Glad to be back. Been away for a little while.

So I recently picked this up after being wowed by the so intriguing cover. Needless to say this is a very relevant and timely book. I’m loving some of the characters very much although I haven’t gone too deep into the story to be able to pass any meaningful judgements.

Go ahead, pick it up and try it for yourself

This series opener, which incidentally I read last due to library hold issues, is indeed a fantastic read full of all the romance tropes that genre lovers kill for.

Avery Morgenstern is a heroine as damaged as any you have ever met, and she has literally and I mean literally run away from her home in Texas to enroll for college in another state and be away from her old damaged life and unsupportive parents.

Right on her first day she bumps into hot guy Cameron Hamilton and sparks indeed fly. Let me not spoil it for you by saying too much. All in all I liked it so much and gave it a very worthy four stars on GR

Just finished listening to the audio version of this and really liked it. Carla Fritz is very likeable even though she does act like a total bitch at times. She’s so sympathetic too, having gone through a lot in life, to the extent that she keeps most of it a secret that she won’t share even with her closest friends.

The plot of this last installment in the series centers on Carla’s return to her home where she finds her mother missing (another story totally), only to be taken care of by one hell of a hot guy Jackson James who has become the head bartender in their family bar, that of course her mother has abandoned.

Sparks fly between Carla and Jackson, aka Jax, and if you are a romance reader you know how the story goes from here.

I liked the voice of the narrator too, and I thought she truly brought the story to life with her exquisite execution.

A total of 4 stars on Goodreads

After having enjoyed the second in the series, is it any wonder then that I’d pick this third, which though I hope is not the last in this fairly good set of instalments

Calla is the heroine of this unit, and she’s the true definition of what we call a wounded M/C. Can’t hardly wait to see how she gets her happy ending

I just finished listening to the audio version of this and to tell the truth I liked it even if contemporary romance especially of the NA category isn’t really my type

The M/C Teresa is a wounded heroin, literally as well as figuratively, because she is recovering from a previous very abusive relationship while at the same time she is recuperating from a leg injury that’s threatening to put an end to her dance-career prospects. Jase, her love interest, has some serious baggage of his own that causes him to keep pushing Tess away even when it’s not necessary to do that at times. It doesn’t help either that Jase is a best friend of Tess’s brother, thereby putting her almost into a forbidden territory position. Fate though has its way if working its magic between them and they just can’t stay from one another for too long

Both heroine and hero were meant for each other in my opinion and despite those supervening issues between them as mentioned, they were able to easily overcome and have their happy ending. The chemistry between them is believable and I enjoyed very much all those scenes when they were together.

Please read this book to find it out for yourself

Just came across this as I was looking for my first read of 2022 and it being another Lauren Oliver I expected it to be nothing short of a masterpiece. Needless to say therefore it didn’t disappoint that much in that department and it had quite some interesting twists and turns here and there.

For what I imagine might be the first time around, Lauren here employs two points of view that contrast quite interestingly. The two major characters are Brinny and Mia and each give their own contribution as to how the story unfolds. It’s clear the author wants us to love Brinny more but I have to confess that at the end I had fallen in love with Mia so much more

At its heart this novel is actually a murder mystery although it also possesses fantasy-like elements that actually dominate the story’s plot. To tell the truth you just have to read to see how great it is. I’m going to give it a 4 on Goodreads and I think that high rating is quite well deserved.

I just picked this up randomly while looking for my next Meg Cabot read and I just thought why not check it out. It’s supposed to be about this small town girl who leaves her lair to find a new beginning in New York City but then a few misfortunes strike, though at this point I can’t pinpoint what exactly that would be. To be honest I love the ‘jinxed’ trope a lot, especially if a little magic is involved and I think I’m going to love this one given that it’s coming from Meg Cabot, truly one of my favorite authors in the YA and NA categories.

So, like you can tell I can’t wait to dig my teeth into it and when I get to, it should be so much fun.

Seriously I hurt to do series comparisons because no two books are the same nor do two authors practice their craft in the same fashion, but the extreme similarity between Matched by Ally Condie, and Delirium by Lauren Oliver, left me with no choice. Needless to say those books were published long ago and a lot has been said about them but my own opinion concerning them has been bugging me so much in my head I just thought let me say something before letting the matter come to rest.

To proceed I shan’t really get into the meat of the two stories nor dwell too much on their characters considering these are famous books that sold very well in the market, but what I would only want to say is that I found Lauren Oliver to have produced the better series overall. The first books in both sets are probably equal in strength and appeal, but as the two series progressed, I think Matched declined significantly and by the end had become so pale and dull I had to labor hard to finish it.

Lauren Oliver on the other hand simply tried to spice things up and although she did not always succeed to maintain the same level of excitement, her main character came out way stronger and tougher than her competitor’s. And to sum it all up her story kept its central focus: that of dealing with and toppling a tyrannical administration, which is something that Matched completely failed to do as it suddenly turned to be more of a search for a cure, a thing that totally had nothing to do with its opening premise.

So go ahead call me names if you want but I think Lauren Oliver gave to the world the much better product here

I just came across this totally by accident as I was searching for some reasonably good YA to peruse, just like I have been doing so much lately. The author name of Meg Cabot would have been synonymous with such successful series as the Princess Dairies or other hit standalones like Teen Idol, but boy was I so surprised to learn that Big Boned is actually an adult book, and a murder mystery no less.

It’s a great story to be honest, and part of a long series as well, featuring curvy but body positive heroin Heather Wells who is just as snarky and self-deprecating as you’d expect of any Meg Cabot M/C. But while I don’t have any major issues with this book’s structure, or plot, or the quality of its prose, which is always superb anyway if it’s a Cabot book, I rather found it a little strange that a highly successful writer like her would stoop as low as to produce a complete Stephanie Plum clone. Because, yeah that’s what Heather Wells is, complete with the infamous love triangle and a whole passe of clownish supporting characters. Not to say that’s too much of a problem, since seriously a number of authors have tried to do it to varying degrees of success, among them Darynda Jones and her Charlie Davidson, but when it comes to Cabot that was so totally unnecessary. A celebrated author like her ought to have crafted something distinct, something with her own characteristic flavor and not some slightly modified version of another author’s creation.

So that became my only gripe with this book. Go ahead and check it out if you want and I probably will be doing the same with the other books in the series but to be honest I still maintain that I’m bummed that a powerful author like Meg can wash away her legacy and just become a very pale version of Janet Evanovich🙂

Meg Cabot

A YA dystopian Trilogy

I picked this series up recently as part of my desire to visit most of those YA titles that I totally ignored at their time of publication but nonetheless achieved some measure of reader acceptance. This journey has produced quite some interesting surprises–which of course I cherished–but also at the same time I must say there has been a slew of disappointments along the way, too. The Birthmarked Trilogy unfortunately ranks among the worst in that category of disappointing reads.

I’m not really going to say a lot here because much has already been spoken about how so underwhelming this series is, and the many poor reviews on Goodreads are a case in point. Like most YA titles published in the new milennium, it features a love triangle, no a love square actually because not two but three men compete for the love of the heroin. The dystopian setting is intriguing at first but then everything just goes flat after after a number of chapters and the story never recovers from there. Books 2 and 3 were a complete waste of time, to say the least.

If you haven’t read this series then save yourself the time and just keep things that way.