This darkly feminist, modern gothic tale revolves around Rose, the newly hired Classics teacher at an illustrious Scottish boarding school for young women. But there is more to Caldonbrae Hall than just prestige and academics—behind the school’s elitist veneer lies a traditional culture and dark secrets that Rose never could have imagined.
As Rose struggles to reconcile her modernist beliefs to the darkly outdated practices at Caldonbrae, she is forced to confront the true extent of the school’s nefarious purpose, and her own role in perpetuating it.
The year is 1666, and widowed Abitha is left to fend for herself amongst a Puritan community who shuns her boldness and outspokenness. But when she chances to awaken the ancient spirit of Slewfoot, she makes a deal with the devil—and both are destined to discover deep truths about themselves and the world around them, forever bonded by blood and bone.
I could not put this down. It was witchy and worldly, dark and disturbing, it was everything I love about historical fantasy! If you are looking for something spooky to read this October, this author has some amazing stories to choose from!
If I’m being honest, this has been my least favorite of all of Jane’s works. But I guess there always has to be one 🤷♀️ To me, it just felt a bit boring, and I don’t think I can get over the ick of Fanny and Edmund’s relationship. Though I will say there were some fantastic symbolism—the gate and the chain stood out to me as very poetic! Overall, not my fav, but still gets a solid ⭐️⭐️⭐️ for the style and story.
When faced with a monster, who ever looked to see beyond the teeth and talons?
For readers of Madeleine Miller and Claire Heywood comes the story of the most infamous monster of Greek mythology: Medusa.
First, they loved her. Then, they abused her. Finally, they made her a villain.
Gifted and burdened with stunning beauty, young Medusa seeks sanctuary with the Goddess Athena. But when she catches the eye of the lecherous but mighty Poseidon, she is beyond protection. Powerful men rarely answer for their actions, after all.
Meanwhile, Perseus embarks on a seemingly impossible quest, equipped with only bravado and determination…
Medusa and Perseus soon become pawns of spiteful and selfish gods. Faced with the repercussions of Athena’s wrath, blamed for her assault, Medusa has no choice but to flee and hide. But can she do so without becoming the monster they say she is?
Medusa’s truth has long been lost. History tells of conquering heroes, of men with hearts of gold. Now it is time to hear the story of how history treats women who don’t comply.
Thank you to @sourcebooks and @storygramtours for sending me a copy of the book and including me on this tour!
Love made her a prisoner. Revenge will set her free.
A story of the fae and the folk; of the mountains and the sea, the lakes and the moors and the rivers and the bees. A modern fairytale of love, loss, and revenge. The circle of life, the wheel—ever turning.
This queer YA reimagining of The Secret Garden subverts the cishet and white status quo of the original in a tale of family secrets wonderful and horrifying.
Mary Lennox didn’t think about death until the day it knocked politely on her bedroom door and invited itself in. When a terrible accident leaves her orphaned at fifteen, she is sent to the wilderness of the Georgian Bay to live with an uncle she’s never met.
At first the impassive, calculating girl believes this new manor will be just like the one she left in Toronto: cold, isolating, and anything but cheerful, where staff is treated as staff and never like family. But as she slowly allows her heart to open like the first blooms of spring, Mary comes to find that this strange place and its strange people—most of whom are Indigenous—may be what she can finally call home.
Then one night Mary discovers Olive, her cousin who has been hidden away in an attic room for years due to a “nervous condition.” The girls become fast friends, and Mary wonders why this big-hearted girl is being kept out of sight and fed medicine that only makes her feel sicker. When Olive’s domineering stepmother returns to the manor, it soon becomes clear that something sinister is going on.
With the help of a charming, intoxicatingly vivacious Metis girl named Sophie, Mary begins digging further into family secrets both wonderful and horrifying to figure out how to free Olive. And some of the answers may lie within the walls of a hidden, overgrown and long-forgotten garden the girls stumble upon while wandering the wilds…
Most Ardently (Pride & Prejudice: coming January 2024)
Thank you to @turnthepagetours, @mackidsbooks, @cherie.dimaline for sending me a copy of the book and teaming up with me for this tour! nd a huge thank you to @macmillaaudio for providing me with a widget of the audiobook! I loved it!
Alice Hoffman is an auto-buy author for me. I love her style of storytelling, and this was one of my most anticipated books of the year. It did not disappoint! Lucky for me I was able to borrow the audiobook on Libby, but it’s definitely another that I want to add to my collection!
In this 𝘚𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘭𝘦𝘵𝘵 𝘓𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 inspired story, MC Mia falls in love with literature and becomes the hero of her own fairytale—saving herself by breaking away from the oppressive cult she was raised in. She ultimately finds herself transported back to another time, and meets her favorite author, Nathaniel Hawthorne himself. Their worlds collide and together they form a bond that time itself cannot break. Half-historical fiction/half-fantasy, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘐𝘯𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘏𝘰𝘶𝘳 is a truly enchanting exploration into the power of love, loss, time, and literature. A beautiful story of books and magic and love 📚✨❤️
I really enjoyed this collection of British folktale retellings! My favorites were 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘏𝘢𝘭𝘭, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳’𝘴 𝘛𝘢𝘭𝘦, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘚𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨, and 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘏𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘢𝘺, but all were really interesting short stories packed full of symbolism and meaningful lessons. Would highly recommend this to anyone who likes fae lore, mythical creatures, and fantasy ✨
💚 A Retelling (The Green Children of Woolpit) @djdaisyjohnson 🥛 Sour Hall (At, We’re Flittin’) @naomi_r_booth Rosheen (The Dauntless Girl) @irenosenokojie 🦭 Between Sea and Sky (The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry) @kirstylogan 🥻 The Panther’s Tale (Chillington House) @mahsudasnaith 🌿 The Tale of Kathleen (The Tale of Kathleen) by Emiear McBride 👯♀️ The Sisters (The Brothers) @livslittle 👁 The Dampness is Spreading (My Fairy Midwife) @emmas_window 🧜♀️ The Droll of the Mermaid (The Old Wandering Droll-Teller of the Lizard, and his Story of the Mermaid and the Man of Cury) @natashacarthewofficial 🧚♀️ The Holloway (Old Farmer Mole) @girlhermes
This was another beautifully told story by @joannechocolat and illustrated by @bonniehelenhawkinsartist
The Blue Salt Road is a stunning tale of love, loss, treachery, revenge, and the call of the ocean. Set upon the high seas, this epic tells the legend of the selkie, and of the trickery and cruelty of human Folk.
Dark, magical, and deep as the open sea, it is a story I will carry with me 💙
The School For Good Mothers, though dystopian fiction, really highlights the ways in which motherhood can be judged and dismissed. Mothers are expected to be perfect all the time, but the reality of motherhood can be isolating, exhausting, and overwhelming.
In this story, our MC Frida is deemed a bad mom by social services and her 2 year old daughter is removed from her care. Frida is placed in a year-long motherhood training program where her decisions and actions are monitored and scrutinized alongside a group of other bad moms. They are degraded and dehumanized, forced to relearn how to feel in talk circle, graded on their parenting styles, and ultimately denied the right to be with their own children.
The book focuses on the pressure mothers face to give up their identity to be “good moms”, and I think it is an unfair expectation that hits too close to home. A country that doesn’t support motherhood should not have the right to control it.
As a mother, this book really resonated with me and left me feeling disturbed and outraged. It’s a scary idea that the government can step in to decide what makes you a good or bad mother. This book demonstrates the danger of letting government draw that line for us.
Good literature makes you feel and think, and this book definitely did that. ️️️️
Not often do I say a show was better than the book. Sadly this is one of those times.
I wanted to like this book. I really did. I tried. I absolutely LOVED the show, but for me, the book fell flat. It felt like the book was written after the script, and mostly borrowed from that script without adding anything new to the story. There was no depth, there was no substance.
Also, I had a problem with the way this author compares skin-to-food, amongst using other racist stereotypes in her attempt to show the societal gap.
I tried to give this author the benefit of the doubt—I think what she was trying to do with such offensive phrasings was meant to highlight the fact that, historically, it was normalized to say/think amongst white people who didn’t realize/care what they were saying was offensive…buuuut, when writing HF in this day-and-age, you have to be more present. The woke storyline needs woke language to match it, and in this case, a good idea was ruined by old-fashioned storytelling methods.
This particular HF already attempts to rewrite the past, so I don’t understand why the language couldn’t also be rewritten. She didn’t need to write-in the constant stereotypes as a demonstration—readers already pick up on inequality as a theme without the MCs being SA’d, stereotyped, compared to food, having their skin rubbed off, and just blatantly insulted.
The book attempts to show British society in the 1700s accepting and uniting black people into society but unfortunately is done in such a tasteless and tone-deaf way that I almost stopped reading multiple times throughout the book. It was an ambitious idea that the author cheapened—but it worked really well-on screen (probably because there was a huge team of people who were able to catch and reframe the problematic areas of the story.)
Historically, racism was not cured in this era as the book suggests, but the suggestion is not my issue with the story. It’s historical fiction, and I would have enjoyed it if the POC MCs stories weren’t simply being used here to fetishize black people and erase problematic historical issues.
There is unfortunately a pattern of celebrating and protecting white women authors while not recognizing how their work promotes and reinforces racism. This is sadly one of those works.
I have seen historical fiction with POC characters done so much better and without the constant marginalization and stereotyping and honestly am disappointed in the author after reading the book. Sad.
In short, don’t read the book. Just watch the show.
This was my first May buddy read with my bff @the.queerreader 💚 We have been working our way through TJ Klune’s books and I have to say this has been my favorite one yet! All of his books have blown us away but THIS ONE. I loved it.
It is so meta, and it evokes so many big questions about the meeting of technology and humans. Can machines feel? Can they exhibit free-will? What defines love? Will robots one day surpass humans, at what point will technology overtake humans? And can technology ever really become conscious? Or will it always be seeking to be like us, only ever able to emulate humans-qualities? So many deep questions are stirred up with this book, and with the rise of AI, it feels more relevant than ever.
Not only is this book incredibly profound, but also emotionally vast. In true Klune style, it is emotional, thought-provoking, and brimming with love and life. He is easily becoming an auto-buy author for me and I highly recommend everyone read this book!
thank you to @librofm for providing this ALC! I loved it!!
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MANDY'S READING LIST 