The Author's Reading Experience with Olivia Dade's Book

The author recently finished reading Olivia Dade's book and is eager to share their thoughts about it. The book tells the story of Athena, a complex and multi-faceted character who doesn't quite fit into traditional rom-com molds. Athena has multiple degrees, but struggles to hold down jobs, while also dealing with parents who are both doctors and willing to fund her lifestyle despite her being in her mid-30s. This unique combination of traits makes Athena relatable and human, despite the challenges she faces.

The author notes that Athena's depressive episode is a particularly difficult aspect of the book to read, but also acknowledges its importance in making her character feel more real. The author praises the way Dade handles sensitive topics like depression with care and nuance, rather than resorting to clichés or stereotypes. In contrast, the book's love interest, Matthew, is portrayed as a romantic and caring partner who is deeply devoted to Athena.

The author expresses admiration for Dade's writing style, which they believe captures the complexity of human relationships in a way that feels authentic and realistic. The romance between Athena and Matthew is tender and intimate, with moments of humor and wit that add depth and warmth to their interactions. The author notes that both Athena and Matthew are "truly misunderstood" characters who evoke empathy and understanding from the reader.

One aspect of the book that stood out to the author was its exploration of themes such as love, identity, and power dynamics. Dade raises questions about how women's bodies and desires can be controlled and manipulated by others, particularly in situations where there is a power imbalance. The author praises the way Dade tackles these issues with sensitivity and care, rather than resorting to sensationalism or exploitation.

The author concludes their review by stating that they loved this book and would highly recommend it to fans of romance fiction. They praise Dade's writing style and the way she brings her characters to life in a way that feels authentic and relatable. The special edition of the book, which was gifted to the author, only added to their enthusiasm for the story.

Overall, the author's review of Olivia Dade's book is a glowing endorsement of the writer's talent and skill. They praise the book's complex characters, nuanced exploration of themes, and tender romance, making it a must-read for fans of romance fiction.

The Author's List: Anticipated Books of 2024

In this video, the author shares their list of anticipated books for 2024, which includes five-star predictions. While some of these books have received mixed reviews, the author is eager to dive into their stories and share their thoughts with viewers. One book that stands out is Olivia Dade's "Afterlight", which was gifted to the author in a special edition.

The Author reflects on how they approached this list, considering only books that they are genuinely excited about reading. They acknowledge that not all of these books will meet their expectations, but are willing to take the risk and share their thoughts with others. The author notes that this list marks one of the most successful lists they have created so far, with many five-star reads included.

As the author looks back on their reading year, they wonder how many five-star books they'll be able to fit into comparison to previous years. They express enthusiasm for reflecting on their reading experience and sharing their thoughts with viewers in future videos.

The Early Reviews: A Cautionary Tale

In contrast to Olivia Dade's "Afterlight", the author had a disappointing experience with Freya's story in another book by the same author, "Fate and Blood". The early reviews for this book had convinced the author that it would be a five-star read, but ultimately fell short. The story follows Freya, a character with cool powers who marries a man with more powers than her husband.

The author found Freya's romance with her brother-in-law to be particularly problematic, as their relationship was not consensual and made Freya feel trapped. The author expresses disappointment that they were unable to connect with this book and its characters, despite the promise of an intriguing premise. Two stars is all the author managed to muster for this disappointing read.

Overall, the author's experience with "Fate and Blood" serves as a reminder to approach early reviews with caution and not get caught up in hype or preconceptions. While it's often exciting to discover new authors and books, it's equally important to be honest about one's reading experiences and not pretend that something is enjoyable when it's not.

The Author's Best Books of the Year Video

Finally, the author notes that they will be creating a video in the future where they'll be sharing their best books of the year. They acknowledge that this will be a challenge, as they've had some mixed experiences with books in 2024 so far. However, they're confident that they'll be able to find some hidden gems and share their thoughts with viewers.

The author expresses enthusiasm for reflecting on their reading experience and sharing their insights with others. They know that not all books will meet their expectations, but are willing to take the risk and share their thoughts in the hopes of helping other readers make informed decisions about what to read next.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello welcome back to my channel in today's video I'm going to be talking all about my 24 five star predictions for 2024 and how those books went what the outcomes actually were I happened to read all of the books on my most anticipated list this year pretty far in advance of the end of the year and I thought you know what October seems like the perfect time to sit down and talk about all these books with you some were in fact five stars but as per usual not all of them were so I'm excited to rant to Rave to talk to you all about these five star predictions so hopefully you can add something to your TBR before the end of the year but before we get into it I have got to tell you about the spons of today's video ritual who have become a really integral part of my daily routine now they're a brand that does the hard work for you so you have the Peace of Mind knowing what's going into your body for the past few months I have personally been using the synbiotic plus which is a three in-1 Prebiotic probiotic and postbiotic that supports a balanced gut microbiome and digestive health symbiotic plus is designed with two clinically studied strains of probiotics to help with digestive discomforts like bloating and gas and support healthy regularity so a few months ago I went on my first antibiotic I know it's crazy that I'm nearly 30 and I've never been on an antibiotic before but that wreaked havoc on my gut health I knew that I wanted to support my digestion and symbiotic plus has been making such a big difference the kind of difference where I notice if I skip a day of taking this again it's more than just a probiotic which I love it contains prebiotics and postbiotics in one capsule prebiotics support the growth of beneficial bacteria and postbiotics support gut barrier function daily disturbances of life like poor diet stress certain medications like the one that I was on can really throw our gut off kilter that's why it's important to take a supplement like Sy iotic plus daily really big on habit stacking so after I feed my cats at night I'm reminded to take my symbiotic plus because it's in the same drawer with their food scale it's just one minty capsule daily and I love that you can take it any time of day with or without food and it's shelf stable so I don't have to refrigerate it which is super awesome especially if You' like to travel with it and it's subscription based so you never run out because again consistency is super key when you are trying to support your digestive health to check out ritual and symbiotic Plus for yourself click the link in my description or use the code Chandler Ansley 25 to get 25% off your first order or you can use the cute little QR code on the screen right here thanks again to Ritual for sponsoring this portion of today's video now let's talk about all of my five star predictions for 2024 and whether or not they actually panned out first up we have pirate girls I thought when I put this on my list that this was going to be a very plot driven love triangle romance I was kind of wrong on the love triangle front but this book definitely is a plot driven story this book is the second in the hellbent series by Penelope Douglas which follows the children of the couples from the fallway series if you've read bully slash if you've been around for a while when it comes to Noodle romances you probably have heard of bully these books again are kind of like a spin-off continuation of that series with like a darker grittier spin focuses a lot on Town Legends and ghost stories this book follows our heroine Dylan who is the daughter of the hero and heroine of bully and she's of course not like other girls she's really into racing motorbikes her dad actually like owns a racetrack and has his own racing team and our heroin is really interested not in racing cars like her dad does but in racing motorbikes in specific her dad really is not super supportive of her Ambitions and her her dreams he wants her to go to college have like a normal healthy safe life but of course she has to be the rebel the bad girl and this kind of puts her in a tough spot like her and her parents as she's a senior in high school just like haven't been meshing very well and so when Dylan gets the opportunity to potentially be traded to a rival high school during homecoming week she decides she's going to jump on this opportunity she comes from a sort of like Posh upbringing maybe not like super spoiled but definitely you know a nicer well-funded High School um she trades to a less affluent high school and she's definitely in for a shock in surprise when she is around all these like rough and tumble people she could definitely hold her own I mean that's like kind of part of the story but she goes there and she is quickly acquainted with how different it is basically the way the tradition works is that for 2 weeks you know you trade a student with the other high school and they get kind of like bullied and hazed or whatever I guess the administration and parents are okay with this but while she's there she ends up coming back into contact with her cousin her cousin who's not really her cousin because it'd be weird if they were her cousin Hunter who has transferred to this rival High School to get away from his twin brother Kate is a bit of a bully he is the quarterback on the lake Richie Rich high school football team he and his brother don't really see eye to eye which is a big part of the story and that I thought was going to really play into the romance I really thought that Kate and Hunter we going to be fighting over our heroin and while that does kind of come into play in the story it's really not what I consider to be a traditional love triangle it's very clear I think from the beginning that Hunter is like endgame for Dylan I don't want to say makes it less exciting but I do think that that would have been a juicy like little tidbit thrown in there regardless the story is kind of complicated when it comes to the plot just beyond Hunter and Dylan reuniting and kind of falling in love there are again these like ghost stories and these rivalries and the complicated relationships between the two different towns again who have very different like socioeconomic statuses I personally enjoyed it I actually enjoyed the plot points of the story I do think at times it gets a little bit convoluted and I don't think this is a story that I would necessarily recommend for everybody as someone who really thrives off of angst and tension in Romance this was really refreshing this is actually one of the books that I have read most recently compared to some of the others on this list which I read like back in February or March very fresh in my mind and it was just what I needed to hit the spot and while it wasn't quite a five-star book I gave this one four stars and I am glad that I like added it to my predictions list one book that I probably should have just skipped and I know now in the future going forward to skip this kind of story is five brothers by Penelope Douglas I just threw both pen Douglas releases for the year onto this list because I was like surely one of them will pan out and it's true one of them did unfortunately was not five brothers this one even in my original video when I was talking about like my five star predictions and like what I thought was going to be great this is the one that I was most tentative about this is the one that sounded most Credence esque and I didn't love Credence especially the second third time around that I've read that book so I I didn't hold out high hopes for this one cuz it had the same Vibe I mean it's literally called five brothers you can only guess what happens it was simply not for me okay it really wasn't this book Falls a heroin named Christian k r i s j n she's recently graduated from high school and is basically screwing around until her mom can marry her off to a 40-year-old to save the family it's very much giving my mom is trying to sell me to One Direction Vibes but I was willing to look past like like the crazy ass plotline or at least like the setup for this book I was like okay I'm willing to put that aside as long as the rest is not crazy that wasn't the case though the rest actually was crazy anyway um Christian is taking care of her siblings because her mom is just like not in a place to do so her dad left the family to go shack up with his mistress a couple of streets away and the mom is just kind of like spending money willy-nilly until the divorce goes through and then she knows that they're going to be destitute which is again why she's trying to sell Christian off to One Direction but anyway she is taking care of her siblings she gets a job at a diner in kind of the cedar part of town she of course is from the side of the tracks she wants to bang the guys from the wrong side of the tracks here's the way this book is set up though because I think this is really what told me that I wasn't going to enjoy this book our heroin at the beginning of the story this is the first chapter she is being picked up by a guy on the side of the road she's just like walking minding her own business and this guy is like hey get in the get in the car or I'll murder you kind of and it was um scary it was shocking I was like is this going to be the way we're starting the story is there going to be an assault that happens no actually after way too many pages we figure out that the guy that's picking her up in a truck is actually her like kind of semi- parttime boyfriend a rle play scenario but during this role play scenario I think he forgets to bring condoms and she gets upset they end up going back to his house they don't hook up but her car tires are slashed by a jealous ex-girlfriend and so she's going to sleep on the couch she doesn't let the fact that she's at someone else's house prevent her from flicking the bean pleasuring herself while someone in the corner watches and once she figures out that someone's watching her in the dark she decides to stop she doesn't decide to leave this situation though she decides to tell this stranger who she doesn't she literally has no idea who this person is in the corner right she tells this person her life story again about being being sold to One Direction about the fact that she's taking care of her siblings and that she's going to be married to this 40-year-old man and her life isn't what she wanted it to be and this culminates in her The Stranger in the corner raw intercourse if you will it's kind of an ongoing is she pregnant is she not she's not but it is a question certainly after this she proceeds to bang each of the five brothers in this house to kind of I guess figure out which key it's perfectly in the lock and of course the last guy she ends up banging is the one that she banged at the beginning of the book and is of course like her perfect match because the sex that she had uh that stranger was like her perfect most magical o and she's never had that with a partner before and so of course they're meant to be this sounds crazy that's because it was candidly I didn't finish this book I mean I skimmed it I very much skimmed it cuz I had to know what the was happening and who she would end up with I got about to the 50% Mark reading it fully then 50% more gone I was like I can only read about her squealing over new sausage just so many times um before I go crazy so yeah I scammed it okay I I did so I'm not going to rate this book but I can tell you with some degree of certainty that it was not for me um moving on shall we to a book that is completely different a book that is a guaranteed safe bet shall we say if if Penn's books are wildly unpredictable LSC Silver's books are a guaranteed safe bet so let's talk about wild love here's the thing sometimes sometimes predictability is great sometimes it gets a little bit boring this book is a single dad small town billionaire brother's best friend romance and if that sounds like a lot of tropes it's cuz it is the book's about Ford Ford finds out that the spum that he donated was used to create a 12-year-old girl whose father has recently passed away and because her mother is in mourning still and really can't handle um raising her at the moment Ford decides that he is going to take over for a little bit while the mom Grieves and then our heroin Rosie is looking for a job because she got unceremoniously fired after reporting assault at her last job so she is dealing with a lot um shaking confidence obviously just questioning her own self worth for sure when she comes to this small town that she is from and she decides she's going to work for Ford I don't know if she like tries to convince him to give her a job or if he's like just running to give her a job not really sure but she ends up working for him they end up falling in love are we surprised are we shocked we shouldn't be because it's an ulie silver book it was sweet enough right I I really appreciated the different kind of family Dynamic here I really like to see Ford's Journey um to kind of like become a parent I thought that was really cool I don't think I see that often in these sorts of romances um especially like a single dad romance I just feel like it kind of lacked what I love about some of Elsie Silver's early stuff and again I think predictability is awesome sometimes like I like picking up an author's book and kind of more or less knowing what I'm going to get the problem I think as she continues to write is that I think things get a little bit sanitized for my liking I feel like she used to do really intense angst intention I feel like her heroins used to be a little bit more prickly a little bit more unlikable both of her characters in her older books like hero and heroin tended to grow more as the story went on I feel like a book like this I wanted our heroin to not necessarily grow but to heal from the things that had happened to her and I feel like that kind of got pushed to the back burner so she could just like Ford in a bucket of wall paint here's the thing it was a good book it was safe it was predictable but sometimes I want a little bit more Nuance I guess is what I'm trying to say so it was a solid four-star book for me it's one of those books that I just don't think I'm going to think about a lot in the future or really like rushed recommend people I feel like Elie's other stuff I prefer more so this next one is really tough for me because put it on this list because I love this author's writing and I did really love this book I originally rated this book five stars but I read another book from this author this year I was kindly I don't want to say gifted a copy I was kindly asked to sensitivity read this author's uh book that's coming out this year and it was just one of the best things I've ever read so it's like hard to compare this book that I loved to that book that is like a new all-time favorite let me let me let me break it down for you okay savor it by Tera deit is the book that I'm talking about and left of forever is the book that I was asked to sensitivity read for please check that out when it comes out I mean it is just truly remarkable but this book is fun and I put it on the list because I expected it to be really deeply romantic and also funny because that's what I've come to expect from this author in the past and she delivered I mean she really did this book is about our main character Sage who is recently dumped by a long-term boyfriend kind of devastating for anyone but is especially devastating to Sage on two different levels on the one hand this has really shaken her confidence and made her feel kind of like unworthy reasons that you find out in the book and then also she wants to enter into this townwide competition but she can't really do that on her own she needs a partner to do it sh out of luck because she doesn't have a boyfriend so she enlists the help of her new temporary neighbor fisher fisher is in town because he is dealing with the grief and the loss of his sister now the guardian of his niece who's a teenager and really prickly and difficult and he is also just like doubting his own skills and abilities he is a chef and he is supposed to be helping open and plan menu new restaurant he used to be in New York now he is here temporarily it's not going to be a forever thing okay but like he's he's here and he and Sage fall for each other and it is just so Charming I loved the moments of levity from the humorous moments of which there are plenty I also really appreciated how both of these characters grow throughout the book how they kind of help to heal each other but how the individual Journeys are so important as well like there definitely is time where these characters have to kind of like retreat and work on themselves for the relationship to work and it just felt so realistic I so appreciated both characters Journeys Fischer is a total green flag of a man honestly I think this book is one that could appeal to a lot of people again it does have that like deep heart to it but with the humor there is some levity like it's not overly melodramatic which I know that some people have kind of a hard time with the more I talk about this book the more I'm like no this is a five star read like I'm not going to change my rating for this book but really truly left of forever is like six-star read material so like check that one out I like cannot stress enough how much I love that book it's about divorced people by the way kind of finding their way back to each other I feel like that's kind of a Trope that is hard to pull off I've only ever seen it done once before that I enjoyed and it was um from the illustrious the wonderful the amazing the incredible Kennedy Ryan sowit does a book just as well as Kennedy Ryan I don't know I just feel like you need to pick up lefta forever anyway okay bye talk about the next book next to you this one on the list because it was getting republished and I hadn't read the prior version or whatever I don't know if the book actually like changed when it got republished but I adored out on a lamb it was one of my favorite books of last year and I was like you know what this is going to be good it's a friends to lover story I love a good friends to lovers I didn't really love this one but I'll try to break down why this one is about Lane and Matt who hook up or kiss at the beginning of the book like on New Year's um they get kind of introduced to each other through mutual friends they're not childhood friends they're not like people who have known each other forever at the start of this book is when they meet over the course of the story they become friends and realize that there's something more there try to fight their attraction for each other there is kind of a friends to benefits element to the story as well this book has Lane who is dealing with grief Matt who is dealing with his own stuff the that they kind of like maintain their friendship and stay in close proximity Is that they're renovating a bus for a heroin to live in this book kind of didn't work for me mostly because there was no semblance of angst and tension I know that I said the last book didn't have a lot of melodrama and that is true this book doesn't either but I think it also lacked angst intention and I just need that for a story to fully land so this was just three stars for me all right a book that I put on the list for Vibes and Vibes only turned out to be a festar read and that would be the familiar by leardo if anyone is going to take a historical fantasy which I notoriously dislike it's something that I'm into it would be Lee bardugo so this book is better main character lusia she is a servant for a kind of awful family during the Spanish Inquisition until one day she is discovered to have magic that can Elevate the status of the family that she works for they are going to kind of like sponsor her almost and she is going to I guess hopefully win a competition by the disgraced Secretary of Spain he is looking for people with magical abilities that can be pedal as like from God so that the king might have him in his favor again right this guy's disgraced he's going to bring a magical person with him and the King's going to be like oh my God come back I love you so much you know the person that discovers luzia's magic though is not the secretary right somebody else and he has kind of a piece of which makes things complicated also complicated is the spooky dude in his employ that is supposed to train luzia and you know get her magic looking R Top Notch for this competition does she fall for the spooky man yes she does is it strangely romantic even though it's not really a romance also yes this this book is one that I just don't really know how to talk about it's one that I don't really foresee a lot of people enjoying as evidenced by the rating of this book on Goodreads I think a lot of people didn't know what to really think about it I think that's also kind of how 9th house went but that one at least didn't have the historical element to it feel like 9th house is a slightly easier sell this one's kind of tough It's a slow-moving historical fantasy where the majority of the historical stuff was not that interesting it's also hardly a True Romance I don't know it it's hard to sell I'm feeling protective of it because it is actually one of the most deeply romantic things I've ever read I gave five star moving on to a book that I have actually in my possession to hold up funny story by Emily Henry I put on this list because I was intrigued by this idea of our heroin fake dating her ex's fiance's her ex's new fiance's ex-boyfriend I don't know I was holding out hope that I would like this one despite not liking almost all of Emily Henry's books I feel like I just had such good luck with people we meet on vacation that I was really hopeful that this one would be just as successful well it was not the five star I was expecting or hoping for it was actually very good good and I'm going to tell you why so this book is about daffany and Miles daany has been with this incredible guy named Peter for a while and she is now engaged and she is going to move to his childhood town and they're going to move into a home together that Peter owns that's important she could be with him which is super romantic only trouble is Peter has a female best friend and this female best friend rears her ugly little head on his bachelor party she confesses her love for him and he does the same and he unceremoniously kicks our heroin out of the house that she just moved into with him and now she has left kind of in a pickle because she's in this place she doesn't know she has left security um to be with this man who she really thought she could count on she's feeling stupid she does no what to do but the good news is Peter is engaged to a woman named Petra right or he's going to be engaged to a woman named Petra that he cheated on his fiance with anyway Petra used to date a guy named miles miles needs a roommate and our heroin needs a place to live Ergo she moves in with this man loved the plot on paper because it felt really romcom me it felt like something I hadn't really read before but I love a good like Revenge fake dating plot line cuz of course dafhne and miles are going to fake date and they do but it is much more than that this story is really about Daphne who is deeply distrustful of men because her dad is a super flaky person continues to come into her life in this book we also have miles who is not distressful of men but is distressful I guess of relationships and or his own happiness because of the way that he grew up and the family structure he grew up in sister comes to visit for part of the book as well I think what I appreciated about this book in comparison to some of Emily Henry's others is that this one felt a lot more realistic and I feel like the main character were much more sympathetic I'm consistently bitching about how Emily Henry's Heroes all tend to feel the same don't get me wrong I love a simp hero I love a hero who is obsessed with the heroin but not at the expense of him having his own character traits and flaws and I feel like Emily Henry really her stories tend to fall apart from me for that reason I'm like how is this going to work long term when I don't even know who this man is and like why they should be a good match this book I could see it because of how flawed our hero was and because our heroine was needing the particular flaws that he has I don't know it was just really really well-crafted I have to say the only thing that I didn't love about the story was how much the family stuff was involved I think it lent itself a little bit more to the women's fiction side of things than the romance side of things had some of that been toned down a little bit I maybe would have liked it more this one this one was better than most I think and daany didn't abandon medical school to make pottery so that's one in my books four stars before I picked up bride I thought that this book was going to be about a woman kind of like sacrificing herself for vampire family it's it's a vampire werewolf romance okay I think we all know that by now I really thought this was going to give that like traditional throw back 2000's goodness right heroin was going to be really Plucky and she was going to I don't know just like do this for her family she's like I'm strong I'm going to go live with the werewolves and there was going to be kind of like a combative playful Bantry relationship between hero and heroine this book is not that but I still liked it this book Spider-Man character misery who is the daughter of a vampire councilman and she agrees to I guess be married off to the werewolf on the other side of the river I don't know if that's metaphorical or physical I honestly can't remember and I don't know why River came to mind but live in different places she goes to live kind of in the country with this werewolf and his pack the pack doesn't like her they don't understand her kind she also kind of feels the same way as the story carries on of course she and the hero start to understand each other more and realize that their species differences don't necessarily mean that they can't fall in love what I liked about this book was the tone of it I wouldn't say it's quite Twilight esque but there is a certain Melancholy to the story that I wasn't expecting but I found kind of refreshing considering that most of Ali hazlewood's books up until this point have been very tropey very fan ficky in the best possible way way but this felt different and I think that that departure was fun not only like in a genre sense but also in a tonal sense I really did like misery's character and while she wasn't someone that I deeply related to I think that there are pieces of her that I really appreciated and I think that a lot of people will really like her as a heroin I wouldn't call her timid necessarily but because of the things she's been through she is definitely not this like in-your-face traditional paranormal heroin I would say and I really I liked that I also found this book deeply sexy despite the nodding I think that says a lot about what Ali Hazelwood is able to pull off you have this book five stars all right moving on to another Ali Hazelwood book because her publishing schedule is just Relentless I was really excited about non- love because this is one of the only Ali Hazelwood contemporaries if not the only Ali Hazelwood adult contemporary not set in a university and it sounded like it was going to be enemy St lover tropy Excellence it's about Rue who is a biotech engineer at a food science company and a guy named Eli who is trying to buy SL take over this food science company again like bride this is one that I really thought was going to be fan ficky in the sense that I thought there was going to be a lot of like sniping at each other and like personal sabotage and like fun it was not that at all these two basically start uh before they know that they actually work together and they find out that they work together and they still keep and over the course of the story you find out more about Eli's intentions in buying the company and you find out more about ru's history and why she is reluctant to enter into a relationship and is more interested in just sleeping with Eli normally and you're going to hear me say this probably for a couple of other books normally I do not enjoy stories that have hookups at their center it's not that I am prudish about sex or don't enjoy reading about it I just personally don't find that romances in books tend to be well suited to that being like the foundation of the relationship you know what I mean if you're so much I'm not going to get a lot of onpage conversations and I think conversations are at the heart of a successful relationship I was unsure of what to think about this one going into it because I'd heard that this one is very sex heavy but I think it works really well for our heroine and I think it helps to explain she is the way she is I think it takes a really masterful author to be able to write relationship Dynamics into sex scenes in a way like this I found out so much about their relationship and how these two would work long term just from the way that they have sex which feels weird to say but somehow it worked and I I really did appreciate this book got done with this and I was like I can see why other people will not enjoy this again because of the rampant hookups because of the lack of frothiness that I feel like is typical in an Ali Hazelwood book but I think because I don't care about the frothiness of books I really liked this and it really landed for me and I am now a sh for Ali Hazelwood I I have to say it I think that there's not been a single book that I have given less than four stars for her maybe some of her novellas but everything else has been four stars plus this was no exception I gave it five stars contrast uh to the last two books this next one is one that is from a new to me author and unfortunately it did not work for me which is a bummer I really don't want to be an old Haag stuck in my ways unwilling to try new things but a fragile enchantment just didn't work for me the synopsis seemed really promising it is a book set in a magical version or rendering of Regency England they have a heroin Neeve who is dying of whatever magic she has and she doesn't know when she's going to die but in the meantime she wants to save her family and improve their material condition so she is going to go to a rival Kingdom or a neighboring Kingdom and dress the royal family or like the bride and groom for the royal wedding and while she's there she ends up I think falling for the groom I wouldn't know cuz I DF this book at 25% the thing about this book and the thing that just didn't really worked for me and and had me questioning why I was reading it honestly was the characters I loved this setting I thought the setting was really nice but NE as a character was so Bland so boring and I couldn't really understand her character motivations uh and then our hero I feel like his character changed a lot throughout the course of the story at least the 25% that I read sometimes he's a total sometimes he was really nice and then on top of that there are two guys I think they're brothers one's a king or like going to become the king I don't know um there's two brothers right two Royal Brothers I couldn't tell for a long time which she was going to end up with and I don't think that was intentional like I don't think it was a a narrative choice I think it was more just like it's unclear because you're not characterizing your hero very well of situation anyway I dnf this book I think I I've already said that dnf it 25% and I have no desire to pick it up again moving on to a mystery thriller because I decided that I needed to put a mystery thriller on this list for some reason I mean to be fair it sounded interesting the ays by Rachel Hawkins is one that has that like mysterious family secrets dead mommy thing that did appeal to me it's pretty solid I think I would have rated it more highly if I hadn't had just watched saltburn before this because there is kind of a similar Vibe and tone to this book but basically Ruby in is an old broad who has been married to a bunch of different men who all wind up dead but she of course has nothing to do with any of these mysterious deaths anyway Ruby adopts a son a while back and she really lavished money and material possessions and education on him which he felt really lucky for but whenever he left home at 18 to like go to college he never came back he didn't really want anything to do with this family and we don't really know why until Ruby of course dies and leaves a lot of money behind he still wants nothing to do with this until he is called back home by some of his relatives adopted relatives and he has to go and like face them and or deal with like the the family secrets that are unfolding we find out more of course about ruby and her character and we find out more about Camden the son um his relationship with the other people that are like around this table as they're like talking uh about things this is not a super super memorable mystery thriller I think that's because the way that things unfolded like they there weren't a ton of surprises like there were a couple of twists and turns I didn't see coming but for the most part you knew how the story was going to end and like what the answers were going to be but it was like fun enough I give it three stars and I think that if you I don't know have an Audi book credit lying around or you want to get this from your library I think it's worth checking out one book that I have a physical copy of uh that I didn't finish or didn't read at all the at list complex by oliv Blake I put this on the list because I was like you know what I need to finish the series that I start because I'm bad at that and guess what I'm still bad at it I just like do not finish series that I start I think a big part of that is because I'm on the YouTube uh frequently I read for YouTube purposes and I don't know I just feel like it's less interesting to watch a vlog of someone reading like the second or third book in a series like I don't know I I wouldn't unless it was like a whole series Vlog that being said I will be doing a whole series Vlog over on patreon at some point for these three if you want to see my thoughts and feelings I really liked Atlas 6 for the record I have read that first book but I didn't I just didn't continue okay a book that I think I still have a copy of where that copy is I don't know um I think it is on my cell pile fan girl down Tessa Bailey has been much less of a consistent author for me in recent years I used to put all of her books on like my most anticipated list and I think this might be the last year that I do so because I just have not had a lot of luck with her stories lately and it's honestly not that the quality of her stories varies that much but obviously my enjoyment of her books does so I hate to say it but fan girl down was a swing and a miss for me it's about a fan girl who helps revive the career of a golfer who is kind of angry and also not very good at his sport he's kind of ragy he kind of sucks really bad she is just relentlessly cheery and happy and she is going to help this man I'm not sure why I thought this book with such a Cookie plot line would work for me but it didn't because we really cannot stand when we have a heroine or even a hero who is obsessed with their you know partner before they even know them she's obsessed with this man's golf career she is like his biggest fan girl and she ends up like you know working for him and kind of like helping his career and I just really don't like books with crazy power imbalances like this I think it honestly might be more questionable for me than certain age Gap romances I just feel like the the power Dynamic is that kind of weird Josephine again like her sunshiny attitude coupled with wells's bad one it just left me wanting to give her a hug and wanting to punch him I really loved It Happened One Summer um which I think a lot of y'all probably already know because that book had a lot of heart to it it had not only these like funny moments these crazy plot lines these kind of wildly smudy sex scenes they also had moments where the heroine and the hero were growing a lot growing in Romance together like having good conversations and being compatible for each other and having a genuine connection here I just wanted it all to stop I just I didn't enjoy it okay two stars so I was reading Wildfire while putting this list together and I realized how much I liked it in comparison to Icebreaker so I figured that Daydream might stand a chance at also being a good book and I was right Daydream is about our overachiever eldest daughter hiie her neurode Divergent hockey Captain Hero Henry lots of hes in this book hie and Henry it has that like classic Sports romance Trope but it is not done in the same way that it is in a lot of books I feel like normally when you've got heroin helping a hero pass a class which is kind of what happens in this book you have a hero who doesn't want to be tutored who thinks he's too good to be tutored and in this book uh he doesn't feel that way at all and hie is not really truly tutoring him just like helping him with his studies they're not in the same class they like are kind of mutual friends and I don't know y'all they just fall in love um this book is really about the emotional challenges as these two are going through college and dealing with their separate families and or separate priorities in life and it was just genuinely really solid sweet new adults college sports romance they probably a few too many thread characters which is kind of the case for all of Hannah Grace's books so far but I can excuse that because you know they felt accurate to college at least I mean a lot of us have a lot of friends in college um I don't know I prefer reading books where the heroes are unrealistically kind and incredible because I think that's what we should in real life and I give this book five stars the next book might end up on my most disappointing of the year list cuz it started off really promising but within a few chapters I wanted to smash this book over the hero's head for some reason this hard cover is really heavy and I feel like that probably would have inflicted some damage which he deserved okay cuz he Mega sucked this book Spider-Man character Emma who is a screenwriter but she hasn't had much success in the way of like career growth because she is the primary caretaker for her father who suffered an injury semi- recently her life kind of gets flipped upside down when she's given this opportunity to revise the screenplay of her favorite screenwriter she jumps on the opportunity of course cuz she wants to meet this guy and she wants to pick his brain and she also wants to help him out because he needs to get this romcom done so that he can get a different screenplay published she doesn't want to write a romcom but he is forced to and I liked the promise of that I thought it was fun I mean that's why I put this book on the list but he sucks I thought oh it's going to be collaborative our hero is going to learn about love because he obviously can't write a good romcom cuz he doesn't know love and our her was going to show it to him and it just didn't happen our heroin's manager kind of conned her into coming she doesn't want to come necessarily I mean she does cuz she wants to meet this guy but she doesn't want to come because she doesn't want to leave her dad behind under the care of her little sister who's like not uh the most responsible but she decided she's going to do it but her manager again ConEd her into doing this and didn't tell Charlie the hero of this book that our heroin was coming so he is not exactly receptive to the fact that our heroin's there and he makes it very well known he insults her looks he insults her intelligence and he just acts like he is God's Gift he's just an abominable to her and don't think that that's okay and I feel like the Redemption Arc that tried to take place here the miscommunication and the reveal at the end of the book as to why he was the way he was did not make up for the secondhand embarrassment I felt from reading our heroin getting just obliterated by this man torn down multiple times it wasn't just once it would have been bad enough if she overheard him talking about her uh just one time at the beginning of the book but it kept happening it kept happening that he would um belittle her and put her down and act like she wasn't important to him and I cannot stand that I really didn't like this book debating on what to rate this but I it's between a one and a two star it really pissed me off that much just for the summer is a book that I added to my list because I knew Abby jimnez would deliver a hauntingly romantic story and she really did that she did that the setup for this book I will say is kind of corny it has a hero who posts on Reddit about the fact that every time he gets dumped his ex finds their soulmate immediately after and of course our heroin starts messaging him and they talk about how oh my God we both love cats how crazy is that you know the setup is pretty superficial and it is pretty corny but looking beyond that there is so much heart to the story the heroin is one that I think has some of the best representation of of trauma that I think I've ever read in a book she has a really tough relationship with her mom that is kind of at the Forefront of the story and Justin has big emotions to deal with of his own because his mom is going to prison and he is now responsible for taking care of his three younger siblings so both hero and heroin are dealing with some kind of challenging things on their own and they decide that they're going to let this relationship just be something that is fleeting and fun and and sexy but then real life kicks in and they realize that they actually might want to do this for real but of course real life is challenging and complicated and they've got a lot of things to work through so this story I thought was really really remarkable again once you get past some of that superficial stuff I know a lot of people are I don't want to say unwilling to look past it but a lot of people can't I have seen that in the negative reviews for this book but I think if you are willing to push through the beginning of this book that feels a little bit silly you'll realize how deeply romantic this book is and how both characters um are so well suited for each other and grow so much together I love loved and adored this book I think my Goodreads review says is this all-time favorite book of the Year material and I think it might be because I don't think I've read anything that has topped this this year it is so good five stars okay so the breakup tour is I believe one of the first books that I read from this list and I gave it three stars and I think both of those things combined can explain why I remember so little about this book and what did or did not work about it for me but I tried to jog my memory and I'm going to try my best to Endeavor to explain it's a Taylor Swift inspired book our heroin has a breakup song concept album and her most recent ex thinks it's about him it is not however it is about her College boyfriend who she ends up breaking up with or he breaks up with her there's a misunderstanding miscommunication that goes on anyway she reconnects with him he goes on tour with her and they fall in love the thing is the vibe of this book was not very fun and I think that that's because it was this author Duo who wrote it I hate to say that but their books tend to have a kind of a Melancholy vibe to them so it's odd to me that they would pick this topic and then not even attempt to bring any levity to it I guess fine with the idea of like the melodrama behind it if it had been executed better but there were just so many plot points also that I didn't care about look old people I think deserve love as well but the divorc mom hooking up with the bus driver I don't know I just like didn't care I didn't care three stars leave it to Christina Lauren to surprise me with a heartfelt romance I put the paradise problem on this list because the cover the vibe everything about it really seemed like it would be the same level of silliness as on Honeymooners but it wasn't the heroin in this book married our hero back in college so she could get access to Better Living accommodations but they never actually dated and they never actually lived together but they also did never get divorced which is convenient for our hero because he needs to prove that he has been married for a certain amount of time to get access to his inheritance he is the heir to a chain of grocery stores that's like pretty popular in the United States but of course it's not going to be easy for him to convince his family that this romance is for real and he has to take his bride to his little sister's wedding on a private island so again kind of close contact with this family who was kind of evil to be honest I liked this it was a little bit succession at parts a little bit on honeymooner E of course but mostly just a really solidly written romance Christina Lauren never blow me away with super unique characters that I'm going to be thinking about for years to come I honestly couldn't tell you either of the characters names without looking at the flap of this dust jacket but these two were unique enough that I felt satisfied I appreciated how these two fell in love you know you need unique enough characters for me to be like oh wow I can see how these two are going to make it work long term and that happened here four stars all right we have another situation on our hands the kind where a book was really good but also so kind of forgettable and I hate saying that but here we go Swift and saddled is about aah and Weston she's an interior designer who is you know trying to like make a name for herself Weston is the son of the ranch son of the guy who owns the ranch that a is going to be doing work on anyway she hooks up with a dude at a bar the day before she goes to the ranch to kind of see what's up not realizing the guy that she ends up hooking up with at the bar is Weston and now they're going to like have this chemistry and they're going to try to fight their feelings for each other but of course it's not going to work and they're going to enter into a relationship here's a this book amongst the other ones that I'm talking about kind of falls into the LC silver Hera dwit side of things but I think the problem here is that like it's not riotously funny it's not deeply romantic it's just a little funny it's just a little romantic and that's not a bad thing sometimes you just want to pick up a book and like have a good time with it but when it comes to the memorability of a book like that I don't think this one is that for me I mean I genuinely like reading back what I I wrote down for my notes I'm like I don't remember the moments of this book I don't don't remember sexy moments I don't know I don't remember anything about this book except for the plot of the book like the the general synopsis that I could read off of the back of the book and that's a problem for me while I enjoyed this I'm going to give it four stars rather than five because it doesn't have lasting power right there was a book that I put on this list that didn't come out and I haven't heard anything about it and I'm really bummed and it would be the first book in the sky Brier series by Talia Hibert I don't know if the series is ever going to come out but it does seem like she has something new coming out soon and I'm excited about that I'll honestly read whatever this woman puts out so I don't care but I am a little bummed that like I didn't have a new release to read from her this year business casual by the ever lovely always lovely Miss Burger King borison is the last book in The Love Light farm series and I added it to the list because of course I love the love light farm series and I do really appreciate the Gilmore Girls Vibes of this world okay so this one is about Nova and Charlie Nova is woman who is trying to open up her own tattoo shop in the small town she lives in and she's putting a lot of pressure on herself to get it right so she's kind of in serious mode you know taking herself maybe a little too seriously then we have our hero Charlie who is the opposite of that he is a really funloving guy but it's a less than funloving job is a suit he works in the city and he occasionally comes back to the small town to see his little half sister older half older half sister I believe anyway they are an interesting match right kind of an opposite to track sort of situation uh they start banging it turns into more now normally I'm not into one night stands kind of romances I've said that before and I can't say that this book necessarily changed my mind about that but it didn't bother me too terribly much because of the other sweet elements of the story The End of This Book the semi- gravel moment is one that is like imprinted and burned into my brain and it's something I look back on with like a lot of fondness my only real complaint is that the hookup component of course took away from the conversational moments I think there could have been a couple of more conversational moments here to really prove to me why Nova and Charlie were so well suited otherwise this book was really fun and I give it four stars a book that was decidedly not fun but in a nice way Was Here We Go Again by Alison Cochran a saffic romance that I added to my list after really really enjoying this author's Christmas book last year um kisser once for me a great holiday romance if you're in the market or one also I'll leave a link in the description down below few my Christmas Romance recommendations video If you're looking for one anyway this one is about two ladies Logan and rosemary who used to be friends back in grade school but had a bit of a falling out sort of like misunderstanding moment and now they really really hate each other which is tough because they're both High School teachers at the same high school that they attended and they decideed they want to be high school teachers because of an English teacher that had a really big impact on both of them a gay man who is just the best and this teacher unfortunately is dying of cancer start of the story and he asks our two heroins to escort him across the country as he kind of does his like death road trip his you know last Harrah before he can go and die in a home in Maine that he's had for a while um that he wants to get to this book was not a fun one because it is really heavy of course with the emphasis on Grief and dying but because of that I think this is really unique compared to a lot of other romances and just books that I've read this year I think it handled the topic of grief so well and as I was dealing with my own grief this year um this book got a good cry out of me I think that it really um landed and I don't know I connected deeply with the emotions that were on display here I think the only complaint that I have is the Romantic portion of this book I really wanted to root for Logan and rosemary but they were kind of immature in some ways and also I feel like uh there just wasn't enough time for the romance in the story I don't necessarily begrudge the author for that I think the emphasis here really was more on like friendship and the impact of this teacher on their lives and how you can I guess like grow in grief together um and how grief can bring people together actually as well as put them apart but bring them together in this book but again I I feel like there could have been a couple maybe more romantic moments regardless this is a five- star book not for the romance but just for what this book is At First Bite was a book that I had on my radar for two different reasons number one the plot of this book sounded so juicy and the hero and heroin in this book are both over the age of 30 which I thought was really fun because I feel like we tend to just read uh books or romances in particular with Heroes and heroins who were in their early 20s or mid 20s this book delivered okay this is one of the books that I've read most recently from this list I think I read it again a couple of weeks ago it's so good this one is about our main character our heroine Athena she's a teacher at the start of the story she is engaged to a really great guy a ped ician named Johnny and she hasn't known him for very long but they're going to get married kind of a whirlwind romance and he is going to support all of her dreams she doesn't really dream of being a teacher she doesn't really dream of anything I would say uh she does dream of like finding a dream job eventually but she hasn't had much success in the past right she's been a teacher for three years which is the longest she's ever held down a job and this kind of draws the eye of Johnny's older brother Matthew Matthew's also a pediatrician he also helped to raise Johnny he's like 9 years older than Johnny he does not think that Johnny and Athena should get married he does not think that Athena is serious enough he thinks that she's just taking advantage of Johnny for his money that's not like entirely untrue though she doesn't have like super ulterior motives I mean it's just like part of what appeals to her about a life with Johnny it's like okay like I'll have the freedom to figure out my passions and my dreams anyway uh Matthew doesn't really like this and after a while he helps to call off this wedding so there's going to be no wedding between Johnny and Athena but this is kind of tricky as well because during the engagement party before they're broken up Matthew and Athena meet under different circumstances like they don't know who the other person is and they have this like connection immediately and Athena remarks honestly that this guy actually might even be better suited for her than Johnny he's like her in age and he just seems to like get her on like a a mind level until of course she figures out who he is vice versa and they're like GH I'm I'm going to view this you know meeting in a in a different light now anyway Athena can't get away from either of these men because she ends up buying a house between their two houses it's going to gift it to Johnny upon their marriage and he is going to be able to like expand his home into that like empty lot once it's raised of course they don't get married and she is stuck with this home that she's purchased and she's kind of in debt and she doesn't have her teaching job cuz she moved to a different city to be with this man and she's not happy this book's tricky in that I don't know that everybody's going to like it I think all my favorite books tend to be that way but the reason for that and the reason I don't think this is for everybody is that Athena our heroine is tricky of course I think I kind of mentioned it she doesn't really have a easy time holding down jobs she has multiple degrees she has parents who are both doctors and are willing to kind of fund Athena's lifestyle even though she's in her mid-30s and she also has a deeply depressive episode in this book that is kind of hard to read if you've been through a depressive episode of your own but while some of that could be read in a bad light or you could view her in a bad light because of this I find it kind of makes her more real as a character and then our hero oh my God he might be the Saving Grace of this book Matthew you think you're going to hate him because again he like warns her other I was going say other hero he warns Johnny off of Athena um you think okay he's like not a nice guy he's like judging Athena but like doesn't she deserve to be judged a bit just kidding he turns around in spectacular faction and just proves to be truly remarkable hero someone who is so s so deeply romantic is a perfect caregiver when our heroin is going through horrible depressive episode he washes her hair like he is so delightful deeply misunderstood both of them I think are just misunderstood characters who felt so real and you might not always like them because they're real people but I loved it I loved this book I think that Olivia Dade writes some of the most real romance out there read a few other books by her and they have all really impressed me but this is definitely by far my favorite and so glad I read this I'm so glad I have like the special edition from after light it was such a banger and five stars spectacular delicious I hate to like go out with a fizzle rather than a bang I feel like I should have saved that one for last but I'm just going in the order in which I put these books on the list from the last video the video I made when I thought that these were going to be you know five stars fate in and blood last and also least okay uh the early reviews for this really suckered me in and convinced me this is going to be like the Romany of the year and it just wasn't okay basically our heroin Freya has cool powers and Freya is married to a shitty man and this shitty man ends up giving her up or like allowing her to marry someone else because this guy has more Powers than the guy she's married to so she's going to marry a yl who wants to use her powers only uh-oh freya's husband's son is really hot and fre really mons to bang him and guess what they do that's kind of not good you know cuz this guy is power hungry not the son but the the husband the husband is power hungry he doesn't really like or doesn't like the idea of our heroin banging his son so that kind of puts her in a pickle and I'm supposed to care but I didn't so I gave this book two stars and that's it those are all my five star predictions for 2024 and if I could count I would count them all and how many actually uh Pro to be successful but when I look at this year as a whole when I look at the books that I've read and the books that I put on this list I think this is my most successful list thus far I think I was really honest with myself when I made this list about the books that I would enjoy as a result most of these books I think are five and fourstar reads I mean obviously there's some Duds in here too because that's bound to happen but the most part I've had a really good reading year with um romances and I'm super excited I think to reflect on not just these anticipated books but also just like my reading as a whole I wonder how many five stars I'm going to have in comparison to other years I feel like it's been a pretty good reading year I think it's been like a five star year or a more five star year but we'll reflect on that when we get to it I don't know what video that's going to be but it'll be a video maybe my best books of the Year video I'll let you know but uh thanks so much for watching this video I hope you found something new to add to your TBR I love you all so much and I'll see you in the next onehello welcome back to my channel in today's video I'm going to be talking all about my 24 five star predictions for 2024 and how those books went what the outcomes actually were I happened to read all of the books on my most anticipated list this year pretty far in advance of the end of the year and I thought you know what October seems like the perfect time to sit down and talk about all these books with you some were in fact five stars but as per usual not all of them were so I'm excited to rant to Rave to talk to you all about these five star predictions so hopefully you can add something to your TBR before the end of the year but before we get into it I have got to tell you about the spons of today's video ritual who have become a really integral part of my daily routine now they're a brand that does the hard work for you so you have the Peace of Mind knowing what's going into your body for the past few months I have personally been using the synbiotic plus which is a three in-1 Prebiotic probiotic and postbiotic that supports a balanced gut microbiome and digestive health symbiotic plus is designed with two clinically studied strains of probiotics to help with digestive discomforts like bloating and gas and support healthy regularity so a few months ago I went on my first antibiotic I know it's crazy that I'm nearly 30 and I've never been on an antibiotic before but that wreaked havoc on my gut health I knew that I wanted to support my digestion and symbiotic plus has been making such a big difference the kind of difference where I notice if I skip a day of taking this again it's more than just a probiotic which I love it contains prebiotics and postbiotics in one capsule prebiotics support the growth of beneficial bacteria and postbiotics support gut barrier function daily disturbances of life like poor diet stress certain medications like the one that I was on can really throw our gut off kilter that's why it's important to take a supplement like Sy iotic plus daily really big on habit stacking so after I feed my cats at night I'm reminded to take my symbiotic plus because it's in the same drawer with their food scale it's just one minty capsule daily and I love that you can take it any time of day with or without food and it's shelf stable so I don't have to refrigerate it which is super awesome especially if You' like to travel with it and it's subscription based so you never run out because again consistency is super key when you are trying to support your digestive health to check out ritual and symbiotic Plus for yourself click the link in my description or use the code Chandler Ansley 25 to get 25% off your first order or you can use the cute little QR code on the screen right here thanks again to Ritual for sponsoring this portion of today's video now let's talk about all of my five star predictions for 2024 and whether or not they actually panned out first up we have pirate girls I thought when I put this on my list that this was going to be a very plot driven love triangle romance I was kind of wrong on the love triangle front but this book definitely is a plot driven story this book is the second in the hellbent series by Penelope Douglas which follows the children of the couples from the fallway series if you've read bully slash if you've been around for a while when it comes to Noodle romances you probably have heard of bully these books again are kind of like a spin-off continuation of that series with like a darker grittier spin focuses a lot on Town Legends and ghost stories this book follows our heroine Dylan who is the daughter of the hero and heroine of bully and she's of course not like other girls she's really into racing motorbikes her dad actually like owns a racetrack and has his own racing team and our heroin is really interested not in racing cars like her dad does but in racing motorbikes in specific her dad really is not super supportive of her Ambitions and her her dreams he wants her to go to college have like a normal healthy safe life but of course she has to be the rebel the bad girl and this kind of puts her in a tough spot like her and her parents as she's a senior in high school just like haven't been meshing very well and so when Dylan gets the opportunity to potentially be traded to a rival high school during homecoming week she decides she's going to jump on this opportunity she comes from a sort of like Posh upbringing maybe not like super spoiled but definitely you know a nicer well-funded High School um she trades to a less affluent high school and she's definitely in for a shock in surprise when she is around all these like rough and tumble people she could definitely hold her own I mean that's like kind of part of the story but she goes there and she is quickly acquainted with how different it is basically the way the tradition works is that for 2 weeks you know you trade a student with the other high school and they get kind of like bullied and hazed or whatever I guess the administration and parents are okay with this but while she's there she ends up coming back into contact with her cousin her cousin who's not really her cousin because it'd be weird if they were her cousin Hunter who has transferred to this rival High School to get away from his twin brother Kate is a bit of a bully he is the quarterback on the lake Richie Rich high school football team he and his brother don't really see eye to eye which is a big part of the story and that I thought was going to really play into the romance I really thought that Kate and Hunter we going to be fighting over our heroin and while that does kind of come into play in the story it's really not what I consider to be a traditional love triangle it's very clear I think from the beginning that Hunter is like endgame for Dylan I don't want to say makes it less exciting but I do think that that would have been a juicy like little tidbit thrown in there regardless the story is kind of complicated when it comes to the plot just beyond Hunter and Dylan reuniting and kind of falling in love there are again these like ghost stories and these rivalries and the complicated relationships between the two different towns again who have very different like socioeconomic statuses I personally enjoyed it I actually enjoyed the plot points of the story I do think at times it gets a little bit convoluted and I don't think this is a story that I would necessarily recommend for everybody as someone who really thrives off of angst and tension in Romance this was really refreshing this is actually one of the books that I have read most recently compared to some of the others on this list which I read like back in February or March very fresh in my mind and it was just what I needed to hit the spot and while it wasn't quite a five-star book I gave this one four stars and I am glad that I like added it to my predictions list one book that I probably should have just skipped and I know now in the future going forward to skip this kind of story is five brothers by Penelope Douglas I just threw both pen Douglas releases for the year onto this list because I was like surely one of them will pan out and it's true one of them did unfortunately was not five brothers this one even in my original video when I was talking about like my five star predictions and like what I thought was going to be great this is the one that I was most tentative about this is the one that sounded most Credence esque and I didn't love Credence especially the second third time around that I've read that book so I I didn't hold out high hopes for this one cuz it had the same Vibe I mean it's literally called five brothers you can only guess what happens it was simply not for me okay it really wasn't this book Falls a heroin named Christian k r i s j n she's recently graduated from high school and is basically screwing around until her mom can marry her off to a 40-year-old to save the family it's very much giving my mom is trying to sell me to One Direction Vibes but I was willing to look past like like the crazy ass plotline or at least like the setup for this book I was like okay I'm willing to put that aside as long as the rest is not crazy that wasn't the case though the rest actually was crazy anyway um Christian is taking care of her siblings because her mom is just like not in a place to do so her dad left the family to go shack up with his mistress a couple of streets away and the mom is just kind of like spending money willy-nilly until the divorce goes through and then she knows that they're going to be destitute which is again why she's trying to sell Christian off to One Direction but anyway she is taking care of her siblings she gets a job at a diner in kind of the cedar part of town she of course is from the side of the tracks she wants to bang the guys from the wrong side of the tracks here's the way this book is set up though because I think this is really what told me that I wasn't going to enjoy this book our heroin at the beginning of the story this is the first chapter she is being picked up by a guy on the side of the road she's just like walking minding her own business and this guy is like hey get in the get in the car or I'll murder you kind of and it was um scary it was shocking I was like is this going to be the way we're starting the story is there going to be an assault that happens no actually after way too many pages we figure out that the guy that's picking her up in a truck is actually her like kind of semi- parttime boyfriend a rle play scenario but during this role play scenario I think he forgets to bring condoms and she gets upset they end up going back to his house they don't hook up but her car tires are slashed by a jealous ex-girlfriend and so she's going to sleep on the couch she doesn't let the fact that she's at someone else's house prevent her from flicking the bean pleasuring herself while someone in the corner watches and once she figures out that someone's watching her in the dark she decides to stop she doesn't decide to leave this situation though she decides to tell this stranger who she doesn't she literally has no idea who this person is in the corner right she tells this person her life story again about being being sold to One Direction about the fact that she's taking care of her siblings and that she's going to be married to this 40-year-old man and her life isn't what she wanted it to be and this culminates in her The Stranger in the corner raw intercourse if you will it's kind of an ongoing is she pregnant is she not she's not but it is a question certainly after this she proceeds to bang each of the five brothers in this house to kind of I guess figure out which key it's perfectly in the lock and of course the last guy she ends up banging is the one that she banged at the beginning of the book and is of course like her perfect match because the sex that she had uh that stranger was like her perfect most magical o and she's never had that with a partner before and so of course they're meant to be this sounds crazy that's because it was candidly I didn't finish this book I mean I skimmed it I very much skimmed it cuz I had to know what the was happening and who she would end up with I got about to the 50% Mark reading it fully then 50% more gone I was like I can only read about her squealing over new sausage just so many times um before I go crazy so yeah I scammed it okay I I did so I'm not going to rate this book but I can tell you with some degree of certainty that it was not for me um moving on shall we to a book that is completely different a book that is a guaranteed safe bet shall we say if if Penn's books are wildly unpredictable LSC Silver's books are a guaranteed safe bet so let's talk about wild love here's the thing sometimes sometimes predictability is great sometimes it gets a little bit boring this book is a single dad small town billionaire brother's best friend romance and if that sounds like a lot of tropes it's cuz it is the book's about Ford Ford finds out that the spum that he donated was used to create a 12-year-old girl whose father has recently passed away and because her mother is in mourning still and really can't handle um raising her at the moment Ford decides that he is going to take over for a little bit while the mom Grieves and then our heroin Rosie is looking for a job because she got unceremoniously fired after reporting assault at her last job so she is dealing with a lot um shaking confidence obviously just questioning her own self worth for sure when she comes to this small town that she is from and she decides she's going to work for Ford I don't know if she like tries to convince him to give her a job or if he's like just running to give her a job not really sure but she ends up working for him they end up falling in love are we surprised are we shocked we shouldn't be because it's an ulie silver book it was sweet enough right I I really appreciated the different kind of family Dynamic here I really like to see Ford's Journey um to kind of like become a parent I thought that was really cool I don't think I see that often in these sorts of romances um especially like a single dad romance I just feel like it kind of lacked what I love about some of Elsie Silver's early stuff and again I think predictability is awesome sometimes like I like picking up an author's book and kind of more or less knowing what I'm going to get the problem I think as she continues to write is that I think things get a little bit sanitized for my liking I feel like she used to do really intense angst intention I feel like her heroins used to be a little bit more prickly a little bit more unlikable both of her characters in her older books like hero and heroin tended to grow more as the story went on I feel like a book like this I wanted our heroin to not necessarily grow but to heal from the things that had happened to her and I feel like that kind of got pushed to the back burner so she could just like Ford in a bucket of wall paint here's the thing it was a good book it was safe it was predictable but sometimes I want a little bit more Nuance I guess is what I'm trying to say so it was a solid four-star book for me it's one of those books that I just don't think I'm going to think about a lot in the future or really like rushed recommend people I feel like Elie's other stuff I prefer more so this next one is really tough for me because put it on this list because I love this author's writing and I did really love this book I originally rated this book five stars but I read another book from this author this year I was kindly I don't want to say gifted a copy I was kindly asked to sensitivity read this author's uh book that's coming out this year and it was just one of the best things I've ever read so it's like hard to compare this book that I loved to that book that is like a new all-time favorite let me let me let me break it down for you okay savor it by Tera deit is the book that I'm talking about and left of forever is the book that I was asked to sensitivity read for please check that out when it comes out I mean it is just truly remarkable but this book is fun and I put it on the list because I expected it to be really deeply romantic and also funny because that's what I've come to expect from this author in the past and she delivered I mean she really did this book is about our main character Sage who is recently dumped by a long-term boyfriend kind of devastating for anyone but is especially devastating to Sage on two different levels on the one hand this has really shaken her confidence and made her feel kind of like unworthy reasons that you find out in the book and then also she wants to enter into this townwide competition but she can't really do that on her own she needs a partner to do it sh out of luck because she doesn't have a boyfriend so she enlists the help of her new temporary neighbor fisher fisher is in town because he is dealing with the grief and the loss of his sister now the guardian of his niece who's a teenager and really prickly and difficult and he is also just like doubting his own skills and abilities he is a chef and he is supposed to be helping open and plan menu new restaurant he used to be in New York now he is here temporarily it's not going to be a forever thing okay but like he's he's here and he and Sage fall for each other and it is just so Charming I loved the moments of levity from the humorous moments of which there are plenty I also really appreciated how both of these characters grow throughout the book how they kind of help to heal each other but how the individual Journeys are so important as well like there definitely is time where these characters have to kind of like retreat and work on themselves for the relationship to work and it just felt so realistic I so appreciated both characters Journeys Fischer is a total green flag of a man honestly I think this book is one that could appeal to a lot of people again it does have that like deep heart to it but with the humor there is some levity like it's not overly melodramatic which I know that some people have kind of a hard time with the more I talk about this book the more I'm like no this is a five star read like I'm not going to change my rating for this book but really truly left of forever is like six-star read material so like check that one out I like cannot stress enough how much I love that book it's about divorced people by the way kind of finding their way back to each other I feel like that's kind of a Trope that is hard to pull off I've only ever seen it done once before that I enjoyed and it was um from the illustrious the wonderful the amazing the incredible Kennedy Ryan sowit does a book just as well as Kennedy Ryan I don't know I just feel like you need to pick up lefta forever anyway okay bye talk about the next book next to you this one on the list because it was getting republished and I hadn't read the prior version or whatever I don't know if the book actually like changed when it got republished but I adored out on a lamb it was one of my favorite books of last year and I was like you know what this is going to be good it's a friends to lover story I love a good friends to lovers I didn't really love this one but I'll try to break down why this one is about Lane and Matt who hook up or kiss at the beginning of the book like on New Year's um they get kind of introduced to each other through mutual friends they're not childhood friends they're not like people who have known each other forever at the start of this book is when they meet over the course of the story they become friends and realize that there's something more there try to fight their attraction for each other there is kind of a friends to benefits element to the story as well this book has Lane who is dealing with grief Matt who is dealing with his own stuff the that they kind of like maintain their friendship and stay in close proximity Is that they're renovating a bus for a heroin to live in this book kind of didn't work for me mostly because there was no semblance of angst and tension I know that I said the last book didn't have a lot of melodrama and that is true this book doesn't either but I think it also lacked angst intention and I just need that for a story to fully land so this was just three stars for me all right a book that I put on the list for Vibes and Vibes only turned out to be a festar read and that would be the familiar by leardo if anyone is going to take a historical fantasy which I notoriously dislike it's something that I'm into it would be Lee bardugo so this book is better main character lusia she is a servant for a kind of awful family during the Spanish Inquisition until one day she is discovered to have magic that can Elevate the status of the family that she works for they are going to kind of like sponsor her almost and she is going to I guess hopefully win a competition by the disgraced Secretary of Spain he is looking for people with magical abilities that can be pedal as like from God so that the king might have him in his favor again right this guy's disgraced he's going to bring a magical person with him and the King's going to be like oh my God come back I love you so much you know the person that discovers luzia's magic though is not the secretary right somebody else and he has kind of a piece of which makes things complicated also complicated is the spooky dude in his employ that is supposed to train luzia and you know get her magic looking R Top Notch for this competition does she fall for the spooky man yes she does is it strangely romantic even though it's not really a romance also yes this this book is one that I just don't really know how to talk about it's one that I don't really foresee a lot of people enjoying as evidenced by the rating of this book on Goodreads I think a lot of people didn't know what to really think about it I think that's also kind of how 9th house went but that one at least didn't have the historical element to it feel like 9th house is a slightly easier sell this one's kind of tough It's a slow-moving historical fantasy where the majority of the historical stuff was not that interesting it's also hardly a True Romance I don't know it it's hard to sell I'm feeling protective of it because it is actually one of the most deeply romantic things I've ever read I gave five star moving on to a book that I have actually in my possession to hold up funny story by Emily Henry I put on this list because I was intrigued by this idea of our heroin fake dating her ex's fiance's her ex's new fiance's ex-boyfriend I don't know I was holding out hope that I would like this one despite not liking almost all of Emily Henry's books I feel like I just had such good luck with people we meet on vacation that I was really hopeful that this one would be just as successful well it was not the five star I was expecting or hoping for it was actually very good good and I'm going to tell you why so this book is about daffany and Miles daany has been with this incredible guy named Peter for a while and she is now engaged and she is going to move to his childhood town and they're going to move into a home together that Peter owns that's important she could be with him which is super romantic only trouble is Peter has a female best friend and this female best friend rears her ugly little head on his bachelor party she confesses her love for him and he does the same and he unceremoniously kicks our heroin out of the house that she just moved into with him and now she has left kind of in a pickle because she's in this place she doesn't know she has left security um to be with this man who she really thought she could count on she's feeling stupid she does no what to do but the good news is Peter is engaged to a woman named Petra right or he's going to be engaged to a woman named Petra that he cheated on his fiance with anyway Petra used to date a guy named miles miles needs a roommate and our heroin needs a place to live Ergo she moves in with this man loved the plot on paper because it felt really romcom me it felt like something I hadn't really read before but I love a good like Revenge fake dating plot line cuz of course dafhne and miles are going to fake date and they do but it is much more than that this story is really about Daphne who is deeply distrustful of men because her dad is a super flaky person continues to come into her life in this book we also have miles who is not distressful of men but is distressful I guess of relationships and or his own happiness because of the way that he grew up and the family structure he grew up in sister comes to visit for part of the book as well I think what I appreciated about this book in comparison to some of Emily Henry's others is that this one felt a lot more realistic and I feel like the main character were much more sympathetic I'm consistently bitching about how Emily Henry's Heroes all tend to feel the same don't get me wrong I love a simp hero I love a hero who is obsessed with the heroin but not at the expense of him having his own character traits and flaws and I feel like Emily Henry really her stories tend to fall apart from me for that reason I'm like how is this going to work long term when I don't even know who this man is and like why they should be a good match this book I could see it because of how flawed our hero was and because our heroine was needing the particular flaws that he has I don't know it was just really really well-crafted I have to say the only thing that I didn't love about the story was how much the family stuff was involved I think it lent itself a little bit more to the women's fiction side of things than the romance side of things had some of that been toned down a little bit I maybe would have liked it more this one this one was better than most I think and daany didn't abandon medical school to make pottery so that's one in my books four stars before I picked up bride I thought that this book was going to be about a woman kind of like sacrificing herself for vampire family it's it's a vampire werewolf romance okay I think we all know that by now I really thought this was going to give that like traditional throw back 2000's goodness right heroin was going to be really Plucky and she was going to I don't know just like do this for her family she's like I'm strong I'm going to go live with the werewolves and there was going to be kind of like a combative playful Bantry relationship between hero and heroine this book is not that but I still liked it this book Spider-Man character misery who is the daughter of a vampire councilman and she agrees to I guess be married off to the werewolf on the other side of the river I don't know if that's metaphorical or physical I honestly can't remember and I don't know why River came to mind but live in different places she goes to live kind of in the country with this werewolf and his pack the pack doesn't like her they don't understand her kind she also kind of feels the same way as the story carries on of course she and the hero start to understand each other more and realize that their species differences don't necessarily mean that they can't fall in love what I liked about this book was the tone of it I wouldn't say it's quite Twilight esque but there is a certain Melancholy to the story that I wasn't expecting but I found kind of refreshing considering that most of Ali hazlewood's books up until this point have been very tropey very fan ficky in the best possible way way but this felt different and I think that that departure was fun not only like in a genre sense but also in a tonal sense I really did like misery's character and while she wasn't someone that I deeply related to I think that there are pieces of her that I really appreciated and I think that a lot of people will really like her as a heroin I wouldn't call her timid necessarily but because of the things she's been through she is definitely not this like in-your-face traditional paranormal heroin I would say and I really I liked that I also found this book deeply sexy despite the nodding I think that says a lot about what Ali Hazelwood is able to pull off you have this book five stars all right moving on to another Ali Hazelwood book because her publishing schedule is just Relentless I was really excited about non- love because this is one of the only Ali Hazelwood contemporaries if not the only Ali Hazelwood adult contemporary not set in a university and it sounded like it was going to be enemy St lover tropy Excellence it's about Rue who is a biotech engineer at a food science company and a guy named Eli who is trying to buy SL take over this food science company again like bride this is one that I really thought was going to be fan ficky in the sense that I thought there was going to be a lot of like sniping at each other and like personal sabotage and like fun it was not that at all these two basically start uh before they know that they actually work together and they find out that they work together and they still keep and over the course of the story you find out more about Eli's intentions in buying the company and you find out more about ru's history and why she is reluctant to enter into a relationship and is more interested in just sleeping with Eli normally and you're going to hear me say this probably for a couple of other books normally I do not enjoy stories that have hookups at their center it's not that I am prudish about sex or don't enjoy reading about it I just personally don't find that romances in books tend to be well suited to that being like the foundation of the relationship you know what I mean if you're so much I'm not going to get a lot of onpage conversations and I think conversations are at the heart of a successful relationship I was unsure of what to think about this one going into it because I'd heard that this one is very sex heavy but I think it works really well for our heroine and I think it helps to explain she is the way she is I think it takes a really masterful author to be able to write relationship Dynamics into sex scenes in a way like this I found out so much about their relationship and how these two would work long term just from the way that they have sex which feels weird to say but somehow it worked and I I really did appreciate this book got done with this and I was like I can see why other people will not enjoy this again because of the rampant hookups because of the lack of frothiness that I feel like is typical in an Ali Hazelwood book but I think because I don't care about the frothiness of books I really liked this and it really landed for me and I am now a sh for Ali Hazelwood I I have to say it I think that there's not been a single book that I have given less than four stars for her maybe some of her novellas but everything else has been four stars plus this was no exception I gave it five stars contrast uh to the last two books this next one is one that is from a new to me author and unfortunately it did not work for me which is a bummer I really don't want to be an old Haag stuck in my ways unwilling to try new things but a fragile enchantment just didn't work for me the synopsis seemed really promising it is a book set in a magical version or rendering of Regency England they have a heroin Neeve who is dying of whatever magic she has and she doesn't know when she's going to die but in the meantime she wants to save her family and improve their material condition so she is going to go to a rival Kingdom or a neighboring Kingdom and dress the royal family or like the bride and groom for the royal wedding and while she's there she ends up I think falling for the groom I wouldn't know cuz I DF this book at 25% the thing about this book and the thing that just didn't really worked for me and and had me questioning why I was reading it honestly was the characters I loved this setting I thought the setting was really nice but NE as a character was so Bland so boring and I couldn't really understand her character motivations uh and then our hero I feel like his character changed a lot throughout the course of the story at least the 25% that I read sometimes he's a total sometimes he was really nice and then on top of that there are two guys I think they're brothers one's a king or like going to become the king I don't know um there's two brothers right two Royal Brothers I couldn't tell for a long time which she was going to end up with and I don't think that was intentional like I don't think it was a a narrative choice I think it was more just like it's unclear because you're not characterizing your hero very well of situation anyway I dnf this book I think I I've already said that dnf it 25% and I have no desire to pick it up again moving on to a mystery thriller because I decided that I needed to put a mystery thriller on this list for some reason I mean to be fair it sounded interesting the ays by Rachel Hawkins is one that has that like mysterious family secrets dead mommy thing that did appeal to me it's pretty solid I think I would have rated it more highly if I hadn't had just watched saltburn before this because there is kind of a similar Vibe and tone to this book but basically Ruby in is an old broad who has been married to a bunch of different men who all wind up dead but she of course has nothing to do with any of these mysterious deaths anyway Ruby adopts a son a while back and she really lavished money and material possessions and education on him which he felt really lucky for but whenever he left home at 18 to like go to college he never came back he didn't really want anything to do with this family and we don't really know why until Ruby of course dies and leaves a lot of money behind he still wants nothing to do with this until he is called back home by some of his relatives adopted relatives and he has to go and like face them and or deal with like the the family secrets that are unfolding we find out more of course about ruby and her character and we find out more about Camden the son um his relationship with the other people that are like around this table as they're like talking uh about things this is not a super super memorable mystery thriller I think that's because the way that things unfolded like they there weren't a ton of surprises like there were a couple of twists and turns I didn't see coming but for the most part you knew how the story was going to end and like what the answers were going to be but it was like fun enough I give it three stars and I think that if you I don't know have an Audi book credit lying around or you want to get this from your library I think it's worth checking out one book that I have a physical copy of uh that I didn't finish or didn't read at all the at list complex by oliv Blake I put this on the list because I was like you know what I need to finish the series that I start because I'm bad at that and guess what I'm still bad at it I just like do not finish series that I start I think a big part of that is because I'm on the YouTube uh frequently I read for YouTube purposes and I don't know I just feel like it's less interesting to watch a vlog of someone reading like the second or third book in a series like I don't know I I wouldn't unless it was like a whole series Vlog that being said I will be doing a whole series Vlog over on patreon at some point for these three if you want to see my thoughts and feelings I really liked Atlas 6 for the record I have read that first book but I didn't I just didn't continue okay a book that I think I still have a copy of where that copy is I don't know um I think it is on my cell pile fan girl down Tessa Bailey has been much less of a consistent author for me in recent years I used to put all of her books on like my most anticipated list and I think this might be the last year that I do so because I just have not had a lot of luck with her stories lately and it's honestly not that the quality of her stories varies that much but obviously my enjoyment of her books does so I hate to say it but fan girl down was a swing and a miss for me it's about a fan girl who helps revive the career of a golfer who is kind of angry and also not very good at his sport he's kind of ragy he kind of sucks really bad she is just relentlessly cheery and happy and she is going to help this man I'm not sure why I thought this book with such a Cookie plot line would work for me but it didn't because we really cannot stand when we have a heroine or even a hero who is obsessed with their you know partner before they even know them she's obsessed with this man's golf career she is like his biggest fan girl and she ends up like you know working for him and kind of like helping his career and I just really don't like books with crazy power imbalances like this I think it honestly might be more questionable for me than certain age Gap romances I just feel like the the power Dynamic is that kind of weird Josephine again like her sunshiny attitude coupled with wells's bad one it just left me wanting to give her a hug and wanting to punch him I really loved It Happened One Summer um which I think a lot of y'all probably already know because that book had a lot of heart to it it had not only these like funny moments these crazy plot lines these kind of wildly smudy sex scenes they also had moments where the heroine and the hero were growing a lot growing in Romance together like having good conversations and being compatible for each other and having a genuine connection here I just wanted it all to stop I just I didn't enjoy it okay two stars so I was reading Wildfire while putting this list together and I realized how much I liked it in comparison to Icebreaker so I figured that Daydream might stand a chance at also being a good book and I was right Daydream is about our overachiever eldest daughter hiie her neurode Divergent hockey Captain Hero Henry lots of hes in this book hie and Henry it has that like classic Sports romance Trope but it is not done in the same way that it is in a lot of books I feel like normally when you've got heroin helping a hero pass a class which is kind of what happens in this book you have a hero who doesn't want to be tutored who thinks he's too good to be tutored and in this book uh he doesn't feel that way at all and hie is not really truly tutoring him just like helping him with his studies they're not in the same class they like are kind of mutual friends and I don't know y'all they just fall in love um this book is really about the emotional challenges as these two are going through college and dealing with their separate families and or separate priorities in life and it was just genuinely really solid sweet new adults college sports romance they probably a few too many thread characters which is kind of the case for all of Hannah Grace's books so far but I can excuse that because you know they felt accurate to college at least I mean a lot of us have a lot of friends in college um I don't know I prefer reading books where the heroes are unrealistically kind and incredible because I think that's what we should in real life and I give this book five stars the next book might end up on my most disappointing of the year list cuz it started off really promising but within a few chapters I wanted to smash this book over the hero's head for some reason this hard cover is really heavy and I feel like that probably would have inflicted some damage which he deserved okay cuz he Mega sucked this book Spider-Man character Emma who is a screenwriter but she hasn't had much success in the way of like career growth because she is the primary caretaker for her father who suffered an injury semi- recently her life kind of gets flipped upside down when she's given this opportunity to revise the screenplay of her favorite screenwriter she jumps on the opportunity of course cuz she wants to meet this guy and she wants to pick his brain and she also wants to help him out because he needs to get this romcom done so that he can get a different screenplay published she doesn't want to write a romcom but he is forced to and I liked the promise of that I thought it was fun I mean that's why I put this book on the list but he sucks I thought oh it's going to be collaborative our hero is going to learn about love because he obviously can't write a good romcom cuz he doesn't know love and our her was going to show it to him and it just didn't happen our heroin's manager kind of conned her into coming she doesn't want to come necessarily I mean she does cuz she wants to meet this guy but she doesn't want to come because she doesn't want to leave her dad behind under the care of her little sister who's like not uh the most responsible but she decided she's going to do it but her manager again ConEd her into doing this and didn't tell Charlie the hero of this book that our heroin was coming so he is not exactly receptive to the fact that our heroin's there and he makes it very well known he insults her looks he insults her intelligence and he just acts like he is God's Gift he's just an abominable to her and don't think that that's okay and I feel like the Redemption Arc that tried to take place here the miscommunication and the reveal at the end of the book as to why he was the way he was did not make up for the secondhand embarrassment I felt from reading our heroin getting just obliterated by this man torn down multiple times it wasn't just once it would have been bad enough if she overheard him talking about her uh just one time at the beginning of the book but it kept happening it kept happening that he would um belittle her and put her down and act like she wasn't important to him and I cannot stand that I really didn't like this book debating on what to rate this but I it's between a one and a two star it really pissed me off that much just for the summer is a book that I added to my list because I knew Abby jimnez would deliver a hauntingly romantic story and she really did that she did that the setup for this book I will say is kind of corny it has a hero who posts on Reddit about the fact that every time he gets dumped his ex finds their soulmate immediately after and of course our heroin starts messaging him and they talk about how oh my God we both love cats how crazy is that you know the setup is pretty superficial and it is pretty corny but looking beyond that there is so much heart to the story the heroin is one that I think has some of the best representation of of trauma that I think I've ever read in a book she has a really tough relationship with her mom that is kind of at the Forefront of the story and Justin has big emotions to deal with of his own because his mom is going to prison and he is now responsible for taking care of his three younger siblings so both hero and heroin are dealing with some kind of challenging things on their own and they decide that they're going to let this relationship just be something that is fleeting and fun and and sexy but then real life kicks in and they realize that they actually might want to do this for real but of course real life is challenging and complicated and they've got a lot of things to work through so this story I thought was really really remarkable again once you get past some of that superficial stuff I know a lot of people are I don't want to say unwilling to look past it but a lot of people can't I have seen that in the negative reviews for this book but I think if you are willing to push through the beginning of this book that feels a little bit silly you'll realize how deeply romantic this book is and how both characters um are so well suited for each other and grow so much together I love loved and adored this book I think my Goodreads review says is this all-time favorite book of the Year material and I think it might be because I don't think I've read anything that has topped this this year it is so good five stars okay so the breakup tour is I believe one of the first books that I read from this list and I gave it three stars and I think both of those things combined can explain why I remember so little about this book and what did or did not work about it for me but I tried to jog my memory and I'm going to try my best to Endeavor to explain it's a Taylor Swift inspired book our heroin has a breakup song concept album and her most recent ex thinks it's about him it is not however it is about her College boyfriend who she ends up breaking up with or he breaks up with her there's a misunderstanding miscommunication that goes on anyway she reconnects with him he goes on tour with her and they fall in love the thing is the vibe of this book was not very fun and I think that that's because it was this author Duo who wrote it I hate to say that but their books tend to have a kind of a Melancholy vibe to them so it's odd to me that they would pick this topic and then not even attempt to bring any levity to it I guess fine with the idea of like the melodrama behind it if it had been executed better but there were just so many plot points also that I didn't care about look old people I think deserve love as well but the divorc mom hooking up with the bus driver I don't know I just like didn't care I didn't care three stars leave it to Christina Lauren to surprise me with a heartfelt romance I put the paradise problem on this list because the cover the vibe everything about it really seemed like it would be the same level of silliness as on Honeymooners but it wasn't the heroin in this book married our hero back in college so she could get access to Better Living accommodations but they never actually dated and they never actually lived together but they also did never get divorced which is convenient for our hero because he needs to prove that he has been married for a certain amount of time to get access to his inheritance he is the heir to a chain of grocery stores that's like pretty popular in the United States but of course it's not going to be easy for him to convince his family that this romance is for real and he has to take his bride to his little sister's wedding on a private island so again kind of close contact with this family who was kind of evil to be honest I liked this it was a little bit succession at parts a little bit on honeymooner E of course but mostly just a really solidly written romance Christina Lauren never blow me away with super unique characters that I'm going to be thinking about for years to come I honestly couldn't tell you either of the characters names without looking at the flap of this dust jacket but these two were unique enough that I felt satisfied I appreciated how these two fell in love you know you need unique enough characters for me to be like oh wow I can see how these two are going to make it work long term and that happened here four stars all right we have another situation on our hands the kind where a book was really good but also so kind of forgettable and I hate saying that but here we go Swift and saddled is about aah and Weston she's an interior designer who is you know trying to like make a name for herself Weston is the son of the ranch son of the guy who owns the ranch that a is going to be doing work on anyway she hooks up with a dude at a bar the day before she goes to the ranch to kind of see what's up not realizing the guy that she ends up hooking up with at the bar is Weston and now they're going to like have this chemistry and they're going to try to fight their feelings for each other but of course it's not going to work and they're going to enter into a relationship here's a this book amongst the other ones that I'm talking about kind of falls into the LC silver Hera dwit side of things but I think the problem here is that like it's not riotously funny it's not deeply romantic it's just a little funny it's just a little romantic and that's not a bad thing sometimes you just want to pick up a book and like have a good time with it but when it comes to the memorability of a book like that I don't think this one is that for me I mean I genuinely like reading back what I I wrote down for my notes I'm like I don't remember the moments of this book I don't don't remember sexy moments I don't know I don't remember anything about this book except for the plot of the book like the the general synopsis that I could read off of the back of the book and that's a problem for me while I enjoyed this I'm going to give it four stars rather than five because it doesn't have lasting power right there was a book that I put on this list that didn't come out and I haven't heard anything about it and I'm really bummed and it would be the first book in the sky Brier series by Talia Hibert I don't know if the series is ever going to come out but it does seem like she has something new coming out soon and I'm excited about that I'll honestly read whatever this woman puts out so I don't care but I am a little bummed that like I didn't have a new release to read from her this year business casual by the ever lovely always lovely Miss Burger King borison is the last book in The Love Light farm series and I added it to the list because of course I love the love light farm series and I do really appreciate the Gilmore Girls Vibes of this world okay so this one is about Nova and Charlie Nova is woman who is trying to open up her own tattoo shop in the small town she lives in and she's putting a lot of pressure on herself to get it right so she's kind of in serious mode you know taking herself maybe a little too seriously then we have our hero Charlie who is the opposite of that he is a really funloving guy but it's a less than funloving job is a suit he works in the city and he occasionally comes back to the small town to see his little half sister older half older half sister I believe anyway they are an interesting match right kind of an opposite to track sort of situation uh they start banging it turns into more now normally I'm not into one night stands kind of romances I've said that before and I can't say that this book necessarily changed my mind about that but it didn't bother me too terribly much because of the other sweet elements of the story The End of This Book the semi- gravel moment is one that is like imprinted and burned into my brain and it's something I look back on with like a lot of fondness my only real complaint is that the hookup component of course took away from the conversational moments I think there could have been a couple of more conversational moments here to really prove to me why Nova and Charlie were so well suited otherwise this book was really fun and I give it four stars a book that was decidedly not fun but in a nice way Was Here We Go Again by Alison Cochran a saffic romance that I added to my list after really really enjoying this author's Christmas book last year um kisser once for me a great holiday romance if you're in the market or one also I'll leave a link in the description down below few my Christmas Romance recommendations video If you're looking for one anyway this one is about two ladies Logan and rosemary who used to be friends back in grade school but had a bit of a falling out sort of like misunderstanding moment and now they really really hate each other which is tough because they're both High School teachers at the same high school that they attended and they decideed they want to be high school teachers because of an English teacher that had a really big impact on both of them a gay man who is just the best and this teacher unfortunately is dying of cancer start of the story and he asks our two heroins to escort him across the country as he kind of does his like death road trip his you know last Harrah before he can go and die in a home in Maine that he's had for a while um that he wants to get to this book was not a fun one because it is really heavy of course with the emphasis on Grief and dying but because of that I think this is really unique compared to a lot of other romances and just books that I've read this year I think it handled the topic of grief so well and as I was dealing with my own grief this year um this book got a good cry out of me I think that it really um landed and I don't know I connected deeply with the emotions that were on display here I think the only complaint that I have is the Romantic portion of this book I really wanted to root for Logan and rosemary but they were kind of immature in some ways and also I feel like uh there just wasn't enough time for the romance in the story I don't necessarily begrudge the author for that I think the emphasis here really was more on like friendship and the impact of this teacher on their lives and how you can I guess like grow in grief together um and how grief can bring people together actually as well as put them apart but bring them together in this book but again I I feel like there could have been a couple maybe more romantic moments regardless this is a five- star book not for the romance but just for what this book is At First Bite was a book that I had on my radar for two different reasons number one the plot of this book sounded so juicy and the hero and heroin in this book are both over the age of 30 which I thought was really fun because I feel like we tend to just read uh books or romances in particular with Heroes and heroins who were in their early 20s or mid 20s this book delivered okay this is one of the books that I've read most recently from this list I think I read it again a couple of weeks ago it's so good this one is about our main character our heroine Athena she's a teacher at the start of the story she is engaged to a really great guy a ped ician named Johnny and she hasn't known him for very long but they're going to get married kind of a whirlwind romance and he is going to support all of her dreams she doesn't really dream of being a teacher she doesn't really dream of anything I would say uh she does dream of like finding a dream job eventually but she hasn't had much success in the past right she's been a teacher for three years which is the longest she's ever held down a job and this kind of draws the eye of Johnny's older brother Matthew Matthew's also a pediatrician he also helped to raise Johnny he's like 9 years older than Johnny he does not think that Johnny and Athena should get married he does not think that Athena is serious enough he thinks that she's just taking advantage of Johnny for his money that's not like entirely untrue though she doesn't have like super ulterior motives I mean it's just like part of what appeals to her about a life with Johnny it's like okay like I'll have the freedom to figure out my passions and my dreams anyway uh Matthew doesn't really like this and after a while he helps to call off this wedding so there's going to be no wedding between Johnny and Athena but this is kind of tricky as well because during the engagement party before they're broken up Matthew and Athena meet under different circumstances like they don't know who the other person is and they have this like connection immediately and Athena remarks honestly that this guy actually might even be better suited for her than Johnny he's like her in age and he just seems to like get her on like a a mind level until of course she figures out who he is vice versa and they're like GH I'm I'm going to view this you know meeting in a in a different light now anyway Athena can't get away from either of these men because she ends up buying a house between their two houses it's going to gift it to Johnny upon their marriage and he is going to be able to like expand his home into that like empty lot once it's raised of course they don't get married and she is stuck with this home that she's purchased and she's kind of in debt and she doesn't have her teaching job cuz she moved to a different city to be with this man and she's not happy this book's tricky in that I don't know that everybody's going to like it I think all my favorite books tend to be that way but the reason for that and the reason I don't think this is for everybody is that Athena our heroine is tricky of course I think I kind of mentioned it she doesn't really have a easy time holding down jobs she has multiple degrees she has parents who are both doctors and are willing to kind of fund Athena's lifestyle even though she's in her mid-30s and she also has a deeply depressive episode in this book that is kind of hard to read if you've been through a depressive episode of your own but while some of that could be read in a bad light or you could view her in a bad light because of this I find it kind of makes her more real as a character and then our hero oh my God he might be the Saving Grace of this book Matthew you think you're going to hate him because again he like warns her other I was going say other hero he warns Johnny off of Athena um you think okay he's like not a nice guy he's like judging Athena but like doesn't she deserve to be judged a bit just kidding he turns around in spectacular faction and just proves to be truly remarkable hero someone who is so s so deeply romantic is a perfect caregiver when our heroin is going through horrible depressive episode he washes her hair like he is so delightful deeply misunderstood both of them I think are just misunderstood characters who felt so real and you might not always like them because they're real people but I loved it I loved this book I think that Olivia Dade writes some of the most real romance out there read a few other books by her and they have all really impressed me but this is definitely by far my favorite and so glad I read this I'm so glad I have like the special edition from after light it was such a banger and five stars spectacular delicious I hate to like go out with a fizzle rather than a bang I feel like I should have saved that one for last but I'm just going in the order in which I put these books on the list from the last video the video I made when I thought that these were going to be you know five stars fate in and blood last and also least okay uh the early reviews for this really suckered me in and convinced me this is going to be like the Romany of the year and it just wasn't okay basically our heroin Freya has cool powers and Freya is married to a shitty man and this shitty man ends up giving her up or like allowing her to marry someone else because this guy has more Powers than the guy she's married to so she's going to marry a yl who wants to use her powers only uh-oh freya's husband's son is really hot and fre really mons to bang him and guess what they do that's kind of not good you know cuz this guy is power hungry not the son but the the husband the husband is power hungry he doesn't really like or doesn't like the idea of our heroin banging his son so that kind of puts her in a pickle and I'm supposed to care but I didn't so I gave this book two stars and that's it those are all my five star predictions for 2024 and if I could count I would count them all and how many actually uh Pro to be successful but when I look at this year as a whole when I look at the books that I've read and the books that I put on this list I think this is my most successful list thus far I think I was really honest with myself when I made this list about the books that I would enjoy as a result most of these books I think are five and fourstar reads I mean obviously there's some Duds in here too because that's bound to happen but the most part I've had a really good reading year with um romances and I'm super excited I think to reflect on not just these anticipated books but also just like my reading as a whole I wonder how many five stars I'm going to have in comparison to other years I feel like it's been a pretty good reading year I think it's been like a five star year or a more five star year but we'll reflect on that when we get to it I don't know what video that's going to be but it'll be a video maybe my best books of the Year video I'll let you know but uh thanks so much for watching this video I hope you found something new to add to your TBR I love you all so much and I'll see you in the next one\n"