Riley is a teenage musical fanatic and has been dreaming of being the student director of her school's spring musical since she became a high schooler. There's only one problem - the school has canceled the musical, citing lack of interest and funding. Even though she's being forced to work at her dad's game store as a punishment while she's grounded, Riley is determined to find a way to bring her theater dreams back to reality. But when Riley panics after running into her ex with his new girlfriend, she's forced to deal with another unforeseen issue: convincing everyone, including her ex, that her cranky coworker Nathan is her new boyfriend. Nathan agrees to the scheme since his crush pays heightened attention to him any time Riley is nearby. Between work, finding a way to save the musical, learning how to play D&D, and possibly convincing Nathan to be her date to homecoming, Riley has her hands full.

This book is just a straight-up delight. As a YA novel, the stakes are reasonably low, but the characters are written in a way that you understand why the stakes seem impossibly high to them. You remember what its like to want to impress the people around you, maintain the hobbies you love, and maybe catch the eye of your crush who gives you butterflies when they're nearby. 

Maybe it's because I was a wannabe theater kid (and actual speech & debate kid), but I was thoroughly charmed by Riley. She had reasonable angst about her parents' divorce and having to spend time with her dad. Making a fool out yourself in front of your ex? Totally relatable. Convincing yourself that you're merely bending, and not breaking, the rules set by your mom? Also totally relatable.

Nathan was the perfect foil to Riley's bubbly extrovert. He was slightly moody, protective of his friends, defensive about his interests, and exactly the type of nerdy smart boy that would have been my catnip in high school. I loved his interactions with his friends, and how immediately his indifferent facade would drop when his crush was around. Honestly, I loved all of the D&D guys - they were a great group of different personalities while still being a believable group of friends. 

I don't usually go for YA, but this was the exact low-stakes, high entertainment, easy read I hoped it would be.

Lila is a baker who thought she escaped her tiny hometown, but she's called back to help her Tia Rosie save the family restaurant. Lila thinks putting her life on hold is the worst part of returning home, at least until a horrible restaurant critic, Lila's ex-boyfriend, suddenly dies while eating at Tita Rosie's restaurant. When Lila finds herself and her family at the center of the investigation into his death, she decides to embark on her own investigation, leveraging family ties, petty grudges, and a lifetime of small-town history, in an attempt to clear her own name.

First things first - Longanisa is the perfect name for a dachshund and I will broker no arguments to the contrary.

This book is a charming and funny mystery with fun characters and an interesting undercurrent of family dynamics that impact the story in meaningful ways. That intertwining of cultures was the best part of the story for me because it not only drove the story, but it informed some of the character beats in ways that made them more grounded in reality.

That being said, I did find myself frustrated with Lila, which is a difficult way to feel about the main character. When her family members, especially Tia Rosie, who were not born here and were immigrants to the area, would talk to the police, I understood where that impulse was coming from, as misguided as it sometimes was. It's a common default among some immigrant communities. But when Lila, born and raised in this town, whose longtime friend/possible love interest who just so happens to be a lawyer is telling her to wait for him and not say anything (completely reasonable and appropriate advice!!!!), and she starts spilling her guts without much prompting...ugh. I can usually turn off my lawyer brain and suspend disbelief for stories involving law enforcement, but this one just nagged at me.

In the end, I get it. This is meant to be fun and somewhat lighthearted, and not taken too seriously. But it made it difficult to jump back in and root for the truth to come out, at least from my perspective. However, for people who love cozy mysteries and questionable decision-making, this is a perfectly charming and entertaining option. 

Sybil is a free-spirited, fun, and exuberant individual, devoted to her friends and family, but struggling to ground herself in work and standard adulthood. Kiran, on the other hand, is serious to a fault, having left medical school to come run the family donut shop after his grandfather falls ill. Sybil and Kiran have undeniable chemistry, and when a sudden hook-up results in Sybil losing her winning lotto ticket at the shop, Kiran's plea to find her goes viral and drums up business for the shop. The pair decide that a fake relationship will solve two problems: save Kiran's failing business, and make Sybil appear more grounded to her family.

I love a good opposites attract/fake dating trope, so I was primed to love this. I enjoyed Sybil as a character, and I appreciated how well-developed her family dynamic was because it explained her thought process that led to entering the relationship with Kiran. I had her pegged as

ADHD coded

, so I was very glad that issue was discussed toward the end of the book.

I'm always on board with a moody, broody male lead, and Kiran did not disappoint in that regard. His love for his family was obvious, and his clear indecision about his future was well-established. I understood why he would want to put off the harder decisions and stay at the shop. I never questioned whether his character would make those choices.

My issues with the book are twofold. First, the amount of money that Sybil wins was laughably absurd. And I get it; Megabucks and Powerball jackpots can become huge. But it detracted from her family's concerns about her squandering the money when it was in the 9-digit range. It may have been more effective to have a smaller jackpot that helped illustrate the problem her mom and sister identified. It would have been more realistic, so to speak.

Second, the issue leading to the third-act break-up...I can't. That was close to unforgiveable.

Regardless of his ambivalence about returning, I couldn't suspend disbelief about Kiran forgiving Sybil for completely wrecking his medical school career.

It was a really hard pill to swallow, and one that made it hard to root for them in the end. 

Overall, despite my misgivings, I still liked Sybil and Kiran, I liked the other characters, and I wanted them to succeed. But it was a rough go for a few chapters.

Ginny and Elsie are the best of friends, despite one awkward interaction when Ginny asked Elsie to go to a school dance as their date and she declined. But now they're both young adults and trying to figure out the lives they want for themselves. For Elsie, does that mean marrying her college boyfriend after he plans the wedding and asks her to show up for it in seven days? Actually...no. But now Elsie has a non-refundable honeymoon trip with no plus one. Enter Ginny, looking for any way to escape the mundanity of the job they hate, and always willing to spend more time with the woman they've had a crush on for years. There's only one rule on their vacation adventure: Elsie gets what she wants, as long as she asks for it. But how does that translate to real life when the vacation ends?

This is a very charming and lighthearted story of friends to lovers to something more. In terms of characters, Elsie is a little tough to relate to - being so unwilling to make a decision that your fiancé plans the whole wedding a week in the future? That is some major indecision! As she starts to stand up for herself and find confidence within her family and work, you start to understand what Ginny sees in her. But to be honest, it took a little time to get there.

I loved Ginny. They were grounded and relatable - who hasn't wanted to walk out of a dead-end job? Who wouldn't want to go do pub trivia with a group of tough-love lesbians and drag queens? The care and concern that Ginny had for Elsie was lovely, although it did feel like they may have underestimated her at times. 

Overall, I adored the diversity of identity highlighted throughout the story, and was charmed by the central love story. I can't deny that I wanted to spend more time in the pub with Ginny's mentor and pub team than I did in the cabana with Elsie, but I was ultimately rooting for the pair to get their sh*t together and find the happily ever after they both deserved.

It's always hard for me to rate a memoir, but this one strays a little from the traditional "here's my life" sort of format. Instead, each chapter is dedicated to a failed project that Bruce Vilanch was involved with in some way - as a writer, actor, personality, or all of the above. From The Star Wars Christmas Special to Snow White at the Oscars, this is full of deeply inside-baseball factoids for Hollywood buffs. As someone who hasn't watched most of the projects highlighted in the book, I still enjoyed the stories for the tidbits of information that you can't find in a standard review. Getting the gossip on how certain projects came to be served as an entertaining way to pass the time, and Bruce's narration lends the winks and nudges exactly where you think they belong.

Noelle is a workaholic who makes up for a lack of social life or love life with more hours at the office. Still nursing a broken heart while trying to make headway in a male-dominated profession, Noelle avoids socializing with her colleagues and prefers to stay home so she can build the nest egg that would provide some comfort from her financial anxiety. But when Noelle stops by a night market one Friday night and eats the best dumplings of her life, she wakes up on Saturday to discover that she's reliving Friday all over again. As Noelle lives that Friday over and over again, support comes from two surprising places: another woman who seems to be in the same predicament, and Cam, a brewery owner who always experiences deja vu when Noelle is around. 

This book ended up being so much more than a Groundhog Day re-do. It took the premise of reliving the same day and used it to examine how we interact with others, what we can learn from each other, and how to determine what we truly need for ourselves. 

The good news is that Noelle is a deceptively interesting character - a useful trait since you have to spend the same day with her over and over. She reads like a typical rom-com style heroine, but she's struggling with issues of identity, success, and culture. As she realizes that she can spend money in a way she would never usually do, Noelle unpacks the internalized issues she has from the way her parents spent money in her childhood. She questions how her identity as a multi-racial individual changes the way she moves through the world. And most profoundly, Noelle gains empathy for her sister's mental health struggles as Noelle experiences what its like to have people reject the truth she's trying to tell them. 

My one wish is that we spent a little more time with Cam. We get snippets of his life in the form of short chapters that are interspersed with Noelle's continuous Friday loop, but I found myself wanting more. Cam has his own issues of identity and family expectations which we primarily hear about through Noelle's interactions with him, but there seemed to be an opportunity to flesh him out even more throughout the story.

But overall, in terms of a story that kept me engaged, rooting for the central pair, and still thinking about it after the fact, Time Loops & Meet Cutes certainly hits that mark. It's charming and easy, while still tackling harder subjects in a way that's appropriate to the story. Definitely recommend.

This is another charmer in the Taming of the Dukes series, this time a spin on Emma/Clueless. Vesper is the picture perfect daughter of a Duke, and a previous diamond of the season. No one can truly deny her charms, until her childhood love, Aspen, Duke of Greydon, returns to London after an extended research trip to the Americas. The pair can't quite patch over the misunderstandings that defined their interactions in their adolescent years, but Vesper is still willing to help Greydon find a match for his ward, if only to show off her matchmaking prowess. Meanwhile, Aspen has returned to solve the mystery of his father's incapacitation and death, all while working to pass a new law that will aim to protect against asylum patients from suffering his father's fate. Of course, to meet those goals, Aspen will require the assistance of Vesper's father, bringing the two former friends into close proximity in more ways than one.

I say this every time, but I just adore this series. The spin on classic stories is so much fun, especially as you get to pick up on the Easter egg references to the source material (e.g.,

Vesper helping with documents and her father's solicitor yelling at her a la Cher in Clueless

). It makes for a very entertaining time.

As I read the series out of order, I had a decent grasp on Vesper as a character and knew there was more to her than meets the eye. I appreciated getting to know her as a fully fleshed out character here, particularly the focus on how she viewed herself and her perceived inadequacies. It humanized her in a very real way, making the "perfect future duchess" persona more relatable overall. 

Aspen makes for a wonderful foil to Vesper. He so clearly wants to be anywhere but a society event, but understands he must fulfill his duties if he ever wants to clear his father's name. His dedication to that goal is a commendable character trait, and his heartache makes him the perfect "But I can fix him!" kind of swoony lead.

I think this is probably ranked third for me of the series, if only because the miscommunication trope is hard for me to love. While used in many books, including the other two in the series, this one was the one where I felt like I was sighing, "JUST ASK HIM/HER," over and over. But with two well-defined leads in Vesper and Aspen, an entertaining story, and a lot of heart, there's enough here to recommend despite any misgivings I may have had.

In modern day London, a special government agent known only as a Bridge meets her new charge, Commander Graham Gore, previously a member of a failed arctic expedition in the mid-1800s, now alive and somehow living in London alongside a few other travelers from ages gone by. This story alternates between the current day and Gore's expedition in the late 1840s, weaving together the tale of how a man who was, by all accounts, dead for centuries, is now alive and learning to acclimate alongside his historic cohorts and the Bridge.

This book kind of defies explanation, and there were times that I, quite frankly, felt like I might not be able to fully understand it. Then I realized that I was making the mistake of trying to guess where the story was going, rather than allowing it to unfold in the order the author intended. Once I stopped trying to be smarter than the book, I was able to appreciate the story beats, the turns it took, and the ending that I absolutely did not see coming.

This is a book that requires you to pay attention. There a deliberate pacing to the story, you meet characters who act in a specific manner that better informs who they will become down the line. The beating heart of the story is Graham, who manages to ground the absurdity of the situation (time travel is real?) in compassion, a willingness to learn, and the ability to be open to those around him, including the Bridge. 

While I may not sound effusive about this book, I still find myself drifting back to some of its themes for further consideration. Enjoyed seems like the wrong verb, but appreciated may be more apt. Overall, I suspect I'll find myself revisiting this one after I've had time to marinate on it for a while. 

Mabel Willicker is a cheerful and friendly ghostwriter, but doesn't quite have the confidence to write her own stories. When she gets selected as a replacement ghostwriter for Alfie Harding, she's not very excited, especially since Alfie has already gone through multiple writers and lives up to his jerky reputation. Alfie is no more excited than she is - Mabel is everything he's not, and he's not ready to adopt her particular brand of lighthearted cheeriness. But as they each get to know the true person below the grump and sunshine surfaces, Mabel and Alfie learn that it may not take much to adapt to each other.

This is the first of two Ted Lasso-inspired stories, with Alfie as the stand-in for Roy Kent. Does that mean I'm particularly predisposed to enjoying this? Yes. Is Roy Kent my favorite TV grump? Also yes.

So all that being said, this is a light and fluffy confection of a story, with very low stakes and an outcome that you know is coming the whole time. Mabel is a lovely FMC who makes mostly reasonable decisions, but is also frustratingly obtuse about Alfie and his feelings. The miscommunication toward the end of the story is as frustrating as miscommunication often is, but that's obviously not entirely on Mabel.

But while Alfie also bears responsibility for the 3rd-act breakup, I still adore him because he's Roy Kent-coded, whether that's fair or not. The way he clearly loves Mabel is wonderful, and his gruff exterior is very funny and charming.

If you're a fan of Ted Lasso, this is a lovely homage. It's very light, low stakes, and not particularly deep, but still a fun way to spend a few hours. 

Lord Christopher Eden maintains sole responsibility for his family estate, as the last surviving member. As such, Christopher is duty-bound to seek out a wife and maintain the estate, but he is a "man of unusual make," so any marriage will be one for the sake of image, rather than love or attraction. But Christopher reluctantly ventures into the ton and the marriage market, helped along by his new, and troublingly attractive, valet, James. Honesty is paramount, so Christopher won't lie to any prospective brides, but in maintaining his integrity, he risks ruin on multiple fronts.

All I could think while reading this book is that Lord Christopher is so lovely and pure and must be protected at all costs. Losing his entire family and having to protect his true nature has necessarily isolated him, and it explains his reluctance to open himself up to outsiders. This provides the context for his initial interactions with James, ensuring that their relationship to one another makes sense. Nothing feels forced; rather, everything feels entirely earned. I also love the fact that Christopher will not lie to a prospect simply to ensure he gets to protect his estate. This decision provides a level of depth to his character that helps round out his characterization.

And James must also be protected at all costs. I absolutely adored getting more information about James' backstory because it humanized a character that might otherwise seem too terse or beholden to societal norms and positions. 

I really started to love this book when I stopped trying to guess what was coming next. Christopher and James are such an interesting pair, and letting the story unfold was so much more satisfying than trying to predetermine the outcome. I adored the representation in the book, not just trans representation, but class distinctions, and gender norms. While the latter two are common in regency romance, the former is not. Together, this created a beautifully rich world with interesting characters and questions to consider.

This was a wonderful addition to the historical romance category, highlighting an underrepresented community, while still maintaining a believable happily ever after.