I was seriously afraid that I’d be wasting my time on yet another damsel in distress story where the awkward boy gets to find himself and be the hero, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that Bone Gap played with all those expectations and tropes in an unexpected way. This was shortlisted for the National Book Award, so I was hoping it’d be good. It was! Bone Gap is a strange town with some serious secrets. Finn and Sean are two young men/boys just […]
Admired But Unloved
I think I’m going to have to file this one away on the “admired but unloved” shelf. It was definitely an interesting read because whether you like Fates And Furies or not, you can’t deny that Groff is a great writer doing some innovative things with structure. She was clearly very influenced by the theatre, especially old school tragedy. I think for this story to truly resonate, you need to have been married. It just didn’t hit me emotionally, but I think it might have […]
To sleep, perchance to dream
Night Beach (4.5 stars) is about a one very simple thing. A girl surfer-slash-artist has a crush on a boy surfer who sees her — sometimes. But it’s also about a few other very complicated, possibly unreal things, which make this book overall very hard to define. Abbie likes Kane; this much is clear. In fact, she’s obsessed with him, in that painfully teenage way that grovels for the tiniest morsel of acknowledgement and acceptance. This kid, Kane, is a few years older, stays in […]
Best kind of accident, I suppose.
The aptly titled Accidentally In Love, is a contemporary romance set somewhere in the middle of author Laura Drewry’s Friends First series. Since I got my copy from NetGalley, I wasn’t aware I was jumping in in the middle of a series, but it’s pretty easy to tell that the pre-paired couples’ stories must have already been told in the previous books. You don’t need to know them to appreciate Ellie and Brett’s story, but some people (me) like to start at the beginning, so […]
These are the kind of lines that need blurring
One of my favorite romance novel tropes is friends to lovers. Best friends to lovers? Even better. But one of the things I hate about that trope is when a book starts off with all that “We’re proof that men and women can just be friends, contrary to what everyone in our lives keeps saying” nonsense. If there are still people in the world who don’t believe that men and women can be in platonic relationships, I do not want to spend time with them […]
The safe cracker and the nerdy secret agent
Five years ago, Angel Ramirez gave up safe-cracking and stealing and swore to mend her ways, sick of hurting and using people. She’s been working hard to stay on the straight and narrow, making a living as an interior decorator, trying to earn the forgiveness of her disappointed family members. When the woman Angel considers as close as a real aunt is kidnapped, and the ransom demanded is the hoard of diamonds belonging to notorious gangster Walter Borgola, Angel has no choice but to reunite […]
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