The Captain’s Bluestocking Mistress by Erica Ridley

Rating: 2.5 Stars ★★★☆☆

Under normal circumstances, Miss Jane Downing would have been eager to alight from a chilly carriage and rush indoors for a welcome respite from the brutal winter.

Plot

Captain Xavier Grey’s body is back amongst the Beau Monde, but his mind cannot break free from the horrors of war. His friends try to help him find peace. He knows he doesn’t deserve it. Just like he doesn’t deserve the attentions of the sultry bluestocking intent on seducing him into bed…

Spinster Jane Downing wants off the shelf and into the arms of a hot-blooded man. Specifically, the dark and dangerous Captain Grey. She may not be destined to be his wife, but nothing will stop her from being his mistress. She could quote classical Greek by the age of four. How hard can it be to learn the language of love?

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

Rating: 3.5 Stars ★★★☆☆

The Opera ghost really existed.

Plot

Christine is a beautiful young singer at the Paris Opera. She is watched by the Opera’s ‘phantom’ – a mysterious masked figure who terrorises the Opera’s management and players. With the Phantom’s help, Christine rises to become the Opera’s star performer, but when the Phantom demands her heart in return, Christine is torn between gratitude and pity for her strange benefactor, and love for her childhood sweetheart, Raoul.

 

My Single Friend by Jane Costello

Rating: 3 Stars ★★★☆☆

Some might say I don’t need another pair of glossy black shoes with a to-die-for heel. Particularly when, to the untrained eye, there are eight similar pairs fighting for space under my bed.

Plot

Lucy, has a great job, but she’s not happy being single. Yet all her dates turn out disastrously, mainly because she can’t stop lying to them. She invents a different life for herself on every date, one where she’s sporty, has fascinating hobbies or knows about modern art – depending on the guy she’s out with. It usually backfires.

Her roommate and best friend since childhood, Henry, does not understand why she feels the need to lie. After all, she’s loveable just the way she is.

When Lucy decides Henry needs a makeover, he doesn’t realize how much his life will change. With the help of her two best friends, Lucy takes Henry from an odd-jumper-and-ugly-glasses wearing guy with a bad haircut to a swoonworthy hunk. With unexpected results.

The Glass Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg

Rating: 3 Stars★★★☆☆

A late summer breeze wafted through the open kitchen window, making the twenty tiny flames upon Ceony’s cake dance back and forth on their candlewicks.

Plot

It’s been only a few months since the events in The Paper Magician. Ceony is continuing her education as a paper mage and neither she nor Emery talk about her confessing her love for him while in his heart.

But then the Excisioners attack again. One of them believes Ceony holds the key to the secret of Lira’s freezing, magic never seen before. Everyone she knows and cares about is in danger. Ceony is determined to find her enemy and protect those she loves.

The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas fils

Rating: 3 Stars ★★★☆☆

In my opinion, it is impossible to create characters until one has spent a long time in studying men, as it is impossible to speak a language until it has been seriously acquired.

Plot

The Lady of the Camellias tells the story of Marguerite Gautier, the most beautiful, brazen, and expensive courtesan in all of Paris. Known to all as “the Lady of the Camellias” because she is never seen without her favorite flowers, she leads a glittering life of endless parties and aristocratic balls, with the richest men in France flocking to her boudoir to lay their fortunes at her feet. But despite having many lovers, she has never really loved—until she meets Armand Duval, young, handsome, and from a lower social class, and yet hopelessly in love with Marguerite.

Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor

Rating: 2.5 Stars

Walking to school over the snow-muffled cobbles, Karou had no sinister premonitions about the day.

The Plot

Karou is a blue-haired artist with a secret: She grew up with and works for strange creatures: half human, half animal. One of them is Brimstone, the Wishmonger, who collects teeth and offers wishes in return.

But they are threatened. Dark handmarks appear on the doors that lead to Brimstone’s shop and angels walk on earth. Angels that are determined to destroy Brimstone. Karous should hate them, but among them is one who sets her heart on fire. And she can’t shake the feeling that she knows him, from somewhere…

The Year We Fell Down – Review

Rating: 3.5 Stars

 

“This looks promising,” my mother said, eyeing the dormitory’s ivy-covered facade. I could hear the anticipation in her voice. “Try your key card, Corey.”

It was move-in day at Harkness College, and parents of the new frosh were oohing and ahhing all around campus.

 

The Plot

 

Corey Callahan was a hockey player. Past tense. She loved playing hockey and expected to do so in college as well. But a serious accident means she is moving into her accessible dorm room in a wheelchair instead.

There, she meets Adam Hartley, a hot hockey player with an broken leg and a girlfriend. They bond, but Corey is all too aware that he is in a relationship and that she needs to find herself anew, not as the hockey player and not as the girl pining for Hartley.