Category: Review Roundup

Review Round Up | One Italian Summer, All Good People Here, and The Final Gambit

Posted September 8, 2022 / Book Reviews, Review Roundup / 0 Comments

In an effort to cut down on posts and burnout, my Review Roundups will feature 2-4 books I’ve read or listened to recently. Sometimes they’re newer releases and sometimes they’re all backlist titles. My ARC reviews usually get the solo treatment. Enjoy the mini reviews! I picked this one up from my shelves on a whim when I was trying to read 7 books in 7 days. It was short and had an audiobook available on Scribd, so I was able to read it in a day and feel good about my progress! I was pleasantly surprised for the most part, after really enjoying Serle’s other adult fiction books (and not loving her YA lol). She writes such unique and creative concepts! The book starts with a lot of raw grief as Katy is mourning the loss of her mom, Carol. Her mom was legitimately her best friend and it sounds like she really relied on her for pretty much everything. I don’t usually gravitate toward books where someone is actively grieving like this – I don’t mind books with someone trying to move on but usually not right after, if that makes sense… I try to stay away from sad reads! I also couldn’t relate to her relationship with her mom. I really love my mom and get along well with her, but she isn’t my go-to person for every problem or question. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the way Katy spoke about her, but it was clear they […]

Review Round Up | Kamila Knows Best and Finlay Donovan Knocks ‘Em Dead

Posted April 1, 2022 / Book Reviews, Review Roundup / 0 Comments

In an effort to cut down on posts and burnout, my Review Roundups will feature 2-4 books I’ve read or listened to recently. Sometimes they’re newer releases and sometimes they’re all backlist titles. My ARC reviews usually get the solo treatment. Enjoy the mini reviews! I’m enjoying Farah Heron’s books a lot! This book, like the first one I read by her, made me so hungry! This time for biryani instead of beer and bread. In KAMILA KNOWS BEST, she is struggling to balance everything in her life. She loves her job at a small accounting firm run by her father and family friends, volunteering for party planning and with an animal shelter, and hosting elaborate weekly Bollywood movie nights for her friends. She has a ton on her plate and still manages to take on more. Kamila was a…challenging character to get along with for me. Her actions and the fact that she constantly cut people off, assuming she knew what they were going to say about her, was so frustrating. I know that her father and Rohan sometimes acted like they knew what she wanted and assumed things when they shouldn’t, but she totally did the same thing to them too. Aside from those frustrating moments, she otherwise had a fun personality and generally wasn’t afraid to be herself… I just struggled to LIKE her a lot of the time. The ending was so cute and I love the way everything wrapped up. The romance was top-notch for most of […]

Review Round Up | Of Princes & Promises and Reckless Girls

Posted February 25, 2022 / Book Reviews, Review Roundup / 0 Comments

In an effort to cut down on posts and burnout, my Review Roundups will feature 2-4 books I’ve read or listened to recently. Sometimes they’re newer releases and sometimes they’re all backlist titles. My ARC reviews usually get the solo treatment. Enjoy the mini reviews! This series continues to baffle me a little bit. I enjoyed this book a similar amount to the first one. I was really hoping it was the characters from book one that prevented me from loving it but that turned out to not be the case here. If I were to read this without knowing Sandhya Menon wrote it, I’d be shocked to learn that she did. It just does not have the same feel as her other books, like the Dimple/Rishi universe. I think it’s mostly because she writes the characters as posh boarding school kids and her writing style feels weird as a result, like she’s trying hard to be fancy or something? In any case, this story followed Catarina and Rahul. She’s the pretty rich girl who rules the school and Rahul is the socially awkward kid whose family doesn’t even include him in public photos (his cousin stands in). The two of them had a ~moment~ after the school dance and Rahul is dying to capitalize on this. Catarina starts to “train him” to be a prince instead of a frog; she wants to make her cheater-ex-boyfriend jealous at some important events with a transformed Rahul on her arm. They acquire a magical […]

Review Round Up | The Hawthorne Legacy and You’ll be the Death of Me

Posted February 2, 2022 / Book Reviews, Review Roundup / 0 Comments

In an effort to cut down on posts and burnout, my Review Roundups will feature 2-4 books I’ve read or listened to recently. Sometimes they’re newer releases and sometimes they’re all backlist titles. My ARC reviews usually get the solo treatment. Enjoy the mini reviews! I was super excited to start this book right away when it was released. I am very particular about what books I buy so it was a big deal to head to B&N on release day and snag this one. For whatever reason, I put it aside on and off over the course of multiple months. I think it’s primarily because I was doing a ton of reading in bed and therefore needed my Kindle with a backlight. As it got closer to the end of the year, I knew I had to crank through and finish it off to reach my reading challenge. Every time I sat down to read this book, I wondered how it was possible I kept putting it down and not reading it for weeks! The short chapters and overall plot make this book super addicting and hard to stop reading once you start. This book picks up soonafter the first, THE INHERITANCE GAMES, ends. Avery has inherited a multi-billion dollar empire, mansion, and all of the family drama that comes along with it, out of the blue. She didn’t know the billionaire who left it for her but quickly finds out how much he loved puzzles and riddles. His will and […]

ARC Review Round Up | When You Get the Chance and Bad Luck Bridesmaid

Posted January 19, 2022 / Book Reviews, Review Roundup / 0 Comments

In an effort to cut down on posts and burnout, my Review Roundups will feature 2-4 books I’ve read or listened to recently. Sometimes they’re newer releases and sometimes they’re all backlist titles. My ARC reviews usually get the solo treatment. Enjoy the mini reviews! I will never not request a new Emma Lord book! I adored her two previous releases and therefore had high hopes and expectations for this one. I’m not a big fan of musicals or theater-oriented books, generally speaking, so I wasn’t entirely sure Millie or the premise would be for me. However, the whole concept of Millie trying to track down her mother and figure out who she is? That’s right up my alley. That factor plus the author made this an easy NG request. Yet again, Emma Lord nails it. This book was a really nice reading experience. Millie was a bit much (with her drama and Millie Moods) but every time she crossed the line to “annoying,” she would fall back to the “endearing” side soonafter. She definitely had a flair for the dramatic but that was a fun part of her personality in the end. I like how Oliver balanced her out and how naturally they moved away from enemies. Books like this make me wish I liked NYC more – what a fun place to grow up and have the freedom to explore. (I get too nervous in the city lol). The search for her mom (basically a spin on Mama Mia, apparently […]

Holiday Reviews: The Christmas Pact and The Twelve Dogs of Christmas

Posted December 27, 2021 / Book Reviews, Review Roundup / 0 Comments

Story I decided to listen to this on a whim when I ran out of podcasts on December 22nd – I had a lot of Christmas errands to run and knew the 2 hour runtime would be something quick and easy to bolster my holiday reading AND Goodreads challenge. I ended up enjoying it quite a bit! Riley Kennedy and Kennedy Riley work at the same publishing house and constantly receive each other’s emails. When they finally meet at the company Christmas party, they end up making a Christmas pact: Kennedy will go to Riley’s Christmas Eve to show her mom she DOES have something exciting in her life, and in exchange, Riley will go to Kennedy’s brother’s wedding after New Years. I thought the chemistry was actually well-done (very THE HATING GAME!) in a novella. I usually struggle with plot development due to the length and find there to be too much instalove, but this felt just right for me. I loved the characters and their families: they slotted into each other’s lives nicely. Wintery Setting & Holiday Feels Yes, there’s a smattering of Christmas and a mention of New Years but in a novella, not a ton of time to develop holiday feels. It has a company holiday party, Christmas Eve and morning (briefly) celebrated… and that’s about it. The setting is upstate NY so there’s some snow too! Overall The ending was a bit silly but I enjoyed it – it kind of made sense! There were […]

Review Round Up | Good as Dead and We Can’t Keep Meeting Like This

Posted September 6, 2021 / Book Reviews, Review Roundup / 0 Comments

In an effort to cut down on posts and burnout, my Review Roundups will feature 2-4 books I’ve read or listened to recently. Sometimes they’re newer releases and sometimes they’re all backlist titles. My ARC reviews usually get the solo treatment. Enjoy the mini reviews! If I could leave this review as a link to THIS review, I would haha. Basically she said she hated the book from 45% on, but understood the choices that were made, and still rated it around 3 stars. I mean… same. This series has been by go-to during the pandemic. When I’m desperate to kick my reading into gear again, one of these books has helped me do that. I loved the first book so much and didn’t want to wait for the second, so I ordered it (and the third) from Book Depository as the UK versions instead of US. I was eager to read this ASAP when it came in (around a month before the US book publishes) and was somewhat addicted like the other two, but I genuinely had to put it aside for a few days because of the turn the book took in the middle. I had figured out a THING and then it took a major turn and then, as you can see, I took a couple of days off or could only read a little at a time. It’s really hard to review this without completely giving everything away, even if you’ve read the first two books in the […]

Review Round Up | A Vow So Bold and Deadly and All the Tides of Fate

Posted July 23, 2021 / Book Reviews, Review Roundup / 2 Comments

In an effort to cut down on posts and burnout, my Review Roundups will feature 2-4 books I’ve read or listened to recently. Sometimes they’re newer releases and sometimes they’re all backlist titles. My ARC reviews usually get the solo treatment. Enjoy the mini reviews! I enjoyed the first two books in this series but my mind was a blank when starting this final book in the trilogy. Even worse? All of my book recap websites didn’t have a summary for book two! I was able to piece everything together pretty well from spoilery reviews at least. Usually I get very sidetracked and unmotivated to read fantasy books, especially this year. I’m so behind on my challenge that I’ve been focusing on quick contemporary books or mysteries. However, VOW really kept my attention. I was always interested in reading it and didn’t feel like putting it down every two seconds to check my phone. Reviews for third or final books can be challenging because I don’t want to give everything away from the first two, but I’m going to hope most people reading this review read the first two books. I won’t say anything major though. The character in the last book who was very terrible is on the path to redemption, in a way, in this book. I didn’t remember the gory details from book two but remember thinking “since when is he like this?!” All in all, a very interesting character arc there. I liked getting all four character’s POVs […]

Review Round Up | Finlay Donovan is Killing It, The Girls Are All So Nice Here, and The Ex-Talk

Posted May 21, 2021 / Book Reviews, Review Roundup / 0 Comments

In an effort to cut down on posts and burnout, my Review Roundups will feature 2-4 books I’ve read or listened to recently. Sometimes they’re newer releases and sometimes they’re all backlist titles. My ARC reviews usually get the solo treatment. Enjoy the mini reviews! This was so fun and refreshing – exactly what I needed! I’ve been intrigued by the cozy mystery genre, or at least “lighter” mysteries that focus heavily on the amateur sleuth and her personal life, but none have fully hit the mark. They’ve either been not-good in a compulsively readable way, or just straight-up not great in general. This one hit the mark for me in so many ways. Finlay is a struggling romantic suspense author and she finds herself caught up in a murder mystery, along with her babysitter-turned-roommate, Vero. They have a fun relationship – I loved how quickly Vero worked with Finlay to figure out what was happening, even getting involved with some extremely elicit activities. Like many mysteries like this, the crime/murder is a main point of the book, but you learn even more about the main character and their personal life as they try to figure out what’s going on. Finlay is dealing with her shitty ex-husband and his new perfect fiance while trying to be a single working mom of two cute kids. I enjoyed seeing how she attempted to balance it all and how Vero stepped in to help her… in more ways than one. I won’t spoil too much […]

Review Round Up | Influence, This is Not the Jess Show, and Girls With Rebel Souls

Posted April 7, 2021 / Book Reviews, Review Roundup / 0 Comments

In an effort to cut down on posts and burnout, my Review Roundups will feature 2-4 books I’ve read or listened to recently. Sometimes they’re newer releases and sometimes they’re all backlist titles. My ARC reviews usually get the solo treatment. Enjoy the mini reviews! All Sara Shepard books are the same… and I mean that as a compliment. I know what I’m getting into and her books always hit the spot. They’re so easy to read, are super addicting, and always have a surprising ending. That’s all I ask for with my mystery/thrillers, to be honest, and reading her books feels like coming home for me. I remember the good ol’ PLL days and some of her older series. So good, so classic. This one involves influencers – a topic I personally haven’t encountered much in YA books yet. Just a little bit here and there. It goes between Delilah, Jasmine, and Fiona, with flickers of Scarlet’s live streams and vlog transcripts in between as well. Delilah just moved to LA and is a budding influencer after saving a puppy from a burning shed. Jasmine and Fiona are well-established influencers hiding major secrets, both trying to break out of their shells. I liked each of the points of view here but Delilah’s felt a bit young compared to the other two. Of course, because it’s Sara Shepard, there’s a mystery involved. The book starts with a prologue where one of the girls (we assume one of the MCs) ends up dying […]