Bookshop Murder, Enchanted Woods, Christmas Romance, and More!

In addition to being a fabulous shade of purple, courtesy of ube extract, these cookies are also not too sweet — a quality I admire in a cookie. Janelle Eats details the recipe for the Filipine cookies on her Youtube account and website.

Now that you’ve got warm cookies, let’s get to the books!

This isn’t standard cozy fare for me as it’s a little on the serious side, but I still think it works. Mukesh tries to carry on in a London borough after having lost his wife. He spends his time doing regular life stuff like grocery shopping and going to Temple, but he also worries about his granddaughter Priya, who has withdrawn into herself.

Then there’s Aleisha, a teenager who works at the library and has found a list of books she’s never heard of in a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird. Naturally, she decides to read them and through them discovers an escape from home life. When Mukesh comes to the library, he’s hoping to find a way to connect to his granddaughter. What he finds is a teenage girl who shares a book list with him that opens him up.

Here’s another library one! Honestly, library and bookstores are such perfectly cozy settings. This is more my usual speed for cozy readings as its a cozy mystery. In it, Marvey is a librarian who has moved from Brooklyn to a small town in Georgia. She’s still getting used to the quirky town when she finds a dead body in a bookstore. She gets involved in the murder investigation once her friend becomes a suspect. As a librarian, she’s an expert researcher and knows a thing or two about crime from all the mystery novels she’s read. She also goes around asking if everyone has a library card, which is precious.

Nora Walker comes from a long line of women who have a special, magical connection to the woods. It’s this special connection that lets Nora know that when Oliver Huntsman — the same Oliver Huntsman who disappeared from a camp weeks ago during a terrible snowstorm — shows up, something is amiss. The woods shift uncomfortably around the boy, who should be dead, and Nora starts to seek out the truth surrounding Oliver’s survival. She cares about him, but he has more than a few secrets. This is a kind of wintery fairytale that’s atmospheric with beautiful writing.

Ellie is all about Christmas, even outside of its usual season. Her job she likes…less. She’s desperate for a career change, which comes in the form of CEO Rosalind Caldwell’s need for a new personal assistant. As Caldwell tries to save her Christmas party with the new girl snd Christmas enthusiast Ellie, Ellie develops a big crush on her assertive new boss…