Welcome to Litsy!

This sapphic regency romance with gods and fairies is a low pick. The second half kind of dragged, but the framing was fun and I had some laugh out loud moments.

Maelys is a semi-respectable Regency-era young lady who just happens to be cursed. It started with her dress dissolving at a ball and quickly escalates to attempts on her life. She recruits her best friend, her cousin, and Lady Georgiana Landrake aka The Duke, to help end the curse.
I usually love Hall‘s books but this one didn‘t land for me. It felt like two books with the exact same plot stuck together.
I did enjoy the magical realism, tho

Wrapping up November reading (including my seemingly unpopular thoughts on Mortal Follies) https://youtu.be/1AgqRHKwdUE

Oh, friends, MORTAL FOLLIES has such a delightful narrative voice, but it took me four long days to finish it and that was just too long for me to love it. Even if I‘d read it quickly, though, I think I would‘ve faltered due to the distance Robin Goodfellow‘s narration gives us from our protagonist, the drawn out Regency pacing, and the way I revelled in the worldbuilding but never invested myself in the romance. It wasn‘t BAD but… yeah. 😔

I‘m struggling with this one a bit right now. I‘m going to keep pushing, but it‘s a bummer because this should be everything that I want.

I started MORTAL FOLLIES while I cooked and ate a jackfruit version of Nigella‘s Korean keema. Love the book‘s narrative voice so far. The keema was good, but it‘s better when made with beef (yeah, I know, it‘s very wrong). The jackfruit‘s sourness doesn‘t meld with the spice in quite the right way.

AH always has a new and interesting message to tell in all his books. In MFs we touch on themes of vulnerability in 💕 and the trauma of having to confront an abuser, and how reality and fantasy are very different. Even though there were a lot of fantastical elements, I was always grounded before I could get too off track

I also really liked all the characters but NGL, Lizzie enchanted me. She was very charming!

A rec! #romance #mystery

The #tbr never ends!! Right now I'm reading Mortal Follies by one of my favorite authors :D it's ok and I'm starting to realize that certain types of characters exist in AH's world's and I wouldn't be surprised if they were related somehow 😂😂😂

Purples & pinks 💕💕

#BookReport for June

Very little reading time this month. I was all about the comfort reads and all of these served the purpose. Mortal Follies was the most diverting.

Exactly the ridiculous nonsense I needed in the last weeks. A queer regency romance set in a world where witches, fairies, hobgoblins & old gods are just another strata of society & narrated (with frequent acid asides) by a creature heavily hinted to be Puck from a Midsummer Night‘s Dream “reduced to …professional storytelling” - “I gave a story to a mortal playmaker around 1600 & the bastard didn‘t even give me a co-writer credit” 🤣 I loved it.

4/5

In a regency England full of magic, fae, and old gods, Maelys has been cursed. She and her friends must figure out how to break the curse before it's too late. I enjoyed the story overall, but my favorite part was having Puck be the narrator. I thought it was very fun and allowed a lot of context of the world's mythology to be added through his perspective on Maely's story.

audiobook: The Life Council by Laura Tremaine
e-book: Mortal Follies by Alexis Hall
#naturalitsy: Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn

#weekendreads @rachelsbrittain

Introductions, gentle reader are in order. I am that knavish sprite that frights the maidens of the villagery. I am Oberon's jester - was Oberon's jester, that's rather the issue.

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

Maelys finds herself cursed. & her only allies are a genre savy cousin, an accused murderess, a witch, & a priestess. All narrated by good old Puck.

This was charming. A sapphic romance, with an intriguing mystery of who cursed Maelys, with a delightful array of secondary characters, including her cousin, Lizzie, who everyone should have just listened to the whole time. A bit predictable, & an abrupt ending, but also a lot of fun! 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

To survive a mysterious and malicious curse and find the figure behind it, a young noblewoman must encounter mischievous fairies, queer priestesses, ancient deities—and a strangely alluring, potentially “malign witch” (who may have murdered her own male relations to inherit her dukedom) in this feverishly fun sapphic fantasy wittily and wantonly narrated, of course, by Puck himself. Such fun!