Good Morning,
It’s Monday! What are you Reading is hosted by Kathryn from Book Date, this is a weekly event to share what we’ve read in the past week and what we hope to read, plus whatever else comes to mind.
Books I have Finished Recently
City of Storms by Kat Ross | (Nightmarked, #1) | Fantasy | Add to Goodreads
For the Shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down the deep well . . .
After decades of civil war, the Via Sancta has declared victory over humanity’s basest instincts. Anger, hatred and greed are suppressed by intricate Marks on the skin. Wards have tamed the wild psychic magic of the ley. Four of the six cities still stand, and if a few rebel Nightmages haunt the ruins of the other two, the Church has dismissed them as toothless.
Alexei Bryce is a priest in the storm-wracked southern capital of Novostopol. He hunts deviants whose Marks have inverted, driving them mad. When a prominent doctor violently turns, Alexei stumbles across a conspiracy at the highest levels of the Via Sancta. The trail leads to Kasia Novak, a tarot reader with dangerous secrets of her own. The cards say their fates are intertwined — but only if the threads aren’t snapped short.
Now the ley is rising again. A Nightmage has infiltrated the city, bent on finding Kasia. And Alexei discovers that his faith’s victory over the darkest recesses of the human soul is more fragile than he imagined.
What is your deepest desire? Money? Power? Revenge? Lust? I’ll give to you.
Malach is many things. Corrupter of the pious. Survivor of the Via Sancta’s bloody campaigns. Implacable enemy of all it stands for. He’s primal desire made flesh, and the thing he wants most is a child. Half-bloods are fragile creatures, but if this one survives, it will be monster, a savior — or both.
The King’s Beast, Vol. 5 by Rei Toma | (The King’s Beast #5) | Manga, Fantasy, Romance | Add to Goodreads
A smoldering tale of romance and revenge set in the world of the New York Times best seller Dawn of the Arcana!
Ajin boys who show signs of special abilities are conscripted to serve in the imperial palace as beast-servants—status symbols and shields for their royal masters, to be kept or discarded on a whim. When they were children, Rangetsu’s twin brother Sogetsu was ripped from her arms and sent to the palace to attend Prince Tenyou as a beast-servant, where he quickly fell victim to bloody dynastic intrigues. Now in a world that promises only bitterness, Rangetsu’s one hope at avenging her brother is to disguise herself as a man and find a way into the palace!
Female Ajin are prohibited from serving in the palace, and so Rangetsu’s revenge depends on her ability to maintain her ruse. But when the attendant Taihaku discovers the truth and Third Prince Kougai’s suspicions are roused, will Rangetsu lose her place by Prince Tenyou’s side and her chance at vengeance?
Maid-sama! (2-in-1 Edition), Vol. 4: Includes Vols. 7 and 8 by Hiro Fujiwara | Maid-sama! | Manga, Romance | Add to Goodreads
As if being student council president of a predominantly male high school isn’t hard enough, Misaki Ayuzawa has a major secret—she works at a maid café after school! How is she supposed to keep her image of being ultrasmart, strong and overachieving intact once school heartthrob Takumi Usui discovers her double life?!
Misaki secretly participates in the maid café’s eating contest to save a coworker from keeping a promise that she never should’ve made in the first place. Then things unexpectedly heat up when a game called Love Trial forces Misaki to participate in various festival games with Usui—while holding hands!
Currently Reading
The Queen of Izmoroz by Jon Skovron | (The Goddess War #2) | Fantasy | Add to Goodreads
Sonya has brought a foreign army to free her country from imperial rule, but her allies may have other goals in the second book of this thrilling epic fantasy trilogy from Jon Skovron.
The first battle is over, but war yet looms on the horizon. Sonya and her allies–the foreign Uaine and their armies of the undead–have beaten back the imperial soldiers from the capital city. Now they have the rest of the country to free.
Meanwhile, her brother the famed wizard Sebastian has retreated with the imperial forces to regroup and lick his wounds. Betrayed by his sister and his wife, the beautiful noblewoman Galina, he will regain control of his life and his country at any cost.
The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling | Gothic, Fantasy, History, Mystery | Add to Goodreads
Practical, unassuming Jane Shoringfield has done the calculations, and decided that the most secure path forward is this: a husband, in a marriage of convenience, who will allow her to remain independent and occupied with meaningful work. Her first choice, the dashing but reclusive doctor Augustine Lawrence, agrees to her proposal with only one condition: that she must never visit Lindridge Hall, his crumbling family manor outside of town. Yet on their wedding night, an accident strands her at his door in a pitch-black rainstorm, and she finds him changed. Gone is the bold, courageous surgeon, and in his place is a terrified, paranoid man—one who cannot tell reality from nightmare, and fears Jane is an apparition, come to haunt him.
By morning, Augustine is himself again, but Jane knows something is deeply wrong at Lindridge Hall, and with the man she has so hastily bound her safety to. Set in a dark-mirror version of post-war England, Starling crafts a new kind of gothic horror from the bones of the beloved canon. This Crimson Peak-inspired story assembles, then upends, every expectation set in place by Shirley Jackson and Rebecca, and will leave readers shaken, desperate to begin again as soon as they are finished.
What are you hoping to get to read this week?
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