Summary: We’re all afraid of monsters. They coil in our subconscious, slither along the edges of thought. Still we creep to the crackling fire to whisper their stories.

Love Devours is a collection of new fables for queer women, extracted from the bones of the dark: ominous fairy tales, sinister myths, dystopias rife with nightmares. But in the midst of monsters, love still struggles to find the light.

A witch traps a beast of the sea; a corpse is reanimated out of love; a muse drains her supplicant; a priestess worships in a church of wolves. Six monster stories lurk within these pages. Six heroines, sometimes monsters themselves, unearth romance, rebuild worlds, shatter spells. Their courage unveils the secret faces of humankind’s greatest compulsions: fear and love.

Come into the dark and be devoured.

See the review at On The Nightstand.

Summary: With the Brotherhood persecuting witches like never before, a divided Sisterhood desperately needs Cate to come into her Prophesied powers. And after Cate’s friend Sachi is arrested for using magic, a war-thirsty Sister offers to help her find answers—if Cate is willing to endanger everyone she loves.

Cate doesn’t want to be a weapon, and she doesn’t want to involve her friends and Finn in the Sisterhood’s schemes. But when Maura and Tess join the Sisterhood, Maura makes it clear that she’ll do whatever it takes to lead the witches to victory. Even if it means sacrifices. Even if it means overthrowing Cate. Even if it means all-out war.

Oh, Star Cursed. For all the ways you improved upon Born Wicked, you also fell much, much farther than the first book in this series did.

See the review at On The Nightstand.

Summary: Everybody thinks Cate Cahill and her sisters are eccentric. Too pretty, too reclusive, and far too educated for their own good. But the truth is even worse: they’re witches. And if their secret is discovered by the priests of the Brotherhood, it would mean an asylum, a prison ship–or an early grave.

Then Cate finds her mother’s diary, and uncovers a secret that could spell her family’s destruction. Desperate to find alternatives to their fate, Cate starts scouring banned books and questioning rebellious new friends, all while juggling tea parties, shocking marriage proposals, and a forbidden romance with the completely unsuitable Finn Belastra. But if what her mother wrote is true, the Cahill girls aren’t safe–not even from each other.

Do you ever have one of those books that has pretty much everything you love in a novel, and you’re sure you’re going to absolutely adore it… except then you read it, and while you do like it, there’s one huge detail that’s ruining the entire thing for you?

Born Wicked is that book for me.

See the review at On The Nightstand.

Gossamer Axe is a stand-alone novel by Gael Baudino. It’s a Tam Lin-like story about a young woman attempting to rescue her lover from the Sidh. This is complicated by the modern setting and the way the Sidh Realm is receding from the world. You can tell this book was written in the late 80s because the cover blurb very cleverly fails to mention that Our Heroine’s lover is a girl. Our Heroine is stumped at finding a way to defeat the Sidh bard holding her lover captive, until she discovers rock and roll.

Read this Outline on Rena's Hub of Random on WordPress.

Summary: Liyana has trained her entire life to be the vessel of a goddess. She will dance and summon her tribe’s deity, who will inhabit Liyana’s body and use magic to bring rain to the desert. But when the dance ends, Liyana is still there. Her tribe is furious–and sure that it is Liyana’s fault. Abandoned by her tribe, Liyana expects to die in the desert. Until a boy walks out of the dust in search of her.

Korbyn is a god inside his vessel, and a trickster god at that. He tells Liyana that five other gods are missing, and they set off across the desert in search of the other vessels. The desert tribes cannot survive without the magic of their gods. But the journey is dangerous, even with a god’s help. And not everyone is willing to believe the trickster god’s tale.

The closer she grows to Korbyn, the less Liyana wants to disappear to make way for her goddess. But she has no choice–she must die for her tribe to live. Unless a trickster god can help her to trick fate–or a human girl can muster some magic of her own.

I’ve been a fan of Sarah Beth Durst ever since I read her first novel, Into the Wild. Despite some mishaps along the way, she’s remained one of my favourite authors, and Vessel is yet another winning book from her.

Read the review at On The Nightstand.