The Blue Fairy's Bookshelf

The Stars Too Fondly Emily Hamilton, 2024 Premise: Chloe and her friends meant to break into the old spaceship and try to find out what happened to the crew. They didn't intend to end up on a trip across the galaxy.  This is a light fluffy read if you're in a light fluffy romance mood. I didn't hate it overall, but the sci-fi parts were terrible. I didn't find the characters particularly compelling, but the story was interesting enough, at least at first. The group felt a little checkbox-y, by which I mean that our main protagonist Chloe was "just" a lesbian, but the others "checked off" a bunch of other minority groups, but not in a way that really affected the story, other than the fact that they were a bunch of different flavors of queer and a tight group of friends.  So they are exploring this ship that was supposed to be humanity's great attempt at the stars 20 years earlier, but the crew vanished on the day that was supposed to be the laun...

Tangled Up in You (Meant to Be Series) Christina Lauren, 2024 Premise: Ren had hardly ever been off her parents' remote homestead when she finally convinced them to let her attend college. Once there, she tried to live by her parents' rules, but her curiosity about the world (and about one cute troublemaker) would lead her to an unforgettable road trip that would reveal the truth about her past.  So, I admit that I was very skeptical when I learned that Disney was hiring romance authors to write novels inspired by their animated films. I decided to try this one because I'd been entertained by another romance by Christina Lauren ( https://bluefairysbookshelf.blogspot.com/2021/12/in-holidaze.html ) so I figured this one would hopefully be passable. But I was worried that it would devolve into a game of spot-the-reference and be full of sequences that only made sense in the context of the original movie.  Happily, this was not the case. This wasn't like a fanfiction that ...

The City in Glass Nghi Vo, 2024 Premise: A love story about a city. And a demon. Destruction, history, and rebirth. This novella was fascinating, weird, heartbreaking, and beautiful. I'm not sure what else to say.  Vitrine is a demon and the patron of a thriving port city. She loves the city and the people, but at the beginning of the story, the city is destroyed by angels, all its people murdered. She spends decades recoving from this blow, remembering what was, and slowly seeing what might come next.  That's it. That's the story. During this emotional journey, she is also troubled by one of the angels, who falls in love with her. But love between these beings isn't like mortal love. She has cursed him, and he suffers. They fight and work together and fight again, helping the new city to grow on the ashes of the old in their own ways. And the ending is delightfully weird. They do not "get together" in any human sense, but... how can I say this without complet...

Crossposted from Mainlining Christmas Book Review: The Merriest Misters Timothy Janovsky, 2024 This year, I'm looking at a handful of interesting retellings of holiday classics. This romantic spin on The Santa Clause makes for some real holiday magic. Premise: Patrick and Quinn met, fell in love, got married, moved into their own house. Everything you're "supposed" to do. But their marriage is cracking under the pressure of family expectations, unspoken resentments, and unfulfilling careers. That's when Patrick unexpectedly gets a most unusual opportunity, and Quinn's along for a wild ride all the way to the North Pole.  Well, the library gods were kind to me and provided this last-minute holiday gift! This might be my favorite Christmas read of the season.  Think The Santa Clause, except instead of a guy killing Santa, becoming Santa, and fixing his relationship with his son, Patrick injures Santa (who unexpectedly quits), becomes Santa, and fixes his relati...

Crossposted from Mainlining Christmas. Book Review: Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret Benjamin Stevenson, 2024 New Release! I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.  This is a weird one. It's book three in a series, and I haven't read the others. However, I think the bigger factor here is that this book (and its series) is written in a particular style of extremely meta humor which... isn't for everyone. Ernie Cunningham was a mystery buff before his life turned into Murder, She Wrote. With two solved murders under his belt (and written into the previous books, which exist in the world of the story), he's beginning to get a reputation. Enter - the Christmas Special. (The prologue literally has the narrator say that this is a Christmas special.) It's the lead up to Christmas, and he's traveling to see a magician do a holiday benefit show, because the CEO of the nonprofit the benefit is for was murdered, and Ernie's ex-w...

Crossposted from Mainlining Christmas Novella Review: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas Julianna Keyes, 2024 New Release! I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.  I've been reviewing a bunch of retellings this year, and this very nearly qualifies. It starts with a writer on a Christmas Train, after all.  Only in reality, it's more a funny subversion of Hallmark tropes with a happily-ever-after.  Eve and Will are travel writers, and their boss somehow sent them both to cover Christmas in this special holiday resort town. Whoever writes the best article gets a pending promotion. (This is a set-up that makes no sense. Not because of the promotion, but because you wouldn't write about a special (probably prohibitively expensive) Christmas experience in a travel magazine AFTER the holiday.) The problem is that both Eve and Will are Christmas cynics, but their boss isn't at all. They know she's going to want the schmalt...