lisaluvsliterature's Reviews (4.19k)

Just couldn’t get into it sadly. I’ll donate it to my school library and maybe my students will enjoy it. 

I adored this fast paced, steamy, holiday romance. If it had been a weekend day, or during a break from school, it would have been devoured in one day. As it was I might have sneaked in finishing it at my desk on the Friday before our Thanksgiving break at school. Like the little image above, I do really wish I could get my own Nick for Christmas. I mean, he was perfection. And the way the author told the story, I almost wondered for a bit if he was supposed to be THE Nick we all think about for the holidays. Especially when he kept saying things but being cagey about who his family was.

I had a tiny bit of irritation with how Holliday kept pushing Nick away, even as I understood it based on what she’d dealt with her ex-husband. But oh my gosh was Nick really just perfect. While the story itself took place during the holiday season, we got a quick look back at when Holliday and her kids had first moved in and what the interactions between her and her new hot firefighter neighbor since that time. I loved how all of it, included one of the very first interactions, led up to a perfect connection between the two. This book made me smile, laugh, swoon, and fan myself at several points. The perfect holiday read that I needed this year! 

Story was too much telling, not sure I could see why the characters would actually like each other the way they behaved.  No little details to make it more believable.

Characters were not likable for me unfortunately and I just couldn't get into it.

 

Crissa-Jean Chappell is one of my favorite authors, I will read anything that she writes.  This was another really great book.  I haven’t read much about the Amish, and this book really had a lot of interesting bits to it, and I learned some things I didn’t know.  Of course I’d heard about Rumspringa, I mean there was some reality tv show about it at one time, right?  

The main character in the story is a girl named Lucy, who lives in Florida with a much less strict order of the Amish.  They are allowed many things that the other Amish that are called the “Old Order” would never be okay with.  Every year during winter the northern Old Order Amish, who they call the “snowbirds” arrive in Florida and  spend the winter there.  Lucy’s best friend is one of the snowbirds.  Her name is Alice.  Alice is 16, and it is time that she can have her Rumspringa, and also decide if she wants to stay with the religion, the community.  But from how Alice is behaving, it seems as if she will not be staying.  In fact she tells Lucy that she is going to run away.  Not only that, but she has a boyfriend she is meeting there, Tobias.  While Lucy’s order is much more lenient, she still has a strict father.  Because of how much more accepting the Florida order is, she also does not get a Rumspringa, although she must decide whether to be baptized, which will decide if she can stay with the order.  Lucy is unsure herself because she wants to go to college.  Her father does not want her to.

When Alice gets to town, she basically dares Lucy to go out to a party that night.  Lucy goes, with Tobias and a guy named Faron who is driving the truck they use to get to the party.  At one point along the way, Lucy hears Tobias talking to Faron and she gets to see a side of Tobias that is not one she trusts, one that she thinks Alice shouldn’t trust.  Faron is Amish as well, but he is shunned by his order.  That night at the party, the police show up, and everyone runs.  Lucy and Alice have already been split up because Alice is drinking and doesn’t seem to like how Lucy is bringing her down.  

Faron helps Lucy get away from the police, and later on they still can’t find Alice, she’s disappeared.  It turns into a mystery, everyone searching for her, and there isn’t any trace of what happened other than a broken cell phone.  When even Alice’s mother seems to give up on finding her, Lucy refuses.  She has to find her friend, or what happened to her.  Faron will be her partner in the search, and she will learn not only a lot about what her friend’s life really was, but she will learn more about herself and what she wants, as well as learn about Faron and maybe fall in love.  

As I mentioned above, I really enjoyed learning about the whole Amish community, at least as much was in this book.  The characters were so well written, and you really felt for Lucy and her father, and I really liked Faron.  A great read, another book I will be adding to the shelf in my high school library and promoting at the bookstore where I work as one of my staff picks.  Thanks again to the author for sending me an ARC of this when I asked her about it.  Chappell writes such meaningful characters in contemporary YA stories with the aspect that makes them a very real story. 

Now, I’ve posted the cover above that seems to be what is going to be published.  But I honestly liked the first cover I saw, the one that is on my ARC, so I’ve posted it below. 

Oh my gosh, I loved going back and getting Violet and Buck’s parents’ romance story so much! Not only was it fun seeing those two as teens, as well as even Randy Ballistic, but spending time with Violet’s mom Skye, who we really only know through Violet’s eyes as the crazy mom, was just perfection! I feel like we’ve gotten more about her in the books and not as much about Buck’s dad Sidney, so that was a great addition to this whole world of hockey families that I adore so much. Yes I’ve read other authors that go back and do prequels like this. Or even with Hunting bringing us the stories of the next generation these days that is similar. But this one was seriously perfect. It was the kind of story that I often wish authors could tell so that we know just what happened before. Humorously, or maybe it is my nerdy side, this makes me wish for things like the story of Harry Potter’s family and the world of Voldemort before the stories we know and love so well.

I loved this and sped through it and laughed so much at all the you-know-what-blocking these teens did to their parents. Sometimes I wonder if there is any story that Helena Hunting can’t tell perfectly as she exceeds all my expectations every single time!

So, again, third person just doesn't always work for me.  And it isn't with this.  And to be fair, I did read Sense and Sensibility, but barely finished, didn't enjoy the writing on the original either.  I think this story seems like it will be good though!

While I think this is probably a really good book, I can't keep reading the character's spiraling thoughts for my own mental health, while my own thoughts are always up there swirling around.  Can't add more!

I really enjoyed the second book in this series, still need to go back and read the first one, and this one was just as good! I loved all the characters, loved what they were dealing with, and the way it all fell together for an HEA at the end was perfect! But it also started with a perfect “meet-cute” or maybe it would be a not so meet cute, lol.

I really liked both characters so much. Frankie was understandable in how she handled those around her with what she’d experienced with her mom and even her own sister. Although at a certain point I didn’t like how she was treating Harrison, I feel like she should have realized or wanted to do better than those women she’d been using for example. Especially how she acted like he was causing her more trouble, and how she hurt his feelings early in the story with that.

Harrison, I adored him. I hated that people treated him like a good time guy and wouldn’t take him seriously for most of his life. But again, his own past made so much sense for why he let that happen so often, and how he reacted to things in his own life. In the end though, he was there. For her, for George, for Colette. He was a keeper and one you could rely on. With my own relative facing some of the same issues George was going through, there were some parts hard to read for me, but it really made it harder to put down as well because I was so emotionally invested in the story and these characters.