CBR15 Book 17: "Chick Magnet" by Emma Barry

Page count: 302 pages

Rating: 4 stars

#CBR15 Passport Challenge - Different genres (contemporary romance)

Readers of my blog know that all my reviews are crossposted over on the Cannonball Read, which celebrates its fifteenth anniversary this year. I have been a participant since year two. To celebrate these momentous fifteen years, a comment diversion was suggested - where we were challenged to write fifteen-word reviews. No matter the length of the book, the review could only be fifteen small words. Now, long-time followers of my blog know that I have trouble writing a single sentence in fewer than fifteen words, let alone a full review. Nevertheless, I decided to use the comment diversion to try to help myself through my review backlog (which is now on 12 books and counting). So until I've caught up - my book summaries are going to be very short and succinct, and then I'll try to say what worked and possibly didn't work so well for me in the books.

Chick Magnet: Hot, but struggling small-town vet and earnest chicken influencer fall in love after the pandemic.

If you want a longer summary, there are over two hundred reviews of this on Goodreads. This book was recommended to me by my good friend and fellow romance aficionado Emmalita. There were so many parts of it that I liked, but I really couldn't get past what a central part chickens played in the story. I don't like birds. I have always found them pretty creepy. That I frequently got dive-bombed by seagulls every summer visiting my grandmother in the west of Norway probably didn't help. I'm very fond of eggs, they're very tasty, but I really don't like chickens. I find them unnerving. So the fact that Nic's whole life revolves around chickens was somewhat of a downside to me. Now, this is unlikely to be a big deal for most readers, but I still wanted to explain why this wasn't higher than four stars for me. 

Will is very handsome (described basically as a big, blond viking) and really loves the job he's doing as a small-town vet. However, with the pandemic massively reducing the number of clients his clinic receives and so many more customers ordering their pet supplies online, he's really having a hard time making ends meet. He feels awful about not being able to keep his business afloat or being able to afford to pay his employees. It takes him quite a while to face up to the depression that he's feeling as a result of this. While he tried to resist, he watched his new neighbour Nicole "Chick Nic" Jones' videos about chicken keeping and was taken with her beauty and charm. Her videos caused a lot of people to adopt chicks during the pandemic, and then get bored with them as they grew bigger and harder to take care of. Hence he's a bit judgmental and dismissive when he first meets her, and pretty rude when she comes to his clinic with a sick chicken. 

Nic has moved across the country to escape her emotionally abusive ex-boyfriend, who broke up with her in a video that went viral. His gaslighting and lies convinced even her best friend that Nic was the villain of the piece and she needs a fresh start. She meets Will when chasing an escaped chicken in the rain, and finds him rather attractive, but his rudeness when she's vulnerable and terrified for the health of her chicken makes him seem a lot less appealing. 

However, they live across from each other, and it's hard to avoid each other in a small town. They strike up a friendship and as they get to know each other better, they try to help the other, making their lives easier in whatever way they can. Nic is pretty nervous about getting involved with someone new, based on her previously very toxic relationship. Will is depressed enough and feels like so much of a failure that he doesn't seem to realise that he deserves to be loved. Neither of them is healed by the power of love, but both of them feel better when they spend time with the other person.

Emma Barry is a good writer and her characters feel like real people, even the ones who are less nice. While Will gets along well with his sister, he has a strained relationship with his father and brother, and as his clinic keeps getting closer to bankruptcy, family dinners get more and more difficult for him. Nic has chosen to move to the town where her beloved grandmother once lived but has no real connections there. Thanks to Will, she meets a lot of like-minded people and can work on setting down actual roots in her new hometown.

The author herself apparently keeps chickens, so I get why she writes so affectionately about the birds and keeping them. As I mentioned, this is unlikely to be a big issue for most people. This is a lovely book, which deals with several heavy topics in a sensitive way without ever making the book seem too angsty or challenging. 

Judging a book based on its cover: With cartoony covers still being all the rage in the publishing world, you don't see a lot of naked man chest anymore. So I appreciate this book doing its own thing and giving the female gaze some eye candy. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR12 Book 75: "Star Dust" by Emma Barry and Genevieve Turner

Page count: 313 pages

Rating: 3 stars

Official book description:

Houston, 1962

Anne-Marie Smith wanted normal: a loving husband, two beautiful kids, and a well-kept house. But when she catches her husband cheating, she decides that normal isn’t worth it. Now in a new city with a new job, she’s trying to find her new normal—but she knows it doesn’t include the sexy playboy astronaut next door.

Commander Kit Campbell has a taste for fast: fast cars, fast planes, and even faster women. But no ride he’s ever taken will be as fast as the one he’s taking into orbit. He’s willing to put up with the prying adoration of an entire country if it will get him into space.

But Anne-Marie and Kit’s inconvenient attraction threatens both normal and fast. As the space race heats up, his ambitions and their connection collide and combustion threatens their plans… and their hearts.

I feel like Kit is presented as a bit too much of a shallow playboy in the book description. He doesn't particularly seem to enjoy casual sex or the attention of shallow astronaut groupies all that much, and mostly, he seems super focused on his career, not the party lifestyle. Misleading book blurbs annoy me.

This book was a perfectly fine read, but the romance didn't exactly blow me away. What I enjoyed the most about this book was Anne-Marie trying to make an independent life for herself, getting a job, supporting her family, eventually making supportive female friends who didn't judge her for doing the unusual thing of taking her kids and divorcing her cheating husband, rather than stay in an unhappy marriage because divorces weren't really common back in the 1960s. Good for you, Anne-Marie, for looking out for yourself.

I kind of wish Anne-Marie had been childless. Her two plot-moppet children are not particularly engaging and feel sort of non-descript. I'm not sure they brought much to the story.

It was interesting to read a historical novel set in the mid-20th Century, most of my historical novels seem to be set in the 18th or 19th Century. I basically had the visuals for Mad Men in my head the whole time I was reading this. I got the whole series bundled in an e-book sale but still haven't made my mind up if I'm going to read the rest. This was OK, but really not much more than that

Judging a book by its cover: I think the original cover for this book features a photo of a couple embracing, but since I much tend to prefer my own mental image of the characters to whatever the book designer tends to come up with, I really like this stylised cover with period details. The silhouette of the stylish 60s lady, leaning nonchalantly on the title. The little space ship cartoon and the font, it all works for me. To top it off, the background is teal, a colour I really like. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.