Get Rec’d with Amanda – Volume 69

How to Marry an Earl

A Bluestocking, a betrothal of convenience, a traitor… and a handsome rake. What could go wrong?

Persephone Blackwell prefers digging in the dirt for old bones and secret treasure to anything Society might have to offer. When her godfather, the Duke of Pendleton, decides to host a Festival of Antiquaries, she jumps at the chance to take part-especially since it’s the best way to save her oldest friend, Henry Talbot, who is being framed for treason. She has not yet found the evidence that he has sent home hidden inside Egyptian forgeries—but she does find something else: Conall Hunter, the Earl of Northwyck.

The Conall she knew before the war was shy and serious, but this new Conall is a celebrated rake with a practiced charm and a dangerous grin. Persephone finds them both irresistible. Rumor has it, he is searching for a wife. Not that Percy is on the Marriage Mart. After all, earls do not marry ladies with scandalous pasts and a penchant for the mummification process of Ancient Egypt.

As it happens, Conall is secretly searching for a traitor, not a bride. But he is beginning to wonder if Persephone might fight both categories.

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The Matrimony Trap

The first novella in Louisa Darling’s steamy, rompy Regency-set Drake Family trilogy!

She’s the beauty and the brains…

Miss Caroline Quick is desperate to escape London for the freedom of the wilds and her career as a naturalist—but she must get her widowed mother married before she can go. It’s a simple enough idea; track down Mama’s first love and engineer a meeting…with the help of the gentleman’s alarmingly charming son.

He’s just Fitz.

The bored, scapegrace younger son of a disapproving Earl, Fitzwilliam Drake is no stranger to madcap schemes, but the proposition put to him by the delectable Caroline is the wildest he’s ever heard. Of course, trapping his father into marriage is better than tumbling into the pit himself, but Fitz will need to exercise caution around Caroline, who is too tempting by half. Unfortunately, Fitz has never been the cautious type…

They might make the ideal match…

From “surprise” encounters in the park to scandalous country house parties, Caroline’s plans quickly spin out of control. But Fitz is there to help…and to drive her to distraction with his irresistible kisses and strong embraces. Because Fitz may not be a genius, but he’s smart enough to see that with a woman like Caroline, matrimony is no trap—it’s the start of the grandest adventure of them all.

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The Other Olympians

The story of the early trans athletes and Olympic bureaucrats who lit the flame for today’s culture wars.

In December 1935, Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar panic around trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming athletes.

In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany’s atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced the IOC’s nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender.

Immersive and revelatory, The Other Olympians is a groundbreaking, hidden-in-the-archives marvel, an inspiring call for equality, and an essential contribution toward understanding the contemporary culture wars over gender in sports.

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What My Bones Know

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing memoir of reckoning and healing by acclaimed journalist Stephanie Foo, investigating the little-understood science behind complex PTSD and how it has shaped her life

“Achingly exquisite . . . providing real hope for those who long to heal.”—Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, NPR, Mashable, She Reads, Publishers Weekly

By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD—a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years.

Both of Foo’s parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she’d moved on, but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD.

In this deeply personal and thoroughly researched account, Foo interviews scientists and psychologists and tries a variety of innovative therapies. She returns to her hometown of San Jose, California, to investigate the effects of immigrant trauma on the community, and she uncovers family secrets in the country of her birth, Malaysia, to learn how trauma can be inherited through generations. Ultimately, she discovers that you don’t move on from trauma—but you can learn to move with it.

Powerful, enlightening, and hopeful, What My Bones Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body—and examines one woman’s ability to reclaim agency from her trauma.

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