We Know How to Read

We are very excited to announce our Dragon Season! This author interview season will be paired with our read-along of Onyx Storm. Every other Wednesday, we will release a They Know How to Write with one of our amazing authors! This week we had an AMAZING time with Judy Liu; author of The Vending Portal. Her debut novel is a sci-fi dystopia for middle and high school students, but young adults woul...

We have been keeping this a secret, we wanted to surprise you this Valentine's Day with what we like to call the latest Shadow Daddy!  Happy Valentine's Day from us, we hope you enjoy our thoughts, comments, and review of QuickSilver by Callie Hart. Book one in the series, Callie brings us; KingFischer, a broody fae male with dark magic, a bad temper, and oh-so easy to love! 

Welcome back! SPOILERS this is a spoilers series. We will be going into detail about the chapters of Onyx Storm in each episode. This week we head into the true beginnings of Onyx Storm as the plot thickens, players are making their first moves and we are learning A LOT! Everyone has secrets this time and the key is to who to tell and when to reveal. We absolutely love diving farther into the chap...

We are very excited to announce our Dragon Season! This author interview season will be paired with our read-along of Onyx Storm. Every other Wednesday, we will release a They Know How to Write with one of our amazing authors! Starting off the Dragon season with the talented Allie Shante! An avid author of romance, fantasy, and BIPOC characters we all fall for, her series Living Legends will do ju...

SPOILERS this is a spoilers series. We will be going into detail the chapters of Onyx Storm in each episode. This week we start off the sensational book three with a prologue and chapters 1 through 8. Going through and annotating, tabbing, and more we have stumbled across many memorable moments that we must talk more about! Come back next week for an author interview with Elisa Kova! 

Spoilers!! In this episode, we are excited to go down the rabbit hole of Onyx Storm predictions. Some of these are cannon, some are a possibility, and some are just straight chaos theory! Hopefully, you enjoy or descent into madness as we are days away from Onyx Storm being released and all our theories are proven right or wrong. What do you think will happen next for Violet and Xaden?

We reread and summarized Iron Flame so you didn't have too! Onyx Storm is just days away so now is the time to lock in and review the text! Today is just a detailed summary of the events of Iron Flame so we can all go into reading Onyx Storm ready to pick up where Violet and Xaden left off. Not that any of us could forget THAT ending! Come back tomorrow for Onyx Storm Theories! 

As we are well into 2025 we have had time to reflect on 2024, our reads, our reviews, and our top 12 books of the 2024 year! Enjoy or chaotic list of best reads for 2024. Let us know if you've read them AND what books were in your top 5 for 2024 so we can read them this year! We are very excited for our new reading goals for 2025.

Welcome to our annual holiday season series, They Know How to Write, where we interview authors for the holidays. This week we have V.B. Lacey, author of  Elementals of Iona duology: It is a captivating fantasy adventure set in a world where beings wield the powers of earth, water, fire, and air. With richly developed characters and a plot full of suspense and enchantment, the series explores the...

Welcome to our annual holiday season series, They Know How to Write, where we interview authors for the holidays. This week we have Hillary Raymer, author of  Starstorm Series: A spicy romantasy series of eight interconnected books following each of the Starstorm siblings, set in a world where marriage is required but love isn't always guaranteed. Full of magic, love, banter, and emotional damage....

Welcome to our annual holiday season series, They Know How to Write, where we interview authors for the holidays. This week we have Shania Scichilone, author of Fates Divine Series. An author with many talents weaves a supernatural, fantasy, and adventure in her books, starting with A Fate of Smoke and Ash. This Young Adult novel is great for those who wish to read witches, dark fantasy, and suspe...

Welcome to our annual holiday season, They Know How to Write where we interview authors for the holidays. We are starting our season with the talented Kate St. Clair, author of Ptolemy. She is an advocate for education through fiction, and works with young writers through various #OwnVoices and underserved youth groups. She loves speaking on the topics of mental health, Queer characters, and addre...

Welcome back to our Stacks on Stacks series, a once-a-month book club. We started this to help us conquer that never-ending TBR, talk more with you, and abbreviate it as “S.O.S.” because yes send help! We will never finish our TBR at this rate!! We announce our “SOS” read at the beginning of each month, inviting you to read, listen, and talk with us on Instagram or Discord about that month's "SOS"...

Let the trials begin! This week we are putting Romance to the test in the following categories first impressions, design, writing style, general plot, characters, and our critical and enjoyment scores. In one corner for men, we have Thunderstruck by Carter Blake, and in the other corner for the women is Jackson by Nyssa Kathryn. Carter Blake writes novellas about steamy alpha romances. Nyssa Kathr...

Welcome back to our Stacks on Stacks series, a once-a-month book club. We started this to help us conquer that never-ending TBR, talk more with you, and abbreviate it as “S.O.S.” because yes send help! We will never finish our TBR at this rate!! We announce our “SOS” read at the beginning of each month, inviting you to read, listen, and talk with us on Instagram or Discord about that month's "SOS"...

Welcome to our TROPE-tastic summer series season finale! Wrapping up this whirlwind of a summer with the good, the bad, the ugly, and the fun of tropes. This final episode goes into the tropes you can't avoid because they are the genre! Yes, we are getting into it today on the podcast. Come back tomorrow for our Stacks on Stacks episode and next week for Trial of the Tomes!

Continuing our discussion from last week, are tropes bad?  Bad for marketing? Bad for the reader? How do tropes impact reader experience, marketing, and more in the book community? We talk about how we see the impacts of tropes in the publishing and reading world. 

We put tropes under the microscope to see what they really are and are they good? How do tropes impact reader experience, marketing, and more in the book community? We talk about how we see the impacts of tropes in the publishing and reading world. 

Microtropes that have a chokehold on us - enough said! This week we are getting to the subcategory of tropes with all our favorites! The TROPE-tastic summer episode gets wild with these micro tropes, mainly in fantasy romance, but across all genres. 

Welcome to our TROPE-tastic summer series! This series will follow what is a trope, why do we use tropes, are tropes good or bad, how do they impact book marketing, the reader experience, and some tropes you just can't avoid. This week we are focusing on the 'What' is a trope: a word completely synonyms in the community at this point, but what is it? Find out on this week's episode! 

Welcome back to our Stacks on Stacks series, a once-a-month book club. We started this to help us conquer that never-ending TBR, talk more with you, and abbreviate it as “S.O.S.” because yes send help! We will never finish our TBR at this rate!! We announce our “SOS” read at the beginning of each month, inviting you to read, listen, and talk with us on Instagram or Discord about that month's "SOS"...

We love fanfiction, we love fiction, but do we love fanfiction turned fiction? What are the implications on publishing rights, the community space, and over all the impression fanfiction is giving others. We concluded our series with a more critical view on the rise of fanfiction turned fiction, how that impacts fanfic readers and non, plus more. The series really reflects on how important fanfict...

Did you know you are reading fanfiction? Some of these we all know and love to talk about BUT some of these were a complete surprise. We discover fandoms that have left the fanfiction world, breaking the 4th wall into trad publishing, and now are on the bookshelves today. We love them, we hate them, and we are excited to see fanfiction outside of the community because say it louder for those in th...

We went to Imaginarium Book Festival!! We are excited to share our stories, author meet-and-greets-, book hauls, and more with you all. This is our second year and for sure an annual trip for us! We met so many wonderful authors, said hi to author friends, and made new friends. Imaginarium was a blast with many laughs and memorable moments we wanted to share with you.

We are fans of fanfic! If you all didn't already know that! This mini-series of three episodes focuses on fanfiction turned fiction and the impacts of fanfiction culture, fiction publication, the ethical side, and more. This week we are doing a brief history of fanfiction, terms, words directly taken from Internet writing culture, and how they are making their way into mainstream fiction. Our Stac...