Tag: romance

Happy Place

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Emily Henry
Genres: Romance, Fiction
Pub. Date: April 2023

At this point, I feel like Emily Henry needs no introduction. She’s become one of the most popular contemporary romance writers and I continue to be a fan of her storytelling style. First and foremost, I find her romances to be incredibly believable, and I love that even though romance is central to the plot, there’s always a lot of other issues going on in her stories. She has captured some pretty heavy themes in her books and despite the name, I think Happy Place is her saddest book to date.

Harriet and Wyn have been separated for 6 months, but they haven’t worked up the courage to tell their friends yet. When they find out that their friend Sabrina is selling her family cottage in Maine, the 6 friends meet up at the cottage for one last hurrah at Harriet’s ‘happy place’. The problem is, Harriet and Wyn don’t want to bring down the party with their break-up, so they pretend to still be together until the end of the trip.

I’m sure you can guess how this goes. It’s both as predictable as you expect, while also being surprisingly unpredictable and heartbreaking. Parts of this book really worked for me, while other parts didn’t. I don’t mind a good fake dating scenario, but I’m not a fan of the miscommunication trope, which this book definitely had. 

Harriet and Wyn’s love story worked for me. I loved the flashbacks and getting to know how they fell in love. It was really soft and believable and the two characters had undeniable chemistry. I also liked the inclusion of so many secondary characters. The storyline about finding a group of people you connect with and then having to grow up and go in different life directions is very relatable and I think it brought more depth to the story. 

Emily Henry is good at creating really complex dynamics between her characters in a very sad kind of way. Sometimes no matter how much we love another person, there are just pieces of our lives that will never be compatible. It’s important to give and take, but not at the expense of the core of who we are. Henry weaves these intricacies into her characters in a way that you legitimately wonder if they will be able to reconcile and make it work in the end. Harriet and Wyn never had a problem of loving each other, but they struggle with being the person that the other needs. They are both people pleasers to the extent that they sabotage their own happiness. 

It’s a compelling story and I sped through it, but having some time to reflect, there were definitely some aspects about it that I didn’t like. Mostly it was to do with the rest of the friend group. I thought the concept for the book was great, but in practice, I didn’t think any of the secondary characters were very well developed. I never really got a sense of who any of the friends were, except for Sabrina at the end. Nobody was very fleshed out and because of this, it was hard to empathize with any of them. 

Honestly, I thought Sabrina was terrible. Without giving anything away, I thought she made some really questionable choices and while I understood that in theory, her decisions were made from a place of love, it didn’t excuse her for playing God with her friends’ emotions and generally being so manipulative. Had her character been a little better developed, I might have understood her better, but all 4 of the friends felt like shells of people to me. 

Second, as much as I love Harriet and Wyn, I thought the ending was a bit frustrating. Just talk to each other and say what you really mean instead of constantly making assumptions about the others motivations and feelings. At the end of the day, these two still had a lot to learn about each other and it was just kind of sad that despite being together so long and loving each other so much, they had no real understanding of each other’s psyche or emotional state. 

Finally, this book was just too sad. There’s a time and a place for really sad and emotional books, but a contemporary romance with a hot pink cover with happy cartoon beach goers is not it. You should absolutely have highs and lows in your narrative, but I really think you need a certain level of balance so that the entire book doesn’t read as sad and nostalgic. Harriet and Wyn had a lot of happy moments in the earlier days of their relationship, but the present day narrative was just so sad that it overwhelmed the rest of the book. If you’re going to bring your reader low, you have to have a recovery plan. This book was depressing from start to finish and as much as I loved the characters, it left me feeling sad and overwhelmed rather than hopeful. 

I still really liked it. If you’re an EH fan, definitely pick this one up, but it’s not the kind of romance I would be in a rush to re-read. Book Lovers remains my favourite to date, but I will 100% be reading Emily’s next book, Funny Story.

Every Summer After

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Author: Carley Fortune
Genres: Fiction, Romance
Pub. Date: May 2022

I was really feeling in the mood for a romance and oh my goodness, I devoured this one. Every Summer After has been making the circuit on social media this year and I was particularly excited about it being a Canadian author and novel. I love Canadian lit, but a lot of it is really heavy and often weird. I found this to be one of the most accessible Canadian contemporaries and I loved the setting in Toronto and rural Ontario. It is surprising how much more realistic and relatable a book can seem just from a familiar setting (even though I’ve never even lived in Ontario).

Every Summer After is a second chance, friends to lovers romance between Persephone (Percy) and Sam, beginning when they meet at age 13. Percy’s parents purchase a lakeside cottage in the sleepy town of Barry’s Bay and she quickly becomes fast friends with her next door neighbour Sam, spending every summer with him until they start university. Because it’s a second chance romance, it’s a dual timeline – split between when Percy and Sam first meet, and their reunion a decade later for Sam’s mom’s funeral. I find dual timeline stories can be very hit or miss, but I thought this one was actually really well done. Both timelines were compelling and I found myself equally invested in both (a rare occurrence). 

Second chance romance isn’t one of my favourite tropes. I always find it a bit unbelievable and sad that 2 people could still be madly in love after 10 years without being able to resolve their differences. I don’t buy into the idea that there’s only one person for someone and while I do believe in soulmates, I think they are made through the shared experience of growing and loving together rather than by fate. Knowing the reason why Sam and Percy’s relationship ends the first time around, I could buy into the premise for this second chance romance. I would definitely need time and space from the other person if this happened in my relationship, though I also think I would never have been able to reconcile.

However, as a friends to lovers romance, I adored this story! Booktok is obsessed with enemies to lovers, and they can be fun, but friends to lovers will always take the number one spot in my heart! Friends to lovers stories are so much more believable to me, both because I value emotional connection with people, and I think it’s so easy to fall in love with someone you already like and who already takes up valuable real estate in your life. 

Percy and Sam’s love story was so beautiful and believable to me. It had a very natural progression, with both of them connecting on so many levels before starting a physical relationship. I found Sam to be somewhat frustrating, though I understood his trepidation in getting too serious, too fast. Likewise, I could understand why Percy was upset with him, though I couldn’t excuse the big ugly thing that happens.

But it’s so easy to fall in love at 13 years old and it does become an all-consuming thing to teenagers. Percy and Sam were both so young and trying to make incredibly grown up decisions that they frankly didn’t have the maturity for, so I could forgive both of them for their mistakes. I still fell in love with them – they are good people, even though they are flawed and make errors in judgement, just like anyone else.

I do want to say that this book had too much cheating and almost-cheating for me to really be able to overlook it. The author tries to explain away some of the cheating (the characters hadn’t made a formal commitment; they just broke up; etc) so I guess it really depends on your own personal definition and code when it comes to cheating. I felt that the way the characters bent the rules in some cases to still be hurtful and unfair and I want to acknowledge that you can emotionally cheat on your partner, which for some people is more hurtful than a classic affair. I personally have zero tolerance for cheating, so it was hard for me to overlook it.

So overall I’m a bit uncomfortable with giving this 4 stars, but I can’t deny I was transfixed by the story. All of these characters felt intensely real to me. I wouldn’t call it a fluffy romance novel because there is a lot of depth here. I haven’t read a lot of other second chance romance novels, but the ones I have read didn’t feature characters with the same kind of history as Sam and Percy, which is why I didn’t really like them. Sam and Percy definitely had a lot of history and I’m glad the author dedicates the time to taking us through that history. The reason for their estrangement is very believable and because they were so young at the time and such good friends before that, I could believe the draw between the two of them to want to reconcile, even 10 years later.

So while I don’t condone everything in this book, I can’t deny I still really liked it! Carley Fortune has another book coming out this year, which I will probably read, but from the synopsis, it’s sounds very similar to this one. It’s another second chance romance, but without the history between the characters that Sam and Percy have, so I’m a bit on the fence about it. Either way, I’m glad I read this one! I might be a teensy bit in love with Sam Florek now…

The Happy Ever After Playlist

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Author: Abby Jimenez
Genres: Fiction, Romance
Pub. Date: Apr. 2020 (read Sep. 2022)

I picked up this book while on holiday from a thrift store in a backwater town in BC because I had only brought 1 book with me and had finished it too soon. It had limited selection, but this book featured a dog and sounded cute, so it could have been a lot worse!

It actually started off really promising. Our protagonist, Sloan, rescues a runaway dog and then takes care of him when she can’t get a hold of his owner, Jason, for 2 weeks. Jason is a semi-famous musician who was out in the Australian wilderness backpacking and didn’t know that his dogsitter had lost his dog until he returned to civilization. Sloan agrees to watch the dog until he returns to America and they start having cute exchanges via text and phone. Sloan is getting over the death of her fiancé 2 years previously and this is the first time she’s been attracted to a man since. 

Their phone calls and text banter were really cute and I loved that the book centered around a dog. It had a good amount of depth and I was enjoying it. Unfortunately, I thought the author blew through the initial attraction way too quickly and the couple immediately starts dating. Sloan faces some initial challenges with the relationship as she tries to move on with her previous relationship, but I thought Sloan and Jason’s relationship got too intense too fast and the pacing didn’t work. I felt like I was at the climax of the novel at just the halfway mark, which made me question what the author was going to focus on for the second half without any romantic tension.

This is where she lost me. The novel takes a turn and focuses more on the struggles of being in a relationship with a rock star who’s always on the road. I felt like the “Sloan-as-a-widow” and the “couple-on-tour” plots were 2 very different storylines that just didn’t mesh with one another. Sloan was on a healing journey and then all of a sudden she’s chasing Jason all over the country? I felt they should be two different books with two different sets of characters.

There were other aspects I didn’t like – Jason is a bit of a womanizer – he’s very confident in himself, which should be a turn-on, but he read more as cocky to me and I wasn’t really into it. Both parties fell too hard, too quickly, and it removed some of the believability for me.

The other aspect I didn’t like was Lola’s character as the crazy-ex girlfriend. It’s bad enough when men call women crazy and portray them as such, but it’s so much worse when women do it to each other. So I was initially very turned off by this side plot, but I ended up being impressed with how the author handled in the end. Lola turns out to be pretty misunderstood and I appreciated when the characters were able to reconcile with each other and understand how Lola had been manipulated and abused by her record label. 

So overall it was a bit of an odd novel. I liked parts of it and disliked other parts, but I think it is a fairly standard 3 star read at the end of the day and considering I picked it up in a thrift store, it exceeded my expectations. I wouldn’t recommend, but also, don’t regret reading. 

Love on the Brain

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Rating: ⭐⭐.5
Author: Ali Hazelwood
Genres: Fiction, Romance
Pub. Date: Aug. 2022 (read Sep. 2022)

Oh dear, I haven’t written a book review since June… I usually don’t read a lot in the summer, although I did read more than I anticipated this year, so it’s time to get caught up!

Love on the Brain was one of my most anticipated new releases for 2022. The Love Hypothesis was wildly popular last year and I really loved it – in retrospect I can recognize that it has some flaws, but it opened me up to the whole world of romance reading, so I have to give it some credit. Love on the Brain is the second of Ali Hazelwood’s STEM novels, though she did write 3 novellas in between that I haven’t read. 

Love on the Brain features Bee and Levi, a brainy neuroscientist and engineer who end up working on an astronaut helmet together for NASA. They’re both leaders in their fields, but the catch is they used to be in grad school together, and Levi had a very clear dislike of Bee, so she’s not sure how they are going to work together.

From there it follows the trajectory you would expect of any romance novel. Bee has a very strong character voice and I won’t lie that I devoured this book in 3 days while on holiday. I love the setting of Hazelwood’s books and that they focus on women in STEM and the various injustices they face. Unfortunately, Love on the Brain just didn’t have the same charm as The Love Hypothesis and even though it’s very readable, I couldn’t overlook its shortcomings. 

Let’s start with what I liked. I did mostly like Bee as the main character. She’s funny and she has a strong personality. She’s not afraid to go for it and she does call people out on their shit instead of just suffering in silence. She was a victim in her previous relationship, but she didn’t let that define her. She did have a tendency to go off on tangents though and I did feel she was a little manic pixie dream girl in that she’s “not like other girls”. Otherwise, I liked her relationships with her sister and her assistant – I can’t remember her name, but omg, the assistant was hilarious! She was pretty much the highlight of the book for me.

Unfortunately I didn’t like a whole lot else after that. My biggest gripe is that Hazelwood does absolutely nothing new with this book. I think that Olive and Bee are quite different characters, but Levi and Adam are carbon copies of one another and it’s still impossible to ignore that this is just Adam Driver fan fiction. I’m over the whole brooding, tall man trope and the romance genre’s obsession with large men and tiny women. It’s like Hazelwood tried to shake up the characters by having Adam be mean to everyone and only nice to Olive, whereas Levi was supposedly nice to everyone and only mean to Bee, but they still read like the same person to me and it just made me not like Levi. At least I understood Olive’s attraction to Adam (he was nice), but Levi was a jerk to Bee. Personally, I would never have forgiven his dress code comment. Levi read like a mess, like he can’t act like a normal human being around the woman he likes?

Speaking of understanding the attraction – I’d love to know what either of these characters saw in one another? Seriously though? Levi has been supposedly in love with Bee since he met her and has been harbouring the same pathetic crush for 6 years? That ain’t romantic! Get a life man! The whole “it was always you” trope drives me nuts because people have way more depth than that. Who wants a lover that’s obsessed with them? Isn’t it way more romantic to fall in love with someone with other interests and a nuanced personality? Hazelwood tells us these two characters love each other, but I didn’t understand why. There’s no context as to why Levi likes Bee or vice versa. Sure, I could get Bee’s sexual fantasies about Levi, but what does he ever do that makes her look deeper? We are never shown what makes these two love each other.

Which brings me to my next gripe – the miscommunication trope. I don’t like the miscommunication trope on a good day, but this book was the miscommunication trope on steroids. God, the level of misunderstanding between the two characters was unbearable. Can we please just all stop being idiots? Why do these super smart scientists have the emotional intelligence of a potato? They were so juvenille, I couldn’t handle it.

Finally, let’s talk about the ending, because that really went off the rails. Suddenly we go from a romance novel to an action mystery? Which gets resolved in the span of a chapter? Have you lost your place in the world Hazelwood? The drama at the end felt so out of place and crammed into the final pages that my jaw was on the floor. It didn’t belong. I feel like Hazelwood wanted some kind of physical confrontation because all of her characters are based on Star Wars, which is action, but like, girl you’re gonna have to write a dark romance or a fantasy if you want to go there. The ending didn’t work here when the rest of the novel was extremely bubbly. Also, the fact that both characters are obsessed with Star Wars when the reader knows this book is basically Kylo Ren fanfic is too meta for me. 

Anyways, I should probably clue up this rant, but plotwise, I do want to say that what I found the most disappointing is that in addition to the characters having no depth, the plot had none either. I loved what TLH did with the sexual harassment and reporting storyline. I feel like Hazelwood had a lot of balls in the air about sexism in academia and the workplace, but I felt like they were all ideas and none of them were developed. The story didn’t have any real meaningful social commentary. Sure, she draws awareness to ideas like men stealing women’s ideas, not listening to them, or only acknowledging women’s legitimacy when it’s pointed out by another man, but as a woman in STEM, these are really basic concepts and she doesn’t do anything with them. The most focus was on admissions standards, which was great, but it still felt surface level. There was no real tension in the storyline and everything with Marie Curie being exposed was too easily resolved. I didn’t feel the anguish or despair. The situations just felt contrived. 

So yeah, I didn’t like it. Initially I rated it 3 stars because I still flew through it, it is an easy read, but after reflecting on all its flaws, I think I’m going to have to bump it down to a 2. I haven’t read her novellas, but I’ve seen other reviews saying it’s more of the same, so I think I’m probably going to have to give them a pass. I will probably still read her next book, but I hope she branches out a bit and does something new, because this was such a disappointment.

The Hating Game

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Author: Sally Thorne
Genres: Fiction, Romance
Pub. Date: Aug. 2016 (read May 2022)

This is another book that it’s been a while since I read it, but I did put together a summary of my thoughts right after which is giving me a refresher. After reading The Spanish Love Deception earlier in the year, I knew I would eventually get to The Hating Game, which seems to be the most well known book with the enemies-to-lovers/fake-dating tropes. 

I was anticipating this would be better than TSLD, and in some ways it was, but to be honest, I thought it was still a lot of the same and had some tropes that I didn’t like. The Hating Game is about two publishing companies that merged and the relationship between the two executive assistants to the CEO’s. The CEO’s do not have an amicable relationship and Lucy and Josh have been rivals since they started working together. Now they’re up for the same promotion, which further escalates their competitive nature.

I don’t want to continually compare it to TSLD, because The Hating Game was written first, so I will say that a lot of TSLD seemed like a knock-off, but that I think the “enemies” part of enemies-to-lovers was better done in The Hating Game. I understood why these 2 characters didn’t get along and I believed it. It wasn’t believable in TSLD, which just made the main character look kind of dumb. But I’ll end the comparisons there and focus on The Hating Game.

To be honest, I thought this was a mess at the beginning. I was expecting to like it and I think the story did improve later in the book, but initially I really struggled to buy into anything the author was selling. The first third of the book felt extremely disorganized and I found some scenes jarring because they felt so forced. I felt like the author had all these romantic fantasies that she wanted to write and decided to include them whether they worked with the narrative or not. For example, I found the elevator scene a bit jarring – I know it’s now a pretty iconic scene from the book, but it felt very sudden and forced to me when I first read it. 

But the most notable scene for me was the corporate paintball retreat. I didn’t think it fit with the rest of the book. It wasn’t believable to me that a corporate company would sanction paintball for a team building event and the forced proximity with Lucy and Josh was just TOO forced. The whole “big man defending the tiny woman” trope is tired and felt out of place for 2 characters that supposedly didn’t like each other. I also found the whole scene where Josh takes care of Lucy when she’s sick extremely uncomfortable and unbelievable for two co-workers. A normal reaction would be “please let me call your friend or drop you at the hospital”, not “I’ll stay at your house for 2 days and get my doctor brother to make a house call”. They have worked together as rivals for several years at this point, but now they’re suddenly all over each other, all the time. I know that’s kind of the point of the book, but none of it felt natural or organic to me. 

While we’re on the topic, I’d also like to say that I am SO tired of the big man-tiny woman trope. It’s not even that I mind that all the male protagonists are tall, but authors seem to be obsessed with beating us over the head about just HOW tall they are. TSLD and The Love Hypothesis were pretty bad for it, but The Hating Game was really the most aggressive with the trope. Josh is 6 foot 5 while Lucy is 5 foot nothing – that is a huge difference! It just made Lucy seem like a child and I feel like it would honestly be more frightening than sexy. Plus, men don’t need to be giants to be attractive. 

So what did I like about the book? Because I seem to mostly be railing against it. Once I got over the chaotic start and the characters chilled out a bit, I actually got pretty into it. I do think that Lucy and Josh had great chemistry and Thorne does a great job at building up the sexual tension. Lucy and Josh are both pretty nuanced characters with strengths and flaws. I liked the exploration of Lucy working to gain more respect at work and her passion for her field. As well as I liked the exploration of Josh’s insecurities and his relationship with his father. He wants more from his relationships and I liked that he had this depth. There was a good balance of sexual tension without waiting until the very last minute for the characters to be together (drove me nuts in TSLD).

The last thing I will say is that there were some questionable behaviours throughout the book. Both characters are certified stalkers. The “I painted my room the colour of your eyes” was a hard pass for me and Josh has some questionable possessive behaviour that I didn’t like. Sadly these ideas seem to be a bit normalized in romance novels, but as far as the genre goes this was a pretty solid 3 star read for me. I did watch the movie and I liked parts of it, but would still give the edge to the book.