This Heart of Mine by Bertrice Small

Fiction

In the fourth book of the Skye O’Malley series we follow her youngest daughter, Velvet de Marisco. Being the only one of Skye’s children to spend the entirety of her childhood with their mother, and being fortunate enough to have her father in her life, Velvet is well loved and somewhat spoiled. She is also educated, intelligent, beautiful, and being her fathers only biological child, a wealthy heiress. Her enchanted life in the countryside comes to an end when the man she was betrothed to as a child informs her that he is coming from Scotland to celebrate their marriage a year early, due to the death of his father and brother which has left him the last living male in his family. Velvet is infuriated with both the tone of his letter and the way in which he demands that they marry immediately so that he can get an heir. Clever Velvet is able to escape her intended husband when she becomes a maid of honor for the English queen, a woman who becomes infuriated with any man who tries to take her ladies away from her. 

Fitting in with the trend of enemies to lovers that is so popular right now, you’ll enjoy reading about the fights that happen between Velvet and the Scottish earl which ultimately lead them to learning to love one another. There is a lot that happens in between, and I won’t say anything more. It involves an unfortunate case of miscommunication and misunderstanding and I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who is interested in reading.

A Love For All Time by Bertrice Small

Fiction

If you were intrigued with Skye O’Malley’s younger brother, Conn, in All The Sweet Tomorrows, you are going to love seeing much more of him in A Love For All Time, which chronicles how he was introduced and married to his wife, Aiden St. Michael. This book almost didn’t happen, as the author had already written This Heart Of Mine, which centers around Skye and Adam’s daughter, Velvet. But Small received so many fan letters stating that they wanted more of Conn that she decided she had to give it to them. Even though it wasn’t planned, this story fits in perfectly with the timeline, and I am a stickler for continuity. 

Aiden is a shy, cloistered English heiress who is sent to court after her fathers death in order to find a husband so that they might carry on her family name. Her few short months here are lonely, as she is an older unmarried woman in her time, she is intelligent, and she does not flaunt her wealth with fashionable clothing and fine jewels, all of which make her invisible to the mostly extroverted people residing there. By a stroke of luck, and a surprising bit of boldness, she is married to the most handsome man at Elizabeth Tudors court, and it is at this point in time that she finally begins to bloom. Conn and Aiden live in bliss and fall in love, but after only a few months of happiness together the two are separated when a couple of evil men come up with an evil plan which results in Aiden being kidnapped and sold into slavery. 

You do get a happy ending, but it is not without a great deal of turmoil in order for the lovers to get there. I like this one better than its predecessor because even though our leading lady finds herself a captive, her time in bondage is not as frustrating as it was on our last journey with Skye. This is a book I would pick up many, many more times.

All The Sweet Tomorrows by Bertrice Small

Fiction

The second book in the Skye O’Malley saga, this book again follows the life and adventures of the heroine. Out of all the books in the series, and the legacy books as well, this is the one I have read the least and am therefore the least familiar with. Having just finished it, I cannot recall why I have never tended to reach for this one. 

When we last left Skye in the first book, titled after the very woman, she was on her way home with her best friend, Adam, and her now fourth husband, Niall. Tragedy seems to follow Skye as this is how All The Sweet Tomorrows opens up, with Niall believed to be dead. After many months, which include a terribly mismatched political marriage, and a few liaisons with lovers, it is discovered that Niall actually survived the attempted murder. Skye then goes on a risky rescue mission in order to save him. A good chunk of the middle of this tale is why I don’t consider it a favorite of mine, which includes Skye’s failed fifth marriage and her adventures in the East, as it is just so incredibly frustrating to read about the things that happen to this woman. Her fifth husband is a cruel and unusual man with whom she tries to find some peace and common ground with, as she cannot see herself ever loving him. In the East she is forced to become a harem slave in order to save Niall and the things that happen to her are degrading and barbarous, you truly end up hating her vicious master, Kedar. 

The very beginning and the majority of the end of the book are why I decided that I do love it. You get to learn more about Skye’s extended family as she actually gets to interact with a lot of them for once rather than only seeing them briefly in between her many adventures. And we are also introduced to her youngest brother, Conn, who is one of the main characters in the third book, which I will be reading next week. So if you loved the first book, continue with the second, because you will want to make your way through the entire series. 

I have also included a picture in which I marked all the good spicy scenes, as this is a historical romance.

This Is Your Mind On Plants by Michael Pollan

Nonfiction

This Is Your Mind On Plants is definitely going on my list of best books I have read this year. It was educational, extremely interesting, and insightful. It is exactly the type of non fiction book that I like to read, a book that is written in such a manner that it is entertaining so much so that you forget that you are learning. I loved the mixture of historical stories and facts blended together with the real life experiences of the author as he researched and ingested three different plants in order to provide the best possible insight. He wanted to give the reader an understanding of what is a downer, an upper, and an outer, and he did an amazing job. 

The first part of the book is about downers, in this case, opium. This may be naive of me, but considering the fact that I do not use recreational drugs and I only rarely get prescribed a painkiller for medical reasons, I did not know that OxyContin, a famous opioid, was a downer. I also did not know that overdose and addiction to this prescription drug led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of individuals. Deaths did not only occur from the very drug itself, but from those who turned to illegal forms of the drug after they could no longer get them legally. A disturbingly large number of new heroin users have turned to illegal drugs after becoming addicted to prescription painkillers. This is frightening, and I’ve gotten a little off track, but I was really moved by the above facts. The form of opium that the author explores for research purposes in this book is poppy, a plant that anyone can grow in their backyard gardens. The back and forth between what is currently legal and illegal, right and wrong, when it comes to growing poppies, was absolutely enthralling. I especially loved getting to read the original piece on the author’s experience growing poppy and drinking the tea which he wrote decades ago. At the time he was unable to publish for legal reasons, and the piece itself was lost for years before it was found and finally deemed safe to publish. 

Part two was about uppers. The easiest upper to get in the world, considering that it is legal everywhere, is caffeine in the form of coffee or tea. I learned a lot about a substance that I consume almost everyday, yet knew very little about until reading this chapter. There is an interesting bit about why we associate coffee with sobering us up after ingesting too much alcohol, why coffee is associated with masculinity and tea with femininity, and the relationship between coffee and opium and the terrible impact it had on Chinese culture. Although the chapter on opium was amazing, I became completely engrossed with this chapter probably because caffeine is a substance I use regularly. It both made me want to try and take a break from caffeine, if you read you will see why, and also continue to use it so that I can be at maximum potential and productivity.

The final part was about the substance I knew the least about, mescaline, or the outer, and the plants that produce this substance. Illegal to everyone in the United States, with the exception of those who are active members of the Native American Church, the plants have become endangered due to people poaching. This is a huge concern for followers of the church, as the plants are used for religious ceremonies and healing purposes, not to get high. They don’t consider these plants as drugs, and they find the term offensive. The plants are thought of as holy and sacred, and the individuals who are poaching the plants do not have the respect and reverence for them that members of the Native American Church do. You really need to read this chapter to even begin to get an understanding of what these plants mean to these people as a whole. Honestly, from the way the author described it, unless you have grown up within this religion or you join it and devote your whole heart to it, you will never really understand.

If anyone made it through that incredibly long review, thank you. I will try to keep my next one shorter, I don’t think it will be a challenge actually because I don’t think the next book I read will come close to this. I can only hope that I read one or two more books that are this good by the end of the year.

Never Kiss A Bad Boy by Nora Flite

Fiction

A dark, unconventional romance that is rooted in revenge is the premise of Never Kiss A Bad Boy. The story begins and ends with murder, and everything in between fills us in on how our male leads, Kite and Jacob, became hit men, and why the female main character, Marina, is out to kill. If you couldn’t guess it from the phrase ‘male leads’, this is a triad tale. I liked it far better than the Dark Elite series I read several weeks ago. I enjoyed there being only two male love interests rather than a harem of four, and the plot was better besides.

That being said, I was disappointed in the number of grammatical and punctuation errors that I found in the text. Equally disappointing was the fact that not only was the antagonist’s last name misspelled once, the main female character’s first name was also spelled incorrectly one time. Did the author incorrectly spell her own characters names more than once, or were they somehow messed up during editing or printing? Either way, I find this carelessness sloppy. 

On top of that, I found the format to be unsightly, the margins were incredibly large, taking up about a third of the surface of the page all around. It made for odd sentence spacing and large gaps in paragraphs, which I also found to be too numerous. The chosen font and size of the text I found unfitting of the genre, the text being large and ordinary when something smaller and more feminine or delicate would have looked a lot better. I might not have even made such a big fuss over the errors I mentioned in the previous paragraph had the font and format been more pleasing to the eye. It’s not just that the story has to be good, it has to be visually pleasing for the reader, in my opinion. 

Besides seeing obvious room for improvement, I will say that I might read this again.  The spicy scenes are probably the most well written parts of the book, which is good since that is the genre this book falls within. They are lengthy, which I like, the language can be just slightly vulgar, and the descriptions are just right to give you a good visual, for those with very active imaginations. I did mark the scenes with post it notes just in case I want to skip over everything else, which I can see myself doing because I can also see myself becoming irritated if I notice even more errors during a re-read. I feel as though I am slowly making my way towards finding my perfect book or series in this genre, I just have to pay my dues by reading some not so great pieces first.