*The thumbnail pic is not my cat. Instead, it is a pic of me as a cat in my preferred location and outfit of choice.
Time has lost all meaning. I float in a never-ending circuit of sofa, kitchen, laundry closet. Meals are made from remnants of other meals; a bizarre hot and cold buffet of Christmas leftovers and the occasional fruit and veg to ward off scurvy. The candy and chocolate wrappers fill the trash bin. It doesn’t rain but everything outside is cold and damp, covered in a fine mist. I haven’t done anything in days, and yet I am somehow out of clean clothes.
Instead of writing in my journal, taking down the recycling, or establishing a healthy sleeping cycle, I’ve been reading mindless, silly, bonkers smut. These books are a perfect brainless activity when it’s too cold and wet to do much outside except for the obligatory mandatory mental health walk and reconstituting different side dishes and mains into something resembling a meal for humans.
A Very Phoenix Christmas: A Phoenix Club novella (The Phoenix Club)
by CJ Bishop
I haven’t read any of the other books in this series. I got this book as part of Friday’s Stuff Your Kindle Day from romance bookworms as I wanted something smutty and Christmassy to wrap up the holidays and the end of the year.
CJ Bishop has a ton of books. I doubt that this is unusual, but I was shocked to discover they have over one hundred and twenty ebooks in the Kindle store.
This book brings together couples from several of Bishop’s other works. The men gather at The Phoenix Club strip club for a Christmas Eve bash. Some attendees are porn stars, most are strippers, and others have other unrelated jobs. This isn’t really important other than they all know or have heard of one another through the sex industry grapevine.
This was a sexy, fun little read. It took a turn at the end when it is discovered that one of the sex workers had been abused, which is not what I was expecting from such a silly and frothy read. However, it was a fun little novella that was a quick read when I wasn’t trying to keep the couples straight (har har) in my head.
A Swan for Christmas: A Winter Romance
by M.M. Wilde
Vic rescues Kellen from the side riverbank after Kellan was kicked out of his shifter swan herd. Kellan is weak, freezing, has no idea where he is, and is convinced Vic, a wolf shifter, is there to kill him. Kellan cannot shift from his human form, and is left unprotected in the snow. Vic rescues Kellan and takes him back to Vale Valley, his shifter/omegaverse small town haven.
Kellan is an outcast even among his own kind. He followed his brother and their group of criminal swan shifters from town to town until his brother pushed him out of a moving truck to get rid of him. Always neglected and abused, he clings to Vic and decides to make a new life Vale Valley.
Vic runs an inn and gets Kellan a job working there. They fall hard and fast, one thing leads to another, and they end up with a cross-shifter-species-hybrid-wolf-swan egg.
This was a ridiculous, silly, predictable, and mostly light read. It happens in the wintertime in a snowy mountain town so it’s Christmassy I guess? I don’t know. Either way, it was silly, fast, and provided a nice little brainless escape for a few hours.
