Angieville

I was not expecting this. I was simply not expecting just what was to come when I picked up this deceptively pleasant-looking novel. My mom gifted me a copy of Jenny Colgan 's The Café by the Sea awhile ago, but it took until the other night while I was browsing my shelves after starting and stopping no fewer than four different books for me to snatch it up off my TBR shelf and give it a go. And I'm not remotely ashamed to say that I didn't even make it past the epigraph before falling hopelessly and irretrievably in love. The epigraph read: hiraeth (n): a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home that maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for lost places in your past Tears filled my eyes. I cannot tell you how frequently I experience that emotion as an adult, how complicated and full (and yes, very often painful) it has been trying to accommodate it, and just how very much it meant to me, knowing that there is a word out there that ...

The moral of this story is that it has been far too long since I read a Gail Carriger book. I discovered her back when her debut novel Soulless first came out and thought it was perfectly delightful. I read the next couple of Parasol Protectorate novels and then sort of lost my way a bit. I've always rather wanted to return and, my word, has she been prolific in the intervening years. When I began hearing happy rumblings about this first installment in a new series of novellas set in the same familiar world, it felt like the perfect time to jump back in and test the waters. Faith Wigglesworth (I know) has been exiled to London and ordered to find herself a werewolf husband posthaste. Her family appears to view such a fate as merely her just desserts for the scandal she caused them back home in Boston. Faith remembers the story a trifle differently. But she is nothing if not relieved to be an ocean away from her less-than-loving family and not at all opposed to a werewolf spou...

The Kiss Quotien t crossed my radar around about the same time I got wind of  The Wedding Date . Both debut books looked like exactly the sort of charming romcoms I wanted in my life at this specific point in time (always, really), and both sported perfectly adorable covers. I was intrigued not only by the obvious mathematical aspect of this novel, but with the fact that the protagonist is on the spectrum and that the story itself was inspired by Helen Hoang 's own diagnosis with Autistic Spectrum Disorder. I found myself very eager to dive in and find out just what this gender-swapped Pretty Woman revision had to offer.  Stella Lane's mother will not leave her alone. She would like a suitable suitor for her daughter and the requisite grandchildren, and she would like them now . And Stella just can't with the pressure anymore. Relationships―interactions with people in general―have never been her strong suit. She far prefers math and her job as an econometrician to att...