All Systems Red

Martha Wells

This book consumed me. Like utterly and epically, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I listened to the audiobooks, which were on audible plus, and I basically plowed through the entire series.

“As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure.”

The premise is simple: a security unit who’s part organic, part android, frees itself from its control chip and decides to watch soap operas all day. And do its job (barely).

This is coming out on AppleTV as a series soon starring Alexander Skarsgård and I am STOKED.

Prince and Pawn

Tavia Lark

I know I’ve recommended Tavia Lark before. She’s an incredible author who somehow always grabs me from the first few pages and makes it just impossible for me to drop any of her books. I end up desperately turning pages on my Kindle, hungry to find out what happens to these deliciously wounded boys.

Prince and Pawn is about the eldest son of the kingdom she’s been focused on for the previous two books. He ends up engaged to a kind of awful fiancé and so goes out for one last night of freedom before the engagement is finalized.

Where he meets Corin, an illegitimate son, raised in a brothel and the sort of character that makes me want to read 80,000 words just about his HEA.

This one delivers of surprise kinks that both characters enjoy.

A Psalm for the Wild Built

Becky Chambers

I’m going to be honest: this book is so gentle that it will make you feel desperately better if what you need is like… tea for the soul.

In a sci-fi future, a society realized that their robots were sentient so they let them go free rather than enslave them. Now the society exists in a social and ecological utopia.

This book follows a tea monk who meets the first robot to come out of the wilderness in decades. And their relationship is so gentle and so kind that I find myself revisiting favorite bits just when I need that sort of soothing in my own life.