Books

Book 770: Eight Nights in December – Keira Andrews

What a lovely little novella. After reading 10 Christmas romances I knew I wanted to find at least one non-Christmas romance for my 12 Days of MM Holiday Romances. And Hanukkah romances were a lot easier to find than Kwanza or Yule or anything else—so here we go!

Eight Nights in December is the story of Lucas, first year student whose dad recently passed away, and Nate, Lucas’s randomly assigned Senior roommate Sam’s little brother. Nate’s mom (being the take charge Jewish mother that she is, tells Lucas that he’s not spending the winter holidays alone when she goes to pick up Sam from school.

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Books

Book 768: Merry Cherry Christmas – Keira Andrews

As I cross the 3/4 mark with book nine of my 12 MM Holiday Books of 2020, I’m finding it harder to judge the books. I’m not sure if it’s because they’re starting to run together, they totally are, or if it’s because they’re dividing pretty quickly into those that I really enjoy and those that are just sort of meh (this is the first).

In Merry Cherry Christmas we have Jeremy (aka Cherry – his little brother couldn’t say his name growing up and it stuck) another virgin desperately trying to no longer be a virgin, and his knight in shining armor Max, the super fit and attractive captain of the university football team. But really, Andrews wrote it best: “a nervous nerd and protective, jealous jock.” Not going to lie, this one gave a lot of the same things that A Guy for Christmas did, but Andrews did it better, for me at least.

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ARC, Books

Book 756: Strawberry Kisses – Charlie Novak

Give me a fake boyfriend romance any day of the week, gay, straight, bisexual, anything really, and I’m in. I don’t know why I like them so much, I just do. So, when I saw this come through from Gay Romance Reviews and I needed a filler between two nonfiction books, I requested a copy.*

I won’t lie and tell you it got off to a great start, there was a typo on page one [“Deseeding twenty passion fruit and another ten pomegranates was a pain the ass and had taken a ton of time.” (Chapter One)] and I wasn’t sure about Novak’s voice, but it definitely got better so I’m glad I kept reading.

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Books

Book 754: The Friend Scheme – Cale Dietrich

I’ve honestly stopped keeping track of where I see books. I just add them to a list or request them at the library and then when they come in I read them and spend 10-15 minutes trying to find out where I found them. In essence, I have no clue where I saw this, but thank you to whoever put it on my radar.

If I’m honest, the cover art drew me to the book, I like the graphic identity and the clean lines and with both their eyes closed it just made it that much more pleasing to the eye. You can sort of read the stress in Matt’s posture (right) and Jason kind of looks above it all.

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Books

Book 731 & 732: Date Me, Bryson Keller – Kevin van Whye

It’s so nice I read it twice—no, seriously. I finished it and then the next morning decided I wanted to read it again. That’s twice this year (excluding illustrated/graphic novels)! The other double read this year was Two for Trust and the real connection of the two is that they could both be easily turned into one of those wonderfully cheesy made-for-TV movies that whenever you see it you just leave it on and inevitably get drawn into it.

You could definitely see where van Whye got his inspiration for this #ownvoices story. He acknowledged he was inspired by She’s All That (IMDb link) from the 90s, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han. And this definitely deserves to be up there with these great coming of age stories.

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