Not To Be Confused: Book Title Edition

This is one of my all time favorite romance novels — which is fantastic as an audiobook — that is a grumpy sunshine pairing, partially set in a baking competition, and has a hilarious unicorn cake scene. It’s everything you want in a romance if you read contemporary romance, m/f, grumpy sunshine pairings. It is also nothing like the next book which is what many people thought I was talking about when I said this title!

Just one “e” makes a huge difference because we are no longer in HEA land. We are in *movie announcer voice* horror land! That’s right, there are no unicorn cakes here, there are only high school students on a deserted island told to kill one another until there is only one left. You can see how you wouldn’t want to mistake those two titles, even if you read both types of books.

And finally we have one more entry: keep the “e” but tweak “battle” to “batter” and we’re back in the fluffy land arena. This time with a graphic novel, teens, and back to a baking reality show.

I recently read this fun and adorable graphic novel about a young man trying to find a job in publishing who ends up working for an overbearing chef with a hot coworker he quickly starts crushing on — and hopes crushes on him back. But when I looked up the title to mark it as “read” I found myself staring at a long list of “chef’s” and “kisses.”

Like this romance — not graphic novel — which also has an unexpected career transition (!) but rather than being m/m like the above Chef’s Kiss, it’s a female and nonbinary person with a grump and sunshine pairing! Both covers are blue, illustrated, and the same title — ha, have fun playing the “do you know the book?” between these two.

Add an “a” and we have another one! This time we get a m/f second chance romance between a small-town chef and a celebrity cook forced back together. Spoiler: it’s a romance, so we get another HEA!

There are a lot of final girls. Some are just final (like in this case) and as we move farther down the list, you’ll see some of these final girls have opinions or are in groups or are really, really, FINAL. In this case, we go full into the final girl trope — the last woman/women to survive a killer — as final girls try to make sense of the emotional toll while also having to figure out why another final girl has NOW been found dead…

You can see how it would be easy to confuse this book with the previous one. This time, the final girls are written under Seanan McGuire’s (Every Heart a Doorway) pseudonym and we’re in the sci-fi/horror world with an interesting premise. A Doctor has created virtual technology to help people through trauma by simulating scenarios from horror movies and nightmares — that sounds like a nightmare in itself!

Not to be confused with the Final GirlS this is just one. Single. Final Girl. And we’re also now in the poetry genre! “These scathing poems build upon the tenants of confessional and synthesize them with modern horror metaphor, inventing a new feminist paradigm for our time.”

In case you thought any of the other women were the final girls, this one is certainly THE LAST one. And we’re back in the horror genre by the horror author who you might know (should know if you don’t!) for his other works: The Only Good Indians; My Heart Is a Chainsaw; Night of the Mannequins; Mongrels.

Last but certainly not least — at least based on the title — we have the final girl that isn’t your final girl. So how could we possibly confuse her with all the other final girls?! And we finish off with another poetry collection — gotta say I had not thought I’d be confusing horror titles with a poetry collection, let alone two, but life is always filled with fun surprises.