Bodice Tipplers

Adam is a Jewish sub who's tired of seeing Christmas all over the place. Tate is a trans Daddy who's looking for somebody to take care of. In our annual December tradition of reading gay Hanukkah novellas, we present His for Hanukkah by Reese Morrison!

No real triggers in this book - it's very sweet. The only thing that might be upsetting is that Adam's anxiety, which is very realistic and may be too close to home for some people, and Tate's crappy family, which may also be too close to home for some people.

Happy New Year's, y'all!

We recorded this one in... September, maybe? Who knows! Life is weird these days! Anyway it's December and that's appropriate because this book has cabins! Spies! Amnesia! It's White Lies by Linda Howard!

He's... possibly her ex husband but probably not her ex husband and he's got amnesia and is in full body traction! She quit her high powered finance job because the FBI is paying her rent so she can let him grab her boobs! If that sounds bananapants you're right, it's bananapants! And honestly pretty good. Amnesia!

This book is mostly fine unless soap opera wackitude bothers you - it does have some mild sexual aggression and boner-pestering.

GOBBLE GOBBLE YO!

He's America's Farmer. She's America's Guilt. Together they are our tryptophan turd - Stella Bagwell's Their First Thanksgiving. Seriously, y'all, this book is awful. He gaslights her, she's got a white savior complex, every woman in his family puts a solid 80 hours of work into Thanksgiving for five people... it is a damned mess. We burned the book in protest. Do you know what it takes to get two librarians to participate in a book burning? NOW YOU DO.

The only real content warning for this one is a real "there won't be snow in Africa this Christmastime" situation even though a white dude totally wrote that Snows of Kilimanjaro book. And gross gender norms. And a truly ridiculous amount of pie.

We had a lot of fun talking with Denise Williams, author of The Fastest Way to Fall. If you'd like to purchase a copy, please consider doing it from Dog Eared Books, Denise's local independent bookstore in Ames, Iowa.

Britta didn't plan on falling for her personal trainer, and Wes didn't plan on Britta. Plans change and it's unclear if love, career, or both will meet them at the finish line.

Britta Colby works for a lifestyle website, and when tasked to write about her experience with a hot new body-positive fitness app that includes personal coaching, she knows it's a major opportunity to prove she should write for the site full-time.

As CEO of the FitMi Fitness app, Wes Lawson finally has the financial security he grew up without, but despite his success, his floundering love life and complicated family situation leaves him feeling isolated and unfulfilled. He decides to get back to what he loves--coaching. Britta's his first new client and they click immediately.

As weeks pass, she's surprised at how much she enjoys experimenting with her exercise routine. He's surprised at how much he looks forward to talking to her every day. They convince themselves their attraction is harmless, but when they start working out in person, Wes and Britta find it increasingly challenging to deny their chemistry and maintain a professional distance.

Wes isn't supposed to be training clients, much less meeting with them, and Britta's credibility will be sunk if the lifestyle site finds out she's practically dating the fitness coach she's reviewing. Walking away from each other is the smartest thing to do, but running side by side feels like the start of something big.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN to those who celebrate! We're continuing our Halloween tradition by bringing you another Anne Rice jam with Special Guest Dr. Claire! Last year we covered The Vampire Lestat and you should totally go back and listen to that one too. This time we didn't go for three hours - two and a half hours is not three hours. We got off the rails because quite frankly this book never even got on the rails. This book is a speedboat trying to use the train tracks. That's our excuse here.

The Queen of the Damned is, we all agreed, where the Vampire Chronicles went off the rails. It gets shaggy. It makes... somewhere south of narrative sense. It theoretically starts off where The Vampire Lestat leaves off (so if you want to know and you haven't read either, start with last year's podcast) but it actually takes half a book to get there. It has a bunch of ancient vampires and some baby vampires. It has crazy vampire mythology. It has some seriously dicey understandings of the developing world. It's bananas. Meet Akasha! She's the oldest vampire! She has dumb ideas! She's burning all the vampires. She burns most of them but the ones she doesn't burn talk a lot! Then a bog witch shows up and yanks her head clean off! End of book. See, Anne? That didn't need to be five hundred pages!

Content warnings - it's a vampire book so it's got all sorts of nonconsensual stuff going on but, like, even more so. It has people who Rice thinks are asexual because she doesn't understand the term. It has grooming. It has bananas racism.

Patreon alert! In November we'll be doing a Halloween Hangover episode for patreons only about the Queen of the Damned movie! Join now!

And as promised, don't forget to check out our show notes to see some international covers for this book at our website, www.bodicetipplers.com!

Welcome to spooky season, where we get ghosts in our brains that make us incapable of remembering the name of the book or half of the characters! So so sorry, "Ted"! OooooooOOOOOoooo spooooky! We love Halloween here at Bodice Tipplers so we decided to give you not one but two Halloween books - the first is Devil May Care by Elizabeth Peters. The second you'll have to wait to find out about - expect it at the end of the month.

Ellie is a young... what does she do again? Anyway a young lady engaged to a twit who housesits for her aunt. Donald is the neighbor's son. Some ghosts appear by various means and occupations. THE DEVIL IS THE DEVIL. I cannot stress enough how surprised I was by this - the actual devil makes an appearance in this book. Yes, that is a spoiler. Don't worry, I already told everybody I know. THE DEVIL. Ol' Splitfoot! Lucifer! The Adversary! So, implied is that it has the kind of witchcraft that most of the modern witches I know would not appreciate. Oh and there's some expected 70's homophobia and a lot of people talk about what's now the Washington Football Team. Mostly it's the actual devil. Just when you think these books hold no more surprises for you. That's when they get you. (And by they I suppose I mean Asmodeus and Beelzebub and Mephistopheles and....)

He's Brig McCord (no really), a Hatchet-scenario survivor, ex-soldier of fortune, and rancher. She's Johanna something or other, hot redhead-in-certain-lights and general doer of nothing in particular (except for, of course, big game hunting with her dad.) It's a tale of murder, mystery, and doing it - it's Ride the Thunder by Janet Dailey!

Content warnings for this include big game trophy hunting which is super gross, including some skinning and stuff, mild ravishing, a guy who's just an asshole to women including sex workers and anybody over the age of 25, and a father daughter relationship that doesn't seem to be incestuous or anything but it just kind of pings your Bad Dad radar. Oh and of course murdering murder. On the other hand, anti-content-warnings: no horses die and there's a gay character who isn't evil or funny, comes out in a nice scene to his sister, and then does not die.

We had the great pleasure of sitting down with Alison Cochrun to talk about her very buzzy book, The Charm Offensive. If you'd like to purchase a copy, please consider buying from Alison's local independent bookstore, Vintage Books! At this time there are signed copies available!

Dev Deshpande has always believed in fairy tales. So it's no wonder then that he's spent his career crafting them on the long-running reality dating show Ever After. As the most successful producer in the franchise's history, Dev always scripts the perfect love story for his contestants, even as his own love life crashes and burns. But then the show casts disgraced tech wunderkind Charlie Winshaw as its star.

Charlie is far from the romantic Prince Charming Ever After expects. He doesn't believe in true love, and only agreed to the show as a last-ditch effort to rehabilitate his image. In front of the cameras, he's a stiff, anxious mess with no idea how to date twenty women on national television. Behind the scenes, he's cold, awkward, and emotionally closed-off.

As Dev fights to get Charlie to connect with the contestants on a whirlwind, worldwide tour, they begin to open up to each other, and Charlie realizes he has better chemistry with Dev than with any of his female co-stars. But even reality TV has a script, and in order to find to happily ever after, they'll have to reconsider whose love story gets told.

If you're seeing two Navy Wife episodes in your aggregator, this is the one that doesn't have a bunch of weird audio problems! We couldn't figure out how else to make sure that people set to automatically download episodes would get the corrected version once we replaced the file - our apologies.

Life comes at you fast! When we recorded this episode focusing on the military and talking a great deal about our choices abroad we had no idea it was going to come out at the exact same time as our withdrawal from Afghanistan. Here are some ways to help people in Afghanistan and refugees arriving in the United States. If you served in Afghanistan, know that we're thinking about you and about how hard and complicated this is.

So! Debbie Macomber's Navy Wife, first in her Navy series. She's trying to cure her broken heart by moving cross country to sublet her brother's apartment! He's in love with the sea but is cockblocked by mechanical issues on an aircraft carrier! They get married after knowing each other for two weeks and guess what maybe that wasn't the world's best idea but USA! USA! USA! No major trigger warnings here except of course for American hegemony and the military industrial complex.

Oh and I promised you - military tiaras! Full mess dress in the 50's had tiaras for female soldiers, sailors, and Marines and you can see one here, from the Smithsonian.

Update: looks like the Navy just retired the tiara (along with the seriously cool boat cloak) as "optional" uniform accessories in 2016. Which is crazy because I promise you I'd wear it all the time. With the boat cloak. I'd be the flyest lady admiral-type you ever saw.

Update to update: looks like you can still tiara it up if you're wearing your NOAA Corps uniform! This is a boring PDF but I offer it as proof. AND NOW FOR THE WEATHER!

She's brought her masters' degree in performance piano and her new Trans Am to the bright lights big city Detroit to... engage in corporate espionage for her eighteenth cousin once removed. He's a 36 year old high flying executive with the world and all the women in it at his feet. Together they do crimes cry a lot have a gross 80's boss-secretary relationship.

This is obviously gonna have some content warnings. In addition to the urrrrgh of the whole workplace romance thing, there's also some child abandonment, some chucking kids into the Doberman enclosure, some ludicrous it's-a me, Mario! Italian stereotypes, some sexual callousness - the whole thing is kind of a mess. The biggest problem a lot of people will have with this is that she's presented as REALLY young. Younger than her chronological age. She keeps getting mistaken for a teenager. It does have good outfits though!

Check out our website for this one to see some international covers for this book, which are as usual amazing and also bananas!