On the surface, “Until Summer” follows Kyle on his final summer before he and his core group of very rich and privileged friends, leave their summer island homes behind for college. This is the last summer they can play their games and catch up and live carefree and wild lives together. Some more than others, like Trent who seems to make a sport out of making the local girls fall for him and then breaking their hearts and destroying their lives. There’s very much a “Dirty” Dancing” kind of vibe between the rich visitors that come every year, and the locals that wait upon them. Kyle is more sensitive than his friends, a closeted gay boy who isn’t looking for the same kind of sexual conquests as his friends, until The Boy appears and suddenly all of Kyle’s attention, his purpose for breathing and thinking, becomes Jack. When the author says this is a book about obsessive first love, he wasn’t kidding.

It's always a fascinating experience to go back through an author’s backlog once you’ve fallen in love with their recent work. I adore the Brown Sisters and their romance series, it’s secured Talia Hibbert as one of my favorite authors. So, of course, after finishing those books I went back. And in “The Princess Trap”, you can really see where Reuben walked so Red, Zaf, and Jacob could run. In this contemporary romance, you have the fake engagement trope in spades along with a very heavy case of insta-lust between Cherry and Reuben after he visits the Academy she works at. He’s a prince in disguise so of course he doesn’t tell her exactly who he is when he takes her out to lunch, and of course it doesn’t come up when they get a little frisky in the alley before getting to Cherry’s apartment. It’s not until a paparazzi catches them that Cherry really learns who Reuben is and agrees to the engagement scheme to protect him, herself, and also pay for her sister’s college expenses. Cherry is a wonderful example of how Hibbert keeps true to her strong, big, beautiful, and incredibly capable female lead characters. And while Reuben possess a lot of the characteristics that later MMC in Hibbert’s books posses much more strongly, I think were you really see Hibbert’s growth is how her romantic leads help each other grow in some capacity. Cherry certainly helps Reuben through his trauma, but there’s not much for Cherry to do growth wise.

“An American Marriage” is multiple stories wrapped together, and I don’t say that because there are three POV characters. You have the messy relationships of Celestial and Roy, Andre and Celestial, and then the relationships between them and their parents all under a magnifying lens highlighting every flaw. Then you have the story of the gross injustice in our justice system that incarcerates a disproportionate amount of Black and Brown men, and how that incarceration upends not just their lives, but the lives of their families and disrupts a whole community. Sometimes, these two stories came together, and other times they didn’t, which made this book hard for me to put my finger on if I liked it in its entirety, or just certain parts. So, let’s talk about the characters first and the “romance” aspect. Beware, this is a long one!

Rarely do I think reading a book synopsis is all that necessary before I start a book, but for “Gearteeth” I highly recommend you do so. The western feeling steampunk world starts off already deep in the lore, the “after” of the event that forced people into the skies, following lightning storms in order to keep their floating cities sky bound and away from the deadly beasts below. We follow Elijah, a brakeman on one of these massive trains used to collect lightning. He’s very much a southern gentleman, which is partially why this book had such a south western vibe to it. The world was fascinating with a heavy dose of conspiracy theories that fit really well with the Edison vs Tesla alternate history, so I enjoyed the twist this story took with that. Tesla is the the lesser of two evils here with his ability to harness lightning which both gave rise to these cities, and birthed a cult as well. But for as much as I liked Elijah and the uniqueness of the werewolves in this setting, the pacing did not always match the story.

The elements that I loved about the first Emily Wilde book are still present in this story and I couldn’t be happier. Emily is still a delightfully grumpy scholar, which is still the perfect foil to Wendell’s lackadaisical sunshine viewpoint of the world. Their banter is still adorable and so fun. Emily is still single minded with her research, for the most part, but in the “Map of the Otherlands” we finally see Emily grow more emotionally, occasionally. Our girl still has work to do. But in this book, Emily, Wendell, and her niece all embark to Austria in search of Wendell’s Faerie door, which will finally lead him back to his home kingdom. But before they get very far in their search, assassin’s sent by his step-mother, and a threat from Emily’s professorial supervisor immediately complicate things and make the journey all the more urgent.