CBR17 Book 52: "Problematic Summer Romance" by Ali Hazelwood

Page count: 416 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Nowhere Book Bingo 2025: A book set on vacation

Official plot summary (because it's better than anything I could come up with):

Maya Killgore is twenty-three and still in the process of figuring out her life.

Conor Harkness is thirty-eight, and Maya cannot stop thinking about him.

It’s such a cliché, it almost makes her heart implode: older man and younger woman; successful biotech guy and struggling grad student; brother’s best friend and the girl he never even knew existed. As Conor loves to remind her, the power dynamic is too imbalanced. Any relationship between them would be problematic in too many ways to count, and Maya should just get over him. After all, he has made it clear that he wants her gone from his life.

But not everything is as it seems—and clichés sometimes become plot twists.

When Maya’s brother decides to get married in Taormina, she and Conor end up stuck together in a romantic Sicilian villa for over a week. There, on the beautiful Ionian coast, between ancient ruins, delicious foods, and natural caves, Maya realizes that Conor might be hiding something from her. And as the destination wedding begins to erupt out of control, she decides that a summer fling might be just what she needs—even if it’s a problematic one.

Maya and Conor were both secondary, supporting characters in Not in Love, one of my favourite Hazelwood books to date. So when I realised that not only was Hazelwood in 2025 generously blessing her readers with Deep End, and later this year, the sequel to her paranormal romance, Bride, but a third romance, and an unexpected follow-up to a book I love, I was beside myself with joy. Itty bitty spoiler - there is, in fact, a cameo of Scarlett and Lucas from Deep End in this book, because Ali Hazelwood loves her readers and knows we eat that sh*t up. 

This book came out at the end of May, and as far as I can tell, Hazelwood did very little promo for it, compared to some of her other releases. Nevertheless, it ended up becoming a bestseller because her readers are now legion, and who can resist an age gap romance with a title like this one? Nature even helped out a little bit, with a volcanic eruption on Mount Etna about a week after the book's release (if you have read the book, you know why this is relevant). 

An age gap romance can be a tricky proposition, but as soon as I worked out that the actual age gap was only 15 years, and Maya was fully adult the first time she really considered Conor in any romantic way whatsoever, I frankly couldn't see what all the fuss was about. One of my favourite romance novels of all time, What I Did for a Duke by Julie Anne Long, has a bigger age gap between the protagonists. It's not like the age difference between Maya and Conor is anything like that between so many ageing male celebrities and their child brides who are young enough to be their granddaughters. And it's not like the potentially squicky issue isn't addressed right there in the title of the novel.

This book alternates between the present day, with Rue and Eli's rapidly approaching nuptials in Cicily (although there is a string of complications long enough for anyone to wonder if their wedding is cursed), where things are awkward and tense between Maya and Conor. Interspersed among these chapters are ones set a few years in the past, when the seeds of their romance were sown, so to speak, while Maya was a student in Edinburgh and Conor showed up unexpectedly to help her.

Was this one of Hazelwood's best novels? No, but neither was it one of her worst (I don't actually think she has any bad ones, just great and slightly less great ones). Getting to see Rue and Eli again was a happy bonus, and while you don't need to have read their romance to fully get this book, it is probably an even more satisfying read if you have. It also made me really want to visit the south of Italy and/or Sicily. The setting and the food described seemed amazing. 

Judging a book by its cover: So many of Hazelwood's covers feature the main characters in some sort of embrace. Much as I think many of them are very cute, I love this one so much more. It perfectly captures both the holiday vibe in the book, as well as gives you an impression of both protagonists, even though you can only see their legs. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR17 Book 34: "The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam" by Megan Bannen

Page count: 432 pages

Rating: 5 stars

Thanks to Netgalley and Orbit Books for this ARC. My opinions, are as always, my own.

This is the third book in the series, and as such, not the best place to start reading. This review may contain some spoilers for the previous two books in the series, and the place to begin is with The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy. 

Tanrian Marshall Rosie Fox can't die. Or at least she doesn't stay dead, because she's a demigod, daughter of the Trickster. She is 157 years old, and has died more times than she can count. Every time it happens, it tends to freak out the people around her, and it gets mighty lonely watching everyone you care about grow old and die, while you just stay the same. Rosie's most recent death, from electrocution, happened after she stuck her hand into the wiring of one of the portals that allow people from outside to cross into the magical area of Tanria. The portals keep short-circuiting, and Rosie thinks she can see a strange, shadowy vine tangling in the machinery. It's when she's trying to "investigate" this that she, once again, dies.

The trouble with the portals is serious enough that they have to call for the inventor himself, Dr. Adam Lee. Rosie remembers meeting the impeccably dressed gentleman five years ago, but doubts he'll even remember her from so long ago. Of course, a statuesque woman over six feet tall, with long rust-red hair and "eyes like garnets", is difficult to forget, and Adam Lee remembers her very well. Not that he is willing to admit this at first, he seems shy and almost stand-offish.

Because of the trouble with the portals, which all seem to be breaking down, everyone in Tanria needs to be evacuated. Due to a complicated series of events, Rosie, Dr. Adam Lee, Rosie's partner Penrose Duckers and Duckers' ex-boyfriend Zeddie Birdsall are all stuck in Tanria when the final portal breaks down. Rosie notices that the shadowy vines seem to be spreading and growing thicker on the ground. The various animals and wildlife in Tanria can also clearly see and interact with the vines, but presumably, none of the other people can see what Rosie sees. 

Now, Adam, Rosie, Duckers and Zeddie have to work together to try to get the portals working again, or risk being trapped in Tanria, potentially forever. To begin with, animal messages can cross the magical border (it's a whole complicated thing, I can't begin to explain it here) and bring messages, supplies and food from the outside, but as the vines proliferate and thicken, it gets harder and harder for even them to cross over.

Duckers is very amused to see his normally unflappable partner so taken with Dr. Lee, and teases her mercilessly. He also tries to avoid his ex-boyfriend as much as possible, which isn't easy when there's just the four of them there, and Zeddie cooks almost all the food they eat. How can Rosie even hope to have a chance with Adam when she's over a hundred years old and will possibly never die? No one would want to complicate their life with someone like her, would he?

This is the third and final book in the Hart and Mercy trilogy, and while I enjoyed the second book, The Undermining of Twyla and Frank, it didn't enchant me in the way that The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy or this one did. Exploring some more of the mythological sides of this strange and original fantasy world, the story of exuberant demigod Rosie and the reticent and lonely inventor she falls for was an utter delight to read, and I loved finding out more about the portals, how they worked, and how they came to be invented in the first place.

Penrose Duckers has been an amazing supporting character in each of the three books so far, and part of the joy of reading the series has been seeing how he has developed over time. He is young and inexperienced when he partners with Hart in the first book, he goes through a lot of personal turmoil in the second book, and in this one, set seven years after the end of book 2, he has to rethink some of his former decisions and life choices when Zeddie Birdsall comes back into his orbit (Duckers breaks up with him in book 2 because he needs space). 

With every story featuring characters who have some form of immortality or can just live a terribly long time, I find myself so grateful that I will never have to deal with something like that. While Rosie has a nice life, there are very few people who can even begin to understand how hard it is to keep dying and resurrecting, seeing friends and loved ones drift away, or grow old and die around you. She's starting to get sick of the whole thing, and the Trickster's sudden reappearance in her life, claiming he wants to be a proper father to her (after most of a lifetime of being neglectful of her and her mother), isn't making the situation any better.

A friend of mine constantly complains that there are very few tall heroines with short heroes (I'm still waiting for Ali Hazelwood to change things up in her writing and try it), so I'm going to recommend she read this book. Rosie is six-foot-five, while Dr. Adam Lee is a full foot shorter than her (five-foot-five). Duckers keeps calling him her pocket boyfriend. At one point, he stands on a little step to reach up to kiss her (it's adorable). 

This was a wonderful ending to the trilogy, and very nicely wraps up the story not just of Rosie and Adam, but pretty much all the significant characters we've met over the course of the whole series. If you liked the first two, this one is well worth the wait. 

Judging a book by its cover: I'm not a huge fan of the colour orange (even before it became irrevocably associated with THAT one), and I really don't think the shade of blue of the background patterns, and then the bright pink of the heart at the centre of the cover go well together. They all sort of clash. Nevertheless, it continues the very whimsical tradition established on the previous two covers in the series. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

CBR17 Book 32: "Manic Pixie Dream Earl" by Jenny Holiday

Page count: 320 pages

Audio book length: 11 hrs 15 mins

Rating: 3.5 stars

Thanks to Jenny Holiday, Netgalley and Tantor Audio for this ARC. My opinion is my own.

Edward "Effie" Astley, Viscount Featherfinch, is a poet and a terrible disappointment to his father. Thankfully, he's about to set off on the annual "Earl's trip" with his two best friends, who support him come what may. So they don't ask any questions when Effie asks them to help him store a broken printing press, nor why he's so preoccupied with letters from a Miss Evans. Effie doesn't really want to confess to having become infatuated with a non-aristocratic lady, who coincidentally thinks he's a woman too, called Euphemia. 

Miss Julianna Evans loves the magazine she publishes, but hates that her odious brother insists on weekly editorial meetings and keeps questioning every decision she makes, constantly cutting her budget. Normally, she's far too busy to ever consider taking a brief holiday, but when there is a delay at her printers, and the alternative is waiting impatiently at her sister's house, generally just being in the way, she impulsively decides that she's going to spend some of her hard-earned savings to go to Brighton to meet her best friend Euphemia, who she knows will be staying there with her friends. 

Brighton isn't a big enough place for Effie and Julianna to avoid each other for very long (nor would this be a particularly effective romance novel if they did). Considering Effie has been lying about his identity to Julianna for the past five years, she gets over the deceit remarkably quickly. Effie's two best buds also take it in their stride that their slightly unorthodox bestie is in love with a magazine publisher who is quite a few years his elder.

The publisher claims that this book is Ted Lasso meets Bridgerton meets The Hangover. I have complained in the past that absolutely everything set in the Regency era is now marketed towards "fans of Bridgerton", and I can only surmise that the Ted Lasso comparison is made because this book features non-toxic male friendships and guys who support each other in wholesome ways, while The Hangover is thrown in there because it's the most famous dudes on a road trip story out there, even now, sixteen years later. I despair at these sales pitches. 

There is a lot to like here. Effie is bisexual and has no problem admitting this to his friends, although his friends seem to have suspected him to be gay and/or asexual before he reveals his feelings for Julianna. There's the aforementioned non-toxic male friendships. We have an age gap, where the heroine is about a decade older than the hero (Effie is in his late twenties, Julianna is in her late thirties). Most of the book takes place in Brighton rather than London, and the more unusual location made for a nice change. 

Harry Frost does a good job with the narration of the book, but I find that about a month after finishing the story, I don't remember too much of the overall plot. While I've liked several of Jenny Holiday's contemporary romances, I'm not sure I liked her rather unusual take on the historical genre. Nevertheless, I already own Earl's Trip, the first book in the series, so I'll probably get round to reading it at some point. I also hope she gets round to writing about Effie's friend Olive in some future instalment, she was the most interesting supporting character here. 

Judging a book by its cover: This cover is rather busy, and features a number of people in various situations, not all of which take place in the actual story, unless my memory entirely fails me. I think there are too many things going on here. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read