I have been continuing with The Ivy Years books by Sarina Bowen and they continue to be delightful. Delightful feels like such a weird word to use about a series that focuses on such relatively heavy topics and subjects. As I’ve discussed previously The Year We Hid Away and The Year We Fell Down each tackle heavy topics with a deft hand, and The Understatement of the Year, the third full novel in the series, does the same, this time venturing into the dynamics of […]
Four years in four days
I can recognize a sensation when I see it. Sarina Bowen’s tag blew up this summer with positive reviews for her series, The Ivy Years, and after more minor prodding on Facebook, I decided to change the status on when to read these from “Later” to “Now.” All four stories feature couples who are in some capacity part of the Fake Harvard Harkness varsity hockey universe. Each book excels at portraying characters who behave as real people would, in situations both mundane and extraordinary. These […]
The Good Guy and the Not Dumb Blonde
I wasn’t planning on reading Blonde Date immediately after finishing The Year We Hid Away. But I had a book hangover and spending some time with the ancillary characters that were to be featured in their own novella seemed to be the perfect plan. One of my few complaints about The Year We Hid Away was that we didn’t get to spend much time at all with other characters or parts of Harkness College, and Blonde Date fills that gap well. The story is the […]
There Should Have Been Too Much Sadness In This Book, But It Worked Very Well
When I finished reading The Year We Hid Away I commented on Goodreads that the struggles these characters face should make this one unreadable, but Bowen has a knack for writing believable characters in unbelievable circumstances. I was completely absorbed in the world of Bridger and Scarlet Normally the topics at hand in The Year We Hid Away would be found in darker, grittier fiction – not the Romance Novel department. Bridger, who we met in The Year We Fell Down, is in his junior […]
An Interesting Romance Told Well
I rely wholeheartedly on the advice of fellow Romance readers as I continue to broaden my reading horizons. There is simply too much good stuff available to waste time with the bad stuff. Cannonball Read has been hit with a couple of reviews for Sarina Bowen’s The Ivy Years series, a Contemporary/New Adult romance series set at a prestigious university in Connecticut. The reviews have been nearly unanimously positive. I of course downloaded the first one to my Nook and when trapped without my copy […]
New Adult Romance Requiring Two “It’s Hot in Here” Gifs
Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy who have each published good new adult romances, collaborated on a new one called Him that manages to be enjoyable, well-written, and To be honest the may have overshadowed the story a bit, but I can’t decide how much I mind. Jamie Canning and Ryan (Wes) Wesley were best friends from the age of thirteen to eighteen after meeting at an elite hockey camp in Lake Placid. One night that last year, things got a little out of hand after […]