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 51: "In a Jam" by Kate Canterbary

Page count: 474 pages

Audio book length: 15 hrs 53 minutes

Rating: 3.5 stars

CBR17 Bingo: I (A book title beginning with I)

Official plot summary:

When Shay Zucconi’s step-grandmother died, she left Shay a tulip farm—under two conditions.

First, Shay has to move home to the small town of Friendship, Rhode Island. Second—and most problematic, since her fiancé just called off the wedding—Shay must be married within one year.

Marriage is the last thing in the world Shay wants but she’ll do anything to save the only real home she’s ever known.

Noah Barden loved Shay Zucconi back in high school. Not that he ever told her. He was too shy, too awkward, too painfully uncool to ask out the beautiful, popular girl.

A lifetime later, Noah is a single dad to his niece and has his hands full running the family business. That old crush is the farthest thing from his mind.

Until Shay returns to their hometown.

So, I had pretty much decided that I wasn't going to review this book, because my review backlog was massive in the first place, and while it was a perfectly fine book, it wasn't one of the most memorable or squee-inducing Canterbary romances I've read. But then the CBR17 Bingo came around, and this was the only book I had left unreviewed that started with an I. So back onto the review list it went.

Shay is literally putting on her wedding dress and getting ready to say her vows, when her fiancé calls her from his car and breaks up with her (he doesn't even have the decency to do it face to face). Naturally, she's pretty devastated, but after a few weeks of wallowing, seems to realise that she's better off without him. 

Then unexpectedly, she inherits a farm from one of the only adults who were really there for her during what was clearly a turbulent adolescence and back to Friendship, Rhode Island, she goes, because she can't keep crashing with her friends forever. 

Shortly after her return, she reconnects with Noah Barden, probably her only real friend when she stayed with her step-grandmother for a while and attended high school in Friendship. Noah used to be an outcast, overweight and occasionally bullied, but the best times of his week were always driving Shay to school and the many private conversations they had, away from everyone else. Now he's tall, handsome and seems rather angry with Shay. He also seems to own pretty much all the farmland surrounding Shay's newly inherited property, with dairy farming, jam and preserve production, as well as baking facilities (his rather gruff way of flirting with her involves a lot of feeding her, and leaving her delicious bread - sign me up). 

As well as running a very extensive farming enterprise, Noah has his hands full with his niece, Gennie (pronounced Jennie, which I wouldn't have known if I hadn't listened to the audio,) whom he has sole custody of, because his sister is in prison and the baby daddy is dead. Because of years of very unstable living conditions, the girl has massive trust issues, wants to be a pirate, and certainly swears like one. She needs to improve her manners and catch up on most areas of schooling, or she'll be held back in school after the summer. Luckily, Shay is a teacher and the plot moppet loves her pretty much at first sight. 

This book did not need to be 474 pages long; a standard 384 would have been just fine. While the central romance between Shay and Noah is fine, and Shay establishes herself as the ideal step-aunt to the little girl within days of meeting her, there were just too many pages of Shay being extremely down on herself and self-pitying to the point of ridiculousness. It didn't get as bad as in The Love Haters, where the heroine's extreme body issues almost made me quit reading the book. While Shay hasn't had the easiest life and has been disappointed a few times, the obvious love of her fierce and loyal friend group back in Boston, as well as Noah and Gennie's clearly both being mad about her, long before she figuratively wakes up and sees the hot farmer for who he truly is, should have made it abundantly clear to her that she isn't all alone in the world, and she is plenty lovable if she would just let people in.

If this had been a bit shorter, and Shay had been a bit less frustrating, it could probably have been one of my favourite of Canterbary's. books.  As it is, it's merely fine. Having heard a bunch about Shay and her jam farmer in Emme's book, In a Rush, it was fun to read this and see their romance developing, though. 

Judging a book by its cover: While I love the lovely turquoisey teal background, basically just spreading out some raspberries and taking a photo of it isn't exactly great art. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR17 Book 50: "Great Big Beautiful Life" by Emily Henry

Page count: 384 pages

Audiobook length: 12 hrs 2 mins

Rating: 4.5 stars

CBR17 Bingo: G (A book title starting with G)

After months of online research, Alice Scott has tracked down the reclusive former tabloid darling Margaret Ives and hopes to persuade the woman to let Alice write her biography. Imagine the unpleasant surprise for Alice when it turns out that Margaret might not want to tell her life's story at all, and she basically wants to 'audition' Alice and another writer for the next month, before she makes up her mind. That other writer, Hayden Anderson, acclaimed journalist who won a Pulitzer for the last celebrity biography he wrote.

Since Hayden seems taciturn and generally disapproving of everyone, and especially Alice, Alice hopes that she, with her much more outgoing personality, might persuade Margaret to pick her to chronicle her eventful life. Meeting with the woman several mornings a week, Alice comes to realise that while Margaret has a story to tell, it doesn't start with her own birth, but involves several previous generations of the Ives family, all with skeletons in their closets and delectable secrets which have never previously been uncovered. 

Since they are both stuck in the small seaside town together, taking turns interviewing Margaret, Alice and Hayden keep running into one another, and as the weeks pass, Alice discovers that Hayden might not be so arrogant and unpleasant as she initially believed. Because of the iron-clad NDAs they've signed, they can't really speak about the information they're getting from Margaret, so it becomes more natural for them to talk about other things. By the end of the month, when it becomes time for Margaret to make her choice, Alice is no longer sure that she wants to be in competition with Hayden, and that no matter what decision Margaret makes, it's going to lead to heartbreak in some way or other.

Some things have become clear to me over the last few years. I will auto-buy and even pre-order any book by Emily Henry and Ali Hazelwood, and I will probably enjoy the heck out of said books (or love them fiercely). As with Funny Story last year, I bought Great Big Beautiful Life and devoured it in about 48 hours, and then got the audiobook and listened to it again, taking more time to soak in the story and the characters. 

With this book, Henry is doing something different from her previous romances, in that this book is just as much a tragic family saga, slowly unfolding in the tales from Margaret, and Alice and Hayden's romance becomes more of a secondary plot, just as important, but not quite the main focus. It's Emily Henry channelling Taylor Jenkins Reid, if you like. From reviews I've seen online, this shift has worked fine for some readers, while others didn't like it at all.

Because Margaret is a fascinating character, I didn't mind it, and especially when revisiting the book in audio for the second time, I came to see that Alice and Hayden's story is still woven through the entire framework of the book, and that there was a wider connection to everything in the story that was wrapped up very satisfyingly in the end. It also made me tear up a few times, but that's partially because it deals with some pretty heavy grief themes throughout, and it doesn't take much to make me cry these days. 

The audiobook is narrated by Julia Whelan. She does an amazing job, as always. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR17 Book 49: "The Change" by Kirsten Miller

Page count: 480 pages

Rating: 4.5 stars

Buzzwords Cover Challenge 25: Pattern

CBR17 Bingo: Red (A book with a red cover)

Official plot summary:

In the Long Island oceanfront community of Mattauk, three different women discover that midlife changes bring a whole new type of empowerment...

After Nessa James's husband dies and her twin daughters leave for college, she's left all alone in a trim white house not far from the ocean. In the quiet of her late forties, the former nurse begins to hear voices. It doesn't take long for Nessa to realise that the voices calling out to her belong to the dead--a gift she's inherited from her grandmother, which comes with special responsibilities.

On the cusp of 50, suave advertising director Harriett Osborne has just witnessed the implosion of her lucrative career and her marriage. She hasn't left her house in months, and from the outside, it appears as if she and her garden have both gone to seed. But Harriett's life is far from over--in fact, she's undergone a stunning and very welcome metamorphosis.

Ambitious former executive Jo Levison has spent thirty long years at war with her body. The free-floating rage and hot flashes that arrive with the beginning of menopause feel like the very last straw--until she realizes she has the ability to channel them, and finally comes into her power.

Guided by voices only Nessa can hear, the trio of women discover a teenage girl whose body was abandoned beside a remote beach. The police have written the victim off as a drug-addicted sex worker, but the women refuse to buy into the official narrative. Their investigation into the girl's murder leads to more bodies, and to the town's most exclusive and isolated enclave, a world of stupendous wealth where the rules don't apply. With their newfound powers, Jo, Nessa, and Harriett will take matters into their own hands...

This was my IRL book club's selection for April (because a murder mystery starring three witchy women seemed really appropriate in the same month as Easter (see my description of traditional Norwegian Easter pastimes here). We had a very interesting discussion about it at the end of the month, and it turned out to be a bit of a divisive book. I absolutely loved it, but I suspect that if I'd been younger when I read it (as many members of my book club are) or a man, this book might not have worked for me on as many levels as it did.

One of the things that turned out to be an issue with a lot of the readers was the difficulty in pinpointing the genre of the book. This book isn't an urban fantasy novel, even though there are seemingly supernatural elements in it. It's not a straight-up mystery/crime novel. It's not literary fiction. It's very feminist, and some of the women in the story are described by others as witches, but it doesn't fit neatly into any one category, and for some of the members, that was apparently really frustrating. I've classified it as a contemporary fiction novel with magical realism elements, and there is a mystery to be solved, but it doesn't follow the traditional genre beats of a mystery novel.

Fully in my perimenopausal era now, there were many things in this novel that I recognised almost too well. Jo's overwhelming sense of rage at everyone and everything all the time. Harriet getting to a point where she just wants to do her own thing and doesn't give a single f*ck about what anyone says about it. Nessa is probably the nicest of the three protagonists, but also the one I identified the least with. Her supernatural gift, which it's established as something that women of her family have shared for generations, seems rather horrible. Being able to see the ghosts of dead women, who need the culprits brought to justice, and just not getting peace until the issue is dealt with - it seems like a heavy burden. Thankfully, she has the two other women to assist her in avenging these helpless victims (because while it starts with one dead body, it becomes clear that she is just one in a very long line of women who have met a horrible end in the area).

The POVs of the story mostly shift between Harriet (who was pretty much a middle-aged Poison Ivy), Jo and Nessa. We also get chapters from other women's POVs, including several of the dead girls whom they are determined to get justice for. It helps the reader see these young women as actual people, not just disposable victims. There's a subplot involving a True Crime podcaster, there to delve into the case, who previously did a season on a serial killer decapitating his victims and leaving the heads as grisly trophies. When asked about it, it turns out that he can easily remember every single location a head was found, but he struggles to remember the name of a single one of the victims. Getting to see the world through the victim's eyes, even for just one chapter each, made their tragic fates so much more impactful. 

This book could be summed up as 'F*ck the Patriarchy' or 'Not all men, but almost all of them, and quite a few women who facilitate their awfulness'. Not to say that there aren't some actually good men in the story. Nessa reconnects with the former partner of her dead husband, who is a genuinely decent man and a policeman determined to help with the cases, even when it becomes clear that many of his co-workers feel differently. Jo's husband, who is out of work and working on a screenplay, may not be perfect, but he clearly loves and supports his wife, and as someone who has been with a man for 25 years now, who, because of a whole host of mental issues, depression, and the like has struggled to hold down jobs for a lot of our time together, but who is still a caring husband and father, I got rather heated in my defense of a guy a lot of other readers thought was a bit of a useless sadsack.

To me, this book about righteously angry women, who set out to right the wrongs done by privileged, spoiled and callous men, was an almost perfect read. The latter half had some pacing issues that kept me from giving it a full five stars, but I really enjoyed it when reading, and had trouble putting it down. Strongly recommended, but it may work better for you if you are a woman of a certain age, who has experienced some of the varied awfulnesses that menopause brings. 

Judging a book by its cover: I have the UK paperback edition of this book, where the cover is the black patterns on the blood red background. On some versions, I've seen more of a black border around the edges, and there's red and even a bit of violet in the colour scheme. The American cover seems to be dark blue with sinister-looking thistles on the front. Here, there's just the woman's partially obscured face, and a bee very prominently on the lower half. Both are relevant to the contents. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR17 Book 48: "The Goose Girl" by Shannon Hale

Page count: 383 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

StoryGraph Easy Read Challenge: A book with flowers, plants or leaves on the cover

Buzzword Title Challenge 25: Animals (Birds are animals, right?)

Nowhere Book Bingo 2025: A YA book

CBR17 Bingo: TBR (I bought this back in 2009, it's been on my TBR for 16 years)

Anidora-Kiladra, the Crown Princess of Kildenree is taught the language of animals by her aunt while she is still a girl, but she has to hide this from people around her. Unfortunately, she's unconventional enough that as she gets older, her younger brother proves to be a more suitable royal heir and her mother the Queen announces that she's being sent to the neighbouring kingdom of Bayern to be married off to their Crown Prince. Ani, having been brought up believing she would be Queen of Kildenree at some point, doesn't really have any other choice but to obey her mother.

She is sent with a large retinue, including her beautiful and dangerously ambitious attendant Selia. About halfway through the journey, Selia has charmed enough of the guards to enact a coup, and Ani is shocked and devastated to see many loyal soldiers slaughtered around her. She manages to escape into the woods and finds refuge on a secluded farm in Bayern, where her wounds are treated and she's nursed back to health. She discovers that Selia has assumed her identity and is pretending to be the real princess. Once Ani is healthy enough, she makes her way to the capital and gets a job as a goose herder in the king's stables. She hopes to be able to make enough money to eventually make it home to her mother, to warn her of the dastardly deeds of Celia and the rogue guards.

Thanks to her secret skills, Ani is able to charm the geese enough that they will listen to her. She works hard and makes several friends among the other labourers, tending the king's livestock. She befriends the handsome and charming Geric and is, in general, quite happy to have avoided having to marry the prince, whom she's seen from a distance. He appears to be about thirteen, much younger than her. But then Ani discovers that Celia isn't just content to lie herself into a royal marriage; she is also trying to get the king of Bayern to declare war on Kildenree. Ani has to enlist the help of her friends to get to the king before the wedding is finalised.

This is a YA fantasy retelling of Grimm's The Goose Girl, and some pretty bleak stuff happens to Ani over the course of the story. For people who don't like harm to come to animals, be warned that Ani's beloved horse Falada meets a very unpleasant end. I also kept thinking of Anakin Skywalker because of Ani's shortened name, which isn't necessarily the best connotation to have to a protagonist. 

This was a nice young adult book with a plucky heroine and a more faithful retelling of the original fairy tale than T. Kingfisher's A Sorceress Comes to Call, which I read last year. Nevertheless, I much preferred that one, I think the darker, more grown-up themes were better done in that one. 

Judging a book by its cover: Cover design was different back in the early 2000s. I seem to recall that by the later books in this series, they did a complete redesign, leading anyone who owned the series to the cruel fate of owning mismatched books (we hates it). This book is remarkably cutesy-looking, considering the rather dark subject matter. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR17 Book 47: "Partners in Crime" by Alisha Rai

Page count: 400 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Buzzword Cover Challenge 25: Skyline

CBR17 Pie Chart Challenge: Diversity 

Yet again resorting to the official plot summary, because I finished this in mid-April and I just cannot remember all the of details of the plot anymore:

At thirty-five, with a stable job as an accountant, Mira Chaudhary wants nothing more than to find a boring man to spend the rest of her life with. Having had enough excitement in her younger days and desperately trying to escape her dysfunctional past, she turns to a matching app specializing in Indian American singles to help her find someone to settle down with.

Enter Naveen Desai. An English professor with an uneventful, normal, and—dare she say it, boring—life, Naveen is perfect.

But just when things are going well, Mira receives news that her aunt has died. Suddenly, a trip to Las Vegas to settle her aunt’s affairs turns into a mad dash to escape kidnappers, evade art thieves, and consorting with hackers who can decipher just what it was Mira’s aunt was involved with. Mira just hopes that Naveen isn’t chased away by the very same life of “excitement” that she’s been trying to get away from. But maybe, over the course of one wild night, Mira and Naveen will find the love connection that neither expected.

Mira is trying to be traditional and respectable, to distance herself from her family's less than savoury past. Naveen is trying to help his grandfather keep his lawyer's practice. The two of them have a past, and Mira broke up with Naveen via text message. Not exactly classy. He's right to be pissed off at her.

However, when they end up drugged and abducted together to Las Vegas, they try to figure out what the bad guys want from Mira's dad and aunt's pasts, before bad things happen to them (or people they care about, like Naveen's grandfather). They are forced to work together to stay ahead of their pursuers, and over the course of a whirlwind adventure in Vegas, they also get a chance to reconnect, reevaluate their past relationship and see each other honestly as the people they really are now.

Unfortunately, I don't remember a lot of details particularly clearly, but at the same time, I also don't remember anything that annoyed me while reading it, either. It was a fun read, and I finished it in less than 48 hours. 

Judging a book by its cover: Standard grumble about cartoon cover trend - but I do appreciate that both the characters on the cover look approximately as described in the story, and the scene in question, complete with fancy car and evening wear, does actually take place in the story. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR17 Book 46: "Listen for the Lie" by Amy Tintera

Page count: 384 pages

Audio book length: 9 hrs 17 mins

Rating: 4 stars

Buzzword Title Challenge 25: Truth and Lies

CBR17 Bingo: Review (this was very favourably reviewed by Pooja, Narfna and Chairbrarian)

Five years ago, Lucy's best friend Savvy was murdered and Lucy was found wandering along the road, absolutely covered in Savvy's blood. Unfortunately, Lucy also had a pretty severe head wound, which resulted in amnesia, and can't remember anything about the night in question, before or after the murder took place. There wasn't enough evidence to convict her, but most people in her home town of Plumpton, Texas made up their own minds.

Since absolutely everyone back home is convinced Lucy is a murderer, she's been living and working in LA, writing romance novels under an assumed name and doing her very best to try to stay as anonymous as possible. Unfortunately, podcaster Ben Owens has decided to dedicate the second season of his very popular podcast 'Listen for the Lie' to investigating Savvy's murder, and all the sordid details are being dragged back into the light. In short order, Lucy gets fired from her job, and it becomes clear that her throroughly average boyfriend is too scared of her to actually break up with her, but very much would like her to be gone, from his life and apartment. So when Lucy's grandmother calls and emotionally blackmails her into coming back to Texas for her 80th birthday, Lucy doesn't really have a lot of options.

Of course, back in Plumpton, Ben Owens is going around interviewing people and asking intrusive questions, making Lucy's life oh so much more awkward. That he turns out to be handsome and very charming, and that Lucy's grandma is a big fan of his, makes the situation even more annoying. Did Lucy actually kill Savvy? If she didn't, who was the actual murderer and why have they managed to stay hidden for the past five years? Lucy wants Ben to find out the truth, but also fears that it may turn out she was guilty all along.

As I mentioned above, several Cannonballers whose opinions I trust recommended this book, and I had Audible credits to spare, so I figured it might be an entertaining Spring read. There is a tradition in Norway, that during the Easter holidays, you do very little (if you're outdoorsy, you go to a cabin in the mountains somewhere and ski, either cross-country or downhill) and you read crime novels. The various television networks all show mystery mini-series and the book stores put all their crime novels front and centre on their displays. We even have a specific term for it 'påskekrim', roughly translated as Easter Crime/Mystery. It's a whole thing. So listening to a novel about murder and true crime around Easter seemed very fitting.

The audio book is very well done. It alternates between chapters narrated by Lucy, who is a very sarcastic and cynical individual. January LaVoy does an excellent job conveying her snarky tone. Then in between, there are the 'podcast' sections, narrated by Will Damron as Ben Owens. I don't listen to podcasts, really (they take time away when I could be reading, or watching something with my husband, who is already a bit cranky about how much time I would rather be reading than watching stuff with him). So I'll take other people's word for it that these podcast sections are well-done and feel realistic. Based on what I heard, if I had ANY interest at all in true crime (I do NOT - the world is an awful place and I do not need to find out about all the horrible things people to do one another this way), 'Listen for the Lie' sounds like it would be a good podcast to follow.

I really liked that Tintera let Lucy be a quite spiky and hostile character. Convenient though it may seem, the amnesia makes her life more difficult, because there is always that nagging doubt that something horrible happened, and she actually murdered her best friend. Her complete lack of memory of the whole evening (including the events leading up to the murder) also makes it impossible for her to help the police investigate and find the real killer, when she desperately wants justice for Savvy. So a little part of her is relieved that Ben Owens is investigating the case again. It's obvious that a lot of people have been lying about and keeping secrets about the night of the murder, but he manages to ferret out the truth and uncover a lot of information the police never discovered.

This was very entertaining, and I'm impressed that this was Tintera's debut into crime fiction She seems to have only written YA fantasy before this. Nevertheless, I didn't love it as much as Narfna and Chairbrarian. There were some story developments that I found a bit unneccesary. I would absolutely read more of Tintera's books in the future, though. 

Judging a book by its cover: Not the most exciting cover, really (and it also seems like it directly ripped off the cover design of Good Girl, Bad Blood, which came out four years before this book. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.