Category: Author’s Alley
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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…
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The Translator
He couldn’t read her moods from her face — a quirk of his own neurology he’d explained to her early on, matter-of-fact, no apology in it. Years of practice had taught him to compensate in other ways, mostly by listening more carefully than most people bothered to. “I won’t always catch it if you’re upset…
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The Late Bloomer
He’d been married before, briefly, decades ago, to someone wrong for him in ways that had taken years to fully understand. By the time he met Annika he was fifty-three, settled into a life he’d assumed was its final shape, no longer expecting anything to rearrange itself. It rearranged itself anyway. “I wasn’t looking,” he…
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Books That Feel Like Autumn: Cozy, Witchy, Romantic and Just a Little Unhinged
Because apparently the temperature drops three degrees and suddenly we require witches, yearning and a suspicious amount of cinnamon. Hey bestie, let me tell you what I discovered while building my autumn reading pile: I don’t actually want books that are set in autumn. I want books that feel like autumn. There’s a difference. Give…
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The Understudy’s Understudy
She knew his coffee order before she knew his last name. It was a small, accidental intimacy — she worked the counter at the café he stopped at every morning, and for three months he’d been “oat milk flat white, extra hot” before he was anything else. He’d asked her out the day she got…
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The Practice Fight
They’d had exactly one real fight in nine years, early on, about something neither of them could fully reconstruct afterward. It had frightened them both — not the disagreement itself, but the unfamiliar heat of it, the realization that they were capable of hurting each other if they weren’t careful. So they’d done something unusual.…
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No Time to Reread ACOTAR? Here’s What You Actually Need to Remember
Because five books, several courts and approximately nine thousand years of fae emotional baggage are a lot to keep in one human brain. Hey bestie, grab your coffee because I have been back down the ACOTAR rabbit hole, and I have news: you do not need to reread the entire series every time you realise…
