Travel

Highlands New Year

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Title: Highlands New Year

Author: Amy Quick Parrish

Year: 2023

Genre: romance, travel

Queer shit: one side wlw couple

Vibe Check: Snowed in at a Scottish bed and breakfast with romance and the warm and fuzzies

Pile of Opinions:

This book was a cute, romantic, snowed-in, Scottish slumber party! It was the perfect read for me during the summer as I prefer the cold weather. This is book two of three (that I know of) and I ordered book 1 and pre-ordered book 3 and am greatly looking forward to reading them as well. This book is less than 200 pages and makes for a great read-in-one-sitting story. Melissa moved to Scotland (I’m assuming in the first book) because she was told she inherited a home from a distant relative. Her best friend, Caitlin flies out to visit her and finds herself snowed in at a hotel with strangers, including one handsome man who plays guitar, sings like an angel, and makes her want to dive head first into the unknown. This book is exactly what I want in a romance that isn’t spicy. The romance was sweet and gives you the warm and fuzzies.

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Other Books by Amy Quick Parrish

Holiday Read

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Book Review (more just a pile of my personal opinions from my personal experiences)

Title: Holiday Read

Author: Taylor Cole

Year: 2023

Genre: Romance, Surfing, 

Queer shit: one queer side couple barely mentioned

Vibe Check: Surfers in Cornwall, writers and readers, found family, extensive detail on random subjects and choppy incohesive plot 

Pile of Opinions: This one was rough… I think this book was a really great idea with poor execution. I was dragging myself through the book. There were too many stories going on that sort of came together at the end but not cohesively and it felt really forced into a tidy wrap up. I felt like there were many things well researched and understood but I could not tell you what this book was about other than surfing because there were so many stories and substories. I think this could make a great mini series show but it did not make a great book. The plot twists felt like plot holes and there were so many niche rabbit trails of information that I felt like they took away from the story instead of fueling it. The lead character fell flat for me but then would react explosively with great rooted values and character that were shown nowhere else in the book. It was unclear what she wanted in this book so in the end when it felt like she got some things, it wasn’t satisfying because it was set up so choppy. I wanted to like this book because I love found family but this felt like an unpolished draft. Also the title and cover do not reflect the book and though covers aren’t everything, they matter quite a bit to readers. I would like to petition for the cover to be of the ocean and her van as that intrigues me and feels like it reflects the book. I would also like the title to be changed to “Writing the Waves” because I think that is also intriguing and more in line with what the story is. This story is not just a romance, it has so many other pieces and is long enough and webbed enough that it really needs a title and cover that show that. This book is for you if you love surfing, if you love Cornwall and/or Hawaii, if you are looking for a little escape to another town, if you love found family, and if you read it in a single weekend so you can keep up with all the side stories. 

Professional Reader

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One True Loves

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Book Review (more just a pile of my personal opinions from my personal experiences)

Title: One True Loves

Author: Elise Bryant

Year: 2022

Genre: YA Fiction/Romance

Queer shit: Gay friend, gay brother

Vibe Check: This book has everything! Betrayal, complex family dynamics, mental illness, pressures to succeed, the beauty of friendship, love after broken trust and also complete hesitancy with love because broken trust, a cruise ship, amazing countries I would like to go to, prom, planning for after high school, deciding what to do with your life. This is basically a book about an Enneagram 4 going on a family cruise and as an Enneagram 4, I am here for it. 

Pile of Opinions: This book was so much more than I expected. The story is about the best friend (Lenore) of the lead (Tessa) from happily Ever Afters, Elise Bryant’s debut book, who we already sort of knew was a strong-willed free spirit. The book mostly takes place on a Mediterranean cruise with her little sister who is a prodigy child already reading and comprehending at the collegiate level while barely being a tween, her older brother who is getting ready to start law school, and their parents. Lenore is about to go to prom and graduate, then spend two weeks of her summer on this family vacation. I loved how this book captured how much at this point in someone’s life is everything. I talk a lot about this but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop anytime soon, but we (adults) can be so rude and inconsiderate to teenagers by taking the mindset of “in a few years you’ll look back and this won’t seem like as big a deal” and I find this so demeaning. My crushes and loves as a teenager were everything and all-consuming and someone older belittling my experience was incredibly hurtful and damaging. Bryant writes these young adults so beautifully, their problems are real and they aren’t silly or childish. Relationships are difficult and complicated and we bring all our past experiences into our future relationships, and not just romantic. Siblings, parents, friends, all of these relationships help shape how we build and maintain relationships. Bryant also wrote beautifully about mental health, more specifically, panic attacks. As someone who experiences panic attacks and has had to learn how to navigate the world and explain myself to people about this, while being misunderstood about it, I really appreciated how gently she handled this subject. This book made me cry three completely separate times and it was wonderful. I highly recommend this book for a large number of reasons. The amount of personal reflection I did during this book felt like months worth of therapy. It was beautiful. I am looking forward to reading this one again.

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