Order Monsoon Queen Today and the newly released sequel, Dream Swimmers
Twenty-year-old Noor has been hiding her magic and biding her time in the spice markets of 1812 Tajoura as she and her neighbours wait for the ravenous British Empire to sail into their homeport, cannons blazing. But when the HMS Victory arrives, so does the chance of a lifetime to join a found family in the Yemeni resistance. Noor finds herself caught up in the fight against the Empire’s battle mages and Rami, the dark prince who leads them.
In a case of mistaken identity, Noor heals Rami before a decisive battle. She sees the good in him, and her heart is torn.
Noor’s new friend Razan—a brilliant and beautiful inventor for the resistance—has no such qualms. She hates Rami for his role in the raid that killed her parents. Razan has found a way to harness Noor’s power to defeat the British, and the two women grow ever closer. On a perilous camel ride to the coffee roasting city of Mocha, Rami strikes, kidnapping Noor and taking her back to his cruel master on the HMS Victory.
In order to survive, Noor will need to call on everything she learned in the spice markets and the Yemeni resistance.
Rebels, mages, lovers. With the final battle looming and the resistance struggling without her, Noor must keep her eye on the prize: saving Yemen from the British Empire. If she can keep Razan in her bed and save Rami from the Empire, she will have the future she’s always dreamed of. But first, Noor has to survive the storms to come.
New to Jo’s writing?
Jo Carthage (she/her) writes historical romance, science fiction, and fantasy. Queer folks have always been here and we deserve to be in stories. Read for slow burn, enemies-to-lovers, hurt/comfort, and intense world-building geekery.
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Dream Swimmers (Book 2 of the War Between Cedar and Oak Quartet)
Monsoon Queen (Book 1 of the War Between Cedar and Oak Quartet)
Book 3 of the War Between Cedar and Oak Quartet
Nuclear Sunrise (December 19, 2023)
Nuclear Sunrise Sequel
What is “stellar light-based life”?
A few years ago, I was writing a novella that had me spending a lot of time on the Wikipedia page for potentially habitable exoplanets. When reading the profile for Kapetyn b, I came across this phrase when describing its sister planet, Kapetyn c: “It is considered to be too cold for stellar-light-based life.” And it stuck. My readers tell me they look forward to my visceral writing, hot love scenes, the sense of calm they get when they finish a well-structured story, my complex world-building and reliable update schedule. But whether I’m writing about fixing near-past US foreign policy blunders using alien time travel or an Islamic Golden Age on Mars, saving an angel from Hell using music or an evil prince from prison using his dreams, or just two lonely people connecting across time and space, aren’t all of these stories about stellar light-based life?
Why love stories?
They’re what I like to read. I enjoy the conventions of queer romance and I wish other genres could see their way to allowing love stories at the center of their work without automatically nudging the books into the romance category. But as it is, while the settings of my stories might be sci fi or historical or fantasy (or all 3!) the publishing genre they fall into is Romance. And if that never changes, I’ll be a happy gal. Because who doesn’t love a good love story?