amanda_readingnwritinglife's Reviews (180)

One of the things I really like about Kindle Alexander's writing is that they don't just do the normal sequence of couples meeting, falling in love, happily ever after, the end. Alexander's stories usually span a lot more time than normal romances, and I love that. We get to invest in the characters for longer than just the happy ending. Not to say that Alexander's books aren't happy, but we just get to see the couples living their normal lives most of the time. In this story, we meet two very different people. One is wealthy and wants to avoid any entanglements, so he usually pays someone to be his escort in whatever town he's in so he doesn't have to do relationships. The other one is raising his two younger brothers after their dad passes away. He has no money and has only just started medical school and has to drop out. What he knows for sure though, is that he doesn't want to be an escort. He works as a waiter instead. He wants a forever kind of relationship, and the two of them finally workout a way to make their relationship work for them both. I really liked this book, and I'll be reading the next one because Julian seems like a great character and I'm excited to see what ultimately happens to him.

This was one of my first buddy reads, and I'm so glad I did it. This book follows a girl who is living in two different worlds. Her mother is from a wealthy white family living near the nearby Ojibwe reservation, and her dad is from the Firekeeper family from the Ojibwe tribe. The description of this novel really does a good job of explaining what this is about without giving away any spoilers, so I'll just say that I loved almost everything about it. I gave it 4.5 stars on my rating system, but that means a 5 star over here. It is a book full of challenge and the despair in the unequal treatment of native individuals. It's also a book about hope and about holding onto the ways of the ancestors at the same time as living into the future. Daunis is a great character and I would love to read even a novella about how things turn out for her in the future.

This book was an awesome concept that was sometimes a little confusing for me to follow. I don't want to give away a lot of spoilers, so I'll just say that it was a very interesting look into what your life would be like if you got a do-over every time you died. Every time Ursula Todd dies (beginning with the night of her birth), we are taken right back to the time just before she dies, and we see it in a different way where she lives. This continues to happen, and not just to her. Her actions, or inactions, affect the lives of the people around her. I notice that it's only the first book in a series, so I will be reading the others to see what happens with the rest of her family members. It seems that there is a hint in this book that maybe her mother has this same ability as well as one of her siblings. It also seemed that the more do-overs she got, the better she was at anticipating that bad things were going to be happening. Just a fascinating, thought-provoking concept.

I love a romance series that follows a family. That's all it takes, really, for me to love a romance series. :) With the Love & Luck series, that's just what we get. There are 11 children in the Kelly family, and once you have them all straight, it makes it easier to follow along with their banter. I liked that she started with one of the kids in the middle, no oldest to youngest stuff around her. Declan is gay and is hanging out with his best friend, Heath, who is not gay. They run into Heath's ex-girlfriend, and she's newly engaged, and Heath freaks out and pretends to be with Declan. She's shocked, of course, and then posts about it on facebook where all of Heath's friends and family now start calling. It's the classic fake dating trope, and I thought it worked well in this book. I love a low angst book, and this provided. Now, I'm ready for all the other siblings... well, at least the single ones.

I have read lots of Lora Leigh books, so I feel like I went in knowing what to expect. I love the bodyguard trope, and this book was exactly what you think it is. He's her bodyguard... they fall in love... the end. Just kidding. This one actually has a little twist on that trope. At the beginning that are already in love, and she's been kidnapped. We start with him rescuing her and then she has no memory of him and what they meant to each other. It was a nice twist, and I liked it. Her father is a former member of the Russian mob, and he left the organization to take her away from it all. I liked the relationship she had with her father, and I'm excited because the next book seems to be about him.

This is the second book in this series, and it's about Ivan. He left with his daughter when she was a baby because he wanted out of the mafia life. Now his daughter is grown and is with her bodyguard and in love. He has found a woman who he thinks might be involved in the people who kidnapped his daughter. What actually happened was that her family has been trying to kill Ivan and his family since he was a little boy. Now, someone is after her and they both think it's her family. This book was good, and I'm ready to read the next one to find out what happened to his best friend, Ilya.

The Kelly family is back again. This book is about the youngest Kelly, well, the youngest Kellys are twins, so he's half of the youngest pair. Owen is a nurse and seems to thrive when he's at his job and helping other people settle down and deal with the things he deals with at the hospital, but everywhere else he seems to not be able to deal. He plays video games a lot, and meets someone on a game. They start voice chatting while playing and eventually things turn in their relationship. He has no idea that he's actually talking to his oldest brother's best friend. Blake has no idea he's been talking to his best friend's little brother, but he is definitely interested, and once he finds out, that doesn't stop him in the least. He does pause a little when he realizes that Owen is 19 years younger than him, but that doesn't stop him for long. I liked the banter back and forth, and I also liked how there was really pretty low angst in this one. Owen did have to officially come out to his family, and he did it at the same time that his twin sister revealed that she was pregnant. I'm ready to keep reading about the rest of the huge Kelly family!

Mary Coin, Walker Dodge, and Vera Dare all three tell their own story in this novel. None of them have had easy lives, even if some of them had more money than the others. None of them have all the answers they've been searching for, but something about them is connected in some way that goes beyond time.
This was a pick from my NPR concierge list from 2013. I wasn't sure what to think about it, and I was really confused at first about how the college professor was going to fit into the story, but once I caught on to how these people were interconnected, I really liked it. I think she captured the 1930's as well as anyone who didn't live through them could. I think she made the woman in the photograph into a real person with real problems, but also with real grit and determination. I really liked this book and I'm happy that it was picked from the list.

This finished off this series, and wrapped things up pretty nicely, so I'm not sure if there will be more in the series. I liked this series as a whole, but this book wasn't my favorite. It was really good in places, especially about the Dragon clan and all of the lore surrounding them, but the romance just wasn't as enjoyable to me. I liked Ilya, but he keeps using stupid excuses to not fall in love. He knows that she's his mate, and even went so far as to get a tattoo about his mate, but then he has no intentions of ever doing anything about it. Even when it's clear she's falling in love with him and he feels the same, he still has no intention of staying, and OF COURSE, they never communicate about their feelings until close to the very end.

I liked book one, but I didn't love it. I wasn't sure how I would feel about this one, and I was pleasantly surprised. I knew what was going to happen at the end before it happened, and it felt like something added in just to keep the story going. I really liked their relationship and how much they didn't like each other at the beginning. I really wanted the overarching goal to be solved in this book and then have something else be the problem in the next book instead of it being the same thing again in this book, therefore setting up the next book with the same problem.
Anyway, overall, I liked this one and I'll be reading the next one to see how things unfold.