Book Review, Fiction, Romance

Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Romance

When Delilah returns to her small town to photograph her stepsister Astrid’s wedding, the last thing she expects is to find herself charmed by one of Astrid’s friends. This book was like movie theater popcorn, it was sooo digestible. Delilah is painted as the classic woman who escaped her small town life to pursue photography in NYC who doesn’t care about love. She was very believable and sure of herself and was truly a delightful main character.

Delilah faced a lot of sorrow and loneliness growing up, and it’s clear that returning to her small town of Bright Falls is very triggering for her. She comes in with her walls as high up as they could be, and I loved watching them slowly come down as she sees that people and perspectives change.

The characters really shone in this book. The main crew of side characters were all very nuanced and distinct and I loved seeing them band together and connect over the course of the story. I will definitely be checking out the next book in the series.

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Book Review, Fiction, Romance

Wreck the Halls by Tessa Bailey ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Romance

Beat and Melody are the children of two former rockstars who haven’t performed together in decades. When they are offered a million dollars to reunite their mothers on live tv, they each decide to take the plunge, agreeing to be live-streamed for the weeks leading up to the Christmas Eve reunion. Beat and Melody have only met once before, but their chemistry is immediate as soon as their livestream extravaganza begins.

Melody was your classic quirky, clumsy rom-com character who comes out of her shell as the livestream audience grows and falls in love with her. She was funny and entertaining and for the most part felt like a real person. Beat on the other hand was very one-dimensional and so much of his internal monologue was focused on his sexual preferences that I felt like I didn’t know him at all.

The premise of this book felt a little like a TikTok livestream meets Black Mirror episode, but I could totally see something like this happening and the public loving it. It was also interesting how the two of them had to navigate their lives with very little private time.

I would love to have known more about their mom’s banned, the Steel Birds. We meet the two mothers, Trina and Octavia, late in the book and they felt thrown in without completely being formed. The whole ending of the story in general was extremely rushed and unrealistic.

The romance was definitely there in this book and it did what it was trying to in terms of feeling very Hallmark movie-esque. Cute, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend it.

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Book Review, Fiction

The Summer of Songbirds by Kristy Woodson Harvey ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Fiction
Similar to: Our Place on the Island

Daphne, Lanier, and Mary Stuart met at Camp Holly Springs as kids and it will forever hold a special place in their hearts. When they find out that the camp’s future is on rocky ground, they join forces as a group to raise money to save it. Coming back to the camp brings up ghosts from each woman’s past and causes them all to reassess their past and their present.

The setting of this book was so nostalgic and perfectly captured the feeling of being carefree at summer camp as a child. Some of the narrative is set in the past, allowing us to see our narrators coming together for the first time and experiencing the thrill of lazy summers away from home.

I really appreciated the way these friendships were portrayed, partially through email exchanges between the grown women. It was clear how much they cared for one another and I love the depiction of childhood friends turned to lifelong friendships.

In the present, each narrator is dealing with some sort of difficult drama, creating a tangled web amongst them, all as they attempt to navigate what they are personally dealing with while also trying to save the camp. I was holding my breath to see who would find out about what and how the fallout would be resolved.

The story got a little cheesy toward the end for me and there were some choices that made me like some of the characters less, but overall, this was a wonderful escape into summer and a great exploration of female support and friendship.

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Buy The Summer of Songbirds at an indie bookstore near you
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Book Review, Fiction, Horror

Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪.5
Genre: Horror

I need to reread this book just to try to actually conceptualize what happened.

Wilder is writing the story of his childhood summers and the discovery of a serial killer that changed his life. The narrative follows him past the summer to meeting Sky who became very close to him and subsequently stole Wilder’s previous memoir iteration and published a fictionalized and sensationalized version of it. Wilder is determined to get his real story out this time but finds himself struggling to untangle what really happened with the version that Sky wrote.

The format bounces between present day, excerpts from Sky’s book, and some mysterious chapters that include word games. This story had layers on layers and each one introduced its own kind of horror. Ward has a way of creating deeply unsettling descriptions of even the everyday, creating a narrative that made my skin crawl consistently.

I had nooo idea how everything was going to connect and found the different threads of storyline a little difficult to keep separate in my head, particularly since they were narrating essentially the same things just from different perspectives. It took me a while at the end to actually understand what had happened but it was a really cool concept once I did. I even flipped back through the book to rationalize it in my head and I loved that I could actually see the connections.

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Book Review, Fiction, Romance

Practice Makes Perfect by Sarah Adams ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪
Genre: Romance
Similar to: When in Rome

Not sure why I picked this one up when it’s set in the same universe as When in Rome, which also got 2 starts from me. Practice Makes Perfect focuses on Annie who feels desperate for low-stakes dating practice after she overhears her date telling a friend that she’s incredibly boring. Enter Will, a sexy bodyguard who Annie decides is perfect for fake dating despite the fact that she is desperately attracted to him.

My main qualm with this book is that I could not stand Annie. She’s incredibly naive and immature and takes no agency in her own life. She spends a lot of time complaining that everyone in town sees her as this innocent little butterfly and yet she plays right into that role and doesn’t correct her sisters when they treat her that way. It honestly made me wonder why Will put up with her.

Also, the lack of communication between Will and Annie was frustrating. I often struggle with the fake-dating trope because there’s always a period where one person has feelings and won’t tell the other person and I’m like just talk to each other!!

Anyway, I did enjoy the small town gossipy setting and the slowburn of the romance, but that was about it.

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Book Review, Fiction, Historical Fiction

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪.5
Genre: Historical Fiction

The Invention of Wings is a look at slavery in the American South. It tells the story of Sarah, who is given a slave of her own, ‘Handful,’ on her eleventh birthday. Sarah is desperate to set Handful free rather than keep her as property, but each effort comes up against boundaries put in place to prevent her from doing so.

This was a fascinating depiction of each woman’s life, the horrors of slavery, and the mindset of the society at large. As Sarah grows up, she turns away from an interest in marriage and toward the church, and eventually speaking up for the abolition of slavery. Handful meanwhile learns stories of her family history from her mother, learns of the terrors facing the slaves around her, and struggles as her mother consistently pushes the envelop of what’s allowed of her.

Over decades, the two women’s lives orbit around each other. Their narratives painted a shocking depiction of stark inequality and the horrors that humans find ways to justify.

Although the story was at times slow, the details added up to create clear tapestries of two striking lives.

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Book Review, Fiction, Romance

Twisted Love by Ana Huang ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪.5
Genre: Romance

I gotta stop getting excited about these super-hyped-on-social-media romance books. Alex Volkov has everything: brains, looks, inexplicable ability to sing, but he’s haunted by demons from his past. Ava Chen is his best friend’s little sister who’s just unreliable enough that her brother asks Alex to look out for her. Surprise, surprise, instead of doing that he sleeps with her.

Alex really did not seem appealing to me. He felt very flat and one dimensional and too possessive and focused on how kinky he is in bed. Both main characters have dark pasts but deal with it in completely opposite ways. I was interested to see how that would play out as the story went on. I will say I didn’t see the twist coming and it added a much needed level of depth and complexity to the story that I appreciated and was exciting and compelling and complicated.

Other than that, I didn’t really care about the characters and it felt like the story was trying too hard to be something it wasn’t (unclear quite what).

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Buy Twisted Love at an indie bookstore near you
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Book Review, Fiction, Horror

Mexican Gothic by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪.5
Genre: Horror

When Noemí receives a frantic message from her newly-wed cousin Catalina, she drops everything to go help her. She arrives at the grand house, High Place, and immediately feels ill at ease around Catalina’s in-laws. As she learns about the strange rules and customs they keep and the tragic family history, she comes to believe that something is deeply wrong.

This book was extremely unsettling. I love it when the setting of a thriller/horror book starts to feel like its own character and that was definitely the case with High Place. I appreciated Noemí’s bravery and perseverance to figure out what was going on.

Although the atmosphere and setting kept me on edge, the actual narrative didn’t. It felt fairly slow to me and the same details were being harped on time and time again and the ultimate discovery felt anticlimactic.

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Book Review, Fiction

The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise by Colleen Oakley ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪.5
Genre: Fiction
Similar to: Remarkably Bright Creatures

The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise follows an unlikely duo, 84 year old Louise and 21 year old Tanner. Following an injury that led to her losing her soccer scholarship, Tanner is desperate to make enough money to return to college. She begrudgingly takes on the job of Louise’s caretaker, anticipating that she’ll largely be able to hang out and play video games. What she doesn’t expect is to find herself on the run with Louise.

As the two journey across the country with little explanation to Tanner, the two form an unexpected and increasingly heartwarming connection. Both women are funny and witty in their own way and I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with both of them.

Interspersed between the chapters of their adventure are text and in-person conversations between Louise’s children when they realize she is missing and get the police involved. Their sarcasm and dry humor were so fun and made these passages fly.

I definitely wasn’t expecting the turn the story took toward the end, but I appreciated the added depth it brought particularly to Louise. It seemed a little out of left field, which wasn’t my favorite thing, but it was interesting and painted the women’s adventure in a new light.

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Buy The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise at an indie bookstore near you
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Book Review, Fiction, Historical Fiction

The Spectacular by Fiona Davis ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Historical Fiction

Fiona Davis is back with another historical fiction novel set in NYC. Love me a book set in this city and the focus on the Rockettes was especially fascinating. The book tells the story of Marion, a 19 year old in 1956 who struggles between her passion to dance as a newly selected Rockette and the expectations of her father. Meanwhile, the city is being plagued by a bomber.

This story has a little bit of mystery, a little bit of romance, and a great foundation with the details of Marion’s life. We come to understand her family well and to see how each family member’s opinion influences Marion’s choices. Marion feels caught between her boyfriend and father’s wishes that she gets married, her sister’s choice to work for their dad, and her increasing questions surrounding her mother’s death. We see how difficult it is for Marion to pursue her passions, which made her very likeable as a protagonist.

I really enjoyed learning about Marion, 1950’s New York, and the Rockettes. The bomber storyline, which turns Marion into an amateur detective, didn’t fully work for me. It seemed so at odds with the rest of her story and I wished the focus hadn’t been split. Not to mention, it was extremely unbelievable.

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Buy The Spectacular at an indie bookstore near you
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