Emma Types Stuff

I'm reviewing published Jane Austen fanfiction and I don't even care. Time to cash in on that Bridgeton period drama momentum.  I was incredibly wary of The Other Bennet Sister [Janice Hadlow] for several reasons. Firstly, because a title that derivative doesn't give one a great deal of hope for the originality of the premise (and let's face it, 'what happened to Mary Bennet?' is already the most cliché premise in Jane Austen fandom.) Secondly, the cover was a carbon copy of Longbourn [Jo Baker] which isn't just the worst Jane Austen themed book I've read, but one of the worst books I've read overall.  Still, an author can't help how their work is marketed, and when a BookTuber claimed this was one of their best reads of 2023, I was prepared to give it a chance.  And, dammit , it's really good.  The Other Bennet Sister is the story of Mary Bennet: the plain, annoyingly moral middle-child whose bad singing at the Netherfield Ball is one of...

In preparation for my trip to Italy, I read a whole bunch of Ancient Rome themed books designed to educate and entertain me ahead of my holiday. Of course, after two weeks taking in the sights (and eating my bodyweight in pizza and pasta) you can understand that I was done with the theme for a while. 'A while' turned out to be... three months.  The bite of winter has sent me scurrying back to books featuring sunshine and olives. No wonder all these men are constantly thinking about Ancient Rome when faced with the bitter reality of Londinium as of Jan/Feb 2024.  So here is my second list of books to read when you can't stop thinking about Ancient Rome... The Books Falco: Shadows in Bronze by Lindsey Davis  The Falco series looks set to be my new obsession. It's set in Rome, about eight years before Vesuvius erupted. Falco is an informer (a private investigator) and the series delightfully inverts every 'hardboiled PI' trope imaginable. Falco may live in a scumm...

I don't like Romantasy. There, I said it.  If you aren't familiar with the genre... yes, you probably are. It's the fantasy book that's the size of a doorstopper but not written by Tolkien or George R. R. Martin. It will have a precious metal, royal term, element, or flower in the title ( A Saint of Elderberries , A Throne of Dew and Wildflowers, you get the idea.) It will be a trilogy, minimum, and will normally have a teenage girl as the protagonist.  Hundreds of pages will be devoted to a fairly interesting fantasy world and several thousand more will be devoted to the misunderstanding-filled romance she has with the love interest. Depending on their target they are sometimes 'spicy' which is fine, so long as nobody uses a term like 'erotica' or 'porn'. Only spiciness is allowed when talking about fantasy fap material.  It strikes me that I sound both snobbish and sexist, as I write the above, especially as there is a certain amount of dram...

Witness me striding over to the window.  I throw said window open and lean out, startling an urchin below. (Naturally, I have a comical olde-world sleep cap on.) "You there! What genre is this?"  "W-why... it's traditional romance ma'am!" I step back and dance around my bedroom in delight. A miracle has occurred. My cold, dead heart is beating once more - because I read a traditional romance novel and it was fantastic.    Unlike Scrooge, who we are assured stuck to his new do-gooding lifestyle, I am probably not going to become a romance devotee, but in this particular case I am delighted to be proved wrong.  Traditional romance is traditionally the stuff of Mills and Boon. Where they once had covers of men and women in various stages of their clothes falling off, contemporary romances now have covers with characters drawn in a cartoonish style, looking wistfully at each other like they are part of a the syllabus textbook for a GCSE in Pining.  The Norther...

I don't write this blog to slag off books. In fact, it's very rare for me to review books I hate, since I don't finish them. Even books that I've been highly critical of on here, I've more-or-less considered the experience a net positive.  And I try to be responsible; for all that my audience rarely reaches above one or two, I would never take pot-shots against a self-published or indie author, or at otherwise easy targets. But sometimes a book betrays you. Sometimes you, the reader, are the injured party. Sometimes writing a thousand word blog piece is your only source of justice. So, what did A Marvellous Light [Freya Marske] do to earn this dubious honour? And what is it about? Robin has just inherited the family estate but has been denied the family money, forcing him to fail-up into a civil service role. He soon discovers that he is actually the Prime Minister's liaison to the magical business of the country. His predecessor has vanished wi...

There was a point about two thirds into this queer romance when I suddenly realised that I didn't want the main characters to get together.  This was a bit of a shock as I am generally easy to please when it comes to romantic pairings. If you tell me that two warm-blooded, consenting humans are meant for each other then I will happily go along with it. I ship mainstream ships. I even ship multiple heterosexual pairings, which as a queer woman in fandom is faintly hilarious, if not actually embarrassing. So for a romance book to set up a meet cute, and then get me to the point where I'm actively rooting against them... that takes skill. Of course, this is what the author [Alexis Hall] was intending all along. Because Paris Dalliencourt is About to Crumble is a baking show romance that is far from cookie-cutter. Paris is, to put it simply, an anxious mess. He worries about absolutely everything. He gets by in life via insane posh-boy privilege and the emotional support of his bes...

I've always associated 'romance' books with the Catherine Cookson books my nan used to read in front of the TV, or the books I skim past in the 'free eBook' section of Kobo. As a queer woman, most heterosexual romance stories don't appeal, and even the queer romance I read tends to cross over with other genres. If I want romance, I usually read fanfiction, which is free and about pairings I care about. But, the modern romance market is currently packed with self-aware, interesting titles, and one of them is this book: Love in the Time of Serial Killers (Alicia Thompson). I'm trying to be more open and less judgemental about my own reading, so I was willing to give it a go, especially since I am a millennial woman and therefore have a subscription to every true crime channel available to me. Phoebe's having a hard time, and not in a cute romance book 'I got locked out in my pyjamas and my boss was a jerk to me!' way. In a 'my dad just died, I...

For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, I dislike Guy Fawkes Night, the UK's answer to the 4th of July. We celebrate our opression with bonfires, fireworks and funfairs. I personally sit indoors crying and working through my own opressive grief.  So what I'm trying to say is that I REALLY needed cheering up. Legends & Lattes (Travis Baldree) is one of those books that sounds too good to be true. 'Low-stakes' is often code for 'lack of plot' and 'queer romance'... well... we've been hurt before. To my great surprise, all the other excited reviewers were right. Legends & Lattes is fantastic.  We follow Viv, an Orc with a dream. A dream of putting down the sword and putting on a barista apron. She wants to open a coffee shop in a city that hasn't heard of coffee. Of course, she can't do it alone, and so she gathers a ragtag group of misfits along the way. They progress from coffee to lattes, from lattes to pastries, ...

Being a 90s kid was great. As those Facebook nostalgia posts regularly remind us, we were the last generation to play outside and we were free from the pollution of texting and the internet. We had mysterious Pogs, troublesome Tamagotchis, decent mid-budget movies, and only mildly-embarassing fashion. We also had our future stolen from us, but hey, we didn't know that yet! Our parents were still telling us we could have a comfortable 2.4 kids life and any career we wanted.  Suffice to say, when times are tough, nostalgia is a comforting tonic. There's been a trend for books that trigger our nostalgia recently - so I've rounded up three that should send you back to the 90s so hard your hair will re-perm itself.  Practical Magic The Practical Magic trailer was at the beginning of a VHS video I loved, so I saw it a LOT. Inevitably, I was rather underwhelmed when I eventually rented the movie from LoveFilm (I am not nostalgic for LoveFilm, by the way).  It was fine . Sandra ...