Tag: new release

One Italian Summer

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Rating: ⭐⭐.5
Author: Rebecca Serle
Genres: Fiction, Romance
Pub. Date: Mar. 2022 (read Mar. 2022)

This book was a bit of a bummer for me. I’ve seen some really excellent (and some not so excellent) reviews, so I was a bit on the fence, but impulsively decided to give it a go. The book did improve throughout, but I knew almost as soon as I started reading it that I wasn’t going to love it.
 
One Italian Summer tells the story of 30 year old Katy Silver, who has just lost her mother to cancer and has in turn, lost a piece of herself. Her Mom was her best friend and she doesn’t know how to move on without her. The two women were supposed to take a trip to Positano, Italy together, a place that was special to her mother Carol, but unfortunately she passes away before the trip and Katy decides to go to Italy alone to try and heal her broken heart. However, while in Positano, something magical happens and the 30 year old version of Carol stumbles into Katy’s holiday, bringing truths to light that Katy never realized about her mother.

It’s a book about love and grief, so I was ready for an emotional and moving read, but sadly, the writing style just didn’t work for me. I don’t want to totally slam on the book because I can see how some people might love this, Serle definitely crafts a very vivid portrayal of Italy in her writing, but the style was so straight forward and matter of fact that I was left feeling like I was reading a dull travel diary rather than the emotional, grief-stricken self discovery story that I was hoping for.

To put it simply, the writing is boring. Everything about this was a classic example of telling instead of showing. It’s overwritten and I thought we got so many details that were just unnecessary. If you’re looking for a good detailed itinerary of what to do in Positano, this is great, but I wanted to go on an emotional journey with Katy and that just wasn’t happening. I found it extremely hard to relate with Katy and the whole narrative was a bit insufferable. Everything about Positano is incredibly beautiful, from the scenery, to the sunsets, to the food, to the luxury hotels – so it’s hard to empathize with a bunch of faux-sad white people living a dream holiday. We’re told about Katy’s grief, but we don’t really experience it. 

It also comes down to Katy being a pretty unlikeable character. There’s nothing wrong with a good unlikeable character, but Katy is not intentionally unlikeable. I believe we’re supposed to like and empathize with her, but it’s very hard because she seems totally unaware of her privilege and it’s hard to buy that a 30-year old woman would be this out of touch with reality. One of the key themes is centered around how Katy and Carol are best friends and Katy’s discovery that, surprise, her mother actually had a life before and outside of her. She’s shocked by this 30 year old version of her mother and spends so much time in awe of the ways in which her mother is both the same and different. I’m sorry, but what 30 year old woman is unable to imagine that their mother might have had a vibrant life before them? Plus I thought the whole my-mom-is-my-best-friend thing was a little tired.

A lot of women love their moms and would consider them a best friend. But come on, mother-daughter friendships are still going to be based on a totally different foundation than peer-to-peer friendships and I would it extremely unrelatable that Katy didn’t have ANY friends outside of her Mom and husband. She mentions one girlfriend in passing, but as far as I can tell, she has no other friends, so that’s probably why she’s so shocked to find out that her mother actually had a life before her. So mostly Katy just read as juvenile and bit dense to me.
 
The one thing I did like about this book though was the exploration of the erasure of women through motherhood. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot as more and more of my girlfriends have children. I’ve been noticing that some of my friends almost seem to disappear into motherhood. They’re still them, but all of their passions and interests have become secondary to that of being a mother. Their children become their number one priority and personality. I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing, I just personally find it very scary because I have a lot of things that I’m passionate about and the idea of losing or having to give up those things in motherhood is one of the primary reasons I delay it. Some people are able to find a good balance between being a mom and being a woman with your own dreams, but it seems it’s easy for who are before being a mother to get lost in the chaos of parenthood.

What Katy is grappling with more than anything is the loss of who she thought she was and the fear of having to suddenly be her own person. Her mom was a comfort to her because then she never had to think too hard and her suddenly realizing that her mother had her own hopes and dreams is scary for her. The realization that our parents can want things for themselves beyond the hopes and dreams they have for us. I don’t fault children for this, but it’s hard to watch a grown woman suddenly figuring this out.

The other issue I had with this book was with the romance. I won’t get into it to avoid spoilers, but I thought it was an interesting choice to give a married woman a love interest. We’re told Katy and her mother are best friends, but we’re not shown it. Likewise, we’re told at the beginning of the novel that things aren’t really working out between Katy and her husband, but we’re not told why and we’re definitely not shown it either. We’re just told that she’s so depressed over the loss of her mother that she has no interest in any of her other relationships, which is really only her marriage because she has no other friends.

Anyways, the only other thing I’ll say is that the book has a bit of a twist, which I thought was well done. I really should have seen it coming, but I didn’t. Unfortunately, none of the positives were really enough to outweigh the negatives and I wouldn’t recommend this book. But if you like it and Rebecca Serle’s writing, then all the more power to you! It did have some very evocative descriptions of Italy, but the writing style along with Katy’s immaturity make it a pass from me.

The Maid

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Rating: ⭐⭐.5
Author: Nita Prose
Genres: Mystery
Pub. Date: Jan. 2022 (read Mar. 2022)

The Maid was my Book Club’s pick for March. I admit I wasn’t super enthused for it because mysteries aren’t generally my favourite, but it had good early reviews, so I was intrigued. Unfortunately, very little about this book worked for me and it was not popular in our book club discussion.

The Maid tells the story of Molly Gray, a young 20-something woman raised by her grandmother and working at an upscale hotel as a maid. In her work, Molly mostly blends in with the shadows, but when she discovers one of the hotel guests dead in his bed, she is catapulted into the limelight and her awkward social demeanor makes her one of the prime suspects. 

Let’s start with talking about the writing style. It wasn’t my favourite, but it reminded me a bit of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, with less charm. It’s never stated outright, but Molly struggles with how to interact in social situations and I think the reader can assume she likely falls somewhere on the spectrum. Her grandmother played a large role in helping Molly navigate the world, but has recently passed, leaving Molly struggling both socially and financially. As the protagonist, I thought the writing style suited Molly’s voice, but sadly the characterization and storytelling were lacking. 

Molly grows a lot throughout the novel, learning about herself and others around her as several new people enter her life to help her through the police investigation. But while she supposedly grows as a person, her growth didn’t feel organic or natural to me. The entire story happens in the span of 5 days and was too neatly packaged for me to buy into it. Molly has struggled her entire life with social interactions and suddenly at the climax she has all these revelations about how other people react. I thought this to be super unlikely if she has struggled her whole life with reading people and I didn’t think it was a particularly good message, as if people on the spectrum can suddenly change the way they see and interpret the world.

But my biggest problem with the book is that the plot is just not very sophisticated. For a mystery novel, I found it to be incredibly boring. I wanted the mystery to be clever and have lots of twists and turns, but the author reveals almost everything to us upfront! It’s clear that there’s something sinister going on in the hotel, we don’t necessarily know who the murderer is, but we know who the key suspects at the hotel are, so it’s not a stretch to see where the story is going. Arguably there are a few twists towards the end of the book, but even these fell flat to me. So before I get into discussion about this in the spoiler part of my review, I’ll just say that I wouldn’t recommend this book because unfortunately it’s lacking in both plot and characterization. 

Okay, now for SPOILERS.
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What drove me nuts at the end is that this whole book is marketed and sold as a “closed door mystery novel” reminiscent of Agatha Christie. People love these kinds of books and it’s a great premise. So WHY IN THE WORLD is the murderer not someone from inside the hotel! It’s such a cop-out and just read like lazy writing to me. The author hands us Rodney and Giselle on a silver platter as suspects in the drug scheme at the very least, but even if they didn’t commit the murder, there were still lots of other suspects – from the hotel manager, to Cheryl, to Juan Manuel, to the other maids, and of course, even Molly. I was just flat out annoyed that the author decided to make the murderer someone from outside the hotel. It’s disappointing and it’s not clever. I could understand why Molly would want to protect Giselle (if she was the murderer), but I really don’t see why she would protect Ms. Black. She had no reason to keep this information secret.

Then there’s the unnecessary twist near the end where Mr. Preston appears to reveal that he is Molly’s grandfather?! It wasn’t totally clear to me if this was the case, but I don’t think it added much to the novel and it actually, if anything, made me more sad because it means Mr. Preston likely only ever wanted to help Molly because she was his granddaughter and not just because he happened to like her. Also the whole lawyer bailing Molly out of jail thing seemed super unlikely to me.

Finally, my friend at book club brought up an excellent point about the very end – why on earth was Charlotte questioning Molly on the stand? Molly was no longer a suspect, she was only a witness, so she would have been questioned by either the prosecution or the defense (for Rodney), neither of which Charlotte was likely to be representing. It’s a small detail, but it does highlight the lack of forethought that seems to have gone into the novel. I just didn’t think the plot was sophisticated enough. It was too easily resolved and the character growth too easily realized. It had the potential for a good story, but sadly, I just don’t think this author is there yet. 

So 2.5 stars from me – not a favourite, nor would I recommend.

Black Girls Must Be Magic

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Author: Jayne Allen
Genres: Fiction
Pub. Date: Feb. 2022 (read Feb. 2022)
Series: Black Girls Must Be Exhausted #2

This is going to be a hard review to write. I was pleasantly surprised by Black Girls Must Die Exhausted last year and was really excited to rejoin Tabitha Walker for another book. I was immediately surprised by the length of this one though. BGMDE is considerably longer than BGMBM and I was concerned that some of the pacing issues from the first book would bleed into this one. Because this is a sequel, I really can’t talk about it without getting into spoilers, so I recommend checking out my review for BGMDE instead of this one if you haven’t already read it. Spoilers Below!
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The main thing I didn’t like about BGMDE was that it ended too quickly. The author ties up a lot of plot points very quickly that I thought would have made a great starter for BGMBM. But instead, Allen jumps ahead in this book in a way that I thought was pretty jarring. What I liked about Black Girls Must Die Exhausted is that it dealt with complex themes with no easy answers. Tabby has a limited period of time in which to have children, but because she doesn’t have a partner who is ready to have kids, she basically has to freeze her eggs at the expense of the down payment for her future home.

When we pick up with Black Girls Must be Magic, Tabby has decided that instead of freezing her eggs, she’s going to immediately implant them and do the whole single mother thing. It’s not stated directly, but she now has a house, so I guess we’re supposed to assume that she was able to save her down payment after all. I’m not American, so maybe her healthcare did cover an implant (and it’s stated that she had an embryo implanted, not insemination), but from what I understand, in vitro is just as expensive as freezing your eggs and housing in LA isn’t exactly cheap, so this whole premise didn’t make any sense to me and was potentially lacking in research, but I don’t honestly know enough about it, so I just had to suspend my disbelief and move on.

But what I didn’t like was that the author cut the reader out of this decision making process. The book is not long (only 270 pages), so why not start with this dilemma? Why have one of the biggest decisions Tabby has to make take place off-screen? It didn’t really make sense to me and it made the book feel a little bit less like a sequel. I didn’t think it was great for Tabby’s characterization as it removes one of the key conflicts from the narrative. It was an odd choice from a character and plot perspective.

Which is really my key complaint with this book. I thought the first one offered so much of both: relatable character and plot, it left me wondering what the author was really trying to accomplish with this book. Infertility is a challenging and heartbreaking problem for many people and I didn’t really like that we just brushed over its complexity. But I do think that a single woman choosing to become a single mother is a great plot to explore, so I was still excited to get into that, only to have that plotline go off the rails with that first twist early in the novel. Surprise! It’s actually Marc’s baby.

This changes the entire dynamic of the story and the key points I thought the author was trying to make about choosing motherhood on your own terms. I’d rather see Tabby trying to navigate the world of dating and motherhood as a single parent, with all the judgements and criticisms that comes along with that, than explore the more exhausted trope of surprise pregnancy and re-hash a romance that failed in the first book. It didn’t bother me that Marc was unlikeable, I actually thought that made him more real, I just feel like we’d already done this relationship drama once already and I wasn’t interested in reading it a second time.

So why is this a hard review to write when I’m pretty much just ragging on the whole book? Mostly it’s because I love how much time Allen dedicated to talking about Black hair. I know Allen didn’t write this book for me, but I want to try and do my best to understand the history and complexity that comes with black women’s hair and I thought that was such an important part of this story. I think for white people it’s easy to think of hair as a side story, like, “oh great, Allen is addressing the workplace and cultural double standard of hair”. But that’s the problem – it’s not a side story. Hair is an important piece of culture and identity and it is important for it to be given the gravitas it deserves. The thing that I think makes this series great is that being Black is not the main point of the story, but rather it’s a story with Black characters and everything that comes along with what that means. Last month was Black History Month and I saw a lot of promo about anti-racist, non-fiction, and historical reads – I think these are important – but I also think we need to be reading more authors like Jayne Allen, Candace Carty-Williams, and Brit Bennet, who are writing Black stories, not necessarily Black history. 

So while I don’t think that this was a great book in terms of structure, pacing, and characterization; it still matters because Allen is addressing something that we don’t see all that often in popular fiction. Maybe I didn’t love the love interest or some of the plot choices, but it’s important because it is a book about a successful Black woman, and that is a story I do want to read.

Finlay Donovan Knocks ‘Em Dead

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐.5
Author: Elle Cosimano
Genres: Mystery
Pub. Date: Feb. 2022 (read Feb. 2022 on Audible)
Series: Finlay Donovan is Killing It #2

Finlay Donovan Is Killing It was an impulse purchase for me last year and I ended up really loving it, so this was one of my most anticipated reads for 2022. I can’t help but always compare this book to a train wreck because the plot goes off the rails in the most out of control way and I just can’t look away from it!

Finlay Donovan is not high brow literature in any sense, but it’s one of the most fun mystery thrillers I’ve ever read. It reminds me a lot of How to Get Away with Murder in that the plot keeps escalating so quickly that it’s hard to imagine how your characters got here, but unlike HTGAWM, Finlay Donovan never takes itself too seriously. Cosimano creates the most hilarious characters and has a heavy dose of comic relief, so even though the plot is super compelling, it’s never dark or bleak. 

Finlay Donovan Knocks ‘Em Dead isn’t quite as strong as the first book, but I still think it’s a romping good time. It starts off a little bit slower and I got frustrated by Finlay and Vero keeping secrets from one another, but the plot picks up quickly and they get back to the same kind of shenanigans as the first book. If you get annoyed by characters who miscommunicate and make stupid decisions, then this book is probably not for you, but if you’re here for a super fast-paced good time then I think you will like this sequel.

I don’t want to say too much about it because it’s definitely one of those books you should read blind, but I just wanted to say that, Damn, I was into Nick in this book. I couldn’t really remember him from the first book, but he made a nice addition to this storyline. The only thing I thought could be improved was that the author/book writing plot aspect was too deja-vu from the last book. We get a new mystery, but some of the plot still felt recycled from the first book. 

The ending makes it pretty clear that we’ll be back for a 3rd book and I will 100% be continuing with this series. Highly recommend the audiobook, the narrator is excellent!

Running Wild

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: K.A. Tucker
Genres: Fiction
Pub. Date: Jan. 2022 (read Feb. 2022)
Series: Wild #3

I’m honestly quite shocked to say that I loved Running Wild. I feel like the tagline of this book should be “don’t write it off, give it a try”, because even the author felt like she had to convince her readers that they should care and want to read about Marie. That was never the problem for me though. It never really bothered me that Marie was into Jonah, though I know some people were really offended by it. Her and Jonah were good friends and who isn’t disappointed when the friend they were hoping to be ‘end game’ with doesn’t pan out. As Marie uses to defend her actions, I always thought she was “only human”. 

So I wasn’t nervous to read this book out of a fear of not liking Marie, more I was worried that it wouldn’t live up to how much I love the books that came before. I’ve read a few of Tucker’s other books outside this series and I didn’t like any of them. It wasn’t even so much that I didn’t care for them, I actively didn’t like them and it made me question how she can get some of her books so wrong and continue to get this series so right. I have loved everything she has done with this series, it’s honestly like she can’t go wrong. In her bio, Tucker describes herself as writing “captivating stories with an edge”, and I think what I like about these books is that they are NOT that. What makes them captivating to me is the very fact that they do not have an edge at all. In some ways they are even mundane, but it’s that they’re so honest and genuine in their telling and that the mundane is actually incredibly relatable. 

Running Wild is the third book (fourth if you count the novella) in the Simple Wild series. The first two books focus on the love story of Calla and Jonah, which Tucker concludes in the novella. Running Wild is the first book about Jonah’s friend Marie, a side character in the early books. She was in love with Jonah before Calla and is sidelined in the original books. She is heartbroken that she isn’t the one for Jonah, but genuinely happy to see him so happy and tries very hard to set aside her feelings for him. But even though she’s been able to move on from Jonah, she is now 38 years old and mostly sad and afraid that she’s going to miss out on her own great love story. She desperately wants to get married and have children, but she doesn’t want to settle. She wants her own fireworks and passion, but she can’t ignore that her biological clock is still ticking.

Enter Tyler, a competitive musher who has just moved to Alaska to race in the 1000 mile Iditarod dog sled race. Marie and Tyler get off on the wrong foot after a misunderstanding, but quickly realize they were both wrong and begin to question their feelings for one another. The problem is, Tyler is still pining over someone else and is only interested in being friends, while Marie is not willing to go down that road again after Jonah. 

I don’t think I can get into talking about this book without getting into spoilers, but I can assure you it is absolutely worth your time to read. Like the Simple Wild and Wild at Heart, I don’t believe that Running Wild is a romance book at its core. It’s really a book about finding yourself, but also knowing yourself, which I think is just as powerful. At 38, Marie has already discovered a lot about who she is and this book is more about her knowing herself and knowing what she wants. She still questions herself, but it’s also about the maturity to know when to protect your heart and when to chase after something you want. 

So if you don’t want spoilers, I suggest you go read my review of The Simple Wild instead and pick up a copy of this series as fast as possible! Okay, let’s get into it. Spoilers ahead
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First off, this book is definitely a slow burn. It didn’t surprise me that much, but I was surprised how little Tyler seemed to feature in it. We meet him quickly and get to know him at the Iditarod competition, and then he somewhat vanishes from the narrative when he offers Marie friendship and she declines him. Instead, we spend a lot of time with Marie’s family and I can tell you, I adored this just as much!

I could maybe see some readers finding this to be a bit boring, but it’s where my comment about the mundane and relatability come into play. Marie’s family dynamic seemed at times so loving and at times so frustrating – exactly like a real family. I loved her parents for their unconditional sacrifices for their children and I was frustrated by her sisters’ shortsightedness and frankly, selfishness. They had all the love and tension of any family – people who love you more than anyone else in the world, but also drive you crazy. We want to support our sisters, but sometimes it also feels like we need to compete with them and complicated relationships can grow between parents and each of their children. Marie’s future is put in an uncomfortable position by her family when they want to sell her business and while you felt bad for her, you could also totally empathize with why her family might ask that of her. 

No one wants to give up their home and business, but it’s also not up to our parents to provide for us forever and despite wanting to give the best to their children, it’s also reasonable to want to cash in on some of your own happiness when you retire. This is something I feel like I haven’t seen portrayed in many books, at least not in the sensitive way that it is in this book. I feel like these types of scenarios in other stories are often motivated by a feeling of resentment of a bad relationship that a character had with their parents. Marie’s predicament isn’t motivated by any of these things, but rather by honest love and respect that this family has for one another and the desire of both Marie and her parents for the other to be happy and taken care of. I thought it was really beautiful and even though it’s not quite resolved, I liked that there was really no easy fix. That’s what made her family so relatable. There’s not always an easy answer or a happily ever after, eventually we often end up having to find a compromise that works for both parties. 

Now let’s talk about Tyler because this story also really worked for me. When I first read the synopsis and read that Tyler wanted to just be friends, I wasn’t really interested in going down that road again. I figured he had an ex that he was trying to get over and I wasn’t really interested in reading a story about someone who comes around to love Marie (I wanted them to just love her). But Tyler’s hang up is that his wife died. In some ways this is even harder because as Marie says, how is she supposed to compete with a ghost? It’s not possible. But in this story, it just kind of worked. Tyler genuinely likes Marie for who she is – there’s never really any discussion about him comparing her to Mila or vice versa. He loved his wife and now unfortunately she is gone, and now he also loves Marie. It’s both complicated and uncomplicated. I felt bad for both him and Marie having to navigate that kind of heartbreak, but also that it’s something that could be worked through with time and respect. 

The only thing that irked me a bit was when he asked her on a date only to basically dump her again the next day after they had sex (unprotected sex – which was also irksome – let’s not pretend people are just willing to knock people up like it’s nothing). I understood that it was hard for him being with someone else and feeling like he was betraying the memory of his family, but at the same time, I wish he’d had the maturity to just ask to take it slow, rather than to cut it off altogether. Especially when he then does another 180 as soon as she starts dating someone else. I didn’t trust that he wouldn’t just keep dicking her around again while he tried to work out his demons. He needed to be in therapy to work on himself before he would be properly ready to be there for Marie. Also, I didn’t love when they had sex in the truck. I was too much, too fast after such a slow burn. I wish they just kissed – but whatever, I guess we’re all adults here and it sounded like it had probably been a few years since either of them had let off some steam.

My only other minor complaint is that I think the plot moved a little too quickly at the end after such a slow pace throughout. I would have liked to take a bit more time building up the relationship before parting ways with these lovely characters. In some ways I hope Tucker writes another book about Marie and Tyler, and in some ways I don’t think we need it. But I didn’t think we needed Wild at Heart either and I ended up loving it. Tucker seems to excel in this setting and I think there’s a lot more we could glean from Marie and Tyler, so it might be worth the investment.

In conclusion, the simplicity of The Simple Wild series is what makes it so special for me. Tucker isn’t afraid to tackle complex human emotions, but she does it in the most relatable settings. I think it demonstrates that we don’t need wild storylines to trigger those complex emotions because it’s complex people that trigger wild emotions in our own normal, mundane, and everyday lives. Fill your life with those kinds of people.