I was really excited for this book and I thought I would love it, but it really didn’t work for me. The writing style was difficult for me to 2 stars
I was really excited for this book and I thought I would love it, but it really didn’t work for me. The writing style was difficult for me to get into and the story was so incredibly slow (and yet nothing seemed to be happening at the same time). Maybe I’ll try another one of Dade’s books in an audiobook format in the future, but not anytime soon....more
Event planner Hallie is mistakenly sent videos from her client’s ex-boyfriend Chris that he made when he was an astronaut in space. Hallie wa 3 stars
Event planner Hallie is mistakenly sent videos from her client’s ex-boyfriend Chris that he made when he was an astronaut in space. Hallie watches all the videos and loves them, but then realizes she has invaded Chris� privacy. To make it up to him, she makes confessional videos of herself to send back. When the two meet at a party for her client, sparks fly right away and the two fall into an easy friendship.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it forever, Samantha Young is one of my favorite authors and I’ll read anything she writes. Does it mean I love everything she writes? No. But I love that she tries new things and delivers different experiences to her readers. This book wasn’t fleshed out really well, it was slow in the beginning and then rushed in the middle to end. There was a lot that had to do with toxic parents that I wish had been better resolved by the end of the book.
Overall I liked this book, but I almost quit reading halfway through and it left me feeling unsatisfied by the ending. And I wasn’t rooting for this couple to make it, they annoyed me for most of the book.
ARC provided by the publisher via Netgalley ...more
Believe me when I say no one is more shocked by my rating of this book than I am because I thought this was going to be a slam dunk. Several 2 stars
Believe me when I say no one is more shocked by my rating of this book than I am because I thought this was going to be a slam dunk. Several people, online and in person have told me how much they loved this book and I was very excited to read it.
I find it hard to put exactly into words what didn’t work for me, I can’t really explain it. Mostly I don’t care for the technicalities of social media marketing or STEM which were two main subjects. Nothing against them, they just don’t interest me. And I felt a lot of this book was endless tedious conversations between three characters that just went on and on instead of a plot that drove the story forward. Basically a lot of dialogue and no action.
I’m really sad I didn’t love this because normally I love Penny Reid books. I’m just going to pass this off as a fluke and hope I enjoy the next one I read....more
When Bee accepts a job on a project with NASA, she doesn’t realize that her co-lead will be her graduate school nemesis: Levi Ward. But Bee i 3 stars
When Bee accepts a job on a project with NASA, she doesn’t realize that her co-lead will be her graduate school nemesis: Levi Ward. But Bee is optimistic, she can absolutely work with someone who hates her. Until a week into the project none of her equipment is ordered, she doesn’t have lab access, and the staff begin to ignore her. That’s when she approaches Levi and realizes there’s more to the situation than she already knew.
The Love Hypothesis was one of my favorite books last year, I gave it a five star rating and review. I’ve even read all of Hazelwood’s novellas and enjoyed them thoroughly. So I went into Love on the Brain thinking it would be a home run when it really was just more of a bench warmer of a book. I liked Bee as a main character even though she kind of had pick-me girl vibes, and Levi was a great grumpy hero. But the plot lacked cohesiveness for me and the pacing was all over the place. I found it very easy to set this book down and not return to it for days.
All of that would have been fine, except for one thing. I love that we are seeing more women in STEM and more stories centered around it: but I am not a science girl. Like I don’t want to say I’m dumb, but science was always one of my worst subjects in school and reading about complicated scientific processes, I was bored out of my mind/confused. Like we get it, there’s science in this book. But I didn’t understand most of what was happening and it really took away a lot of my enjoyment of this book. I found myself skimming a lot over the technical aspects and I think I missed out. All of this an then an overdramatic climax at the end of the book bumped it from 4 stars down to 3 for me.
I will say I think this book is going to be a hit and incredibly successful, lots of people are going to love reading it. But it just wasn’t for me. And it won’t stop me from reading anything else by Hazelwood in the future.
An ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review ...more
Viola Caroll was presumed dead at the battle of Waterloo and took the opportunity to restart her life and live as her truest self. When she 3.5 stars
Viola Caroll was presumed dead at the battle of Waterloo and took the opportunity to restart her life and live as her truest self. When she gets word that her closest friend, the Duke of Gracewood, has retreated into grief years after the death of his best friend. Viola works hard to bring life back to her best friend, but feelings she never had before surface for the Duke but she can’t help but feel nothing can ever come of it.
I was really excited to read this book, I’ve never read a historical romance with a trans main character. And while the concept and the characters in the book were wonderful, the actual plot and pacing of the book was a total snoozefest. I listened to the audiobook and while I normally love reading in that format, I was choosing to listen to music on my commute instead of the book because it was so boring. I’m actually genuinely upset that you can have a premise so interesting with the friends to lovers trope and just make it uninteresting.
Like I said before I loved the characters, main and side, but this book struggled to hold my interest for long periods of time. And I think it could have been a lot shorter than it was.
I received an ALC from libro.fm as a part of their librarian ALC program ...more
I genuinely feel like Susan Cain is overrated. I read Quiet last year after many recommendation and it was okay, but I wanted to give her another chanI genuinely feel like Susan Cain is overrated. I read Quiet last year after many recommendation and it was okay, but I wanted to give her another chance and thought this would be interesting subject matter. It felt like instead of a cohesive book, a bunch of ramblings on why it’s okay to be sad. And that’s okay, that’s fine. But most of what she presented in this book felt like common sense to me? Not sure how else to explain it. I just wasn’t amused or impressed while listening to this book.
That being said, there were a few people in my life that I felt would gain something by reading this book even if I didn’t, so if you read my review and it makes you not want to read the book maybe don’t listen to me and try it for yourself. Everyone has different tastes and I can see others loving this book....more
Stacey has been living the same life for the past few years and the only time she feels alive is the weeks during the local ren faire. When a 3 stars
Stacey has been living the same life for the past few years and the only time she feels alive is the weeks during the local ren faire. When another season ends, Stacey feels like it’s time to make a change and part of that includes messaging her ren faire “booty call� and seeing if there can be something more�
It’s funny because I was so excited to read this book when it came out and then covid messed with my reading mojo and I didn’t want to read anything. This book was a casualty of that. Now I’m trying to read the backlog of Netgalley arcs that have been waiting and this was the oldest. While I felt this book was easy to read, I didn’t care for the story. I’m all for a play on the Cyrano angle, but I felt like the two main characters just fell in love really quickly for me and I didn’t feel that connection between the two of them. And I don’t entirely love a passive romance hero, I kept feeling like he could fight harder or show more. And he didn’t. I’ll definitely read the other books in the series, this one just wasn’t as good as the first.
ARC provided by the publisher via Netgalley ...more
I think I would have enjoyed this book more if it hadn’t been so utterly predictable, I was able to guess from the beginning what happened with most of the plot and it didn’t feel like the most original of thrillers. I saw that this book was optioned to become a show and I would certainly watch it. I thought Chloe was a bit� dumb and annoying. I give a lot of grace to heroines generally so if she bugged me, it had to be pretty bad. Overall a very underwhelming read considering all the high ratings and reviews....more
So for right now, this is a DNF at 200 pages in. I previously did audiobook format for the first two books and really enjoyed them and did hard copy tSo for right now, this is a DNF at 200 pages in. I previously did audiobook format for the first two books and really enjoyed them and did hard copy this time so I may go back and try again on audio. But this was dragging, 200 pages in and nothing was happening.
I definitely will still go on to read The Emma Project but will be doing that one on audio. ...more
The Dating Plan is a fake dating, friends/enemies/friends to lovers romance story between Daisy Patel and Liam Murphy. Growing up, Liam was b 2 stars
The Dating Plan is a fake dating, friends/enemies/friends to lovers romance story between Daisy Patel and Liam Murphy. Growing up, Liam was best friends with Daisy’s brother and over at their house all the time. Daisy was entirely in love with him, until he stood her up for her prom and disappeared for eight years. When Liam bumps into Daisy all these years later, he realizes she might be the perfect girl to help him get his inheritance. The only catch? They need to get married.
There is so much about this book that bugged me and yet I finished it? Maybe I should have quit but by the time I started realizing I didn’t like this book I was too far gone. The number one thing I was annoyed by was the heroine constantly being referred to as “weirdly smart� and then we didn’t get any examples of how smart she was except for frequent (and I mean FREQUENT) references to how much she loved Marvel. WE GET IT. SHE LIKES MARVEL. ENOUGH! And aside from that she had major “pick me� girl energy. “I’m not like other girls I like Marvel and love doing computer stuff�.
A lot of the most interesting plot points of the book were completely glossed over: Liam’s relationship with his brother, Daisy’s relationships with her father and brother. I just felt there were so many things that were started in the plot but not finished, or maybe it was me. For a fake dating trope the plot was all over the place.
And one tiny thing that bugged me more than it should have. Hockey games have three periods, between which are period breaks. There is no half time break in hockey, you’d think something like that would be caught before publication but maybe I’m being too picky. ...more
I’m trying to put a finger on why all my friends loved this book and for me it was just fine. It had a lot of promise, Y2K killer at a blockb 3 stars
I’m trying to put a finger on why all my friends loved this book and for me it was just fine. It had a lot of promise, Y2K killer at a blockbuster, a repeat of the murder about 15 years later at an ice cream shop. Told in multiple points of view, I found this book to be a bit information overload which is weird because it was short. Also, I didn’t love one of the audiobook narrators so that may have taken away from my enjoyment as well.
And for all of that information that was dumped on us, I felt the reveal of the killer was a little bit out of left field, unless maybe I missed something along the way. I’m usually fairly good at guessing whodunit and didn’t for this one and felt really underwhelmed by the reveal.
I’d be willing to give Finlay another chance but also not eager to pick up anything else by them anytime soon....more
I wasn't feeling this book while listening to it, it was predictable and yet still gave me anxiety. I googled the spoilers and had pretty muDNF at 54%
I wasn't feeling this book while listening to it, it was predictable and yet still gave me anxiety. I googled the spoilers and had pretty much guessed what happened so I decided to take my losses and stop. I'm a quitter!...more
Ari Abrams landed her dream job working with her childhood idol as the weather girl at her local new station. And that would be perfect, exce 2 stars
Ari Abrams landed her dream job working with her childhood idol as the weather girl at her local new station. And that would be perfect, except her boss is a nightmare to work with because her boss is constantly fighting with her ex at the news station. After a particularly bad fight at the Christmas party, Ari and one of the men on the sports team, Russell, decide to work together to parent trap their bosses back together.
I was trying to figure out what it was that I didn’t like about this book, and then I read some other reviews and it clicked into place: there was absolutely zero spark between Ari and Russell. On paper a cute romance between the weather girl and the sports guy sounds like the perfect romance. But it just didn’t work. There was even one point during the book were Russell said something during a sex scene that I think was supposed to be sexy or cute and I actually said “ew� out loud while reading.
I liked reading about Ari’s journey with depression I thought it was presented in an understandable and empathetic way; I’m so glad that this book portrays characters going to therapy when they need it. I liked Russell as a hero I thought he was great, but I never really got him and Ari together. That combined with a very slow plot was the kiss of death for me. I read The Ex Talk by this author and felt similarly if not better about that book, I’m not sure if I will read more by Solomon....more
Full disclosure, I listened to about 60% of the audiobook, heard something I didn’t like, googled spoilers, and promptly dnf’d this book. B 1.5 stars
Full disclosure, I listened to about 60% of the audiobook, heard something I didn’t like, googled spoilers, and promptly dnf’d this book. But, I feel I invested enough time to give it a rating. I loved the Winner’s Circle trilogy by Rutkowski so I was excited when she wrote this adult thriller. I had no idea she worked as a stripper before and her knowledge of the industry really showed in this book, those parts were very interesting. Where she lost me is a personal preference, I hate when characters are developed just for them to die very shortly afterwards. That and the multiple POVs just really bugged me. This was one of my biggest letdown books because I was really excited to read it....more
Not sure if I didn’t like this because it wasn’t good or it’s just outdated. Either way it didn’t really work for me. The mousy author mee 2.75 stars
Not sure if I didn’t like this because it wasn’t good or it’s just outdated. Either way it didn’t really work for me. The mousy author meets the gambling den owner? Sounds super promising to me. But the writing style was a bit off and I never really felt the chemistry between Derek and Sara. I liked them both a lot on their own, they’re very interesting characters. But I wasn’t sold on their love story. ...more
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