Books

Book 941: Dylan’s Dilemma (Maine Men #4) – K.C. Wells

On my trek to get to Aaron’s Awakening, I continued to make my way through Wells’ series. I did get sick while visiting Texas so quite a few of these are going to be back posted as I catch up on things. I was a little disappointed in the series with the last installation and all I can say about this one is the same.

For me, the problem with this one and the last one is the character development. There were such strong characters in the first two books who grew and changed within their stories, but in Seb’s Summer and this one the characters were okay, but they just fell flat for me.

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Updates

May Recap 2022

May did NOT fly by even though we spent a long weekend in North Conway, NH for our 8th anniversary and flew to Texas at the end of the month for graduation parties. Add in that work picked up with the end of the fiscal year coming up fast and school starts the first week of June, I’m trying to figure out how it felt like a regular full-length long-ass month.

I got a lot of knitting done, more on that later, and read SO many books. I’m ready for summer, but not really ready for the heat so we’ll see how long that lasts.

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Books

Book 940: Seb’s Summer (Maine Men #3) – K.C. Wells

As I continue blazing through Wells’ Maine Men series to get ready for Aaron’s Awakening, book six, I’m not really hoping this isn’t a downturn in the series. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a bad book, it just wasn’t as good as Finn’s Fantasy or Ben’s Boss.

In this book, we have Seb from the core friend group who has had to leave Ogunquit to head further north to Cape Porpoise to help out his injured uncle on his lobster boat. While there he runs into Marcus, an older (mid-30s) copywriter who fled his demons in NYC and is seeking refuge in his family’s vacation house.

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Books

Book 939: Ben’s Boss (Maine Men #2) – K.C. Wells

I decided to catch up on this series after reading Finn’s Fantasy, way back in April of last year, and seeing the ARC of book six, Aaron’s Awakening, in the last week or so. I enjoyed Finn’s story and the Maine setting so thought why not.

We got a taste of the friend group that provides the characters for each book, but barely enough to even guess at their various personalities. Ben is one of the quieter ones who was bullied in high school and has the opportunity to leave his grocery store job for a little tourist shop. As luck would have it, his new boss is his high school bully, Wade, who was so deep in the closet he lashed out at anyone and everyone, but particularly Ben because he had the biggest crush on him.

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ARC, Books

Book 937: Burn Rate – Andy Dunn

When someone in the marketing department at the publisher reached out about this because I’d positively reviewed David Chang’s Eat a Peach, I had to take a few minutes to really think if I wanted to go back into this world.*

In Chang’s book, his mental health struggles are peripheral, but in Dunn’s Burn Rate, he centers them. I spent quite a bit of time reading about bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and other mental health issues before my mom died a few years ago to try and understand what she was going through and what my sister and I were experiencing. And that REALLY hit home when the first quote Dunn uses in his book is a quote from Kay Redfield Jamison who wrote THE book (An Unquiet Mind) about brains and bipolar/manic depression/brains in general.

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