At the end of last year, I once again committed to taking part in Wendy the Super Librarian’s TBR challenge. I don’t know if and where Wendy is posting everyone else’s posts but I rarely go to my old social media haunts (I still have accounts but I am rarely posting). I am not across the older apps these days. If anyone knows, or if Wendy is reading this :: waves wildly ::, I would love to know where I can follow along in the laziest possible way (because I know I can just click on everyone’s link on the TBR link but shhhhhhh!).

I have been too lazy to write full reviews with blurbs and plots synopses. Instead I am just giving you my irrational, emotional reader-reacts. Hold on to your hats. There will be swearing!

Reading Note 72: January – Once More With Feeling

The Only Purple House in Town by Ann Agguire.

This book had been recommended to me by many readerly friends. I had several false starts and I found myself dragging my feet rather than read it. I borrowed it from the library three times until in January, I fully committed myself to reading it once more with feeling. And the feeling was loveliness.

This story didn’t overwhelm me with intense with emotions, it didn’t make me swoon or get angry or cry. And though it wasn’t intense, it went deep into the feelings of being on the outer in your own family, to finding your own place at your own pace. The story was gentle and lovely, set in our real world and the paranormal elements weren’t so fantastical that I cringed (Yes – I am thinking of the Black Dagger Brotherhood et al., of yesteryears).

I guess I am now an official “older demographic” and I’m leaning into the moment by loving the cozy romances I find. As for this book, well…there are fairies (TICK!), there are witches (TICK!) and there are sparkling glitter moments of love and joy and family found (TICK! TICK! TICK!). Oh and there is a cinnamon roll of hero too. Lots of feels for this one.

Reading Note 73: February – Furry Friends

With Love, from Cold World by Alicia Thompson

Well…this book doesn’t really have any furry friends in it. But there are weird mentions about the heroine’s “cat pants” and misread lists and stuffed toys and that it is a good idea to own animals but all these were only cursory thoughts…and really…I just couldn’t with this book.

It had all the elements of being fab. Cool cover art, a blue-haired bi-sexual hero (the amount of times this was explained in the book started to become tedious), a former foster heroine looking to be a foster carer, a failing, ailing, aging “Winter Attraction” fairground in hot hot Florida, a forced proximity locked-in-Cold World-can’t-get-out-but-need-to-snuggle-to-get-warm” scene. IT HAD IT ALL! And yet, the book felt cold (LOL), it felt stilted in its narrative, and sadly, I got bored.

Reading Note 74: March – Not in Kansas Any More

Here For The Right Reasons by Jodi McAlister.

A full disclosure that will surprise no-one – Jodi is a friend of mine so there is friend bias but I don’t care. This was one funny, romantic book. I read it and I could hear Jodi’s voice and cadences and intonations which was a bonus plus.

The book is set on a set, set during the pandemic. Based on long running reality TV dating show Bachelor, the TV show in the book series is called Marry Me Juliet. Recently unemployed-due to lockdowns-and-will-do-anything-for-money-cause-she-is-poor heroine CeCe gets a chance to be one of the Juliets. As excited as she is, she fumbles and stumbles on the first night, not impressing the hero, Dylan and finds herself being eliminated on Day One. However, because of the pandemic, the eliminated contestants are not allowed to leave the compound until the show is over. And over time, the hero falls in love with little-Ms-eliminated-on-the-first-day. But the rules as we all know are that he has to fall in love with a not-yet-eliminated contestant. The set up is real, my friends, and it all gets emotional and swoozy-schmushy. I rarely find books funny and romantic and tension-filled and this was all just wrapped into one novel. It was superb. Please please please read it!

Reading Note 75: April – No Place Like Home

Canadian Boyfriend – Jenny Holiday

I don’t even know where to start with this book. It started out with the “boyfriend” in the book being toothless. This is a total personal “ick” for me (long story but it includes a lazy Saturday afternoon, a surprise proxy and a suitor with rotten teeth) so I was reading cautiously. Can I bear a gummy hero? Did he have to lose a second tooth? The bells in my ears kept warning me but I had Miss Bates’s review which assured me that it was going to be good. And she was right!

Aurora (Rory) is a dance teacher at a local suburban school. She is recently single, and several years earlier had quit a lucrative ballet school in New York as it was toxic for her health and wellbeing. She uses an EFT tapping routine to help her deal with panic attacks and in trying to “follow” her body. She has body issues from years of abusive ballet training, finding this out when she was described as “malnourished” by an emergency room doctor and not her usual ballet school doctor. Rory had spent most of her lonely teen and young adult years writing to a kinda “mythical” Canadian boyfriend called Mike, a young man she met briefly when she served him a drink back in her high school years.

Fast forward to Rory at the dance school where one of her students returns after a long hiatus due to her mother dying and now it is her father who is bringing her to class. Mike Martin reminds her of that long-ago hockey player but she isn’t sure it is the same person. Meanwhile, Mike Martin (who oddly over the course of the book is only ever referred to by his full name even during sexy times) is grieving and flagellating over his wife and some personal misconceptions that he had about her which then become realisations of his own failings and assumptions of her role as the woman in his life who carried the emotional labour, and now he has to carry it and life becomes a light bulb over the hero’s head.

Over time, Mike Martin starts pursuing Rory and the gentleness takes over, the sparks fly and the love soars. I was so enamoured by the two of them negotiating and dancing around their need for each other while they also cared for their own selves, and of course, Mike’s daughter. After a holiday to Canada, Rory discovers that Mike Martin is indeed the person she had made a drink for when she was a teen, and the mythical boyfriend she had made up and had spend years writing to. Rory comes clean and Mike kinda freaks out and they break up for a while. It takes Mike’s friend who points out to him that Rory withholding the truth from Mike isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “If somebody fucked up, you gotta leave room for them to unfuck it up”. So lovely. This thought that you don’t just cut someone out. Give them space to be human, to make reparations, especially if they are fundamentally good people.

Aurora/Rory also writes that “once you open your eyes to the possibility, life is full of conflicting truths”. What a guiding statement! What a gorgeous book. It had everything from love, dreams coming true, a delightful dog with disabilities (is there any other fictional dog like Earl 9), negotiating what a career can look like, discovering that non-competitiveness is a healthier way of being. And Mike Martin is such a hero. He is much more than a cinnamon roll. He is a butter tart!

Jenny Holiday wrote such a wonderful story in Canadian Boyfriend. Heartfelt and loving and full of the promise of people just trying to better than their previous selves. Another must read!

Reading Note 76: May – With A Little Help From My Friends

Happy Place by Emily Henry

Last year, I had the good fortune to read Emily Henry’s Book Lovers (Reading Note 58) which I adored. So of course, I was on board for a bit more of her writing style. Happy Place is quite similar in style and writing rhythms, it was not a great experience. But hold on. I need to let you know that there will there be spoilers. Which is why the book cover below gives you ample time to avert your eyes.

This book made me clench my teeth. Infuriating and dull. The main couple was dull. The never-ending friendship circle was dull. Their life problems were excruciatingly dull. And the ending made me want to flip tables. Imagine leaving your neurosurgeon studies to smoke joints and do pottery in Montana for love. What a fucked up life trajectory.

Also, all the drug taking in the book (yeah yeah – I know, it is legal in the US but so is fucking smoking but there hasn’t been any smoking in romance fiction for many decades). Anyway, I fucking hated all the drug taking. It was SHIT upon SHIT. Especially when the toxic fucked friends Cleo and Kimmy told the main character Harriet (who was freaking anxious about taking drugs) that they were low grade but THE FRIENDS FUCKING LIED AND AFTER HARRIET AGREED (peer-group pressure much!) AND TOOK A GUMMY WEED SHE WAS TOLD THEY HAD GIVEN HER HOME-MADE UNREGULATED STRONG SHIT. LIKE WHAT SORT OF FUCKED UP NARCISSISTIC CRAP FRIENDS ARE THEY. Especially when they fucking knew that  Harriet is anxious about weed and they even have the temerity to MOCK HER! And then there is the manipulative friend who doesn’t want their friendship circle to change and forces everyone to be together when the majority don’t even want to be there. Errm – go fucking get some therapy. No-one needs a little help from friends like these!

Like seriously, fucked up friends who lie and give you drugs, a super-needy boyfriend who breaks up over the phone because you don’t give him him-time when you are busting a gut trying to become a doctor. And then the finale when the on career-track neurosurgeon doesn’t even downgrade to a family GP but fucking fully drops out and becomes a pottery-making Demi Moore in Montana with study debts. Just what sort of story is this! This is not a fucking romance; it is a fucking nightmare from a hellscape life.

Oh the anger I felt at the end of this book. If I had read this book in print, I would have torn it apart, thrown it in the sink, poured dishwashing liquid on it, soaked it, watched the pages pulp up and then thrown it into the compost. Sustainability is the only way to deal with books that evoke such ever lasting anger. Now don’t be alarmed. No books were harmed. As I had borrowed a library e-book copy, the best I could manage was poking the RETURN EARLY button with vehemence.

Reading Note 77: June – Bananapants!

Emergency Contact by Lauren Layne and Anthony LeDonne

As many of you know, I love Lauren Layne’s romances. An author who somehow doesn’t get the love and amplification many lesser authors (in my not-humble opinion) get. But this novel was a bit bananapants-nuts in the assumptions and ass-holery that goes on, not only does it not get my love, but I actively want to shout and scream at it. Which isn’t all that bad. When you consider how gentle so much romance fiction has become (geez – must I love just another cozy cinammon roll???), it gets a High Distinction for going Old Skool and doing shit worthy of a Lynne Graham novel (just with a different level of angst).

Lauren Layne has co-written this book with her husband Anthony LeDonne and it is written in a he said/she said style with alternating chapters being from the hero/heroine’s points of view. The writing itself is engaging and funny and just lovely. The road trip is full of mishaps and fun. The dialogue works well with the internal monologue of the characters, juxtoposing what they are saying with what they are feeling in a way which should have been okay but the downfall of this book is the underlying thoughtlessness (and downright nastiness) of the hero Tom.

The premise of the novel is that the main character Katherine gets in an accident and has a number of injuries including a bad concussion a few days before Christmas. All of her friends are (conveniently) out of town and Katherine’s “Emergency Contact” is her ex-husband whom she had forgotten to change out for someone else. Her ex-husband Tom is pretty rude and pissed off he got called to help her as he needed to be on a plane to Chicago where he was heading to propose to his new boo. So instead of just sucking it up and helping Katherine by staying with her for 24 hours to make sure she doesn’t sleep/die/get worse etc., he decides he will drag Katherine all the way to Chicago where his mum can care for her and he can take off with the new chick. Of course, there is a blizzard, they get kicked off a plane (because Katherine is anxious she’ll miss the call from her boss telling her that she got a promotion), and of course hilarity ensues as Tom drags her onto trains, and buses, and cars, and getting robbed and all the while, poor Katherine has concussion, headaches, injuries requiring the dressing is changed regularly. Meanwhile, Tom just snarks at her for being so career focused that she didn’t focus on him. Ungh!

Girl! I just wanted her to find a lovely man but instead, by the end of the book, Tom ditches his new girl for his old girl, and the old girl stops obsessing about her job because love will cure all ugggh! Gah! What is it with all these fucking romances that the man-babies are crying about their highly successful wives/girlfriends and the resolution has the woman giving up all her career dreams for him.

Like really? This is now two books in a row where a woman has given up her hard fought for career for a needy man. Both Happy Place and Emergency Contact. And last year, I read several books with this type of ending including Alexandria Bellefleur’s nauseating Hang the Moon where the European, cosmopolitan heroine gives up a lucrative London job for a life in a back-suburb with a nothing-man who just likes going to Disney. Ugh!

I need to question: have men started ghost-writing romance fiction? Is this an editor’s cut? Is this the current poison of Handmaid’s Tale nightmares we women are watching unfold in the USA which will inevitably catch up to us in the rest of the world. Does it need to permeate my romance fiction? Why am I reading my favourite novels in horror. All I can think of is Audre Lorde’s “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own”. I thought at least romance fiction women would not be shackled and would get to have it all. But I guess not.

Can someone just make the nightmare end?