Tag: Illinois

Books

Book 782: Love Lessons (Love Lessons #1) – Heidi Cullinan

Geoff W

Book cover of "Love Lessons" with Amazon Affiliate linkIt’s been quite a while since I read anything by Heidi Cullinan—and this is distinctly different from her contributions to the Tucker Springs universe. I actually lost track of Cullinan after how rude Riptide Publishing was years ago because I went out of my way not to read anything by them and ultimately it was my loss. Thankfully, this isn’t published by them and I re-discovered an author I truly enjoyed reading.

I grabbed this one from the library because I forgot I wanted to read Secret Admirer by D.J. Jamison and I needed to read something to align a galley for what I thought was the publication date and failed miserably so you now get to have four back-to-back unplanned MM Romance reviews, oh darn 😀

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Books

Book 635: Severance – Ling Ma

Geoff W

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 629: Ryker & Gavin (Something About Him #5) – A.D. Ellis

Geoff W

I think this is the one I hate-read the most. I say this because apart from the opening and closing lines, I only highlighted two lines/passages and one of those was because of its reappearance after an absence, but I’ll get to that.

Ryker’s mom kicks him out when he comes out. She gets a gay bff and then tries to reconcile with Ryker. Gavin is the gay bff who happened to be balls deep in Gavin a few days before said reconciliation. They decide to give it a go, don’t tell mom/bff, and shit hits the fan. Oh yeah and there’s a 14 year age difference that is a “big deal”.

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Books

Book 531: Pride, Prejudice and the Perfect Bet (Perfect #2) – Marilyn Brant

Geoff W

This is the second novel in the two book series, Perfect. The first, Pride, Prejudice and the Perfect Bet and this one are both just sort of okay. This picks up within six months of Pride, Prejudice and the Perfect Match and happens over three weeks.

I did really enjoy Brant’s characterizations of the Jane and Bingley characters from Pride and Prejudice, which is who this book focuses on. They’re the best friends of Beth Ann and William from the first book and the story revolves around their being best man and maid of honor at their wedding and the various shenanigans that ensue surrounding various bets they make with each other while trying not to kiss or kill each other.

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Books

Book 530: Pride, Prejudice and the Perfect Match (Perfect #1) – Marilyn Brant

Geoff W

I picked up a digital copy of this back in June of 2014. I never got around to reading it because it never caught my attention as well as it did when I first bought it. However, when I needed a book to kickstart my reading, as usual, I went to my Goodreads account and sorted by shortest to longest and this was one of the shorter novels on the list.

I think what I actually enjoyed about this novel is that it reminded me of the Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks movie You’ve Got Mail (IMDb link). You can see more at this blog post by The Bennet Sisters talking about it as a pseudo-adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. You’ve got the scrappy upstart (Social Work student in this case) in Beth Ann Bennet and the rich haughty Dr. William Darcy (who does have a charitable streak) and the rest sort of plays out very similarly.

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