harrow

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Grade A #AudioBookReview: The Knight and the Butcherbird by Alix E. HarrowThe Knight and the Butcherbird by Alix E. Harrow
Narrator: Aida Reluzco
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: borrowed from Amazon Kindle Unlimited
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, dystopian, fantasy, horror, short stories
Pages: 36
Length: 1 hour and 17 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on March 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

New York Times bestselling author Alix E. Harrow weaves a dystopian fairy tale that follows the town storyteller as she struggles to protect a local demon from the knight hired to kill it.
In this gritty, haunting tale about doing whatever it takes for love, a small-town storyteller resolves to keep the local monster—and her own secrets—safe from a legendary knight.
Nestled deep in the steep hills, valleys, and surrounding woodlands lies Iron Hollow, a rural community beset by demons. Such horrors are common in the outlands, where most folks die young, if they don’t turn into monsters first. But what’s causing these transformations?
No one has the answer, not even the town’s oral historian, seventeen-year-old Shrike. And when a legendary knight is summoned to hunt down the latest beast to haunt their woods, Shrike has more reason than most to be concerned. Because that demon was her wife. And while Shrike is certain that May still recognizes her—that May is still human, somewhere beneath it all—she can’t prove it.
Determined to keep May safe, Shrike stalks the knight and his demon-hunting hawk through the recesses of the forest. But as they creep through toxic creeks and overgrown kudzu, Shrike realizes the knight has a secret of his own. And he’ll do anything to protect it.

My Review:

I picked this up for two reasons. The first reason – and the more important – is that I really loved The Starling House by this same author, also in audio. The second reason is that I’ve been experimenting with a Kindle Unlimited subscription and have really liked some of the Amazon Original Stories with audio that I’ve discovered, notably my holiday romp through the Under the Mistletoe Collection.

The Knight and the Butcherbird looked like exactly the kind of story I’ve been enjoying more lately, dark fantasy hovering over the edge of horror, in a nice, bite-sized audio version by an author I already like. It sounded like a win/win – and it absolutely was. All the more so because this is one of those stories that straddles the line between science fiction and fantasy in a way that chills, thrills, and makes the reader, or at least this reader, go both “Aha!” AND “Ahhhh” at the end.

It also turned out to remind me of a whole lot of different, differently weird and differently creepy stories while blending into a darkly satisfying whole.

This is very much a dystopia, the kind of dystopia you get when your story is set on an Earth that we’ve fucked around on and left the consequences for our descendants. At first, I thought it was a bit Mad Max but things aren’t quite that bad – or at least the violence isn’t quite that widespread.

Instead, it’s very much like the world of Premee Mohamed’s The Annual Migration of Clouds duology, where pollution has ruined the ground, the air, the wildlife and the weather, but people are hanging on by the literal edge of their fingernails, like the grim death that’s inevitably coming for them sooner than it should.

But that’s the view in the ‘outlands’, which is very much where Iron Hollow survives in remote, rural Appalachia. Just as in Clouds, there are “Enclaves”, protected places where technology is still functional, where the elite live in abundance, health and prosperity and look down upon the dying primitives that send them raw materials to keep their technology functional so they can remain all of the above.

Those outlands, still rife with pollution and radiation and microplastics, produce more than just raw materials. They are also plagued by monsters. Monsters that the Enclave-folk call demons. Monsters that used to be their friends and their loved ones, transformed by an alchemy that no one understands and no one can cure.

The Enclaves send out knights to eliminate those monsters. Not out of altruism. Not out of the goodness of their hearts. Out of need and greed. The populations of the Enclaves have grown too large for their technology to maintain. The outlanders are dying off, each generation smaller than the next. Extinction is in sight. All the Enclaves need to do is wait to sweep into what will soon be empty lands.

But those lands are filled with monsters, and until the science of the Enclaves can find a way to stop humans from becoming monsters, the land they covet is not safe for them to take.

The knight that comes to Iron Hollow has come to kill the latest monster. The monster that, as far as Shrike, Iron Hollow’s scribe and archivist is concerned, is still her wife May. Whether May is a monster or not. Because, when all is said and done, aren’t all of us capable of becoming monsters if the need is great enough?

Escape Rating A: This was a story that chilled me to the bone – even though I laughed myself silly when the knight of this story, Sir John, said that he had been sent by the “King of Cincinnati”. (I don’t see my old hometown mentioned much in fiction, and I absolutely wasn’t expecting it here.)

This story starts out dark, and it gets darker as it goes, and not in the ways the reader initially expects.

First because it’s saturated with Shrike’s bottomless grief. She and her wife were childhood besties, young sweethearts, happy marrieds, and now Shrike is a widow. At seventeen, because people in the outlands don’t live past 40 if they even reach that milestone.

Most monsters are found early, because the metamorphosis manifests as an illness that changes people from, well, people, to red-eyed shapeshifters with hoofs and horns, or feathers and claws, or gills and fins, and eventually to all of the above in a neverending kaleidoscope of transformation.

Shrike, as the historian, archivist, chronicler and storyteller of the hollow, knows that the mutation isn’t truly a disease, and that there is no real cure. Her only real fear about the nature of her wife’s condition is her fear that the transformation has wiped out May’s recognition of her and her memory of their love.

The knight’s secret provides Shrike with the answer she has long hoped for, even as her storytelling provides him with an answer that he wishes he had never learned.

As I listened to the audiobook of The Knight and the Butcherbird, read marvelously by Aida Reluzco, even as I was absorbed in the story I was surprised, teased and occasionally outright puzzled by all the stories it reminded me of. And I want to share those before I close as on the one hand this story was exactly the right length for what it wanted to tell AND I wanted more like it at the same conflicted time.

The setup of the elite Enclaves vs the disease-ridden outlands is very similar to The Annual Migration of Clouds and We Speak Through the Mountains, definitely including the patronizing attitudes of the Enclave citizens towards the outlanders they exploit. The slow, hidden transformation of humans into monsters, as well as that creepy border-shifting sense that the story is on the sharp and pointy line between the darkest of fantasy and the fear-shiver of horror is similar to T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead and What Feasts at Night as well as Kerstin Hall’s Star Eater. (Tracking down that the thing stuck in my head was Star Eater took quite a while because I didn’t even like it all that much but it there were parts of it that were creepy in exactly the same way that The Knight and the Butcherbird is creepy, although Star Eater has plenty of extra creepy bits that are all its own.) There are also hints of Idolfire in those dying dystopian outlands.

But the biggest surprises were just how much of The Last Unicorn and the movie Ladyhawke I found in The Knight and the Butcherbird. I wasn’t expecting both the state of the world and Sir John’s quest to hit so many of the same notes that The Last Unicorn did. And I absolutely did not come into this story thinking that Ladyhawke would fly away with the whole thing after all.

The Knight and the Butcherbird is not exactly a happy story, but it is a haunting one. It is also very, very satisfying, in an astonishingly rueful way. I’m glad I spent an hour with the knight, the butcherbird, and their beloved monsters.

#AudioBookReview: The Conjurer’s Wife by Sarah Penner

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B Reviews> book reviews> Short Story Review
#AudioBookReview: The Conjurer’s Wife by Sarah PennerThe Conjurer's Wife by Sarah Penner
Narrator: Helen Laser
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fantasy, historical fiction, magical realism
Pages: 40
Length: 1 hour and 2 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on January 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

In nineteenth-century Venice, a young woman’s marriage to an illusionist hides secrets that go deeper than his spectacular acts. The stage is set for transformation in a mesmerizing short story by the New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Apothecary.
In 1820s Venice, world-renowned magician Oscar Van Hoff confounds sold-out crowds with his astounding manifestations. Even his beautiful wife and assistant, Olivia, is mystified. Her job is to smile and recite her lines—onstage and in society. But the thankless routine is bringing out her rebellious side. Then, on the eve of what promises to be Oscar’s greatest performance yet, Olivia uncovers a secret with the power to shatter all her husband’s illusions. Now the finale belongs to her.

My Review:

The story begins simply, and seems a bit familiar even if, or especially because of its historical setting.

We open with, and looking through the eyes of, the titular conjurer’s wife, Olivia Van Hoff, standing on the stage of an early 19th century Venice theater, waiting for the curtain to rise on her husband’s masterful magical show filled with absolutely breathtaking illusions that no one can penetrate. Not even Olivia, who is not only his wife but also his assistant both onstage and off.

But Oscar is a man who demands that everything be ‘just so’, both on the stage and in their private life. Olivia is standing, knowingly, willfully and rebelliously, three whole entire inches off her mark when the curtain rises.

She can tell that Oscar is incensed. Olivia, however, is practically drunk on the tiny flame of rebellion kindled in her heart. Just as Olivia learns that defiance can be intoxicating, we learn that Oscar is an abusive bastard, and that Olivia has a form of amnesia so all-encompassing that she remembers nothing before their hasty marriage only one year previously.

And just as Olivia has a whole lot of sneaking suspicions about her life before the terrible accident that resulted in her amnesia, the mysteriously masterful nature of Oscar’s illusion, and the suspicious coincidence of timing between her accident and his rise to fame – so do we.

Olivia isn’t necessarily searching for the truth, or even, specifically, a way out of her marriage and the life in the spotlight that she has no desire for. Or, truthfully, for Oscar himself. But that does not mean she does not know precisely what to do with the truth when she finds it.

Escape Rating B: I initially picked this up because it looked like a quick read on a cloudy day, and because I liked two of the author’s previous books, The Lost Apothecary and The London Séance Society. At only 40 pages I read it over lunch, thought it was interesting but not very deep – which is fair for a 40 page story – and moved on with my reading.

(The Conjurer’s Wife also reminded me more than a bit of The Ladies of the Secret Circus by Constance Sayers, which is also a story about magic, performing under the spotlights, and secrets. Lots and lots of secrets.)

Then I picked up an eARC of the author’s upcoming book, The Amalfi Curse. Again, because I enjoyed The London Séance Society and The Lost Apothecary, and not just for their utterly gorgeous covers. But the blurb for The Amalfi Curse seemed like it was teasing me – specifically about something mentioned in The Conjurer’s Wife. Which led to the discovery that the audio of that short story was available through Amazon Prime, and that it would take me about an hour to listen to.

Which brings me to this review, because the story was even more interesting the second time around and the narrator, Helen Laser, did a terrific job as Olivia Van Hoff. Also, the story absolutely does tease something about the ‘witches of Positano’, Oscar’s potential and presumably unrealized ambitions in their direction, as well as the Amalfi coast if not (yet) The Amalfi Curse, making me all the more eager for the book coming at the end of April.

#AudioBookReview: Merry Ever After by Tessa Bailey

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews> C Reviews
#AudioBookReview: Merry Ever After by Tessa BaileyMerry Ever After (Under the Mistletoe Collection, #2) by Tessa Bailey
Narrator: Summer Morton, Connor Crais
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, erotic romance, holiday romance, short stories
Series: Under the Mistletoe #2
Pages: 59
Length: 1 hour and 32 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 12, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

A single mother working in a thrift store. A gentle giant farmer who can’t find jeans that fit. When opposites attract, they find themselves making alterations in more ways than one in this smoking-hot short story by #1 New York Times bestselling author Tessa Bailey.
Evie Crowe is starting over in a strange town with her newborn, and men are the furthest thing from her mind. If only the quiet, hulking farmer, Luke Ward, would stop coming into the thrift shop and piquing her reluctant interest. Evie wants to stay single all the way—she can’t trust anything more than friends-with-holiday-benefits. But Luke is in it for the long haul. He’s fixed on making this a Christmas Evie will remember forever. If she gives him a chance.
Tessa Bailey’s Merry Ever After is part of Under the Mistletoe, a stirring collection of December romances that thrill and tingle all the way. They can be read or listened to in one swoony sitting.

My Review:

Today is the last day of 2024. It’s part of the ‘twilight zone’ of time between Xmas and New Year’s, when time is really REAL, when the days all sort of blend together, when it seems as if time is sorta/kinda infinite and not necessarily in a good way.

I am a terrible completist. By that I mean that I have a tendency to feel compelled to complete things – especially when it comes to book series. Not that I absolutely can’t stop if something isn’t working for me, but when something is working then I have to get and finish them all – no matter how long it takes.

Because this is New Year’s Eve, I have to confess that I don’t expect Reading Reality to get a ton of readers today. But I feel compelled to have a post every single day – there I go with the completist thing again. Adding to that compulsion, I have listened to all of the other novellas in the Under the Mistletoe collection, so I simply couldn’t let the season go by without finishing this last story in the set.

Which leads us to today, December 31, 2024, and my review of Merry Ever After. (It’s still Hanukkah, so it could also be said that from my perspective it is still very much the holiday season and not too late for a holiday read or listen. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!)

The first, and possibly most important thing to know before jumping into this story is that I was wrong about Merriment and Mayhem being the steamiest story Under the Mistletoe. Because hands down – or perhaps that should be other parts down (and potentially getting rugburn in places no one wants rugburn) Merry Ever After is definitely the steamiest.

To the point where I wouldn’t listen to this where anyone else could hear it. I felt a bit like a voyeur listening to it all by myself in the car. (Also, one never arrives at one’s destination at a convenient point for either the scene or the listener.)

Second, while all of the stories in this collection are short by the very nature of the collection, this one was too short for the depth of the relationship it dove just about straight into. While all of the stories except Cruel Winter with You had hints of insta-love – and Cruel Winter had considerably more than hints – they all did a good job of making the relationships seem a bit longer, at least as friendships and/or leaned into the holiday romance fantasy aspect enough to make it seem not quite so instantaneous.

It’s not just that Evie and Luke jump into bed really, really fast – or in their case get down and dirty on the living room rug – it’s that the depth of their commitment seems to go from zero to sixty too fast for the emotional baggage they’re each dragging along – as well as Evie’s sincere need not to bring someone as undependable and untrustworthy into her baby son’s life as his sperm donor turned out to be.

Not that Luke isn’t reliable and trustworthy, as it turns out, but Evie hasn’t had time to find that out, at least not yet.

And while I did like that this was multi-voiced, with Summer Morton voicing Evie’s perspective while Connor Crais handled Luke’s, Luke’s internal monologue veered really close to some fairly possessive lines right on the verge of stuff that made me really, really wary.

Escape Rating C: In the end, I had a LOT of mixed feelings about Merry Ever After, making it my least favorite story in the collection. Either this one needed a LOT more story to get these characters to the point where their relationship makes sense, or it needed to be a lot simpler by making it about just two adults who are still in a position to potentially screw up their own lives without collateral damage.

This turned out to not be the greatest end for my reading and listening adventures this year, but, it certainly felt cathartic to wrap-up the set, which, overall, I did have a lot of fun with.

As always, your reading/listening mileage may vary.

#AudioBookReview: Merriment and Mayhem by Alexandria Bellefleur

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B Reviews> book reviews
#AudioBookReview: Merriment and Mayhem by Alexandria BellefleurMerriment and Mayhem (Under the Mistletoe Collection, #4) by Alexandria Bellefleur
Narrator: Amelie Griffin
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: ebook, audio
Genres: contemporary romance, holiday romance, short stories
Series: Under the Mistletoe #4
Pages: 58
Length: 1 hour and 30 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 12, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

This Christmas, a hot fireman makes a holiday rescue and sparks fly in this funny, sexy holiday short story by bestselling author Alexandria Bellefleur.
When Everleigh Dangerfield’s baking disaster necessitates a call to 911, firefighter Griffin Brantley douses the flames in the kitchen, but the ones he stokes in Everleigh are an entirely different story. Unfortunately, Everleigh’s only visiting and doesn’t do casual hookups, no matter how smoldering the temptation. But Everleigh’s holiday mishaps have just begun. And Griffin is seemingly always on call. If Everleigh is game for a change of plans, he can give her the merriest Christmas of her life.
Alexandria Bellefleur’s Merriment and Mayhem is part of Under the Mistletoe, a stirring collection of December romances that thrill and tingle all the way. They can be read or listened to in one swoony sitting.

My Review:

In this last week before both Christmas AND Hanukkah, I found myself looking for something a bit lighter than the books I had originally planned. Which is when I remembered that I still had two short little holiday pick-me-ups left in the Under the Mistletoe collection, and thereby hangs a tale. Or at least an Xmas stocking.

And this story certainly is a pick-me-up – or perhaps I should say it’s a pick-her-up. Because that’s exactly what firefighter Griffin Brantley does to, with, and for Everleigh Dangerfield the very first time they meet.

As she’s falling off her kitchen counter after setting her kitchen on fire and failing to turn off the wailing smoke alarm now that its warning has been heeded and the damage from the fire as well as from Everleigh’s successful attempt to put it out have succeeded.

Everleigh is past the point of needing the fire department, when they arrive. But that doesn’t mean that she’s past needing a hot firefighter in her life. Pretty much the opposite, in fact. The very friendly and endlessly flirty Griffin is EXACTLY what Everleigh needs this particular holiday season.

And not just because she keeps living up to her name. She really does bring a “danger field” wherever she goes. Which is only fair, as Griffin has absolutely endangered her heart. It’s a good – and delightfully naughty – thing that she’s done the same to his.

Escape Rating B: First, foremost, and most importantly, this was the right book – in this case audiobook – at the right time. While I was enjoying both the book I was reading (Miss Amelia’s List) and the book I was listening to (Blood Jade), neither of them is exactly light in their respective ways. And the third book I was planning on this week (Echo) is set in the depths of a Chicago winter, which brings its own heaviness to the story even before the murders begin.

In other words, I was looking for something light and fluffy, and this collection has consistently delivered.

Having now read/listened to four of the five, including Cruel Winter with You, All By My Elf and Only Santas in the Building, with Merry Ever After yet to go, I have to say that all of the stories have been a lot of fun, just right for a quick listen or a very quick read in a few spare minutes in the holiday rush.

This particular entry in the series is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum from Cruel Winter, and not just because that’s the longest and this is one of the shortest. The stories take place, almost in each of their entireties, over the Xmas holidays. There’s not a lot of time for the romances to develop, and they absolutely do give off insta-love vibes but it does work.

The holiday season, after all, is supposed to be just a bit magical. Just like falling in love.

Cruel Winter is the one that is far from instant, as the protagonists have known each other ALL their lives. It’s just never been the right time for them until it finally is on this particular night. In some ways, it feels the closest to realistic among these very quick holiday rom-coms.

Merriment and Mayhem is the opposite. It’s VERY instant, to the point where the story feels a bit like a fantasy holiday rom-com. I don’t mean fantasy in the foolish wand-waving sense. I mean fantasy in the sense that the daydream of being swept off one’s feet by a hot firefighter is not exactly uncommon. We ALL already know how we want this one to go. And, for that matter, come. (Ahem!).

It’s just that Everleigh Dangerfield gets to live that particular fantasy over this particular Christmas. Everleigh’s ‘real-life’ version of this particular romantic daydream is so damn hot that it’s a good thing that it’s set in a place that doesn’t get much in the way of snow – because they’d certainly melt any accumulated snowfall for MILES around.

This romance is probably the steamiest of the whole collection. To the point of actual steam rising off the pages and possibly even embarrassment if you listen to the story out loud instead of with headphones. It’s absolutely right for this couple, but not all readers want everyone around them to know exactly what they are reading based on the heat of their blushes.

I listened to Merriment and Mayhem (with headphones) and the story absolutely flew by. The reader, Amelie Griffin, did an excellent job BEING Everleigh, and read the scenes with just the right amounts of chagrin and breathlessness as the story required.

I still have time to finish up the Under the Mistletoe collection before my holidays are over, as Hanukkah doesn’t end until sunset on January 2, 2025 this year. Plenty of time for Merry Ever After and one last sweet and romantic holiday reading treat!

#AudioBookReview: Cruel Winter with You by Ali Hazelwood

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B Reviews> book reviews
#AudioBookReview: Cruel Winter with You by Ali HazelwoodCruel Winter with You (Under the Mistletoe Collection, #1) by Ali Hazelwood
Narrator: Vivienne LaRue
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: ebook, audio
Genres: contemporary romance, holiday romance, short stories
Series: Under the Mistletoe #1
Pages: 73
Length: 2 hours
Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 12, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

For two former childhood friends, a blustery winter storm stirs some frosty—and scorching—memories in a delightful short story by #1 New York Times bestselling author Ali Hazelwood.
All newly minted pediatrician Jamie Malek wants is to borrow a roasting pan for Christmas dinner. Unfortunately, that requires her to interact with Marc—her best friend’s troublemaking brother, who’s now a tech billionaire. He’s the one who got away. She’s the one who broke his heart. Outside, a howling blizzard. Inside, a crackling fire. Suddenly, being snowbound with the man she never expected to see again might not be such a bad way to spend a winter’s night.
Ali Hazelwood’s Cruel Winter with You is part of Under the Mistletoe, a stirring collection of December romances that thrill and tingle all the way. They can be read or listened to in one swoony sitting.

My Review:

I was stuck in traffic at the end of Only Santas in the Building and found myself listening to the teasers for ALL the rest of the stories in the Under the Mistletoe collection and, well, I got hooked. So here we are back with another not too big, not too small, just right little holiday romance to sweeten – and heat up – the season.

This one is the longest entry in the collection, so it has just a bit more time and scope to get into the setup of the story and the backstory of the characters – and do they EVER have backstory. So this one gets just a bit deeper than the others – and it makes for a nice change of pace from the rest.

Jamie and Marc were not childhood sweethearts. Nor did they have a high school romance. Not that Marc didn’t want either of those things to happen. He was just very, very good at not letting Jamie know it.

Which was probably a good thing, as Jamie and his older sister Tabitha were childhood and high school besties. And even when this story takes place – ten whole years after Jamie and Tabitha’s high school graduation – Tabitha still hasn’t gotten past her childhood resentment of her parents’ bringing home their ‘Oops Baby’ just after her third birthday.

But Marc seems to have recognized that Jamie was his person the very first time she held him in her arms, when he was a newborn and she was all of two-and-a-half. In spite of decades of teasing and name-calling and everything that children can do to each other short of outright warfare, Jamie is still his person – a fact that Marc has built his entire life around even as he’s held it so close to his heart that Jamie doesn’t have a clue.

But on this one blustery cold winter night, stuck together at his parents’ otherwise empty house because her self-absorbed father thought nothing of sending her two miles down the road, on foot, in an impending northern Illinois blizzard, to retrieve a copper baking pan from his parents’ kitchen – all the secrets are laid bare.

And finally, at last, so are they.

Escape Rating B: In a collection of mostly fluff, this story gets surprisingly deep. And sad. And just a bit heartbreaking. It’s told in a series of flashbacks, sandwiched between the events of the now, and those flashbacks are what give the story its depth. But not in the way one expects.

It’s never been quite the right time for Jamie and Marc. She’s not quite three years older – something that mattered a lot when they were children but doesn’t matter in their late 20s at all. When things have gotten hard between them – not like that – it’s been because Marc’s been keeping the secret of his true feelings for Jamie pretty much all of his life – and occasionally those feelings get impatient.

He’s always been ready, but Jamie hasn’t. Because she’s afraid, not of Marc, not of having Marc, but of losing him. And it’s in the past that we see why. And that’s where the heartbreaking bits come in, because it’s not about him. It’s about her dad. Not in any terrible way, but certainly in a terribly human way.

I have to admit that Marc’s behavior occasionally tip-toed up to the line into the song “Every Breath You Take” in that it seems like he’s always been watching Jamie, always looking at her and after her even if she doesn’t know it, always waiting for the right moment to tell her that he loves her, planning his whole, entire life around making that happen. It seems romantic – but it’s also just a bit squicky and could have easily gone VERY wrong.

If it had it wouldn’t have fit in this collection at all. But since it didn’t, it did. And it does, in the end, work out. They are both finally in the right place at the right time with all their cards on the table.

I’m still enjoying this collection, the audios have ALL been lovely including this story’s voicing by Vivienne LaRue, and it’s all still feeling “just right” for the season. I may finish them ALL before this holiday is done. After all, Hanukkah doesn’t end until January 2, 2025, so I have plenty of time to indulge my holiday spirit!

#AudioBookReview: Only Santas in the Building by Alexis Daria

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B Reviews> book reviews
#AudioBookReview: Only Santas in the Building by Alexis DariaOnly Santas in the Building (Under the Mistletoe Collection, #5) by Alexis Daria
Narrator: Ruby Corazon
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, holiday romance, short stories
Series: Under the Mistletoe #5
Pages: 65
Length: 1 hour and 31 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 12, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, especially for a comic book illustrator whose late-night fantasies become real in a festive and flirty short story by bestselling author Alexis Daria.
All Evie Cruz wants for Christmas is a nap. And maybe some ornaments for her naked Christmas tree. And while she’s making a list, she wouldn’t mind unwrapping her sexy upstairs neighbor like a present. Luckily, the building’s Santa-themed party and a surprise sprig of mistletoe give her just the opening she needs to make all her wishes come true.
Alexis Daria’s Only Santas in the Building is part of Under the Mistletoe, a stirring collection of December romances that thrill and tingle all the way. They can be read or listened to in one swoony sitting.

My Review:

There are going to be more than a few readers/listeners to this one who are disappointed – not by the story itself but rather because the title sets up an expectation that the story will have a bit of a resemblance to the TV series, Only Murders in the Building. It doesn’t.

But I wasn’t looking for that. Instead, I got caught up in Evie’s freelance, gig-economy, deadline-driven life. Let’s just say that her cramming and scrambling to get her work in just minutes before the deadline sounded familiar. I understood the high she got from concentrating SO HARD and squeaking in JUST under the wire a bit too well.

That she was using the concentration and the pressure and the all-consuming nature of it to keep a whole lot of emotional stuff at bay was also something it was easy for this reader to identify with.

And then the story turned utterly delicious when her really sweet and deliciously hot neighbor turned up at her apartment door. It was pretty easy to see exactly why she had a crush on this guy – and to understand why she had no time to figure out whether that crush was returned – or not. Especially with her older sister naysaying in her ear at every turn.

The story, this deliciously sweet little holiday treat, comes to a delightful climax at the building’s annual holiday party, when everyone in the building comes to the penthouse apartment dressed as some variation of Santa – and a couple of meddling neighbors maneuver these two particular Santas under some strategically placed mistletoe to make their Christmas wishes come true.

Escape Rating B: I picked this second title from the Under the Mistletoe collection for the 2024 Ho-Ho-Ho Readathon because I wanted something short and sweet – or in this case steamy – for a day when most of us will still be recovering from yesterday’s turkey-induced coma.

And that’s exactly what I found.

Two stories into the collection, though, I’m starting to think that the real theme of the whole thing isn’t so much mistletoe as it is misunderstanding. Or at least mixed signals. Particularly the kind of mixed signals that occur between two people who don’t know each other well enough to know what the person they’ve been dreaming of – or at least daydreaming of – might be thinking about them.

Because their own insecurities get in their way. Both of their ways.

As compared to All By My Elf, the disconnect between Evie and Theo doesn’t even come close to a misunderstandammit. They don’t KNOW each other – and if someone doesn’t help them straighten out their crossed wires, they won’t have a chance to.

Hence that well-placed mistletoe.

Only Santas in the Building turned out to be the perfect light and frothy little story to listen to at the end of a long week. I got precisely what I was expecting and even a little bit more as Evie’s work resonated more than this reader expected. Then again, it resonated more with Theo’s work than he expected, too.

If you’re looking for little pick-me-up stories, this collection has been great so far – and I’ve already finished a third. They’re not deep, because there’s no time for that in this short format. But they’ve all been lovely for what they are and a perfect read and/or listen to help fill out my personal 2024 Ho-Ho-Ho Readathon readings.

#AudioBookReview: All By My Elf by Olivia Dade

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B Reviews> book reviews
#AudioBookReview: All By My Elf by Olivia DadeAll by My Elf (Under the Mistletoe Collection, #3) by Olivia Dade
Narrator: Andi Arndt
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon, purchased from Audible
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, holiday romance, short stories
Series: Under the Mistletoe #3
Pages: 55
Length: 1 hour and 28 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 12, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

Secret crushes, spicy Christmas treats, heinous holiday traffic, and a fateful snowstorm bring good friends together in a funny, heartfelt short story by bestselling author Olivia Dade.
Nina and William are underpaid adjunct professors at the same university, where winter break is no break at all: ’tis the season to make extra money. When their holiday side hustle has them stranded by a blinding blizzard in the middle of nowhere, there’s nothing to do but cuddle up for warmth and play a game of Never Have I Ever to pass the time. But in the game of love, secrets never stay secret for long…
Olivia Dade’s All by My Elf is part of Under the Mistletoe, a stirring collection of December romances that thrill and tingle all the way. They can be read or listened to in one swoony sitting.

My Review:

What do you do with a used Weinermobile? Does what happens in the Weinermobile STAY in the Weinermobile? Have you ever wondered? Inquiring minds actually get to find out in All By My Elf.

The answers to those questions coincide with a few considerably less humorous and more down-to-earth questions about the lengths (pun definitely intended) that part-time college professors will go to in order to keep feeding their dreams of the ivory towers of academia while still managing to feed themselves on stipends that barely allow them to make ends wave at each other.

Most of all – and best of all – All By My Elf is a romance that satisfies the craving for a hot, steamy friends into lovers romance that toasts a nearly frozen night in a grey-market Weinermobile into a story that’s way bigger than even a 27 foot long hot dog in a bun – or equally long mincemeat-filled roll of phyllo dough in a Mincemobile – could ever manage to contain.

Escape Rating B: Believe it or not, the puns are part of the story – and they are groaners even when Adjunct Professors Nina Teems and William Dern aren’t moaning together in the back of the weiner.

(Speaking of groaners, if the title of this story is giving you an earworm that refuses to let itself be nailed down, that’s because the earworm is tripping over the slight difference between the book’s title and the song’s title, which is ‘All By Myself’, originally performed by Eric Carmen in 1975 but also covered by Sheryl Crow in 1993 and Céline Dion in 1996.)

So, even though there’s nothing either light or fluffy about a giant hot dog nestled in an even bigger bun – the story itself has plenty of both as well as being the perfect steamy antidote to all of Thanksgiving’s turkey and trimmings – not to mention the rock solid nature of some traditional holiday fruitcakes.

After yesterday’s book, which turned out to be more Xmas and less Halloween than I expected, I found myself looking for a lighter and fluffier story to ease us all into the holiday season and especially the 2024 Ho-Ho-Ho Readathon that begins tomorrow. I chose this particular short story in the Under the Mistletoe collection because I loved the author’s Spoiler Alert series and was hoping for some of the same laughs amid the romance.

Which I definitely got even if I’m not all that fond of hot dogs and I’ve never had mincemeat in any form – let alone this particular version – that I can recall. And I don’t think I’ll ever be able to even think of it again without giggling at least a bit.

All By My Elf takes a gigantic misunderstandammit and turns up the heat between two friends who have epic crushes on each other and are afraid to act on them. At least until the Mincemobile gets stuck in an epic blizzard and they need each other’s body heat to keep from freezing to death. (That’s not really a spoiler as this is a short story and the inevitable is so obvious it can be seen from outer space.) This scenario is one that gets used in romance and in fanfiction ALL THE TIME, and it’s a classic for a reason. It works. It really, really works – no matter how contrived the machinations for getting the couple into it.

If you’re looking for a quick read that combines warmth and heat and more than a few groaning laughs, All By My Elf is a fun, quick, read or listen to give you an excuse to put your feet up and your mind on coast for a few minutes during the busy holiday season.

 

#AudioBookReview: Lovers at the Museum by Isabel Allende

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B Reviews> book reviews
#AudioBookReview: Lovers at the Museum by Isabel AllendeLovers at the Museum by Isabel Allende
Narrator: Nicholas Boulton
Format: audiobook, ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: fantasy, magical realism, short stories
Pages: 25
Length: 38 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories on April 1, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Wind Knows My Name comes a mesmerizing tale of two passionate souls who share one magical night that defies all rational explanation.
Love, be it wild or tender, often defies logic. In fact, at times, the only rationale behind the instant connection of two souls is plain magic.
Bibiña Aranda, runaway bride, wakes up in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao still wearing her wedding dress, draped in the loving arms of a naked man whose name she doesn’t know. She and the man with no clothes, Indar Zubieta, attempt to explain to the authorities how they got there. It’s a story of love at first sight and experience beyond compare, one that involves a dreamlike journey through the museum.
But the lovers’ transcendent night bears no resemblance to the crude one Detective Larramendi attempts to reconstruct. And no amount of fantastical descriptions can convince the irritated inspector of the truth.
Allende’s dreamy short story has the power to transport readers in any language, leaving them to ponder the wonders of love long after the story’s over.

My Review:

Lovers at the Museum caught my eye primarily for the audiobook. The narrator, Nicholas Boulton, is the voice of one of my favorite characters in the video game Mass Effect Andromeda. (A game that is much better than the reviews would lead one to believe, but that is not the topic of this review.)

Back on topic, at least a bit more on topic, I have to say that he didn’t sound much like that character in this narration, which I should have expected because they’re not remotely alike nor should they be and that’s just plain good acting.

Which leads me back, again, by a meandering path, to this lovely little short story about, well, love, and magic, and the magic of love.

Although it starts out with the evidence of a whole lot of lust – as that’s a much easier thing to get a handle on – particularly when one of the protagonists is still presenting a handle. So to speak.

Ahem.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao of modern and contemporary art in Spain’s Basque region (pictured at left) is already a magical place, both for its bulky, blocky and some would even say Brutalist, design, and in this story, at least, for the strange and weird things that happen within its walls.

This incident would add to that legend.

The morning staff of the museum discovered two disheveled, entwined, partially nude lovers in one of the galleries sleeping off a night of lustful debauchery that shouldn’t have happened at all. Not for particularly nefarious reasons but simply because they entered while the museum was closed – and should have triggered alarms in every single room they came into – which seems to have been all of them.

They say the door opened for them. They claim that they weren’t really in the museum, but in a magical pleasure palace.

The local police inspector, with a reputation for finding hidden clues, eliciting damning confessions, and a dogged determination to punish the guilty, is frustrated that he can’t break their ridiculous stories and isn’t sure what crime, if any, they actually committed.

It seems as if the magic of the Guggenheim claimed the lovers that incredible night, and it’s taking away the inspector’s will to punish them in the cold light of day.

Escape Rating B: This is short and very, very sweet – even though the inspector is downright salty for a lot of the story.

There’s a lot of salt to be had – at least from his perspective. He’s sure that someone HAS to be guilty of something prosecutable, and that someone is lying to him.

(I was betting on the museum officials lying to cover up less than attentive guards and not so secure security. It seemed like the obvious solution. Which it is logically but then again, this is about magic.)

The inspector wants to punish the lovers for their vice and their disrespect of the museum. But mostly because he envies them the magic of their love – something that is clearly lacking in his own life in spite of his decades long marriage – or perhaps because of it. That’s a bit hard to tell, but it’s sad no matter how one looks at it. Unless one is the inspector, in which case it’s downright tragic.

In the end, it all boils down to magic, the kind of magical realism that takes a story out of the everyday and sprinkles a bit of fairy dust over the proceedings. So short, sweet and utterly charming – including the inspector’s bluster.

Even better, if Isabel Allende is an author you’ve heard about but haven’t ever actually read – as was true for this reader – or if you’re not sure whether or not magical realism could be a flavor in your jam – this delightful short is the perfect way to stick your reading toe into magical realism with an author who is considered a master of the genre.

Review: Signal Moon by Kate Quinn + Giveaway

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A++ Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> blog tours> book reviews> Giveaways
Review: Signal Moon by Kate Quinn + GiveawaySignal Moon: A Short Story by Kate Quinn
Narrator: Saskia Maarleveld, Andrew Gibson
Format: audiobook
Source: publisher
Formats available: ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, timeslip fiction, World War II
Pages: 57
Length: 1 hour and 22 minutes
Published by Amazon Original Stories, Audible Audio on August 1, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon
Goodreads

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye comes a riveting short story about an impossible connection across two centuries that could make the difference between peace or war.

Yorkshire, 1943. Lily Baines, a bright young debutante increasingly ground down by an endless war, has traded in her white gloves for a set of headphones. It’s her job to intercept enemy naval communications and send them to Bletchley Park for decryption.

One night, she picks up a transmission that isn’t code at all—it’s a cry for help.

An American ship is taking heavy fire in the North Atlantic—but no one else has reported an attack, and the information relayed by the young US officer, Matt Jackson, seems all wrong. The contact that Lily has made on the other end of the radio channel says it’s…2023.

Across an eighty-year gap, Lily and Matt must find a way to help each other: Matt to convince her that the war she’s fighting can still be won, and Lily to help him stave off the war to come. As their connection grows stronger, they both know there’s no telling when time will run out on their inexplicable link.

My Review:

This story was so beautiful it just about broke me. It was gorgeous and glorious and heartbreaking all at the same time, and I was in tears at the end.

I want to say this is a timeslip story but that isn’t quite right. It’s more of a time-merging story, or a bit of technological SF sleight of hand story. It’s best to just say that it works. It all works marvelously, and let the how and why of it remain a bit nebulous.

After all, our two principals don’t completely understand the why of it themselves. They just know that it happened. And that it saved them both.

Lily Baines is a signal tech in Yorkshire in 1943, spending her days and nights with a Bakelite headset wrapped around her “bat-like” ears, listening for German signals. She’s a Petty Officer in the WRENS (Women’s Royal Naval Service), doing her bit for in a war that she’s entirely too afraid is being lost.

Late one shift, she picks up a signal from an American ship, broadcast in English, in the “clear”, detailing an attack on the ship by “Vampires”. An attack that results in the ship sinking with all hands after 42 minutes of harrowing transmission by the U.S. Naval signal tech, ST Matt Jackson, who gives the date as 2023.

While her superiors are certain that Lily has just been working too many days in a row without a break, Lily feels like she owes it to her fellow signal tech, the man she just heard narrate his own death, to try to help him. So she sends him a letter, a 1943-era radio, extra batteries, and a list of frequencies that she promises to listen on at a specific time every day.

There’s no science fiction involved in her package to the future. Her uncle is a solicitor and she contracts with his office to deliver the package to a certain room in a certain hotel in York on the day Matt said he checked in. Law offices do this all the time, just not necessarily for quite 80 years.

When Matt gets the radio, he’s sure it’s a prank, but he dials the frequency anyway. Even when Lily starts talking, he STILL thinks it’s a prank – at least until that night, when an event that she predicted comes true.

They have less than 24 hours to analyze the transmission that Matt hasn’t sent yet, in the hopes of figuring out what is about to go wrong so that he can prevent it. Or save his ship. Whatever it takes to prevent yet another war.

What they get is more than either of them ever bargained for. It’s enough – and it’s not nearly enough at all.

Escape Rating A++: Signal Moon is short and absolutely perfect in its length. It represents a very brief moment in time and needed to reflect that brevity. Also, it’s just so damn bittersweet – and appropriate in that bitter sweetness, that more would be just too much to take.

It’s that good.

But because of that short length, I was able to sit down with the audiobook and finish in one utterly absorbing and in the end completely heartbreaking listen. (If you have Amazon Prime you can get both the ebook and the audio as part of your Prime membership, and it’s so worth it to listen to the audio if you have a mere 82 minutes to occupy your hands while your mind wanders back to 1943 – and forward to OMG next year.)

The strength of this story is in the characters. The author sketches us a complete picture of Lily and her wartime service with just a bit of description and a whole lot of Lily’s internal monologue as she goes through her day pretending that everything is going to be alright even though she’s scared right down to her not-nearly-warm-enough fingertips that all is already lost.

While Matt’s more frank and frequently profane dialog, along with the desperation of his own internal monologue, gives the reader or listener a clear portrait of who he is and what drove him to become the person – and the officer – that he is on the brink of what could be – briefly – his very own war.

In the audiobook, the two characters are brilliantly voiced by their own narrators, Saskia Maarleveld for Lily and Andrew Gibson for Matt and they embody their characters beautifully. The audio would not have worked half so well with a single narrator. (Saskia Maarleveld is also the narrator for several of the author’s novels, including this year’s The Diamond Eye, which just moved up the towering TBR pile as a result.)

The ending of this story is inevitable. There’s just no other way this one works. But it’s easy to get so involved in their story that you just want it to have a different ending anyway. And that’s what broke me in the end. I knew what the end would be, but this was just one of those times where I really wanted a deus ex machina to step in and make that difference happen – even knowing how much I usually hate those kinds of endings. But it wasn’t, and it shouldn’t have been, meant to be.

Dammit.

~~~~~~ TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~

Kate Quinn and Amazon Publishing are giving away a $50 Amazon Gift Card to one very lucky entrant on this tour!
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