books_ergo_sum's Reviews (933)

I love a widowed heroine, I love a reformed rake, love epistolary elements, and, as much as reading is an escape from The Kid Life™️ for me, I live for the heart-squeezes of a love interest feeling parental about a single parent MC’s children 🥹

But mostly I’m a bit stunned by how excellently these tropes were written here—and I’ve been pondering why that is. Here’s my theories:

✨ The very realistic (and even legalese) setup for the premise added well-earned tension. I can’t resist a book with a bibliography and I think the attention to detail made this book feel dramatic without hyperbole, which I appreciated.

✨ The characterization was top-tier. Everyone had some flaws. I liked how we let our rake Nate dig himself into a hole (on-page) for a little bit before his redemption arc started. And I liked how Cora wasn’t just a patiently angelic mother, she had some things to work on too. Plus, the tie-in to Raymond, Nate’s older brother/guardian from the novella, made me feel feelings.

✨ The pacing was slow, in a good way. "On-page” was the name of the game. It had an intimate, almost Mrs. Dalloway feeling because nothing was skipped or merely gestured at. I loved how dialogue, actions, and even the steam meaningfully mapped on to plot and character arcs. I don’t know.. the whole book just had an immediacy that was very compelling.

Plus, Nate Travers can get it 😮‍💨

First of all, this cover? Obsessed. The title, the font, the swan?? The 1970s-esque regency costume plus full glam eyeshadow? All of it.

I loved the beginning. The ‘trespassing to retrieve my swan named Gerald’ meet-cute hooked me right in. April was such a nut 😆

For me, the special sauce of this historical romance was the way April felt like a regular girl. Can you call someone an Around The Way Girl if she’s from rural regency England rather than 1980s Brooklyn? I don’t know, she just didn’t have that paper doll/‘I don’t know what a clit is’ feeling that some historicals get trapped in.

I liked all the romcom shenanigans our characters got up to. My only wish was that the all-day conversation they had where they fell for each other had been at least partially on-page.

Still, a very fun and surprisingly heart-squeezey KU novella.

I’m sad that I had such a meh time with this one.

Love a big-donged blue alien. I mean, who doesn’t? Also, loved the American frontier-ish colony in space premise—I only need the barest hint of plausibility to justify horses and saloons on an alien planet with big blue neighbours, because that’s just so fun.

But, I wanted to feel more feelings. The pining didn’t land. The ILY thoughts had me Huh-ing. And I wanted way way more scenes with both MCs together. Instead, the vast majority of this book was conversations with the other alien brothers. It felt like the story was prioritizing setup for the rest of the series rather than developing this romance.

Also, the spice was super underwhelming. A bunch of fade to black scenes and then when we got something on-page, this heroine’s hair trigger orgasms annoyed me. A lady-orgasm after one thrust and zero foreplay?? No ma’am. An: “As soon as his mouth closed over the swollen bud, she climaxed” …what does it even mean??

A fun premise, a heartwarming group of brothers, but lame-o sexy times and not enough romance plot. It was pretty putdownable, so I’m going with two stars.

I should have hated this. Illustrated cover, single POV, a quirky heroine dumped by her fiancé, and the slowest slow burn that ever slow burned with her new roommate…

But I kinda loved it? 

This was a book lovers book (complete with love interest walking in on her listening to a sex scene in her audiobook, sans headphones 😆). The premise was fun. Our heroine was trying to manufacture a second chance romance by re-dating all her exes. Her new hot fireman roommate was helping her and they were feeling feelings in the sweetest, most heart-squeezy way 🥰🥰

Loved the characterization of our heroine Tara. She was a bookstagrammer (and you could tell the author had been a bookstagrammer too), a hopeless romantic, extraverted, and... just generally nuts 😆

Also, I’m rarely feeling the comedy in a rom-com. But here, I was genuinely laughing out loud. The heroine’s self-deprecating humour, the goofy situations she got into, and the adorable banter with her roommate Trevor was all so great.

This felt unputdownable while I was reading. And I was getting such five star vibes! But a ‘just okay’ ending knocked it down to a four. The combination of single POV and our clammed-up piner hero made the declarations from him at the end feel a tad abrupt. And maybe I don’t like single POV books where the non-POV character also has a character arc? I wish we’d had more of a front row seat to Trevor’s growth, and weren’t just told about it after the fact.

Still, this was adorable!

aka, How Not To Write A Slow Burn

I don’t know, guys. No exaggeration—this book was awful.

The core of slow burn, for me, is maximum interaction between the MCs with lots of on-page sexual/emotional tension.

And that’s exactly what this was missing. You’d think that having our heroine rent a garage apartment from Rhodes would involve some forced proximity… and you’d be wrong 😑 By the 50+% mark we were still in the ‘one head nod from across the driveway every few weeks’ part. And I was dying inside.

And when the romance began, it was all off-page! This book really had the gall to to have LITERALLY NOTHING happen for hundreds of pages and then be all like ‘oh yeah, these past weeks we’ve hung out a few times and now I know so much about him.’ I don’t think so! On-page, or it didn’t happen.

And then we had this classic slow burn cop-out: ‘I’ll be gone for weeks for work.’ Followed immediately by abrupt ILY declarations and then more “the next couple of weeks went by in an absolute blur” off-page nonsense 🤯

But it had to be off-page, because nothing made any sense. They were fully together, sleeping in the same bed every night, but it was still a “slow burn” because they weren’t holding hands or kissing yet? WHAT WAS THE REASON?? Other than ‘we still have 100+ pages to go and time to waste.’ But don’t worry, there was a miscommunication-y third act break up too because, why not? 🙃

Plus all this:
👎 The cringiest nicknames I’ve ever read.
👎 Seriously, what is going on with the pee?? This woman could not go one hour without peeing. And when she talked about going “poopy” (with zero children in the room)…💀
👎 Terrible writing—it was repetitive, circular, and even had mistakes?
👎 And character writing that sacrificed depth for hotness too many times to result in meaningful personalities for these MCs.

I’ve loved every other Mariana Zapata I’ve read but this book is making me question everything 🤷🏻‍♀️

By some excellent-author-sorcery, this book was literally everything I loved in some of my all-time favourite fantasy books, combined 😍 It had Game of Thrones political machinations plus morally grey characters vibes, From Blood and Ash vampire kingdoms with gods vibes, Hunger Games gladiator battles to the death vibes, and our heroine was a bit of a serial killer? A bit Batman? I LOVED her!!

We had enemy vampire clans on the brink of war, a human FMC raised by a vampire king, a sexy vampire MMC, and THEY WERE IN A MULTI-EVENT BATTLE TO THE DEATH AGAINST EACH OTHER. It was everything!

If you love ENEMIES to lovers, you will be just as obsessed with this as I was. Whew, these enemies had ✨layers✨ If my E2L couple isn’t actively trying to murder each other like these two, I don’t want it!

My kryptonite? When enemies have a sentence they say to hit pause on being enemies and say something vulnerable and:

“Give me one honest thing.”

Turned. Me. Into. Goo. Every. Time.

I’d heard rumors that the ending of this book was 🔥 But I was still not prepared for how effing good that ending was!! One of the top three endings of all time, for sure!

I need the next book! I’m not okay!!

On one level, this book was solid. A starchy widower-ish hero engaged to our heroine’s sister—and all the mess that comes with that. Our heroine Lily was conniving and impulsive, which is always fun. She’d had a child out of wedlock, which was a compelling backstory. And these two had decent compatibility.

But there was also a bunch of stuff that was just meh, for me 🤷🏻‍♀️

I’ve figured out what I’m missing in these earlier Kleypas novels: the heartwarming family and friend dynamics of the Wallflowers, Hathaways, and Ravenels. There was one friendship in here, our heroine Lily and Derek Craven, but I don’t think it was the most well-written friendship? And they still had their guards up, which interfered with my favourite part of book friendships: scenes of the MCs being themselves with other characters in a way that lets their characterization shine. The result: more telling than showing and more character flatness than I expect from a Kleypas novel.

There were some minor consent issues (both him against her and her against him). But I’m mostly bugged at how they never got addressed? I wanted a grovel or some growth. I know it’s partly the age of the book but still, not my fav.

And there was some clumsiness to the storytelling. Like, why was there a bear? 😆 But mostly, so many random side characters were introduced who served no function beyond performing an info-dumpy monologue, and I couldn’t help but read said monologue with my *sceptical face* 🤨 

Plus it’s 2023, I’m getting tired of my ‘ruined’ heroines being this virginal, you know?

This author is single-handedly reinvigorating my love of fantasy romance 🥰 

I used to be a major fantasy lover. But then, my tastes started to change.. the Chosen One characters were too flat, the world they were fighting against too simple, and the romance plots way way too tame.

Except, these characters were amazing! It’s not just that they had flaws or were morally grey, it’s that each one of their personality traits sat on a knife’s edge between good and bad. And they were so well-conceived and complementary. I feel like so much thought went in to them and how they would play off each other, especially our two MCs and their romance, and it really paid off.

And I loved how this author really ‘went there’ with the fantasy world and politics. We had all the fun stuff—different types of magic users, a magic school, and baddy battles—but this setting also had a ton of grit. It was complicated, morally grey, and extremely compelling.

Plus the writing was just so good? Like, for most of the book, the FMC was speaking in her second language and ~you could tell~. I was really blown away by how well written all the scenes were, how the story built, the timing of reveals, just all of it!

To be fair, the romance plot in this book was much sweeter than the other book I just read from this author (The Serpent and the Wings of Night). If you want something hornier, go for that one. But if you want more fantasy vibes, this was an excellent beginning to a adult fantasy romance series!

Oh yeah, this series feels like it’ll be addictive.

This book just had that alien romance secret sauce. That ‘human women crash landing on a planet with tall, big-donged, super earnest, and intensely into their fated mate alien guys’ secret sauce 😆

A read-in-one-day KU alien romance? I’m being so picky by not giving this one five stars. A super intense barbarian alien guy who fell so hard, more language barrier silliness than I’ve ever read before, fun adventure stuff on a harsh planet. And this was a good couple to introduce the series, their empathy and level-headedness balanced the craziness of the situation they were in. Plus, it was hot—the planet and the smüt 🥵

The only thing that brought my rating down was how the first little part occurred on earth and on the spaceship (and I was starting this a tad sceptical because this was a new-to-me author). As much as I love a show-don’t-tell moment, I’m also getting to the point where I just want the shipload of double-digit human ladies to crash-land on an alien planet in the first chapter. Explain the backstory to me later, you know? Get me to the bonkers alien meet-cute/meet-disaster ASAP 😂

Oh this was fun.

This alien hero was nuts. A baddy. A narcissist. A tad psychotic. Would I want him as my fated mate? Absolutely not. Was it fun to watch a fictional human woman deal with all THAT? Heck yeah.

So much horniness. So much crazy. So much language barrier. I was dying 🤣

I want to give this one five stars so bad but it had one little flaw, imo. It occurred simultaneously with the first book and, instead of glossing over those scenes or dialogues repeated from book one, it included them again here. It didn’t happen a lot, like two or three times. But it made me skim them (I mean, I literally read the first book yesterday so it’s not like I forgot them already 😆). And I feel like any skimming I do should be reflected in my rating.

But so fun!