Books

Book 783: Secret Admirer (Love Notes #1) – D.J. Jamison

I PROMISE I’M READING MORE THAN MM ROMANCE THIS YEAR! Things just happened to work out that I needed to fill a few posts between nonfiction galleys to hit publishing dates so here we are.

I picked this up from Kindle Unlimited back in December when I read Naughty & Nice. At the time I was looking for MM Holiday Romances and was enraptured at the abs on that cover not realizing it was part of a series. Thankfully, they were pretty much standalones!

Secret Admirer features Ace, a super-hot upperclassman intelligent frat boy who is keeping an eye out for his best friend’s kid brother the other protagonist, Benji, a first-year who doesn’t want to be babied by his brother’s best friend and just wants to have fun. Continue reading “Book 783: Secret Admirer (Love Notes #1) – D.J. Jamison”

Books

Book 764: All I Want – Stella Starling

This is book five of what will almost certainly be at least 12 Holiday MM Romances this year. What can I say? They’re better than watching the hetero Hallmark/Lifetime movies. Don’t get me wrong, I like those too, but I just want these this year.

This is the story of Elliott, an adorable charitable naive department store clerk, and Ash, the troublemaker son of the department store owner, and by far this is the one that is best set to be adapted into an actual Hallmark/Lifetime movie that I’ve read.

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Books

Book 635: Severance – Ling Ma

I’ve been digesting this one for a little over a week as I write this (it’s posting much later than that). I very much enjoyed the work, but I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

The story follows first generation immigrant Candace Chen after an apocalyptic virus has decimated the human population creating habit zombies. You loose all higher function and go about doing a habit/routine until you die. The problems that Candace faces (and even creates in some occasions) are uniquely urban and (predominantly) millennial.

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Books

Book 578: Bad Idea – Damon Suede

As I’m slogging my way through the absolute TOME that is Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crisis Changed the World (which is fascinating), I needed something a little lighter to break up the finance/business talk.

I wasn’t sure what to expect with this. Suede is a great romance writer, but sometimes it’s a little crass for me. This one definitely rode that line and sometimes went over, but not enough so for me to abandon the book (as if I’d ever do that). Ultimately, Suede pulled me in though I mean a neurotic comic book illustrator (Trip) and a southern comic/pop culture nerd (Silas) getting together in the big city (NYC), hello custom-made dream for me 😀

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Books

Book 557: The Brontë Plot – Katherine Reay

The downside with reading so many romance novels by the same author back-to-back is you quickly discover their strengths and weaknesses. As I read each of Reay’s works, they became less and less memorable even as I was reading them.

If I have to tie it down to the most basic its character development closely followed by pacing. I’m not one to need a “two months later” directional at every instance, but in Reay’s case it would’ve helped a lot. Toward the beginning of the novel the meet cute and the timing was so off I found myself having to re-read multiple sections to see if I’d missed the introduction or some major indicator of time having passed. (I hadn’t.)

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