Book Review, Fiction, Romance

Yours for the Season by Emily Stone ~ Book Review

Morgan

Genre: Romance
My Rating: 🍪🍪.5

I was feeling ready for a light read so I picked up my first holiday romance of the year. In Yours for the Season, Mel’s ex, Finn, begs her to go on his family’s Christmas trip to Scotland with him and she…. says yes? From the get-go, I found her character hard to connect with because of that choice. She rationalizes it because she would otherwise be alone for the holidays. Call me crazy, but I’d much rather be alone.

The story bounces back and forth between their present day experience in Scotland and their past relationship. I enjoyed the parts set in the present. The forced proximity made for a cute build up of romance. Everything felt very cozy and festive with Finn’s family and I liked the holiday vibes.

The segments outlining Finn and Mel’s relationship when they were together didn’t do enough to make me care about them as a couple. There wasn’t enough chemistry for me to root for them and Finn’s decision to break up with her and the way he did it felt really poorly thought out.

This wasn’t a total loss because it did help me get in the holiday spirit, but there are other holiday romances that do a lot more.

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Buy Yours for the Season at an indie bookstore near you
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Book Review, Fiction, Magical Realism

The Second Chance Cinema by Thea Weiss ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪
Genre: Magical Realism

One night, Ellie and her fiancé Drake come across a glamorous old school cinema they’ve never seen before only to discover that the one thing it’s showing is memories from each of their lives. After their first showing, they struggle to decide if they should return and risk uprooting secrets they’ve been keeping from each other.

I love movies and I love magical realism, so by all accounts this book should have been totally my thing. I really struggled with the main characters though. They felt incredibly one dimensional to the point where I didn’t care about them or really buy into their love story. There kept being things set up as big secrets from their pasts and I kept waiting to be shocked, but everything felt very blasé to me.

The main redeeming element of this book was the cinema because I could perfectly imagine its glitzyness and I liked the zany employees there. It felt like much more of a fleshed out world and concept than the rest of the book. I would have loved to spend more time there, rather than out in ‘real life’ with Ellie and Drake.

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Buy The Second Chance Cinema at an indie bookstore near you
These Summer Storms on Goodreads

Book Review, Fantasy, Fiction

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Mass ~ Book Review

Morgan

Genre: Fantasy
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪

I have heard sooo many good things about the Throne of Glass series and despite my difficulty getting into fantasy, I’m so glad I picked it up. I think part of what was helpful for me is that there wasn’t an overwhelming amount of worldbuilding at the beginning. It was integrated really naturally throughout the story. 

Celaena is an assassin fighting for her freedom. She has been chosen to compete against twenty-three other people and if she wins, she will leave prison and become the king’s champion. Before too many of her competitors are disqualified, however, they begin to show up dead.

There were so many pieces to this book that made it really bingeable: a love triangle, the competition itself, the mystery of what was killing people, the glamor of the castle and royalty within it, and hints of magic. I found the competition maybe slightly less compelling than the rest of it, but I loved Celaena’s solo adventures through the castle she was staying in and seeing her relationships grow and change.

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Buy Throne of Glass at an indie bookstore near you
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Book Review, Fiction, Science Fiction

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami ~ Book Review

Morgan

Genre: Science Fiction

My Rating: 🍪🍪.5

        The Dream Hotel follows Sara as she is detained on her way home from a conference abroad. She lives in a world where the Risk Assessment Administration can monitor people’s dreams and put them in a retention center if it’s believed that, based on those dreams, they could become a threat.

        Sara has a husband and infant twins at home and is desperate to get back to them. She soon begins to realize that all the other women detained with her believe themselves innocent as well and yet their stays are lengthened time and time again by a deeply faulty system.

        There is so much in this book that is reflective of our actual current reality, making this all the more horrifying to read about. The details about how personal data was twisted and used against the women made me uncomfortable and deeply aware of how much of my own data is floating around.

        Despite the really fascinating premise and set up, this book was incredibly slow. I felt like I was reading the same chapter over and over again. I’m sure to some extent this was intentional, to reflect the monotony of Sara’s life, but it was way too extreme. I also found the characters to be kind of one dimensional. They each had their “thing” that defined them, but I didn’t feel I knew them beyond that.

        Phenomenal world-building and ideas, but really challenging pacing and amount of plot.

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Buy The Dream Hotel at an indie bookstore near you

The Dream Hotel on Goodreads

Book Review, thriller, Uncategorized

Count My Lies by Sophie Stava ~ Book Review

Morgan

Genre: Thriller

My Rating: 🍪🍪

Sloane Caraway has been lying about who she is all her life. When she sees an opportunity to becomes the nanny for the wealthy Lockhart family, she jumps at the chance and quickly lies her way into their life.

We slowly learn about the lies Sloane has told in her past and how her obsessive nature has gotten her in trouble and cost her her last job.

The first part of this book is told through Sloane’s point of view and I enjoyed watching her worm her way into Jay and Violet’s life, however, there was a lot of repetition including random allusions to Taylor Swift lyrics like every other chapter?? I’m a Swiftie, but it was really off-putting.

When we switch to Violet’s POV I think it was supposed to feel like some big dramatic twist, but it just fell into a very overdone set of thriller tropes that I have enjoyed in the past, but have been done very well already. It made it hard for me to get through the rest of the book.

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Book Review, Fiction

The Compound by Aisling Rawle ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪.5
Genre: Fiction

I was obsessed with the concept behind this book. It takes place on the ‘set’ of a reality show much like Love Island in which contestants must pair up into couples as a safety net to remain on the show. The compound they are staying with starts out trashed from the previous season of contestants and with few supplies and they must complete tasks or challenges to gain things, which they often then promote to watchers back home.

The setting of this compound was so vivid to me and I loved the way it changed throughout the story as contestants were rewarded or punished for their actions. It was also clear that the outside world was in some way dystopian, making the motivation to stay on the show and in the compound that much greater. I love it when a setting feels almost like a character in itself and that was definitely the case in this one.

Lily, our narrator, is extremely beautiful but doesn’t have much else going for her (in her own words). She doesn’t really have much of a personality, but I think that was largely the point. She’s exactly the type of vain, fame-hungry person you might expect to be on this kind of show. I appreciated getting to know the other contestants through her eyes and trying to figure out who would be trustworthy.

I’m a big fan of reality tv, which I think added to my enjoyment of the premise, but the unsettling, cutthroat nature of the game upped the ante. There were elements of desperation in the game that reminded me of The Hunger Games in the best way.

I was expecting there to be a little more to the ending, which is why this didn’t quite make it to five stars, but I loved it nonetheless.

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

Book Review, Fiction, mystery, thriller

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪.5
Genre: Thriller

When Ted meets Lily on a flight, he finds himself confessing to her that his wife, Miranda, is cheating on him. After a throwaway comment expressing his anger, Lily offers to help him kill Miranda. Slowly, we begin to learn that there might be much more to Lily’s interest in helping Ted.

I enjoyed the parts of this book narrated by Lily. We hear about her dark childhood and she speaks in such a matter of fact way about her twisted thoughts and actions. It allowed me to really get inside her head and understand her motivations. Miranda’s sections on the other hand seemed pretty surface level. Ted as a narrator had no real personality and I had trouble caring about him.

The storyline was very twisty with a lot of layers, which I enjoyed. That said, I didn’t find any of it super gripping or particularly shocking. This was a pretty good thriller, but nothing I would go out of my way to recommend.

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy The Kind Worth Killing at an indie bookstore near you
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Book Review, Fiction

These Summer Storms by Sarah MacLean ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪
Genre: Fiction

When the patriarch of the Storm family dies, his family gathers on their private island to find out what was left to each of them. Alice is returning after a long estrangement after choosing not to use her family name to get ahead in life. When she gets back, she quickly remembers why she got out from under the manipulative grasp of her father. He has set up for them an inheritance game requiring them to stay on the island for a week and each perform different tasks.

I loved the concept of these inheritance games and the fact that the family was trapped on an island with an attractive employee of their patriarch overseeing their actions. I found the games themselves to be kind of boring though. They were painted as being really shocking and humiliating, but they just…weren’t that crazy. Honestly, it made me want to reread The Inheritance Games if anything.

One of my favorite parts of the book was the romance, which I didn’t event expect to be part of it. I thought that relationship was far more compelling than those of the family members (who I couldn’t keep straight because they weren’t individually given any depth). I think I mostly kept reading to find out how the romance would wrap-up and there were some twists along the way that kept me going.

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Buy These Summer Storms at an indie bookstore near you
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Book Review, Fiction, Magical Realism

Cassandra in Reverse by Holly Smale ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪.5
Genre: Fiction

Cassandra, our neurodivergent main character, has always needed things to be done in a certain way and tends to struggle to understand other people’s perspectives. When she unexpectedly discovers that she has the ability to go back in time, she uses it to her advantage to learn more about the people and experiences around her and play out scenarios in a way that she’s happier with. Most notably, she attempts to keep her job and her boyfriend, both of which she loses at the beginning of the book.

The premise of this story was so intriguing to me. I love magical realism and have enjoyed a lot of similar types of books. Unfortunately, the way time travel was used in this book was a) incredibly repetitive and b) undefined to a point where it was confusing what the rules of this new ‘ability’ were.

I really enjoyed the way that Cassandra (sometimes) learned and grew from her power, but often she was just hitting rewind willy nilly to her heart’s content when she said something slightly wrong. I also didn’t particularly appreciate how much effort she spent trying to change herself for a man and using her powers to keep herself in situations that clearly did not serve her. I found it to be incredibly frustrating.

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Buy Cassandra in Reverse at an indie bookstore near you
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Book Review, Fiction, Magical Realism

Once and Again by Rebecca Serle ~ Book Review

Morgan

My Rating: 🍪🍪.5
Genre: Fiction/Magical Realism

I am SUCH a big Rebecca Serle fan and it physically pains me to write a not glowing review of one of her books, but man did Once and Again make me mad. Lauren learns as a teenager that every woman in her family is granted the ability to turn back time once in their life. Her mother used this gift to prevent a deadly car accident from killing Lauren’s dad and Lauren has spent her life wondering when she will need to use hers. Conceptually, I loved it. It made for interesting dynamics between Lauren and her mom and grandma and I appreciated the explorationof the mental toll the gift took on each of them.

I found Lauren’s decision making absolutely horrible. I could not stand the choices she made and the way she handled the aftermath of those choices that she was in complete control of. It made the *very cool* concept lose a lot of its power for me.

The split setting between the Malibu beach and New York City was wonderfully written and I could picture Lauren’s life in each place so well. Serle absolutely made the settings come alive which was a huge redeeming factor for me.

Something felt lacking with the intercharacter relationships. I felt like I did not know Lauren’s husband or her childhood sweetheart well enough to really feel invested in them. I felt the same way with her mother and grandmother. There were a couple chapters from their perspectives, but it was so little in the grand scheme of the book that they felt misplaced to me.

TONS of potential here and I largely could not stop reading, but ultimately I couldn’t look past the weakness of the relationships and the main character’s choices, which steered the narrative.

Thank you to the publisher for my ARC!

Check out my bookstagram: @Treat.your.shelf
Buy Once and Again at an indie bookstore near you
Once and Again on Goodreads