We’re back to read alongs this week! We’re big Kylie Scott fans here at Fated Mates, and we talked about her Stage Dive series all the way back in Season One on our very first interstitial, and now we’re doing a deep dive. We’d intended to do book three, Lead, but we ended up talking about all four, and honestly, rereading this was pretty great for us. We hope it was great for you, too.

Our next read along, sometime in July, is Cat Sebastian’s wonderful Unmasked by the Marquess. Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, B&N, Kobo, or Bookshop.org.

Thank you, as always, for listening! Please follow us on your favorite podcasting app, and if you are up for leaving a rating or review there, we would be very grateful!

Show Notes

• Sarah has a book coming on August 24th! Preorder Bombshell now. You won't regret it.
• Everyone is struggling with getting dressed again. 
• It’s a 1001 in the 1001 Dark Nights series as an homage and allusion to Scheherazade, the story-teller of the Arabian Nights. 
• We also love the VIP series by Kristen Callihan, and the 4th book in that series, Exposed, comes out next month, July 2021.
• On our upcoming episode with Susan Elizabeth Phillips, where she told us that back in the day, “rock stars, actors, and athletes” were not allowed in the early days of romance. We aren’t sure why, but we speculate that it was fear of putting “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” and other high roller lifestyles on page. 
• If you want to join the OSRBC group (Old School Romance Book Club) on Facebook, make sure to answer the three questions if you want to be admitted.
• Beverly Jenkins liked the Stage Dive series, too.
• Andi Arndt is the narrator of all Kylie’s books, including the entire Stage Dive series, and Jen thinks she is terrific. 
• The Captains’ Vegas Vows has a similar set up to Lick: waking up married in Vegas, and only one of them remembered what happened. 
• “Retcon” is a word that started out as shorthand for retroactive continuity, and here’s a piece from Merriam-Webster explaining its remarkable elasticity.
• Hyperemesis gravidarum is the medical term for severe morning sickness, which affects about one percent of pregnant people. 
• DC comics claims that Batman doesn’t go down, but the internet and everyone else on twitter and even Zach Snyder disagred. But in all seriousness, maybe it's just another interesting data point about America turning back towards the Hays Code and continuing to remove sex from all kinds of media.
• Thelma and Louise does have a great ending, you can’t argue with that. And since 2021 is the 30th anniversary of the film’s release, there are lots of interesting retrospectives on the movie.
• Desmond Morris is an English zoologist who outlined the 12 stages of intimacy -- hey, humans are animals, too! 
• Our July interviews will be with Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Nicola Yoon, and Nikki Sloane. Our July read-along is Unmasked by the Marquess by Cat Sebastian.

The Rest

• For even more info about this episode, and to explore everything Fated Mates has to offer, visit: https://fatedmates.net/episodes/2021/6/19/s0344-the-stage-dive-series-by-kylie-scott
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• If you've never listened to our Stop Book Banning episode, there's no better time than now.