psocoptera

The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal, KJ Charles, 2015 or 2017 paranormal romance. A series of short stories taking place across the late 19th and early 20th century about a journalist and a ghost hunter, as their relationship develops out of sex-for-supernatural-reasons into a long-term thing, riffing on various bits of British folklore and Victorian occult pulp fiction. An entertaining end to "KJ Charles week" here.

All of Us Murderers, KJ Charles, 2025 novel. A sort of meta-Gothic mystery with bonus romance, extremely page-turny as Charles tends to be. I had to have Dental Work and managed to get myself *three* Charles books in preparation/consolation, although, not to jinx anything, but so far at ~24 hours I am in less of a state of being unable to do anything but languish than I thought I might be. Anyways, I recommend this one even if you aren't specifically looking for Distractions, (although if you don't like Charles' romances I don't think you'd like this even though it's less primarily a romance).

Heated Rivalry, 2024 six-episode TV series hockey romance. Season one, I guess, since I guess with it such a hit they're going to do more. I was just as delighted by it as it was a safe bet I would be. An excellent exception to my general TV non-watching. (I guess that's a weird thing to say at a time when I've been watching enormous-for-me amounts of television watching Stranger Things, but there's like Family Activity Watching and then Personal Watching and they are different.)

Copperscript, KJ Charles, 2025 romance novel. Having just read several of these I wasn't going to indulge again so soon, but then I got it from the hold queue, and then I ended up in a Direct Tire for a couple of hours and was like "am I going to use this time to make progress on the book I am bogged down in? no I am not", so here we are. This one is back to the post-WWI timeframe like Think of England (but I don't think had any character cameos)? A police detective gets involved with a handwriting analyst with supernatural-level powers of handwriting insight. I thought Charles did a nice job walking the line of "this *is* unlikely, the characters are aware of that, and in fact that skepticism drives a bunch of the plot" and "it works exactly how it needs to for plot purposes". Fun!

Wanted, A Gentleman, KJ Charles, romance. (Not actually sure if it was a novel or novella.) I'm behind on writing up books so I'm doing them easiest-post-first instead of chronologically. The publisher of a personal-ads newspaper teams up with a formerly enslaved businessman to find the eloping daughter of the latter's former enslavers, with a lot of attention to what it might have felt like to be trying to make long rapid journeys by stagecoach. Charles is so good at making her characters people (and people who I feel like I haven't met before, even if they are also tropey or types).

Rules for Ghosting, Shelly Jay Shore, 2024 novel. I was still playing Hugos hooky, after also reading two-thirds of Asunder which got interrupted when my ebook expired, but I have a paper copy as of this afternoon so expect to hear about that soon. I came across this book in a couple of different contexts (a book group I'm not in but am adjacent to was reading it, etc) and was intrigued - queer (m/m) romance, literal ghosts, Jewish funeral customs? Sure! If that sounds good to you you will probably also enjoy it, although I felt like it was stronger as a family drama in some ways than as a romance - it almost felt like some of the early "getting to know each other" scenes might have been deleted for length, since there was a kind of weird jump to them knowing more about each other than had happened on the page. Pluses: learning about taharah and shmira, interesting low-key take on including paranormal elements. Minuses: dog squick (really hard for me to enjoy a schmoopy scene of the couple kissing and cuddling if one of them just kissed his dog, ew ew ew), author mentioned in a Q&A at the back of the book that she was picturing one of the couple as an actor whose face I hate, which kind of ruined the ship for me tbh. I mean, at least I had already finished the book, but it killed any post-romance-novel afterglow. Maybe don't read the Q&A if you have any actors whose faces you hate. Could be a plus or minus: I am not qualified to evaluate how good a job Shore did writing in a trans POV, but it seemed reasonable to me? But also seems plausible that a review by a transmasc person might point out things I wouldn't catch? (Shore herself is a she/they person.)

The Last Dragon of the East, Katrina Kwan, 2024 fantasy romance novel. (Is this the romantasy I keep hearing about?) It wasn't good and honestly I mostly kept reading it out of a sort of perverse curiosity to see whether it might pull an interesting ending out of nowhere. Gorgeous Kuri Huang cover though.

I don't want to run on about my dislike but I have two somewhat general thoughts. One is that I'm not sure how well I think soulmate tropes (in this case red strings of fate) work in standalone original fiction - like, I will absolutely read fanfic with every possible version of soulmates, but in fic I'm already sold on the pairing. Without it, in something like this, it kind of just felt like love by authorial fiat instead of love by chemistry or character interaction on the page. I'm sure there's some orig-fic soulmate work I've liked... I very vaguely recall that one of the Pants Press comics people was doing a red string comic I liked (with some digging, I think this was Jen Wang's Strings of Fate)... but idk.

My other thought is that putting an author's note up front that this was a "fantasy intended for adult readers" was maaaybe not the best move for something that mostly read like YA in tone and writing style. Like, I get wanting to do a content warning, especially with the very YA cover, but phrasing it that way foregrounded that question of tone/style for me, and maybe that was not the most generous lens to be reading through.

The Friend Zone Experiment, Zen Cho, 2024 romance novel. Cho is better known for fantasy but this is a straight-up contemporary het romance, and while I liked it a lot (and thought it was fun seeing Cho genre-hop) I would probably only recommend it to people who like het romance in general and not so much anyone who was considering whether they like Cho so much they would follow her across any genre. I, like I said, liked it a lot; I enjoy the Malaysian-English voice of her characters (here a Singaporean Chinese woman and Malaysian man living in London) and I thought the subplots about difficult family and business corruption wove together nicely with the core second-chance-romance plot.

The Earl Who Isn't, Courtney Milan, 2024 romance novel. Third of a trilogy (1, 2) of het historical romances set at the end of the 19th century in a British village of expat Asians, with Chinese and Japanese main characters. I was in a library queue for it but decided I was having the kind of week that justified an indulgent book purchase (and rereading the first two, which turned out to be useful - I would read them in order if you're interested, to see how characters get introduced). Exactly what I was looking for. I liked the couple, and this whole series has had lots of neat details about different crafts and trades. Gardening and printing presses in this one.

A Restless Truth, Freya Marske, 2022 novel, second in the Last Binding trilogy after A Marvellous Light. This series continues to remind me very strongly of certain HP stories, like, Resonant's Transfigurations or Astolat's House Proud or The Compact, except original and not retroactively tainted by association. This particular novel takes place entirely on a large ship crossing the Atlantic (a fun setting for this sort of thing, and Marske makes good use of it) and is f/f (primarily m/m writers vary wildly in how much interest they can get up for f/f - I thought Marske did great). I couldn't resist going straight into book three. :)