Category: Books

Beautiful Gifts (Catherine Anderson)

This novella was released as part of an anthology entitled The True Love Wedding Dress, in which Catherine Anderson wrote the prologue, the epilogue, and the final story. Other authors included Connie Brockway, Casey Claybourne, and Barbara Metzger.

Overall Response

Anthologies are really one of my least favorite types of books to buy. Best case scenario, you love all the stories in the books and you might even find a new author to follow. My usual experience has been one or two of the stories are fine, and then there are two more you’d be happy to never read again. This anthology is one of the better ones, somewhere in the middle of those two scenarios.

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After the Wedding (The Worth Saga #2)

Note: Received as ARC in exchange for a review. For order links, see Courtney Milan’s website.

Initial Thoughts & Hot Take

I thought the book got off to a slow start. The first few chapters threw a lot of information at me about Adrian’s background and family, so it took me a minute to get into the story. That being said, once it got going, I couldn’t put it down and I finished it in a few hours. We’d waited a while for the follow-up to the cliffhanger ending at the end of the first book, Once Upon a Marquess, and I definitely felt like After the Wedding delivered.

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Lucky Penny (Catherine Anderson)

Overall Response

So I like this book a lot even though there are a lot of reasons I shouldn’t.  This book has some major red flags, particularly in the way David treats Brianna early on and I really don’t think I was satisfied with how it worked out in that respect. That being said, Catherine Anderson does everyone a service in that once her initial lie is exposed, Brianna goes to great pains not to lie to David again, even when he is particularly unkind to her about that honesty. I liked the subplots and supporting cast, and I think the overall resolution was fine. I’m just not sure I’m sold on the romance. The characters and the story itself save a lot of it.

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Early Dawn (Catherine Anderson)

Overall Response

This is one of those so-so kind of books. It’s an interesting story with mostly engaging characters, but there are portions of the book that just seem to drag on forever, and there are some tropes that I’m not a huge fan of. The writing is fine. I think my general lack of love for this book is more that it failed to connect with me. It’s one of those subjective things where I’m sure there are lot of people who would give this book a five-star rating because Catherine Anderson writes this genre very well.
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Summer Reading

Master List for Summer Reading

MelissaLeave a comment
This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Summer Reading

The books listed below are the novels I intend to read for my summer reading project. I’m going to try my best to read them in order, review each book separately, and then review the series as a whole. That’s the plan anyway. And yes…I know there’s a lot of books here. I can usually read two or three books a day, especially since since almost all of these books are going to be rereads which makes it go faster.

Edited August 4, 2018: I’ve removed some series from this list because well…I’m running out of time, haha.

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Summer Breeze (Catherine Anderson)

Overall Response

There’s always been something sweet and tragic about this particular romance. Rachel is one of Catherine Anderson’s tragic backstory heroines–a trope particular to her writing. Her heroines have always been through the absolute worst and are attempting to dig themselves out. I like this about her writing, but one my critique is usually that the hero doesn’t ever seem to share in this trope, but this is one of the books it doesn’t feel quite so tipped in the one direction. I really liked both leading characters and the path they followed to be together. The romance wasn’t the source of the conflict, but rather solving the mystery of what happened to Rachel’s family.

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The Pursuit Of… (Courtney Milan)

Note: This book was originally released as part of an anthology, Hamilton’s Battalion, and will be released as a standalone novella on June 26, 2018. This book was provided as an ARC in exchange for a review.

Overall Response

I’m still very much dipping my toes into the m/m romance subgenre. This is not really a matter of preference, only that I tend to follow the same authors who tend to only use LGBTQ characters and romances as subplots and supporting characters. This is my third novel in this category, and the second in the m/m tradition. So that being said, I’m happy to have read this. The leads are engaging, the banter is lovely and swift and as always, Courtney Milan tackles the larger issues so deftly you don’t even notice what she’s doing.  There’s always something deeper at work in Milan books, and her hero and heroines are always just left of conventional, which is my favorite thing about her work. I love knowing when I pick up a book from Courtney Milan, I’m about to be taken on a journey that no other author could have done.
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Keegan’s Lady (Catherine Anderson)

Overall Response

I’ve always liked this book. It has one of my favorite romance tropes — a marriage of convenience — and the hero and heroine are relatable, flawed people who give me something to root for. In addition, the plot itself is interesting and the supporting cast is strong enough that readers clamored for Catherine Anderson to write stories for the brothers. That being said, as much as I like this book, one this re-read there are aspects that bother me more now than when I first read it a decade ago. It’s a good story, but I wouldn’t put it in my top ten.

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Books

2017 in Books

MelissaLeave a comment
This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Book Reviews

This was the first year that Goodreads let you add a variety of reading dates to your shelf, so I could finally count the high number of books I reread towards my challenge. I set my books at 200, but I reached that in November. I’ll finish the year somewhere around 210-215 depending on how much reading I do the next few days.

Here are my top 10 academic and leisure reads. It’s not ranked — rather, I’m going through chronologically. So 1 is the earliest book I read, 10 is the latest, etc.

  1. American Slavery, American Freedom (Edmund S. Morgan) – I had to read this for my Colonial America graduate class and it really challenged what I had learned about the Virginian colonies of the seventeenth century and the trajectory of slavery in the country overall.
  2. To Seduce a Sinner (Elizabeth Hoyt). This was a reread for me, but I love this book. It’s the first Elizabeth Hoyt book I ever read and it introduced me to her writing just in time for her amazing Maiden Lane series. I love picking it up and rereading it. I would have found Hoyt eventually because she’s too good to miss, but I grabbed this book on a whim at CVS, so I got very lucky.
  3.  Hold Me (Courtney Milan). When one of my favorite historical authors announced she would be doing contemporary romance, but it would be in first person, I swallowed my doubts and read Trade Me, which is one of my favorite all-time books. But Hold Me was seriously out of my comfort zone as a reader — it has a trans woman and a bisexual man as the leads. So I waited to read it. And then I gave up the ghost, read it, and loved it. It was amazing, and I’m so glad I took the plunge.
  4. Devil in Spring (Lisa Kleypas) A lot of LK’s fans were divided on this, and no, it’s not as good as Devil in Winter because honestly, no one is ever going to be better than Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent. But this was the year for strong female heroines and Pandora was amazing. And I loved going back into LK’s Wallflower universe and seeing how Evie and Sebastian aged. I loved Gabriel, too. I hope we get more from the second generation of Wallflowers. So glad to see Lisa Kleypas back writing historicals.
  5. Perfect Stranger (Anne Gracie). Another reread. Anne Gracie had an amazing year with Marry In Haste, which I also loved but I still love the story of Faith and Nicholas, finding love in the last place they expected. It’s a beautiful story with a touch of mysticism and an amazing cast of supporting characters.
  6. Memory in Death (J.D. Robb) I reread the entire In Death series, novellas included, this year. I hadn’t reread some of the books at all or in years. While I love the entire series, this particular entry is amazing and I actually like it more than New York to Dallas, which actually introduces Eve’s mother. That’s an amazing book, but this is Eve confronting the foster mother who tortured her and going after her murderer. Her sense of justice is what makes her an amazing character and this is the book that drives it home.
  7. Race and Revolution (Gary B. Nash) One of the best things about pursuing my masters in American history is digging into the Early Republic period and, again, this book challenged the way I had been taught about slavery in the era of the Revolutionary era. A great series of essays that adds substance and nuance to the tumultuous 1780s.
  8. IT (Stephen King) Another reread. I read it in anticipation of the movie release, and it was the first time I’d read it all the way through in about a decade. The older I get, the better it reads which isn’t true of everything I love. The way King writes about friendship and childhood is beautiful, and Pennywise remains the defining villain of my childhood.
  9. Duke of Desire (Elizabeth Hoyt) The only repeat author on the list, but Hoyt is my go-to, never fail, never disappoint author. I was sad to see Maiden Lane end, but Rafe was an amazing hero with a truly devastating background, and Iris was so amazing, so up to the challenge.
  10. Empire of Liberty (Gordon S. Wood) This one is a cheat. I’m about three chapters from the end, but I plan to finish it this weekend. I love Wood’s work in general, and I read a lot of him for my Revolutionary era class. The way he writes is so succinct and clear–I had so much fun reading this mammoth look at the early republic.

I honestly liked almost everything I read this year  and picking just ten was soooo hard. Check out my Goodreads challenge for the rest of them.