Tag: Massachusetts

Books

Book 736: Romantic Renovations – Blake Allwood

Geoff W

Book cover of "Romantic Renovations" with Amazon Affiliate link"I stumbled across Blake Allwood on the MM Romance Reader blog with their review of Love by Chance and thought I’d give him a chance (ha!). Allwood isn’t a five-star read for me yet, but there is a lot of potential. I will say though, if he doesn’t hire better developmental and copy editors and proofreaders he’ll never get there for me.

Rather than diving directly into the Chances series that MM Romance Reader reviewed I thought I’d start with a stand-alone. It didn’t hurt that this one was set on a home renovation show.

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Books

Book 684: Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton

Geoff W

Book cover of "Ethan Frome" and Amazon Affiliate linkSimilar to my reading of The Age of Innocence two years ago, I was pleasantly surprised by my reading of this. I read it in high school, but of course was not impressed and definitely didn’t enjoy it, but now almost 20 years later, I get it. I’m going to keep slowly working through all the books I read in high school.

Not only was I able to appreciate the beautiful prose and stark setting thanks to living in Massachusetts now, I was also able to make connections from this to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, a connection I made last time I read Wharton too! The biggest parallel of the two works was the structure of the novel, a visiting traveler/worker has an interaction of some type with the protagonists and then gets the rest of the story from the locals. It’s all third party he said she said with some basic observations, and it works.

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ARC, Books

Book 667: Firewall – Eugenia Lovett West

Geoff W

firewall cover art and amazon affiliate linkI’m not going to lie, when I read the first line of this one I got super nervous. The last time I read a book from a non-major publishing company that was set in Boston I was VERY disappointed. So it was a good thing I was pleasantly surprised by this one—especially as it came from the same publicity company!*

Firewall is actually the third in the Emma Streat mystery series and I wouldn’t usually take on a book mid-series. However, West’s story of not getting published until she was in her 70s and then again in her 90s (Concord Monitor news link) I found to be intriguing and the blurb for this was just interesting enough to tempt me.

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Books

Book 659: The Testaments (The Handmaid’s Tale #2) – Margaret Atwood

Geoff W

I did not expect to read this so soon or so quickly. When I first heard Atwood was revisiting The Handmaid’s Tale nearly 35 years later I was incredibly wary about it. With the success of the Hulu series, I wasn’t surprised she was revisiting it, but I was hesitant to jump into this feet first so I put my name on the hold list at the library for an e-book version expecting not to get it until early-2020. They must’ve bought additional copies because I got it within two months of release!

There WILL be spoilers, so if you don’t want to know anything that happens stop now.

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