Review: P.S. from Paris by Marc Levy, Translated by Sam Taylor

P.S. from Paris by Marc Levy, Translated by Sam Taylor

Blurb from Goodreads:

On the big screen, Mia plays a woman in love. But in real life, she’s an actress in need of a break from her real-life philandering husband—the megastar who plays her romantic interest in the movies. So she heads across the English Channel to hide in Paris behind a new haircut, fake eyeglasses, and a waitressing job at her best friend’s restaurant.

Paul is an American author hoping to recapture the fame of his first novel. When his best friend surreptitiously sets him up with Mia through a dating website, Paul and Mia’s relationship status is “complicated.”

Even though everything about Paris seems to be nudging them together, the two lonely ex-pats resist, concocting increasingly far-fetched strategies to stay “just friends.” A feat easier said than done, as fate has other plans in store. Is true love waiting for them in a postscript? 

My Review:
 

This book was apparently popular in France and translate from French but something was certainly lost in its translation because I can't help but feel that this book has no soul. It could have been written by anyone, anytime and it read like bad fanfiction inspired after seeing Roman Holiday or Notting Hill.  I made myself finish this and I'm not sure why - nothing about it was redeeming.  The writing was fine, if simple, but I didn't care for the stories nor did I feel that the author was able to successfully write from a woman's POV.  His misogyny and lack of understanding pervaded the book.  I can't say I'd recommend this one.

P.S. from Paris comes out next week on September 1, 2017, and you can purchase HERE. Hopefully you have better luck with this one than I did!

In the mornings, they ate breakfast at Moustache's cafe and chatted. In the afternoons, they strolled around Paris. Paul bought all sorts of useless objects--kitchen utensils, knickknacks, clothes he would never wear, books he would never read, and gifts for his godson. Arthur tried to curb his sudden shopaholic tendencies, but to no avail.

Review: The One That Got Away by Melissa Pimentel

The One That Got Away by Melissa Pimentel

Blurb from Goodreads:

Ruby and Ethan were perfect for each other. Until the day they suddenly weren't.

Now, ten years later, Ruby is single, having spent the last decade focusing on her demanding career and hectic life in Manhattan. There's barely time for a trip to England for her little sister's wedding. And there's certainly not time to think about what it will be like to see Ethan again, who just so happens to be the best man.

But as the family frantically prepare for the big day, Ruby can't help but wonder if she made the right choice all those years ago. Because there is nothing like a wedding for stirring up the past . . .

My Review:
 

I will read any book that labels itself as a Jane Austen retelling - especially a retelling of Persuasion! So I was excited for this one and it really just fell flat.  I suppose you could say the plot very loosely followed Persuasion but it was missing all of the emotion and spark from that book.  To me, that book is about yearning more than anything. This book was about . . . pettiness and little bit of reminiscing.  I didn't long for the characters to reignite, I was just bored while reading this one. The book is told between past and present and I don't think the author did a good job at those transitions. I found myself read for this to end rather than wanting to keep reading.  Overall, I would skip this and re-read Persuasion.

The One that Got Away comes out next week on August 22, 2017, and you can purchase HERE. I think there are way better JA retellings out there than this one but, if you do read this, hopefully you will have a better time!

I hadn't had white toast since Bush was in office--I'd forgotten how completely, utterly perfect it is. Definitely squats tomorrow.

Review: Ready to Run (I Do, I Don't #1) by Lauren Layne

Ready to Run (I Do, I Don't #1) by Lauren Layne

Blurb from Goodreads:

The Bachelor meets The Runaway Bride in this addictive romance novel about a reality TV producer falling for her would-be star: a Montana heartthrob who wants nothing to do with the show.

Jordan Carpenter thinks she’s finally found the perfect candidate for Jilted, a new dating show about runaway grooms: Luke Elliott, a playboy firefighter who’s left not one but three brides at the altar. The only problem? Luke refuses to answer Jordan’s emails or return her calls. Which is how she ends up on a flight to Montana to recruit him in person. It’s not Manhattan but at least the locals in Lucky Hollow seem friendly . . . except for Luke, who’s more intense—and way hotter—than the slick womanizer Jordan expected.

Eager to put the past behind him, Luke has zero intention of following this gorgeous, fast-talking city girl back to New York. But before he can send her packing, Jordan’s everywhere: at his favorite bar, the county fair, even his exes’ book club. Annoyingly, everyone in Lucky Hollow seems to like her—and deep down, she’s starting to grow on him too. But the more he fights her constant pestering, the more Luke finds himself wishing that Jordan would kick off her high heels and make herself comfortable in his arms.

My Review:
 

This is probably my least favorite LL that I've read so far but I still liked it because her books are just that good.  I'm trying to put my finger on what didn't quite work for me in this one and I think it was the chemistry, or lack thereof.  I am used to LL's books having insane chemistry between the love interests and the chemistry between Luke and Jordan wasn't what I expected. While there were flashes of LL's usual stellar chemistry created between Jordan and Luke, there was not enough of those although it could just be that I have very high expectations for LL's book after reading and loving quite a few of them  What did work for me were all the secondary characters and the setting.  LL is a genius at sidekicks, for lack of a better word.  You know that person that the MC can bounce all his or her thoughts and feeling off of and who's the most amazing friends? She excels at creating just such characters. I can't wait to see where this series goes next!

Ready to Run comes out next week on August 22, 2017, and you can purchase HERE.  

His fingers spread wide over her waist as his mouth opened over hers, and Jordan's fingers gripped his shirt, holding him close. 

It was a bit like being a teenager again, where you thought you'd die of the frantic want, where you didn't care that you were in a parking lot, pressed against a car, probably getting dirt on your blouse, because all that mattered was the boy.  

Except this was not a boy. 

The guy pinning her to the truck was all man, and his hands and mouth absolutely knew what they were doing. 

Someone whistled as he walked by, and Jordan broke away with a gasping laugh. "Is this how you got three women to agree to marry you? Kissing them against your truck?"

Review: Things That Happened Before the Earthquake by Chiara Barzini

Things That Happened Before the Earthquake by Chiara Barzini

Blurb from Goodreads:

Welcome to LA? Nineties' Hollywood gets an Italian makeover in this poignant and ruefully funny coming-of-age novel featuring a teenage girl who's on shaky ground in more ways than one.

Mere weeks after the 1992 riots that laid waste to Los Angeles, Eugenia, a typical Italian teenager, is rudely yanked from her privileged Roman milieu by her hippieish filmmaker parents and transplanted to the strange suburban world of the San Fernando Valley. With only the Virgin Mary to call on for guidance as her parents struggle to make it big, Hollywood fashion, she must navigate her huge new public high school, complete with Crips and Bloods and Persian gang members, and a car-based environment of 99-cent stores and obscure fast-food franchises and all-night raves. She forges friendships with Henry, who runs his mother's movie memorabilia store, and the bewitching Deva, who introduces her to the alternate cultural universe that is Topanga Canyon. And then the 1994 earthquake rocks the foundations not only of Eugenia's home but of the future she'd been imagining for herself.

My Review:
 

This book took me nearly a week.  I kept putting it down and had to force myself to pick it back up every time.  I did not want to finish it but I did so out of guilt.  It actually picked up about 75% in but it was never what I would term "enjoyable." It wasn't that the writing was bad or even the plot, really, but I never connected with this.  It was written in a narrative style and jumped around a lot. It was supposed to be linear but there were weird gaps of time that threw me off.  I appreciated the reflection of LA in the 90's and the fish out of water first person POV but that was about it.  The whole thing felt too fantastic to me even though every word could have been true.  This might really sing for some people, especially if you have a real nostalgia for the LA of the early 90s but it didn't quite come together for me.  One tip: throw your hopes for political correctness out the window if you do read this.

Things That Happened Before the Earthquake comes out next week on August 15, 2017, and you can purchase HERE.

When I told my Roman schoolmates we were moving to America they all gasped. I should refuse to move to an imperialist country. America was evil. That was the bottom line. Ours was a politically active institution. Every year students conducted a sit-in on the school grounds to protest government decisions about public education. The real activists printed pamphlets and screamed communist slogans into megaphones. The rest of us like the excuse of sleeping away from home. We camped in sleeping bags inside the freezing gym, smoked hash, and talked about "the system." Nobody washed for days. Halls were littered with cigarette butts, posters, and empty cartons of pizza-our only sustenance. Most of the boys had anxious Italian mothers who snuck home-cooked meals through the gates. They didn't want to look like mama's boys so they ate their food alone in the restrooms.

Review: Are You Sleeping by Kathleen Barber

Are You Sleeping by Kathleen Barber

Blurb from Goodreads:

Serial meets Ruth Ware’s In A Dark, Dark Wood in this inventive and twisty psychological thriller about a mega-hit podcast that reopens a murder case—and threatens to unravel the carefully constructed life of the victim’s daughter.

The only thing more dangerous than a lie...is the truth.

Josie Buhrman has spent the last ten years trying to escape her family’s reputation and with good reason. After her father's murder thirteen years prior, her mother ran away to join a cult and her twin sister Lanie, once Josie’s closest friend and confidant, betrayed her in an unimaginable way. Now, Josie has finally put down roots in New York, settling into domestic life with her partner Caleb, and that’s where she intends to stay.

The only problem is that she has lied to Caleb about every detail of her past—starting with her last name.

When investigative reporter Poppy Parnell sets off a media firestorm with a mega-hit podcast that reopens the long-closed case of Josie’s father’s murder, Josie’s world begins to unravel. Meanwhile, the unexpected death of Josie’s long-absent mother forces her to return to her Midwestern hometown where she must confront the demons from her past—and the lies on which she has staked her future.

My Review:
 

I LOVE LOVE LOVED the first season of Serial so I thought the premise of this thriller sounded so good. And the similarities to Serial were pretty well done - the book vacillates between the first person narrative of Josie and each episode of the podcast reconsidering her father's murder a decade before, with a few reddit posts and tweets concerning the podcast in real time thrown in. Use of faux social media in books is becoming more prevalent every day and I generally like it. This book wasn't necessarily bad but it also wasn't very thrilling.  It started out pretty good and I could sympathize with Josie who has tried to create a new life for herself after her father's murder, her mother's disappearance into a cult and her twin sister's betrayal.  Obviously, the popularity of the podcast reconsidering whether the man in prison after being convicted of her murdering her father actually did murder him is upsetting, to say the least.  All of this had the set up and making of a great book but it just fizzled out.  There were too many threads and the author went out of her way to make the journalist authoring the podcast absolutely atrocious. I didn't get a better sense of Josie or any of the characters in the book any better than I did in the first chapter.  I think this was an interesting read but it could have been so much more.  Hopefully you have better luck!

Are You Sleeping comes out next week on August 1, 2017, and you can purchase HERE.

Nothing good happens after midnight. At least that's what Aunt A used to tell us whenever we begged for later curfews. We would scoff and roll our eyes and dramatically pronounce she was ruining our social lives, but over time I cam to see the wisdom in her words. Trouble is the only thing that occurs between midnight and morning.

Review: Shadow of the Lions by Christopher Swann

Shadow of the Lions by Christopher Swann

Blurb from Goodreads:

How long must we pay for the crimes of our youth? It has been almost ten years since Matthias graduated from the elite Blackburne School, where his roommate and best friend, Fritz, fled into the woods, never to be heard from again, in the middle of their senior year. Fritz vanished just after an argument over Matthias's breaking of the school's honor code, and Matthias has long been haunted by the idea that his betrayal led to his friend's disappearance.

Years later, after hitting the fast lane in New York as a successful novelist--then falling twice as hard--Matthias is stuck, a failure as a writer, a boyfriend, a person. When he is offered the opportunity to return to Blackburne as an English teacher, he sees it as a chance to put his life back together. But once on campus, Matthias gets swiftly drawn into the past, and is driven to find out what happened to Fritz. He partners with a curmudgeonly local retired cop and tries to solve the case, dealing with campus politics, the shocking death of a student, Fritz's complicated and powerful Washington, D.C., family, and his own place in the privileged world of Blackburne.

In the spirit of film noir, what follows is a tale full of unexpected turns. Shadow of the Lions is a gripping literary thriller, but also a moving coming-of-age story that is as much about the mystery as it is about the redemption of a broken friendship and a lost soul. 

My Review:
 

This was on the verge of being really interesting but the big reveal was just such a letdown for me.  I still enjoyed this, even though it meandered quite a bit, and it was a fast read.  The book started off great - a snapshot 10 years back in time at the boarding school when the MC's best friend just vanishes off campus before graduation. Fritz's disappearance sets of a downward spiral for his family and for Matthias, the MC, which culminates in Matthias coming back to teach at his alma mater where Fritz is constantly on his mind. He halfheartedly begins his search in earnest but it never felt organic to me.  Something just felt off and what Matthias ultimately discovered was weird.  Not good weird but it felt like the author didn't know how to end the book and to taper from all this build-up and just ended up cobbling a story together.  I think this could have benefited from more direction and more editing but I am interested to see what this author writes next.

Shadow of the Lions comes out next week on August 1, 2017, and you can purchase HERE. I would definitely read another book from this author, especially in this genre.  You can see some of my favorite books set in boarding schools HERE.

I had always enjoyed reading poetry, although it's a very different thing to teach others how to read it. My students felt that poets were weird, which had actually been true of some of the poets I had known at NYU. They had scared me a little, to be honest--at parties, the poets were the ones swinging from the light fixtures and trying to get the faculty, or their souses, into bed, whereas we fiction writers leaned against walls, drank early, and snuck glances at our watches. That hadn't kept me from sleeping with two of the poets. Beth was blond and warm and wrote Whitmanesque verse about rivers; Giselle was dark haired and dark spirited, with fingernails bitten to the bone, and wrote tight, acidic poems about death and betrayal, as if she were the love child of Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe. Beth said I was a lost soul while Giselle called me a fucking asshole, both of which, when you think about it, are pretty much the same thing.

Mini Reviews: Battle of Hello, Sunshine[s]!

Hello, Sunshine by Leila Howland

Blurb from Goodreads:

A Prep School Girl with a Hollywood Dream

Becca Harrington is a reject. After being rebuffed by every college on her list, she needs a fresh start, so she packs up everything and moves to LA, giving herself one year to land an acting gig or kill herself trying. 

Unfortunately, not everything turns out as planned, and after a few grueling months, LA is looking like the worst idea ever. As hard as she tries, Becca can’t land an agent, she's running out of cash, and her mom is hounding her to apply to more schools. In an act of desperation, Becca and her friend Marisol start posting short videos online—with the help of their adorable filmmaker neighbor, Raj—and the videos catch the attention of a TV producer. Could this be it? Her big break? Or will she have to move back home with nothing but some bad head shots and a monstrous credit-card bill? 

Becca may not get the Hollywood ending she was hoping for, but perhaps she’ll learn there’s more than one way to achieve her dream. 

My Review:
 

I totally loved Leila Howland's book from a few summers ago, Nantucket Blue, so I was excited to read her latest offering. And it was engaging from the first sentence.  I really loved Becca - even though she was only 18, she had a dream and I was kind of awe-struck of her pursuit of it.  This felt very realistic to me and I have to say that Leila Howland writes kick-ass women MCs.  Even if they're young, they are so well developed and know what the want.  There is this pushing through life in the face of the fear that she is able to capture and that I so admire! One of the other things that Leila was able to convey in both books was super strong friendships.  I loved Becca's friendships and how she really grew and came into her own over the course of the book.  The beginning of the book started focused on a romance but the romance then took a backseat to the acting, which I thought worked SO well!

I've been trying to fall asleep for five hours. I've breathed according to a pocket-sized book about meditation, read the People magazine I bought near the bus stop in Pasadena, memorized half of a Shakespearian sonnet, and flipped the pillow to the cool side, but nothing has worked.

Hello, Sunshine by Laura Dave

Blurb from Goodreads:

Sunshine Mackenzie has it all…until her secrets come to light.

Sunshine Mackenzie is living the dream—she’s a culinary star with millions of fans, a line of #1 bestselling cookbooks, and a devoted husband happy to support her every endeavor.

And then she gets hacked.

When Sunshine’s secrets are revealed, her fall from grace is catastrophic. She loses the husband, her show, the fans, and her apartment. She’s forced to return to the childhood home—and the estranged sister—she’s tried hard to forget. But what Sunshine does amid the ashes of her own destruction may well save her life.

In a world where celebrity is a careful construct, Hello, Sunshine is a compelling, funny, and evocative novel about what it means to live an authentic life in an inauthentic age.

My Review:
Even though the MC of this Hello, Sunshine is 20 years older than Becca in Leila Howland's Hello, Sunshine, she isn't nearly as comfortable in her own skin. I typically love books involving food and kitchens but this one was just lacking - I don't mind an MC that isn't perfect and that you might not even like - but Sunshine was pretty awful.  Getting past that, the setting was ok (mostly in the Hamptons) but I just felt like this book wasn't really worth reading.  I don't know that Sunshine learned anything or really grew in the book and I honestly didn't care by the end.

You should probably know two things up front. And the first is this: On my thirty-fifth birthday--the day I lost my career and my husband and my home in one uncompromising swoop--I woke up to one of my favorite songs playing on the radio-alarm clock. I woke up to "Moonlight Mile" playing on the radio (where it is almost never played) and actually thought, as you only would think if you're a total fool (or, perhaps, if you were about to lose your career and your husband and your home in one uncompromising swoop): The world, my world, is good.

Both of these books not only have the same title but they both involve an MC that has lost everything.  I think that Leila Howland was able to show more growth, strength and a good journey than Laura Dave.  Both Hello, Sunshine and Hello, Sunshine were released earlier this week on July 11, 2017, and I would definitely recommend reading some Leila Howland!!