REVIEW: Friends Don't Fall in Love by Erin Hahn

 

OUR REVIEW:

Friends Don't Fall in Love is the next book in a universe of interconnected characters. In this novel we get the story of Lorelai (a friend of Shelby's in Built to Last) and Huck. Huck, our lovable, geeky, sweet, smart, record producer has been in love with Lorelai since he was in a band with her ex-fiancé. And Lorelai? Well Lorelai has been in denial of her feelings about Huck since she's been in Michigan licking her wounds after being 'canceled' for a benign protest when she was a rising country music star. They both end up in Nashville, where they are working on her album, and it's during this time that they fall even further for each other. Of course they muck it up--lots of doubts, unspoken feelings, and poor communication, even though communication is what they're known for. And in the midst of all of this there are missteps with her comeback, followed by the best steps for her comeback; thank goodness for good friends in high places. Also luckily for them, they have a lot of outside help that nudges them into the right direction when it comes to *them*, making for a sweet and happy ending.

Friends Don't Fall in Love is fun, sexy, and sweet; it reminded me of a Taylor Swift song--lots of longing and love that leaves you feeling fully satisfied when it ends. 

BUY IT: https://amzn.to/3KqHVsn

Lorelai Jones had it all: a thriving country music career and a superstar fiancé. Then she played one teenie tiny protest song at a concert and ruined her entire future, including her impending celebrity marriage. But five years later, she refuses to be done with her dreams and calls up the one person who stuck by her, her dear friend and her former fiancé’s co-writer and bandmate, Craig.

Craig Boseman’s held a torch for Lorelai for years, but even he knows the backup bass player never gets the girl. Things are different now, though. Craig owns his own indie record label and his songwriting career is taking off. If he can confront his past and embrace his gifts, he might just be able to help Lorelai earn the comeback she deserves—and maybe win her heart in the process.

But when the two reunite to rebuild her career and finally scratch that itch that’s been building between them for years, Lorelai realizes a lot about what friends don’t do. For one, friends don’t have scratch-that-itch sex. They also don’t almost-kiss on street corners, publish secret erotic poetry about each other, have counter-top sex, write songs for each other, have no-strings motorcycle sex, or go on dates. And they sure as heck don't fall in love... right?

Erin Hahn’s Friends Don’t Fall in Love is about long-time friends, taking chances, and finding out that, sometimes, your perfect person was right there in your corner all along.

REVIEW: Better Hate Than Never by Chloe Liese

 

OUR REVIEW:

Better Hate Than Never is a modern take on The Taming of the Shrew featuring Katerina and Christopher, two people who seemingly know each other better than most and have seemed to hate each other for most (?) or all (?) of their adulthood. 

Katerina is a traveling photographer who has a passion for causes and uses her passion and talent to tell those stories. Christopher is a venture capitalist whose firm invests in progressive causes. He shares a yard with her parents, parents who took him in after his died and he needed the love and guidance of someone who knew them better than his grandmother. Essentially, in his most formative years, Katerina's family was like his. They were close. Knew everything about each other. That knowledge fueled an antagonist relationship between Katerina and Christopher. All she wanted was his attention and respect and all he wanted was her love and to protect her and keep her close. Despite what they wanted, what they had was a relationship where she needled him about being a money sucking capitalist and he needled her about running away and never being home. Round and round they would go until her dad intervened and asked Christopher to try to stop. 

As anyone in a mutually antagonistic relationship knows, when one of the parties starts being nice, you get really suspicious really fast. So when Christopher tries to care for her, she's prickly and resistant until she sees his sincerity. Once she believes them, their love story is sweet and tender and respectful.

If you're familiar with the play that this novel is based on, you can definitely recognize many of the original features-lots of witty banter, lots of barbs, and a truly sweet ending. As a fan of the Shakespearean version, I can definitely recommend this one.

BUY IT: https://amzn.to/3Q2Ur4s

SYNOPSIS:

Childhood enemies discover the fine line between love and loathing in this heartfelt reimagining of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.

Katerina Wilmot and Christopher Petruchio shared backyards as kids, but as adults they won’t even share the same hemisphere. That is, until Kate makes a rare visit home, and their fiery animosity rekindles into a raging inferno.

Despite their friends’ and families' pleas for peace, Christopher is unconvinced Kate would willingly douse the flames of their enmity. But when a drunken Kate confesses she’s only been hostile because she thought he hated her, Christopher vows to make peace with Kate once and for all. Tempting as it is to be swept away by her nemesis-turned-gentleman, Kate isn’t sure she can trust his charming good-guy act.

When Christopher’s persistence and Kate’s curiosity lead to an impassioned kiss, they realize “peace” is the last thing that will ever be possible between them. As desire gives way to deeper feelings, Kate and Christopher must decide if it’s truly better to hate than to never risk their hearts—or if they already gave them away long ago.

REVIEW: A Winter in New York by Josie Silver

OUR REVIEW:

This is the second Josie Silver novel I've read and it packed an emotional punch. The story  really is of Iris, a woman with no family to speak of, absolutely alone in the world, finding a family and love and security. She leaves a horrible situation in London and begins to find her footing in New York, only to be thrown for a loop when she discovers an important piece of her family history. A place that was meaningful to her mother, the person she's currently grieving. When she visits this place, a gelateria, she discovers a family and history that are enmeshed with her own, the only catch is that the one person who knows how she's connected is hospitalized and her desire to help the family will require that she keep secrets. Keeping secrets in and of itself isn't problematic, until you learn more about the Belotti family (owners of the gelateria) and how they view secrets and lies and honor and trust. So, Iris keeps the secrets, does her best to help and not harm, and ends up falling madly in love with Gio, the person running the shop. As the story progresses, her guilt and shame become more and more of a burden, and you can't help but just want her to spill all of the secrets and just come clean. As the ending nears, the angst and helplessness just kept increasing until you just knew something had to happen. It did. It was super sad, and then it wasn't, and then some unexpected things happened, and yes-the happily ever after happened too. 

Something about Iris being an adult orphan just punched me in the gut. All she wanted was her mom back and in lieu of that, a family to belong with and to. She wanted love and warmth and connection and she found it and the idea that it could go away just got to me. The way Josie Silver described the Belotti family interactions and dinners were so vivid and reminded me so much of my family--I really connected to it all. I also really appreciated how she described various NYC scenes; they felt iconic and picturesque and I wanted to live in those scenes. 

So here I am in the blazing hot heat of Louisiana in July, wishing for a Winter in New York. 

PS-I know it's an impossible dream, but I really would love more of the Belotti family. I feel like there are many more stories to be had. 

BUY IT: https://amzn.to/3pUiJDj

SYNOPSIS:

A young chef stumbles on a secret family recipe that might lead her to the love—and life—she’s been looking for in this stunning novel.

When Iris decides to move to New York to restart her life, she realizes she underestimated how big the Big Apple really is—all the nostalgic movies set in New York she’d watched with her mom while eating their special secret-recipe gelato didn’t quite do it justice. 

But Bobby, Iris’s best friend, isn’t about to let her hide away. He drags her to a famous autumn street fair in Little Italy, and as they walk through the food stalls, a little family-run gelateria catches her eye—could it be the same shop that’s in an old photo of her mother’s?

Curious, Iris returns the next day and meets the handsome Gio, who tells her that the shop is in danger of closing. His uncle, sole keeper of their family’s gelato recipe, is in a coma, so they can’t make more. When Iris samples the last remaining batch, she realizes that their gelato and her gelato are one and the same. But how can she tell them she knows their secret recipe when she’s not sure why Gio’s uncle gave it to her mother in the first place?

Iris offers her services as a chef to help them re-create the flavor and finds herself falling for Gio and his family. But when Gio’s uncle finally wakes up, all of the secrets Iris has been keeping threaten to ruin the new life—and new love—she’s been building all winter long. 

REVIEW: Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

COURT: Around here, we've been fans of Rebecca Yarros for a really long time...and her books are always deep in plot and heavy on emotion, and give me a great hangover but I was very curious to see how this epic fantasy would go since it was pretty different from her usual novels. SHEL: Yes! Court told me I absolutely had to read this book and knowing it was Rebecca Yarros, I put aside any hesitancy about it being something outside of my norm and jumped in. I'm so glad I did. 

COURT: And I am so glad that it lived up...and dare I say exceeded... every expectation that I had! I made Shelley stop what she was doing and read it immediately! SHEL: She did. Very insistent. So glad she bossed me around.

COURT: So the general premise is that Violet is ready to be a student at Basgiath War College, and her mother is the general. She has lived her entire life to be a scribe like her father, but last minute her mother decides that she will volunteer to be a Dragon Rider, and in this book you either become a rider or you die! So I was so on the edge of my seat to see how that would go since she's described as being weaker than her peers and small, and fragile. 

COURT: This brings happiness in my nurse heart with several friends who have Ehlers Danlos syndrome will absolutely love this book! It take something that is sometimes an invisible struggle for people, until it very much isn't (hello, random dislocation of joints) and gives a voice to something that might not be something most people know about or understand and I love it so much. Violet's journey is incredible because we see her character development grow her into who she is meant to be, and every little bump along the way is realistic for the rest of us in this epic fantasy. SHEL: 'Seeing' her transformation was so invigorating--you were pulling for her the whole time, especially because she was perceived as so weak. To see her excel and succeed was so gratifying.

COURT: THEN...dun, dun, dun, the dragons. I came for the dragons, let's be real, and I stayed for everything else. I LOVED the dragons. SHEL: ME TOO! Who'd a thunk it?! I really did! COURT: I loved the tone of the book being more modern language, and their internal dialogue was hilarious and I also really loved an aspect of the novel that they really had to train and learn their abilities and it wasn't just instant fierceness. They worked for it with every blood, sweat and tear, and it added so much depth to the book. SHEL: Their tenacity and desire to overcome was inspiring, but seeing how they handled their failures was too. And let's not forget the romance--that was a nice addition too!

COURT: I cannot stress enough that this is a must read, and you will miss out if you do not give it a shot! SHEL: I agree. It wasn't my norm and I'm so glad I got it and am so very eager for the rest of the series to come out!

Buy the Book:  

Amazon

528 pages, Hardcover

First published May 2, 2023

Enter the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragon riders from USA Today bestselling author Rebecca Yarros

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.

But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.

With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.

She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.

Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom's protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.

Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die

REVIEW: Salt Kiss by Sierra Simone

 

  SALT KISS BY SIERRA SIMONE 

Release Date: September 12th   

  Prepare to Be Seduced by Salt Kiss by Sierra Simone! 

The First Sizzling Installment in the Captivating Lyonesse Series!   

 Welcome to a world of desire, temptation, and irresistible attraction in this scintillating MMF romance that will leave you breathless.   

  Get your copy now and experience a romance that's as forbidden as it is irresistible: https://www.thesierrasimone.com/salt-kiss

    

  Add to Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75296599-salt-kiss 

OUR REVIEW:

Before you read the next sentence, make sure that you know that you really really really should read the prequel, Salt in the Wound, before you read Salt Kiss. Now that we've got that out of the way, let's chat. 

In Salt in the Wound we see everything through Isolde's point of view, whereas in Salt Kiss it's from Tristan's point of view. As you'll come to know via synopsis or reading, Tristan is Mark's nephew-in-law and his newly hired bodyguard. From the beginning, we come to know Tristan as honorable and smart and kind, loyal, and haunted from his recent military duty. We see him trying to process that while processing exactly what his new job entails: the kinky-f***kery that is Lyonesse. And we see him begin to discover more and more about himself and his wants and desires. And of course, because Sierra Simone loves to torture her darlings, she has him fall in love with the person he really shouldn't: Mark. The conflict he feels about his feelings only deepen when he finds out about Isolde and the further intensify when he gets to know her and fall in love with her too. This poor boy. Only Sierra Simone could cook up something this delicious, and yet so wrong, and have us all know that we should just go with it because, while she'll torture us all a lot more, eventually she'll make it all better in a really wonderful and twisted way.

I really appreciated that we got to see Tristan in almost equal parts with Mark and Isolde-nothing felt rushed or slow. I loved seeing a different side of Mark (I won't lie--he really pisses me off sometimes, especially when I think about how he treated Isolde versus how he's treating Tristan) and I know he's up to things and I can't wait to see what those things are. I still have many questions about Isolde and Rome so I'm looking forward to more of that, too. And now with the incident that happened at Lyonesse, I really am eager to see where that goes.

Definitely a 5/5 read for me and as eager as I am to have book 2, I'm okay with waiting because I know that it'll be well worth it. 

   Blurb:   After being a soldier, working as a bodyguard should have been simple: Keep the owner of DC’s ultra-secret club safe. Don’t think about his midnight eyes or his devil’s smile. Don’t surrender my body to his wicked desires. But I underestimated Mark Trevena and the power of his dark, seductive world. I underestimated the hold he’d have on me, the way I would do anything for him, anything at all. And so when he asks me to escort his soon-to-be bride home, I can only—miserably, broken-heartedly—say yes. Isolde is nothing like I expect, however. Quiet and lonely and sharp, a girl who likes knives and God, a girl whose nightmares echo my own. One night while sailing under the cold stars, we share a reckless, tear-soaked kiss. I’m doomed. Falling in love with Mark was one thing, but his bride too? Being in love with a husband and wife at the same time? Torture. Misery. A tragedy if tragedies came with bruises, sweat, sighs. But it isn’t enough to merely fall into the forbidden. Because in Mark Trevena’s world, the fall is only the beginning…  

    

  Read the Lyonesse Prequel, Salt in the Wound, for FREE 

 Tropes: Anti-hero. Age gap. Arranged marriage

   https://www.thesierrasimone.com/saltinthewound     About the Author: Sierra Simone is a USA Today Bestselling former librarian (who spent too much time reading romance novels at the information desk.) She lives with her husband and family in Kansas City.

   

  Connect w/Sierra Simone: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheSierraSimone/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SierraSimonesLambs Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheSierraSimone Amazon : http://amzn.to/1PDR4K4 Goodreads : http://bit.ly/1oo9WEh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesierrasimone/ Website: http://authorsierrasimone.com/   Subscribe to Sierra's newsletter: https://www.subscribepage.com/sierrasimone