Book Review, Fiction, Romance

This Spells Love by Kate Robb ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪
Genre: Romance

When Gemma finds herself drunk and crying over her breakup, she enlists the help of her sister, aunt, and best friend Dax to help her conduct a cleansing spell to erase her ex from her life. Lo and behold, Gemma wakes to find out that it was a little too powerful, and has sent her to an alternate reality where not only does her ex not know who she is, neither does Dax.

I appreciated the message behind this story about being thankful for the things you have in your life at the present moment. As Gemma sees what her life could be, she has to weigh that reality against the relationships she has lost because of the spell.

The romance in this book was so unrealistic. Dax goes from thinking Gemma is breaking into his store to suddenly being really into her pages later. Their flirting was so cringey and nothing about the relationship felt organic.

One thing that I love about this kind of book is seeing the person who time/line travels needing to navigate their new life and inevitably making mistakes. This was almost entirely glossed over in this book. Gemma picked everything up way too quickly, eliminating what could have been a great opportunity for more connection between her and her friends and family.

If you’re interested in a timeline hopping story, I’d suggest finding another one.

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy This Spells Love at an indie bookstore near you
This Spells Love on Goodreads

Book Review, Memoir, Nonfiction

Down the Drain by Julia Fox ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Memoir

I read Down the Drain for a book club having no idea who Julia Fox is and, to be honest, I still don’t really know who she is. This memoir follows Julia’s life from the time she’s very young to present day. It paints a picture of a child who was denied love from her parents and forced to fend for herself from a young age.

Her time in NYC featured lots of drugs, a sugar daddy, and her escapades as a dominatrix. From there, we follow Julia to New Orleans and are chaotically introduced to friends who seem to come out of nowhere. It was a little hard to keep up with the pacing.

This is an overview of Julia’s life without any reflection. She tells her story exactly as it happens. It was fascinating to read about a journey so different from mine and to see how she was able to fight for herself and become famous (for what exactly, I’m still not sure). It was hard to see her make the same mistakes over and over without commenting on that at all, but I guess that’s either not the kind of book she wanted to write, or that self-awareness doesn’t exist. I think she woke up one day and said “I’m going to write a memoir” and that was all the forethought that went into it.

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy Down the Drain at an indie bookstore near you
Down the Drain on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, Romance

Mistakes We Never Made by Hannah Brown ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪
Genre: Romance

Mistakes We Never Made is the road trip journey of Emma and her will-they-won’t-they friend Finn as they attempt to track down a runaway bride, Sybil, in the days leading up to the wedding. I love me a road trip story, but this one reallyyy dragged. Emma kept making dumb decisions and assumptions about where Sybil was, like I could have found this woman faster. That said, I did enjoy her conversations with Finn and watching them untangle their past and the problems that had stood in the way of them getting together.

There were a lot of loose ends in this book which really frustrated me. We never fully figured out what went down with Emma and Finn on prom night, which is harped on incessantly, and we don’t even find out what happens with Sybil?? It felt like lazy writing! Like no one wanted to take the time to figure out what happened.

Parts of this book were fun flirty romps around the the country, but I cannot recommend it just for those sections.

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy Mistakes We Never Made at an indie bookstore near you
Mistakes We Never Made on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, mystery

Happiness Falls by Angie Kim ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Mystery

There are so many layers to this book. It starts off with a missing person. Mia’s father, Adam, fails to return from a walk with her younger brother, Eugene, who is nonverbal. The family begins to work together to try to uncover anything hinting at Adam’s whereabouts.

As they go through his things, they find notebooks indicating that Adam was fascinated by the psychology behind happiness, and determining ‘happiness quotients.’ This took up a large portion of the book, and honestly, there were whole sections I kind of skimmed. I found the science interesting to an extent, but it didn’t feel like it was moving the story along.

The other big focus of the book is on Eugene and how he was misunderstood as someone with autism and Angelman syndrome. It goes in depth about the different types of teaching and learning they have explored to try to help Eugene communicate. The research that must have gone into this narrative was tremendous and it painted a really powerful picture of the difficulty and frustration Eugene, and others like him, deal with.

Each piece of this book was interesting on its own, but as a whole, it felt like too many BIG THINGS to fit into one book. Together, they bogged the narrative down somewhat and made it feel slow.

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy Happiness Falls at an indie bookstore near you
Happiness Falls on Goodreads

Book Review, Romance

Better Left Unsent by Lia Louis ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Romance

I’ve been a huge fan of Lia Louis’s previous books, but there was something lacking from Better Left Unsent. The premise was unusual and had a lot of promise: Millie writes down her thoughts, the ones she would never say out loud, in draft emails as a way of releasing them. One day, she finds that all her drafts were delivered. Millie is left to pick up the pieces of her life when her deepest thoughts have been shared with the exact people who were never supposed to see them.

Louis always writes wonderfully quirky and loveable characters, and this was no exception. Millie and her friends seem realistic in their quirks and I loved spending time with them. Although the romance was on the back burner for much of the book, I really enjoyed Jack and Millie’s chemistry. It was clear that they complemented each other wonderfully and I was so rooting for them.

The premise definitely did not feel deep enough to sustain the whole book. Millie’s constant need to clean up after herself/the emails got old pretty quickly and there wasn’t much else plot-wise to keep me hooked.

The loveable characters and promise of romance kept me reading, but the charm I expect from Louis’s books wasn’t sustained throughout.

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy Better Left Unsent at an indie bookstore near you
Better Left Unsent on Goodreads

Book Review, thriller

The Teacher by Frieda McFadden ~ Book Revie

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Thriller

This book is nottt going to be for everyone. It’s one of the more twisted McFadden books, focusing on the relationship between Addie, a high school student, and her English teacher, Nate. Nate makes Addie feel special at a time in her life when she’s at her lowest of lows and no other students want to spend time with her. As their relationship escalates, she quickly becomes obsessively jealous of Nate’s wife Eve, who herself feels trapped in a loveless marriage.

McFadden’s short, snappy chapters always make her books breeze by and this was no exception. Told from alternating perspectives, I loved getting to know the secrets each of the main characters was harboring. We know from the prologue that someone ends up digging a grave and although I guessed pretty early on who it was for, I couldn’t wait to see how we would get there.

In typical McFadden fashion, there was a big old twist at the end. At first I was shocked in the way only a truly twisty twist can do, but if I think about it too much it just…doesn’t make sense. It didn’t put me off the whole book, but it definitely could have been better thought out.

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy The Teacher at an indie bookstore near you
The Teacher on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Fiction

What an unexpected surprise Tom Lake was for me. Lara’s three daughters come home to the family cherry farm in the spring of 2020 as the pandemic sets in. To pass the time, they request that their mom tell them about the time when she dated the famous actor Peter Duke. Lara transports us and her girls back in time to when she first began acting weaves a fascinating and nuanced story of her life and her relationships.

As much as this story focused on the past, I found the portions in the present fascinating, hearing about the labor involved with running the farm and the ways that the family considered the impacts of the pandemic on their lives. Having spent some time back with my parents at the start of Covid myself, this was particularly interesting. The complexity of the emotions Lara feels about having her girls home was compelling.

Lara’s journey in the limelight was quite at odds with her later life and made for a really refreshing contrast between the two running narratives. Her time acting focused on playing Emily in Our Town, but you definitely don’t need to be familiar with the play to understand the book. I’m shocked that hearing about the same characters over and over again didn’t start to feel old, but something about Patchett’s writing and the way Lara’s life changed from performance to performance kept the story moving and feeling fresh.

Tom Lake isn’t especially action packed. It looks deeply at relationships and how they change, both as people change and as circumstances do. This was such a gentle and immersive narrative and really reminded me of the slower pace of life when the pandemic first began.

I cannot recommend the audiobook enough. It’s narrated by Meryl Streep and she made it truly a joy to listen to.

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy Tom Lake at an indie bookstore near you
Tom Lake on Goodreads

Book Review, Romance

The Second Chance Year by Melissa Wiesner ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Romance
Read if you liked: The Good Part

I saw this book compared to Josie Silver and Rebecca Serle and that perhaps set my expectations too high. Sadie’s life feels like it’s falling apart. She’s lost her job, her boyfriend, and her apartment and finds herself crashing in the spare bedroom of her brother’s childhood friend. With nothing to lose, she makes a wish to redo the last year of her life and low and behold, her wish is granted.

In an attempt to keep the “bad” things from happening to her all over again, Sadie finds herself censoring her words and actions and trying to fit into a mold she thinks will get her where she wants to go. I found this conceptually interesting, but it quickly felt repetitive and made me frustrated with her as a character.

The secondary characters in Sadie’s life were really lovely and interesting and the found-family she created around her ultimately helped her to figure out what was most important to her. I appreciated the way this journey helped Sadie to find herself and thought the premise was an interesting way to approach it (albeit, not a unique one).

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy The Second Chance Year at an indie bookstore near you
The Second-Chance Year on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, Magical Realism

Other Birds by Sarah Addison Allen ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Magical Realism
Read if you liked: The Wishing Game

Zoey arrives at her late-mother’s apartment with the hope that it will help her feel close to her and understand her life more. Upon her arrival at the Dellawisp, she meets a cast of quirky neighbors. When one of them dies in a tragic accident, the neighbors begin to come together and the magic that surrounds the Dellawisp becomes more apparent.

Some of Zoey’s new ‘neighbors’ just so happen to be ghosts and their narration is scattered throughout the story providing insight and perspective to the living characters who they haunt. The whole cast of characters really made this book sparkle. From the secretive estranged sisters, to the shy chef, to the elusive owner of the Dellawisp himself, the group became an unexpected family as they work together to clean out the apartment of the deceased resident in an effort to uncover the secret story she so often mentioned hiding.

The magic of the Dellawisp, which hosts a group of magical birds called dellawisps, was so palpable as was the larger community on Mallow Island. The lore surrounding the island’s famous recluse author was another level of mystery that tied the community together and kept me reading.

I loved the way individual one-on-on resident relationships were explored, each completely different and nuanced. We slowly come to learn the hardships and demons that each person is dealing with and to watch them soften as they open up.

This was a very character-driven story and as such, it felt fairly slow to me and I didn’t find the reveals to be terribly intriguing. That said, it was a very lovely, heartwarming, and unusual tale with a setting that truly came to life in a way that few books are able to achieve. 

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy Other Birds at an indie bookstore near you
Other Birds on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, thriller

The Heiress By Rachel Hawkins ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Thriller
Read if you liked: Daisy Darker

When Ruby McTavish died, she left her entire fortune and her estate, Ashby House, to her adopted son Camden, who turned down his inheritance and chose to lay low with his wife, Jules. Upon his uncle’s death though, the couple is summoned to Ashby house where the whole family is waiting to discuss the fortune and next steps.

The narration is split into three perspectives, that of Camden, Jules, and the late Ruby. Each voice is so distinct and their points of view and motivations completely different. Weaving them together made for such a layered story. Camden questions his adoption and Ruby’s motivation while Jules feels cautiously optimistic that her luck could change given Camden’s family wealth. Ruby’s voice was probably my favorite. She was sarcastic and witty and her story was startling and surprising at every turn.

There were so many twists in this book but each one made sense and added an exciting element to the story. I loved never knowing who the characters truly were and what was driving their motivations. The story goes as far back as Ruby’s childhood, when she was briefly kidnapped as a girl, and builds from their creating a rich backstory to the present action.

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy The Heiress at an indie bookstore near you
The Heiress on Goodreads