Stacking the Shelves

Stacking The Shelves is all about sharing the books we are adding to our shelves, whether they be physical or digital. This includes books bought (my wife would say I buy too many), borrowed (a rare occurrence), and received for review (which I’m trying to reign in).

New Acquisitions: Paperback Treasures

Believe it or not, I lasted until Friday night with not buying any books. Not that I wasn’t tempted – especially wandering the massive Indigo downtown Toronto on Sunday – but I restrained myself. Then, of course, the last part of my online order arrived, which I actually purchased weeks ago, so I’m still counting this week as a success. LOL

Rounding out that online order is Chicks Ahoy!, a omnibus edition of the first three Chicks in Chainmail collections, featuring light-hearted stories of fierce female fighters, as edited by Esther Friesner; and a mass-market paperback edition of Year One, the first volume of The One, Nora Roberts’ apocalyptic chronicle of hope and horror, chaos and magick.

New Acquisitions: Digital Titles

While I did actually leave a bookstore empty-handed this week, I made up for it with some free downloads. A Witch’s Mortal Desire by Chloe Adler is a paranormal romance with a witch, a vampire Dominatrix stripper, and a gay shapeshifter; Drawing Dead by SM Reine is an urban fantasy about a vampire slayer who is fighting her own transformation into a vampire; Clara by Suzanna J. Linton is an epic fantasy about a slave whose ability to see the future drags her into a war with evil forces; and More Than He Ever Bargained For is another tale of female domination from the wonderful Mistress Benay (who I reviewed earlier in the week).

Review Titles

A relatively quiet week this time around, but that pair of Tor.com titles I mentioning requesting last week? They arrived.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a slender March 2020 release by Nghi Vo that’s been described as a feminist high fantasy and an indictment of monarchy with the heart of an Atwood tale and the visuals of a classic Asian period drama. How could I not request a copy of that?

Docile is a much thicker March release from K.M. Szpara, a science fiction parable about love and sex, wealth and debt, abuse and power that has been described as disturbingly sexy and a dystopian erotica human rights masterpiece. Definitely falls outside my female focus, but the themes were far too interesting and eerily compelling to resist.