WEEK: 3/3/2025 - 3/8/2025

As you all saw last week, I will be putting out an interest form for authors who may be interested in content pulls, buying advertisement space on the website as another way to promote your dark romance book and even allow Library of Angels to host your Virtual Release Day Launch Party that will come with it’s own website landing page!

If you are interested for now, you can send me an inquiry via the contact page. If you happen to have more services that you would like to see done on the site, then you are welcome to submit that in the inquiry form as well!

Also, if you are here, then you get an early notice that Library of Angels will be opening our REP Applications on Friday, March 14th. Please note, that an incomplete application will not be considered. I look forward to sharing the details of the search with all of you very soon!!

What am I reading this week?

HAPPY RELEASE DAY TO AUTHOR A.X. Cole!!! This book is absolutely phenomenal and truthfully, I cannot get enough of these characters. I will have a review coming so soon for you all and I cannot wait to share my thoughts, but also my memes.

This week I will also have another review coming for a book that released last week and I think you guys will like this one as well. It is Nevermore by Jade Hernandez and the MMC, Fabian Cuervo, is definitely one of my top 5 book boyfriends.

Influencer Spotlight:

I know it seems like every week I’m changing the layout or sections of my What This Week Posts, but please bare with me lol! I’m hoping this is one of the last changes. Instead of having a Bookstagram, Booktok, and Booktube spotlight, I’m just going to do one person a week and showcase the app that I found them on!

This week’s spotlight goes to Teejay! I have been following her for so long on social media and what’s not to love about her content? Her bookshelf and mask collection are those of my dreams! I literally counted 27 masks, but I have a feeling she may have more than that LOL! She’s a dark romance giry though and through and I’m telling you she’s going to give you some of the prettiest looking reccs.

Author Spotlight

I was drawn to spotlight this author, M.J Byrne, because one of their series’ is called the NYC Triad and since I am a born and raised New Yorker, who loves dark romance, I just knew that I would have to read it soon!

Look at these absolutely awesome covers too! The Echoes of Fate series is also a why choose situation meaning she gets all the love interests!!!

New-to-Me Authors

My Kindle came in clutch for this week’s new-to-me authors. I am so stoked to be able to actually see dark romance books that I’ve neverr heard of populate in my Home section as recommended books! I love it here lol!

Bookish News This Week:

Harmful Stereotypes & Where They Belong

The trash. That’s where. Representation matters.

As humans, we inherently look for connection in the world around us. Readers especially find comfort in connection through their books. The books people read, no mater what race, religious background, creed, gender or sexual orientation they identify with, often offers an escape. They are windows into the world around us that don’t necessarily include our lived experiences. This not only offers perspective but a sense of community as well.

How characters that we don’t identify ourselves with, are portrayed in literature has a much larger impact on the world around us. Imagine this, as a Latina myself, I do not know the lived experience of a Black woman. When I read books with Black female leads, it often allows me to see bits and pieces of the Black women I know and love in those stories. The author does not know my friends or family memebers, and yet, I can see them in the words I read. I not only have appreciation for these portrayals, but when done right, I find even more love for a community of people in my life that mean so much to me.

Representation of characters from marginalized groups across the world deserve to be written in ways that don’t continue to perpetuate harmful stereotypes or minimize them down to what they fight against in their everyday lives. For example, in the last 24-48 hours we have seen the book community highlight a very popular author, Sophie Lark, as someone who minimized the experience of immigrants to the following quote “but shouldn’t there be a crew of people with questionable work visas picking these grapes for us?” As this quote was released during an ARC period, there is no way to know if the specification of questionable work visas was crucial to the overarching plotline of the book since it has not been officially released. However, since the author herself noted that her publisher advised her to remove the harmful lines, to which she willfully ignored, it might be safe to say that it wasn’t crucial at all.

The reason that this is so important for us to discuss as a community, is because readers of all different demographics have the potential to pick up a book and for the first time, experience what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes. And if the character is not of a marginalized group, but makes comments regarding such communities with little to no repercussions from the characters around them, it then enforces the idea that what was said is okay to say. This in turn, continues the cycle of regurgitating harmful rhetoric. Being racist, is not a character flaw and making racist or prejudiced statements is not okay in any capacity and not just because of our current political climate. If you’re focused on the idea of changing your wording simply because of the current political climate that means you’ve missed the fact that racism has stemmed from hundreds of years of oppression and is not a new phenomena to the year 2025.

I hope that as a community we continue to open these conversations to continue to express our discomfort or simply call out harmful language used in the books we know and love. These conversations have the potential to not only be eye-opening, but life changing for those who still have a lot to learn.

Booktube Videos of The Week

I’m gonna remove this section because 3 weeks in a row and no video recommendations for you guys is BONKERS lol!

What This Week! (Vol. 9 2025)