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530 reviews
A Sweet Mess by Jayci Lee
1.0
ARC provided by NetGalley.
I was very excited about this book. It is a contemporary romance between a pastry chef and the food reviewer who unknowingly gives her a bad review. I thought this sounded like a situation with great conflict and the rest of the summary made me think this was going to absolutely delight me. I was incorrect, I did not like this book.
The first big thing I really hated about this book is the food reviewer admits he was unfair in his review and that he should not have written a review based on literally one bite of food. But he absolutely will under no circumstances even literally consider doing a new review or printing a clarification or retraction. He comes across as a selfish coward and I fully rooted against him from this moment on. Later in the book their is discussion of his unwillingness to apologize and he actually says sorry about instances that happen later in the book but he at no point apologized for this.
The food absolutely was a choking hazard, it was a gummy worm in a chocolate peanut butter cake. But the book treats this like it is incredibly outlandish and sensational enough to cause loyal long time customers to completely abandon the restaurant. It is absolutely bizarre. And this man is supposed to be famous enough that he can singlehandedly ruin someones business but also it is perfectly reasonable that the heroine does not recognize him at all. His attempt at making things right is coming up with a convoluted round about opportunity for her to maybe save her business through exposure on a food show. Right after fully accusing her of sleeping with him for good press.
There is just nothing about this character that I like.
But it is not just him that I disliked about this book. I do not think the way this authors writes is for me at all. I found her plot be be conveyed in almost a mechanical way, almost nothing about this book was able to solicit emotion from me, and literally never was I engaged in the narrative. There was a point in time where the characters were having fun together and I thought it was cute then immediately the author tells the reader that the characters are having fun together. Her whole writing style came off as cringy and redundant.
I also found the romantic and sexual parts of this book kind of odd. When the hero meets the heroine he immediately thinks about hot she would be in bed, this sometimes works for me btu did not here. And this was before I started to hate him! This book starts out with the couple having a one night stand. It is fade to black, but then later the heroine awkwardly and vaguely recounds the encounter. It is the worst of both worlds, we get both a bad sex scene and no sex scene at the same time. Later in the book there is a sex scene that is short and vague and flowery and incredibly awkward to read. And she writes the worst dirty talk I have ever read. It just feels like the author is uncomfortable writing sex scenes but is including them anyway. It really would be a better book if it was purely fade to black.
There is also a scene where the heroine is apologizing to the hero for giving him mixed signals earlier. And in that scene she literally apologized for leaving him when he wanted to have sex with her. She says "I shouldn’t have run off and left you in that . . . um . . . condition. I didn’t mean to do that.” I really really hate this. It is just reinforcing rape culture ideology that men are owed sex and that denying a man sex when he wants it is an offense that requires an apology.
The heroine is delicate and incapable of lying and loves food but in a way that is erotic and not gluttonous. The hero gets so close to thinking he likes her because she isn't like other girls. She is offered money by the tv production company as compensation because her business will have to be closed while she is filming. Despite being in financial peril she refuses to maintain decorum which does kind of infuriate me. There is a point where this literal chef eats a lot of food and says “Did I actually eat all of this? Please tell me you ate enough, too.” Because she is worried she seemed like a glutton. I hate the underlying fatphobia here obviously, but also why is the chef embarrassed that she likes food? That is so nonsensical.
Part of the third act conflict in this book is a secret baby plot line. The hero does decide he wants the heroine back before he knows about the baby, but he doesn't actually take any steps towards getting her back until he knows about the child. I really dislike the implication here that he is spurred into action not by here but by his child. I just think it is more romantic for it to be because of the woman and not the baby and as this is a romance novel I think that is a valid desire.
Clearly this book did not work for me at all. I was bummed, I went into this book sure I would love it. But my romance hit rate is not excellent.
I was very excited about this book. It is a contemporary romance between a pastry chef and the food reviewer who unknowingly gives her a bad review. I thought this sounded like a situation with great conflict and the rest of the summary made me think this was going to absolutely delight me. I was incorrect, I did not like this book.
The first big thing I really hated about this book is the food reviewer admits he was unfair in his review and that he should not have written a review based on literally one bite of food. But he absolutely will under no circumstances even literally consider doing a new review or printing a clarification or retraction. He comes across as a selfish coward and I fully rooted against him from this moment on. Later in the book their is discussion of his unwillingness to apologize and he actually says sorry about instances that happen later in the book but he at no point apologized for this.
The food absolutely was a choking hazard, it was a gummy worm in a chocolate peanut butter cake. But the book treats this like it is incredibly outlandish and sensational enough to cause loyal long time customers to completely abandon the restaurant. It is absolutely bizarre. And this man is supposed to be famous enough that he can singlehandedly ruin someones business but also it is perfectly reasonable that the heroine does not recognize him at all. His attempt at making things right is coming up with a convoluted round about opportunity for her to maybe save her business through exposure on a food show. Right after fully accusing her of sleeping with him for good press.
There is just nothing about this character that I like.
But it is not just him that I disliked about this book. I do not think the way this authors writes is for me at all. I found her plot be be conveyed in almost a mechanical way, almost nothing about this book was able to solicit emotion from me, and literally never was I engaged in the narrative. There was a point in time where the characters were having fun together and I thought it was cute then immediately the author tells the reader that the characters are having fun together. Her whole writing style came off as cringy and redundant.
I also found the romantic and sexual parts of this book kind of odd. When the hero meets the heroine he immediately thinks about hot she would be in bed, this sometimes works for me btu did not here. And this was before I started to hate him! This book starts out with the couple having a one night stand. It is fade to black, but then later the heroine awkwardly and vaguely recounds the encounter. It is the worst of both worlds, we get both a bad sex scene and no sex scene at the same time. Later in the book there is a sex scene that is short and vague and flowery and incredibly awkward to read. And she writes the worst dirty talk I have ever read. It just feels like the author is uncomfortable writing sex scenes but is including them anyway. It really would be a better book if it was purely fade to black.
There is also a scene where the heroine is apologizing to the hero for giving him mixed signals earlier. And in that scene she literally apologized for leaving him when he wanted to have sex with her. She says "I shouldn’t have run off and left you in that . . . um . . . condition. I didn’t mean to do that.” I really really hate this. It is just reinforcing rape culture ideology that men are owed sex and that denying a man sex when he wants it is an offense that requires an apology.
The heroine is delicate and incapable of lying and loves food but in a way that is erotic and not gluttonous. The hero gets so close to thinking he likes her because she isn't like other girls. She is offered money by the tv production company as compensation because her business will have to be closed while she is filming. Despite being in financial peril she refuses to maintain decorum which does kind of infuriate me. There is a point where this literal chef eats a lot of food and says “Did I actually eat all of this? Please tell me you ate enough, too.” Because she is worried she seemed like a glutton. I hate the underlying fatphobia here obviously, but also why is the chef embarrassed that she likes food? That is so nonsensical.
Part of the third act conflict in this book is a secret baby plot line. The hero does decide he wants the heroine back before he knows about the baby, but he doesn't actually take any steps towards getting her back until he knows about the child. I really dislike the implication here that he is spurred into action not by here but by his child. I just think it is more romantic for it to be because of the woman and not the baby and as this is a romance novel I think that is a valid desire.
Clearly this book did not work for me at all. I was bummed, I went into this book sure I would love it. But my romance hit rate is not excellent.
Wicked and the Wallflower by Sarah MacLean
5.0
I had a tremendous time reading this book. I have been reading all of Sarah MacLean's books in publication order and have really liked them all, and really loved many of them. So it was really interesting to read this book just feel like MacLean had just kind of leveled up. This book had everything I have loved about a MacLean book in the past, it just also takes an additional step.
The banter in this book is absolutely top notch. I was immediately besotted. I legitimately had trouble because I was underlining too much of the dialogue and it was slowing down my reading. I just found the word play and conversation in this book to be really really well done. I was delighted.
I thought that MacLean built the conflict in this book so well. It is a little bit like looking at a crash about to happen. The reader sees the hurt that is hurtling towards these characters and absolutely cannot look away. You begin the book in Devil's POV, and get to see his motivations pretty clearly and quickly. The reader knows this man is building his own trap, and it really propelled me through this book.
I have loved how much mythology shows up in MacLean's books in the past but was absolutely delighted about the Janus integration. This is purely because he is one of my favorite Roman gods and I really love the myth. I also just thought this book in general did a really great job of using metaphor. I found myself really emotionally compelled by the moth and the flame metaphor in particular.
I know all of the books MacLean has written are romances, but I just kept feeling like this book was was even more romantic than I was expecting. I felt completely wrapped up in this relationship. The emotions of this story just worked so well for me. I cried multiple times, I think three times, and everytime it was because of the conflict between the couple, which has not always been the case for me lately. I also found this book very funny, it made me laugh consistently throughout the novel. All of the emotions were handled so well.
This book also has me so excited for the future couples in the series and for the overarching plot that is going on. I am so curious about how she is going to handle the Duke in the last book. I think there is a slight drawback to romance in that I already believe that I will be fully on board with that couple that I kind of am not fully experiencing the emotional turmoil I should be relating to that character, but hopefully that will change once I get to the third book.
I do think this story fit really well with MacLean's first big foray outside of just the aristocracy. I am really interested in seeing how she continues to write these characters and to keep thinking about the way she writes about crime. She clearly has a thing for the nobel criminal, the person pushed to the edges of society who then has to break laws in order to survive but has a clear code of ethics. I don't dislike this character archetype, I probably like it too much, but I am always curious about the use of it and what broader commentary the author is providing.
This is certainly a case where my review is slightly lacking because it is often harder to pull out things that really worked for you than it is to focus on what didn't. This whole book just worked for me and I am so excited to keep reading this series.
The banter in this book is absolutely top notch. I was immediately besotted. I legitimately had trouble because I was underlining too much of the dialogue and it was slowing down my reading. I just found the word play and conversation in this book to be really really well done. I was delighted.
I thought that MacLean built the conflict in this book so well. It is a little bit like looking at a crash about to happen. The reader sees the hurt that is hurtling towards these characters and absolutely cannot look away. You begin the book in Devil's POV, and get to see his motivations pretty clearly and quickly. The reader knows this man is building his own trap, and it really propelled me through this book.
I have loved how much mythology shows up in MacLean's books in the past but was absolutely delighted about the Janus integration. This is purely because he is one of my favorite Roman gods and I really love the myth. I also just thought this book in general did a really great job of using metaphor. I found myself really emotionally compelled by the moth and the flame metaphor in particular.
I know all of the books MacLean has written are romances, but I just kept feeling like this book was was even more romantic than I was expecting. I felt completely wrapped up in this relationship. The emotions of this story just worked so well for me. I cried multiple times, I think three times, and everytime it was because of the conflict between the couple, which has not always been the case for me lately. I also found this book very funny, it made me laugh consistently throughout the novel. All of the emotions were handled so well.
This book also has me so excited for the future couples in the series and for the overarching plot that is going on. I am so curious about how she is going to handle the Duke in the last book. I think there is a slight drawback to romance in that I already believe that I will be fully on board with that couple that I kind of am not fully experiencing the emotional turmoil I should be relating to that character, but hopefully that will change once I get to the third book.
I do think this story fit really well with MacLean's first big foray outside of just the aristocracy. I am really interested in seeing how she continues to write these characters and to keep thinking about the way she writes about crime. She clearly has a thing for the nobel criminal, the person pushed to the edges of society who then has to break laws in order to survive but has a clear code of ethics. I don't dislike this character archetype, I probably like it too much, but I am always curious about the use of it and what broader commentary the author is providing.
This is certainly a case where my review is slightly lacking because it is often harder to pull out things that really worked for you than it is to focus on what didn't. This whole book just worked for me and I am so excited to keep reading this series.
Little Thieves by Margaret Owen
5.0
I had such an excellent time reading this book.
I haven't read much fantasy or much YA in recent months and this book absolutely reminded me that I should rectify both of those things. I was so invested in this story.
My little criticisms shall come first. I occasionally found the narration style a tough overwrought. The tongue and cheek telling of a tale was mostly a delight but occasionally over explained. I would have liked slightly more radical politics from Vanja, she was slightly more forgiving of Gisele than I felt made sense. She starts the book very eat the rich and that is mostly a thread that is done well, but the book focused a little bit more on individual actions than I would have prefered. But this is quite slight. I also tend to be annoyed when the final reveal is hidden from the reader, but I had figured it out already so this bothered me less than usual. I did think it took the characters too long to figure out the legal matter they were going to face, but that can be explained by it being targeted at a younger age group.
Overall I was really delighted by this book. I wanted to be reading it whenever I could not be. It made me cry three times. I constantly wanted to see what was coming next, and I really loved the cast of characters.
Vanja, the narrator, is particularly well written. She is such an excellent exploration of the ways past trauma can cause maladaptive behaviors in later life. Most of the time her intense suspicion and wairyness are incredibly helpful to her, but there is an excellent moment in this book where Vanja is reacting to trauma in a way that is self sabotaging and Owens writes this in an incredibly heart wrenching and empathy building way. I truly ached for Vanja many times in this book. Every choice she makes is so incredibly understandable even when the reader can identify the 'better' choice to make. She is also just a fun character. She is clever and playful and vindictive, which is truly delightful to read.
This book has lots of casual queer representation. This isn't a world free of homophobia, but it is a world where most people who aren't cruel are generally accepting of queer people. We get lots of background queer people, including references to binary trans people and some on page nonbinary or gender fluid people. There are sapphic secondary characters (at least four), and the main romance is a girl and a boy but they are both presented as demisexual.
I really loved the romance in this book. It was quite sweet, but also had incredibly high stakes attached. Owen makes the pair excellent foils to each other and does not shy away from giving them very serious conflict. She really shows the ways in which the two deeply understand each other early on, then shows the reader the deep ways in which they misunderstand each other. Which obviously had disastrous consequences. Owen builds this dynamic so excellently. I really adored it.
In general Owen just layers conflict really well. I was constantly invested in what was coming. There were so many interesting threads of this plot and I was glued to the page to see what was coming up next. I found the plot intellectually interesting before I found it emotionally enthralling, but before long I was invested in both aspects equally.
I really loved reading this book. I shall have to dive into Owen's back catalog and I will certainly read whatever she writes next.
I haven't read much fantasy or much YA in recent months and this book absolutely reminded me that I should rectify both of those things. I was so invested in this story.
My little criticisms shall come first. I occasionally found the narration style a tough overwrought. The tongue and cheek telling of a tale was mostly a delight but occasionally over explained. I would have liked slightly more radical politics from Vanja, she was slightly more forgiving of Gisele than I felt made sense. She starts the book very eat the rich and that is mostly a thread that is done well, but the book focused a little bit more on individual actions than I would have prefered. But this is quite slight. I also tend to be annoyed when the final reveal is hidden from the reader, but I had figured it out already so this bothered me less than usual. I did think it took the characters too long to figure out the legal matter they were going to face, but that can be explained by it being targeted at a younger age group.
Overall I was really delighted by this book. I wanted to be reading it whenever I could not be. It made me cry three times. I constantly wanted to see what was coming next, and I really loved the cast of characters.
Vanja, the narrator, is particularly well written. She is such an excellent exploration of the ways past trauma can cause maladaptive behaviors in later life. Most of the time her intense suspicion and wairyness are incredibly helpful to her, but there is an excellent moment in this book where Vanja is reacting to trauma in a way that is self sabotaging and Owens writes this in an incredibly heart wrenching and empathy building way. I truly ached for Vanja many times in this book. Every choice she makes is so incredibly understandable even when the reader can identify the 'better' choice to make. She is also just a fun character. She is clever and playful and vindictive, which is truly delightful to read.
This book has lots of casual queer representation. This isn't a world free of homophobia, but it is a world where most people who aren't cruel are generally accepting of queer people. We get lots of background queer people, including references to binary trans people and some on page nonbinary or gender fluid people. There are sapphic secondary characters (at least four), and the main romance is a girl and a boy but they are both presented as demisexual.
I really loved the romance in this book. It was quite sweet, but also had incredibly high stakes attached. Owen makes the pair excellent foils to each other and does not shy away from giving them very serious conflict. She really shows the ways in which the two deeply understand each other early on, then shows the reader the deep ways in which they misunderstand each other. Which obviously had disastrous consequences. Owen builds this dynamic so excellently. I really adored it.
In general Owen just layers conflict really well. I was constantly invested in what was coming. There were so many interesting threads of this plot and I was glued to the page to see what was coming up next. I found the plot intellectually interesting before I found it emotionally enthralling, but before long I was invested in both aspects equally.
I really loved reading this book. I shall have to dive into Owen's back catalog and I will certainly read whatever she writes next.
Elektra by Jennifer Saint
4.0
I really enjoyed this book. I love a retelling. I think that I like the way the reader gets to engage with intertextuality between both the book the the original work and the book and other works inspired by the original. I just find it really engaging. But I also found this story interesting and engaging in its own right.
This story follows Agamemnon's daughter Elektra, her mother Clytemnestra, and the Trojan seer Cassandra. It mostly follows the events of the Trojan war as told by Aeschylus but also definitely engages with the Iliad as well. Homer stans don't lament.
An aspect of this retelling that I found really interesting was the way Saint treats Helen in this book. Obviously in classical tellings of this story Helen's point of view is not really explored, we get the stories of the men that surrounded Helen, they cast their assumptions about her motives but we don't explore Helen's motives from her point of view. This book also doesn't really get a ton of information about Helen directly from Helen. I thought it was a really interesting choice to have the women around Helen be the ones talking about her. To see her through the eyes of her sister who deeply loved her, her niece who only knows her aunt through gossip, and Cassandra who has a really interesting relationship with Helen.
So much of this book is about grief. Clytemnestra's story most obviously engages with the theme, but Elektra is clearly grieving her relationship with both of her parents, and Cassandra is grieving the loss of safety she feels multiple times in this novel and the loss of being treated as sane. I just really found each woman's relationship with grief and the violence they were experiencing to be really fascinating.
Somewhere where this book didn't work quite as strongly on me was the emotional reaction. I really liked this book intellectually and I was really engaged with the characters and following their emotional journeys. But I mostly felt interest and curiosity and did not have a similar emotional reaction to the emotions the characters were experiencing. This could be because I was reading on a very tight deadline (about 8 hours between start and deadline, and I still had to do a few things).
I had a really good time reading this book and really look forward to reading both her first novel and her upcoming book.
This story follows Agamemnon's daughter Elektra, her mother Clytemnestra, and the Trojan seer Cassandra. It mostly follows the events of the Trojan war as told by Aeschylus but also definitely engages with the Iliad as well. Homer stans don't lament.
An aspect of this retelling that I found really interesting was the way Saint treats Helen in this book. Obviously in classical tellings of this story Helen's point of view is not really explored, we get the stories of the men that surrounded Helen, they cast their assumptions about her motives but we don't explore Helen's motives from her point of view. This book also doesn't really get a ton of information about Helen directly from Helen. I thought it was a really interesting choice to have the women around Helen be the ones talking about her. To see her through the eyes of her sister who deeply loved her, her niece who only knows her aunt through gossip, and Cassandra who has a really interesting relationship with Helen.
So much of this book is about grief. Clytemnestra's story most obviously engages with the theme, but Elektra is clearly grieving her relationship with both of her parents, and Cassandra is grieving the loss of safety she feels multiple times in this novel and the loss of being treated as sane. I just really found each woman's relationship with grief and the violence they were experiencing to be really fascinating.
Somewhere where this book didn't work quite as strongly on me was the emotional reaction. I really liked this book intellectually and I was really engaged with the characters and following their emotional journeys. But I mostly felt interest and curiosity and did not have a similar emotional reaction to the emotions the characters were experiencing. This could be because I was reading on a very tight deadline (about 8 hours between start and deadline, and I still had to do a few things).
I had a really good time reading this book and really look forward to reading both her first novel and her upcoming book.
A Scot in the Dark by Sarah MacLean
4.0
I am writing this review many months after reading it based on notes I took while reading the book.
The Duke of Warnick was the hero in this story and though I did like him as a character I really did think that his emotional journey in this book needed more page time to be explored more fully. He is a classic MacLean hero in that he is a massive man who truly does not believe he is good enough for the heroine of the story, which all does work for me. Though I will say that for a while I did think that he was fat and I was so happy that a romance author was writing a sexy fat man and then was a touch disappointed when he ended up being a thin but hugely muscled gentleman. When shall we get fat men in romance? But back to his emotional journey. He is used throughout this book to explore the shame the patriarchy causes men to feel when the put women on impossible and perfect pedestals. He is VERY 'if I touch her I will ruin her'. While I did like his emotional journey I really do not feel it got enough time for his feelings to be properly addressed and unpacked and especially felt like this story was rushed along towards the end. I just really liked him and his character growth and thought he needed a touch more time to executed perfectly.
This story also uses one of my least favorite narrative devices, when a huge action is taken off page by a point of view character but is obscured from the reader so that we can later feel like things are going wrong when they are not or so that we can be surprised with another point of view character. In this instance I truly feel like this popped the motion of the scene for me because I was far more interested the heroine's emotional reaction to this thing and I was getting the hero's reaction. This has to do with the revenge porn element of the story and I truly am torn about how I feel about MacLean's handling of this topic.
On the one hand I do think she made a really bold and empowering choice for the heroine to not distance herself from her nude portrait and for it to be so positively received with her being unashamed and no longer under this man's thumb. But I also do think that this really hampered the parallel with revenge porn. I just think that this went a little too far away from exploring the trauma of this action and tried to divorce Lily from 'victimhood' when she is objectively horribly victimized.
I can suspend my disbelief a bit and accept that the man who painted the portrait does not materially benefit from this portrait, but this is really hard to do. Because I genuinely do think he would have materially benefitted if this were true and I think that in real like men do materially benefit from revenge porn, so I did think this was another point where this parallel failed a little bit for me. Especially because this book dug so deeply into the ways in which Derek, the painter, truly did not respect Lily's personhood in any way, it felt a little bit like she continues to be denied that personhood by becoming a literal piece of art. I do think this was meant to be empowering and be a statement about not being ashamed of female sexuality I am just not sure it worked for me.
Smaller issue was that even though I did really like the conflict in this book I do think that it got a little bit repetitive as I was reading. I don't have much more to say about this, I thought it was a good conflict, but eventually I felt a tad like I was reading the same thing multiple times.
My last negative thing to say about this book (a book I truly did enjoy so much I promise) is that I feel very uncomfortable generally with how Scotland is treated in historical romance as a whole. I just never feel like the historical political realities of being Scottish and especially of being Scottish and being in close proximity to English people who have benefitted from the disenfranchisement of the Scottish people is never actually addressed in any satisfactory way. Also they do seem to write Scotland as a land devoid of women.
But on to a more positive note! I truly loved the beginning of this book so much. MacLean does such an excellent job building her characters so fully and quickly and beautifully layering the conflict that is going to be relevant for the rest of the novel. I was really impressed by how little time it took me to become fully invested in what was going to happen in the book and I am properly glued to the story.
I really did like the chapter headings, this book is a historical take on celebrity gossip and on revenge porn so I did think it was clever and fun that each chapter begins with an attention grabbing headline. I thought it really worked well with the larger narrative and was just a fun little structural element.
I am particularly interested in the way miscommunication is used in romance novels, I truly think it it vital for them to work, and I really liked the way Warnick misunderstands Lily throughout this story. He truly does not understand fully her desire for community and connection and instead sees her as someone in need of authority and protection. It is tangled up in his own patriarchal views and the shame he feels about himself in a way that really makes the reader understand why he has so much trouble understanding what Lily actually needs to be happy.
A much smaller thing I loved about this book, and many of MacLean's previous books, is the use of theater. I just think she does a really lovely job extracting meaning from performance and art in her stories. Also if you are in a theater in a historical you know something excellent or terrible is about to happen.
I thought this book has really excellent cameos throughout. I did want Lily to have slightly more on page interaction with her friends, but don't think the friendship was maligned in its page time. I do think this book did a good job showing that Lily's want for community and connection did go past her desire for a fulfilling romantic life and showed her growing her community by making friends that truly valued her. I really love a romance novel that spends time with a friend group.
I talked about Warnick feeling shame earlier in my review but I truly thought this was maybe the stand out part of this narrative for me. The reader really deeply feels this deep and abiding shame that has followed him throughout most of his life. We see how this shame has shaped him as a person, how his actions and thoughts and desires have all been warped by this horrible thing that happened to him as a teenager and see the ripple effects in how Lily interacts with him. This aspect of their relationship was my favorite, I loved watching these two try so hard to actually be able to understand each other and so much of that involved them working to break down this shame and created a trusting relationship to move forward together in.
This review is much longer than I anticipated. I did truly really enjoy this book and absolutely plan on rereading it, it really impacted me as I was reading it and I still regularly think about this book. But my last little comment, this book has so many building blocks of what would become Bombshell in it. Both in that we get to see a lot of the Talbot's and in that A Scot in the Dark and Bombshell both have pretty similar themes explored within them.
The Duke of Warnick was the hero in this story and though I did like him as a character I really did think that his emotional journey in this book needed more page time to be explored more fully. He is a classic MacLean hero in that he is a massive man who truly does not believe he is good enough for the heroine of the story, which all does work for me. Though I will say that for a while I did think that he was fat and I was so happy that a romance author was writing a sexy fat man and then was a touch disappointed when he ended up being a thin but hugely muscled gentleman. When shall we get fat men in romance? But back to his emotional journey. He is used throughout this book to explore the shame the patriarchy causes men to feel when the put women on impossible and perfect pedestals. He is VERY 'if I touch her I will ruin her'. While I did like his emotional journey I really do not feel it got enough time for his feelings to be properly addressed and unpacked and especially felt like this story was rushed along towards the end. I just really liked him and his character growth and thought he needed a touch more time to executed perfectly.
This story also uses one of my least favorite narrative devices, when a huge action is taken off page by a point of view character but is obscured from the reader so that we can later feel like things are going wrong when they are not or so that we can be surprised with another point of view character. In this instance I truly feel like this popped the motion of the scene for me because I was far more interested the heroine's emotional reaction to this thing and I was getting the hero's reaction. This has to do with the revenge porn element of the story and I truly am torn about how I feel about MacLean's handling of this topic.
On the one hand I do think she made a really bold and empowering choice for the heroine to not distance herself from her nude portrait and for it to be so positively received with her being unashamed and no longer under this man's thumb. But I also do think that this really hampered the parallel with revenge porn. I just think that this went a little too far away from exploring the trauma of this action and tried to divorce Lily from 'victimhood' when she is objectively horribly victimized.
I can suspend my disbelief a bit and accept that the man who painted the portrait does not materially benefit from this portrait, but this is really hard to do. Because I genuinely do think he would have materially benefitted if this were true and I think that in real like men do materially benefit from revenge porn, so I did think this was another point where this parallel failed a little bit for me. Especially because this book dug so deeply into the ways in which Derek, the painter, truly did not respect Lily's personhood in any way, it felt a little bit like she continues to be denied that personhood by becoming a literal piece of art. I do think this was meant to be empowering and be a statement about not being ashamed of female sexuality I am just not sure it worked for me.
Smaller issue was that even though I did really like the conflict in this book I do think that it got a little bit repetitive as I was reading. I don't have much more to say about this, I thought it was a good conflict, but eventually I felt a tad like I was reading the same thing multiple times.
My last negative thing to say about this book (a book I truly did enjoy so much I promise) is that I feel very uncomfortable generally with how Scotland is treated in historical romance as a whole. I just never feel like the historical political realities of being Scottish and especially of being Scottish and being in close proximity to English people who have benefitted from the disenfranchisement of the Scottish people is never actually addressed in any satisfactory way. Also they do seem to write Scotland as a land devoid of women.
But on to a more positive note! I truly loved the beginning of this book so much. MacLean does such an excellent job building her characters so fully and quickly and beautifully layering the conflict that is going to be relevant for the rest of the novel. I was really impressed by how little time it took me to become fully invested in what was going to happen in the book and I am properly glued to the story.
I really did like the chapter headings, this book is a historical take on celebrity gossip and on revenge porn so I did think it was clever and fun that each chapter begins with an attention grabbing headline. I thought it really worked well with the larger narrative and was just a fun little structural element.
I am particularly interested in the way miscommunication is used in romance novels, I truly think it it vital for them to work, and I really liked the way Warnick misunderstands Lily throughout this story. He truly does not understand fully her desire for community and connection and instead sees her as someone in need of authority and protection. It is tangled up in his own patriarchal views and the shame he feels about himself in a way that really makes the reader understand why he has so much trouble understanding what Lily actually needs to be happy.
A much smaller thing I loved about this book, and many of MacLean's previous books, is the use of theater. I just think she does a really lovely job extracting meaning from performance and art in her stories. Also if you are in a theater in a historical you know something excellent or terrible is about to happen.
I thought this book has really excellent cameos throughout. I did want Lily to have slightly more on page interaction with her friends, but don't think the friendship was maligned in its page time. I do think this book did a good job showing that Lily's want for community and connection did go past her desire for a fulfilling romantic life and showed her growing her community by making friends that truly valued her. I really love a romance novel that spends time with a friend group.
I talked about Warnick feeling shame earlier in my review but I truly thought this was maybe the stand out part of this narrative for me. The reader really deeply feels this deep and abiding shame that has followed him throughout most of his life. We see how this shame has shaped him as a person, how his actions and thoughts and desires have all been warped by this horrible thing that happened to him as a teenager and see the ripple effects in how Lily interacts with him. This aspect of their relationship was my favorite, I loved watching these two try so hard to actually be able to understand each other and so much of that involved them working to break down this shame and created a trusting relationship to move forward together in.
This review is much longer than I anticipated. I did truly really enjoy this book and absolutely plan on rereading it, it really impacted me as I was reading it and I still regularly think about this book. But my last little comment, this book has so many building blocks of what would become Bombshell in it. Both in that we get to see a lot of the Talbot's and in that A Scot in the Dark and Bombshell both have pretty similar themes explored within them.
Kiss Me, Daddy by Quinn Ward
3.0
Continuing my experiment. I can confirm that the book by a queer author was not homophobic the way the Athena Steller ones were, which is obvious haha. But I only liked it a touch more, I just don't think this is my jam.
This book was fine, I was a touch bored, I was able to put is down for a few days, I don't thinkt he conflict was particularly well done which lead to some pacing issues.
Also I just kept thinking about how irresponsible this single father was being. Don't introduce someone you have been dating for a few days to you kid, that is bananas.
This book was fine, I was a touch bored, I was able to put is down for a few days, I don't thinkt he conflict was particularly well done which lead to some pacing issues.
Also I just kept thinking about how irresponsible this single father was being. Don't introduce someone you have been dating for a few days to you kid, that is bananas.
I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
5.0
I completely understand why everyone is sprinting towards this book. It is an excellent case for why people find memoir compelling. It is open and vulnerable and deeply reflective. And McCurdy is just a really talented writer, her prose is so clear and compelling. This book made me want to turn pages with much the same fervor that a thriller does.
If you are not in a position to read about parental abuse (mental, physical, and sexual), eating disorders, unhealthy relationships with alcohol, or parental death then maybe this book isn’t going to be for you.
I really found this book incredibly compelling. Throughout a good chunk of this book you will really absolutely feel the sense of mounting tension as Jennette is continuing to be abused and manipulated by her mother. It feels like you are holding your breath with this little girl who just wants to make her mother happy. She was failed by so many people in her life, and was dealing with an incredible amount of responsibility with the added stress of financially supporting her family.
I really wish I could grasp the correct language to talk about this book properly. I am sure there are going to be some incredible thoughtful reviews out there, and that very much does not seem like how mine is going to end up.
It is always a little bit weird critiquing memoir. It feels a little bit like laying judgment of a person, looking at their life and trauma and responding with callousness. And there were small things that I might have liked a little bit more about, but on the whole I did just think this was a really exemplary memoir. I found it thoughtful and engaging and just generally an excellent read.
If you are not in a position to read about parental abuse (mental, physical, and sexual), eating disorders, unhealthy relationships with alcohol, or parental death then maybe this book isn’t going to be for you.
I really found this book incredibly compelling. Throughout a good chunk of this book you will really absolutely feel the sense of mounting tension as Jennette is continuing to be abused and manipulated by her mother. It feels like you are holding your breath with this little girl who just wants to make her mother happy. She was failed by so many people in her life, and was dealing with an incredible amount of responsibility with the added stress of financially supporting her family.
I really wish I could grasp the correct language to talk about this book properly. I am sure there are going to be some incredible thoughtful reviews out there, and that very much does not seem like how mine is going to end up.
It is always a little bit weird critiquing memoir. It feels a little bit like laying judgment of a person, looking at their life and trauma and responding with callousness. And there were small things that I might have liked a little bit more about, but on the whole I did just think this was a really exemplary memoir. I found it thoughtful and engaging and just generally an excellent read.
The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake
3.0
It has been awhile since I read this book and I am now writing my review based on what I remember and on the notes I wrote while I was reading it!
The prologue was so incredibly terrible that if I was not reading this book for a book club I would not have gotten past the first page. The language is so dense and so incredibly faux intellectual as to be almost unintelligible. I read the first paragraph to three people who all just looked at me with uncomprehending eyes and laughed. It is truly bad writing. Fortunately the writing does improve after this.
This is a really character focused fantasy. We spend the first third of the novel doing essentially home visits with different characters as we are introduced to each person and the world the book will inhabit. It really has an open house before the first day of school feeling, which is apt as they are essentially being recruited for magical graduate school and once they are in magical graduate school the plot really starts to focus a bit more. Though there are very important clues to the end of the book in the first section of the novel.
Nico and Libby do sort of occupy the same place in the story in a way that experienced readers will note is a clue to something else coming. The two are starting so closely paired because there needs to be a big even that will differentiate them at some point. I am not sure the book really used either of these two to their full extent, but I do think that was a running problem as this cast was a little bit too big for the page count and skill level of the author. But I did enjoy Nico and Libby as characters and the fact that they were so similar did help in me not getting confused in their storylines.
I am writing this about five months after I read the book and all I have written about Callum and Tristan was that I kept getting the two of them confused with each other. I currently cannot remember if anyone died, I don't think anyone did? But absolutely this story would have benefited from the emotional turmoil of a death and the narrowing of the cast. Though I still think these two were underdeveloped generally.
Reina was my early favorite. She gets such a bad ass set up and then is barely in the rest of the book. She is so underutilized it is almost comical. I thought she was the most interesting and engaging of the lot and she just sort of pops in every hundred pages. It was absolutely the most disappointing part of the book for me because I think she could have been so interesting to read from more often.
With Perisa I really liked the tension in trying to figure out her motives throughout the story. I do not remember too many other strong feelings about her expect that she got a lot more page time than I originally expected. I might come in later and expand my thoughts about Perisa and Atlas and Ezra but I need to locate more in depth notes to properly do this.
About the plot I was pretty happy that I was able to predict the big twist. I do think the telegraphing is pretty apparent in the first section of the book, and as the book progresses it talks more and more about secret hiding places and pathways and time. I like to have guessed correctly and was surprised enough by other aspects of the story that I wasn't disappointed to have seen the twist coming.
The magic system was another area where I felt like it was underdeveloped. Even though I felt like this needed more page time in the story I did think the magic system was really fun and I genuinely enjoyed it.
I did find this book a touch pretentious throughout. This coupled with the way the book also talks down to the reader with its references was confusing. It was pretentious enough to use slightly obscure references, but then Blake would explain the reference to the reader in a way that did feel a bit condescending. It is not very often that a book chooses to do those two things together. Be pretentious or use more widely known references, I hated the trying to have your cake and eat it too feeling this gave me.
A similar issue was that Blake uses a lot of half baked metaphor in the book. It was a weird feeling to read and think that the author was not really understanding the metaphors she was actively using throughout the book. I do hope this is something that would have been addressed between this edition the the traditionally published edition. But while I was reading I just kept feelin like what Black was saying and what she meant by a metaphor were not aligned.
I didn't hate this book, I did generally enjoy reading it and I always like the opportunity to be able to engage with people over a popular novel, but I just thought so much in this book was underdeveloped. I might read book two and see how I like Blake's writing as she grows in her writing career.
The prologue was so incredibly terrible that if I was not reading this book for a book club I would not have gotten past the first page. The language is so dense and so incredibly faux intellectual as to be almost unintelligible. I read the first paragraph to three people who all just looked at me with uncomprehending eyes and laughed. It is truly bad writing. Fortunately the writing does improve after this.
This is a really character focused fantasy. We spend the first third of the novel doing essentially home visits with different characters as we are introduced to each person and the world the book will inhabit. It really has an open house before the first day of school feeling, which is apt as they are essentially being recruited for magical graduate school and once they are in magical graduate school the plot really starts to focus a bit more. Though there are very important clues to the end of the book in the first section of the novel.
Nico and Libby do sort of occupy the same place in the story in a way that experienced readers will note is a clue to something else coming. The two are starting so closely paired because there needs to be a big even that will differentiate them at some point. I am not sure the book really used either of these two to their full extent, but I do think that was a running problem as this cast was a little bit too big for the page count and skill level of the author. But I did enjoy Nico and Libby as characters and the fact that they were so similar did help in me not getting confused in their storylines.
I am writing this about five months after I read the book and all I have written about Callum and Tristan was that I kept getting the two of them confused with each other. I currently cannot remember if anyone died, I don't think anyone did? But absolutely this story would have benefited from the emotional turmoil of a death and the narrowing of the cast. Though I still think these two were underdeveloped generally.
Reina was my early favorite. She gets such a bad ass set up and then is barely in the rest of the book. She is so underutilized it is almost comical. I thought she was the most interesting and engaging of the lot and she just sort of pops in every hundred pages. It was absolutely the most disappointing part of the book for me because I think she could have been so interesting to read from more often.
With Perisa I really liked the tension in trying to figure out her motives throughout the story. I do not remember too many other strong feelings about her expect that she got a lot more page time than I originally expected. I might come in later and expand my thoughts about Perisa and Atlas and Ezra but I need to locate more in depth notes to properly do this.
About the plot I was pretty happy that I was able to predict the big twist. I do think the telegraphing is pretty apparent in the first section of the book, and as the book progresses it talks more and more about secret hiding places and pathways and time. I like to have guessed correctly and was surprised enough by other aspects of the story that I wasn't disappointed to have seen the twist coming.
The magic system was another area where I felt like it was underdeveloped. Even though I felt like this needed more page time in the story I did think the magic system was really fun and I genuinely enjoyed it.
I did find this book a touch pretentious throughout. This coupled with the way the book also talks down to the reader with its references was confusing. It was pretentious enough to use slightly obscure references, but then Blake would explain the reference to the reader in a way that did feel a bit condescending. It is not very often that a book chooses to do those two things together. Be pretentious or use more widely known references, I hated the trying to have your cake and eat it too feeling this gave me.
A similar issue was that Blake uses a lot of half baked metaphor in the book. It was a weird feeling to read and think that the author was not really understanding the metaphors she was actively using throughout the book. I do hope this is something that would have been addressed between this edition the the traditionally published edition. But while I was reading I just kept feelin like what Black was saying and what she meant by a metaphor were not aligned.
I didn't hate this book, I did generally enjoy reading it and I always like the opportunity to be able to engage with people over a popular novel, but I just thought so much in this book was underdeveloped. I might read book two and see how I like Blake's writing as she grows in her writing career.
Huge Deal by Lauren Layne
3.0
This is the third book in this series. This one follows a wall street dude and his long time assistant. She has been in love with him for forever, he is oblivious until he starts to realize she might be moving on to other men.
This is my favorite of the three. I think the relationship was actually compelling and I was very invested in the couple. I again didn't like the end, this author relies too much on the grand gesture, but I liked their relationship until that moment. Except their is a moment where Kennedy realized that Kate is being underpaid and then just does nothing about that despite the implication that he could. This series is so weird about money.
I did think this book was still pretty conservative in its underpinnings. This book has a gay side character and occasionally has some other surface level engagement that would imply a more progressive world view, but it is not enough to combat the overall tone. This book the extra shitty in the food area, and I hate the way family relationships were written. But I do now know that Lauren Layne is very much not for me!
This is my favorite of the three. I think the relationship was actually compelling and I was very invested in the couple. I again didn't like the end, this author relies too much on the grand gesture, but I liked their relationship until that moment. Except their is a moment where Kennedy realized that Kate is being underpaid and then just does nothing about that despite the implication that he could. This series is so weird about money.
I did think this book was still pretty conservative in its underpinnings. This book has a gay side character and occasionally has some other surface level engagement that would imply a more progressive world view, but it is not enough to combat the overall tone. This book the extra shitty in the food area, and I hate the way family relationships were written. But I do now know that Lauren Layne is very much not for me!
Hard Sell by Lauren Layne
2.0
Hard Sell is the Follow up to Hot Asset. It is a rivals to lovers fake dating (for a reason that baffled me, but I can try to be accommodating toward) romance.
I sort of had all the same issues with book to that I had with book one, the narrators are slightly better this time around, both because I speed them up and because I am used to them now. But the romance still didn't dive deeply enough into their internal conflict for my liking. We solve the third act conflict with a grand gesture and not with actually working out the problems in a way I would have found more satisfying. I still dislike the way this author writes sex, and I still think this series is incredibly conservative in its world view.
This book makes reference to a few women who make money via sex work. The first is a stripper who is not treated like a person by the narrative but instead is the terrible thing that happened to the hero and is mostly treated as a joke. She is constantly referred to as the stripper who gave a lackluster lapdance. The second is a woman who dabbled in full service sex work, prostitution, who is absolutely a villain in this story. She gets zero empathy or redeeming qualities.
This book does seem to mostly hate women who are not going to be the heroine of their own book in this series. With the exception of the lawyer in book one almost every woman named (maybe with the exception of the best friend in book one who left immediately after her plot relevance was over) is a bad person or causes harm to the heroes.
This series also traffics in the 'no woman mattered to me before her' which I am meant to find charming but I cannot because the underlying shittiness of this assertion is literally never explored. The mostly nameless women of the past are treated as blanketly unworthy, or as collateral damage to get the hero to the heroine. The heroines past romantic or sexual history is not engaged with at all in a really weird way. I just wish their was a single ounce of empathy for the tossed aside women the populate these books and book like it. Treat your male characters like humans, want them to treat women well and to have remorse when they didn't. That would be a much mor ecompelling narrative.
The heroine of this book is supposedly the best friend of the hero in the previous book but this series treats their relationship so weirdly. It basically passes this heroine to the heroine of the previous book because it wasnt to enshrine the hierarchy of romantic love over platonic love. These 'best friends' barely speak to each other, he does not ask her to be in the wedding his fiancee does, and it is explicitly stated twice that this life long friendship that came about through shared trauma is inherently less valuable than romantic love. Why can't they just be best friends without making it a competition? I am baffled.
This series is also weird about food. It absolutely does the cool girls eat real food thing, while also maintaining a pretty fatphobic undertone throughout the novels.
Last complaint, this book treats poor people exceptionally poorly. We have two characters who bootstrapped their way out of poverty. And one still poor person who is kind of a lovable joke, but the rest of the poor people are inherently unable to maintain family units, and bring society nothing but misery. It is an incredibly unkind and deeply conservative and paternalistic way of viewing people in poverty. I legitimately hate this.
I thought the plot was fine, I'm going to read book three mostly so I can be assured that this author is not at all for me.
I sort of had all the same issues with book to that I had with book one, the narrators are slightly better this time around, both because I speed them up and because I am used to them now. But the romance still didn't dive deeply enough into their internal conflict for my liking. We solve the third act conflict with a grand gesture and not with actually working out the problems in a way I would have found more satisfying. I still dislike the way this author writes sex, and I still think this series is incredibly conservative in its world view.
This book makes reference to a few women who make money via sex work. The first is a stripper who is not treated like a person by the narrative but instead is the terrible thing that happened to the hero and is mostly treated as a joke. She is constantly referred to as the stripper who gave a lackluster lapdance. The second is a woman who dabbled in full service sex work, prostitution, who is absolutely a villain in this story. She gets zero empathy or redeeming qualities.
This book does seem to mostly hate women who are not going to be the heroine of their own book in this series. With the exception of the lawyer in book one almost every woman named (maybe with the exception of the best friend in book one who left immediately after her plot relevance was over) is a bad person or causes harm to the heroes.
This series also traffics in the 'no woman mattered to me before her' which I am meant to find charming but I cannot because the underlying shittiness of this assertion is literally never explored. The mostly nameless women of the past are treated as blanketly unworthy, or as collateral damage to get the hero to the heroine. The heroines past romantic or sexual history is not engaged with at all in a really weird way. I just wish their was a single ounce of empathy for the tossed aside women the populate these books and book like it. Treat your male characters like humans, want them to treat women well and to have remorse when they didn't. That would be a much mor ecompelling narrative.
The heroine of this book is supposedly the best friend of the hero in the previous book but this series treats their relationship so weirdly. It basically passes this heroine to the heroine of the previous book because it wasnt to enshrine the hierarchy of romantic love over platonic love. These 'best friends' barely speak to each other, he does not ask her to be in the wedding his fiancee does, and it is explicitly stated twice that this life long friendship that came about through shared trauma is inherently less valuable than romantic love. Why can't they just be best friends without making it a competition? I am baffled.
This series is also weird about food. It absolutely does the cool girls eat real food thing, while also maintaining a pretty fatphobic undertone throughout the novels.
Last complaint, this book treats poor people exceptionally poorly. We have two characters who bootstrapped their way out of poverty. And one still poor person who is kind of a lovable joke, but the rest of the poor people are inherently unable to maintain family units, and bring society nothing but misery. It is an incredibly unkind and deeply conservative and paternalistic way of viewing people in poverty. I legitimately hate this.
I thought the plot was fine, I'm going to read book three mostly so I can be assured that this author is not at all for me.