The Saucy Wenches Book Club

Pierce Brown’s Red Rising trilogy is a roller-coaster ride of action-packed space opera that kept me gasping and guessing right up until the last page.

About what would happen next (I was usually wrong).
About who would live to fight another day.
About whether I’d survive the next round of heart palpitations to finish the story.

These books ripped my heart to shreds and stomped all over the pieces a few times. But as a trilogy, they soared with intricate plots, flat-out amazing world building — that expanded with each book, and a hellaciously satisfying ending. The characters were diverse and often offbeat, with fascinating histories and a continuously evolving social dynamic that drove many plots.

This is rollicking sci-fi epic at its best, augmented with the excellent social and political commentary and philosophical introspection I expect in dystopian drama. If that whets your appetite for literary adventure, I hope you’ll let me tell you more about each book below. Minimal sp…

The dream chooses the dreamer,
not the other way around. Strange the Dreamer tells the story of Lazlo Strange, a young orphan boy in a faraway land who dreams of magic.

Lazlo is obsessed with Weep, a mythical, Unseen city that has become “lost” because everyone has forgotten it. He remembers the exact moment when the city’s real name and history disappeared from the minds of everyone around him, so he knows what others no longer believe – that magic exists, because only magic could erase Weep from the world.

Lazlo also knows that fairy tales are real. And his dreams are magic. What he never foresees is how much the life he dreams for himself will become a magical fairy tale.

Florida is a collection of masterfully written short stories about modern uncertainty and anxiety — the uneasy feeling that everything might fall apart with no warning at any minute. Eleven stories are narrated by female characters who don’t seem to have much in common except existential angst, which many readers can probably relate to, and a strong connection to the state of Florida.

This is literary fiction that hooked me not with action-packed plots, but with deep-dish servings of the southern psyche, framed by the orchestral chorus of cicadas, stalked by repitilan menace, and fanned by the sway of Spanish moss in sprawling oaks.

And because the language of Florida is in turns as lush and threatening and seductive as the ecosystem that infuses these stories, I’d like to share a few photos from one of my favorite northern Florida photographers to illustrate my review.

Now that 2018 is behind us (and I hope the door SMACKED it on the way out), we can finally let out a big sigh of relief and reflect on some of the finer points of the year.

I don’t know about you, but I spent every single unscheduled minute with my nose buried deeply in a book, intent on escape into exotic realms or adventures. On the plus side, that means I read a lot of books that enthralled me. So I want to share four that I thought were particularly good, but never had time to review, before embarking on a new year of discoveries.

These books were deviations from the usual types of urban fantasy and dystopian sci-fi I read most of the year. They were from four different genres, led by strong but quite diverse female characters: an immortal witch goddess, a socially awkward orphan, an identity-swapping avenger, and backstabbing corporate ladder climbers. I wasn’t specifically looking for books about women, but isn’t it great that there are such a variety of female protagonists to…

I recently picked up three books that had been sitting in my TBR list for about a year. (They were in the 2018 reading list that I posted in January.) They share similarities in theme, yet the stories and characters are very different. They’re all pre- or post-apocalyptic visions of a future that I think of as female dystopian horror (or horrific speculation, per Margaret Atwood).

These aren’t stories written for women only, but stories focused on issues related to gender rights and roles in society. These books were really short, compared to the Throne of Glass books I’d been reading for months, and I had sufficiently recovered from the overdose of apocalyptic dystopian sci-fi I suffered back in the summer by bingeing The Handmaid’s Tale, Man in the High Castle, and Colony back to back, so I decided to read them all in one week and compare them.

Though none of these got 5 stars from me, each offered a provocative glimpse into a future I’m glad I’m not living and an interesting exp…

Kingdom of Ash — the final installment in the wildly popular, roller-coaster thrill ride that is Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass series — is finally out, and we’re here to sing its praises!

It has been a looooong journey through vast and complex realms, borne of exotic mythologies and inhabited by wondrous and wicked creatures — and by seemingly hundreds of major characters, including at least a couple of dozen with whom we’ve developed deep, personal relationships.

But in the end, we got our epic showdown between the forces of darkness and light, serially unfolding amidst an onslaught of twists, turns, shocking revelations, and nail-biting suspense. We added new names to our laminated list of favorite fictional friends. We got answers to lots of questions, including some that we didn’t know we had when we started this book. We got a definitive future for Terrasen, Erilea, and even the Southern Continent. And last but definitely not least important to saucy readers, we got generous…

In this thrilling new Night Rebel series set in New York Times bestselling author Jeaniene Frost’s Night Huntress world, sexy and ruthless vampire Ian finally meets his match!
The Rule Breaker
Master vampire Ian is unrepentant, shameless…and every shade of wicked. He’s made one too many enemies in his two centuries of existence, including Dagon, a demon who now lays claim to his soul. Ian’s only chance to escape Dagon is to join forces with a Law Guardian, but he’s never been able to abide by the rules for long.
The Law Maker
Veritas’ normal role is police, judge and jury to reprobates like Ian. But she has her own ax to grind with Dagon, so if she can use Ian as bait…well, all’s fair in law and war. As they scour supernatural hotspots to perfect their trap, Veritas soon realizes Ian’s devil-may-care, roguish image hides something much more powerful. And Ian discovers that Veritas has shocking secrets of her own. As they’re drawn to each other with a passion as intense as their peril, eit…