Book Review, Fiction, Romance, Uncategorized, YA

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell ~ Book Review

Morgan

Eleanor & Park with brownies

St. Martin’s Press
Genre: YA Romance
Release Date: February 26, 2013
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪

I have never smiled so much while listening to an audiobook. Eleanor & Park tells the story of, well, Eleanor and Park, whose romance begins on the seats of the yellow school bus that brings them to and from high school each day. Eleanor’s the new kid. She’s overweight, and her flaming red hair and eclectic clothes immediately make her standout to the other kids, and not in a good way. Park, unable to stand the awkwardness that ensues when no one lets her sit with them, scoots over for her. Aw, young love. From there, Rowell does a captivating job of creating a believable YA love story. It starts with Park’s comic books, which Eleanor reads over his shoulder on their daily bus rides, subtly at first, and then not so subtly.

The humor infused in this novel is fantastic. Eleanor’s flirty sass is adorable and believable, and her banter with Park is perfect. Their internal insights and conversations, narrated by Rebecca Lowman and Sunil Malhotra wonderfully bring to life the trepidation that comes with first relationships.

There’s an extra layer added to Park and Eleanor’s story that was woven through every action: Eleanor’s family. She lives with her mom and abusive stepfather, and a gaggle of younger siblings she tries her best to protect. The details of her home life are heartbreaking: her race to take a bath after school before her stepdad gets home because the bathroom door won’t close and her attempts to confront her mom about what’s going on while she quietly assures Eleanor she is fine.

Park’s family welcomes Eleanor into their home as Park’s girlfriend and for the first time in her life, she has a safe place. I appreciated the discussions the two of them had about their families and Park’s feelings about his Asian heritage. It was touching and painful to see the way he tried to understand and accommodate Eleanor’s home life, and the way the romantic relationships Eleanor’s mom engaged in affected her ability to express the way she felt toward Park. Overall, this was an engrossing coming-of-age romance and there was a good balance between the heavy and disturbing topics and the adorable and humorous relationship between Eleanor and Park.

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪
Buy Eleanor & Park at an indie bookstore near you
Eleanor & Park on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, Romance, Uncategorized

The Happy Ever After Playlist by Abby Jimenez ~ Book Review

Morgan

The Happy Ever After Playlist with Lemon Bars

Forever
Genre: Romance
Release Date: April 14, 2020
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪

When I started The Happy Ever After Playlist, (thanks to Libro.fm for my audiobook, narrated by Zachary Webber & Erin Mallon!) I had no idea that it was kind of sequel-adjacent to The Friend Zone, also by Abby Jimenez. That being said, I listened to the audiobook as a standalone story and didn’t feel like I was missing anything (I believe the main character is a side character in The Friend Zone). Based on the adorable cover (I know, I know, don’t judge a book by it’s cover and all that) and the fun start of each chapter with a song title that thematically matched the prose, I was expecting a fun, lighthearted romance. The book starts with Sloan, stuck in her own life two years after the death of her fiancé. When a dog jumps directly into her car and on top of her leading to a police officer pulling her over, she thinks it’s just the next installment in a string of bad luck.

There are definitely heavy themes in this book as Sloan grapples with her grief and how to let someone new into her life, but the romance between her and (spoiler alert!) the dog’s owner, Jason, is extremely adorable. The chemistry, especially at the beginning, is palpable, believable, and very cute. I was immediately sucked into the romance. The way that Sloan deals with opening up her heart again is also illustrated tastefully and adds some depth to the story.

Beyond the central love story, the main plot has to do with Jason’s music career and how the industry (including a crazy pop-star who seems to be obsessed with him) challenges and threatens their relationship. This focus is part of what lost me. I felt like Sloan and Jason’s love story was diluted by throwing in the extra elements surrounding fame and going on tour, and they got repetitive. It was definitely a unique way for the story to go, but Sloan seemed to lose all agency in her own life and was suddenly just at the beck and call of Jason’s career. The passivity of her character became disheartening.

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪
Buy The Happy Ever After Playlist at an indie bookstore near you
Buy the audiobook from Libro.fm
The Happy Ever After Playlist on Goodreads

Book Review, Memoir, Nonfiction, Uncategorized

Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me by Adrienne Brodeur ~ Book Review

Morgan

Wild Game with Brownies

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Genre: Memoir
Release Date: October 15, 2019
My Rating: 🍪🍪.5

The setting of this story intoxicated me. Brodeur’s descriptions came alive through her writing. I could feel the salty humidity of summers on Cape Cod, hear the sound of the ocean on a summer night, and vividly imagine sitting, stuffed full of exquisite food, tipsy on red wine, perfectly content in a hot breeze. These are the prose that drew me into Wild Game. What followed was Adrienne’s story of her relationship with her mother, Malabar, who used Adrienne as a pawn in her affair.

Starting at age fourteen, Adrienne is privy to her mother’s every trist with a close family friend, Ben. Malabar treats Adrienne as her closest confidant, and has her daughter help orchestrate times for her to be alone with her lover. Not once does she seem to consider the detrimental effect this may have on Adrienne. As a teenager, Adrienne thinks it’s all very exciting. She basks in being her mom’s chosen confidant. As she gets older, she struggles when those around her tell her that her relationship with her mom is toxic. Adrienne is so blinded by her mother’s glamour, and intoxicated by her seemingly thrilling and secretive life, that it takes her a long time to understand the terrible toll her mom’s secret had on her own life.

It was incredibly shocking reading about the dinner parties with spouses who were secretly sleeping together. Even more disturbing was Ben and Malabar’s plan to wait until their spouses, each with severe illnesses, died, and then to be together. It was hard to understand how their secret was sustained for so many years, but that clearly would not have been the case without Adrienne’s help.

I wanted to shake Adrienne through a lot of this book to get her to see clearly how awfully her mom treated her. Malabar’s utter selfishness is proven again and again, and it was painful to witness how blinded Adrienne to the one-sided nature of their relationship. In addition to the repetitive nature of Malabar’s actions, much of this memoir felt repetitious. Despite the speed at which it sucked me in, I found that the later chapters seemed drawn out, with Ben and Malabar nearly getting caught, and then making it through, over and over again. Unfortunately, this caused me to largely lose interest by the end of the book.

My Rating: 🍪🍪.5
Buy Wild Game at an indie bookstore near you
Wild Game on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, Uncategorized

Beach Read by Emily Henry ~ Book Review

Morgan

 

Beach Read with cake

Berkley
Genre: Romance
Release Date: May 19, 2020
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪

Beach Read was so much deeper than I anticipated. Based on the title and synopsis, I was expecting, well, a beach read, but this story touches on a series of heavier topics and realistic character hardships. In addition to that, the main characters, January and Augustus, have the cutest dang romance, complete with writing notes to each other from their windows à la Taylor Swift.

The two are authors, both suffering with writer’s block, who challenge themselves to swap genres for their next books to get their creative juices flowing. To help do so, they organize weekend research outings to teach each other about their writing processes. I love that this book explores each author’s relationship to their respective genre, and how they ended up writing what they do. January’s transformation from believing wholeheartedly in her parents’ love story to discovering secret infidelities shakes her hugely and rattles her ability to move forward with her romance novel. In the wake of her father’s sudden death, she grapples to wrap her head around the man she thought she knew and the unburied secrets he kept from her. Augustus is stubbornly disillusioned with love and, rather than being a stereotypical playboy, or curmudgeon, we slowly find out the depth of hurt that has made him that way. Both character’s backstories are raw, deep, and believable, and made this story so much more than a fluffy romance.

The small-town setting of this story is perfect. It’s wonderfully constructed with quirky, believable shops and townspeople, and it frames January and Augustus’s story very well. Isolated from distraction in such a quiet town, they have little to focus on but one another.

This book definitely made me feel things: anticipation over an impending romance, sorrow and grief, and happy butterflies for the two main characters. Although not strictly a ‘beach read,’ Beach Read is a touching contemporary romance with depth and narratives that stretch far beyond what I expected.

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪
Buy Beach Read at an indie bookstore near you
Beach Read on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, thriller, Uncategorized

Sister Dear by Hannah Mary McKinnon ~ Book Review

Morgan

Sister Dear with Babka

MIRA Books
Genre: Thriller
Release Date: May 26, 2020 (Thank you to NetGalley and Harlequin for the ARC!)
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪

I spent the first half of Sister Dear wondering why it was classified as a thriller. Don’t get me wrong, I was fully invested in the story, just a little confused. There’s an underlying creepy factor for sure as Eleanor Hardwicke discovers that the man she grew up calling Dad is not, in fact, her biological father, and begins a quest to get to know her biological family. She tries to confront her ‘real’ dad first, and upon his rejection, instead decides to try to get to know her biological sister, Victoria, without telling her how they’re related.

I loved the complexities of Eleanor. In a genre overwhelmed with seemingly perfect women (read: wealthy, gorgeous, married to Prince Charming), I liked that the protagonist in Sister Dear did not fill that role. Eleanor’s struggles with binge-eating, growing her own business, and trying not to let her terrible relationship with her mom get to her, made her seem real. She tries to dye her own hair and it goes wrong, she runs into a cute guy while she’s holding her polka-dot underwear in the laundry room: she has a definite relatable factor.

As Eleanor finds herself suddenly devastated by the death of the man she always thought was her father, combined with the indisputable rejection from her biological father, she begins unhealthily obsessing over Victoria. The two of them fall into a cautious friendship, under the guise of Eleanor helping Victoria with building a website, and Eleanor begins to believe she has found the inseparable sister-slash-best-friend she never had in her non-biological sister, Amy.

I was really hoping there would be a shocker of a twist in this book, and I was not disappointed. The deeper Eleanor becomes enmeshed in Victoria’s life, the faster I found myself reading, anticipating that things were not quite as Eleanor saw them. The levels of deceit and darkness that played into the ending of this story were incredibly unexpected. In the end, Sister Dear absolutely lives up to its thriller categorization. 

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪
Buy Sister Dear at an indie bookstore near you
Sister Dear on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, Uncategorized, YA

Harley in the Sky by Akemi Dawn Bowman ~ Book Review

Morgan

Harley in the Sky with Blondies

Simon Pulse
Genre: YA Fiction
Release Date: March 10, 2020
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪

I really had no idea what to expect going into this book. I received it in the March YA Once Upon a Book Club Box and it’s probably not something I would have picked up otherwise. The premise of a story set at a circus was extremely unique and gave me major The Greatest Showman vibes. Harley’s parents own a circus and she has grown up surrounded by performers, desperately dreaming of someday being an aerialist and performing under the big top herself. Her parents, however, have other plans for her. Plans that involve college and postponing her dream. 

I often struggle with YA, and find that it falls into the same repetitive tropes. The setting of Harley in the Sky really helped set it apart and avoid those issues. This was an incredibly distinctive storyline. The theme of family played heavily into the plot, especially how relationships with parents and other relatives change through the teenage years and beyond. The letters written by Harley’s mom were alternately heartbreaking and eye opening and really helped the reader understand where her character was coming from in contrast to Harley’s narration.

Identity was also a major theme. Harley struggles with the different parts of her heritage. She doesn’t feel fully connected with any one part of her Asian heritage and as a result doesn’t feel like she knows how to define herself. The standard coming-of-age theme seemed relevant and important for a YA audience.

Mental health also featured significantly in this story. Harley candidly discusses how she has dealt with extreme mood swings and depression in the past, and paints a heartbreaking image of her parents misunderstanding and reticence to send her to therapy. This is such an important conversation for young people to be exposed to, and it made me really happy to see the way it was opened up through Harley.

The pieces of the plot and narrative were all tied together by the overarching location of the circus. Bowman does a wonderful job of explaining circus culture and dropping in beautiful imagery to describe the performers and performances. The consistency of the setting was a wonderful backdrop for the story to unfold within and really made Harley’s story cohesive.

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪
Buy Harley in the Sky at an indie bookstore near you
Harley in the Sky on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, Romance, Uncategorized

A Taste of Sage by Yaffa S. Santos ~ Book Review

Morgan

A Taste of Sage with cookies

HarperCollins
Genre: Romance
Release Date: May 19, 2020
My Rating: 🍪🍪.5

I generally love food writing, fiction or nonfiction, so I was pumped to receive an eGalley of A Taste of Sage, which infuses food writing with romance. The book includes recipes at the end of most chapters, that directly correlate with the food discussed in that chapter. Despite the fact that I rarely actually end up making these recipes, I love it when books do that!

A Taste of Sage follows Lumi Santana as she signs on to be the sous chef for arrogant and easily angered Julien Dax. His explosive personality, and rigid, uncreative approach to his restaurant’s menu grate on Lumi’s nerves, but from the get-go, it was clear they were going to get together. One aspect of Lumi’s character that was very intriguing was her relationship to food and taste. Santos chose to give Lumi the gift of being able to taste the emotions individual’s had when cooking the food she eats. This clever and unexpected twist added a lot to the story.

Unfortunately, the on-and-off relationship between Lumi and Julien felt very jerky to me and I couldn’t understand how explosive each of their fights got or what they were upset about most of the time. The unrealistic nature of the romance that was at the core of the story made it hard for me to get into it.

My Rating: 🍪🍪.5
Buy A Taste of Sage at an indie bookstore near you
A Taste of Sage on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, Uncategorized

Oona Out of Order: A Novel by Margarita Montimore ~ Book Review

Morgan

Oona Out of Order with banana bread

Flatiron Books
Genre: Fiction
Release Date: February 25, 2020
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪

Thank you to Libro.fm for the audiobook Oona out of Order, narrated by the wonderful Brittany Pressley! I am very conflicted about what genre Oona Out of Order falls into. The premise is this: every year at the stroke of the New Year, Oona is transported to a different year of her life. From there, she lives that one year internally a different age than her external self. Enter lots of confusion and difficulty maintaining relationships. It sounds kind of sci-fi based solely off of that, but the story is so much more.

The relationships in Oona’s life, and the exceptional way that she is forced to navigate them really stood out to me. Oona’s mother is particularly central, and seeing the way she supports her daughter as best she can through her strange condition is really touching. As with all parents and children, their love for one another ebbs and flows, with Oona often unaware of why her mother feels a certain way toward her. The dynamic between them is strong and often painfully relatable, and felt like a believable extension of a mother-daughter relationship.

I also loved the world-building in this book. Montimore took the time to really think out how Oona’s condition works. Oona writes notes to herself at the end of each year to help her future self process the world around her. Since she can’t pursue a traditional career, she utilizes her future knowledge of stock markets to support herself (more than support herself, really). It was clear that a lot of planning went into making this premise work, and as a result, it didn’t feel fantastically far-fetched.

Oona deals with things that everyone is forced to grapple with: heartbreak, grief, lust, anger. Her story just written out chronologically would have been interesting, but the added twist of her time-hopping makes it especially powerful. She finds out about the death of loved ones years after they occurred, only to reencounter them, alive, the next year. She learns secrets about the past and the future that she’s forced to keep quiet in order to avoid impacting events to come. Oona Out of Order was definitely not like anything I’ve ever read before, and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Brittany Pressley’s narration.

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪
Buy Oona Out of Order at an indie bookstore near you
Buy the Audio Book on Libro.fm
Oona Out of Order on Goodreads

Book Review, Fiction, thriller, Uncategorized

The Girl Before by JP Delaney ~ Book Review

Morgan

The Girl Before and cookies

Ballantine Books
Genre: Thriller
Release Date: January 24, 2017
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪.5

I got major Riley Sager vibes from this book (although it definitely came out before any of the Sager books I’ve read). I love the premise of a creepy residence with a life of its own. ‘Settings that almost become characters in and of themselves’ seems to be its own subset of the thriller genre, and I’m not mad about it. One Folgate Street is just such a setting. A futuristic fortress designed entirely to teach its inhabitants to be more minimalistic and alter their morals, it is also steeped in tragedy. Initially designed to be the home of the architect, Edward Monkford, and his family, it was instead put up for rent after Edward’s wife and child were killed in an on-site construction accident.

The book is split between Emma and Jane’s narrations, fifteen years apart. Both women apply to stay at One Folgate Street, a process which includes an extensive and intrusive questionnaire as the first step. Each one is reeling from a personal tragedy, and sees the strange residence as an opportunity for a fresh start despite the strange rules and regulations that they agree to upon signing the lease.

Before moving in, both Emma and Jane meet Edward Monkford, the alluring architect of the home. Both women find themselves instantly attracted to him and the feeling appears mutual. Packed full of desolation, lies, mistrust, instability, and sex, this book was a rollercoaster from start to finish. I will say that there were times when it felt like there was too much trying to be crammed in (the sudden introduction of an eating disorder and excessive compulsive lying caught me off guard), but nonetheless, the parallel stories of Emma and Jane kept me utterly enthralled and on the edge of my seat to know what would happen next.

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪🍪.5
The Girl Before on Goodreads
Buy The Girl Before at an indie bookstore near you

Book Review, Nonfiction, Uncategorized

The Genius of Women by Janice Kaplan ~ Book Review

Morgan

IMG_4182

Dutton
Genre: Nonfiction
Release Date: February 18, 2020
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪

I loved the concept behind The Genius of Women. The perception that geniuses are men is so ingrained in society, that many people don’t even realize that the image they associate with genius is male. Kaplan sets out to expose this deep rooted viewpoint, and to explore the stories of women geniuses, living and dead, many of whom were never recognized (at least not in their lifetime) for their incredible intellect. The statistics and the research behind The Genius of Women were staggering and clearly extremely extensive. Kaplan went to great depths to speak to women who are geniuses and carefully collect their individuals experiences, stories, and coping mechanisms. The statistical nuggets she dropped in were shocking and made me, as a reader, want to get fired up and demand change (or at least encourage it).

Unfortunately, the repetitive nature of the book really took away from the concept for me. After a while, the chapters started to blend together. It seemed that each was following the same format by introducing an incredible new woman or two, outlining all the ways they were slighted because they were female, and then discussing how they did or didn’t address this bias. This was great the first few times, but after a while they were hard to distinguish.

This book was absolutely eye-opening, and made me want to be more careful about how I personally perceive genius as well as incite large scale societal change. I think this was a big part of the reason it was written, so in that sense, it was very successful. I wish it was either shorter, or that the examples and chapters were a bit more varied, so I remained captivated and they felt more distinct.

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪
Buy The Genius of Women at an indie bookstore near you
Buy The Genius of Women on Amazon
The Genius of Women on Goodreads