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Get Rec’d with Amanda – Volume 113
Apr. 26th, 2026 09:00 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
smartbitches_feedHello and welcome back!
In this edition, we have two very different mystery options. There’s also some cozy fantasy and non-fiction.
Have any book recommendations you’d like to pass along? Drop them in the comments!
The Gardeners’ Club
This certainly feels like Thursday Murder Club, but with a gardening club instead. It has an ensemble cast and is a standalone (for now!).
Gardening is dirty work—but should it be deadly? When a corpse turns up in the community greenhouse, Gill Swanley discovers her new hobby might be more dangerous than she imagined.
When Gill Swanley decides to take up gardening to fight a bad case of midlife malaise, she never expected it to become quite such a dangerous hobby.
Pushing herself to “get out there,” Gill picks herself up the secateurs and joins the Bromley Botanists. Here she finds a seven-strong group whose main agenda is how to win the coveted Golden Trowel for best community club of the year.
But when a dead body turns up in the community greenhouse, they suddenly have more serious matters to consider than victory. They must uncover whether their arch-rivals, Croydon, are taking things to another level or whether someone more dangerous is targeting their rag tag group.
Can they dig up the truth before someone else is left pushing up the daisies?
The Halfling’s Harvest
I saw this on a list of books for Stardew Valley fans. It’s a cozy fantasy and, while I love Stardew Valley and have sunk hundreds of hours into the game, I also know cozy fantasies aren’t quite for me. But they might be for you!
When pumpkins glow and cider flows, behold the harvest’s magic.
For most halflings, the annual harvest festival is a time to revel in life’s simple pleasures—hearty feasts, flowing wine, and warm hospitality. But for Marigold Bramblefoot, owner of the Dew Drop Inn and Vineyard, it’s the busiest—and most stressful—time of the year.
Juggling an inn full of quirky guests, preparing for the bustling festivities, and managing her vineyard would be enough to overwhelm anyone. But Marigold has her sights set on something bigger: winning first place in the annual wine competition and finally stepping out of her father’s shadow.
The only problem? Her rival, Darkroot Cellars, has dominated the competition for a decade thanks to the druidic magic behind their wines.
With her hands full and her heart set on success, Marigold must balance the chaos of the festival, a budding romance, and unraveling the vineyard’s hidden mysteries, all while discovering what it truly means to craft her own legacy. Because in Willowbrook, the harvest festival is more than a celebration—it’s a season for transformation, and Marigold’s is long overdue.
About the Welcome to the enchanting world of Tales of Aedrea, where small-scale stories, low-stakes adventure, and cozy fantasy come to life within an epic, high-fantasy realm.
The Iron Garden Sutra
I love scifi horror/mystery so much. It also doesn’t hurt that the marketing copy references two of my favorite scifi titles with “S. A. Barnes’s Dead Silence with a touch of Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built.”
Klara and the Sun meets S. A. Barnes’s Dead Silence with a touch of Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built in Nebula Award-winning author A.D. Sui’s darkly philosophical murder mystery, as a death monk and a team of researchers trapped onboard a spaceship of the dead encounter something beyond human understanding…
Vessel Iris has devoted himself to the Starlit Order, performing funeral rites for the dead across the galaxy, guiding souls back into the Infinite Light. Despite the comfort he wants to believe he brings to the dead, his relationships with his fellow Vessels are distant at best, leaving him reliant on his AI implant for companionship.
The spaceship Counsel of Nicaea has been lost for more than a thousand years. A relic of Earth’s dying past, humanity took the ship to the stars on a multi-generation journey to find another habitable planet yet never reached its destination. Its sudden appearance has attracted a team of academics eager to investigate its archeological history. And Iris has been assigned to bring peace to the crew’s long departed souls.
Carpeted in moss and intertwined with vines, Nicaea is more forest than ship. Skeletons are all that remain of the crew, and Iris’ religious rituals are met with bemusement by the scientists—and outright hostility by the engineer Yan Fukui. Determined to be more than just the curator of the dead, Iris tries to make himself useful to the team, desperate to form friendships.
But Nicaea’s plant life isn’t the only sentience to have survived in the past millennia. Something onboard is stalking the explorers one by one. And Iris with his AI enhancement may be their only hope for survival. . .
You’re So Strong
This is the only non-fiction title in the bunch and deals with grief, young widowhood, and suddenly becoming a single parent. She also has a great instagram account where she talks to and seeks advice from other widows.
“Vulnerable and slyly funny.”–Publishers Weekly
“You’re doing so well,” they tell you. “You’re so strong.”
Meanwhile, you’re standing in the middle of your living room, staring at a mountain of grown-man Legos, wondering if it’s disrespectful to donate them or insane to keep them.
You’re on hold with AT&T for the third time this week, trying to explain to a stranger that the account holder doesn’t need unlimited data anymore because he’s dead. You are holding it together on the outside, but on the inside, you are navigating a map that no one gave you, for a terrain you never wanted to visit.
Leslie Harter-Berg knows too well the absurdity of the “admin of death”–the paperwork, the passwords, the phone calls that punctuate the grief. She knows what it’s like to have a life that was “pretty darn good” implode into a reality of solo parenting and widowhood at the age of thirty. She knows exactly what it feels like to have to do school drop-off when simply getting out of bed seems insurmountable.
In this relatable, poignant, and funny memoir-meets-grief-guide, Leslie shares her many attempts at conquering the stages of grief and her ultimate acceptance that no one is actually grading her in Coping 101. In this deeply honest account of life after loss, Leslie learns the hard way that surviving is often more profound and beautiful than thriving.
If you’re exhausted by the well-meaning but empty promises that this is a “blessing in disguise,” that “now you have a guardian angel” or “everything happens for a reason,” come sit next to Leslie as she discovers that there’s not a magic prayer for moving on, and that it’s time to lay down the mantle of “doing grief right.”
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