Liberty & Other Stories Smoked Tea BBQ Ribs

I’m a pretty cerebral romance reader. It’s rare that I read one book by an author that so transports me I can’t write anything intelligent about it, much less two. So when it comes to Alexis Hall’s work, I’m three books in and still struggling to write anything coherent, both because it’s just not how

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A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong Dried Apple Pie

          A Christmas Gone Perfectly Wrong was eagerly awaited by this avid Cecilia Grant fan. Her Blackshear Family series is one for the few currently publishing Regency romance series I have consistently enjoyed. I love that her characters get into interesting scrapes and yet still feel like historical romance characters, not

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Christmas Morning Bananas Foster Waffles

Strangely enough, all my family’s Christmas food traditions are Christmas Eve based. I’m from San Francisco originally and Christmas Eve always meant cold Dungeness crab and french onion soup. Christmas Eve was always the best because we would sit around with our next door neighbors and sing carols and eat treats all afternoon. Our neighbors

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Christmas in the Duke’s Arms Chocolate Cookie Mix

When I picked up Christmas in The Duke’s Arms, I went into it with trepidation. I expected…well…Dukes. And while I don’t have a problem with Dukes per se, I do have a problem with the sameness of Dukes: powerful guy, lots of wealth and responsibility, inevitably rakish, rarely seen doing any government work or estate

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More Than A Man Gingerbread Men

I’m not a huge fan of Christmas romance in general. So it’s really not surprising that my Christmas posts for the next few weeks will feature a couple historicals and, well, this. I guess it’s sort of futuristic? I’d called it speculative fiction rather than sci fi though because there’s no real science going on

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A Matter of Disagreement Lavender Earl Grey Tea Cookies

Back in October during Queer Romance Month, I picked up A Matter of Disagreement by E.E. Ottoman. The premise of the book grabbed me right away: two steampunk scientists have an academic difference of opinion regarding the future of their chosen field of mechanical animation. As plots go, it’s a fresh one, and the conflict

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