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Possibly my favorite read of this month was Kate Williams' Becoming Queen Victoria: The Tragic Death of Princess Charlotte and the Unexpected Rise of Britain's Greatest Monarch. As the subtitle indicates, it's really about the 40-odd year period of these two royals' childhood and early adulthood, and the political maneuvering around the throne. Princess Charlotte died in childbirth, setting off an "heirstakes" among her uncles that resulted in Victoria becoming the new heiress. I knew of the heirstakes but enjoyed new-to-me details.
I also read an enjoyable SF anthology, Temporally Out of Order, edited by Joshua Palmatier & Patricia Bray. The premise is in the title, objects that are displaced or interacting abnormally with time. Not all of the stories are great ones, but I felt this made a good theme. Even middling stories often had an concept worth some thought. The last anthology I read with a "sticky" theme for me was Machine of Death.
Finally, I'll mention a freebie: while I wasn't blown out of the water by Annie Bellet's Justice Calling, the first of her Twenty-Sided Sorceress series, I liked it enough to keep further installments on my reading radar. The series is somewhere on the urban fantasy / paranormal fringe - there's a likely love interest, but that isn't a focus of the book. The book was a freebie last year, and so it may be on others' electronic bookshelves.
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