Dima
Amy Cameron is a musician-turned-marketing director in a struggling theatre in Edinburgh. She is absolutely unhappy with her work and her social life. When an email finds its way to her by mistake, she strikes a friendship with the person she thinks it was intended for. And it doesn't hurt to embellish a little bit when she talks about herself - after all, they're strangers who will never meet. But as things progress between them, the embellishments become bigger, and eventually, she will have to come clean.
This was a quick and fun novel to go through. I liked that Amy decided to take charge of her career and go on with opening the bar. I also liked to see the supporting group of coworkers around her. I did NOT, however, like her friend group. I understand that people in different stages of their lives have different interests and priorities, but the dismissiveness of her friends was a bit too much. I was also happy when she turned down the position in the orchestra. Her realizing that she deserves better was a good sign of growth. Her relationship with Harry was also very sweet. Support and friendship come in all shapes.Another thing I liked in the book was the motivation that both Amy and Cameron have unknowingly given each other. It felt that both were stuck in jobs that were making them miserable, and they just needed the push to go out and do the things that would make them happy.I could have done without the deceptions, though. One thing that I'm still trying to wrap my head around is Amy's reaction to Cameron's last email saying that he had something to confess, too. I felt that it was a bit too strong given that she has knowingly been lying to him. And her confidence that he would not show up was unfounded based on his emails with her.
Finally, as big of a fan as I am of epistolary novels, this was not my favorite. The email exchanges droned on a lot, and they did not discuss things that were of interest to the characters or the plot. I get that Amy is a fan of penguins and Cameron wanted to provide her with information he thought she would like, but from the story's perspective, I think we could have done without most of the email contents. It would have been more relevant if they tried to discuss their careers or events that were happening in their personal life while trying not to give away their lies. But, all in all, this was a fun book to read.
In April 25th, 1955, 642,987 women shed their skins and became dragons. Alex was only a child, and her aunt was one of these women. That event had a big impact on Alex and her little family. It raised a lot of questions her young brain could not answer. And she now has a little sister, who up until recently was just her cousin. But Alex did not have an aunt! Because there were no dragons. And no one was able to talk about them. Until they came back, and they could no longer be ignored!
I listened to the audiobook last year, and I read it again this year. It is one of the books that raise a lot of feelings in me. I love to see a world where women don't put up with being put down and limited due to their gender. Becoming dragons is the perfect metaphor for letting the fire inside them flare up. And seeing how their transformation did not have the same results everywhere. Some dragons were so angry that they burned everything and everyone that hurt them. Others stayed back and continued to live with their families. And others just decided to leave and go away to find their own destiny.
With the dragons' return, we can see a society that is trying to slowly adapt to make room for these giant creatures. Just like society had to adapt to allow for women to take part in education and the workforce. However, it didn't seem that the change was enough. One of the things that don't sit too well with me is that a big chunk of society did not change. They continued to be the close-minded little people they had always been. Alex's dad is the biggest example of that. As hurt as he was by his wife's death, he turned around, abandoned his daughters, got married, and started a new family as if nothing happened.
But I guess that is a reflection of the real world we live in. Misogyny did not subside just because women were given equal rights to men. Up until this day, even among the most educated, well-intentioned, and self-proclaimed “progressive” men, you will find hints of them thinking that women are less than. When women were told that they belonged in the workplace, no one told the men that they belonged at home. This ended up with women being expected to work inside and outside of the home, while the expectations of men did not change. And I think this story reflects that but in a more positive way.
Miranda, a comedian living in Toronto, has just lost the baby she adopted a month earlier. After months of grieving, her family stages an intervention and sends her off to her exiled uncle's island grief resort. On the way there, the boat she's on gets shipwrecked, and she arrives at an extremely kooky neo-Pagan circus! And once she arrives mayhem ensues. Between the colorful grieving attendees in her cohort, her eccentric and meddling wizard of an uncle, her ethereal aunt, and the resort's enthusiastic staff, Miranda would rather be anywhere but there.
This book is first and foremost a comedy and should be read as such. The characters are exaggerated cartoonish versions of what they may otherwise be. And if you go into the book expecting anything else, you will be disappointed, and you will not have given the book its fair chance. But that's not to say that the book doesn't deal with hard-hitting and heavy topics, in the best way possible. The book starts with us seeing Miranda lose the baby that she had adopted 30 days earlier because the birth mother changed her mind. The book showcases the horrors of the Canadian adoption system, which are mind-bogglingly ridiculous.
We also learn about Miranda's struggle with IVF and lost pregnancy, although this topic isn't discussed in detail. Being set in a grief resort, we have people dealing with their own losses. Miranda's cohort is dealing with all kinds of grief, like the loss of a parent, excommunication from a family, living with the aftermath of a botched plastic surgery, and teen pregnancy. And each of these grieving people is comedic in their own right, while also presenting a real view of loss. Being a comedy did nothing to make the discussion of these topics any less serious. This whole farce is run by Miranda's uncle, who is a legitimate wizard, and her auntie, who is eccentric in the most hippy ethereal way. And these two love nothing more than meddling, with the best possible intentions. And her uncle's main target is setting up Miranda and the very hunky New York chef, Scott. I was very skeptical of Miranda's and Scott's relationship at first. She was very clear that she had no interest in him, and it felt like he was still trying to befriend her, with no instinct of self-preservation. But things clicked for me when they decided to fake dating to get her uncle off their backs. And as we all know, fake dating always leads to true love!
Ducky is a chaotic theoretical physicist at CERN, and her only love is physics. The last thing she wants is a man who would force her to reorder her priorities and put him and her future family ahead of her work.
Henry is a neat experimental physicist, and he believes that he has found his one true love. Which happens to be Ducky. He also happens to be her boss.
It seems that there is no future where these two would be together. Until an anomaly at the particle collider has them switch bodies! Then, mayhem ensues!
This is an extremely cute story! From the get-go, you get a feel for Ducky's chaotic personality, but you cannot begrudge her wanting to fulfill her career goals. But then Henry comes to rescue her from being literally stuck to a bar bench, and it's clear that they are falling for each other. But then Ducky goes about it in the worst possible way, and now her future boss REALLY doesn't seem to like her.
When an electric storm happens and they switch bodies, things become extremely ridiculous! It was hilarious how Ducky was trying to navigate in Henry's body, and I would have loved to get an extra chapter that showed what Henry's morning had been like in more detail!
Seeing Henry's family interactions with Ducky in Henry's body was so endearing. It allowed her to get a better sense of how much she had affected him when he first met her.
The flashbacks that they both got of some of each other's significant memories were ingenious, and my favorite part is that they didn't dance around that. When she figured out that she was his first, she brought it up with him, and when he realized that she loved him, he immediately confronted her. Having them communicate well with each other made me root for them even more.
And she was willing to show a vulnerable side of herself by asking him not to leave CERN.
I also loved that Ducky got to resolve her conflicted feelings regarding her mom's life choices. In an ideal world, her mom would have spoken to her and explained things to her directly. But humans often don't do what's best for them. But getting that explanation, even in Henry's body was very cathartic.
And for two very smart physicists, it took them quite a long time to figure out what they needed to do to switch back.
As I was reading this book, I kept thinking how much I would love to watch a movie of it!
And, since I have missed out on reading Ghosted, I have to go back and find out what Jillian and Daniel's story is because I am intrigued!
In a world where your inheritance limits your prospects in marriage, the Bennets have five daughters to worry about. This makes the arrival of the very eligible Mr. Bingley to their county an opportunity to secure the marriage of one of their daughters. And no one is disappointed that he seems to only have eyes for Jane, their eldest. However, in his company, Mr. Darcy arrives, who seems to be a very unpleasantly proud man, and his acquaintance with Elizabeth, the second daughter, is off to a bumpy start.
My first exposure to this story was when an abridged version of it was the assigned reading for my 9th-grade English class. Since then, I have watched multiple adaptations and retellings of the story, but I didn't come around to reading the original novel until this year. And boy was I missing out! The novel manages to convey how much Mr. Darcy liked Lizzy very early on in the story. This has always been a point that bothered me before because the focus of all the adaptations seems to be on his comment of there not being any women handsome enough to tempt him to dance, but not his actual reaction and opinion about Lizzy.
I have often struggled with the title of the book, I knew that it was meant to convey Mr. Darcy's pride and Lizzy's prejudice, but I couldn't manage to see how it's prejudice when he was proud and thought that the people of Hertfordshire beneath him. However, the novel shows his aversion to social gatherings in general, making it obvious that his pride was indeed being prejudged. The most entertaining thing to me was how my own opinion of Mary has changed. Even though I still would never perform any sort of music publicly, I agree with her that staying home and reading is better than any social function.
Teddy was the undefeated Answers! player with 76 wins, until Max showed up, stole his heart and his victory, and continued to gain more money in prizes in her 38-win streak than he did in his 76 games! Teddy was able to gain back some of his pride in the annual tournament when he managed to defeat Max. But, they remain tied, and they really dislike each other. Now they have another chance to face off in the Ultimate Answers! Tournament against Hercules McKnight, the all-time undefeated champion.
If you thought that things should go smoothly, you thought wrong. Maxine is ADHD, so she does not have the capacity to prepare for the game the traditional way. And Teddy's game strategy is very safe which could risk him his win. And they both need to win the games leading to the finale if they want a chance at beating McKnight - who is not who the world seems to think he is. And that is all the motivation these two extremely different people need to form this extremely unlikely alliance.
This book will always have a place in my heart because it contains the best ADHD depiction that made me feel seen and represented. I don't think I highlighted passages as much as I did think “That is so me”. Not only did I see myself in Max, but I also felt a kinship with Teddy because I am a rule follower, I am currently working on my graduate degree, and I love finding new ways to teach that will get through to my students. So, if you're a woman with ADHD, or in Academia, or both, you will enjoy this book! AND you will learn some trivia, which is, like Max, one of my love languages!
Thanks to the publisher for an eARC provided through NetGalley. The following is my honest and personal review of the book.
Time to Rise is a fun romcom set in Sweden that follows two storylines.
The first is set in the modern day, about a TV show host who helps bakers improve their business and products, and a small town bakery owner whose friend entered into the show. Both of these people come from a long line of bakers, him on his paternal side, and her on her maternal side, and so they are very passionate about what they do.
To complicate things, his TV show persona is mean and condescending, while she refuses to be made to look stupid when she is confident that she is a better baker than him. And neither of them can back out of the show.
In parallel, we follow a storyline from 1945, where a Finnish widow who is passionate about baking migrates with her two children to Sweden and takes a job working as a packer in a family-owned up-and-coming bakery, run by the family's single son.
And the two storylines eventually collide in the cutest way.
I enjoyed reading the book, the story flows easily, and it is a warm and fluffy romcom.
Both Nora and Henrik have their motives for the show to go on, which got me invested in it as much as they were. And they both are skilled bakers, which makes their quarrels and disagreements plausible.
Tuula and Nils' storyline was so tender, and it left me with a little heartbreak.
The parallels between the two storylines are pretty clear, and it was easy to draw conclusions and make predictions, but it was in line with what I would expect of a romance story, and I was glad to be reading a book where a happy ending is pretty much guaranteed.
I also loved how the storylines diverged from each other, particularly, how Henrik and Nils handled their relationship with their fathers. I also appreciate the way that both Nora and Tuula contributed to those decisions.
The side characters were interesting and diverse, and I liked to see female friendships throughout the story. And I enjoyed the glimpse into Swedish Christmas traditions!
However, in Nora and Henrik's storyline, there was more telling and not as much showing as I would have liked, especially regarding their quarrels and their romance. I usually love reading banter, and I felt there was room for more. I also felt the ending was a bit abrupt since the issue of sourdough starter, which is the core of the whole book, did not feel resolved until the epilogue.
This was my first time reading Mansfield, and the way she describes what often are mundane everyday events is captivating. The book consists of 6 short stories, that I felt showed some of the horrible parts of human beings. Bliss tells the story of a woman who was feeling extraordinarily happy one day, and I wanted to express it in every single way. At the end of the day, she learns that her husband is having an affair with a new close friend of hers. Mr Reginald Peacock's Day tells the story of Reginald, a music teacher, who feels he is miserable in his marriage because his wife doesn't care about his interests, and he constantly feels personally attacked by everything she says. The story shows his interactions with different women in his life that he teaches music to, and he is convinced that he is a man of society that all these women are interested in him, and that he can get anyone that he wants. By the end of the day, when he goes home to his wife, he attempts to connect with her one more time, only to find that all he has are the empty words that he says to the other women. Pictures tells the story of a singer who is no longer in her prime and is struggling to find a job performing. It follows her throughout the day trying to talk to producers and conductors without success. At the end of the day, she ends up going home with a man to be able to get the money and afford her rent. It was absolutely heartbreaking. The Little Governess tells the story of a young naive English woman who is traveling for the first time all by herself on a train from France to Germany to take a job as a governess there. On the train, she ends up sharing a compartment with an old man whom she starts thinking of as a grandfather figure. She has been advised to be careful of people and not to trust anyone on her trip, but she deems the man harmless and lowers her guard with him. He convinces her that she should let him show her around Munich instead of spending the day alone at the hotel waiting for the woman who will take her to the town where she'll be working. When she tries to leave to go back to the hotel he insists that they go for ice cream first, then back to his apartment where he kisses her without her consent. She leaves and goes back to the hotel to find that she is late, and the woman who was meeting her came and left when she didn't find her and no one could tell her where she was or when she would come back. Feuille d'Album tells the story of a young artist in Paris who intrigues women with the mystery around him, and his inclusiveness. And the artist himself is obsessed with a woman who lives in the building across from his. He imagines how their lives together would be, and orchestrates a “chance” meeting with her when he follows her while she's doing her shopping one day, walks behind her till she gets home, and then pretends that he has found an egg that she had “dropped”. I particularly liked this story because it highlights how people's expectations and perceptions of others sometimes overshadow who they really are. A Dill Pickle tells the story of an encounter between two people who used to be involved romantically. The man keeps going on about all the things he accomplished since they have last seen each other. The woman, while still attracted to him, notices how his focus is more on himself and money and not their relationship. The highlight of the story for me was when the woman simply gets up and leaves him while he's still mid-sentence. However, we find out that he did not even care that she left, and was more concerned with not being charged extra for the cream he didn't add to his coffee. I thought that those stories were very interesting, and invited quite a lot of reflection. I enjoyed the guide's notes and the pointers that were provided, as they helped put some of those reflections in a better context. They also managed to point out things that I would have otherwise overlooked in the stories.
The four horsemen have arrived to declare the beginning of the end of the world, causing most technology to break down, and then they disappeared. Now Pestilence is back and is spreading a Plague everywhere he goes, and only Sara is brave enough to try to kill him - or so she thinks. She was not the first one to think that, or to try, not knowing Pestilence cannot be killed. Now she's his prisoner, and he's taking her with him all over the world to finish his task. Can she sway him to change his mind?
I had some conflicting feelings about the characters in this book. Pestilence is supposed to be neutral, unfeeling, and indiscriminating. But he decides to show mercy to Sara because he thought he saw a sign. But, even knowing that, seeing Sara chip away at that part of his exterior kept making me hope for a redeeming act from him. And I think that was the mistake Sara kept making - romanticizing Pestilence when he was clear about his intention to make her suffer. However, I was happy at the end when he actually broke down and decided he was done with his task, and that humans can, in fact, be redeemed. I am looking forward to reading War next.
Two royals in disguise run into each other in Rome and end up spending the day together pretending to be commoners. Their relationship was too instalovey, and Callum's reaction when he finds out who Illaria is was exaggerated. And I still don't get why in the end he said he wouldn't be able to spend a lot of time with her.
Audrey Love, the best man, and Theo Luck, the maid of honor, lose the groom on his wedding day, and they're running around town looking for them. They checked all the rooms except the bridal suite before they started their manhunt, and if they had they would have discovered that the bride and groom had eloped. And their love is not convincing.
Daisy loves the pastries in Harris' bakery, the only problem is Harris seems to hate Daisy, and they end up stuck there together on Valentine's Day. I still can't understand how Harris can not only hide his feelings but project the exact opposite at every interaction for months. It does not seem he lacks people skills, he's nice to other people! And they go from 0-100 at lightning speed. Not convinced.
After becoming unemployed, Iris moves in with her brother and gets a job as a receptionist in Dex's tattoo shop. Being polar opposites, Iris and Dex are off to a rocky start. That is, until the members of another bike club and the Croatian mafia show up to collect on a debt Iris's dad owes them. With her brother gone to look for him, Iris has to move in with Dex in order to stay safe. What could go wrong when a naive innocent pretty woman moves in with a hot dangerous grumpy man?
This was my third time reading Under Locke, and when reflecting on it, I found Dex to be too much of an asshole, and Iris was a bit too naive for my liking. And some of the humor is that of an 11-year-old boy. But don't get me wrong, I still love the book! I will probably read it again in the not-very-far future, but I think the characters in more recent Mariana Zapata books are more developed and likable. The story itself is interesting, I like seeing the relationship development in Mariana Zapata's books going slowly from dislike to friendship to love. I think that is what makes me forgive all their personality flaws and root for them!
This play follows Nora, a married woman whose seemingly loving husband, Torvald, thinks is not very careful with money. When a secret that Nora has been keeping for years threatens to come out, she tries to hide it from Torvald and resolve the problem on her own. Unfortunately, her efforts do not succeed, and her life begins to unravel and she is faced with the reality of what her husband's priorities are.
I was not expecting a powerful play when I started listening to this. My first thoughts were that Nora seemed to be sneaking behind her husband and was in fact squandering money. But it became quickly clear that that was only Torvald's narrow and ignorant perception of her. My heart was broken for her when she decided to stay away from her children believing she was poisoning their lives with her secret. And I felt betrayed when Christine went back on her plan of helping her. However, as it helped reveal Torvald's true person which led Nora to leave him, I could find it in me to forgive her.
This book takes place in Cafe Funiculi Funicula in Tokyo. It may look like a regular small cafe, other than the fact that it is in a basement, and has three clocks that don't show the same time, but it hides a bigger secret. Following a set of rigid rules, visitors to the cafe may travel in time! The book follows the story of four different people looking to find closure, healing, forgiveness, and acceptance.
One of the main rules of time travel in Cafe Funiculi Funicula is that no matter what you do in the past, you cannot change the present. They also have to drink their coffee before it gets cold to return to their present, otherwise, they will face harsh repercussions. So what motivates people to travel back in time to their pasts?
We meet a woman whose boyfriend left her to go to work in America, and she regretted not asking him to stay. We meet a man who has Alzheimer's, and his wife who is heartbroken because he cannot remember her anymore, and they attempt to define the parameters of their new dynamic.
We also meet a woman who is estranged from her family, and who kept rejecting her sister's attempts to reconnect until she lost that sister. And, finally, we meet a pregnant woman who knows she is going to die if she carries on with her pregnancy, but all she wants is to give her baby a chance at life and make sure that they are happy. Each of those people was seeking closure, forgiveness, or an attempt to express their feelings one last time, and even though none of their presents changed, they all managed to find some peace.
In a world with four parallel Londons, magicians who have the ability to travel between them are extremely rare. One of those is Kell who is from Red London, and besides being a messenger between the King of Red London and the monarchs of Grey and White London, he also tends to smuggle artifacts between them, which is extremely illegal. It's all well until it isn't, and events have him setting for Black London, which has been ravaged by magic and blocked from the rest, with an unlikely companion.
I enjoyed this book a lot! This is my first V. E. Schwab book, and I loved her writing style. I regret going for the audiobook because it made it take much longer than I would have preferred, so moving forward, I will finish the series with e-books - luckily they are all currently on Kindle Unlimited. I loved the characters in this book. Kell is struggling to feel like a part of his “family”, Lila is quite a badass that I want to see more of, Rhy's love for Kell was very apparent, the Dane twins made my skin crawl, and as much as I disliked Holland during the book, he did not deserve the ending he got.
When the hockey team's rink is trashed and they have to share the ice-skaters' rink for practice, Stassie is not happy, and the team's captain, Nate, becomes the target of her ire. Their mutual attraction, which she is unwilling to admit to, does not make things easier. And the cherry on the top is when her skating partner is injured and he blames Nate for his accident.
I am glad I read Wildfire first because if I had started with this one it would have been over for this series. I thought the story was missing one more step to being more dramatic and meaningful. For example, Aaron put Stassie on a horribly strict diet that wasn't enough for her active lifestyle, but beyond it causing some quarreling between her and Nate, then confronting Aaron about, nothing happened. Or when Stassie fell into the frozen lake, there was a brief part in the hospital, and most of my friends who read the book forgot about it a week after they were done. Or later when Nate's dad comes back early during Christmas break. His conversation with Nate was very mellow. I didn't feel that Nate got closure out of it. I liked that the book included interactions with secondary characters. It made me invested in seeing them in future books. Henry was my favorite, with his blunt and unfiltered thoughts. As an antagonist, Aaron was quite bland. Nothing he ever did meant anything in the long run, and it doesn't sound like he suffered any repercussions for his actions.
I had no expectations for this book, and I was still disappointed.
This is an abridged version of E. B. White's “Charlotte's Web”. It's a 6-chapter storybook that tells the story of Wilbur, a small piglet, who befriends Charlotte, a spider on the farm where he lives. When they find out that Wilbur will eventually be slaughtered, Charlotte uses her web-spinning skills to write messages that praise Wilbur. When Charlotte dies of old age, Wilbur takes care of the eggs that she leaves behind.
This book is designed where each chapter is a single illustration with text at the bottom. However, the Kindle version that I read had the illustrations rotated horizontally and split into two pages. This split made it difficult to enjoy the illustrations that would have been otherwise nice.
The book is extremely short, so I expected the language would be meant for a very young age, but what I found were more complex sentences that didn't match the look of the book or the length of the text.
I picked this book up specifically to satisfy a prompt in a challenge, which I accomplished. I never read the original story, and I didn't have the time, energy, or desire to do that, so I went for the first abridged edition available on KU, and I guess you get what you pay for.
Violet thought that surviving the first year in Basgiath was going to be difficult. Little did she know that surviving the second year after finding out life-changing secrets at the end of Fourth Wing is going to be even more difficult. Between discovering new enemies, more hidden secrets, and making new allies, the second year is going to be more interesting, but definitely more difficult than the first.
This book was a journey to read! For one thing, I am happy that the Sorrengail siblings got back together. I kept expecting Mira to pick the wrong side of the conflict, so I was thrilled she showed up at Aretia. I loved seeing the growth in Xaden's character and his relationship with Violet. However, his insistence on her asking questions to receive information felt unfair. If these two communicated better, maybe things wouldn't have ended the way they did. Oh, and that ending! It HURT! Oh, and I love adolescent Andarna more than I love teenage Groot, and that's saying a lot. And Tairn rules!
I don't often theorize about where the stories I am reading will go, but I have a theory for this I want to share. I felt a lot of betrayal from Markham, having been Violet's mentor before she joined the riders. There was a mention that the leadership positions used to be occupied by members of the different quadrants. I think the scribes did not like this, and, not being able to face the riders, they needed someone stronger, so they dug up the knowledge to create the venin and wyverns. I am also worried the venin's leader will be Xaden's mom!
This is a two-part short novel. The first part is an account of a true story that happened in Al-Naqab desert in southern occupied Palestine in 1949, where a young Bedouin girl was gang-raped and killed by Israeli soldiers. The second part is fictional based in modern-day Palestine, when the 1949 story was revealed, and a Palestinian woman feels compelled to investigate it further.
This book is not a light read by any means. I was fascinated by the narration style in the first half of the story, being told from the perspective of the head of an Israeli army unit stationed in Al-Naqab in 1949. Following that, the shift to the perspective of a young Palestinian woman living in Ramallah, who seems to have some kind of obsessive tendencies, was unexpected, but not jarring. The description of the road she was traveling to get from Ramallah to Yafa was so well done that, as someone who has traveled that road tens or maybe even hundreds of times, I could visualize it as I was listening to the book.
I started reading the book without reading the synopsis, so I didn't know what the story was about. During the first half, for a split second, I was wondering if I had misinterpreted the intentions of the soldier, and whether he actually wanted to keep the Bedouin girl safe from his unit. The pain and horror I felt when the rape started happening was overwhelming.I loved the parallels drawn between the two timelines, particularly with the appearance of the dog, and the smell of kerosene. The ending was as perfect as it was heartbreaking. There are few things that can be conveyed with minimal words, and this was one of them.
It's such a “minor detail” in a well-narrated book, but I wished the narrator was better instructed on how to pronounce Arabic names.
Gracie was getting ready to be on move again when a member of the Trinity lands injured in her backyard. And he showed no appreciation to her efforts of taking care of him as he healed in her trailer home. As luck would have it, the cartel that has been after Gracie's family for years have finally caught up with her, and her companion is still in no shape to help out. But what if him landing in her backyard was no coincidence?
I enjoyed the sci-fi twist in this book. It paired nicely with the romance while allowing more suspension of reality than what a regular contemporary does. The interactions between Gracie and Alex were funny at times, cute at others, and sometimes even downright gut-wrenching. I stayed up till the wee hours of the morning to finish this book, and for the next three days after I kept returning to it and re-reading the parts I enjoyed the most. I hope that we will get to see more of Alex's siblings find their happily ever after in upcoming books, especially after Selene's statement that at least now one of them won't die sad and alone.
No, no, no! Why?! This is not my first Tessa Bailey book, so I was very excited to read it. And I figured, it's a novella, so it will be light, quick, and breezy. Instead, it was clunky, rushed, and cringy! Seeing a glimpse of Britta and Sumner every few months throughout the year was not enough to make me get on board with their relationship. He was already in love with her before the book started, and she was extremely anti-relation from a traumatized childhood. I can't see how that can completely change in a couple of spread-out scenes. And I was okay with the cringy dialogue until he demanded she love him. No, no, no! Love doesn't come on demand like that. At that point, I just had an icky feeling for him, and we were only at around 60% of the book. If it weren't a novella, it would have been a DNF. Also, if your visa in the US expires tomorrow, you don't go looking for a wife tonight! And what about applying for a marriage license? And who gets a Green Card in 6 months?! My suspension of belief isn't that good, sorry. I also think reading this book at the heels of The Wall of Winnipeg and Me, which does the whole marriage-for-a-green-card trope way better, amplified my distaste for it.