She’s about to turn their lives upside down…
On a freezing Seattle night, teenager Wynter shows up on Caleb’s doorstep in shorts and sandals, seeking sanctuary. Claiming to be his sister. The sister he never knew existed, standing there shivering in clothes wholly inadequate for the Pacific Northwest winter, with nothing but a backpack and a desperate hope that he’ll take her in ❄️
Caleb, Coast Guard hero with the perfect girlfriend, always plays by the rules. He practically raised his two brothers after their mother abandoned them, and his duty is clear: take his little sister in. But bringing Wynter into his carefully ordered life means confronting the past he’s worked so hard to leave behind—and questions about their mother he’s never been able to answer 🌊
Wynter has finally found home with her new family. Jesse, freshman science wiz and a legend in his own mind, takes on the momentous task of educating his sister. But is a physics lecture really what she needs? His enthusiasm is endearing, but Wynter’s scars run deeper than intellectual curiosity can reach 🔬
Indio, rebel with a sarcastic tongue to mask his pain, bonds with Wynter over rock music but he’s more interested in getting wasted than coming home for the weekend. He sees too much of himself in her damaged eyes, and it terrifies him. The connection they share is instantaneous but complicated—two wounded souls recognizing their reflection 🎸
Wynter is determined to wash away her abusive past, but she shares a wound with her brothers that never healed—the pain of their mother’s abandonment. And when these siblings are once again ripped apart, they realize that sometimes love is not enough. Family is messy, healing is non-linear, and the bonds between siblings can be both salvation and breaking point 💔
Why I’m including this: Sara Creasy writes family drama with raw emotional honesty, creating characters whose pain feels achingly real. This isn’t a fairy tale reunion—it’s a genuine exploration of trauma, belonging, and what it means to build family from broken pieces.
While on her deathbed, Emily’s grandmother offers up her biggest secret, leaving Emily with an abundance of unanswered questions. The revelation shatters everything Emily thought she knew about her family history and sets her on a path across the Atlantic. Her grandmother’s final words hint at an inheritance, a hidden past, and a life Emily never imagined 🌹
Seeking the truth, Emily finds herself travelling to England, comforted in the knowledge that her inheritance will allow her to live a pleasant life. The journey represents freedom, independence, and answers to mysteries that have haunted her family for generations. But English society proves far more complicated than she anticipated 🎭
Her world turns upside down though, when she finds out about the condition that dictates she needs to find a husband before her twenty-first birthday. The inheritance isn’t unconditional—it comes with strings attached by a grandmother who wanted to ensure Emily’s security in a world hostile to independent women. The clock is ticking, and suddenly her future depends on making an impossible choice 💎
Fate seems to be teasing her even further, as she soon finds her heart entrapped by the presence of a dashing lord. Lord Maximillian Camborne is a strong and independent man. Despite appearing calm and collected on the surface, a dark secret is hidden behind the reason he’s keeping everyone at distance. Rumours surrounding his wife’s death and a curse upon his home in Cornwall have left him with little to be joyful of, but the arrival of a mysterious young lady might be exactly the salvation he’s been looking for 👑
Will Emily manage to secure her fortune without risking her one chance at true love? As the deadline approaches, she must decide whether to marry for security or risk everything for a man haunted by his own demons. In Cornwall’s windswept cliffs and shadowed halls, Emily will discover that some secrets are worth losing everything to uncover 💕
What makes this special: Aria Norton combines Gothic atmosphere with Regency romance, creating a story rich with mystery, inherited secrets, and the tension between practical necessity and passionate love. Perfect for readers who enjoy Georgette Heyer with a darker edge.
She’s sworn off men. He’s too busy for love. But fate always gets the last laugh.
Left at the altar and on a honeymoon for one, park ranger Holly Bennett goes to NYC and accidentally witnesses a murder. The universe’s timing is impeccable—what were supposed to be romantic strolls through Central Park become hiding from killers in dark alleys. Her failed engagement is embarrassing enough without adding “murder witness” to her resume 🌲
Picking up the pieces of her failed engagement will be embarrassing enough. Now she’s supposed to do it with a grouchy city slicker glued to her hip? Hard pass. Holly wants to lick her wounds in private, lose herself in the wilderness she understands, and forget men exist for at least the next decade. Cole Robinson represents everything wrong with this plan 🗽
Big-city cop Cole Robinson is tasked with keeping Holly safe and must follow her to her small hometown to do it. If Green Valley Falls is a round hole, Cole is a square peg, and he finds himself quickly and thoroughly out of his element. No takeout, no subway, no anonymity—just trees, flannel, and a stubborn park ranger who seems determined to lose him in the woods at every opportunity 🌲
Stuck together against their will, Holly and Cole are forced to navigate uncharted territory—both emotionally and physically. The rough and tumble wilderness pushes them together, but their seemingly insurmountable differences threaten to keep them apart. She knows every trail, every bird call, every secret the forest holds. He knows how to survive cities, not mountains. Teaching a city cop to respect the wilderness becomes unexpectedly intimate 💚
Neither are looking for love. But will it hunt them down and find them anyway? Between dodging danger and navigating small-town life, Holly and Cole discover that sometimes the best relationships grow in the most unlikely soil—when two wounded people stop running from their fears and start running toward each other 💕
Here’s what you’re getting: Jamie Arras delivers fish-out-of-water comedy gold wrapped in genuine suspense and small-town charm. The wilderness setting adds unique flavor to the forced proximity romance, and both characters are healing from real wounds that make their connection feel earned and satisfying.
Humor Me: How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Happy
In his days as an exhausted fifth grade teacher during brutal Boston winters, Chris Duffy taught the funniest person he’s ever met: eleven-year-old Gary, who approached life with the kind of joyful irreverence most adults have forgotten. Gary was the school newspaper’s official food critic, blasting cafeteria pizza for looking like cardboard and opining that the baked beans weren’t “beany” enough—reviews that had students and faculty in stitches. These days, Duffy is a professional comedy writer and the host of a podcast with millions of listeners, but he’s never forgotten the transformative joy of laughing with Gary during that bleak winter. In Humor Me, he shares a road map for how to cultivate and strengthen a sense of humor in a challenging world that desperately needs more laughter. 😂
Duffy embarks on a journey that takes him from comedy clubs where timing is everything to emergency rooms where gallows humor keeps doctors sane to a helicopter full of Navy SEALs who use jokes as a survival mechanism and back to his own keyboard to reveal how—and why—a good laugh can bring us closer to the good life that ancient philosophers promised but couldn’t quite define. Drawing on personal stories that range from hilarious to heartbreaking, insights from the social sciences about why humans evolved to laugh, and the wisdom of comedians who’ve mastered the art of finding funny in darkness, Duffy offers practical strategies that anyone can use. 🎭
Between learning how to hone the art of noticing and finding humor in the most unlikely places (like TSA lines and dentist offices), understanding why you should take social risks to build connection through humor even when jokes might land awkwardly, discovering how to apply the comedy secret that laughs come in threes (setup, escalation, punchline—it’s neuroscience, not just tradition), and recognizing that laughter is both medicine and social glue, Duffy provides a blueprint for living lighter. For anyone who needs more joy, more connection, or just needs to remember that it’s okay to laugh even when the world feels heavy. 🌟
What makes this uplifting: Exhausted fifth grade teacher Chris Duffy teaching funniest person eleven-year-old Gary as school newspaper food critic blasting cafeteria pizza, now professional comedy writer and podcast host with millions of listeners never forgetting transformative joy of laughing during bleak Boston winter, sharing road map for cultivating and strengthening sense of humor in challenging world, embarking on journey from comedy clubs to emergency rooms to Navy SEALs helicopter revealing how good laugh brings us closer to good life, and drawing on personal stories with social sciences insights and comedians’ wisdom offering practical strategies including honing noticing art and taking social risks and applying comedy secret that laughs come in threes.
Anne of Cleves was the fourth wife in the succession of six unfortunate women who were married to Henry VIII—and usually, that’s all we remember about her. We remember the disastrous circumstances in which she came to England (a portrait that lied), the disgust of an ageing and ailing king who’d expected beauty and got something else, the distasteful remarks he made about Anne’s appearance (he called her a “Flanders Mare,” though historians now question if he actually said it), the discretion he lacked in courting her maid before the marriage was even annulled, and the disappointment she must have felt when she was cast aside for Henry’s fifth wife after just six months. Marrying the king made Anne a queen, if only briefly. And, unsurprisingly given its brevity, her queenship is often overlooked. Better known as Henry’s discarded bride, rarely is Anne seen as a queen who wielded influence. 👑
Scrutinizing every shilling in and out of her privy purse—the equivalent of following a paper trail of credit card statements and bank records—James Taffe closely examines Anne’s accounts to reconstruct her queenship and consider her missed potential as consort had Henry not been so fickle. Interpreting the almost indecipherable scrawlings of Anne’s clerks (Tudor accountants had terrible handwriting), from the manoeuvrings of her council to the fetching and feeding of her pet parrot (yes, she had a parrot, and the accounts show exactly what it ate), this book preserves the original manuscript text, transporting the reader into the archives and back to the sixteenth century with all its financial minutiae intact. 📜
Demystifying the Tudor court, the day-to-day running of Anne’s household both above-stairs and below-stairs is also exposed—revealing what queens actually spent money on, how many servants were required to maintain royal dignity, and what it cost to be queen even for six months. Between discovering that Anne maintained her own court after the annulment (she actually got the best deal of any of Henry’s wives), learning what a Tudor parrot’s diet consisted of, understanding how financial records reveal power dynamics, and recognizing Anne as a savvy political survivor rather than a victim, Taffe continues his obsession with the lives of the men and women behind the throne who history usually ignores. 💰
What makes this revealing: Anne of Cleves as fourth wife in succession of six unfortunate women married to Henry VIII, remembering disastrous circumstances coming to England with ageing ailing king’s disgust, distasteful remarks about appearance and casting aside for Henry’s fifth after six months, marrying king making Anne queen if only briefly with queenship often overlooked, James Taffe scrutinizing every shilling in and out of privy purse closely examining accounts to reconstruct queenship and consider missed potential as consort, interpreting almost indecipherable clerks’ scrawlings from council manoeuvrings to pet parrot fetching and feeding, and demystifying Tudor court exposing day-to-day household running above-stairs and below-stairs revealing what queens spent money on.
The brutal murder of Elizabeth Short—better known as the Black Dahlia—in 1947 has been in the public consciousness for nearly eighty years, spawning countless books, films, and theories, yet no serious study of the crime has ever been published that treats Short as a real person rather than a noir fantasy. Short has been mischaracterized as a wayward sex worker or vagabond drifting through Hollywood, and—like the seductive femme fatales of film noir—responsible for and perhaps deserving of her fate in a victim-blaming narrative that says more about 1940s misogyny than about Short herself. William J. Mann, however, is interested in the truth that’s been buried under decades of sensationalism. 💔
His extensive research reveals her as a young woman with curiosity and drive—not a doomed starlet but someone who leveraged what little agency postwar society gave her to explore the world beyond her small-town Massachusetts origins, defying draconian postwar gender expectations to settle down, marry, and have children before she’d lived. It’s time to reexamine the woman who became known as the Black Dahlia, not as a symbol or a cautionary tale, but as Elizabeth Short: daughter, friend, dreamer, human. Using a 21st-century lens that questions rather than accepts the victim-blaming narratives, Mann connects Short’s story to the anxious era after World War II, when the nation was grappling with new ideas, new demographics, new technologies, and old fears dressed up as new ones—particularly the fear of women who wanted independence. 🎬
Only by situating the Black Dahlia case within this changing world can we understand the tragedy of this young woman, whose life and death offer surprising mirrors on today’s society, where women’s bodies are still scrutinized, victim-blaming persists, and unsolved crimes against women often reflect how little we’ve changed. Between uncovering who Elizabeth Short really was beyond the tabloid headlines, examining why her murder captured the nation’s imagination (and why we’re still obsessed), understanding the postwar anxiety that shaped public response, and recognizing how her story reflects ongoing issues of violence against women and media exploitation, Mann finally gives Elizabeth Short the serious treatment she deserved seventy-eight years ago. 🌹
What makes this essential: Brutal murder of Elizabeth Short known as Black Dahlia in 1947 been in public consciousness nearly eighty years yet no serious study published, mischaracterized as wayward sex worker or vagabond and like film noir femme fatales responsible for perhaps deserving fate, William J. Mann interested in truth with extensive research revealing her as young woman with curiosity and drive leveraging little agency postwar society gave to explore world defying draconian gender expectations, time to reexamine woman who became Black Dahlia using 21st-century lens, connecting Short’s story to anxious post-WWII era grappling with new ideas and old fears, and understanding tragedy of young woman whose life and death offer surprising mirrors on today.