Publisher: Abrams

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

Posted May 4, 2020 / Book Reviews, Review Roundup / 1 Comment
Review Round Up | Beach Read, A Deadly Inside Scoop, and The Summer of Impossibilities

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

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 […]

Mini ARC Reviews: Letters to the Lost, Pretty Fierce, Zenn Diagram, and Done Dirt Cheap

Posted April 3, 2017 / Book Reviews / 9 Comments
Mini ARC Reviews: Letters to the Lost, Pretty Fierce, Zenn Diagram, and Done Dirt Cheap

Am I the only one with a million ARCs of books releasing this month?! (Even this week in particular!) I wanted to bring together a few reviews here because there are just too many to include. I read some of these a long time ago and a couple of them more recently, but I’m going to pat myself on the back for getting a good portion of them done before their release date. All of these ones were mostly enjoyable – a few more than others – so be sure to read on! 😉 S H O R T  &  S W E E T   A R C   R E V I E W S I enjoyed this one quite a bit. Declan and Juliet were definitely interesting characters who were going through a LOT of shit. The premise of writing letters to each other was really sweet; I love the whole “hidden identity” letter-writing/online-chatting trope. There’s always the torturous waiting game to see when one or both of them realize who the other person is. In this case, it was fairly complicated as they grew to know each other IRL too. Like I said, both had a lot going on. Juliet was dealing with the unexpected death of her mother from earlier that year. Declan was dealing with community service requirements and big family-related issues. He was always angry and closed off from literally everyone, and Juliet was fairly similar except she was sad instead of mad. It […]

ARC Review: Seven Ways We Lie

Posted March 23, 2016 / Book Reviews / 15 Comments
ARC Review: Seven Ways We Lie

I’ve seen some mixed thoughts on this one overall but I really, really enjoyed it. There are many people who didn’t think the seven points of view were different enough, but I fall firmly on the opposite side of that opinion. I really could see the difference between each person and felt that they were all different and unique in their own ways. I’m super impressed that the author was able to take seven different people with distinct personalities and carve them out THAT well. Corresponding to the different sins, however, was a little less clear for some characters compared to others. Some of them were very obvious while others didn’t click right away. I did some researching around other reviews and confirmed what I suspected about some of them, so that helped. However, I think in terms of matching up with that completely, the sins could have been more obvious – since that seemed to be the entire idea behind the story. Because this is such a character-driven story, I’ll talk a little about each character and go through them in order of my favorite to least favorite. The character descriptions may be spoiler-y in the sense that I WILL say which sin I think they each correspond to. Characters Olivia | I feel like she was kind of the main character even though there wasn’t necessarily a MAIN character. Her sin was pretty clearly lust because she hooked up with a lot of guys. I really loved her perspective and feminism. […]

Review: Yolo

Posted November 17, 2014 / Book Reviews / 0 Comments
Review: Yolo

The Internet Girls/Winsome Threesome are back! I was so excited to see this book in Barnes & Noble a few months ago. I read the Internet Girls series back when the books first came out and loved the style. The books are written in instant messaging format, so they’re super quick reads. The first three books in the series were written over seven years ago and followed three best friends through high school. This follow-up book brings the three girls into college, where there are new forms of technology and social media to deal with. I loved hearing about their new college experiences but wish I remembered more about the previous three books. Since I read them so long ago, I didn’t remember much about the boyfriends or their social situations; I only remembered basics. Luckily that was enough to get me through the book without much confusion! I liked that this book was a realistic portrayal of college life and how it affects friendships and relationships. I had experienced almost everything these girls did when I went away to college. In some ways, their stories seemed a little superficial or stereotypical… but I still think they were realistic. It’s not that easy to fully explain what each character is thinking or going through when you’re only using IM format. Regardless, the three girls were dealing with very different issues, so it seemed to encompass the variety of “paths” people choose during college. Angela, at one point, had an experience […]