Category: Author’s Alley
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The Grocery List
He sent her a photo of the grocery list every time he went, just to check if she needed anything added. He’d been doing this for four years. It had started as practicality and become, somehow, a ritual she looked forward to with a fondness entirely disproportionate to the act. Sometimes she added things. Sometimes…
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The September Reading Slump Is Real, Bestie. Here’s How We’re Getting Our Books Back
Because scrolling for 47 minutes and then claiming we had no time to read is getting suspicious. Can we have a tiny intervention? September arrives, everybody gets back into routines, and somehow reading is the first thing quietly sacrificed to the scheduling gods. School starts. Work gets serious again. Activities restart. The calendar suddenly looks…
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Chapter iv. Blood Recognizing Blood
You voted. Nesta and Cassian are telling Rhys and Feyre everything. This should go beautifully, provided nobody objects to concealed blood-oaths, ancient magical archives, or possible death before breakfast.… Cassian had walked into burning cities with less dread than he felt walking into this study. Nesta went first, as if she’d decided somewhere between the…
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The Light He Left On
He always left the porch light on when she worked late. Not because she’d asked. Not because the building was unsafe or the street was dark. Just because, he’d said once when she’d asked him about it, he liked the idea of her turning the corner and seeing it — that warm yellow square in…
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Forty Years In
They’d been married for forty-one years, and the question people always asked — usually young people, usually at weddings, usually slightly desperate for reassurance — was some version of: how do you make it last? Margit had stopped giving the easy answers years ago. The easy answers were true but insufficient: communication, compromise, shared values.…
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6 Low-Key Sexy Books to Read During the School Pickup Line
Hot enough to improve car line. Innocent enough that you won’t have to explain the cover to another mum. September means back to school, which means something very exciting happens to parents everywhere: we spend an absolutely ridiculous amount of our lives waiting in the car. Ten minutes until pickup. Twenty minutes outside ballet. Somehow…
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The Soft Landing
She panicked on planes. Had since a bad turbulence experience in her twenties, a fear that hadn’t faded with time the way she’d assumed it eventually would. Outi had been embarrassed about it for years, apologizing reflexively to every seatmate, every partner, every person unlucky enough to fly beside her during a rough patch of…
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The Long Game
They’d been best friends for eleven years before anything romantic happened, a fact that still occasionally made people laugh in disbelief when they heard it. “Eleven years,” people would say. “How did neither of you notice?” The truth, Joaquín had come to understand, was more complicated than not noticing. He’d noticed plenty, for years, and…
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Books Like ACOTAR for When You Need Magic, Romance and Men Who Are Clearly a Terrible Idea
Because finishing ACOTAR does not mean you’re suddenly ready to date fictional men with healthy communication skills. Hey bestie, let me tell you what I found while searching for books to fill the ACOTAR-shaped hole in our lives: we’re asking the wrong question. We keep searching “books like ACOTAR”, but what exactly does that mean?…
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Chapter iii. The Oath He Buried
Nesta didn’t move from the doorway. “Explain,” she said. “No deflecting. No heroic silence. What did you promise?” Cassian’s wings had gone rigid against his back, the way they did before a fight he didn’t want. On his inner forearm, the scar she’d traced a hundred times without asking about, the one she’d assumed belonged…
Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc 