![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
smartbitches_feed) wrote2026-05-08 06:00 amFriday Videos Say Make Your Time
So, wanna hear something a little embarrassing?
I have been Chroniquelly Onlinne since forever, but there were some mysteries that to me seemed like magic.
Like Photoshop.
To be honest, Photoshop remains a bit of a mystery to me, and the skills I do have with it probably amount to .00001% of its capabilities.
So when I first saw this video ages and ages ago (2001??! 25 years?) I could not believe how road signs and awnings and whatnot were all altered and looked so real. Ah, what an innocent time for me.
Even a random Ziggy sighting? This is quite a time capsule.
I hope your weekend contain all your base that belong to you.
smartbitches_feed) wrote2026-05-08 06:00 am717. Archangel’s Finale with Nalini Singh
Nalini Singh is back to talk about Archangel’s Eternity, which I have been calling “Archangel’s Finale.”
We’ve got questions from readers and listeners, and some behind the scenes details about how Nalini organizes the massive worlds she’s built in her series.
Plus she teases some major surprises for the next Psy-Changeling book, and what she’s working on right now.
You can find the video of this episode on our YouTube channel if you’d like to watch us!
Listen to the podcast →Read the transcript →
Here are the books we discuss in this podcast:
You can find Nalini Singh at her website, NaliniSingh.com, and on Instagram and Facebook as AuthorNaliniSingh.
Do not miss the chance to sign up for her newsletter!
We also mentioned:
- Nalini’s virtual event with the Ashland Public Library on Wednesday, June 10!
- The next Psy-Changeling book is Cold Redemption, coming out in December 1, 2026.
- Nalini’s prior episodes:
This episode is brought to you by Hatch.
You know how you finish a romantasy and you just need the next thing immediately? Hatch made that thing.
It’s called Ophelia — an original audio drama, inspired by Hamlet, where Ophelia finally gets to be the main character.
Forbidden magic, a crumbling kingdom, a slow-burn love triangle with a prince and his very guarded, very intriguing, best friend. The kind of love triangle where you will absolutely pick a side and you will not be quiet about it.
Book one of the three part series is now available for free wherever you stream, with new chapters dropping every Tuesday. For books 2 and 3, check out hatch.co/Ophelia.
Stay tuned to the end of the episode for a sample of Ophelia, brought to you by Hatch.co!
If you like the podcast, you can subscribe to our feed, or find us at iTunes. You can also find us on Stitcher, and Spotify, too. We also have a cool page for the podcast on iTunes.
Thanks to our sponsors:
More ways to sponsor:
Sponsor us through Patreon! (What is Patreon?)
What did you think of today's episode? Got ideas? Suggestions? You can talk to us on the blog entries for the podcast or talk to us on Facebook if that's where you hang out online. You can email us at sbjpodcast@gmail.com or you can call and leave us a message at our Google voice number: 201-371-3272. Please don't forget to give us a name and where you're calling from so we can work your message into an upcoming podcast.
Thanks for listening!
Podcast Sponsor
Support for this episode comes from The Undergrads: Student Union by #1 New York Times-bestselling author Julie Murphy–a sexy new rom com about a college marriage of convenience that goes way beyond chemistry 101…
Clover Rowan Walsh knows The Plan:
- Get a full ride to her dream school, Wexley University.
- Conquer the school of business.
- Say goodbye to the paycheck-to-paycheck life she and her mom have known for years.
There’s just one hiccup. With the first semester rapidly approaching, Clover learns her housing grant has fallen through. But a loophole presents itself: Married couples can live in the dorms for the price of one student. Clover is willing to sacrifice the sanctity of marriage…even if it means proposing to the one person she swore she’d never speak to again: Bennett Andrew Graves.
Bennett can’t refuse Clover, the girl he grew up with (and whom he completely devastated years ago). He owes her this, but that doesn’t change the fact that these two can barely carry on a conversation without getting at each other’s throats. Forget about sharing a dorm—much less one bed.
But as Clover and Bennett hide the true nature of their marriage, they find that playing house isn’t all that bad–especially with certain marital benefits in the mix. In fact, Clover and Bennett are soon forgetting the most important part of their fake marriage of convenience . . . that it’s supposed to be fake.
With tropes like forced proximity and friends to enemies to lovers, you won’t want to miss this first book in a new trilogy of romance novels that follows a group of girls as they navigate love, friendship, and new adulthood.
Ali Hazelwood calls The Undergrads: Student Union “one addictively swoony book.”
Available now wherever books are sold!
Remember to subscribe to our podcast feed, find us on iTunes or on Stitcher.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elisi) wrote2026-05-08 06:44 am
I don't want to look at the news
However I made an icon of Banksy's new statue, which is very apt. At least we have a few good artists, and that's something.
rizzy_rosie8) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
poetry2026-05-07 09:50 pmExcerpt from Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
Robert Frost
tcampbell1000) wrote in scans_daily2026-05-07 11:40 pmJustice League Antifa: JLA #72-#73* (JLI 93a*/105)
*Also, length. This update ran so long that I’m splitting it into two installments, even though that mucks up my numbering and scheduling a little. The second installment will run tomorrow!
Dan Jurgens, like John Byrne, is a neo-traditionalist: his work shows strong Silver Age influences but is splashy and of its time. Most of it boasts a direct simplicity, a sort of purity. Which is why the “Destiny’s Hand” arc is a shock: it lets him indulge those influences…but also shows a subversive streak well out of his usual register.
( He doesn’t have a character say, ‘‘Those armbands are stupid! WE ALL KNOW SUPES IS COMING BACK!,’’ but that’s the vibe. )
days_unfolding) wrote2026-05-07 10:18 pmInside and Outside
So freaking tired. I closed my eyes leaning on the filing cabinet in Zara’s room. I showered in the morning, so I can have a lunchtime nap. Still silence from the CPAP people, so I need to call.
Overslept my nap. I’m not feeling up to phone calls. I just want to work quietly. I’m doing a tedious task for work, but I volunteered to do it. The government issued an edict that all public-facing Web sites, applications, and the like at colleges and universities will become accessible. The original deadline was last month, but the government extended it for one year because no one was making the deadline. We have a Web page that contains an archive of webinars that we gave for years now. We posted the slides for each webinar in PDF format, which is the devil as far as accessibility is concerned. So I’m replacing the 60-odd PDF files with the original PowerPoint files. Someone will have to caption all the recordings of the webinars, who probably will be me. Oh well, job security. But the upload feature for the files keeps flaking out.
Checked on the dogs, and Gracie was sitting on top of the dirt for the raised beds.
Bella is always so happy when I go outside and see them.
It keeps threatening rain. Probably no lawn mowing tonight. Maybe I’ll take a nap. It started raining, and I went to let the dogs in, but it isn’t raining hard enough for them to want to come in. Okay.
Oliver attended my nap after work, but he was good and let me sleep. Had a good nap. Fed us all.
I finished We Burned So Bright. It was hard because a lot of it was depressing, especially after the fizzy gay hockey player books. But it’s good. And hard.
Another iris is blooming.
I think that the dogs have gone to bed already. They were outside for over 12 hours!
yourlibrarian) wrote in common_nature2026-05-07 08:37 pmDotted Cloud Sunset
A recent sunset seemed to be highlighting the dotted clouds in the area, which made the sky look more patterned than usual.
( Read more... )
scalziwhatever_feed) wrote2026-05-07 06:43 pmThe Big Idea: Jill Rosenberg
While it may seem like fantasy is as far from the real world as possible, author Jill Rosenberg suggests that indulging in fantasies and fiction actually connects people instead of isolating them from reality. Dive in to the Big Idea for her newest release, Now I’m Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself, and see if our desires are really just human nature.
JILL ROSENBERG:
People often think of fantasy and the imagination as ways to escape reality, but I think there’s a more complicated and fraught relationship between the two. What we long for, the ways we wish to escape—this grows out of our real experiences of the world. But the reverse is true as well: our “real” experiences are colored by our fantasies.
We might, for example, wish to be an Olympic-level athlete, as one of my characters does, but this wish highlights the absence of her athletic talent, which may not have shown up as an absence if she’d never longed to be an elite athlete. That feeling of absence and desire drives her behavior, which changes her reality, and the resulting experience changes her understanding of herself and what she really wants.
Our imagination can’t free us from the world because our imagination is made from the world. But it can alter the way we see things and what feels possible. The first story in my collection is called “The Logic of Imaginary Friends.” This is where I present this big idea most directly. A single mother is left lonely and longing when her eleven-year-old daughter goes to sleepaway camp for the first time, so she reunites with her imaginary friend from childhood.
It’s great at first, until one imaginary friend is not enough, no matter how she morphs him in her mind to meet her shifting needs and desires. The fantasies are fun, but not satisfying, and she begins to feel that she’s choosing this fantasy life over her life with her daughter, but does she have to choose between the two?
As a child, I used my imagination to revise reality. Every Thanksgiving I’d feel so excited for my cousins to visit. I’d imagine myself gregarious, irresistible, rehearsing all of the interactions I’d have, writing their dialogue and mine. But when they arrived, I could never be that person or get the response from them I wanted.
Later that night, however, I could rewrite the dialogue to be more plausible but equally thrilling, given what actually happened. That was always my favorite part of the holiday, alone in my room, taking what happened and transforming it into the holiday I longed for. But the bigger the gulf between my fantasies and reality, the less I was able to enjoy the fantasies or the reality.
It’s this competing desire that compelled me to write these stories: the desire to be known, seen, recognized and special, to connect with those around us, and the desire to hide what makes us unique, to pretend we’re no different from everyone else.
On the one hand, my characters are often reminding themselves of their freedom. Maybe they really can be anything they want to be, but when they try to do it, out in the world, it’s not so easy. They can’t control reality or other people’s responses the way they can control their fantasies. But the more they shy away and hide from the real world, the more that fear of reality infects their fantasies, or, in the surreal stories, the events of their fantastical lives. As a result, their fantasies and their lives get weirder and worse.
Of course, my strange characters and the unusual things that happen to my characters all stem from my own strangeness and my unusual thoughts and experiences. In my real life, I do not always feel like showcasing the ways in which I deviate from the norm, but I am happy and proud to put my strange and unusual characters out into the world because I do think that fiction shows us new and different ways of being.
The role of fiction, even surreal fiction, is to bring us closer to the experience of being a human in the real world. That marriage between—and tension between—dream and reality is what I find most thrilling and ultimately satisfying in both my writing and my life.
Now I’m Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Watchung Booksellers
Author socials: Website|Instagram
Read an excerpt of one story from the collection: The Logic of Imaginary Friends
oursin) wrote2026-05-07 06:02 pmFurther Le Guin thoughts
A further trail of thought more or less kicked off by this comment by flemmings on yesterday's post about Ursula as an anthropologist's daughter and the way that inflected her fiction -
- and then I went, hey, wasn't he part of that whole Franz Boas group that I read that book about at the beginning of 2020 (Charles King, The Reinvention of Humanity) and would she not have been aware of Significant Lady Anthropologists and their work (not just her own ma) -
Like, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict?
(Maybe the forthcoming biography will shine some light there???)
Or was that going on in some entirely different compartment to the requirements of fictional narrative? (thinking of my 1920s gals and the gulf between what they were up to with their affairs and abortions and propagating birth control and what the protags in their novels were permitted to get up to.)
Or was there a whole generational thing going on there, which I sort of touched on in commenting about Mitchison on this post, though I think I could make a larger case about that generation that had had to fight for a lot of rights that were already accepted as given by UKleG's day even if there were still major constraints.
(Seem to recollect that I did not think Julie Phillips in that book on writers and motherhood quite brought out the extent to which she was writing of a very specific generation/time-period. With some exceptions.)
Trailer: Star City
From the blurb: Star City is a propulsive paranoid thriller that takes us back to the key moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race — when the Soviet Union became the first nation to put a man on the moon. But this time, we explore the story from behind the Iron Curtain, showing the lives of the cosmonauts, the engineers and the intelligence officers embedded among them in the Soviet space program, and the risks they all took to propel humankind forward.
smartbitches_feed) wrote2026-05-07 03:30 pmCowboys, Sci-Fi, & More
Duchess Material
Duchess Material by Emily Sullivan is $2.99! I believe this is a standalone and adds in some mystery elements. I thought we’ve featured this one before but alas, I couldn’t find anything!
When her student goes missing, an independent bluestocking must seek the help of the arrogant duke who spurned her in this sizzling tale of romance and intrigue, perfect for fans of Netflix’s Bridgerton series
Phoebe Atkinson is what society might call unconventional. Instead of marrying well like other women born to wealth, she chose to be a schoolteacher. Not to mention she lives in a leaky flat in an unfashionable part of town rather than stay in her parents’ mansion. But when her most promising pupil goes missing and the police ignore her, she has only one beg her sister’s best friend, the powerful Duke of Ellis, for help. If sending him a message from the police station doesn’t get his attention, nothing will.
The last thing William Margrave ever expected was to inherit a dukedom. But now that he has it, he’s determined to act the part perfectly—and that includes marrying the perfect duchess. A bluestocking Bohemian schoolteacher is decidedly not duchess material. But he can’t resist her plea for help regarding her missing student. As they fall further into the mystery, William discovers two that he never really got over his childhood crush on Phoebe, and he doesn’t really want to.
A “rising historical romance star.” –Booklist, starred review
Done and Dusted
Done and Dusted by Lyla Sage is $1.99! This is book one in the Rebel Blue Ranch. Here are my very brief thoughts from Goodreads:
Cute with very good spicy scenes and a lovely primary friendship between women.
I don’t love a “best friend’s sister” trope, though, and I feel like that element and Emmy’s residual trauma wrapped up so quickly.
She’s off-limits, but he’s never been good at following the rules.
For the first time in her life, Clementine “Emmy” Ryder has no idea what she’s doing. She’s accomplished everything on her to-do list. She left her small hometown of Meadowlark, Wyoming; went to college; and made a career for herself by doing her favorite riding horses. But after an accident makes it impossible for her to get back into the saddle, she has no choice but to return to the hometown she always wanted to escape.
Luke Brooks is Meadowlark’s most notorious bad boy, bar owner, and bachelor. He’s also the unofficial fifth member of the Ryder family. As Emmy’s older brother’s best friend, Luke spent most of his childhood antagonizing her. It’s been years since he’s seen her, but when she walks into his bar and back into his life, he can’t take his eyes off her. Despite his better judgment, he wants to do a whole lot more than just look at her.
Emmy’s got too much on her mind to think about romance. And Luke knows he should stay away from his best friend’s younger sister. But what if Luke is just what Emmy needs to get her spark back? Or will they both go up in flames?
Witches Get Stuff Done
Witches Get Stuff Done by Molly Harper is $1.99! This is a small town paranormal romance between a witch and a librarian. Sounds a little too twee for me, but it could be right up your alley.
Juggling newfound witchy powers, a house full of ghosts, and verbal battles with the handsome local librarian is almost too much for a new witch to manage. A new witch with a coven, however, can get so much more done…
From the moment Riley Everett set foot in Starfall Point, magic bubbled inside of her. But with only her late aunt’s journals and a cantankerous live-in ghost butler to instruct her on all things witchy—including her newly inherited Victorian haunted house—Riley seeks out a coven for sisterhood and support. The last person she expects to be drawn to is the town’s frustrating, yet ridiculously attractive head librarian.
Edison Held knows almost everything there is to know about Starfall Point, but Shaddow House was always off-limits, thanks to its elusive owner. If he can convince the new owner, Riley, to let him take a peek inside, there’s so much he could learn. But as he gets closer to Riley, he’s fascinated by her dazzling wit and fiery spirit. Edison will do whatever he can to help Riley keep her family legacy alive, especially if it means spending more time with the captivating new witch in town.
Bestselling author Molly Harper wields a magical pen in this hilarious, delightful witchy romcom perfect for readers of The Ex Hex and Payback’s a Witch.
Red Mars
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson is $1.99! I mentioned this on Get Rec’d because Kelly Faircloth pitched this book as:
What if your midlife crisis was moving to Mars? An underappreciated facet of this novel is that everyone is middle-aged and a hot mess, emotionally.
Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel • Discover the novel that launched one of science fiction’s most beloved, acclaimed, and awarded trilogies: Kim Stanley Robinson’s masterly near-future chronicle of interplanetary colonization.
“A staggering book . . . the best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written.”—Arthur C. Clarke
For centuries, the barren, desolate landscape of the red planet has beckoned to humankind. Now a group of one hundred colonists begins a mission whose ultimate goal is to transform Mars into a more Earthlike planet. They will place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light onto its surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. And massive tunnels drilled into the mantle will create stupendous vents of hot gases. But despite these ambitious goals, there are some who would fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.
kazzy_cee) wrote2026-05-07 04:16 pmA little known Dutch artist
Women artists at the time were very restricted in what they could do, as they were prevented from attending formal art training. Fortunately, Michaelina's older brother was a painter, and it is likely he taught her, and they may have had a studio together for some years. During her lifetime, it is thought she was as famous as her contemporary Artemisia Gentileschi, but she has been forgotten for nearly three centuries, with many of her works being attributed to others (and in some instances, her name was painted over on her paintings!).
More of her works are being discovered all the time, including this set of five paintings: The Five Senses:
( Read more... )
It was a really interesting exhibition, and well worth a visit to see an artist who is still having new works discovered and attributed to her skill as a painter.
setsuled) wrote in disneyplusshows2026-05-07 07:36 am
Dare to Write
Last night's Daredevil: Born Again finale may have been the dumbest hour of television I ever watched. "The Southern Cross", written by Dario Scardapane and Jesse Wigutow, presented nonsensical, overly dramatic events driven by vague or utterly nonexistent character motives and weird, extremely hazy conceptions of legal process.
( Spoilers for the Daredevil Born Again season 2 finale )
Daredevil: Born Again is available on Disney+.
aurumcalendula) wrote in c_ent2026-05-07 08:48 amDrama Rec: 暴锋雨 | Sharp Downpour (2026)
(20 × ~15 minute episodes)
Sharp Downpour is a police procedural minidrama set around 2010 that follows detectives Lu Yi and Lin Shen as they investigate a number of cases.
( Read more... )
( content warnings )
It's available on WeTV.
smartbitches_feed) wrote2026-05-07 10:00 amHere For All the Reasons: Why We Love the Bachelor, edited by Ilana Masad and Stevie K. Seibert Desj
My experience with The Bachelor franchise is as follows:
I edit the recaps from Elyse, which she’s been faithfully recording since 2017. That’s it.
Now, I have watched two (2) episodes to fill in for Elyse, prompting the following questions:
- Why are they four hours long?
- Why are they on two subsequent nights sometimes?
- Why on sequential nights or on four hour nights are they stretching out TWENTY FIVE TOTAL MINUTES OF FOOTAGE into an interminable length of time?
- Will my acute secondhand embarrassment survive this? (Answer: Barely)
I’m familiar enough through cultural osmosis and editorial work that I can converse about the show, but what I really love is listening to other people who are fans talk about why they love it – and what makes them want to scream.
So when I received an email from Ilana Masad and Stevie K. Seibert Desjarlais introducing this anthology, I was EXTREMELY ON BOARD. Why?
As they put it:
In 2020, we realized that although the fandom of The Bachelor is the entire reason the show–with its historically retrograde politics and lack of diversity–continues to exist, relatively little had been written about or by the fandom. We set about correcting that and filling that gap and the result is an anthology with nearly 30 contributors–longtime fans, cultural critics, and fellow Bachelor Nation members–writing about the messy, emotional, funny, and sometimes frustrating reasons why viewers keep showing up season after season.
Like the romance genre, romance reality TV (like a lot of media consumed primarily by women) is stereotypically considered to be trashy and/or for airheads–technically, there’s nothing wrong with trash TV or airheads. However, the fact is that millions of people engage with reality TV in meaningful and diverse ways. The Bachelor franchise, as one of the longest-running dating shows, has amassed fans from all corners of life who hold a plethora of identities and have a multitude of reasons for watching the show….
The Bachelor franchise’s fandom is a rich space for discourse on culture, race, sexuality, gender, human behavior, and community.
FINE. JUST EMAIL ME WITH A PILE OF MY CATNIP WHY DON’T YOU.
My episode with Ilana and Stevie is up now, but I also wanted to review this anthology to make sure you (hi!) know about it.
Holy crap is it good.
The essays are like scalpels equipped with magnifying glasses, dissecting and examining at The Bachelor franchise from every possible angle. Each contributor brought a fascinating perspective and pretty much made my brain explode as if someone put Pop Rocks on hot popcorn and drank a Diet Coke spiked with Mentos. It was a mess – a very enjoyable mess. I took so many notes.
Amanda and I have discussed on the podcast the challenge of reviewing an anthology, and this is no exception. I want to mention every essay, and share what I learned from each contributor, but that would be overkill and honestly, what I want to talk about may be very different from what you discover in this collection. These are writers who discuss media literacy skill development, tensions about gender, race, and hierarchical expectations, and beauty standards.
And much like romance lately, The Bachelor franchise and discussions thereof have become very mainstream, especially with the cross-pollination of other reality tv programs and the disastrous casting of Taylor Frankie Paul. This collection does for The Bachelor what we try to do with romance: explore and explain its importance as a cultural entity, while also offering criticism and condemnation when warranted.
Jeanna Kadlec’s essay “White Picket Cage,” which I am still thinking about, examines the evangelical Christian coded messages within the show:
Watching that first night of limousine arrivals and catfighting over cocktails, I had a strange out-of-body sort of experience, like I was watching an alternative version of my former life. I was stunned at how Christian-coded the show was in its treatment of gender roles and relationship expectations, and how hypocritical; for example, the show is belligerently insistent on ignoring the fact that contestants are in an open relationship with the lead while professing traditional values. (emphasis mine)
Apparently I’m one of the last people to recognize the polyamorous construction of the show; Ilana Masad emailed me a link to her March 2018 article in Playboy Magazine titled, “How ‘The Bachelor’ Franchise Celebrates Polyamory.” (Web archive link)
Kadlec’s essay also locates the growing popularity of the show within the evolving political and historical contexts of the time, and writes,
“I’ve come to treat The Bachelor properties as a temperature check of where the white evangelical movement is, and I take heart that, while reactionary Trump policies are flourishing, this show and others like it are dying.”
This concept of a ‘temperature check’ is echoed in other essays; in our interview, Ilana Masad said that for her, the show is a measure of “where heterosexuality is at in this country.”
Other essays I am still thinking about include Alana Hope Levinson’s “Pick Me (Or Don’t)” in which she explores the idea of being ‘chosen’ (or, conversely, not chosen to leave the show), and what that means for some of the contestants in terms of fame, wealth, status, and relative security. One unspoken “reason” for many contestants’ participation is upward social and economic mobility, especially for the women. Some former contestants have married professional football players, billionaire pastors, or other wealthy individuals:
“…it pays to not get picked; these rejected pick-mes actually ended up winning in the long run. There’s a lesson in there somewhere—that being picked by a shitty guy is actually worse for you.”
I love how this echoes Elyse’s repeated assertion that none of the contestants actually want to win The Bachelor; they want to last long enough to go on a cool vacation paid for by the network, and establish enough of a following on IG that they can parlay their Bachelor experience into an influencer career.
Prior podcast guest Sophie Vershbow’s essay, “Falling Out of Love with The Bachelor” focuses on her own relationship with the show, and with on the online community of Bachelor Nation that would watch and tweet about the show while it aired, an example of a live monoculture community event, now increasingly rare.
She parallels her own evolving perspective about relationships against the stubbornly unchanging format of the show, chronicling the growth of her own perspective from “I wanted a man to choose me so my life could begin, even if that man was so obviously the wrong one” to realizing that The Bachelor is “…a franchise peddling the uninvestigated marriage fantasy, often among people too young to have fully-formed prefrontal cortexes.”
“These are people who want to get married, not who want to marry each other as an expression of their love, which is the only kind of marriage I now have any desire for.
I only got to see how full my adult life could be without a romantic partner because circumstance gave me the time and space needed to build a happy life on my own, and I’m often left thinking of all the women whose circumstances turned those bad relationships into worse marriages that stole far more than four years from them. The women who go on The Bachelor shows seem primed for the latter….”
There are so many compelling essays and perspectives in this anthology, and I am still pondering most of them. Like, all the time.
If you’ve ever thought about how The Bachelor continues to have a strange hold on American culture after over 25 years, you’ll find really smart people talking about many, if not all, of the fascinating reasons why.
smartbitches_feed) wrote2026-05-07 08:00 amOn Reviews and What Makes Them Useful
For those of you who have had the pleasure of being edited by Head Smart Bitch Sarah, you’ll know that she’s a master at drilling down to the core of things – distilling language so that it accurately reflects your feelings on a book and, more importantly, the reasons for those feelings so readers can assess for themselves if that book is a good fit for them.
Ed.note: thank you!
While I am a reviewer on the site, I’m also a reader of the site. I recently started working my way through Sherry Thomas’s historical romance back catalogue. I listened to the Lady Sherlock stories on audio a couple years back and really enjoyed them, so I was curious about her more romance-forward books.
I started with The Luckiest Lady in London. Once I finished the book, I searched the site for past reviews to see what had been said about it as I thought about my own experience with this romance. There were five reviews! Three RITA reader reviews, one guest review and one by Carrie. A wealth of thoughts for me to devour!
Four of the five reviews gave the book an A while Carrie landed on a C+.
Shari, one of the reviewers, made a salient point here: “Sometimes a book can go from just good to fantastic because of the particular state of mind you are in when you read it”. Good reviews are able to push past that simple ‘love’ into the nitty gritty of ‘why’, and our reviewers certainly do that.
Before I dive into a review of the literature, dearests, the blurb:
Felix Rivendale, the Marquess of Wrenworth, is The Ideal Gentleman, a man all men want to be and all women want to possess. Felix himself almost believes this golden image. But underneath is a damaged soul soothed only by public adulation.
Louisa Cantwell needs to marry well to support her sisters. She does not, however, want Lord Wrenworth—though he seems inexplicably interested in her. She mistrusts his outward perfection and the praise he garners everywhere he goes.But when he is the only man to propose at the end of the London season, she reluctantly accepts.
Louisa does not understand her husband’s mysterious purposes, but she cannot deny the pleasure her body takes in his touch. Nor can she deny the pull this magnetic man exerts upon her. But does she dare to fall in love with a man so full of dark secrets, anyone of which could devastate her, if she were to get any closer?
Although be warned, Pam G alerted that “prospective readers will need to ignore the cover copy as it is kind of misleading if not downright deceitful.” A personal bug bear of mine – misleading cover copy.
But on to the meat of the reviews …
Several reviews commended the writing (brava, I agree!) Patricia described herself as a “sucker for a really well phrased sentence, a bon mot of a sentence” and Thomas delivers that in spades. Pam G agreed, saying ‘There is just something so clean, controlled, and precise in her use of language. Even her prepositions are perfect. That is not to imply that her writing is stodgy or overly formal. Her descriptions are sumptuous without being wordy, she uses imagery and metaphor like a poet, and her work never seems to contain any repetitive verbal junk.”
The premise is pretty simple and straightforward. Pam G described the story as “deceptively simple”. Lulu concurred saying, “Sherry Thomas is a master at creating beautiful things from simple ingredients. She begins with rather ordinary themes and characters, in this case a rich man meeting and marrying a poor girl … Thomas then adds great dialogue and human frailty, and creates entrancing stories that are completely addictive.” Note, the great dialogue came up in all five reviews!
For Lulu, as Louisa and Felix interact with one another, “so commences an interchange of forward and feint, nuance and coercion. Thomas builds the relationship between Louisa and Felix brilliantly. They are loveable, imperfect creatures brought to life through their actions.”
Lulu’s claim of ‘lovability’ is one of the hot topics in these reviews. I was asking myself a similar question: are both characters lovable? Louisa, certainly. But Felix?
For Carrie and Pam G, Felix was a sticking point. Pam G said, “At more than one point the reader will want to reach into the pages and beat the crap out of Felix. After the initial piece of cruelty, the relationship recovers in a superficial manner, but, later on, another time bomb explodes and demolishes the fragile understanding they manage to reconstruct” For Carrie, she “felt distressed, and frustrated and worried, and never did believe the happy ending.” And it all hinged on Felix’s cruelty: “Felix is so horrified at the realization that he has fallen in love with Louisa that he gives her all kinds of confusing signals and at one moment treats her with absolutely unforgivable emotional cruelty. I’m not past that moment, as a reader. I don’t believe Louisa is past it, as a character. I think Sherry Thomas made Louisa get past it.”
Why were our other reviewers able to get past Felix’s cruelty while for Carrie it was a dealbreaker? Carrie herself has the answer, “I have no personal trigger greater than the idea of someone treating another person with great warmth and then suddenly, with no warning or explanation, becoming utterly cold, while maintaining that nothing is wrong.”
This is by no means an exhaustive comparison of the reviews of this story. A lot more could be said about just the dialogue!
But that isn’t my purpose. I wanted to look for similarities between the reviews and where there were differences, I wanted to see how they were handled by the reviewer. I wanted to see where I fell on the spectrum of these reviews. Certainly there had been moments for me where Felix’s cruelty made me flinch IRL. It’s unspeakable, some of it.
Like the reviewers, I was enamoured with the dialogue and the description and the writing in general. I adored Louisa and even liked Felix. Partly because I so WANTED to see the good in Felix and WANTED to like him, I was able to put to one side those flashes of cruelty and instead focus on the rest of his character. I think in the end, I land at about a B+.
Reading and comparing reviews for a book I’ve just finished was a good reminder of the importance of ‘why’ in a review: why did the reader assign that grade? Why did they like or dislike certain elements? It’s fair and well to love or hate a book, but if I don’t know why the reader felt that way, I have no idea whether the book will be a good fit for me or not.
I’m often frustrated by superficial reviews that don’t articulate the reasoning for an opinion about a book, and the exercise of looking in the SBTB archives brought home for me just how important sites like these and the longer narrative reviews are for readers like me who need more in-depth reviews. I want nuance. I want discernment. I want REASONS.
TL;DR Long may sites like this one live on to serve readers thoughtful, considered reviews.
What about you? What do you want in a review? A lot of detail? A short summary? Are you as obsessed with REASONS for opinions as I am? What reviews do you gravitate toward?
The reviews for The Luckiest Lady in London by Sherry Thomas
svgurl) wrote2026-05-06 11:14 pmwip meme
maevedarcy, who came up with it. Rules: post the names of all the files in your WIP folder regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. Let people comment with the title that most intrigues them and then post a little snippet of it or tell them something about it!
My WIPs
-platonic hanahaki (eddie & christopher)
-(what if we) rewrite the stars (buddie/eddie musician au)
-it's easy to pretend (that we don't have something real) (clois fake dating)
-i'm superwoman (clois role reversal)
-hallmark au (lois/lana)
-i'm not yours (but i want to be) (clark/oliver amnesia/fake engagement)
-pining social media (hollanov)