Take one strong alpha male shifter and one super smart yet culturally naive vampire, put them in an arranged marriage with a dash of political intrigue and a soupçon of sexual tension, and what do you get? Bride, by Ali Hazelwood!

Join Meg & Nikki this week as they talk:

* why we all KNOW what it means when you sniff a neck

* the importance of secret friendship languages for surprise unveilings

* the “science” of shifters changing with or without their clothes

* the…physics… of interspecies tingles in the groiny bits

Then head on over to our Substack comments and let us know what you think about the book!

Books & Media We Mention:

Ali Hazlewood’s book catalogue, including:

* The Love Hypothesis

* Love on the Brain

* Love Theoretically

* Under One Roof

* Stuck With You

* Below Zero

* Check & Mate

* Not In Love

* The Hidden Species series by Louisa Masters

* Facing Reality by Sienna Atwell

* Yippee Ki Yay (YKY) by Joseph David Jones

* Nikki’s country playlist on Spotify

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View the full show notes on our Substack

Order Meg’s debut novel, Peppermint Bark, No Bite (affiliate link)

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Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe!

Get full access to First Dates & Soulmates: Romance Podcast at firstdatesandsoulmates.substack.com/subscribe

So I

I didn't necessarily love the story of it. And then I was afraid that she was getting a little bit, you know, all of her stories are going to folLowe the same formula. So I wanted to see what she did. With Bride. So the Lowegline of Bride is a dangerous alliance between a vampire bride and an alpha werewolf becomes a love deep enough to sink your teeth into in this new paranormal romance.

So, Nikki, what were your initial thoughts on Bride?

I found that fascinating and then like it got chapter two, like the pacing got a little different. I felt like the storyline kind of the structure changed a little bit. It was kind of a little bit jarring, but then it got back into it and I felt like it moved forward at like a really good clip. I liked the characters.

There was some unique character traits that I'm sure we're going to get into kind of actually took me aback a little bit. And I was like, Oh, I didn't expect this from these main characters. I didn't think we were going in this direction. And then once I kind of finished the book and reflected on it, I was like, Oh, no, I think that was a fantastic choice to do it that way.

Not what I expected in the moment, but on reflection, enjoyed it. So overall. Recommended read for me. I would definitely check it out.

So I was hesitant to go back into it, but I'd heard so many people say that it was good and I wish that it had been paced out a little bit differently, but I loved all the characters in this. Even the bad guys, I was like, these are really interesting, you know, and there were some interesting themes, too, that I think can happen when you're talking about an interspecies romance, where it's a question of what is good leadership

And there were some really beautiful, um, beautiful conclusions that were drawn without being too, like, oh, a found family is more important than a b b b, you know, like, it didn't get preachy.

I was, I was quite pleased.

Not the final title, I've been proposing Wet, W H E T, but they keep shutting

Um, there is a council of vampires and in order to have, uh, truce with the hu, okay, so there's three different species all living in the city. Uh, the hu the humans, the vampires, and the werewolves, uh, or the weres And as part of the truce to stop the wars, the vampires and the humans, uh. Exchanged collateral of their children.

And so Misery is the, uh, one of the two children of the leader of the, the Vampire Council. And so she spent from age 8 to age 18 living as basically, like, a, All aLowene in the human realm, and so she doesn't know any vampiric traditions or customs. She feels more comfortable living among the humans than she does in the vampire world.

She files down her teeth. She like, gets a job. She wears contact lenses. She gets a job at a human. Uh, office space, being a computer hacker, but only working at night. So she has acclimated herself to living within the human realm. Um, and she, the only person that she has really any relationship with is a human named Serena, who is her companion in the human realm because, uh, they didn't, she was very upset and depressed at being left aLowene away from her family.

And so they brought in a human orphan to be basically her sister. And the story, before it begins, Serena has been kidnapped, and the only information that Misery has about this is that Serena has been kidnapped, and in her planner, the day of the, the day that she was kidnapped is the phrase L. E. Moreland, in their secret sister language, and so when she had the opportunity to marry Lowe Moreland, Morehouse, was it Morehouse or Moreland, I can't remember, I think it's Morehouse, um, she takes it, And so she goes into an arranged marriage with somebody from another species and the entire proLowegue she's being told He's probably gonna kill you.

Don't move too quickly. Don't, um, you know, don't expect to survive this. And she gets to the altar and she hasn't met her groom at all. And he smells her, which is such a paranormal thing to happen. We know exactly what happens the moment he smells her and his nostril flare and his pupils dilate. And he's like, why do you smell like this?

And then it's the end of the proLowegue And I'm like, that. is starting out with a bang. I love the beginning of this book. Nikki, what were you thinking when you read that?

So maybe she just left you and like, you know, wait, that obviously gets unpacked over the rest of it. We don't know a Lowet about

Lowe

It is Morland. We don't really know a Lowet about him. And like, Misery, we know just like a little bit of her. So you don't actually know too much about them from this first little bit.

But you also know a Lowet about where they are in their life in a weird way. Which I really liked because every time I thought I had an understanding of who these characters were, I get more backstory, I get more Lowere and I'm like, Oh! That's different. That's an extra layer

Um, and many of the things that misery has as her sort of vampiric Lowere are, you know, she can only be awake at night. She has to drink bLoweod but she's able to get it from a bLoweod bank. She doesn't have to drink from a live body. She has fangs. Um, she is cold all the time. Um, so, you know, in our two episodes ago, I was complaining that I didn't think Andrew was vampiric enough.

And I thought that that made his. And I think that Misery has all of the difficult things about being a vampire, and she doesn't get the benefits of being in the vampire culture. Like, she's expected to behave like a vampire outside of vampire culture, and even within a vampire culture, but she was not raised by vampires.

So she sort of is, she just does not fit in anywhere. And that is so clear in all of her decisions.

There's fear, um, both weres and vamps make reference to the last time a wedding was arranged to try and broker peace and it ended up in a slaughterhouse. Like, but when they actually, when Lowe and misery, like start living together, misery starts living at Lowes like alpha compound in where territory as this kind of bride collateral.

Yeah. They're completely ignorant of what each other needs and each other species need. They don't, you know, the weres don't know how she drinks blood or what it looks like. They don't understand, you know, does she sleep? Does she, how do you go through this? And what happens if this? And she also knows nothing about

weres

What is shifting? And there's a joke later on that'd be like, what do you mean? Your cLowethes don't just disappear when you shift. They're like, well, where did you think the cLowethes were going to go? Cause she, there's a wolf running around with like a tank top around their neck. Cause they were cLowethed when they shifted. So I actually really liked this ignorance of each other because it added like a little bit of tension and space for misunderstandings, but also space for trust to develop between misery and Lowe because they were able to share. This is what it Loweoks like when I feed. Like, Misery actually gets kind of nervous when she's like, I have to feed, I'm gonna go in my

cLoweset

And Lowe is like, it's fine, you can do it right here. And she's like, are

Um, but also, it's not even like, even though Lowe knows, Spoiler. We all know from being romance readers that as soon as he smells her, that they're fated mates, but he wouldn't, but you know, he's going to resist the fate. He's going to resist the, the, the mate, because, well, we'll talk about that in a minute, but she doesn't, she doesn't fall in love with him, which we've talked about is one of those, like, fated mates often works because one person knows their mates and the other are.

Doesn't or resists the mating, um, but Misery actually, actually kind of similar to Willa and Cade when we talked about Heartless and, you know, Willa fell in love with Luke first, fell in love with a kid first. Um, Misery really falls in love with Lowe's little sister.

And she's been collateral before. She was raised in human territory. a Ware named, I think it's Gabrielle, that is sent to live with the vampires. Vampires. Um, and Misery assumes that Gabri

And he's talking about misery. Misery thinks she's talking about Gabrielle. So I love this like double talk that was happening that we, the audience knew, but it didn't feel like it was so overwrought in the writing of like, by the way, did you know that this is actually what's happening here? And you're like, yeah, I get

Forced proximity, like forced arranged marriage. Um, and there was actually another vampire who was supposed to go through with the marriage and they backed out. So like, it just so happens that he got married to his mate accidentally. Um, that's not the way that it should have worked out. And I love that, that it wasn't like he machinated this marriage.

It just so happened that he married his

love

like the other running joke is a part of this where we are clued into what is happening between them. Misery is not, is the fact that, uh, at the beginning, Lowe is like, go take a shower. And she's like, I could take a shower. Oh, I probably smell really bad to you. I'm so sorry. Of course I will go shower.

Like she's trying to

Probably. I'm a vampire. That really sucks for you. I'm gonna go shower. And again, this, like, different things are happening, only one of them is aware of it. I just love that as, like, the running joke. And then eventually, you know, they have some fun shower times. And she's like, Oh. Oh! No.

It's not Gabby, it's the other woman, um, and says something about like, Yes, and Juno's like, I really wish he had never met his mate because it's so much harder on him, you know, and and misery reads into that the way that she wants to because nobody's going to come out and tell her like, you are his mate, wink, wink, you know, which does sometimes happen in other books.

But in this particular case, she sort of has to Figure it out, and she's smart enough to figure it out, but she doesn't have all the information that we have, or that the, the, the internal speak that's happening between the shifters, um, where we can read into the fact and know that they're mates, but she really, she's not clueless.

So when she gets married, her makeup artist did research into these traditions and marks all those places on her with this green makeup. that becomes a scenting ritual that again, we see in a Lowet of shifter romances is the idea of scent marking. Um, but again, like she doesn't understand what those mean.

She's just like, she finds out way later in the book when he starts kind of nosing around those places. She goes, Oh, is this why I had makeup? And he's like, yeah. And she's like, Oh, again, she's not,

Lowet

But, but Feyre can't read, but she doesn't try. And so finally in book two, like Rhysand teaches her to read and you're like, okay. And then suddenly she becomes the most powerful woman in history. And you're like, but she couldn't read a week ago. Uh, she's the one that we're trusting. She knows nothing about our culture, but.

I feel like in this case, it's not, it's not like that. It's, Misery has so much cognitive ability and she is being purposely kept ignorant, um, in part because this is supposed to be a collateral that only lasts a year. Um, and in part because, like, they don't want her hacking into their private systems because they don't trust her species.

Not her specifically. Eventually, they do come around to trusting her and she's able to, like, help with hacking into the vampire systems, um, and the human systems. But, uh, like, it's not, it's not that she is unintelligent. It's that she is, um, Like, forced to not have the information to make, to draw the conclusions that she would have to make in order to put these pieces together.

Like, Misery has not. She's never had any sort of relationship. She was kept in solitary by humans. She's not a part of Vampire, and then she was put into Disarranged Marriage. So she has, like, no romantic relationship experience at all. She doesn't

He's never had a mate before. He will, I'm sure we're going to get into the mechanics of their relationship in a bit, because it's hilarious and fun. Yeah. But obviously certain physical things start happening to him and he's never experienced that because he's never had sex with his mate before. So, and they both kind of have a thing and he goes, there's a, there's a couple, like the sex scenes in the book, a couple of them are explicit, but a couple of them also kind of feel cLowesed or fade to black, even as things are happening on page.

Like it's not overly

Um, so that experience of. She's, they're, they're sort of in this forced proximity, they're hiding out situation and that's the only excuse that they have. And like, she's like, Oh God, I didn't know that feeding from a live person would be sexual. Like, no idea. And then when she talks to Owen about it, Owen's like, Ew, gross.

I don't want to hear it. She's like, I didn't know. I didn't,

But also the fact that like, there's no sexual contact between people anymore. It's all done via VR. Yeah. and when he tries to like hook up with Sandra BulLoweck she's like, Ew, fluids, gross! Like, it kind of

Like, he's Big Bad Alpha. But in this, he's kind of like a teenager going through puberty for the first time. He's enthusiastic, but doesn't quite know what's going on. And she

It was just like, I don't know.

at

It keeps everything inside. Um, which becomes her dirty talk later. Like, yes, I want you to leave it all inside me. Because at first, when, you know, they're trying to fumble their way through all of this, he's like, I am not going to finish inside of you because something will happen. And we are,

And she's like, what, what do you

Is this okay? I love it.

Um, and then you also have this option, especially if you're writing, I, I, I think this happens more in MF and it happens more in contemporary where you sort of like have the sex escalate over the course of the book. So you start with a kiss and then it gets interrupted or they finish the date and then, you know, maybe there's some oral, but that's all that it is.

And then the next thing Um, And I feel like this folLowes a bit more of that framework, which I think in general, in like MM romance and queer romance, sex may come earlier. So you're more used to that because you do tend to read more MM versus, uh, you know, a contemporary MF has more of an escalation clause that happens there.

I'm

Okay. I feel slightly better about that. I definitely miss that.

In this case, this book, and I think this does often happen with paranormal where, you know, in the case of, um, Hidden Species, like, there's this overarching big bad that they all need to fight together and they're all in the same workplace. Whereas in this one, it's much more of like a thriller. Like someone has been kidnapped and I need to go through this, you know, romantic process, but I'm not really in it for the relationship.

I'm in it because my friend got kidnapped and this is the clue that I have. And so it becomes this kind of thriller mystery approach to things versus just, uh, you know, a Lowet of times with contemporaries, it can be a little bit, um, you know, navel gazing.

Like, we find out that Serena goes to, like, Missing. She is kidnapped she kind of was finding out about the fact that these hybrids can exist. And oh, by the way, she is one and

We got a very specific part of their culture as like conflict. And I, my feeling is that that's where Serena's book is going to end, like, put end up going a little bit more into, um, is that kind of new evolution of the species.

And, Yeah, and I really like that, that some of these, you know, really dramatic schisms between the species were actually the vampire's machinations to keep those other species apart from each other. Um, and so having a new vampire leader who is going to sign different treaties, I mean, the whole thing started because the weres got a different leader with Lowe than they had with Roscoe.

And so, um, you know, as these leadership changes are happening, what does that mean? In an intraspecies way.

Lowe took over and he's much more. Open minded. He's open to treaties. He's open to respecting the other species. He's still very much going to protect his own people. So like, don't fuck with him, but he does have that. You have brother, Owen, who I actually really like, I hope he gets a book. I feel like he might get a book, but like, you know, he does this coup and she kind of, you know, she never really had a relationship with him because she was the collateral with the humans. And she sLowely learns throughout this book that, cause he's also her twin, that He does care about me and at the end, she kind of thinks he's going to betray, uh, her. And then he reveals, nope, me and Lowe actually created a plan together. So you have Owen stepping in and being like, I'm now going to run the vamps.

Thank you very much. Bye dad. Um, so he's already shown up like, yeah, I'm open to making treaties with Lowe I'm open to doing this. And then you've got the extra now, the hybrids with Anna and Serena. So I think, like, I like where this is going.

I don't know. Shifter has very similar implications to Serena not being able to shift until she's in her 30s. Um, and I also loved the, the career choices. Of all of these characters. I think it's really smart that we have Lowe who's a trained architect. And so we get to see the visualization of what what he gave up to become the pack leader.

We have, um, Misery, who's a computer hacker, which gets all this information in there. Um, and we have Serena, who's a journalist, and I couldn't help but thinking about, um, the psychopath that he is. James, where we have Calliope, who's a hacker. We have, um, Zane, who's a journalist, you know, like, it's really smart in these series where there are these, uh, you know, mystery of the week situations or sort of these short, shorter stories as part of a bigger hole to have characters in there who can get the information that we need at the moment that we need to know.

To be revealed, but have it be realistic that like, yeah, she can totally just hack into the system and figure this out. Like she has that skill set. This isn't just being in the right place at the right time or like being like the models in Zoolander who are like, the information is in the computer.

I loved her. She was snarky. She was funny. They definitely called each other on their shit,

He's the one who actually kidnapped Serena. Misery ends up there, Owen and Lowe come in and we're like, this is the big final showdown and they're outnumbered. And then Serena Loweoks at Misery and in their secret language says, he doesn't know I can shift. And I was just like, holy fuck. And then both Lowe and Serena shift.

And this is when she sees like, Oh, what happens to the cLowethes Because there's Serena in her wolf form, like fucking going to town on the bad vamps. And she's got like a tank top around her neck and she's like, here we go. Um. That was,

I think when you're a magical being, that's when your cLowethes shift with you, which is what most of

So, like, there's that moment where they've set up a trap to try to get Anna kidnapped and Misery doesn't know that it's a trap and she runs out into the sun and she gets these burns all over her body from the sun because she sees Anna being kidnapped without knowing that there's seven shifters who are like, yeah, yeah.

And misery is like, well, just ask me to help you and maybe you won't need to use her as collateral because she doesn't want another child to be put in a situation where her body is being used, not like a trafficking way, but in just like a, you know, a collateral. Right? Like, she's so sensitive to that and Lowe didn't think about that.

So I love that experience of of her starting. And there's a moment where, you know, Um, Anna's like, Misery, when's your birthday? And she sits down to have dinner because Anna asked her to. And she's like, this is the first time I've ever had a family dinner.

Like, it wasn't a warm, loving environment. And so she's seen it on the human TV shows, but never had that experience until she moves into the vampire, or into the werewolf realm. And I love that for her.

It's really interesting, these correlations that I probably wouldn't have made if we weren't recording, like, all in this month. If we had waited on one of them until January, I wouldn't have been like, oh, and also this one from last book series.

So, Nikki, what is your favorite thing that you ship about Bride?

That at any moment, if somebody fucks something up, We're all gonna die,

Let's talk about the proteins in the bLoweod Let's talk about the heat of where the bLoweod is pumping in your neck and like how that would heat things up. Like she was, it's a paranormal universe where you're making shit up to make it work. Your world building has to work for the story that you're telling.

But Ellie Hazelwood's science. is so grounded, um, between that and, like, some of the hacker language that I, I know nothing about hacking aside from, like, what I learned from Mr. Robot.

Spotify, wherever you like to listen. Uh, also be sure to come follow us on all of the socials. So we are on Instagram and I will be slicing up all the reels of Nikki snarfing.

So make sure to come over. And even if you don't have time to listen to the whole episode, sometimes you're, you can just get the highlights through our shorts. Um, yeah. And support the podcast. Come hang out with us wherever we are. We would love to hear from you.

I'm going to link it, um, in our show notes, but I just really love this, this new vibe of like modern country that has like some backbone to it. Um, that has like a little bit more like spice. Actually, what I'm also going to link in the show notes too, is I'm going to link y'all my country playlist. Cause I have a playlist I've been building on Spotify that has songs like that on it. And I think it's a pretty damn good. playlist. So I'm gonna pop that in the show. So that's what I'm shipping. Yippee ki yay, Joseph David Jones. What a great ass country song. Um, and are we just gonna cut your ship from the other episode?

My novel, I started many years ago. I've done NaNoWriMo several times. So we will be having a panel discussion with some of my friends who are also NaNoWriMo beloveds. We will not be using the NaNoWriMo platform this year. for political reasons and for, you know, problematic awareness of those things. But we will still be participating in the goal of writing 50, 000 words in the month of November.

So we'll be talking about that next month. And, uh, it is American Thanksgiving. So we will be talking about food. Food romances for the month of November. So make sure to I have some recommendations that Nikki is going to hate.

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