The Worst Bestsellers

It’s been a scary year, so we returned to the loving embrace of Our Lady Nora Roberts. Even though her 1992 novel Divine Evil is about a Satanic cult, we still felt safe in the small town of Emmitsboro, especially with our returning guest, Christine . Listen to this podcast on the long drive back to your charming hometown from the Big City. Content warning:  This book contains sexual assault...

  We teamed up with Anna and Alene of the Bellwether Friends again! We reconvened the Worst Best Friends to discuss the important topic of Bridgerton. Not the Netflix series, but one of the books that inspired it– The Duke and I by Julia Quinn . Unfortunately, the book is neither as horny nor as diverse as the series, but we persevered. Listen to this episode to drown out the sound of y...

Announcement : On Wednesday, March 31st at 8PM Eastern, we’ll be doing a virtual live show presented by Porter Square Books ! Our very special guest Margaret H. Willison will join us to discuss Didn’t See That Coming by Rachel Hollis (aka Girl, Wash Your Divorce ). The event is free and will be recorded and archived if you can’t make it on the 31st. Register here!  

  Remember the Left Behind series? Did you know it also had a middle grade spinoff series about what would happen to the ungodly children who were left behind when their parents were Raptured? Well: it did, and we read book #1, The Vanishings by Jerry B. Jenkins & Tim LaHaye , along with our sisters in our cult club, Ashley and Grace . Listen now if you want to be saved! Announcement:  Wo...

  You’re not dreaming–we did read a bestseller that’s widely considered to be “good,” The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler . We teamed up with Amanda and Geoffrey from the podcast Dirt Cheap to investigate:  is it actually a good book? Who is the murderer? Where can a guy find some good pornographic material in this town? Listen to this episode on your next stakeout...

We’re back from our hiatus! We spent the off-season training hard so we’d be better at *checks notes* Exy, the cool co-ed sport favored by characters in The Foxhole Court by Nora Sakavic . We were joined by Rachel and Adrienne of the podcast After Adult to read the first novel by this self-published superstar. Listen to this episode while doing your fake sports warmups. Good hustle! Co...

In more precedented years, we’ve picked our favorite and least favorite books that we read each year outside of the podcast. But in 2020, we were too busy just trying to get through the year to do much recreational reading. Instead,  Kait and Renata convened to discuss the top ten things that helped each of them make it through this year. Tune in to hear us discuss all of these things, and k...

  Per the request of our wonderful Patreon patrons , our editor Becca joined us to discuss the anti-drug cautionary tale Go Ask Alice by Anonymous (aka Beatrice Sparks ). Reading it in 2020, we’re not sure what’s harder to believe: that this ever deterred anyone from using drugs, or that anyone ever believed it was actually the diary of a human teenager. We’re grateful to ou...

Like a newborn vampire, we’re always thirsty for more supernatural teen drama around here. We turned to a finely-aged vintage, The Awakening (Vampire Diaries #1) by L. J. Smith , and we were thrilled to be joined by Lily Sparks ( @lilyroro ), author of non-vampire, but still high stakes, YA novel Teen Killers Club . Join us as we extoll all the ways L. J. Smith’s teen vampires are cool...

We read a semi-fictional, semi-self-published, completely bonkers book about the inner workings of the reality show Model Muse which is, of course, legally distinct from the long-running reality show America’s Next Top Model. Bestselling author and ANTM superfan Mackenzi Lee joined us to discuss The Wig, The Bitch, And The Meltdown by Jay Manuel . Readers advisory :  Here. Footnotes:  Episod...

It’s spooky season, so we revisited a classic of our childhoods: Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn . It was a nice change of pace to read a competently-written book, so we had to spend most of our time raging against the poor parenting on display in this book. Our guest Rebecca Mahoney ( @cafecliche )’s debut novel, The Valley and the Flood , comes out in February 2021, so lis...

We read The First Time: Finding Myself and Looking For Love on Reality TV by Colton Underwood with our special guest Rebecca Kim Wells ( @RebeccaWriting ), Bachelor fan and the author of Shatter The Sky and Storm The Earth . If you didn’t already know (or guess from the title), Colton was a contestant on The Bachelorette and later a Bachelor who famously told the world via reality television...

There’s a lot that’s bad about 2020, but hey, we’ve made it to our 6th anniversary! We are feeling extremely #blessed that Stephenie Meyer saw fit to release Midnight Sun just in time for this momentous occasion. Even so, we indulged in some day drinking with our very first guest Carrie to get through this book. We’re planning to record a sober Q&A follow-up episode, so...

Think of the saddest thing you can imagine. No, sadder. Make it fifty times sadder. Okay, you are in the vicinity of comprehending the levels of tragedy porn Wally Lamb has packed into his novel  I Know This Much Is True . Because life in 2020 wasn’t already sad enough, and because  some of us love Mark Ruffalo, we brought Arielle back to discuss this peak 90s Oprah’s Book Club pick. C...

Did you ever wonder what Special Agent Dana Scully was like as a teenager? Did you assume she was probably really into taking classes at her small town’s extremely popular New Age shop? No? Well, she was, and meanwhile also the government was doing some kind of shadowy experiments with unknown goals. That’s according to The X-Files Origins: Devil’s Advocate , an X-Files YA preque...

Flashback Summer 2020 draws to an end with a return to the 90s, which contains within it a return to the 1940s. Our mysterious guest M joined us to read Ground Zero by Kevin J. Anderson , an X-Files tie-in novel. Come along with us on an X-File unbound by the production costs of a weekly television show, as Mulder and Scully suddenly gain the jurisdiction to investigate nuclear ghosts in glamorous...

In an extremely exciting Flashback Summer, we were joined by S. Jae-Jones (aka JJ , aka the New York Times-bestselling author of Wintersong and Shadowsong ) to read Redwall by Brian Jacques ! Well, it was exciting to talk to JJ. The book itself was…less exciting, although it did raise some questions about how the food chain works in the world of Redwall. Listen on your next journey by horse...

Maybe it would be easier to practice social distancing if you knew that someone could literally freeze you solid with a single touch? It’s a theory worth exploring, as our pandemic edition of Flashback Summer continues with Freeze Tag , a Point Horror title by the 90s queen of teen thrillers, Caroline B. Cooney. With our guest Trina ( @TrinaMareena ) we dug into the story of the ultimate ice...

Say hello to your friends! As Flashback Summer continues, we revisited the small, child-friendly town of Stoneybrook. We read Mallory and the Trouble With Twins by Ann M. Martin with returning guest Liz. Join us on a walk around the mall (remember malls?), where we discuss ear piercing, afterschool snacks, and the moral fortitude it takes to identify as a Mallory.

Flashback Summer is off to the races! Well, kind of. We eventually got to the races after a long slog through the wilderness. We read The Black Stallion Revolts by Walter Farley with returning guest Carrie. It's the classic story of a horse and a horse boy. And a crime boy. Well, we're still waiting for the fingerprint analysis to exonerate the crime boy. Listening to this episode might just cure...

It's our 150th episode, and to kick off our 4th Flashback Summer, we asked to hear from you, our listeners. We loved hearing about everyone's childhood favorite books and sharing a little bit about ours.

Bad news: A Werewolf in Riverdale by Caleb Roehrig is not a tie-in to the CW show Riverdale, but rather to the town of Riverdale from the Archie comics. Well--from the Archie Horror comics. Good news: we once again teamed up with J. and Collision from I Don't Even Own a Television to tackle the big questions raised by this novel, most importantly: did you know that Jughead's little hat is called a...

We like X-Men. Our guest Anna (@lcarslibrarian) likes Star Trek. So we thought it would be fun to read the Star Trek: The Next Generation/X-Men crossover novel Planet X by Michael Jan Friedman. But it turns out that this exhausting crossover novel spends most of its time focused on a new character who isn't particularly connected to either franchise. Set your phasers for "none" and don't read this...

When the going gets tough, the tough get to reading cozy cat mysteries. We read The Fast and the Furriest by Sofie Ryan, the story of a small coastal town plagued with murder and antiquers. Our opinions were split--Renata liked the cat but not the murder, Kait liked the murder but not the cat, and Duarte just hopes that feline detectives are paid a fair wage. Listen to this episode at a safe socia...

Katharine McGee's novel American Royals dares to ask: what if the United States had a royal family? And what if the modern-day American royal children were a little bit horny? The Bellwether Friends, Anna and Alene, joined us to discuss this book's baffling structure, insufficient world-building, and potential Wawa sponsorship.