Category: Review (Page 111 of 297)

BOOK REVIEW: Heartland (True North #7) by Sarina Bowen

February 3, 2020 / Arielle / 0 Comments

Heartland (True North #7)
by Sarina Bowen
Purchase on: Amazon, iBooks
Add to: Goodreads

Synopsis:
An emotional friends to lovers romance full of risky secrets and late-night lessons in seduction.

Dylan is my best friend, and the only person in my life who understands me. He doesn’t mind my social awkwardness or my weird history. The only glitch? He doesn’t know that I’ve been hopelessly, desperately in love with him since the first day we picked apples together in his family’s orchard.
But I know better than to confess.
Now that we’re both in college together, I’m seeing a new side of him. College Dylan drinks and has a lot of sex. None of it with me.
Until the night I foolishly ask him to tutor me in more than algebra…and he actually says yes.
But the cool morning light shows me how badly I’ve endangered our friendship. And I don’t know if anything will be the same again.

Review

If there were one fictional family that I would gladly want to be folded into, it would be the Shipley clan. From the very first time we are introduced to all of them in Bittersweet, I knew that I was going to form a life-long attachment and love for the entire family. I actually recently went and re-read that first book and I forgot how many little snippets we see of a younger Dylan that are just hilarious. He still had that larger-than life, easygoing personality (especially compared to Griff).

Since most of the other books take place when the MCs are in their mid-to late-twenties or so, I enjoyed this one being set in college. Since I’m an old woman now with almost two kids (har har, jk..kinda) I always get giddy and nostalgic thinking back to those easygoing times. This book was no different.

I was also pretty excited to learn more about Chastity. After Zach’s book when she shows up and it’s pretty evident that she has her own story to tell about how she got the hell out of there, I was eager to learn more about it and how she was going to fit in in a college setting. Other than struggling with some of the class aspects of things though, I thought she really thrived. She ate up those “normal” college experiences and craved more. Of course I loved that Dylan helped tutor her. What a sweetheart. Really though, other than him having a filthy mouth and being this super brawny hunk of man meat (lolll) he may be the sweetest Shipley out there. No, I take that back. He definitely is.

My heart broke for him on numerous occasions because of the blame he was placing on himself for his father’s death. It’s always easy to see from an outside perspective that there would have been absolutely NOTHING he could have done that day to make his father still be alive. But he still couldn’t see that and of COURSE because he’s a stubborn male he couldn’t talk about it with anyone. I was so happy when he finally was able to talk that out with his mom and brother *sobs*.

Hmmm what else? Oh, the steamy scenes? Yeah, you aren’t going to want to miss those. The whole dynamic where the girl wants the more experienced guy to “teach her” the ways of things always gets me. I mean, how can it not? Especially when Dylan is so sweet to her and cares to make things as good for her as they possibly can be ~shivers~. Highly, highly recommend, as always.

Extra Purchase Links

Kobo https://geni.us/HeartlandKobo

Nook https://geni.us/HeartlandNook

Google https://geni.us/HeartlandGoogle

About Sarina Bowen:

Bowen is the USA Today bestselling author of 30 books, including: the True North series, co-author of Him/Us and the WAGs series with Elle Kennedy, The Ivy Years series and the Brooklyn Bruisers. And more!
Are you looking for a friends-to-lovers story or maybe even a secret baby book? You can read a list of Sarina’s books broken out by trope and style.
Need to know what’s coming next ? Get all the latest news on Sarina’s website, and sign up for her newsletter so you don’t miss a book or a deal.

BOOK REVIEW: All Your Twisted Secrets by Diana Urban

January 29, 2020 / Cassie / 2 Comments

All Your Twisted Secrets by Diana Urban
Purchase on: Amazon, iBooks
Add to: Goodreads

Synopsis:
Welcome to dinner, and again, congratulations on being selected. Now you must do the selecting.

What do the queen bee, star athlete, valedictorian, stoner, loner, and music geek all have in common? They were all invited to a scholarship dinner, only to discover it’s a trap. Someone has locked them into a room with a bomb, a syringe filled with poison, and a note saying they have an hour to pick someone to kill … or else everyone dies.

Amber Prescott is determined to get her classmates and herself out of the room alive, but that might be easier said than done. No one knows how they’re all connected or who would want them dead. As they retrace the events over the past year that might have triggered their captor’s ultimatum, it becomes clear that everyone is hiding something. And with the clock ticking down, confusion turns into fear, and fear morphs into panic as they race to answer the biggest question: Who will they choose to die?

"Talk about frightening page-turners! I kept reading chapter after chapter. I had to know what happens next! And trust me―the scares just keep on coming!" ―R.L. Stine, bestselling author of Goosebumps and Fear Street

Thank you to Edelweiss, the publisher and the author for an ARC in exchange for a honest review.

Welcome to dinner, and again, congratulations on being selected. Now you must do the selecting. Within the hour, you must choose someone in this room to die. If you don’t, everyone dies.

As soon as I read the blurb for this book, I knew I HAD to have it. It has so many elements I love in thrillers: an isolated location (in this case, a locked room), a group of people who have secrets and a running clock until disaster strikes. SIGN ME UP.

Here are the major players of the book:
Amber – Main POV. Loves to compose music and is still dealing with the death of her older sister.
Sasha – Popular cheerleader and lead in the school play. Regina George, if you will.
Priya – Amber’s longtime best friend.
Robbie – Amber’s boyfriend and college-bound baseball player. Also popular.
Diego – Smart and a former friend of Amber’s. Won a Shark Tank-style show, which was the eventual cause of the rift.
Scott – The outlier of the group. Friendly with Amber but not friends with anyone else with the group and falls under your classic “bad boy” trope.

The book is told in a series of short bursts of present day and extended flashback to the events leading up to the fateful night. It is also mostly told through the viewpoint of Amber Prescott, a girl who loves to compose music. So much so that she has convinced to the drama club to perform a Romeo & Juliet set entirely to her original compositions.

It wouldn’t be high school without friend or relationship drama, and while Amber previously found herself on the fringe of high school society, she is thrust into the popular group when she becomes friends with Sasha and begins dating Robbie. Soon she is juggling so many priorities, things start to fall apart. But above all, her driving force is to be accepted into USC’s music program.

“Killing him won’t bury your secret…because I know it too.”

I really don’t want to give away anything more than what I’ve mentioned above, because you just need to read it for yourself. But by the end, everything is threaded together. We know exactly how and why everyone is in that room. I was OK with the ending. I think my biggest frustration was with how little of the book actually takes place in the present. I understand with a ticking clock and everything happening in one room, there’s only so much that can happen. But it really seemed like 80-85% of the book takes place in flashbacks, when the most interesting stuff (to me at least) was what was happening in the locked room. Thus, the four instead of five stars.

If you ever wished the Breakfast Club had been a little more intense (aka those Riverdale episodes), then I wholeheartedly recommend picking up this book and devouring it like I did.

The thing about being trapped in a room with five other people, a bomb, and a syringe of lethal poison is that at some point, shit’s going down. No matter how frantically you claw at rationality, how desperately you cling to common decency, you eventually give in to your basic instinct to survive.

All Your Twisted Secrets will be available March 17, 2020.

BOOK REVIEW: It Sounded Better in My Head by Nina Kenwood

January 28, 2020 / Arielle / 0 Comments

It Sounded Better in My Head by Nina Kenwood
Purchase on: Amazon, iBooks
Add to: Goodreads

Synopsis:
From debut author Nina Kenwood comes a tender, funny, and compulsively readable novel about first love and its confusions, and all of the awkwardness of teen romance.

When her parents announce their impending divorce, Natalie can’t understand why no one is fighting, or at least mildly upset. Then Zach and Lucy, her two best friends, hook up, leaving her feeling slightly miffed and decidedly awkward. She’d always imagined she would end up with Zach one day―in the version of her life that played out like a TV show, with just the right amount of banter, pining, and meaningful looks. Now everything has changed, and nothing is quite making sense. Until an unexpected romance comes along and shakes things up even further.

It Sounded Better in My Head is a compulsively readable love letter to teenage romance in all of its awkward glory, perfect for fans To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and Emergency Contact.

Review

I decided after finishing this book that I need to be more…true to myself(?) with ARC ratings this year. I sometimes tend to rate higher than what I actually feel because I have this weird sense of guilt when I rate them under a four and I don’t think that’s fair to anyone, really. However, with this book specifically, I think it’s truly a case of “it’s not you, it’s me.” This book had a lot of parts that gave me butterflies and made my heart race and other parts that were so….truthful, that I had a lot of appreciation for it. However, it just wasn’t for me. I have been mostly avoiding YA contemporaries lately and this just kind of reaffirms that I can’t read them like I used to. I’m pretty sure that if I had read this in high school or even during my first few years of college, it would have been a five star read.

Even though I can appreciate the conflicts in this book, it’s getting harder and harder for me to put myself back in those shoes and deal with some of the other immaturities that realistically come from being that age.

What I liked: Natalie the main characters has PCOS (which is an aspect of life that I don’t think I’ve ever read about a young character suffering through), which made her acne bad. When I say bad, I mean BAD. I mean like physically scarring but also emotionally scarring in a way that changed her entire personality to that of a shut in during high school basically. You read about bad acne and typical puberty problems in a lot of YA books but this is the worst of the worst. That felt SO real and I felt for her so hard. But again, there were some aspects where I was trying to put myself in my mom’s shoes more and trying to decide how I would have handled things for my own daughter if she had been suffering through that. We get first relationships, all of the messy bits that that can entail, we get college acceptances and failures, and friendships tested. We get all of that stuff in the realest way possible and while I LOVED that, I just couldn’t love the book as a whole.

Again, I think a ton of people will really, really enjoy this. For being Kenwood’s debut novel I really am impressed! I just…probably should finally take a break from YA contemporaries for real this time, lol.

Huge thanks to NetGalley and Flatiron Books for allowing me to read an eARC of this book in exchange for my honest opinions!

BOOK REVIEW: The Stars We Steal by Alexa Donne

January 27, 2020 / Arielle / 3 Comments

The Stars We Steal by Alexa Donne
Purchase on: Amazon, iBooks
Add to: Goodreads

Synopsis:
Engagement season is in the air. Eighteen-year-old Princess Leonie “Leo” Kolburg, heir to a faded European spaceship, only has one thing on her mind: which lucky bachelor can save her family from financial ruin?

But when Leo’s childhood friend and first love Elliot returns as the captain of a successful whiskey ship, everything changes. Elliot was the one that got away, the boy Leo’s family deemed to be unsuitable for marriage. Now, he’s the biggest catch of the season and he seems determined to make Leo’s life miserable. But old habits die hard, and as Leo navigates the glittering balls of the Valg Season, she finds herself falling for her first love in a game of love, lies, and past regrets.

Review

Man am I bummed about this, you guys. For those of you who didn’t know, this is a loose science fiction re-telling of Persuasion by Jane Austen. I personally have never read it before but I HAVE read and loved For Darkness Shows the Stars by Diana Peterfreund which was also inspired by the book. After finishing that I watched the movie from 2007 just to see how the Austen version went. Basically, this story is one of the move FRUSTRATING (but ultimately rewarding) cases of slow-burn/second chance romances that you will ever see in your entire life.

This version had a LOT of potential and I still think that a lot of people will really like this. I personally think that I would have liked it more if it had even been a duology. Even though the world building and plot were pretty well formed and made sense, there was still so much MORE that could have been delved into if there had just been even one more book.

The concept of this book is that the inhabitants of Earth who had the means to do so, left in a fleet of space ships based on different nationalities after another Ice Age came on and froze the planet solid. Our main female protagonist, Leo, is considered a princess even though her family is just about destitute an the title is only really that–a title. Her aunt, who is captain of a much larger ship that is doing really well and has quite a bit of wealth, allows them to dock there.

Said Aunt is about to be hosting an event called the Valg Season which allows young people from all the different ships a chance to come together to find a suitable partner from a different bloodline. Surprise, surprise, Leo’s old love (who she had been engaged to for a hot second years ago before she was talked out of it by her father, aunt, and cousin because he was poor) shows up. Only now, he’s got money and is suddenly the heir to a ship. The two are at each others throats understandably after what happened in the past and there is a lot of tension due to a number of different things that go down.

As much as the small snippets of them reconnecting had my stomach fluttering, I wanted more. More, more, more. There wasn’t enough of them reconnecting because too many other things were going on with different political aspects involving her aunt’s ship and the fleet in general. I didn’t learn nearly enough of what their past was like, or even who they had been as people to compare to the people they had grown to be in each others’ absence. Again, if this had been more than one book, I think everything could have been executed perfectly with a better balance between the two things. Either way, it was still a quick read and I did still enjoy myself.

Huge thanks to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for allowing me to read an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. ♥

BLOG TOUR + REVIEW + GIVEAWAY: The Hand on the Wall (Truly Devious #3) by Maureen Johnson

January 23, 2020 / Cassie / 10 Comments

The Hand on the Wall (Truly Devious #3)
by Maureen Johnson
Purchase on: Amazon, iBooks
Add to: Goodreads

Synopsis:
New York Times bestselling author Maureen Johnson delivers the witty and pulse-pounding conclusion to the Truly Devious series as Stevie Bell solves the mystery that has haunted Ellingham Academy for over 75 years.

Ellingham Academy must be cursed. Three people are now dead. One, a victim of either a prank gone wrong or a murder. Another, dead by misadventure. And now, an accident in Burlington has claimed another life. All three in the wrong place at the wrong time. All at the exact moment of Stevie’s greatest triumph . . .She knows who Truly Devious is. She’s solved it. The greatest case of the century.

At least, she thinks she has. With this latest tragedy, it’s hard to concentrate on the past. Not only has someone died in town, but David disappeared of his own free will and is up to something. Stevie is sure that somehow—somehow—all these things connect. The three deaths in the present. The deaths in the past. The missing Alice Ellingham and the missing David Eastman. Somewhere in this place of riddles and puzzles there must be answers.

Then another accident occurs as a massive storm heads toward Vermont. This is too much for the parents and administrators. Ellingham Academy is evacuated. Obviously, it’s time for Stevie to do something stupid. It’s time to stay on the mountain and face the storm—and a murderer.

In the tantalizing finale to the Truly Devious trilogy, New York Times bestselling author Maureen Johnson expertly tangles her dual narrative threads and ignites an explosive end for all who’ve walked through Ellingham Academy.

Review:

IT’S HERE. The conclusion to the Truly Devious trilogy. And if you’ve been on the edge of your seat, barely hanging on through all the twists and turns and crazy reveals of this series, then buckle up. Maureen Johnson has one last book to shock us and finally reveal exactly what’s been happening at Ellingham Academy – then and now.

All of our favorites are back, including Stevie, David, Janelle, Nate and Pix. We also add in Hunter, who made some brief appearances back in The Vanishing Stair. The gang is all back together and working to figure out why terrible things keep happening and how they are connected to the original Ellingham mystery.

I’ll just say this upfront, I was very happy with the ending. Everything is revealed (in its own time) and all the threads Maureen Johnson has been weaving are tied together and it thankfully all makes sense. These kids have been through so much trauma and craziness, and to see their stories conclude with resolution, made me very appreciative.

The Hand on the Wall picks up shortly after the events of the Vanishing Stair. School is in session, but after another accident happens, Ellingham Academy decided to close its doors and send the students back home. However, Stevie and co. have other ideas. They need to figure out why and how everything has been going on. But to complicate the matters, a massive snow storm is headed their way, essentially trapping them on campus. What better to way hunker down and solve a decades old mystery?

For anyone who’s read this series, you’ve spent at least two books trying to pick out the correct puzzle pieces and figure out this mystery. I really didn’t guess anything correctly, but once everything was revealed, I was truly satisfied. It’s been a pleasure following along with these characters and trying to figure everything out with them. It’s truly a mystery series, with a additional emphasis on friendships and relationships.

Besides the overarching mysteries of the series, I loved these characters, especially when they are all together. They’ve all been through so much together, but it’s very clear how much they care for each other and are in tune to what each other are feeling. This is especially evident when Stevie struggles with her anxiety, when David self-deprecates or when Nate self-sabotages. These are smart and capable teens, but who all have their own unique battles.

If it’s not clear already, overall I really enjoyed this book and this series. It’s a great upper-YA mystery series and I wish there were more like it. The story is unique and all of the characters are memorable in their own way. I’m not sure what Maureen Johnson has planned after this, but I hope it’s another series similar to this. I’m ready to dive back in to a multi-book mystery.

Favorite Quotes:

She’d let him down because she could not handle it all. Guilt crept around the edges of everything—the taste of the coffee and the smell of the room and the cold coming from the window. Guilt and paranoia. She felt the thrumming in her chest, the engine of anxiety rumbling, making itself known.

She had a clue now, a point of focus. There were things in the walls. She wasn’t sure what that meant, or what she might be looking for. But so much of this had been about walls.

But sometimes, quite by accident, you find yourself vibrating on someone else’s frequency. You can follow the sense of the thing, if not the literal meaning. Sometimes, this is more important and more informative.

“So,” Hunter said, breaking the silence. “Weird night, huh?”

“Not really,” Nate replied, picking through the bottom of a large bowl of popcorn, looking for any fully popped pieces that weren’t hard kernels in disguise. “This is pretty much how it goes. Something terrible happens and we all come back here and talk about how terrible it is. We don’t learn.”

He had seen people give up hope before, seen the light leave their eyes. Albert Ellingham could buy almost anything he wanted, but not hope. Hope is not for sale. Hope is a gift.

Stevie had just failed some test she had no idea she had to take, on a subject she was not aware of. She had been sitting here in her hole in the ground, minding her own business, and then this. There was no winning. But he was here.

Giveaway:

Win one copy of The Hand on the Wall (US Only). Open Jan. 21 – Feb. 4, 2020.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

About the Author:

Maureen Johnson HQ Maureen Johnson is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of several YA novels, including 13 Little Blue Envelopes, Suite Scarlett, The Name of the Star, and Truly Devious. She has also done collaborative works, such as Let It Snow (with John Green and Lauren Myracle), and The Bane Chronicles (with Cassandra Clare and Sarah Rees Brennan). Her work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Buzzfeed, and The Guardian, and she has also served as a scriptwriter for EA Games. She has an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and lives in New York City.