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Book 867: Finley Embraces Heart and Home (Love, Austen #4) – Anyta Sunday

This book felt different from the other three books in Anyta Sunday’s Love, Austen series. I was always going to read it and said yes as soon as the review opportunity came in, but it just felt different.*

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I think it has to do with the fact that we spend so much more time with Finley and Ethan growing up than we spent with anyone else in the series. All the other books (Emerett Has Never Been in LoveCameron Wants to Be a Hero, and Bennet, Pride before the Fall) were your more typical whirlwind type romances: sparks fly, a couple of weeks or months past, boom happily ever after.

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Book 838: Keeping Hope – Alexandria Redding

We all know I loved Ngozi’s Check, Please! series and am a sucker for MM Sports Romances. So, this one had a lot to live up to and even though I had some concerns about the cover art (seems slapped together and so meh) I gave Redding the benefit of the doubt and decided to give it a go when it appeared in my inbox.*

Overall, the book was just meh (sort of like the cover). There was a lot of potential and Redding clearly has a lot of ideas, but she could use an editor (or a stronger one). So much of the book was bogged down in social issues, which I am here for every day of the week—bullying, racial inequity/police profiling, homelessness, and mental health awareness absolutely need more representation—but not at the expense of the story. In reading this one so soon after Legendborn and seeing how well Deonn wrote about injustice and had the characters learn/grow from it, I was let down.

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Book 821: Love Me Tenor (Perfect Harmony #2) – Annabeth Albert

Picking up not long after where Treble Maker leaves off we find Trevor (Lucas’ friend and acapella group mate) struggling after coming out to his family and being disowned. A production assistant from the previous show has invited him to be on a new reality TV singing competition made of boy bands and he jumps at the opportunity because it’ll give him housing for a few more months while he tries to figure out his life.

What he didn’t expect was to meet and then fall in love with Jalen, the assistants adopted brother who can sing, but doesn’t have the training of the rest of the group. Jalen has his own anger issues and spends the first half of the book antagonizing Trevor.

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Book 820: Treble Maker (Perfect Harmony #1) – Annabeth Albert

I grabbed this one when Albert shared an ominous “these might be leaving Kindle Unlimited soon” on her Facebook. This was one of the few series of hers I haven’t read yet (and honestly had been avoiding for some unknown reason). I also grabbed it because we randomly re-watched Pitch Perfect and Pitch Perfect 2 recently.

I’m not 100% sure, but I believe this was her first published series. You can tell she’s definitely grown a lot as an author since it was published. Her writing has matured and her stories and characters are so much richer and more believable.

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Book 818: Keeping Kellan (Keeping Him #2) – Amy Aislin

After thoroughly enjoying Keeping Casey, I knew when the next one was released I would jump at it. So, when it came up on Gay Romance Reviews I did.*

This is the story of Kellan, the quiet brooding friend and teammate of Ethan from Keeping Casey, and his childhood crush Brant, a landscape architect in his Canadian childhood hometown. They’ve both been crushing on each other for quite a while, Kellan since he was a pre-teen, and the timing has finally worked out when Brant moves back home to get away from his post-college life.

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