Author: Rachael Allen

Review Round Up | Beach Read, A Deadly Inside Scoop, and The Summer of Impossibilities

Posted May 4, 2020 / Book Reviews, Review Roundup / 1 Comment

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! Woo, boy. I had HIGH expectations for this book. A few bloggers/booktubers I follow closely loved this one (and Madalyn told me I’d love it) so I was really preparing to be wowed. And I totally was. This book exceeded my lofty expectations. January, a romance writer, and her college nemesis and literary fiction writer, Gus, end up neighbors in a sleepy Michigan beach town for the summer. January is getting through the death of her father and all of the secrets she’s learned in the wake of his passing, all while trying to clear his house (and second life) and write a new book. She’s not feeling very romance-y at the moment and when her and Gus meet up, they decide to swap genres for the summer and see if that breaks their writer’s block. Naturally, they get closer throughout the summer, and take each other on genre-relevant field trips so the other person really learns what they should be writing about. I LOVED that this book was very much a typical romance book (and sort of a love letter to the genre) while also managing to invent new tropes. Who knew that TWO grumpy main characters could be so perfect?! Usually you have one grumpy and […]

Review Round Up | A Taxonomy of Love, Together at Midnight, and The Upside to Falling Down

Posted February 2, 2018 / Book Reviews, Review Roundup / 3 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 finally read it, guys!! I’ve had this book in my clutches for months and finally made myself read it. I was really excited for it because I love Rachael Allen, but I just couldn’t get myself in the mood for it. I knew it might be a sadder, harder to read contemporary, so I think I was just avoiding that part. Spencer and Hope have been friends and neighbors since middle school, with countless ups and downs in between. It’s a neverending cycle of one of them wanting something more at the wrong time, and going back and forth for years. I love neighbors/friends-to-more stories so I was definitely hoping for a happy ending. I thought the two of them were a good pair, but it was a LITTLE hard to get the feels because of how up and down their relationship was. On top of that, the story is broken into sections for different ages, starting with 7th grade and working up until they’re 19 years old. I liked seeing the development over time, but it was also a little hard to keep up with their relationship developing in a linear way? Not sure how to describe it. The story has little taxonomies, online chat […]

Blog Tour Review: The Revenge Playbook

Posted June 19, 2015 / Book Reviews / 5 Comments

I had a good feeling I was going to love this book, especially when I started seeing some great reviews roll in, littered with my favorite word: FEMINISM. I also was excited about the football plot, although it doesn’t make football players look good. (The football guys in this school were absolute pigs and it was awful.) Add in the concept of “different girls brought together under a common revenge goal” and I was SOLD. I felt a lot of things while reading this book! I didn’t ever want to stop reading because I was JUST as determined as these girls to get back at the football players. These guys were absolutley horrible! (Nearly all of them, at least…) They had awful lists about girls and forced guys to break up with their girlfriends if they weren’t up to their standards. They got away with doing anything they wanted and had major preferential treatment from everyone in the school. I kept thinking of the Amy Schumer “Football Town Nights” video, which I won’t link up here for potential trigger warnings. (Google it, if you’re interested!) Everyone in the town perpetuates rape culture without even realizing it. As this book said, “Rape culture isn’t something feminists made up to be angry about.” I liked the romance in this one, although it wasn’t as important. The main point of the book is revenge against dickhead boys, and that took center stage. The most heavily romance-related ones were Melanie Jane’s and Liv’s points of […]