book-review

TBR Challenge – New Beginnings: Reading Note 99

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I am on a blogging roll, playing catch up over my 3 days of no teaching and no marking, before assessments come in at the end of the week. I feel astounded at the free time. But also astounded that I am writing rather than reading. Let’s relish the moment and here is the May TBR Challenge topic of New Beginnings – here’s an international student love story.

Elle Kennedy’s Girl Abroad

When nineteen-year-old Abbey Bly gets the opportunity to study abroad for a year in London, it’s the perfect chance to finally slip out from under the thumb of her beloved but overbearing retired rock star father. She’s ready to be free, to discover herself – but first off, to meet the girls she’s rooming with. That is, until she arrives at her gorgeous new flat to discover those roommates are actually all boys. Charming, funny, insufferably attractive boys. And off-limits, with a rule against fraternizing between housemates after unwanted drama with the previous girl.

Abbey has never considered herself a rulebreaker. But soon, she’s lying to her father about her living situation and falling for not one, but two men she can’t have: her rugby-player roommate and a broody musician with a girlfriend. Not to mention, her research for school has gotten her tangled in a deeply hidden scandal of a high nobility family, surrounding her in secrets on all sides.

If there’s any hope of Abbey finding love, answers, or a future in London, she’ll have to decide which rules – and hearts – might be worth breaking . . .

I think if I was anywhere near being a teen/young adult, I would have enjoyed this study abroad, coming of age, love triangle, finding yourself away from your parents story. However, I am in my fifties and I just got increasingly annoyed as I read this book. I was especially agitated with the stereotyped characters – the American ingenue, Abbey and her accidentally rooming with 3 men in a share house in Notting Hill :: rolls eyes:: – the Black, gay Brit, the Hugh Grant Brit, the jacked laconic Australian.

Then you have the protective retired rockstar dad who is struggling with separation anxiety and not being close to his teenage daughter and seriously, I don’t blame the man. Abbey was way too young to be organising this trip into the foreign unknown on her own. Then add all her lies and manipulations so her father doesn’t realise that she wasn’t in a women’s dorm but with unknown men. This could have gone scarily wrong had it been a different genre, and it was all just too much for old-parent-me. I did giggle when Abbey considers buying her father an “emotional support rabbit” to get him through her year abroad.

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TBR Challenge – Fool’s Errand: Reading Note 98

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Wendy the SuperLibrarian provides a short description for April’s TBR challenge theme of Fool’s Errand. She writes that it is “some sort of harebrained/desperate/Hail Mary kind of motivation for one of the main characters, fake relationship/engagement etc. And I have to say that you can’t get more fake a relationship when you are convinced that your romantic fate is coupling with a plane. You read that correctly.

As always, I remind you that I have spoilers throughout my review. The ending is revealed, the crazy is revealed. Though is it a spoiler if it is mentioned in the blurb? Now hold onto your smelling salts, this review is hell-a sweary!

Kate Folk’s Sky Daddy.

The blurb is taken from GoodReads as the publisher blurb was much shorter.

Linda is doing her best to lead a life that would appear normal to the casual observer. Weekdays, she earns $20 an hour moderating comments for a video-sharing platform, then rides the bus home to the windowless garage she rents on the outskirts of San Francisco. But on the last Friday of each month, she indulges in her true passion: taking BART to SFO for a round-trip flight to a regional hub. The destination is irrelevant because each trip means a new date with a handsome stranger—a stranger whose intelligent windscreens, sleek fuselages, and powerful engines make Linda feel a way that no human ever could.

Linda knows that she can’t tell anyone she’s sexually obsessed with planes—nor can she reveal her belief her destiny is to “marry” one of her suitors by dying in a plane crash, thereby uniting her with her soulmate plane for eternity. But when an opportunity arises to hasten her dream of eternal partnership, and the carefully balanced elements of her life begin to spin out of control, she must choose between maintaining the trappings of normalcy and launching herself headlong toward the love she’s always dreamed of.

So there are no surprises when I say that Kate Folk’s Sky Daddy is a fucking wild ride (read?). It is everything that the blurb promised and yet it totally blindsided me. And I am further blindsided by the fact that this book is traditionally published by a Big 5 (Big 4?) company. I am not used to trad pubs going all out with wild stories and I wish there were a lot more easily available.

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TBR Challenge – Tropetastic: Reading Note 97

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I have been lost to my blogging world since March when I had the good fortune to watch and then read Heated Rivalry. My first post for this topic was a review on Heated Rivalry which then turned into a partial academic paper where I am now sitting on 800 words and a 20 slide presentation with nowhere to present it1. So instead, I am going to write about the road trip romance trope for Wendy SuperLibrarian’s TBR Challenge for March in October. Don’t mind me and my lateness. Also a reminder that I always have spoilers. Look away if you don’t want to know what happens at the end.

Cat Sebastian’s Peter Cabot Gets Lost.

The Blurb and Content notes taken straight from the author’s website:

Summer 1960:

After years of scraping by, Caleb Murphy has graduated from college and is finally getting to start a new life. Except he suddenly has no way to get from Boston to Los Angeles. Then, to add to his misery, there’s perfect, privileged Peter Cabot offering to drive him. Caleb can’t refuse, even though the idea of spending a week in the car with a man whose luggage probably costs more than everything Caleb owns makes him want to scream.

Peter Cabot would do pretty much anything to skip out on his father’s presidential campaign, including driving across the country with a classmate who can’t stand him. After all, he’s had plenty of practice with people not liking him much—his own family, for example. The farther Peter gets from his family’s expectations, the more he starts to think about what he really wants, and the more certain he becomes that what he wants is more time with prickly, grumpy Caleb Murphy. As they put more miles between themselves and their pasts, they both start to imagine a future where they can have things they never thought possible. Content notes available2.

The road trip is a romance in its own right, with the changeable settings, navigating the landscape. Then add to the road trip love and the coming together of two people who find themselves in forced proximity with all the joys and tensions that come from being in a car. The romance road trip is the modern day Odyssey, a heroes’ journey both to a destination and to finding their sense of self and sense of connection while fighting off the Cyclops and the Laistrygenians. Unlike the wine-dark sea—antiquity’s water superhighway—in the modern day version, the romance is grounded, it is earth based, trees, deserts, lakes, mountains, terra firma, soil beneath their feet, tar for the tyre treads. The modern roadtrip, just like in the Odyssey, culminating with the love proposition, the conviction and reliability of the marriage bed, a journey worthy of courtship3. Cat Sebastian affirms the role of the roadtrip as a narrative choice in this book, writing that “travelling across the country to be with a lover is a venerable tradition”, and for Peter and Caleb, this is story is centred on their own queer journey together.

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TBR Challenge – Vintage: Reading Note 96

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It has been a sweltering, wet, gluggy February, and I am not enjoying the humidity. Breathing thick muggy air is not conducive to good sleep. The consequence of less sleep is more reading and I have had a stellar reading start to this year, already clocking 16 books to-date. So far, I have only had one five-star fiction read and it is my TBR book for February with this month’s TBR challenge theme being Vintage. Though my book of choice is relatively recent (a 2025 publication), I spent 3 months on the library holds list, sadly missing the festive holiday reading period that the book pitches itself towards, before receiving it late in January. But first…the blurb.

Reading Note 96: Vintage

Grace and Henry’s Holiday Movie Marathon by Matthew Norman

Blurb: The new year had barely begun when Grace White and Henry Adler both lost their spouses. Now, nearly a year later, the first holiday season since their “Great and Terrible Sadnesses” approaches. Although their mothers’ scheme to matchmake the two surviving spouses, it’s clear that neither is ready to date again. Yet no one understands what they are going through better than each other, and a delicate friendship is born. When Henry sees an ad for a Christmas movie marathon-once an annual tradition for him and his wife-Grace offers to watch some films with him, despite her aversion to a few of his picks. Her two young kids, Ian and Bella, also join in whenever possible bedtimes permitting, of course. With each movie, Grace and Henry’s shared grief eases as they start to see a life beyond the sadness. But as they draw closer, other romantic possibilities leave them uncertain about their future together. Is their bond merely the result of loneliness and shared circumstances, or have they found something that’s worth taking a shot at . . . again?

The book’s two protagonists Grace and Henry were both widowed earlier in the year. Their concerned mums (who are in the same bookclub) orchestrate their widowed adult children to meet-up, much to the horror of both Grace and Henry who are just not ready to start moving on from their grief (I had to control my “WHAT!? It hasn’t been a year yet? Are these mothers OK???). Though Grace and Henry completely rule out a romantic connection, they do admit that perhaps they could try towards a friendship of kind. One where they connect while viewing vintage holiday films over the holiday season, occasionally including Grace’s two young children, and other people to also watch.

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