This IS NOT my 2024 best of list. I am just playing catch up for Wendy’s TBR Challenge. In a conscious effort to post on all the TBR topics for 2024, I put together a quick post for the previous 5 months.

Reading Note 80: August – Everyday Heroes

Hello, Stranger by Katherine Center

I became a bit obsessed with Katherine Center this year. I have yet to read one that tanked. In Hello Stranger the protagonist Sadie is a portrait artist who after winning a place in a national competition has a critical head injury when she has a fall in the middle of the street. When she comes to, the result of the fall is that she has aphasia – face blindness. Which, as a portrait artist, is a bit of an issue. While she is trying to navigate her new world, Sadie meets her grumpy neighbour Joe who somehow helps her through the various issues she is experiencing. And of course, they fall in love but not without their own issues.

Sadie has so many circumstances that go against her. An absent father, an evil step-sister, an ambivalent step-mother. A friend who seems supportive but is not at all, sometimes bordering on cruel. When Sadie gets into the portrait competitiion, Sue says to her “You’ve been tragically failing at life for years and years! We have to celebrate!” Sadie thinks “Tragically failing at life seemed a bit harsh. But fine. She wasn’t wrong.”

This devastated me. What an awful put down to a friend who has had bad circumstances well beyond her control (dead mum, dickhead dad, society that does not value artists). The lack of value of artists is highlighted by the Sue’s lovely parents who are successful in real estate. Bleh. but real.

I really enjoyed this book and I cried and cried reading it.

Reading Note 81: September Drama!

The Bodyguard by Katherine Center

This story opens with the main character Hannah being broken up with by her boyfriend Robby on the day of her mother’s funeral. Robby accuses Hannah of not even liking her mother but she says “I didn’t like her, but I loved her. And he’d underestimated me, as well. Because it’s so much harder to love someone who’s difficult than to love someone who’s easy”.

It is a wow of an opening, made worse when you realise that Hannah and Robby work together and their boss insists that they continue to work on the same team as bodyguards to celebrities and politicians. Take note, Robby is not the hero (how could he be!). The hero is celebrity Jack Stapleton who is being stalked and needs a bodyguard who can be his “fake date” when he spends time with his family on their farm. Jack is a bundle of contradictions but neither Hannah or he start their relationship until the fake part is over, and the assigned bodyguard role is over.

This book was as much about the grief of a break up as it is about romance. Hannah says that “… getting dumped lasts forever. Because a person who loved you decided not to love you anymore. Does that every really go away”

Perhaps the romance needed the juxtaposition of the grief unpacking to make it real and possible. Though Jack is rude to Hannah at the beginning, they end up getting on well. This is such a funny book with both Hannah and Jack bouncing off each other making me laugh throughout their story. It was so good that after the page 187 mark, I ended up going deep into the story and forgot to highlight passages. It just got better and better. Lots of angst, lots of sad reveals but also some high level drama when the need for Jack to have a bodyguard actually is very real and rather frightening.

Reading Note 82: October Spooky (Gothic!)

Ready or Not by Cara Bastone

It’s a long bow to describe this book as spooky or gothic but I chose it as there was an element of Jane Eyre/the wife in the attic to it.

Eve Hatch has a lovely life in Brooklyn, lives near her best-friend Willa, goes on dates etc. Eve has a one-night stand with a barkeeper, Ethan and 6 weeks later discovers that she is pregnant. Ethan is not the hero/love interest in this book, which was an interesting twist on the usual pregnancy romance. Instead, Eve falls in love with her best friend’s brother Shep who has been on the sidelines of her life since she and Willa were young. What unfolds is a story of how a major life event shifts the most steadfast friendship dynamics, from Willa being absent and eventually sidelined by her brother, by Ethan stumbling to work out how to go forward, often crying at the turn in his life, especially as his on-again/off-again girlfriend Eleni is horrified that he impregnated someone during one of their off-again periods. Eleni is Bertha Rochester in this book as she rules with mad anger but she is never seen on the page. Instead, I felt she was demonised, a caricature, and perhaps the flaw that rankled.

Overall, I liked Ethan. I liked Shep and I liked Eve. They were all complex people and they all came to their own realisations at different paces. I deeply enjoyed this book though it leaned a slight way towards women’s fiction rather than romance fiction.

Reading Note 83: November It Came From the 1990s

Miranda in Retrograde by Lauren Layne

This is another long bow as I had difficulty finding a book for this one. Once again, an auto-read author for me, Lauren Layne has written another fun novel which I enjoyed. Though the book was sluggish at the start, once you are deep in the story it just flies with delightfulness. And what is the 1990s bow – I think both the protagonists were born in the 1990s (Geez!).

Miranda is a physics professor with a high profile as a science communicator. When she fails to secure tenure at the university where she works, she takes a year off to examine her life and chooses to do it through the improbable astrology. She moves into her aunt’s old home and spends a lot of her time on her roof starwatching. Her aunt’s neighbour is grumpy artist named Archer who just isn’t into astrology, starsigns, sunsigns, or any signs at all, including the signs that Miranda is giving him as she falls in love with him.

This one is a slow burn and just gorgeous.

Reading Note 84: December It’s a Party!

How the Italian Claimed Her by Jennifer Hayward

This is a Harlequin Presents with all the exponential drama, absurd romance with an abundance of glamour parties that you expect of the line. The protagonists are Jensen (a kim kardashianesque character) and Christiano (an Italian fashion house heir). Jensen has a modelling contract to launch Christiano’s new fashion line. Christiano, for good reason, doesn’t believe that Jensen is going to honour her contract so he forces (coerces?) her to go to Italy to meet her work obligations. Unbeknownst to him, Jensen is quite reliable but is victim to vicious media coverage, and a media crazed mother who has brought her (and her sisters) up as an influencer family, with all the sister’s struggling to extricate themselves from a life they hadn’t chosen for themsleves. Jensen is always saving her mother from her wild exploits at various parties.

Jensen and Christiano fall in love despite their awareness that they shouldn’t compromise the work contract. Jensen feels vulnerable as she knows that she is not seen as worthy of him and his family. It is at a family party that Christiano kisses her publicly to show that he cares for her and doesn’t want to hide their relationship.

However, Jensen has to leave her work obligations to run to save her addict mother but doesn’t tell him the truth (once again – she is feeling vulnerable). Christiano loses it and tells her she is not the one for him. Jensen seeks solace with her sisters who point out to her that Christiano did not have all the information to make a clear assessment of her choices. Christiano too regrets the way he spoke to Jensen, admitting that she had told him that she found it hard to be open about issues around her mother. He’s a bit of a dickhead but ultimately a remorseful one that tries to make sense of his own actions. The story was glamorous and so yummy addictive. A fun and enjoyable short read full with melodrama. So good!