Category Archives: Romance

Review: A Curse So Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer

Book Review and Content, Fantasy, Romance, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , , ,
A Curse So Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer

A Curse So Dark and Lonely (Cursebreakers #1)
Brigid Kemmerer
Bloomsbury USA Children’s
Published on January 29, 2018

Amazon | Bookshop | Goodreads

About A Curse So Dark and Lonely

Fall in love, break the curse.

It once seemed so easy to Prince Rhen, the heir to Emberfall. Cursed by a powerful enchantress to repeat the autumn of his eighteenth year over and over, he knew he could be saved if a girl fell for him. But that was before he learned that at the end of each autumn, he would turn into a vicious beast hell-bent on destruction. That was before he destroyed his castle, his family, and every last shred of hope.

Nothing has ever been easy for Harper Lacy. With her father long gone, her mother dying, and her brother barely holding their family together while constantly underestimating her because of her cerebral palsy, she learned to be tough enough to survive. But when she tries to save someone else on the streets of Washington, DC, she’s instead somehow sucked into Rhen’s cursed world.

Break the curse, save the kingdom.

A prince? A monster? A curse? Harper doesn’t know where she is or what to believe. But as she spends time with Rhen in this enchanted land, she begins to understand what’s at stake. And as Rhen realizes Harper is not just another girl to charm, his hope comes flooding back. But powerful forces are standing against Emberfall . . . and it will take more than a broken curse to save Harper, Rhen, and his people from utter ruin.

My Review

I love the way some of the elements of Beauty and the Beast were reimagined in A Curse So Dark and Lonely. Instead of appearing as a monster 24/7, Prince Rhen relives the same season over and over knowing that at the end of the season, he’ll turn into a bloodthirsty monster and have no memory of himself. The monster will kill anyone in his path, so even while Rhen is human, he’s tortured by the guilt of what he’s done as a monster in the past and filled with dread at what will happen the next time.

Rhen’s only surviving companion is Grey, the last surviving member of the Royal Guard. I loved Grey. He’s sharp, focused, and loyal. The only thing that worried me about him was how much I liked him—I worried he’d steal the show. (Looks like he’ll get his own chance to tell a story, though. I wasn’t expecting a sequel to this book, but the ending definitely sets up for one.)

Let’s talk about Harper. She’s spunky. She’s brave. She loves her family with her whole heart. She’s so moved by the suffering of the villagers in Emberfall that she begins to find ways to fight for them. And her compassion wakes Rhen’s passion for his people. I loved that.

One of the cool things to me about A CURSE SO DARK AND LONELY was the way the genres collided. The contemporary parts set in present-day DC really read like contemporary YA. The fantasy parts had a really distinct fantasy feel to them as well. I thought that was really well done and maintained perfectly through the whole book.

The end threw me a little bit, though. I don’t want to give away details. But it’s unclear which actions change things—even the characters seem unsure. I’m hoping that the second book makes all of this clearer.

All in all, A CURSE SO DARK AND LONELY is a must-read for fairy tale lovers. It’s a rich, beautiful re-imagining of the story packed with great characters. Great for fans of Robin McKinley or Wendy Spinale.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 12 up.

Representation
Harper’s brother is gay. He’s in a relationship with a young black doctor. Harper has Cerebral Palsy.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
None.

Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing between boy and girl. Harper finds pictures of her brother with a boyfriend she didn’t know he had. The way they look at each other tells her they’re in love. Before the curse, Rhen slept with a young woman. (No details.)

Spiritual Content
A powerful curse transforms the prince into a monster at the end of each season. The sorceress visits him throughout the season to gloat and punish him using her magic. The prince’s remaining guard has the ability to cross into present day Washington DC for one hour each season to bring back a girl who can hopefully break the curse.

Violent Content
The sorceress tortures Rhen and others, causing a lot of pain and sometimes leaving wounds. The monster has killed many people and left a lot of carnage behind. Some scenes include brief graphic descriptions of blood and gore left behind or of battles with the monster.

Drug Content
The prince and others drink alcohol.

Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. This post contains affiliate links which cost you nothing to use but help support this blog.

Review: Athlanmara by J. M. Burrows

Book Review and Content, Fantasy, Paranormal, Romance, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , ,

Athlanmara: Seaborn Series 1
J. M. Burrows
Published on September 1, 2018

Amazon | Goodreads

About Athlanmara
The beautiful Florida Keys is the setting for love, adventure and a family secret that will affect every creature on earth.

When timid misfit Brooke is rescued from drowning by a handsome merman, Adrian, her eyes are opened to a world she didn’t know existed.

Adrian can’t stay away from the human girl he rescued, even though he faces certain death if their relationship is discovered. He is torn between his desire for love and his desire to save his people.

The two teens join forces to save both races as illegal pollution threatens to destroy Adrian’s people and the Athlanmara are planning to fight back against the human threat. Brooke and Adrian’s forbidden relationship will change both worlds, but not without a cost.

My Review
I’m kind of a sucker for stories about mermaids or mer-people, so I was pretty intrigued when I heard about this book. The way it’s written is a bit unusual as it shows a lot of direct thoughts of different characters, but they’re not in italics. I found it a little confusing at first. The story mostly follows the point of view of Adrian and Brooke, but other characters have scenes or moments from their perspectives, too.

The Athlanmara (mer-people… maybe just mermen?) had an interesting culture and the author included some language and history, which were cool and fit with the story pretty well. I wasn’t really clear on whether the genders live separately all the time or part of the time or how that worked. I enjoyed some of the goofy moments between Adrian and his best friend Maksim and some of the inevitable faux pas that happened when they tried to pass for human.

I really liked the way the plot explored pollution and its effect on marine life and thought it was a great message. I also thought the Athlanmara were a neat take on mermaids even if I didn’t fully understand all the elements of the culture.

Recommended for Ages 12 up.

Cultural Elements
Brooke is white, and her best friend is Latina. Other characters are white.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Most often the characters say things like, “oh my gosh,” or “dang it,” or “shoot.” There’s one instance of a crude word for female anatomy.

Romance/Sexual Content
When the boys transform from Athlanmara (mer-people) to human, they appear naked. Brooke feels embarrassed by this and unsafe especially before she knows them well. Kissing between boy and girl. One scene shows a girl and boy lying in the sand together making out.

Spiritual Content
The Athlanmara have magical artifacts which have certain powers. Adrian is hoping to find one which has the ability to heal so he can save a family member.

Violent Content
A man threatens people with a gun. More than one scene shows giant crabs brutally killing people.

Drug Content
None.

Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Review: White Rabbit by Caleb Roehrig

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White Rabbit
Caleb Roehrig
Feiwel & Friends
Published on April 24, 2018

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads

About White Rabbit

Rufus Holt is having the worst night of his life. It begins with the reappearance of his ex-boyfriend, Sebastian—the guy who stomped his heart out like a spent cigarette. Just as Rufus is getting ready to move on, Sebastian turns up out of the blue, saying they need to “talk.” Things couldn’t get much worse, right?

But then Rufus gets a call from his sister April, begging for help. And then he and Sebastian find her, drenched in blood and holding a knife, beside the dead body of her boyfriend, Fox Whitney.

April swears she didn’t kill Fox—but Rufus knows her too well to believe she’s telling him the whole truth. April has something he needs, though, and her price is his help. Now, with no one to trust but the boy he wants to hate yet can’t stop loving, Rufus has one night to prove his sister’s innocence…or die trying.

My Review

It’s been a while since I read a book purely for the fun of it, but I think I needed this book. It was so much fun to read. I got carried away by mystery elements and the complex relationships between characters.

As the story progressed and Rufus drew closer and closer to the murderer, things got more and more dangerous. I was totally biting my nails and practically jumping at every noise while I read. Add to that the fact that Rufus has this really fabulous voice, which again made it great fun to read. I loved the side comments and the way the dialogue gave these light moments away from the tension without disrupting the storytelling.

I loved that Rufus (okay, first, I loved that he’s called Rufus. There aren’t enough Rufus characters in literature. Love it!) battles this deep anger, part of which seems perhaps hereditary and part of which might be environmental. But he doesn’t just make excuses about Hulking out. He recognizes how damaging it can be and really wrestles with his angry impulses. That made him so easy to understand and so admirable to me.

Also, I loved his relationship with his mom. It felt very real, and I felt like there was this great balance in the story where she was there, and obviously a big force in Rufus’s life, but the relationship with her didn’t dominate the story. I also loved the moment where one character has to confront a family member about a secret he’s been keeping. He’s worried the family member will reject him over it to the point that he’s expecting to lose the relationship. And instead, the family member talks about how they love him no matter what. We need those kinds of stories and moments, and the reminders that there are good parents out there, and that sometimes we expect to be rejected but are instead surprised by love and acceptance.

Anyway, I read this book in less than a day, I think. I had so much fun reading it, and I absolutely want to read Roehrig’s other book, LAST SEEN LEAVING.

Recommended for Ages 12 up.

Cultural Elements
Rufus and Sebastian are both gay. Sebastian is black.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Regular use of extreme profanity.

Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing between two boys. References to sex. Some details leading up to the event. Some sexual comments.

Spiritual Content
None.

Violent Content
Rufus has some pretty serious anger management issues which he speaks pretty candidly about. He’s trying his best to manage via medication and other healthy strategies, but he’s still bearing some consequences from fights in his past. In several scenes he’s very tempted to fight again. At one point a man threatens him and handles him pretty roughly. A couple characters are downright physically threatening. Someone fires a gun at another person in two scenes. A character threatens others with a gun in another scene. More than one character gets drugged.

Drug Content
Teen alcohol use is pretty normalized. Some references to smoking pot. References to a dangerous psychedelic drug that causes some violent outbursts.


Review: Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful by Arwen Elys Dayton

Book Review and Content, Dystopian or Post-Apocalyptic, Romance, Sci-Fi, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , ,

Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful
Arwen Elys Dayton
Delacorte Press
Published on December 4, 2018

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads
About Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful
For fans of television shows Black Mirror and Westworld, this compelling, mind-bending novel is a twisted look into the future, exploring how far we will go to remake ourselves into the perfect human specimen and what it means to be human at all.

Set in our world, spanning the near to distant futures, Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful is a novel made up of six interconnected stories that ask how far we will go to remake ourselves into the perfect human specimens, and how hard that will push the definition of “human.”

This extraordinary work explores the amazing possibilities of genetic manipulation and life extension, as well as the ethical quandaries that will arise with these advances. The results range from the heavenly to the monstrous. Deeply thoughtful, poignant, horrifying, and action-packed, Arwen Elys Dayton’s Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful is groundbreaking in both form and substance.

My Review
The concept of Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful hooked me from when I first heard about it. I tend to be really gripped by stories that explore a moral issue (medical advances in this case).

Rather than one cohesive novel, this story is more like a series of connected novellas set in the same story world. Sometimes one story references events or characters from another story, but the main characters are always different. Each approaches the issue in a slightly different way. One story asks, should people allow doctors to give them synthetic organs following an accident? Does that come too close to playing God? Another follows the lives of people considered second-class who’ve been physically altered to allow them to be a kind of super slaves.

In terms of the characters, most are flawed but looking for answers and facing some regrets from the past. Sometimes this made them immediately likeable, as with Alexios, a boy who’s been edited to have dolphin skin and flippers and lives in an aquatic place, taking care of manatees, and Luck, a girl who has a forbidden love for her best friend. Sometimes I had a hard time seeing past the flaws. For instance, I had a harder time connecting with Jake, who used to pressure girls to have sex and Milla, who took revenge on a boy who made her life miserable.

I kept thinking back to both of the books by Parker Peevyhouse that I’ve read while I was reading Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful. It reminded me of Where Futures End in the way each of the six stories related to each other but didn’t necessarily overlap. And the way it wrestled with science and morality reminded me of The Echo Room. I think Parker Peevyhouse fans will really enjoy this book. If you enjoy Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful and you haven’t read anything by Parker Peevyhouse, definitely check out her books, too.

Recommended for Ages 14 up.

Cultural Elements
Major characters are white or not physically described. Starlock, the boy who Luck loves, is dark-skinned. One story features a couple of Russian characters. One minor character is gay.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Extreme profanity used irregularly. Some sections (like the last one) are pretty clean with regard to cursing. Others (like the one which follows the two slave boys) have more frequent use of profanity.

Romance/Sexual Content
Two characters have sex in the back seat of a car. It’s kind of an odd scene because she feels somewhat conflicted about it and sort of detached at times. No crude details, but you know what’s happening. Later, the boy she had sex with lies about the experience and she gets bullied and shamed.

In another section, a boy makes a girl undress to her underwear. He has no intention of harming her physically, but she’s scared. In a flashback sequence, we learn that one character used to pressure girls and manipulate girls into having sex with him to win a bet with his friend. He later regrets the way he acted.

One character confesses to a friend that his father caught him in a sexual situation with another boy. There are some details about what they were doing.

A boy and girl kiss. A girl catches her lover asleep with another girl. Later they go to bed together. They have sex but there aren’t any graphic details.

Spiritual Content
As medical technology advances, some religious groups oppose .

Violent Content
Some references to and details about human slavery.

Drug Content
None.

Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Review: Evermore by Sara Holland

Book Review and Content, Fantasy, Romance, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , ,

Evermore
Sara Holland
HarperCollins
Publishes on December 31, 2018

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads

About Evermore
Jules Ember was raised hearing legends of the ancient magic of the wicked Alchemist and the good Sorceress. But she has just learned the truth: not only are the stories true, but she herself is the Alchemist, and Caro—a woman who single-handedly murdered the Queen and Jules’s first love, Roan, in cold blood—is the Sorceress.

The whole kingdom believes that Jules is responsible for the murders, and a hefty bounty has been placed on her head. And Caro is intent on destroying Jules, who stole her heart twelve lifetimes ago. Jules must delve into the stories that she now recognizes are accounts of her own past. For it is only by piecing together the mysteries of her lives that Jules will be able to save the person who has captured her own heart in this one.

My Review
I think I liked Evermore better than the first book in the series, which is a pretty rare occurrence for me. I liked Everless. I enjoyed reading it—found the concept of time as currency to be really fascinating. Partly, though, I just wasn’t a big fan of Roan. I kind of felt like Jules could do better in terms of a match who was her equal.

Some of the characters in Evermore really surprised me. Elias and Stef were my favorites. Stef because she was so scrappy and Elias for his loyalty and sense of humor.

I loved the flashbacks that showed Jules and Caro’s early experiences with each other and the way Jules’ recovered memories changed the story. It had a little bit of the feel of the movie Memento that way.

Evermore is a clean, original story with a lot to offer in terms of great characters and a high-energy plot. It’s got a little more content than Everless, so be sure to check the notes below especially for young or sensitive readers.

Recommended for Ages 13 up.

Cultural Elements
Major characters are white or not physically described.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
One instance of mild profanity.

Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing between girl and boy. At one point, she kisses him while in her underclothes. One scene hints that they have sex, but no details of the event itself.

Spiritual Content
Jules is on her twelfth reincarnation as the Alchemist, who can control time. The Sorceress plans to kill her, and this time Jules won’t reincarnate.

Violent Content
Battles between soldiers and Jules. At one point, soldiers burn a village, killing civilians. Another man receives a critical sword wound.

Drug Content
None.

Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Review: Common by Laurie Lucking

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Common
Laurie Lucking
Love2ReadLove2Write Publishing
Published on February 14, 2018

Amazon | Goodreads

About Common
One person knows of the plot against the royal family
and cares enough to try to stop it — the servant girl they banished.

Leah spends her days scrubbing floors, polishing silver, and meekly curtsying to nobility. Nothing distinguishes her from the other commoners serving at the palace, except her red hair.

And her secret friendship with Rafe, the Crown Prince of Imperia.

But Leah’s safe, ordinary world begins to splinter. Unexpected feelings for Rafe surface just as his parents announce his betrothal to a foreign princess. Then she unearths a plot to overthrow the royal family. Her life shatters completely when the queen banishes her for treason.

Harbored by a mysterious group of nuns, Leah must secure Rafe’s safety before it’s too late. But her quest reveals a villain far more sinister than an ambitious nobleman with his eye on the throne.

My Review
Common was a really fun book to read. I enjoyed Leah’s take on things, and especially her relationships with the other female characters, like her friend Gretchen, her Ma, and of course, the awesome mystic nuns. More on them in a minute, though.

I kind of wanted more from Rafe, and I can’t decide if I’m being unfair in that or not. I mean, he taught Leah to read, and he pays attention to her needs in specific instances, but he seems a bit clueless as to what her life as a servant is actually like. That made me question her affection for him a little bit. He does come across like a super honorable guy, though, so I feel like maybe that should be enough, if that makes sense.

]Don’t get me wrong – I was really enjoying reading the story and then once I got to Leah’s banishment, I was super hooked. Then came the mystic nuns and I was like wow, this book is going all kinds of places I did not expect. I loved that! And the nuns were incredible. Deep and wise but also frank and sometimes kind of funny.

The romance element of the story remains sweet and simple—very Cinderella-esque, if Cinderella saved the kingdom instead of finding a dress to wear to the ball. Ha! It reminded me a little bit of The Selection by Kiera Cass or Everless by Sara Holland. I think fans of Traitor’s Masque by Kenley Davidson would also really enjoy this book, and I definitely recommend it.

Recommended for Ages 12 up.

Cultural Elements
Major characters are white or not physically described.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
None.

Romance/Sexual Content
Brief kissing between a boy and girl.

Spiritual Content
Leah and other characters reference a deity called the Luminate. She meets mystic nuns who live secluded lives devoted to serving the Luminate.

Some characters possess special abilities given either by the Luminate or a dark power.

Violent Content
Leah overhears someone plotting to kill members of the royal family.

Drug Content
None.

Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.