Too much time spent fleshing out too many secondary characters and not enough time spent on the main couple. ( )

With both parents gone and the massive debt left by her gambling father looming over her, Kitty finds herself responsible for her four younger sisters, all of whom – including herself – will be without even a home to call their own in just a few short months. And so she decides to travel to London for the season in search of a wealthy husband, all thoughts of a love match for herself abandoned as absurdly unrealistic. She quickly finds a likely target in a bungling-but-kindly second son in a landed gentry family, but finds an obstacle in the older brother, Lord Radcliffe. She soon strikes a deal with the lord, agreeing to leave his younger brother alone in exchange for help navigating a society of which she is sorely lacking in understanding. You can guess the results.

A fun and happy entry in the genre. The characters are instantly likable and the story unfolds with nice pacing and just the right amount of conflict. ( )

The banter was top tier and the main characters were hilarious! Kitty will be forever in my heart ( )

Recommended: YES!
For lots of laughter, for a delicious take on the regency husband-catching story, for a romance you can cheer for, for dramatic scenes full of tension (sexual and dangerous!)

Thoughts:
Y’all, this book was so good that when I finished it, I wanted to turn back to page one and start it over again immediately. I very nearly did, but I felt like that might be too ridiculous. The first read gave me the pleasure of discovering everything that happened, and I feel like my ensuing second-and-beyond reads will give me the pleasure of anticipating my favorite moments all over again. 🥰

The plot is pretty familiar regency, with a struggling family of girls/young women who need to marry rich to get money to live on (as that’s basically the only option for the time). There are definitely a lot of scenes and moments that lean into that common plotline, most notably in the fact that our leading lady is a kind of buck-the-system woman who goes her own way and is different, bolder than the usual members of the tonne. I’m all for that, so no shade there!

Where it differs, though, is in the specific scenarios they find themselves in, and the way some of the tropes and expectations are turned on their head. I found it super refreshing and really fun to be caught off guard by the way the story was executed!

I thoroughly loved both romantic leads, too. Getting chapters from each of their perspectives (though mostly Kitty’s) really helped with that as I could enjoy hearing each of their thoughts on an interaction and delight in seeing them fall for each other. This is a bit enemies-to-lovers (with some lowkey blackmail?) and I adored it so much. The romance is very sweet, and in keeping with the style of the genre, not a lot of physicality to it. It’s all about the T E N S I O N, babyyy!

Thanks to NetGalley and Viking for a free advanced copy. This is my honest review! ( )

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I read Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow earlier this year and I didn’t love it.. which definitely seems to have put me in the minority! It started off well, I enjoyed the writing and I thought the characters were well drawn but I didn’t enjoy the structure, it was too long, the story dragged and in the end I didn’t like, or care what happened to, Sadie or Sam.

However, I liked enough about the writing that I was curious to try another book by the author.

Unfortunately I had a very similar experience with A.J. Fickry, so perhaps Gabrielle Zevin’s stories just aren’t for me.

I liked
– I liked A.J. as a character, even if he’s a bit of a heavy handed portrayal of a curmudgeonly, snobbish bookshop owner.
– I loved Chief Lambiase. He is easily the best character in the book! I wanted more of him.
– A.J.’s notes that preface chapters with his takes on classic books were quite fun.
– It was an easy read (even if frustrating) , and I did finish the 320 pages without too much skimming to the end which us how it an added star.

What I didn’t like
– Like Tomorrow, the story is told over many years and each chapter is a vingnette with a jump forward in time. I felt like I never spent enough time with the characters before things changed again, it just breaks my engagement and I was increasingly bored by it. The story becomes very jumbled and loses any power it had.
– I don’t know what genre this wants to be! It starts as a rom-com but then it drops that; then there is a half-arsed mystery element; then it ends as a heavy-handed tragedy. None of the elements are well done or satisfying and the whole thing is overly sentimental like one of those American made-for-TV “Hallmark” movies. And interestingly it was turned into a movie which has a poor Rotten Tomatoes score!
– I’m not the audience for the cutesy small-town America setting. I also don’t enjoy precocious children!
– It tries so hard to appeal to “bookish” (social media has made me hate this term) people that it turned me off. Also A.J. has a terrible take on eBooks.

If you like super sentimental cheesy small town stories, and memoir style books told in vignettes, then you might like this. If you enjoyed Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow you might like it. It really wasn’t for me.



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