cyphomandra

I actually spent most of my free time this month playing Stardew Valley, a sweet move-to-a-small-town and run a farm sim that is in no way anything I would want to do in real life, and read very little, which was also helped by the fact that I didn’t really like anything I read. On the other hand, my farm is super productive and many of the townspeople are friendly.

The Juliet Code, Christine Wells. While I can sympathise with reading Between Silk and Cyanide and thinking, I want to write about this, I am less sympathetic to making it a romance between the not-quiet Leon Marks codebreaker and the not-quite Noor Inayat Khan radio operatives he trains, especially when it ends happily, and not at all sympathetic to making the leads neither Jewish nor Muslim.

Fence, volume 2. C.S. Pacat. I find this very pretty while not retaining much. I am still baffled by the logistics of the school - if it’s a specialist fencing academy, why are there so few fencers? - and not entirely convinced by the dynamic between the two leads, but it’s fun while I’m reading.

The Glass Ocean, Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, Karen White. Narrative switches between two women on the Lusitania on its final, fated cruise - a wealthy southern belle with a secretive industrialist husband and a steerage passenger forced to carry out a risky theft/forgery by her con artist sister - and a contemporary author descended from one of the ship’s stewards, who, struggling to come up with a new book concept, breaks a promise she made to her mother and opens a chest containing her ancestor’s rescued possessions - which sends her on a quest to find out what they mean. I really liked the beginning, where the author attends a rich, bored, book group, who have pirated copies of her story, and there’s some nice scene-setting on the ship, with that sense of inevitable doom approaching. None of the romances are particularly convincing, though, and I wanted more from the final resolution.

A Prince on Paper & Can’t Escape Love, Alyssa Cole (Reluctant Royals series). These do have fantastic covers. In A Prince on Paper, Nya, who tried to escape to New York from the shadow of her abusive father but never really fitted in there, accidentally shares a bed (on a private jet) with playboy (or is he?) Johan von Braustein, prince of Liechtienbourg; romance and a rather unconvincing action plot ensue. There are a lot of nice moments - Nya’s fondness for playing dating sims, the bit where Nya suggests that the Liechtienbourgers language is just a mash-up of French and German (true, plus misspellings) and Johan says that this is a terrible insult and a misunderstanding and she must never say this again - but there’s a lot going on and a lot of things feel unfinished.

Can’t Escape Love has nerdy popculture blogger Regina (who uses a wheelchair and is Portia from Duke by Default’s twin - I read this next month) is obsessed with the voice of live-streamer and escape room designer, Gustave Nguyen, which she uses to fall asleep to. When he deletes his archive Regina goes looking for him - conveniently, just after he’s been commissioned to design an escape room themed around an anime he’s never watched, that Regina is obsessed with. This is a sterling demonstration of failing to lean in, as per rachelmanija, as at no point is the escape room described nor does anyone get locked in one, and I was so irritated by this that I don’t remember much else.