It’s Fairytale Day!
Do you love fairy tale retellings as much as I do?
Thanks to the group of authors who’ve compiled this list, you can find the perfect one for you!
Psst…some of them are free or 99c! Including a flash sale on Lord of the Hollow Court! You’ll find Lord Braam and friends under Next Gen.
Find the next fairy tale retelling you’ll fall in love with here:
Cheers!
CKB
(A novella of The Dryad Chronicles)
Steamy fantasy romance, The Little Mermaid retelling, fantasy novella
Note: I received an ARC and this is an honest, voluntary review. This book is a steamy open door fantasy romance for mature readers 18+ only.
It’s so nice to be back in Voreios, a land of mythology and community. It’s also a place where multiple mates are both fated and common, giving us another steamy MMF romance.
What I love most about Callie Pey’s work is the loving spirit each story contains. It keeps all the steam from feeling tawdry, with love scenes that often celebrate the bond. Cursed really captures the joy of finding who you’re meant to be with after wondering if you’d always be alone.
There are also The Little Mermaid-retelling vibes! The undersea world was interesting and made for a great climax to the story. Since this story ties into the Dryad Chronicles, there are some series spoilers, so be forewarned!
I enjoyed reading this novella and getting to know its characters.
Steamy fantasy romance, fantasy retelling; October 24, 2022
Note: I received a copy and this is an honest, voluntary review. This book is for mature readers, with steamy open door romance, and also deals with grief/the death of a child and a fiancé)
I thought this Beauty and the Beast retelling was incredibly well-plotted and an enjoyable read. While it is very (very!) spicy and steamy, author S.L. Prater took the time to show her characters connecting intellectually and emotionally instead of just relying on the fated mates trope. Of Roses and Rituals also has some fun horror elements and surprising depths.
Both Fiona and her love interest, Elias, are dealing with grief. Elias has had time to acknowledge and cope with his, while Fiona has tamped hers down. The treatment of grief here is honest and thoughtful.
Of Roses and Rituals also touches on body image, with the message that everyone deserves to be loved and feel attractive. It’s an extreme case, of course (a curse has changed Elias’s body to that of satyr-like beast), but I thought it worked and deepened the characters’ connection. The action parts were also smoothly worked into the plot and pleasantly spooky.
This was a very well-rounded steamy romance and a great addition to the Kriegspiel world.
To learn more about this author, visit streetwitch.net.
It’s the first book birthday for Lord of the Hollow Court today! A big thank you to everyone who preordered and all the authors who supported me along the way.
This book is a spicy romance for mature audiences. You can get your copy below (or read it in KU!). And if you hurry, that 99c price from preorder might still be in effect!
Note: I received an ARC and this is an honest, voluntary review.
When the Prince who swept Cinderella (or in this case, Eleanor) off her feet turns out to be a poor match for her, The Cracked Slipper asks the question, what if the man she should’ve danced with at the ball wasn’t the prince? And what if it was too late by the time she realized it?
Since falling for someone else and acting on it is treasonous, Eleanor tries to ignore her feelings for another fellow at court. With her trusty human-like parrot Chou Chou at her side (all the animals are anthropomorphized, including the delightful unicorns), Eleanor swears she’ll forget her actual Mr. Right and be a good wife to Prince Gregory. If only he was interested in being a good husband to her… Thankfully, Eleanor and Gregory’s relationship didn’t go half as dark as I thought it would from the description, and the potential affair never felt tawdry.
This was a well-written book that engaged me, though the plot relied heavily on the forbidden romance in the middle, even as some pleasantly underhanded schemes were afoot. Only a couple of the sinister plots are fully revealed here, leaving the rest to be discovered later in the series, and I wished I’d gotten at least a few more hints of what was to come.
Overall, the Cracked Slipper is an interesting read with wonderful world-building (again, the unicorns! And I really should mention the witches, too!), with a heroine I can root for. While I wished Eleanor leaned more on logic than dreams of romance at times, maybe that’s the point: love muddies the waters just as much as the lack of it. And after life with the wicked stepmother, who can blame Cinderella for wanting to be loved?
To learn more about this author, visit stephaniealexanderbooks.com.
As the author of 16 titles and counting, plus a new series of retellings called Entangled with Fae, Tessonja Odette should be on your radar, especially if you loved books like The Cruel Prince or A Court of Thorns and Roses. I adored her first book in The Fair Isle Trilogy (To Carve a Fae Heart…my review can be found here), so I was thrilled to find out her new series ventures back into Faerwyvae.
From what I’ve read of Odette’s work, I’d describe it as crowd pleasing fantasy with a sharp bite. There is romance to be had and swoony moments, but they are hard-won by the protagonist.
Tessonja Odette was on my “author TBR” for a while when, for the second time, a book of hers fell in my lap through a Book of Matches Media tour (there’s one happening right now, in fact, for A Taste of Poison—see my Instagram for giveaway details for a contest through Book of Matches Media, which ends August 28, 2022 at midnight PST). I clawed my way out from my endless TBR pile to read this one. Once I started To Carve a Fae Heart, I wondered what had taken me so long!
While my summer of ARC reading has prevented me from getting more than a chapter into A Taste of Poison, her latest, you can be sure I’ll be returning to Faerwyvae as quickly as possible.
To learn more about this author, visit tessonjaodette.com.
Note: I received an ARC and am leaving an honest, voluntary review
I picked up this book looking for a fun, exciting Cinderella retelling with a kick-butt heroine, and that is exactly what I got–plus a pair of touchingly loyal friends and modern Red Carpet-worthy gowns. Heart of Cinders is the story of a steely assassin who finds her heart softening and starts to question what she’s been taught.
Once MC Cinder headed to the palace, this book really picked up and was hard to put down. And what is a fairy tale retelling without a cheeky nod? Cinder’s ladies-in-waiting are Gus and Jacquetta, and it was so fun and lovely to see the friendships developing and see Cinder kick butt in a whole new way, this time as the lady she was meant to be (with knife skills and archery lessons on the side). I rooted for Cinder and her friends at every turn.
But the ending of this book! Heart of Cinders ended on the bad kind of cliffhanger, the kind that left me exclaiming “What do you mean it’s done?!” I actually enjoy a well-executed cliffhanger ending, but this one ended in mid-scene. The worst part is it worked and I wish I could grab book two right away. There were enough breadcrumbs along the way to make me extremely curious about where this series will go next, too.
To learn more about this author, visit jdarleneeverly.com.