fffriday | A little bundle of recommendations

I finished three books this week which strongly featured f/f romance. In decreasing order of fluffiness:

Sweetest Thing by Natasha West is an f/f rivals-to-lovers romance between two contestants in a fictional TV baking show. Lots of fun with the week-by-week structure, the different contestants and their cakes, and the interaction with the judges. Jodie doesn't let anything get to her, and has a plan for this TV show to launch her own baking business; Robyn bakes as an escape from her worries, and goes on the show partly to escape a relationship dilemma. They've nothing in common except neighbouring baking stations, or so it seems at first.

Thrall by Avon Gale and Roan Parrish is a contemporary retelling of Dracula, in which Lucy Westenra and her girlfriend Mina Murray host a true-crime podcast in New Orleans. Lucy's brother Harker has gone missing while investigating a new dating app for his PhD. Together with their friend Arthur Quincey, they get in touch with his advisor, August Van Helsing. It's been a while since I last read Bram Stoker's Dracula so I'm sure I missed some of the references, but I loved reading this assembly of chat logs, podcast transcripts, forum posts, journals, search histories, etc, which is having a lot of fun playing with the original book and exploring the ideas of vampirism and modernity in the 21st century. (Note that this has a lot of m/m as well as f/f.)

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is an SF novella, a part-epistolary romance between two agents, Red & Blue, on opposite sides of said time war. It was very good, frequently violent, weird, sometimes confusing, but came together into a great ending. It's intense and detailed and there's a lot of wordplay, not all of which I got first time around. I know I'm going to read it again soon.