Last Call at the Local by Sarah Grunder Ruiz

 

5*

In the 3^rd book of the Love, Lists and Fancy Ships series, we’re introduced to Jack Dunne, brother of Ollie from book 2, and Raine Hart, a med school dropout and musician who was busking her way around Europe until she had her equipment stolen (including the prized Gibson guitar from her grandfather) right out from under her in colorful, picturesque Cobh, Ireland. Left with only the clothes on her back, her phone and passport, and the spare change in her pockets, she stops into the Local pub for a pint. Shortly after, she meets the charming, handsome Jack and the attraction is instantaneous. After asking her opinion about what the pub needs to draw more traffic and listening to her constructively critical suggestions, he reveals that he’s co-owner and that he wants to offer her a job as their new events coordinator. It’s a temporary arrangement, only until she can earn enough to replace her equipment and revamp the pub. Of course, that’s more than enough time for them to give into their growing feelings for each other. 

 

What elevates this heartwarming romance over other friends-to-lovers offerings are the challenges both main characters face. Jack, after years of physical abuse from his father, suffers from intrusive thoughts due to OCD and that, combined with having to move home to take over the pub following his death, caused him to give up his tattooing career. Raine has ADHD and has always felt she was a disappointment to her doctor parents, especially after she quit medical school to become a full-time itinerant musician. Neither one of them is confident in their talent, but they bond over their mental health issues, see in each other what they fail to see in themselves, and lovingly accept what makes them different. Ruiz has chosen a dual POV which enables her to use her characters’ own voices to describe what goes on in their brains that keeps them from trusting themselves to be in a relationship and sharing their talents. 

 

Although this is only Ruiz’s third book, she has already established herself as a thoughtful writer who tackles everything from grief to mental illness with sensitivity, makes liberal use of humorous banter, and treats her characters with dignity. Fans of Chloe Liese and Talia Hibbert will love her books. Highly recommended.

 

I received a complimentary ARC of this book from Berkley Romance in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed are completely my own.

 

Faking Christmas by Kerry Winfrey

 

4*

Laurel Grant has always struggled to find her passion and her place in the world. She also has an unfortunate habit of engaging in workplace romances which invariably go bad, the most recent of which left her homeless and jobless. So when her best friend suggests she apply for a social media position at Buckeye State of Mind, an Ohio magazine and website, she gives it a shot and is offered the job. The only hitch? Her new boss Gilbert, who she’s at no risk of falling for, thinks she’s a successful farmer thanks to the Meadow Rise Farm Instagram account she moderates for her twin sister Holly and her husband Darius. Fearful that the job offer will be rescinded if she sets him straight, she keeps up the ruse by writing a monthly column highlighting her life on the farm as a fabulous cook, custom furniture maker, and goat tender. So when Gilbert invites himself for their traditional Christmas Eve Eve dinner, she conspires with Holly to switch places, complete with playing Mom to her niece and nephew. How hard could it be to pull off?

Turns out it’s a lot harder than Laurel thinks when her nemesis, Max Beckett, shows up at Holly’s invitation to play her husband. When a blizzard turns an evening’s dinner into a weekend gathering, it’ll take a Christmas miracle to pull it off, especially since she’s hated Max ever since Holly’s wedding when she overheard him trying to convince Darius to call it off. Is it possible that she’s misjudged the grumpy, Christmas-hating killjoy who’s doing his best to help her fool her boss since she has no clue how to cook or milk a goat or why she suddenly finds herself fighting an attraction?

This sweet slow-burn, enemies to lovers, grumpy/sunshine, forced proximity, fake relationship Christmas romance is the perfect recipe for a holiday treat. Combining plot elements from the classic movie Christmas in Connecticut with The Parent Trap, blended together with favorite Christmas songs and movies, Winfrey offers up a great escape for readers looking for a heaping helping of holiday cheer. 

I received an ARC from Berkley Books through NetGalley for an honest review. Opinions are strictly my own.

Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood

 

5*

After having sat in on a panel discussion last spring with author Hazelwood, I now understand why she and several more of our best contemporary romance authors (including Diana Gabaldon and Lauren Billings of the writing duo Christina Lauren) went from careers in STEM to writing romance. At the very least, they are finally getting the recognition (and, hopefully, financial rewards) they deserve. 

In Love on the Brain, neuroscientist Dr. Bee Konigswasser has been fighting her entire career against the unfair treatment women in STEM (especially academia) face from a field full of predominantly white men. Using “trademarked” phrases like Cockcluster and Wurstfest, in describing this seemingly impenetrable brick wall, is the least she can do to release some of the tension and anger she feels when she and her fellow women in STEM are confronted with this misogynistic reality. As a way to fight back anonymously, Bee started a Twitter account as an homage to her hero, Marie Curie, called @WhatWouldMarieDo and has been evading potential career-destroying detection for 4 years. However, other than providing support and encouragement to other female scientists, she’s also developed an open online friendship with Shmac, one of the few male scientists who truly champion and support their female colleagues.

After a bad betrayal and break-up, following by a depressive slump two years before, she’s finally been tapped to lead a joint NASA-NIH project. Unfortunately, even before flying to Houston, she finds out the co-lead is her arch nemesis Levi Ward, a man whose utter disdain for her during grad school was the stuff of legend. Will having to work with him lead to another career dead-end, especially if he goes so far as to sabotage her work? Or will she find that her perception of him has been wrong all along?

Hazelwood’s follow-up to The Love Hypothesis is equally as charming and sexy, with subtly-coded neurodivergent characters who struggle to communicate their feelings but who connect on a cerebral and sometimes nerdy level. Whether it’s bonding over Star Wars, comparing Levi’s rescue cat to Bee’s “imaginary” one, competing over hummingbird sightings, or surprisingly supporting and defending each others’ work in the lab, their journey to love is a joy to behold. Highly recommended!

I received a complimentary ARC of this book from Jove Berkley through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed are completely my own.

Adult Assembly Required by Abbi Waxman

4*

Fans of The Bookish Life of Nina Hill will be thrilled to revisit L.A’s Larchmont Village neighborhood and become reacquainted with that titular heroine and her bookstore co-workers in this new book of women’s fiction. Yes, there’s a very slow-burn love story (actually two), but it’s more about found family and friendship.

Laura Costello leaves her home and ex-fiancé in New York City to attend grad school for physical therapy in L.A. Her family of hardcore science academicians has never hidden their disappointment over her decision to forge a new path, and are convinced that she is too fragile due to her PTSD following a serious car accident and long recovery. However, her mother’s heavy-handedness and her controlling ex-fiancé’s unwillingness to accept her rejection and his insulting infantilization of her only serve to strengthen her resolve.

Following a fire in her new apartment building, she find herself in Knight’s bookstore (co-owned by Nina Hill). Serendipitously, sales clerk Polly hooks her up with a room rental in the house where she lives and, as time goes on, she grows to care about Maggie, her landlord and house mom, and Bob, her handsome housemate. Over the course of the summer, while waiting for her classes to begin, she cultivates friendships with Nina and Polly, joins Nina’s trivia team, and with Bob’s encouragement, kindness, and patience, slowly begins to overcome her trauma-induced panic over driving and her reticence about entering a new relationship. Will either of these two awkward friends ever find the courage to acknowledge the attraction that everyone else sees?

The biggest lesson Laura learns is that everyone has fears and personal issues that can hold them back from falling in love, forging new career paths, mending relationships with close family members, and more. However, her new chosen family helps her see that her inner strength not only aids her recovery but also provides the support her friends need to heal their own hurts, chase their dreams, and take a chance on love.

The only disappointment is the lack of any sexual tension between Laura and Bob. Their friendship is enviable, but aside from a couple of kisses and countless longing glances, there’s no heat. It would have been much more satisfying had Waxman used her epilogue to give readers the satisfaction of seeing the relationship ignite. Despite this, it’s a delightful story with very likable characters, satisfying subplots, glorious gardens, a plethora of books, and the unique idiosyncrasies of Los Angeles. Highly recommended.

I received a complimentary ARC of this book from Berkley Books through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed are completely my own.

The Bride Test by Helen Hoang

5*

In this equally charming and sexy successor to The Kiss Quotient, Hoang again features a lead character with Asperger’s Syndrome whose funny internal thoughts keep readers laughing. As the book opens, we are re-introduced to Khai (the cousin of Michael from the first book) at a wake for his 16-year-old cousin Andy, his best (only) friend who died in a motorcycle accident. Autism makes it difficult for him to show emotion (including crying) or tolerate touching, so he’s accused of not caring. All his young brain registers is that, if he can’t grieve, then he can’t love either. Ten years later, he’s so firmly convinced of this that his interfering mother finally takes matters into her own hands to ensure that he gets married and gives her grandchildren. She heads to Vietnam and devises a bride test to find a woman worthy of her son who won’t just want him for his money. There she meets My (Esme), a single mother who was abandoned by her daughter’s father when she got pregnant (just as her own American father abandoned her mother), and promptly offers her a chance to spend a summer in American getting to know Khai and hopefully convincing him that she is a woman he’d want to marry.

Despite the wacky way they are thrown together, the relationship between Esme and Khai is beautiful and full of humor, and they both blossom with the care and concern they show each other. Although Khai struggles with the disruption Esme brings to his well-ordered life, she is committed to being indispensable to him so that she’ll be able to remain in the U.S. and have her family join her. When Khai helps Esme look for the father she’s never known, their bond strengthens, but he continues to believe he is unloveable despite his actions to the contrary. Will Esme eventually pass the bride’s test and be the woman who gets through to Khai or will she end up back in Vietnam after the summer? Pick up this wonderful book and find out! Readers who have fallen in love with The Kiss Quotient may have a third book to look forward to…perhaps with Khai’s older brother Quan? Here’s hoping!


I received a complimentary ARC of this book from Berkley Publishing Group through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed are completely my own.

The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman

5*

Nina Hill, die-hard bookworm and trivia champ, lives a relatively solitary life in Los Angeles surrounded by books both at home and at work. Her favorite friend is her cat Phil with whom she has two-sided conversations, a consequence of her over-active imagination and loneliness. It’s not difficult to see that her need for structure and extreme social anxiety are the result of abandonment, first by the father she never knew and then by her successful, globe-trotting mother who left parenting to a nanny. Her “anxiety was like her anti-superpower, the one that came out unbidden in a crisis.” So what’s she to do when, on the cusp of her 30th birthday, she learns that her father has died and left her an inheritance and a motley group of relatives? Add to the mix a trivia adversary, who occupies too much of her thoughts and whose presence seems to cancel out her anxiety, and her carefully constructed life starts pulling apart at the seams. Is the possibility of belonging and loving worth the risk or will she push everyone away to keep safe in her cocoon?

Waxman uses a third-person narrator who invites readers into Nina’s quirky, humorous thoughts and life accompanied by a cornucopia of wacky friends, family and the unique character of the City of LA. It’s a thoroughly engaging story with many LOL moments and a sweet romance, too. Highly recommended.

I received a complimentary ARC of this book from Berkley Publishing Group through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed are completely my own.

The Last Year of the War by Susan Meissner

Elise Sontag, the American-born daughter of German immigrants, has been raised in Iowa. She is peripherally aware of the war, but doesn’t give it much thought until her father is arrested on suspicion (based on circumstantial evidence) that he’s a Nazi sympathizer. Although he’s innocent, the country is looking for people to blame for the tragedy of Pearl Harbor and the U.S.’s entry into the war. So, the family is sent to an internment camp in Texas, where, separated from everything that’s familiar and living under armed guard, Elise begins to lose her identity as an American. When she meets fellow internee Mariko Inoue, a Japanese-American teen from Los Angeles, she finally has a friend who she can compare stories with and plan a future together in New York City when they both turn 18. Unfortunately, neither anticipates that their families will be repatriated to their parents’ native countries, leaving behind everything they know and facing great danger as the Allies advance and the war winds down. Will they survive the war and, if so, will they ever make it back home?

Unlike Susan Meissner’s three other 5* books I’ve read (As Bright as Heaven, Secrets of a Charmed Life, and A Fall of Marigolds), this one was a disappointment. The premise was intriguing, but the execution was too much narrative and too little dialogue. It read more like a history book than historical fiction and, as such, characters weren’t well-developed and the emotions felt muted. It is a first-person narrative from Elise’s point of view as an old woman with worsening Alzheimer’s, so the focus is on herself with very little of Mariko’s story since she was unaware of what happened to her friend after the war. Meissner clearly did her research and, for those not familiar with the history, it is interesting to learn of the fate of German Americans during WWII and the depiction of life and death in Germany near the end of the war. It is also surprising to learn that prejudice amongst internees was just as fierce as it was outside the barbed wire fences. Unfortunately, the descriptive narrative bogged down the story and, without Mariko’s backstory, the brief reunion of the two friends after many decades didn’t make much sense or pack the emotional wallop one would expect. Overall, not a bad story, but not on a par with her other novels.

I received a complimentary ARC of this book from Berkley Publishing Group through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed are completely my own.