charliauthor's Reviews (531)

Haha this was really good! This was recommended by a friend and i practically devoured it. Let down I felt by the dragged out ending that turned into some bonnie and clyde mafia detective thing when it started out more kink fest. Either way, it was really funny and actually had a lot of heart. A cinnamon roll son of a serial unaliver wasnt something i thought i would ever need lol Josh is the sweetest little weirdo i've read in a long time and i had a thoroughly good time. the smut was smutting even though it felt quite congested at the end.
I respected how honest it was about kinks and the realistic nature of how one would deal with this stalker nature and i found it quite clever. a good FMC with common sense and good banter throughout, i thought it was good.

Even though it was a quick novella with much of the same, it felt too rushed for me and came a little out of left field. I did like the sexy times as usual but it just didnt have the same heart as the full novels

I enjoyed this well enough and mostly because it was a surprise that it was set in London. I wasnt a great fan of the influencer element simply because i find their existence so grating lol but other than that, it was a cute love story even if a little obvious.
I didnt understand how Bailey didnt catch on quick enough that Caspian liked her. It was so obvious that it felt silly to have drawn it out for so long.

I didnt love this one as much as the others because again it felt too drawn out for no real reason. I liked the dynamic of Amber and Finn. The grumpy sunshine trope is always a good one and there was some added emotion with Amber's parents which i liked. However, where this was let down for me was the lack of spice. Simply for my tastes, it was too drawn out for not enough pay off

The reasons this series is enjoyable continue to run throughout. The family dynamic, the hot brothers, the good smut, the strong and beautiful Black women, its all great. What I didnt love so much about this one was the back and forth between Justin and Toni when they knew full well they wanted to be together. The miscommunication or in this case just straight up not talking got really annoying by the fiftieth time they did it and i just wanted it to get to the reconciliation!
once it did however, it was super cutesy and i loved the epilogue seeing all the brothers getting their happily ever afters.
This is positive Black love in abundance and i really enjoy them. I'd happily pick up more from this author because she is also extremely funny and i love the dialogue and the banter!

I really enjoyed this. I loved the family dynamic of the Wright brothers and how they interact with their women and their father. Theyre so respectful and sweet but when they start getting at each other and having banter its really funny which i appreciate because its so relatable.
I loved that the AAVE was in the dialogue but that the book was still written standardly so it didnt start to read confusing in parts.
The smut is good from this author and will always be top tier because it features Black love which Im always a fan of. The men are hot hot hot and the addition of Joseph being a doctor was even hotter.

Loved loved loved!

This is my second book from this author and I really enjoy her work. There are times when I need a break from the dark stuff that I enjoy and just want some cookie cutter, give you diabetes type stuff and this is one of those books.

I adored this for the relatability and nostalgia. Much like my recent read Twelfth Knight, there was a lot of love given to pop culture and 90s/00s media which I was lapping up like a dog! hahaha
Eva and Saint were just the cutest and while Eva was a lovely FMC, Saint really stole my heart with his easy going attitude and how comfortable he was with himself. He helped Eva grow and it was so cute to witness. I loved how grounded her was and self assured while still having moments of vulnerability.
I liked Eva's dynamic as well and even though I knew it was part of her arc, I didnt love how dependent she was at first. All of her friends seemed to have something going for them and she kind of felt like the one that gets away with everything just because she's pretty. She was obviously against this which made her likeable but it didnt show how much of a passenger princess she was, which im not a super fan of.

I liked her friends, even Oyin by the end even though we all have or have had a hateful frenemy like her in our lives lol i did like how she turned out to have demons of her own that made her less mean. some people have to learn the hard way i guess. i despised jayden and logan haha simply because ive known Jayden and Logan's in this life who are all shameless little bastards who just need a kick haha

I loved this a lot a am happy to add this to my list of cutesie YA that i can read whenever I need a pick me up! 

I read this as it was the book chosen for my new book club and if not for that simple fact, I never would have finished it. This book was bizarre in one of the worst ways I've ever had the opportunity to witness. I'd like to just say it was bad, that it was a book I just personally didn't mesh with, so I'll move on from it, but the levels in which this book managed to shock and offend me by being published in the first place, needs to be addressed. 

 

First off, it needed development. The jumps between voice and time and dialogue were just so non sensical. There was so much promise at the start and even at points in the middle, but it just never lifts off in the way the blurb implies/promised. 

 

What I was able to get from this is that the world is currently in a post war time environment where, what appears to be Russia has taken over the world and is now known as the Allied Force. This has happened because of a meteor crashing I think and some other stuff that’s not quite clear. We’re not sure who the Allied Force are allied with or against, since it seems that they literally have control over the entire world already so who exactly are they fighting. The UK and the US are known as the Transatlantic Empire but don’t really do much in the novel or the world it seems, so not sure why this distinction is made. Anyway, the Russian Nazis rule the world and in a weird twist of things, they were actually the most interesting thing throughout as the writer seemed to have really fleshed out who they were and their motivations for world domination. How they condition their men into soldiers, how they view the world, how the main Hitler guy High General Stormbane rules was so sinister. I enjoyed reading the dynamic of he and his family, especially his sons Maximus and Vorian, but we’ll get to that. 

 

The book take place during an event called the Great Hunt in which the oppressed are forced to take part in a Hunger Games type event which is televised and everyone watching thinks isn’t real. Our main character, Coa is stressed because if she doesn’t win the game – it’s not clear how – her whole family will be killed. The massive problem with this is that Coa’s family is adopted and therefore she has no blood relation to them. This means, that despite DNA tracking being the reason as to how the AF could find her family, this wouldn’t in fact work since they have no DNA in common. In addition to this, at the very start of the book, Coa actively says she is willing to die when one of the soldiers corners her. If that’s the case, then what are the stakes and why are you fighting so hard in the Great Hunt to save your family? Its contradictory and downright stupid. At one-point shes even asked by some bad guys whether she has family and she simply says no and they just… believe her. So how are they ever in danger? 

Coa is in this position ultimately because she is in a labour camp but its never made entirely clear how she got there. She seems to have been some kind of feral child in a human zoo with no verbal communication but by the time we meet her, she’s perfectly understandable. She is also meant to have some kind of lightning magic that after being mentioned, doesn’t play any major part in the story. She mentions there being some kind of price to pay for using but this but its never paid as she uses them at two convenient points in the book and nothing happens to her because of it so why not use it to kill everyone around you? 

 

Speaking of killing people, this brings us onto the second main character/POV from a girl called Ife. Ife is ethnic, the only ethnic in the whole book it seems and she is married to the son of the Allied Forces, a perfect soldier named Maximus. Although magic is supposed to originate in Africa, the only African descendent in the book has no magic of her own. However, I will say that Maximums and Ife were the most entertaining for me as I was the most invested in their pseudo romance and the complexity of their relationship. On the one hand, she spends her time saying she is going to kill Maximus and bring down the Allied Force but its not shown how and at no point does she in fact, try to kill him. She spends most of her time saying she doesn’t care for him while showing that she does in fact care for him and sleeping with him. I guess it’s meant to show how she has to do what she must to survive but since she seems to have willing run to safety with this man and his family – which makes no sense since they’re her mortal enemies and of course is never explained – it reads hollow. She says she ran to him when she was thirteen and married him when she was fifteen. How? Why? To broker peace amongst AF and foreigners. That doesn’t seem to be happening when foreigners are still treated like shit, Ife included. 

 

The book was given an extra star however, simply for the ending in which Ife and Maximus play the biggest part. I can honestly say I didn’t see it coming in such a way. It was truly shocking and exciting and had it been more like that throughout the book/from the start, then it might have been great. The points that led up to it were so well woven into what was happening that while it came out of nowhere, you did realise that the clues had been laid beforehand. Where it was let down is that because there was so much other bullshit in and around it, you didn’t realise that these things were in fact important, and not just Ife being repetitive. 

 

Lastly, I will point out that I understood this was a book with black and brown characters but everyone was blonde haired and blue eyed. Maybe there were some lines crossed here but I was so confused by this and even more so by the image of the author themselves who I’m not sure if they’re even a real person. Im not one to scream AI from the rooftops but coupled with how this book ever got printed, it just doesn’t feel remotely like this is a real person or serious book.