Genre: Young Adult

Holiday ARC Reviews: The Christmas Village and Duke, Actually

Posted December 22, 2021 / Book Reviews / 0 Comments

Story I love Annie Rains’ books – that’s no secret around here. I’ve read them all so far under the Forever Romance umbrella, and can’t wait to dive into the novella that occurs right after this book! I can always count on her to deliver an enjoyable Christmas story each year and THE CHRISTMAS VILLAGE was no exception. This is the second book in the Somerset Lake companion series, a setting we’ve only seen so far during summertime. Lucy and Miles were high school sweethearts who were once engaged before Miles unceremoniously called it off. Neither of them truly moved on from it though. Now they’re back under “one roof” (more like “one yard” as Miles is renting Lucy’s garage apartment temporarily) and sparks are flying again. I do love a second chance romance and this couple was totally worth rooting for! I don’t love reading books about cops but the “Christmas Crankster” mystery that Miles worked on throughout the book was entertaining and he’s really a great guy. Wintery Setting & Holiday Feels Somerset Lake’s residents love Christmas and that was clear in this book! They spoke about the holiday season in its debut novel so I was really looking forward to seeing how they celebrated. There were a lot of decor references and holiday events that made me feel Christmassy, especially decorating Lucy’s big pink house for the neighborhood competition. Overall This series continues to impress! I was sad that Sweetwater Springs was no longer the setting for […]

Blog Tour Review: Sleigh Bells Ring

Posted December 13, 2021 / Book Reviews / 0 Comments

Buy Links: BookShop.org // Harlequin // Barnes & Noble // Amazon // Books-A-Million // Powell’s Review I’ve been reading RaeAnne Thayne’s books for years now and was excited to sign up for this tour! She always writes fun and cheery holiday stories with adorable small town settings. This book was no exception for the most part – instead of a small town with an adorable main street, this takes place on a sprawling ranch in Wyoming. It was very festive with lots of decorating and Christmas cheer, especially through the eyes of a couple of children. SLEIGH BELLS RING centers around Annie, the caretaker of the ranch, and her brother’s children. The owners of the ranch, including her childhood crush Tate, come in for Christmas and she is working as the de facto chef and host to all of them for one final Christmas before they sell it. I was expecting to only read their two POVs but Tate’s sister, Brie, ends up as a main character after the first 20% of the book or so. I immediately knew where her perspective was heading and I was intrigued to see what would happen for her. She wasn’t spoken about very favorably in the beginning of the story so I was curious to see what her reasons would be, or where her head was at during the story. I enjoyed the setting and the family feels in this one. However, I think the writing was a bit repetitive. The characters had the same […]

Holiday ARC Reviews: The Holiday Swap and No Ordinary Christmas

Posted December 3, 2021 / Book Reviews / 0 Comments

Story I love a good swap story! Identical twins Charlie and Cass switch lives for a week during an incredibly busy time in their lives. Charlie manages the family’s bakery in their adorable hometown, where she’s under the gun to finish their famous holiday bread by Christmas Eve while her parents are on vacation. Cass lives in LA, a few hours away, and is a famous celebrity baker. She’s filming a limited-run holiday-themed baking show with a shitty coworker and needs everything to go well so she can “win” her own TV show. When Cass gets a concussion and loses her sense of smell and taste, she and Charlie switch places – Cass doesn’t need those to bake her well-known family recipes and Charlie is a great baker that can step in for the show. Naturally, the two ladies fall for some cute guys where they are, under the guise of their sisters. These kinds of stories usually come with a ton of drama and predictable results in the end, but honestly this one was tame! There were a lot of side plots for both of the MCs and annoying characters, but I think everything got a decent amount of page time to feel necessary. Wintery Setting & Holiday Feels I enjoyed the holiday feels throughout this one. They had a lot of tasty-sounding holiday-themed baked goods. I will admit that Cass’s chapters in their cute, snowy hometown had more holiday feels for me than the scenes in LA (with good […]

Honeymoon Reads // ARC Reviews: The Road Trip and The Royals Next Door

Posted November 8, 2021 / Book Reviews / 0 Comments

I finished THE ROAD TRIP during my honeymoon, late one night when I couldn’t sleep. I then started and blazed through THE ROYALS NEXT DOOR while hanging out in the hot tub, almost all in one sitting. I knew I’d manage to finish a book or two while I was out there enjoying the scenery! Here are the two reviews for this books – both were review copies that had already published. I’ve really enjoyed the first two books I read by Beth O’Leary – they’re unique and charming stories with fun characters. I even got past the horrible internal monologue/writing style in THE FLATSHARE because of how much I loved everyone. This book was generally pretty cute and mostly enjoyable, but not at the same level as the previous two books. I didn’t root for the main couple very much. They met and quickly fell for each other over one summer, have a weird and mostly shitty relationship for a couple of years, and break up. When they see each other again a couple of years later and end up having to road trip to a mutual friend’s wedding, sparks fly again. There were so many weird and complex elements to their love story and I didn’t feel like the chemistry was even there from the beginning, so why bother rooting for them to overcome their issues at all? Sure, they grew up a little bit by the “present day” chapters, but I still didn’t exactly care. There weren’t […]

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 […]

ARC Reviews: Wait for It and The Dating Playbook

Posted August 16, 2021 / Book Reviews / 0 Comments

The cover of this book completely sucked me in right off the bat. Super obsessed, but who’s surprised? I decided to, very randomly, read this book ASAP when I was approved on Netgalley. I read it in just a few sittings because honestly it was pretty addicting and enjoyable! The setup here is that Annabelle’s friends invite her out to Arizona to work at their up-and-coming graphic design studio. They’ve hooked her up with a rental on the property of a mysterious retired man named Nick. She doesn’t lay eyes on him for a long time and incorrectly assumes (because he’s retired and he writes her curmudgeonly letters) he’s an old guy. Wrong – he’s her age and super hot. I enjoyed that there were a lot of things happening in this book – each character had a ton going on in their life and all of the side characters did too. Lots of history and current drama with work or family/friends. At times it felt like a bit much, but for the most part it made everyone feel very fleshed out. I always appreciate that. I also liked that the POVs went back and forth between Anna and Nick – it was important to actually get in his head to understand why he was acting a certain way. On the surface he just seemed super terrible. The writing style was a little repetitive and sometimes annoying (there were a number of things that rubbed me the wrong way). As […]

ARC Reviews: The Woods Are Always Watching and They’ll Never Catch Us

Posted August 2, 2021 / Book Reviews / 0 Comments

I enjoyed Perkins’ first foray into contemporary horror with THERE’S SOMEONE INSIDE YOUR HOUSE. It felt a little closer to a mystery/thriller for me, which is probably why it worked. The whole “teen thrasher movie” vibe was fun and I was eager to read her next. After reading this, I am definitely ready for her to get back into contemporary romance. The story centers around Meena and Josie, two best friends who decide to take a 20 mile backpacking trip in the woods before one of them leaves for college in California. The first half of the book is just them bickering and having issues as they hike, try to set up camp, and sleep in the woods. The story picks up a lot and was pretty addicting in the second half. Josie falls and injures herself, which forces the two of them to separate while Meena runs to get help. They’re a full day into their journey at this point so she has quite a ways to go. When they encounter some less-than-helpful fellow “hikers” in the forest, things get worse for them. This was definitely more horror than thriller, with some pretty terrible gore happening. I should have seen it coming obviously but it just felt yuckier than her previous horror novel. I didn’t really enjoy that this was mostly two girls walking through the woods and fighting for the first half – it was a little boring and I missed having a full cast of characters like I […]

ARC Review: How Sweet It Is

Posted July 30, 2021 / Book Reviews / 0 Comments

It’s no secret that my reading has been weird, terrible, inconsistent – you name it – this year. When I saw Forever post about the pub date arriving for HOW SWEET IT IS, I was immediately motivated to get reading. How could it already be mid-August?! Honestly, I was taken with this book right away. I immediately loved the characters and read a lot of it in one sitting. Then… it sat around while I tried to finish up other reading obligations. But the minute I dove back in, I was ready to finish it up! The story had a unique premise based heavily around the jobs of the two main characters. Kate is an event planner who specializes in romance and weddings. Drake is a horror writer, who happens to be the client of Kate’s best friend, and her services are needed for his book launch. Could this finally be the event that wins the coveted EVPLEX award? She signs on, hoping it’ll work in her favor, and spends time in Drake’s cute town planning the event. The two had a lot of chemistry right from the start but don’t really act on much of anything until 50-60% through the book. I appreciated that they had to keep it PG and appropriate while working together; it made it all the more sweet and exciting when they finally moved forward. I loved Drake’s family and how prevalent they were in the novel. His mom was so sweet. It was like everyone […]

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 […]

ARC Review: Coming Home to Seashell Harbor

Posted July 10, 2021 / Book Reviews / 0 Comments

I read the first book and the last book in the Angel Falls series last year around the holidays and never managed to get the second book read. I hope to get to it in the second half of this year because I actually have a review draft for the whole series that has been SITTING THERE since December of 2019. Regardless, I was excited for a new book by Liasson – this one is set in Seashell Harbor, which appears to be on the Jersey shore. The setup for this one was extremely fun. It’s a second chance romance between two high school sweethearts that return home for the summer. Cam (or Tony) made it big in the NFL as a tight end and had his career come screeching to a halt when he had too many knee injuries to play through. Hadley went out to LA to be a publicist for celebrities and endured a very public breakup when her actor boyfriend left her for a costar. I loved that this was not only a second chance at love for a high school couple, but they both went on to be pretty famous! Coming back to a small, beachside hometown is always something that will appeal to me in books too. There was a lot of tension between the exes because Hadley’s grandmother, after suffering a fall and needing to take time off from Pooch Palace (a dog boarding company), is contemplating retirement. Hadley wants to keep the […]