CBR17 Book 6: "My Inconvenient Duke" by Loretta Chase

Page count: 384 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Nowhere Book Bingo 25: A book that takes place entirely outside the US

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC. My views are my own. 

Spoiler warning! Because some of the issues I have with this book can't really be addressed without me spoiling some parts of the plot, skip the parts of the review I've marked with spoiler tags until you've actually finished the book.

While this is the third book in the series, most of the action takes place before the events in A Duke in Shining Armor and Ten Things I Hate About the Duke. You don't need to have read either of the two other books to enjoy this one, in fact, I would say you might enjoy this one more without prior knowledge of those stories. 

Lady Alice Ancaster has known Giles Lyon, the eighth Duke of Blackwood, since long before he was a duke. They first met when she was eleven and he was thirteen, and he was one of her brother's best friends and partners in crime. By the time she was seventeen and he was nineteen, there was a clear infatuation between them, and they shared one very memorable kiss. Knowing that Alice deserved someone better, and fully aware that he wasn't ready to give up his wild and reckless ways with his two bosom buddies, Blackwood chose to leave it with that one kiss and studiously avoided Alice thereafter. 

Eight years later, their drunken antics take an almost fatal turn, after they play with a loaded pistol and the duke of Ripley, Alice's brother only barely escapes a shot to the head. Alice is furious with Blackwood for letting things go so far (of the three Dis-graces, he is reckoned as the most sensible one). She declares that she hates him, and only a few days later, she sets off to London determined to find a husband. The idiotic stunt proves to Alice just how likely is that her brother will die unfortunately young and their loathsome cousin, Lord Worbury will inherit both the title and the estate. Worbory hates Alice because she and her best friend Cassandra beat him up for torturing a kitten when they were younger, and he hates Ripley and his friends for looking on. Worbury is already living beyond his means, promising his creditors money once he becomes the next Duke of Ripley.

Alice's aunt, Lady Julia, orders Ripley, Blackwood and Ashmont to stay far away from London while Alice tries to find a suitable husband. While Alice has lived a perfectly respectable life, the presence of her dissolute brother and his best friends will make it more difficult for her. Ripley and Ashmont dutifully agree, but Blackwood is unhappy with the idea of leaving Alice alone in London with Worbury still lurking about, so he stays behind to sort out some financial affairs (or so he claims).

Of course, after a series of chaotic events, involving the odious Worbury, a scruffy street urchin in need (whom readers will recognise from the previous two books in the series, not to mention in a slightly cleaner guise in The Dressmakers series), dealings with the criminal underworld, and then Ripley's sudden and unexplained disappearance, Blackwood and Alice have spent so much time travelling about unchaperoned with one another that Alice is likely to be at the centre of a terrible scandal, unless she and Blackwood marry. So they decide to do so (it doesn't hurt that deep down they have loved each other for over a decade) and for a blissful six months, their marriage seems like it will always be harmonious. That is, until the Duke of Ashmont gets himself into even more trouble than usual, and Blackwood has to go off to save him from himself. 

SPOILERS START HERE:

For two books now, Loretta Chase has been dropping hints about the marriage of Lady Alice Ancaster and the Duke of Blackwood, a union which so shocked polite society. In A Duke in Shining Armor, they appear to be estranged, but having gone back and looked at all the mentions of Alice, some of those hints may have been a bit misleading. Having also gone back and looked at Ten Things I Hate About the Duke, I don't understand why Cassandra, Alice's very best friend in the whole world, a person she refers to as a sister not in blood, wouldn't know the truth about Alice and Blackwood's marriage. Alice and Cassandra correspond regularly, and I don't understand why Alice wouldn't have told her friend that she and Blackwood had to spend more time apart because Ashmont was so out of control he had to have someone sensible accompanying him. Everyone who knew the three dukes would have understood why such a thing would be necessary. That most of society didn't know the truth about the Duke and Duchess of Blackwood's supposed estrangement doesn't seem strange at all, but why would Alice have kept the truth about her actually really happy marriage from her friend?

Obviously, it's because Chase wrote this book last, and can't really go back and rewrite her previous book for the details to fit in better. It is just frustrating that after two books setting up the strange and sudden marriage of Alice and Blackwood, and then their estrangement and supposed enmity, it turns out that nope, there's nothing. It feels deeply anti-climactic to have waited since 2017(!) to find out the truth about Alice and Blackwood, only to discover that their marriage was fine. They married because they loved each other, somewhat suddenly to avoid a scandal, and got along splendidly, with the exception of a few rows, where they realised their mistake and apologised to one another before it could ever become a big deal. I shouldn't be disappointed in a book because there isn't enough drama, and two very enjoyable characters have a happy marriage. But I was led to believe that there would be drama - and now I feel short-changed. 

END SPOILERS

The release of a new Loretta Chase book is always a treat, and it's difficult to describe my delight when I was granted a NetGalley ARC for this back in November. Obviously, I read the book almost instantly and had to re-read it now to remind myself of the plot details before I wrote my review.

Loretta Chase has written some absolute classics, including Lord of Scoundrels, which is 30 years old this year. It's a book I have read multiple times, but never actually reviewed (must absolutely rectify that later this year). I happen to think two other books in the series are better, and I've re-read them more often, but that does not take away from the fact that it's a great book, with a stupendous heroine. Chase has also written a lot of books that are fine when you read them, but a bit more forgettable once you put them down. This, sadly, is one of the latter ones. There's nothing wrong with it, as such, but having first read it right after my re-read of Ten Things I Hate About the Duke, which is a full five-star read and so very perfect, this paled in comparison. There's the issue that I mentioned in my spoiler section, and there's the fact that Alice and Blackwood running around after a street urchin seems to take up far too much of the plot, both in the first and last quarter of the book. 

It should be noted, that Loretta Chase is a queen of the romance genre for a reason, and even a not-perfect book by her is worth your time. Some of the things that annoy me about this book won't matter at all if this is the first book in the series you read. While writing this review and finding books to link to, I also discovered that there's a short story, featuring Lord Lovedon (who is Alice's main suitor in this, before it becomes obvious to everyone, including her, that Blackwood is the only man she could possibly be happy with). So now I've got more Loretta Chase to read. 

Judging a book by its cover: This cover differs from the other two in the series, in that on those books, there is a woman seen from the back, apparently running away or towards something. Here, the woman on the cover, who I guess is supposed to be Alice, is happily wandering about the garden, wearing a dress looking nothing like 1830s fashion (which to be fair, was awful, so well done cover designers). She's probably a lot happier, dreamily drifting along since her marriage came about in a much less dramatic way than that of Olivia Hightower or her best friend Cassandra. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR17 Book 5: "Stargate - en julefortelling" (Brightly Shining) by Ingvild H. Rishøi

Page count: 144 pages

Audiobook length: 2 hrs 38 mins

Rating: 3 stars

Nowhere Book Bingo 25: Local author (the story takes place about 15 minutes from where I work)

It is impossible for me to review this book without spoiling parts of it, so if you don't want to know how it ends, and why I can't rate this book higher, skip the paragraphs I've highlighted. 

Ten-year-old Ronja and her sixteen-year-old sister Melissa are used to disappointments, living alone with a father who only occasionally sobers up long enough to hold down a job for a month or two. They're used to pretending they've forgotten their food at home and taking care of themselves. Close to Christmas, it looks like this year, their luck may change when their dad gets a job selling Christmas trees. Sadly, it doesn't take long before he returns to the local pubs and Melissa takes the job instead (at much less pay, of course). Since Ronja ends up spending her afternoons near her sister, she's soon recruited to look pitiful and round up customers for Christmas wreaths and decorative pine branches, for an added share of the profits. While the owner of the stand seems ok with turning a blind eye to Melissa's being barely old enough to work, he's not going to risk his business by outright using child labour, so every time he comes around for an inspection, Ronja has to make herself scarce.

SPOILERS START HERE:

Ingvild H. Rishøi wrote this Christmas novella back in 2021, and while it sold well, it didn't become an instant sell-out until it was translated into English. After singer Dua Lipa raved about it in her Instagram stories and said she'd be buying it as a Christmas present for several loved ones, and then Oprah Winfrey included it among her best books of 2024. Since the Norwegian press wrote enthusiastically about this (as they do about any Norwegian thing that becomes popular internationally), suddenly bookshops all over Norway kept selling out their copies, and the book needed to be reprinted more than once. Having now listened to the audiobook, narrated by the author herself, I can see why it's become very popular. I was mentally bracing myself for the book because I have a hard time reading about alcoholic parents (my own father having been one until I was ten - now he hasn't drunk a drop for 35 years), and if I'd been paying attention more closely, the multiple mentions of H.C. Andersen's The Little Match Girl throughout should have given me an idea of what to expect. I read for escapism, and to feel good, and am in no way a fan of books with sad and tear-jerking endings. I keep seeing the plot of this book described as poignant and heart-warming, and I don't see what's heart-warming about dead kids. 

Yes, it's lovely when for a brief while, the girls appear to be making enough money to possibly have a proper Christmas (even though Melissa has to work something like 10 hours a day, pretty much every second she's not in school). It's nice that their elderly neighbour comes to support Ronja during her school's Christmas concert and pretends to be her grandfather so the mean girls can't snipe at her. But just before Christmas, everything starts going horribly wrong. Their almost constantly drunk dad has dragged his drinking buddies home with him, Ronja is badly sick with a fever, the supportive neighbour is away, and the owner of the Christmas tree stand has discovered that Melissa and the other employee have been making money on the side, so fires them without paying them a dime. The writer doesn't straight-out say that the girls die while curled up under a Christmas tree in a massive winter storm, but them waking up in a magical forest just a short, idyllic walk from the cabin they've kept dreaming about throughout the story certainly seems like some "reunited with grandmother" bullshit while the little Match Girl freezes to death on a Danish street corner.

SPOILERS END HERE

I'm very glad that something from Norway that isn't dark and grisly crime fiction is becoming a publishing success and wish the author nothing but good luck, but this story was not for me. They've apparently turned it into a movie, being released at the end of October this year (just in time for people to be depressed while going to the cinema too), so I have no doubt the book will keep selling. 

Judging a book by its cover: The cover of the edition my co-worker lent me was just a plain red book with title and author name in gold, accompanied by a Christmas tree topped by a star. The English version seems to feature a snow-covered tree in a winter landscape, which doesn't exactly convey the tone of the story. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

CBR17 Book 4: "Kvit Norsk Mann" (White Norwegian Man) by Brynjulf Jung Tjønn

Page count: 93 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Nowhere Bingo 2025: A poetry collection

The author of this poetry collection was adopted from South Korea by a childless Norwegian couple when he was three years old. Throughout this rather short, but very impactful poetry collection, he writes about his constant feeling of exclusion and lack of belonging. As a child of Asian descent in a small western Norwegian village surrounded by white people, he obviously stood out among the other children. Adopted by farmers to take over their farm when they grew old, he turned out to be entirely unfit for the task, with his grass allergy, lactose intolerance and breaking out into a rash every time he touched the wool of the sheep on the farm. Many of the poems deal with his feelings of inadequacy because he was brought to Norway from the other side of the world, named for his grandfather and unable to continue the long family tradition of farming. 

Even as an adult, he never really feels like he fits in, as despite him growing up in Norway, people keep asking him "Where are you really from?", confusing his identity with other Asian people, side-eyeing his relationship with his white girlfriend (then wife). He writes absolutely heart-breaking poems referencing three young Norwegians with a non-white background (two of them adopted like him) who died in racially motivated killings. He doesn't feel like he properly fits in in Norway, but has no actual connection to Korea either. 

Back in 2021, I read a short essay collection by a woman whose mother is Norwegian and whose father is Gambian. While reading these poems, I kept being reminded of the short and brutally honest ways in which Lundestad Joof shared the difficulties she keeps facing as a biracial woman in Norway. Both authors explore the difficulties of being non-white in an almost overwhelmingly white country, which for all its progressive views, excellent social benefits and efforts towards inclusivity, still has a long way to go before the majority of the population gets over its often very unintentional racism. 

Since I'm currently teaching 10th graders, I am absolutely going to have them compare and contrast some of these texts, hopefully giving them more perspectives on contemporary life for a lot of minorities in Norway. If I'm lucky, some of them might even come up with some clever stuff to impress whomever is grading their final exams in a few months. 

Judging a book by its cover: The cover is very stark and simple, with a black background and only the title of the book and the name of the author featured. In class, the students had to discuss the colour choices here: the title "Kvit Norsk Mann" is in yellow - the colour the author describes himself as in several of the poems, while the name of the author is in white - the colour the author claims he always aspired to be growing up. I doubt these colour choices are coincidental. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR17 Book 3: "Bookshops & Bonedust" by Travis Baldree

Page count: 356 pages

Audiobook length: 8 hrs, 1 min

Rating: 3.5 stars

Buzzwords 2025 Title Challenge: Contains punctuation

Twenty years before the events in Legends & Lattes, Viv is a young and relatively inexperienced mercenary, who gets badly injured fighting undead monsters while hunting for a powerful necromancer. Her mercenary band leave her in the quiet and mostly empty seaside town of Murk to heal up and recuperate. She worries that the group are going to leave her there, but thankfully, to take her mind off her fears, she encounters the local bookshop owner, who manages to persuade her (Viv has never exactly been a big reader) to buy a book, which she is surprised that she can barely put down. 

Soon a beautiful friendship is born. Viv spends most of her days hanging out in Fern the Ratkin's rather run-down store, trying to help her come up with ways to make the place a bit less dilapidated and more inviting to customers. Fern keeps giving Viv new books, and after having eagerly completed a few, Viv stops trying to pretend that reading isn't for her. There are some added complications involving a fierce gnome fishing for an invitation to Rackham, Viv's employer; a suspicious city guard captain, and the discovery of the corpse of the sinister fellow who Viv got into a very public fight with after he was rude to Fern's pet. 

Viv also befriends the local bakery owner, a cheerful dwarf who keeps bribing Viv with delicious baked goods. They develop the chastest of romances, which basically amounts to them talking walks, feeding the fish and holding hands occasionally. Both know that Viv isn't going to be staying in Murk for very long, so their flirtation has a definite end date. 

While Viv is worried that her time in Murk is going to be too uneventful and boring, some strange artefacts left behind by the dead fellow on the beach, turn out to be rather exciting and may have links to the necromancer that Viv's mercenary band were hunting. 

This was the December pick for my IRL book club, and we met in early January to discuss it. While most people liked it, a few people disliked it because they felt it was just too bland and uneventful to really hold their attention. Most of the readers agreed that the book was not without its flaws, but you don't read a book like this when you want to be overly critical and therefore they weren't too bothered. This, like Legends & Lattes is like candy for your brain, and the occasional plot inconsistency or lack of consistent world-building shouldn't distract from the silly cosiness of the read. The majority of us were in agreement that we liked Legends & Lattes more, and a few of the flaws with this book came from the fact that it was a prequel and therefore hampered by a few things already established in Baldree's first book. 

One of the readers pointed out that the way the book depicts what a great experience reading can be, and the way it opens Viv's eyes to adventures and new perspectives through reading is very pedagogical, and that a book where so much of the plot centres around books, how great hanging out in a bookshop, and reading can be, it will hopefully get more reluctant readers to try more books. Which can only be a good thing. 

Judging a book by its cover: The cover of my paperback copy of this is in the same style as that of the first book, with more seaside elements and the mysterious book Viv finds very much the focal point. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

CBR17 Book 2: "Hildur (The Clues in the Fjord)" by Satu Rämö

Page count: 353 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Nowhere Books 2025 Bingo: A book in translation

Hildur Rúnarsdóttir is a police investigator on Iceland's harsh and rather sparsely populated west coast. When she was only a child, her two younger sisters disappeared without a trace, and now she's the head of the division for missing children in her part of the country. Her only remaining relative is her aunt, who she eats dinner with every Monday. Her aunt raised her after her parents died in a car accident about a year after her sisters went missing. Hildur surfs in the cold Atlantic Ocean to clear her mind of worries. She has a 'friends with benefits' relationship with one of her neighbours, but neither wants to make it anything official. 

Jakob Johanson is a police trainee from Finland, who always wanted to visit Iceland and has therefore decided to complete his mandatory training period there. In Norway, he has a five-year-old son that his ex-wife refuses to let him have any contact with. He knits to relieve stress and loves the chance to design knitting projects with unusual Icelandic yarns. He and Hildur complement each other well as partners, but Jakob is frustrated that there are parts of the job he has difficulties with since he can't speak Icelandic yet and not all of the locals speak English. 

Murders are rare in Iceland, so when Hildur and Jakob find themselves investigating the murder of an elderly local pedophile, they are surprised to find that it may be connected to the murder of a wealthy lawyer in Reykjavik. The two men seem to have absolutely nothing in common, but there is a strange calling card left with both of the bodies. The body of the old man was found in the ruins of a cabin crushed by an avalanche, while the security cameras in the parking garage where the lawyer was repeatedly run over by his own car were offline at the time of the murder. The killer seems to be meticulous and careful to not leave any traces. Then there is a third murder, and this time, the victim is someone with a direct connection to Hildur herself.

I put myself on the waiting list at my local library for this book, after reading this article about the author in the Guardian. It turns out that only the first novel of her bestselling series is available in Norwegian so far, with no clear sign of when the next books will be translated. In English, this book is called The Clues in the Fjord (which is a strange title, as there are absolutely no clues to any of the murders found in or around any of Iceland's many fjords. I guess it makes it more authentically Icelandic to use the word fjord in the title?) and books 2 and 3 should be out in English throughout 2025. So if I can't read them in Norwegian, I can always check out the English translations.

I don't think I've read any books set in Iceland since I studied various Norse sagas for my Master's thesis at University more than 25 years ago. These books are apparently massive bestsellers in the author's native Finland (she has lived in Iceland for more than 20 years, the books are set close to where she lives). The publishing rights have been sold to more than 17 countries, and I doubt I would have heard of her if it wasn't for the Guardian article. 

Apparently, these books fit into a genre called "Nordic blue", which differs from the already popular "Nordic noir" in that the books focus not only on the crimes committed and the whys and wherefores but also on the lives and worries of the people investigating the crimes. It's as concerned with the social aspects of the crimes as the psychological. 

I used to love reading crime novels, especially by several prominent Norwegian authors (although not Jo Nesbø, those never worked for me). As a teenager, I absolutely devoured everything I could find by Agatha Christie. For the last twenty years or so, though, I have hardly ever read mysteries, with the exception of some historical series featuring strong-minded Victorian lady sleuths, and they are a lot closer to cosies than the gritty psychological crime dramas of Nordic noir writers. I did read the original Lisbeth Salander trilogy by Stieg Larsson (I refuse to acknowledge any of the cash-grab fan fic sequels published after his death), but I found them mostly unpleasant. So much violence, especially towards women.

So this was a nice change of pace for me. Without spoiling anything, it is clear that the disappearance of Hildur's six and eight-year-old sisters twenty-five years in the past is going to play an important role in the series going forward. Since I have become completely incapable of tolerating violence or harm happening to children since I had my own child, I hope there won't be explorations of anything too graphic, or I'm going to freak out. But I am very interested in reading future books. 

Judging a book by its cover: The cover is fairly neutral, showing partially snow-clad hills in a striking landscape. The little red dots are nevertheless a hint that this is a crime novel, as my soon-to-be seven-year-old exclaimed: "That looks like blood, Mama." He's not wrong, it looks like blood spatter and gives you some idea of what you'll find in these pages.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR17 Book 1: "Into the Woods" by Jenny Holiday

Page count: 368 pages

Audio book length: 10 hrs 45 mins

Rating: 4 stars

This was an ARC I won from the author in a Facebook contest (!) I know, right? My opinions are my own.

Gretchen Miller is a self-proclaimed badass, and she's not lying. After growing up with financial instability, food insecurities and a lot of general uncertainness due to her father's unpredictability, she became determined never to have to depend on anyone ever again and started earning and saving her own money as a teenager, squirrelling it away for a future project. That project became a dance studio for kids, known as "Miss Miller's from Minnetonka". Recently, about to turn 40, she's decided to "expand her empire", and is in the process of buying a second building, intending to expand to yoga and pilates classes. She has also decided that she is DONE with men, after years of disappointing deadbeat boyfriends and terrible Tinder dates. 

Gretchen doesn't really have time to take a whole month off from expanding her business, but to help out a friend of a friend, she agrees to mentor kids at a summer camp in the woods. Being away from civilisation and with limited cell service will hopefully help with her "man cleanse" and further her ambitions of "becoming a crone". 

Tennyson "Teddy" Knight agreed to take a job at the same summer camp without even realising it was going to involve teenagers (he didn't read the fine print). He just needed to get away after the dramatic breakup of his band, where he became tabloid fodder after trashing a hotel room. Teddy's not really an outdoorsy person, doesn't know anything about how to relate to teenagers and is generally a grumpy misanthrope. However, time away from tabloid attention and the opportunity to work on a revenge album sounds good to him.

To begin with, Gretchen pegs Teddy as an entitled asshole because he mistook her for an overenthusiastic fan when they first met and did not behave graciously, while Teddy finds Gretchen annoying and far too perky. Her worldview seems to be the exact opposite of his. With cabins right next to each other in the woods, and a lot of time on their hands, they develop a tentative friendship as the days go by, and discover that they have a lot more in common than they would have imagined at first. Taking on board the idea of temporary camp friendships, they seem able to be open to one another about a lot of stuff they've never really told anyone else about. 

All the talking furthers the mutual attraction between them, and after about twelve hours lost in the woods together, Gretchen decides to ask Teddy to be her "last hurrah", one last fling before she embraces her crone status and gives up men and dating forever. Since they agree that it's purely physical and has a set end date when Gretchen leaves the camp, neither of them has hangups about a lot of the stuff that's complicated dating for them in the past. Of course, when it's time for Gretchen to actually leave and return to her real life, it turns out that neither of them are happy with the never seeing each other again plan.

Gretchen Miller was introduced in Jenny Holiday's previous romance, Canadian Boyfriend, where she was the boss and best friend of protagonist Rory (who is now heavily pregnant, yet still a very supportive best friend). I liked Gretchen as a supporting character and even more as a protagonist in her own right. She really is a badass, and a very accomplished woman, who unfortunately has gotten so used to taking care of herself and her very structured plans for her life that she's unable to see that she may need others to take care of her occasionally as well, and that being flexible and allowing the possibility of change might be just as healthy, if not more, than having your future plans set in stone. 

Teddy begins the book as quite a mess, both professionally and as a person. Having been the bassist and co-writer in a major touring rock band since his late teens, he's not really sure who he is as a person now that his band has broken up, and he's on the outs with his former best friend. He has a ton of unresolved issues because of an even more unstable and shittier childhood than Gretchen, and he starts out being angry, resentful and behaving less than great with the people around him. A month in the woods at camp turns out to be great for him, and working with teenagers and other artists makes him have some personal epiphanies and forces him to reevaluate a lot of things. His plans for a revenge album fall by the wayside pretty quickly and for the first few weeks, he seems unable to write or compose anything at all. Confronting a lot of unresolved feelings about his past also allows him to grow closer to his sister, who clearly has a lot of emotional baggage of her own because of their mother's neglect.

I listened to this in audio, and like Canadian Boyfriend, this is a duet narration, where each performer reads the dialogue and action of their character across all chapters and sections, as well as those of characters of the same gender. The narrators, Teddy Hamilton and Kit Swann did an excellent job. I really hope more romance audio books use this style of narration, it makes the story so much more immersive and I felt I got closer to each of the characters this way. 

Into the Woods was a great start to my reading year. Winning it in a Facebook giveaway was a wonderful holiday surprise (especially since I had been rejected for the ARC through NetGalley the week before). It will be released on Tuesday the 7th of January and is well worth your time. 

Judging a book by its cover: Leni Kaufman has yet again made a lovely and very cosy cover for this romance, although if I were to nitpick (and I will), there are no tents involved in this summer camp experience. Everyone lives in cabins. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

2024 Year in Review

2024 was a very good reading year for me. I barely did a single reading challenge. Except for the Goodreads and StoryGraph challenges, I only did the Cannonball Sweet 16 challenge, the Nowhere all-year bingo, the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books Summer Romance bingo and the Cannonball Read 16 Bingo. I completed all except the Nowhere books challenge, mainly because by the time I finished the Cannonball Bingo in early November, I wasn't in any sort of mood to read anything because I had to, and so, for the Nowhere challenge, I completed 21 out of 25 prompts (but all the bonus ones), but didn't black out the card.

Since in some previous years, I have been almost obsessed with doing reading challenges, my main goal for this year was mood reading, and it's been so relaxing. I also wanted to read a lot of books on my TBR list and try to read diverse books. I have done well with both of these personal goals.

Total books started: 127

DNF-d: 3
New to Me books: 91
Re-reads: 33

Average rating: 4.21

My best reading month was October, when I completed 16 books, and my worst month was April when I only completed 7 books, some of which were short.

I completed 25 dead tree books, 36 audiobooks and 63 e-books.

I read 68 books that fit in my diversity challenge and 52 books from my TBR.

My top ten books from 2024:
The Rom-Commers - Katherine Center
What Is Love?- Jen Comfort
Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands - Heather Fawcett
Not in Love - Ali Hazelwood
Funny Story - Emily Henry
Just for the Summer - Abby Jimenez
A Sorceress Comes to Call - T. Kingfisher
My Season of Scandal - Julie Anne Long
Queen of Dreams - Kit Rocha
Slow Dance - Rainbow Rowell

My top ten books from before 2024:
The Widow of Rose House - Diana Biller
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi - Shannon Chakraborty
The Secret Service of Tea and Treason - India Holton
Illuminae - Amie Kaufman/Jay Kristoff
Gemina - Amie Kaufman/Jay Kristoff
Obsidio - Amie Kaufman/Jay Kristoff
How to Tame a Wild Rogue - Julie Anne Long
A Taste of Gold and Iron - Alexandra Rowland
Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me - Mariko Tamaki
Butcher & Blackbird - Brynne Weaver

My worst three books:
3. The Pairing - Casey McQuiston
2. The Witches of Vardø - Anya Bergman
1. Before the Coffee Gets Cold - Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Cannonball 16 Sweet Books Challenge:

New: The Widow of Rose House - Diana Biller, En enda natt - Simon Ahrnstedt, Raiders of the Lost Heart - Jo Segura, Delilah Green Doesn't Care - Ashley Herring Blake

Cozy: The Write Escape - Charish Reid, Role Playing - Cathy Yardley, Love, Lies and Cherry Pie - Jackie Lau, Ronja Rövardotter - Astrid Lindgren

Exciting: Canadian Boyfriend - Jenny Holiday, Bride - Ali Hazelwood, The Prisoner's Throne - Holly Black, Funny Story - Emily Henry

Binge: Illuminae, Gemina and Obsidio - Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, the All the King's Men duology - Kennedy Ryan