ARC, Books

Book 271: Too Busy For Love – Tasmin Baker

I always wonder whether to count novellas as full books when I’m tallying for the year, but why shouldn’t I? I won’t lie and say I requested a copy of this book from the publisher because of the blurb, I’ll be completely honest and say it was the cover. I received a copy of this from the publisher and received no compensation for my honest opinion.

So clearly this is a case where the marketing worked and will probably get the book a lot more readers than the story itself. I mean just take a moment to appreciate it. Now, I don’t want to completely mislead you, the novella wasn’t horrible, it just could’ve been so much better. I think the biggest problem I had with the novel was that I couldn’t tell where the story was set and the language was off. There seemed to be a strange mixture of American, British and Australian English and this really kept me out of the story.

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ARC, Books, Reading Events

Book 225: Two Short Stories

So I felt really guilty about reviewing either one of these short stories/novellas on their own so I squished them together and counted them as one book. Total they are barely 50 pages, but I’m including them anyway. The first, In Another Life, is an ARC from the publisher and I received nothing for my honest opinion; the second, Karma is the 2013 Boston Book Festival 1 City 1 Story selection.


I would’ve read this ages ago if I would only have realized that it was a novella/short story. For some reason I assumed this was a standard 150-200 page love story type novel. Regardless I am glad that I read it, even if it was only 28 pages.

They say that the hardest thing to write of all forms of writing is a short story. Now I don’t know who they are or whether this is true, but I can say I have read really bad short stories and amazing short stories. I think a lot of authors struggle with the finite amount of space and telling a complete story within the short story structure. And although E. E. Montgomery does a great job with this as a short story (or novella as the publisher says), this story would only have been better if it had more meat to it. I will say there were golden passages that made my breath catch and made me want the love the two characters had such as
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