aka @kingrat@sfba.social. I'm following a lot of bookwyrm accounts, since that seems to be the only way to get reviews from larger servers to this small server. I make a lot of Bookwyrm lists. I will like & boost a lot of reviews that come across my feed. I will follow most bookwyrm accounts back if they review & comment. Social reading should be social.
Katie Price is known in every living room in America. A small-town Wisconsin girl who …
Everyone I Kissed Since You Got Famous is starting off so damn well! Romance with smart women (even the minor characters are smart). They use their words. They're setting up the stakes as "is minor TikTok influencer willing to blow up her life for famous Hollywood star". Stakes that make me believe in the characters rather than get frustrated by them.
In the garden of a large Georgian villa in Southwest London, socialites and politicos swap …
I've now completed a list of the winners of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel, including this 2025 winner. As always, editions on the list on SFBA.club have good covers & descriptions; your mileage may vary on other servers.
There's a secret storyline hidden across some of the most popular sitcoms of the 20th …
Great rundown of queer history through tv sitcoms.
5 stars
This was a rather fascinating dive into tv sitcom history, queer history, and how modern media has been able to help sway public perceptions. I didn't watch the referenced shows growing up, so it was really interesting to see how show creators and actors were able to toe the line to get what was considered controversial material onto the air. It also gives you a little hope with how tumultuous things are in the world right now by showing that it's really not a new trend at all and was honestly expected. If you're at all interested in tv history helping the main population to be more accepting of queer folks, this would be a great read.
On a Saturday morning in December 1973, a section of New York’s West Side Highway …
An excellent book about how transportation policy had become so car-centric, and ways that we are moving away from that. What I liked most in the book were Schwartz's stories about his time as traffic commissioner in New York City, including his initial push to get congestion pricing implemented in New York City, which was not implemented at the time of writing, but is now, (and it only took fifteen years to get through!). I also really liked his story of how they got a new stadium built with minimal parking and made it work by placing it next to a metro stop and giving attendees free access to the metro along with their ticket. Schwartz also talks about the future of transportation in this book, which is kind of fun, but more speculative.
From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate …
New episode of If Books Could Kill podcast dropped this week, featuring this fawning biography of a very ugly man. Now added to the If Books Could Kill list on SFBA.club and other fine Bookwyrm servers.
Tagged as a cop killer when a mission of vengeance goes wrong, Angel Dare finds …
Little agency
2 stars
I previously quoted a passage in the book where Angel Dare wonders how she became a sniveling problem. It appeared at the time that Faust had a redemption arc in mind, but the high point of the book is the first chapter where she's about to culminate her revenge by murdering Vukasin (big baddy from previous two books). Someone else gets to him just before she does, and in the melee she shoots and kills a cop.
For the rest of the book, Angel is on the run from the cops, the cop ex-husband of the dead cop in particular. The story hands her off from protector to protector, each of whom gets written out of the story with no real continuity from each to the next. Not just discontinuity between characters, but between each story segment too. Sometimes we aren't even told how they get from segment to segment. …
I previously quoted a passage in the book where Angel Dare wonders how she became a sniveling problem. It appeared at the time that Faust had a redemption arc in mind, but the high point of the book is the first chapter where she's about to culminate her revenge by murdering Vukasin (big baddy from previous two books). Someone else gets to him just before she does, and in the melee she shoots and kills a cop.
For the rest of the book, Angel is on the run from the cops, the cop ex-husband of the dead cop in particular. The story hands her off from protector to protector, each of whom gets written out of the story with no real continuity from each to the next. Not just discontinuity between characters, but between each story segment too. Sometimes we aren't even told how they get from segment to segment. In the penultimate scene she and an accomplice are chased into the forest or scrub by a cop that appears out of nowhere, and then suddenly we're in the final locale a few states away.
Heel turns out of the blue. Bad guys with little or no character development. Angel on an uncontrollable river raft of a story. Everything about this is lacking. Just read the first two books and pretend the third doesn't exist.
Angel Dare went into Witness Protection to escape her past—not as a porn star, but …
Morally flexible heroine
4 stars
After the story of Money Shot, Angel Dare is supposed to be in witness protection, but they didn't protect her enough, so she's on the run trying to hide. On the run, she stumbles into another hit on her ex Thick Vic and his son Cody. Because of her fondness for Vic, she helps Cody. The entire story about her and Cody is orthogonal to her story, except that she's trying to lie low for her own protection. Angel is quite willing to dispense with morals about sex, truth and the sanctity of life to survive, or help Cody survive.
@Tuhnsoo@bookwyrm.social Loved the first two books, hated this one. Will write reviews for the last two later today. But the short version is the first two have a main character that is morally flexible (while understanding what morals she wants to have), and takes her opportunities. The third book she's lost most of her agency and is swept along from scene to scene, and those scenes are jarringly disconnected as well.
