Books

Book 950: Kaleidoscope – Cecily Wong

Book cover of When someone from the publisher reached out about Kaleidoscope, this line caught me: “This book is heart-wrenching and hopeful and the characters truly shine on the page. It’s one of those books where I wish I could read it again for the first time all over again. And I’m so happy that you get to.”

And I downloaded a copy almost immediately, but of course sat on it for a few months, allowing me to forget about the blurb and the subject and go into this completely blind.*  This approach, if you’ve followed me for a while, sometimes works for me and sometimes it doesn’t. This time it sort of worked mostly because the intro was a little abrupt and different from the rest of the story, but that’s on me, not the author.

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Books

Book 945: Rediscovered (Do-Over #2) – E.M. Denning

Book cover of "Rediscovered" with Amazon Affiliate linkWhen this landed in my inbox, it was a case do I really want to continue the series, is it really going to be the end of the world if I just let it go?* I didn’t feel super strong in either direction after reading Rearranged.

I sort of wanted more information about what went down between Rowan, the first book’s protagonist, and Harrison, this book’s, parents because it wasn’t given due justice in the first book and it received even less play in this one unless you count Harrison being fired and Rowan quitting after the main drama of this book.

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Books

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

Book cover of "Seb's Summer" with Amazon Affiliate linkAs 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 938: A Teaspoon of Desire – Alex Danvers

Book cover of "A Teaspoon of Desire" with Amazon Affiliate linkI’ve had this book since January and I really should’ve started it well before I did—not because it was so good, but because it was a slog and I barely met the review deadline.*

I won’t rehash my issues with Riptide Publishing (search the blog, yes I’m still bitter) and as always I’ll give the good and the bad about the book, but TL;DR: this book took WAY too long for me to get through, and maybe it’s just me, but it really should not have.

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Books

Book 937: Burn Rate – Andy Dunn

Book cover of "Burn Rate" with Amazon Affiliate linkWhen 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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