Tag Archives: romance book reviews

Review ~ Forever Mine- Erin Nicholas

28 Wednesday Jun 2017

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Maya Goodwin doesn’t believe in holding back. Ever. As a cop, she never hesitated to throw herself into harm’s way to save someone. Even after an injury on the job forces her to retire, she’s not afraid to keep risking it all to get the life she wants. With a new career teaching martial arts to kids already underway, she’s looking forward to the future – and taking a chance on the unbelievably hot Dr. Alex Nolan.

Maya – daring and spontaneous – is the exact opposite of what Alex always thought he wanted. But when a nine-year-old daughter he never knew existed shows up on his doorstep, Maya is the one who helps them hold it together. With love on the line, will the guy who’s always played it safe be willing to take the biggest risk of all?

 

 

What can I say? I LOVED Maya. She is a badass and a geek, and best of all she isn’t afraid to go after what she wants! A former—maybe—cop who was injured on the job, she turns her energy to helping kids unleash their inner superhero…how cool is that? I had a serious girl crush on her from the moment she appeared on the page. Continue reading →

Review ~ Coming Home – Kimberley O’Malley

26 Monday Jun 2017

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Dr. Elizabeth Abbott Fitzgerald has spent the last ten years of her life running; from tragedy, from family, from love. But now her mother’s failing health calls her home to Windsor Falls, North Carolina; to the place where her past awaits. Sam Bishop can’t believe his eyes when the love of his life returns after ten long years. All he wants is to clear his conscience and get back the family he lost when Connor, his best friend and Elizabeth’s husband died tragically. Could it really be true that time heals all wounds?

Coming Home tells the story of ER doctor Elizabeth Fitzgerald and her journey back to the woman she used to be when called home to Windsor Falls. After back to back tragedies sent her running across the country a decade ago, her mother’s health scare brings her back where she belongs and face to face with her best friend Sam. All grown up and more withdrawn than she remembers, Sam Bishop has a few words to say to the best friend he lost weeks after he lost the other. Kimberley O’Malley has created a wonderful small town with lots of personality, but more importantly the story of Elizabeth and Sam is emotional and tender and real. I had my doubts that these two would get their act together but their journey was a pleasure to follow. Continue reading →

Review ~ Crazy In Love – Annabelle Costa

15 Thursday Jun 2017

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They call her Crazy Anna.

Anna Flint won’t shake your hand. She collects tin cans. She cleans her cubicle at work with Lysol several times a day. But Anna doesn’t care that they call her crazy. She’s absolutely satisfied with her life of perfect organization, cleanliness, and most of all, solitude.

Matt Harper likes Anna Flint. He likes that she’s the smartest person he knows and he likes her big blue eyes. He doesn’t even mind her can collection. In fact, he pretty much likes everything about Anna. As his body and his world are falling apart, she still manages to make him happy.

Matt is the only person Anna has ever wanted to be close to. But how can she go on a date with him if the thought of dinner at a restaurant fills her with terror? How can she ever kiss the man she loves if she can’t even touch him?

Maybe it’s time to stop being Crazy Anna. If only she could.

Crazy in Love is the story of Anna Flint and Matt Harper, two programmers who spend years sharing a cubicle wall and trying very hard not to crush on each other. Anna is a mess but she is also completely wonderful. She collects can, as in food cans, and she can’t stand for anyone to touch her. They call her ‘Crazy Anna’ and it only bothers her marginally. She likes being alone, at least until Matt. He is kind and nice and doesn’t seem to matter that she’s Crazy Anna. Annabelle Costa has done something pretty wonderful with this story, she takes us on a six year journey of crushes, friendship and ultimately, love. Continue reading →

Review ~ Closer – Aria Hawthorne

07 Wednesday Jun 2017

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Famous Dutch architect, Sven van der Meer, has just completed the greatest achievement of his professional life–the design and construction of The Spire, Chicago’s tallest, most controversial skyscraper. But a shameful secret threatens to destroy his prestigious career–he’s losing his eyesight. Now, he’s run out of time and the only woman qualified to help maintain his charade of invincibility is also the one woman who despises him and The Spire. And he’s fairly certain she’s hiding something as well. Will the fiery, but enchanting Miss Sanchez be the right woman to play the role of his pretend girlfriend? Or will the temptation of getting too close, too fast jeopardize their business arrangement and the future of his entire career?

When twenty-eight-year-old, woefully unemployed, Inez Sanchez, arrives to her interview with hotter-than-hell billionaire architect,Sven van der Meer–mastermind behind The Spire–she quickly realizes his job proposition isn’t what she was anticipating. He’s hiding a life-changing secret, one that could ruin his career as the most influential architect in the world, and he’s willing to pay her five thousand dollars a day–just to help him keep it. Will she accept his offer to become his “pretend girlfriend” for the next four days in order to ensure the success of the most important week of his life? Or will her sassy flair for independence and smartass sarcasm keep her from submitting to his stern authoritative commands, no matter how sexy his European accent might be? And what will happen when he discovers she’s hiding a secret, too–one that could threaten the stability of their arrangement and prevent her from getting too close to the one man in the world who might be capable of gaining her trust…


Closer isn’t the first Aria Hawthorne I’ve read but it was different from your typical billionaire alpha romance and I loved it for that very reason! Sven and Inez, despite all their differences share a common struggle an misery that sets them up perfectly for an unexpected romance.

I am a huge fan of the fake girlfriend/fiancé trope but the twist on this one helped endear Sven to me while I got to root for the strong and kind of badass Inez. Given what was happening to Sven, I applaud the author for not trying to make this a sugary sweet romance. Neither our hero or heroine have an easy road ahead, even though they both have their own struggles, so this was real grown up novel with grown up emotions and decisions.

The side drama in the story with his ex and his brother was perfect. It annoyed me and made me want to strangle them all but I never felt it was thrown in just for the sake of drama. Definitely worth a read, possibly even a re-read!

Review ~ Montana Maverick – Debra Salonen

05 Monday Jun 2017

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Be careful what you wish for-
Meg Zabrinski wants a child. She’s a successful scientist, a well-known environmental advocate, and a tenured professor. She doesn’t need a man in her life to make this happen. But having a baby alone is a weighty decision, so she retreats to her isolated mountain cabin to write and think. When Henry Firestone–an old foe from her distant past–drops out of the sky on Christmas Eve with three young children and a baby, Meg tells herself she’d be crazy not to consider all her options–especially when she’s always nursed a secret crush on the handsome rancher. Although the sparks between them ignite a mutual passion, Henry makes it clear he’s done having children. Falling in love with Henry Firestone and his beautiful family would require Meg to give up her dream. Can the Lone Wolf assimilate into a new pack, or was this Big Sky Maverick meant to be alone?

They say timing is everything-
Henry Firestone doesn’t recognize the “angel in snowshoes” who comes to his rescue in the middle of a blizzard, immediately, but Meg Z. knows him. Twenty years earlier, the media paired them as rivals to the death. Meg championed the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, while Henry argued just as passionately that wolves would put ranchers on the Endangered Species List. She’s still beautiful, independent and headstrong, and Henry’s now free to admit that he always had a thing for her. Unfortunately, he’s fighting for sole custody of his late daughter’s four children. They are his biggest priority. He’d do anything to keep his family together–even sleep with the enemy in hopes that she might join his cause.

I have been looking forward to reading Meg’s story since I started reading the Big Sky Maverick’s series. She was the strong one, the older one. The one who was a little bit gruffer than her siblings so I knew when she fell it would be spectacular.

Meg and Henry Firestone have a long history of disagreeing on a matter that impacted both of their respective careers. She spent her career fighting to re-introduce wolves into the wild which of course meant that animals on surrounding ranches and farms were in greater danger of being eaten by those wolves. So when his helicopter full of children crashes near her cabin I was ready for sparks to fly. Continue reading →

Review ~The Baby Bombshell – Victoria James

01 Thursday Jun 2017

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Lily Cookson has a few rules for the New Year, the most important being don’t fall for Jack Bailey. The gorgeous, rugged man returned with a new look and a determination to win her back, catching her off guard. After a forbidden night in his arms, she vows never to let it happen again. But when morning sickness kicks in a few weeks later, Lily realizes staying away from Jack just got a whole lot harder.

Jack Bailey left Shadow Creek behind five years ago when his world imploded around him, knowing it would be best for everyone if he was gone…including Lily. It took him a long time to get his life back on track and grow into the kind of man she needs him to be. Now he’s determined to prove to Lily that he’s back for good and ready to commit, but the secrets she’s holding onto are nothing compared to the bombshell he drops…

I only recently discovered Victoria James but I like her writing style and the small town stories she weaves so I decided to give The Baby Bombshell a try. Plus this story contains two of my favorite tropes! Continue reading →

Review ~ Mann Cakes – Mysti Parker

28 Sunday May 2017

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Love makes men do desperate things, if desperate things means opening a rival cupcake shop to drive your ex-girlfriend crazy.


Twin brothers and Air Force vets, Tanner and Garrett Mann, return from deployment to find their thriving business burned to the ground. Time for Plan B: Move back to their hometown of Beach Pointe to start over.

But that means running into Paige and Morgan Baxter –gorgeous, curvy, and owners of Two Sisters Cupcakes.

There’s an old diner for sale across town, Garrett’s a great cook, and Tanner has an idea. They’ll make savory cupcakes that men would like. We’re talking bacon and Cheez Whiz. Even better? They’ll call it Mann Cakes. Problem is, they end up attracting an unexpected crowd.

Paige is furious. Every man in her life has left her behind, including Tanner. She’s sacrificed everything for her shop. She won’t lose it over some egotistical ex-boyfriend, even if he does have an Air Force-chiseled body. Her younger sister, Morgan, isn’t helping matters. She’s been gaga over Garrett since high school.

To hell with that. If it’s a fight Tanner wants, it’s a fight he’ll get. But how much is Paige willing to risk to win a cupcake war?

Mann Cakes tells the story of two brothers, Tanner and Garrett and two sisters, Paige and Morgan. Tanner and Garrett had a PC business in the big city but during their final deployment it burned to the ground with a good friend inside. So they return to their hometown of Beach Pointe and right back on the radars of the two women they can’t seem to forget. But when the boys open up Mann Cakes to compete with, what else, Two Sisters bakery the heat is on! Mysti Parker has created a wonderfully interesting romance between two sets of siblings with two very different pasts.

Morgan and Garrett were just friends back in high school, both nursing unrequited crushes on the other that they never acted on. But now they’re older and Morgan isn’t quite as shy as she used to be so one coffee date kicks off their sort of second chance romance. I loved watching these two because Garrett who may or may not be a genius, still has that quiet geeky thing going on that makes him stumble over his words or get lost staring at her lips. He was so adorably shy but sweet and kind of bossy at times that he quickly won me over.

Now Paige and Tanner were a different matter altogether. It took me awhile to warm up to them both because he’s kind of a cocky playboy with no problem taking off his shirt to sell a few cupcakes (not that I mind a little six-pack action, I in fact encourage it!) and Paige sometimes acted like a wounded bird or an angry teenager. While I understood where Paige was coming from to an extent, they both took their little rivalry too far in my opinion.

Once they cleared the air, which admittedly did take awhile, I was eager to see if this was a romance that could be rekindled.

I liked that Mann Cakes was kind of a two-in-one romance and Mysti Parker did a great job of giving us all four perspectives without being confusing or pulling the readers out of the story. It also was a great way to keep the story moving forward without adding a lot of unnecessary content. This is a straight up romance with a dash of mystery, not a crash course in owning or operating a bakery which this reader totally appreciated!

This book is definitely a 4.5 cocktail read. So good you’ll get tipsy on it!

*Just $0.99 at time of this review!

Review ~ Her Fated Cowboy – Donna Michaels

09 Tuesday May 2017

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~ Harland County Series…Unruly cowboys and the women who tame them.

L.A. cop, Jordan Masters Ryan has a problem. Her normal method of meeting a crisis head-on and taking it down won’t work. Not this time. Not when fate is her adversary. Having kept her from the man she thought she’d always marry, the same fickle fate took away the man she eventually did. Thrown back into the path of her first love, she finds hers is not the only heart fate has damaged.

Widower and software CEO, Cole McCall fills his days with computer codes and his free time working the family’s cattle ranch. Blaming himself for his wife’s death, he’s become hard and bitter. When his visiting former neighbor sets out to delete the firewall around his heart, he discovers there’s no protection against the Jordan virus. Though she understands his pain and reawakens his soul, will it be enough for Cole to overcome his past and embrace their fated hearts?

Don’t you just love it when you bought a book ages ago and never read it and then you find it, like a favorite dress or book you didn’t realize you still had?

Her Fated Cowboy has a nice ebb and flow to the story. It starts off fun and fast-paced as Jordan and her sister Kerri head back home to Harland County, Texas. When they Continue reading →

Review ~ Apoca(hot)lips – Paula Houseman

05 Friday May 2017

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Up yours! It’s a ballsy attitude for a child, and one that served Ruth (Roth) Gold well back then. It’s one she desperately needs to revive now. 
After her divorce, Ruth finds the love of her life: Herself. And she’s in a happy place … until a geeky, sexy, god-like man fronts up and fulfils her forgotten little-girl fantasies. He tells her she’s ‘The One’.
Talk about screwing everything up!
A romance with him seems so wrong, yet—mmm, mmm— feels so deliciously right. 
With those around her inflaming her doubts, though, Ruth remains trapped in a do-I-don’t-I mindset. But she rallies! She kind of breaks up with her carping mother, and succumbs to Mr Hotlips’ charms.
This Romeo ’n’ Juliet-esque couple engages in epic battles with the knockers, and triumphantly rattles their cages (from where, it appears, they’ve all escaped).
Still, Ruth’s man can’t vanquish the conflicts in her mind. Or the ones in his own. And when an earth-shattering revelation causes him to give her grief, the question on her hot lips is no longer ‘Can our love survive?’ It’s … ‘Do I want it to?’

When I first dug into Apoca(hot)lips by Paula Houseman my eyes bugged out and laughter bubbled up out of me. The main character, a divorcee called Ruth has a somewhat tenuous relationship with her ‘cousin’ Ralph and yes I mean a romantic relationship. Once you get past that, which is easy to do once you realize Ralph is on a journey of his own to find out what he can about his birth mother because. So you see, they’re only sort of cousins. But it isn’t just Ralph making Ruth’s life more difficult than she’d like it. Her mother is a piece of work, her neighbors are making life difficult and in general, Ruth has the entire world conspiring to turn her life upside down. Sounds like a lot of drama, right? Well it is but in the best possible way.

It took awhile for me to warm up to Apoca(hot)lips and it had nothing to do with whether or not Ralph had a legit spot on the family tree. Paula Houseman has a unique writing style that took time to get used to, but the story telling and character development were solid. I truly appreciated Ruth’s tough as nails, “I ain’t no damsel’ way of looking at the world. The way she takes on the people screwing with her own acceptance of her distorted fairytale was priceless and so true to her character you couldn’t help but cheer her on.

Ruth was unapologetic in her new approach to life and I found it admirable as well as highly entertaining.

Houseman added a few plot twists that tested Ruth’s strength and commitment to being a more positive force in her own life. I love the way the author explored the idea that sometimes it’s us who are our own worst enemies. The constant nagging in her own mind was her, though the voice might have belonged to another. This was for me, the most endearing part of the story because as women age and their romantic relationships shift, that kind of negativity can really have an impact on future or current happiness.

If one were to judge this book by its cover you’d come away missing out on a lot because this is an engaging story that was a surprisingly good find.

I was given a complimentary copy of this book by Reader’s Favorite in exchange for an honest review.

Book 1, Odyssey in a Teacup is available for #free at the time of this posting.

Review ~ Slow Burn Cowboy – Maisey Yates

01 Monday May 2017

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In Copper Ridge, Oregon, a cowboy’s best friend might turn out to be the woman of his dreams… 

If Finn Donnelly makes a plan, he sticks to it. After his brothers left Copper Ridge, Finn stayed behind, determined to keep their ranch going by himself. And when he realized his feelings for Lane Jensen were more than platonic, he shoved that inconvenient desire away. It was easy…until it wasn’t. Suddenly his brothers are coming home to claim their share of the property. And Lane is no longer just in his fantasies. She’s in his arms, and their friendship is on the line…

He’s been her buddy, her handyman, her rock. But until that one breathtaking kiss, Lane somehow overlooked the most important thing about Finn Donnelly—he’s all man. They’re right together, no matter how much his volatile past has bruised him. Finn wants to hold Lane’s body, but he doesn’t want to hold her heart. But Lane is falling fast and now she’s got a plan of her own…to show Finn there’s nothing hotter than friendship turned to slow-burning love.

I am an unabashed Maisey Yates fan and a Copper Ridge super fan so it’s safe to say that I loved Slow Burn Cowboy. Finn and Lane have been friends almost from the moment she landed in town to live with her brother. One of the things I liked most about this book was that they had real baggage, which is usually something I try to stay away from because I don’t need a lot of angst with my romance. And of course there wasn’t a lot of angst for the sake of it, because Lane and Finn both had some MAJOR baggage.

The third star of this novel was their friendship. They were basically a married couple who didn’t live together or have sex. She kept him fed and bought clothes when he needed them and Finn, well he killed spiders, changed light bulbs and all the other things that were ‘male jobs’.

Things were going just fine until Finn’s life is shaken, first by the death of his grandfather and then when he learned he wasn’t the sole heir for the ranch he’d worked since he was sixteen. Yep, old grandpa screwed it and split it among the estranged brothers.

Okay so here my mini rant about one particular part of Slow Burn Cowboy. Everyone, including Lane, acted like Finn should just be okay with their grandfather splitting the ranch between all the brothers when the other three hadn’t been completely absent for years. Not just absent but they hardly ever even visited. He had a right to be pissed and hurt, and for them to just brush it off, well it didn’t endear any of the brothers to me. At all. (But I’m sure that will change when we get their stories!)

Okay, rant done!

All the stress in Finn’s life makes it impossible to keep resisting his attraction to his best friend. He’s a guy who likes control and right now nothing in his life is within his control. So he risks it and holy smokes is it so worth it! To me at least. J It wasn’t just the sex and chemistry that was hot, it was watching them both shed their baggage so they could go after what they both wanted.

There’s always a family element to Copper Ridge stories and this one has the big hunky brothers. Although right now they’re kind of in my doghouse, I can’t wait to watch them all fall.

In fact I’m calling it now…Cain & Allison!