cyphomandra

Just finished:

The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows, Olivia Waite. Agatha Griffin, a widow, keeps a firm hand on her printing business despite her radical son and her increasing loneliness; then a colony of bees moves into her print warehouse, and Penelope Flood, a village bee-keeper who exists midway between the wealthy landowners and the townsfolk, spending much of her life trying to be what others want, helps her out. Slow burn, hot sex scenes, and a Regency romance with actual politics; I liked this more than The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics, actually, although it does have a terrible cover and it is also far more about community-building bees than wasps. Agatha’s job has a lot of fascinating detail, and she combines the day-to-day work of the printshop with shrewd calculations about what will sell and how to get it to people; likewise, the bee details from Penelope’s side are great.

and some of the ones I mentioned last time:

Full English, Rachel Spangler. Solid f/f romance, good NE England setting, the American lead Emma is a bit wet (and not in a sexual sense) but the core of the relationship between her and local Brogan not working because Brogan doesn’t think she herself is worth more than summer flings with rich bored tourists was nicely done. Would read another.

Prodigal, TA Moore. The expected reveal. I do like the concept but this treatment of it just annoyed me. The other TA Moore I had out got returned; am trying to decide if I liked it enough to grab it again.

Consolation Songs, edited by Iona Datt Sharma. A hopeful and kind collection; went well with our recent election results. My favourite was Rebecca Fraimow’s “This is New Gehesran Calling”, which is about rebuilding and connection in all the best ways.

Currently reading:

Her Magical Pet anthology, and enjoying it a lot. I’m also most of the way through Endell Street, which is still terribly overdue. Book for beta.

Up next:

I have picked up Diana Souhami’s No Modernism without Lesbians, about a group of women in Paris between the wars who fostered the Modernist movement (Gertrude Stein, Natalie Barney, two others I can’t immediately place). I also seem to have a lot of new books on my Kindle account that I haven’t quite committed to yet.