A Marquis to Protect the Governess by Parker J. Cole  historical romance fiction  Harlequin Historical, December 26, 2023  Sometimes scrolling through new releases available on Libby (even though there's a stack of physical books within arm's reach), leads to unexpected reading pleasure. That's what happened with me upon starting this gem of a tale. Like opening my first books by Ms. Bev(erly Jenkins), Gay G. Gunn, Vanessa Riley, Alyssa Cole, and Lisa Rayne, Isadora and Andre's rocky love story hooked me from the first page. Using a seamless integration of historical context, character evolution, and high stakes combined with emotional nuances, this author has crafted an engaging tale that organically includes people and places too often erased from historical romance fiction.   Hot Flashes and Hockey Slashes by Marika Ray & Sylvie Stewart, authors & publisher  contemporary romance fiction  October 2023  Who knew that normalizing op...

  Above sugar cookies tasted delicious, but were super time-consuming to make and bake compared to making a pan of crispy rice cereal treats (using the vintage recipe of 4 or 5 - instead of 3 - TBSP of butter + 1/2 tsp vanilla extract) pressed out on a 18 inch x 15 inch cookie sheet or jelly roll pan as shown below. Multiple reading breaks may have caused me to stay up really late to finish wrapping gifts.  Wherever you fall on the winter holidays celebration spectrum, hope you survive and thrive this season. 

  Black Comic Book History by Demetrius Sherman, author & publisher  nonfiction  Lion Man. Ace Harlem. The Phantom.  Using the Dumas Family as its foundation, this compact text starts with the fact that in 1844 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas was banned by the Catholic Church. From there it moves to the 1947 debut of Lion Man in All Negro Comics. Parallels between that fictitious character's goal of protecting Africa, its people and natural resources and the current real-life in/humanitarian crisis on the African continent related to cobalt mining are hard to ignore (or avoid being complicit in as my laptop, tablet, and cellphone are used to produce this content and live my daily life). Incidents of racist caricatures and the white-washing of Black characters created by Black artists and publishers also seem relevant to conversations about the American Fiction film currently in theaters.  Black Comic Book History offers readers an intriguing overvie...

  Soul Jar, Thirty-one Fantastical Tales by Disabled Authors  edited by Annie Carl with Foreword by Nicola Griffith  fantasy  Forest Avenue Press, October 2023  from the introduction:  Western society is beginning to understand, after centuries of ignorance, that the disabled community is like other minorities. We're made up of real people with real lives and real stories.  The foreword, introduction, thirty-one stories divided into four thematic sections--Earth in Retrograde, Gone Astray, Wild Space, Creature Feature--acknowledgements, about the editor, contributors' biographies, and a reader's guide work in concert to mesmerize and entertain as they prove the essential premise stated in the foreword: Ableism is a crap story... What disables a person in our culture is not impairment but society's attitude to that impairment... We need to hear our own voices. Our strong, beautiful, ordinary, disabled voices...  The voices in these stories sing som...