Bathtime Books

 ☆⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Gunnie Rose series by Charlaine Harris  is set in an alternate timeline of the US where the assassination of FDR led to the fracturing of the nation into five smaller nations, the Holy Roman Empire on the West coast, the new America in the middle of the country, Texahoma (a merging of Texas and Oklahoma), Dixie (the South mostly) and Britannia on the East coast. In another twist, there is magic in this version of the world. Where Rasputin has created a sect of grigoris (wizards) and established a school to teach them the ways of magic. The world-building of the series is thorough and interesting. I found the characters to be engaging and multifaceted. The main character, Lizbeth Rose, is a tough but compassionate young woman who is strong and independent. She is well-aware of her own opinions and smart as well. Book 1: An Easy Death I listened to this novel as a 'graphic audio'. The production was very well done and the voice acting made the characters come to life....

 ⭐⭐⭐☆☆ This novel is set in the same world as Sagara's Chronicles of Elantra. It takes place before the first of the Chronicles books. It features Severn Handred as the main character, exploring his induction into the Wolves and his first case. It includes a cast of characters that have been seen in the Chronicles but it doesn't rely heavily upon the previous novels. It can likely be read as a stand-alone. The novel begins with how Severn was approached to join the Wolves. He was caught following Kaylin around Elantra by the Barrani man who somehow is in charge of recruiting all of the Wolves. It then proceeds to introduce  Ybelline and investigates Severn's motivations for protecting Kaylin and the actions that he took while in the fief of Nightshade. Finally, we come to the meat of the story which is Severn's first investigation as a Wolf where he is seconded to the Barrani man to investigate the murders of the Tha'alani that had been committed 20 years earlier bu...

⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ This was a cute, fun, at times naughty, romance story. I enjoyed the urban fantasy development. The story follows a man and a woman who had a fraught romance in their college days. They also happen to share actual fairy godmothers who live in a slice of Ever After. They come together again due to their godmothers' meddling and the story then follows some predictable ups and downs between the two romantic leads. The three fairy godmothers further meddle in the lives of the main characters and the supporting cast included a lot of other fairy tale characters by other names such as Red Riding Hood, the 7 dwarves, Sleeping Beauty, etc.  I enjoyed the interweaving of existing fairy tales with the story that DeWylde developed. It was a cute story and I read it very quickly. If you read Seanan McGuire's Indexing series or Mercedes Lackey's Five Hundred Kingdom series and enjoyed their new takes on fairy tales, I think you will enjoy this story as well. This is a romance nove...

 ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ Another solid romance-thriller by Rebecca Zanetti. This novel follows Angus, the leader of the Deep Ops team in his quest to discover if the serial killer who killed his sister really is dead or not. As usual, Zanetti interweaves the romance between the two leads of this novel, Angus Force and Nari Zhang, with the fast action of the secondary plot-line (in this case the hunt for a serial killer). The romance between Angus and Nari had been building in the previous novels, and in this novel, it finally ignited. The chemistry between the two was really nice and they seemed like a solid pairing. I also appreciated the solid character building that happened in this novel. Although these characters were present in the previous series, we didn't really get to know them at all. So learning about their backgrounds and motivations made the cast of characters make more sense. I felt a little less clear about the serial killer hunt storyline. By the resolution of the novel, I was still...

 ⭐⭐⭐☆☆ Prof. Noble wrote a book that focused largely on how search algorithms are designed to continue the hegemony of the white, male, heterosexual due in large part to the creators of the algorithms falling within this group. She further contends that search engine companies, have misrepresented their product by insinuating that the results represent the 'most correct' or 'most useful' information on the web, but they do not. The arguments are legitimate but I feel that the book repeated its arguments without much evidence and attempted to take a moralistic stance at times that felt oppressive. I would say that the final part of the book, truly the last two chapters, is what makes the book worth reading. The first two chapters are repetitious and could benefit from a lot of shortening. In these chapters, Nobel elucidates that algorithms aren't neutral and have implicit biases due to the nature of development, she takes about 100 pages to explain this and give a fe...

 ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ A solid new start for a series. This urban fantasy novel follows a detective who joins the Department of Supernatural Investigations after witnessing a terrible murder committed by a vampire. The DSI, aka the Crows (as called by the supernatural community) are a human-only force that investigates and runs interference when supernatural crimes occur in the world. Cal Kinsey is a young hero. He is apparently pretty smart, having attended Stanford in the past. I'm not clear on why he originally joined the police force...but that's not that important. The other characters in the novel from the sexy and alluring witch to the fellow DSI are all pretty well developed and the interplay between the characters is fun.  The pace of the novel is fast and I thought that the dialogue was pretty decent. I dinged the author a star for some repeated phrases that she leaned on too often, and some of the larger plot points with regard to the romance and the kidnapping of a fellow DSI memb...