When the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, it put abortion rights at the mercy of state legislatures. Now the choices of pregnant people across the country are in the hands of a Texas judge. Matthew Kacsmaryk, who sits in Amarillo, is expected to issue a ruling in the coming days that could make medical […]
Original source: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/03/07/men-explain-abortion-drugs-to-fda/
Uncover what transpires when witch, Mariel Spark, mistakenly summons a demon. A Witch’s Guide to Fake Dating by Demon Sarah Hawley delivered a delightfully cozy, feel-good paranormal romance that left me grinning. You’ll want to turn off your phone and snuggle up with this one!
A Witch’s Guide to Fake Dating
by Sarah Hawley
Genres: Paranormal Romance
Source: Publisher
Purchase*: Amazon | Audible *affiliate
Rating: 
Heat Level: 
Mariel Spark knows not to trust a demon, especially one that wants her soul, but what’s a witch to do when he won’t leave her side—and she kind of doesn’t want him to?
Mariel Spark is prophesied to be the most powerful witch seen in centuries of the famed Spark family, but to the displeasure of her mother, she prefers baking to brewing potions and gardening to casting hexes. When a spell to summon flour goes very wrong, Mariel finds herself staring down a demon—one she inadvertently summoned for a soul bargain.
Ozroth the Ruthless is a legend among demons. Powerful and merciless, he drives hard bargains to collect mortal souls. But his reputation has suffered ever since a bargain went awry—if he can strike a bargain with Mariel, he will earn back his deadly reputation. Ozroth can’t leave Mariel’s side until they complete a bargain, which she refuses to do (turns out some humans are attached to their souls).
But the witch is funny. And curvy. And disgustingly yet endearingly cheerful. Becoming awkward roommates quickly escalates when Mariel, terrified to confess the inadvertent summoning to her mother, blurts out that she’s dating Ozroth. As Ozroth and Mariel struggle with their opposing goals and maintaining a fake relationship, real attraction blooms between them. But Ozroth has a limited amount of time to strike the deal, and if Mariel gives up her soul, she’ll lose all her emotions—including love—which will only spell disaster for them both.
{
“@context”:”https://schema.org”,
“@type”:”Review”,
“datePublished”: “2023-03-07T05:00:00+00:00”,
“description”: “Uncover what transpires when witch, Mariel Spark, mistakenly summons a demon. A Witch’s Guide to Fake Dating by Demon Sarah Hawley delivered a delightfully cozy, feel-good paranormal romance that”,
“publisher”: {
“@type”: “Organization”,
“name”: “Caffeinated Reviewer” },
“url”: “https://caffeinatedbookreviewer.com/2023/03/a-witchs-guide-to-fake-dating-by-demon-sarah-hawley.html”,
“itemReviewed”: {
“@type”: “Book”,
“name”: “A Witch’s Guide to Fake Dating”,
“author”: {
“@type”: “Person”,
“name”: “Sarah Hawley”,
“sameAs”: “” },
“isbn”: “” },
“author”: {
“@type”: “Person”,
“name”: “Kimberly”,
“sameAs”: “https://caffeinatedbookreviewer.com/” },
“reviewRating”: {
“@type”: “Rating”,
“ratingValue”: 4.5,
“bestRating”: “5”
}
}
Mariel Spark is a twenty-something witch who was prophesied to be a powerful witch, or so says her mother. Her mother wants her to perform summoning spells. Mariel prefers talking to her plants and baking. I immediately felt for Mariel and could see the magic in her baking and the plants she grows and nurtures. She has two wonderful friends and big dreams. She also has self-esteem issues and tries way too hard to please others and avoid confrontations. I wanted to hit someone for her..lol
When she attempts to summon flour, things go terribly wrong. Instead, she summons Ozroth the Ruthless. Ozroth can’t leave until the two make a deal. A deal which would involve Mariel giving up her soul.
I loved the twists and getting to know Ozroth. He isn’t your typical demon and while his reputation as a soul bargainer earned him the title, “Ruthless” things have changed recently. A bargain gone awry has stolen his reputation and so much more.
Strong characters, magic and some suspenseful aspects kept me enthralled. I loved the magical town and secondary characters have me wanting to return. The forest and battling matriarchs added to the tale.
I adored the character growth, magic and meddling. I laughed, swooned and hoped for a happily ever after. Fans of the fake dating troupe will get a kick out of this from the horns to the inner dialogue.
Amazon | Audible
One
“Oh, no.” Mariel Spark stared at the startled chicken that had materialized on her kitchen counter. “That wasn’t what I meant to do.”
At the kitchen table, Calladia Cunnington nearly choked on her tea. “Well, that’s surprising. At least they both have wings.”
Mariel gave her friend a look. She’d recited a summoning spell for an air sprite, not poultry. “Literally the only thing they have in common.”
“Points for creativity?” Despite the joke, Calladia’s wince was sympathetic. As a witch and Mariel’s longtime friend, she knew how upsetting it was for Mariel to mess up a spell yet again.
“It’s a basic summoning spell, not a Jackson Pollock painting.” Mariel blew a stray curl out of her face, frowning at the surprise avian guest currently preening its ruffled feathers next to her toaster. Her spells often backfired, but this was a new level of fucked-up-ness.
“Well, I think it’s cute,” their other friend Themmie-short for Themmaline-Tibayan said from where she sat cross-legged in midair. The pixie’s iridescent wings fluttered as she took pictures of the bird with her smartphone.
“Sure, but what do I do with it?” The chicken was now scratching at the chalked pentagram beneath it. What would soothe an alarmed bird that had been teleported into a witch’s kitchen?
“Can you send it back where it came from?” Calladia asked, tightening her blond ponytail. She looked disgustingly peppy for a Friday morning, her blue tank top damp with sweat from a recent gym visit.
Mariel bit her lip, trying not to snap. Calladia was the best person in the world, even if she set unreasonable fitness standards, but she’d never struggled with magic the way Mariel did. “Maybe. If I had any idea where it came from.”
She wasn’t sure how she’d summoned a chicken to begin with. Granted, her mind had wandered to her grocery list while chalking the spell, but it had been a brief distraction, hardly worth noting. And why a live chicken, rather than chicken cutlets or brussels sprouts or a gallon of milk?
Themmie cooed at the chicken as she took more photos. “Cluck for the camera, cutie. Strike that pose!” As a social media influencer, the Filipino American pixie documented everything, and her look changed constantly. This week, her straight black hair had been bespelled green and pink, and a nose ring winked in the sunlight cascading through the kitchen window.
Calladia rolled her eyes. “What is this, America’s Next Top Chicken?”
America’s Next Top Witch was a popular national TV show among both magic and nonmagic humans. The America’s Next Top Model spinoff focused more on lingerie than spellcraft, but the models still cast illusions or shape-shifted during photo shoots. Mariel had enjoyed the show up until she’d realized as a teenager that she was way, way behind even those reality TV disasters in terms of magical competency.
“On the bright side,” Themmie said, “you probably rescued it from the cruel world of cage farming.” Environmental activism was never far from Themmie’s mind, and her face lit up. “We can build it a coop.”
“I’m not keeping it,” Mariel said. Even though it did look adorable as it goggled at her air fryer.
“Try reversing the symbols,” Calladia suggested. “That should send it back.”
Normally her friends didn’t sit in on her spellcraft practice sessions, but in this case, Mariel was glad they’d come. They didn’t judge her for mucking up magic the way her family did.
Mariel took a deep breath, then marked the counter with chalk again. A pentagram, then the reversed summoning marks in each arm of the inverted star. Her handwriting wobbled with the attempt. Hecate, why was writing backward so hard? At least this was a fairly simple summoning and wouldn’t require any of the big witchy guns like salt, sage, or newt sperm. The more complex the spell, the more opportunities to fuck it up.
For the billionth time, Mariel wished magic was as easy as baking or gardening. But while Mariel had perfected a killer cranberry tart and raised beautiful flowers, she couldn’t manage even a simple cleaning spell without making a horrible mistake. Embarrassing for any witch, but doubly so for the prophesied Spark heir. Before Mariel’s birth, the wind, earth, and stars had all signified that she was going to be the strongest witch in generations of the famed magic family.
Joke’s on them, Mariel thought as she marked another uneven rune into the pentagram. I suck.
The chicken flapped awkwardly, then plummeted to the floor in a rustle of feathers. It started clucking, pecking perilously close to her ankles.
Mariel closed her eyes and thought about her spell. Magic incantations weren’t spoken in Latin, much to her chagrin, since at least Latin had a logical structure. Magic had a language all its own-one that was frustratingly complex. It was full of roots pulled from dozens of languages, as well as some that seemed made up wholesale, and the rules of grammar and conjugation were chaotic at best. Sometimes she was tempted to light the dictionary on fire.
“Uh, Chanticleer just took a dump on your floor,” Themmie said.
“Chanticleer was a rooster,” Mariel said, eyes still closed.
“Excuse me, Chaucer enthusiast. And ew, that chicken apparently eats a lot of fiber.”
Great. Mariel scrunched up her nose and dug for the words that would send the chicken back home before it sullied her kitchen further. “Adolesen di pullo!” she proclaimed.
The chicken exploded.
Excerpted from A Witch’s Guide to Fake Dating a Demon by Sarah Hawley Copyright © 2023 by Sarah Hawley. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved.
Never miss a post by adding Caffeinated to your Inbox
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
Source
Original source: https://caffeinatedbookreviewer.com/2023/03/a-witchs-guide-to-fake-dating-by-demon-sarah-hawley.html
Nikita Kapoor’s Pack Of The Lost – The Uninviting Forest is the first novel in the Pack of the Lost series. When the pack of wolves falls apart, Daffodil and Jasper, two young wolves, find themselves lost in the forest and at the mercy of dangerous creatures. While trying to find their way back to each other, they make friends with new canines and discover the secrets of their ancestors. With an amulet that connects Daffodil to Felix, the wolf god, but prompts her to act maliciously and Jasper’s dreams of impending doom, they struggle to return home. Their goal is to rebuild their pack in a bid to live an adventurous life with liberty.
The Pack of The Lost is a mystical fantasy novel with animal protagonists targeted at young readers. The underlying themes in the story are perseverance, friendship, and leadership. With animal characters, the author frames social orders in a new context. The story features talking canines, supernatural creatures, and realistic portrayals of animal life in the wild. The author gives human-like qualities and personalities to these characters. They experience different feelings, including guilt, excitement, anger, pride, and sympathy. This way, the author continually employs personification to drive home the story’s plot. One thing that stands out in the book is the author’s love for nature and its creatures. She uses vivid words to describe the surroundings and convey the thoughts and surroundings of the animals. Her writing style is poetic, and she uses brilliantly couched sentences. Readers would also find interesting the supernatural elements and legends of magical ancestors.
The Pack of the Lost is an exciting novel full of adventures and innovative analogies. It is a perfect read for younger readers like middle graders, who would undoubtedly discover lessons from this unique form of writing.
Pages: 181 | ASIN : B0BHZGJDCP
Original source: https://literarytitan.com/2023/03/07/pack-of-the-lost-the-uninviting-forest/
Ignition 2084, a new science fiction novel by Jordan Hampton, takes place in the long shadow cast by a Second Civil War fought in the United States in 2020. From the War rose the tyrannical and white-dominated Scarlet Kingdom, opposed by three other factions mainly divided along racial lines. As the Kingdom redoubles its efforts to reunify the country by force, one of those factions, the Yaiba Insurrection, manages to level the playing field via new military technology and the skill and courage of warrior John Hamlin.
Hampton’s greatest strength lies in his action scenes; he understands well what makes for good action in print. Not simply in spectacle, as in a movie; instead, he gives each scene context through dialogue and just enough description that the reader always understands the stakes in each fight and, from the prologue onwards, feels invested in each character’s fate. Even incidental characters who appear only briefly often receive a name and a small piece of characterization through dialogue or narrative so that every scene feels like it involves real people with a life outside the immediate context of the story. One should also note that while technology certainly plays a significant role in the story and the spectacle of, e.g., the heat-generating Reikiken sword are appealing, Hampton never lets them overshadow the main points of the story.
Now, Hampton seems to have meant for the racial divisions among the various factions and how they’re handled to be relevant to the real world, which forms an essential aspect of the novel. However, Ignition 2084 is primarily the story of John Hamlin. Though Hampton does have something to say about the real world, he’s not heavy-handed or overly preachy but lets the novel speak for itself.
Overall, Ignition 2084 is a gripping and entertaining Science Fiction novel that’s easy to recommend to any fan of the genre. With espionage, military action, and thrilling battles, readers will be drawn in and hooked from the opening pages of this not-so-distant future story.
Pages: 642 | ASIN : B0B7D2S22Q
Original source: https://literarytitan.com/2023/03/07/ignition-2084/
Carla is looking for the thing she lost, Blessing for who she is, Logan for what to do next, and Junior for who he’s supposed to be. With the characters still reeling from the events of Disruptions, nothing is what it once was or what it was said to be. In T.N. Baldwin’s third installment of the Magicium series, our beloved, rag-tag group of once hesitant adventurers find themselves buried deeper and deeper in the politics of the war they once sought to end. Disciples is an exciting and thrilling story that delves into the root of who the characters are.
Just like the previous books in the series, Disciples does a fantastic job of building off the already-established plot and characters while managing to bring everything to its full potential. Carla, Logan, Blessing, and Junior all have no choice but to step out of their comfort zones in order to grow. I found myself especially interested in Blessing, a character who I haven’t always loved. At times, it felt like I was reading a coming-of-age novel – definitely an interesting choice for the third book in a series but a choice that paid off immensely. It was a joy to watch the characters that I’d already fallen in love with grow into themselves and navigate the conflicts they were forced into, separated as they were.
Disciples kept me interested in everything while not making things too overwhelming. Disciples is a fantastic follow-up to its predecessors and one that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. Action, politics, and adventure – it had everything I wanted out of a fantasy novel while keeping me excited for the inevitable reunion in the next book.
Pages: 485 | ASIN : B08QGQKP2B
Original source: https://literarytitan.com/2023/03/07/disciples/
A cat saved from a terrible accident longs for her own family. Binny, the striped tabby cat, is a survivor, caring for her human, widowed Mrs. Cobbler while keeping watch with her chapter of neighborhood animals. But one sultry night, Binny finds something extraordinary: a tiny life that seems to have fallen from the heavens themselves. Binny gives her all to protect the tiny life form, enlisting the help of her animal friends as well as Ariel, Mrs. Cobbler’s niece, who has the gift of understanding animal speech. Together, Binny and the others must use their wits to help the littlest life survive while evading the clutches of those who would harm the precious little Moon Girl.
Binny and the Moon Girl by R.Y. Suben is the compelling tale of Binny the cat and her quest to protect a mysterious life form. Written from the cat’s point of view, I loved the interaction between Binny and the other animals as they fight to protect the enigmatic Moon Girl. The story draws the reader in, and though this is a short tale, there is no lack of intrigue as the plot develops. The story to guard a little life is deep, and Binny’s first foray into motherhood is both tragic and endearing as the narrative reaches its peak. The author intentionally leaves Moon Girl’s description to a minimum to keep the reader intrigued, making this a read that is hard to put down. I was just as curious as Binny to find out what this life form was, but I also admired Binny for wanting to protect it. I felt the ending was abrupt, and I was left wanting to read more of this charming story at the end. However, the core of the narrative, the conflicts, and emotions of a young mother struggling to protect her child, shines to the very last pages of the story.
The author provides a compelling story, immersive plot, and engaging characters; Binny and the Moon Girl is suitable for ages ten and up. An interesting out-of-the-box tale that fits nicely in an afternoon, this deep story of survival and a mother’s love is a great choice for animal lovers of all kinds.
Pages: 102 | ASIN : B0BJLDXCNP
Original source: https://literarytitan.com/2023/03/07/binny-and-the-moon-girl/
Samantha J. Rose’s novel, What Actually Happened to Isaac Moore, is an imaginative and thrilling story about a man named Isaac who captains a ship. As a child, his mother read him stories of a place called the River that led to other worlds. One of his crewmates, Arnaud, allows him to sail to the entrance to the River, but an angry outburst over the ship’s name causes Arnaud to unleash a furious energy that destroys the crew except for Isaac. It’s soon revealed Arnaud is not an old sailor but an alien woman named Elise. She soon spells Isaac, forcing him to get her to the River and help her home.
On their journey, they meet many alien creatures, including Asael, a man from Elise’s home planet with ice powers; rain, an alien with a death wish; and his friend Nothe who’s trying to keep him alive. There’s Thipka, another Hassune who is part mad from seeing glimpses of the future, and his friends, a girl named Annabel and Gof, the giant creature that protects her. Lastly is Boar, a giant worm who is more intelligent and less murder happy than his relatives. Together they all set out to bring Elise home, where she hopes to undo the damage her uncontrolled powers have caused. Unfortunately, a dark presence in the form of Asael’s Father, who, due to tragedy, is trying to unleash a horrible plan in his hopes of fixing the past. He is plaguing the nightmares of some of our characters, who hope to prevent it from happening.
This gripping book contains an interesting concept of a space river that planets exist along. Each world is unique, with its own trials and histories. These worlds include an array of beings from the Hassune who can not only shapeshift but has blood that can heal to giant worm creatures who hoard metals they mine from their volcano home and kill anyone who gets near them. I love that we have a man from the past meeting a sci-fi world. He argues that spaceships are actual ships and marvels over even our modern things like refrigerators. I especially loved how Thipka’s knowledge of the future led to him learning about The Greatest Show and getting his friends to perform the musical to ghost. This makes for some unique scenes that make this a good read and will have you chuckling throughout. The story takes a slow-burn approach as readers are impressed by the worldbuilding; however, it becomes increasingly engaging as the plot develops.
What Actually Happened to Isaac Moore is a thrilling and unique sci-fi novel that explores themes of coming to grips with the past to create a brighter future. This book will captivate readers with its richly imagined world and well-developed characters.
Pages: 419 | ASIN : B0BLMVWPBH
Original source: https://literarytitan.com/2023/03/07/what-actually-happened-to-isaac-moore/