Review: Let It Snow by John Green, Maureen Johnson & Lauren Myracle

Let It Snow by John Green, Maureen Johnson & Lauren Myracle

Published: 2008, Speak

Genre: Young Adult Contemporary

Format: Paperback

Source: Library

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“Do you think couples all over the world get together on Christmas Eve?” I said, wondering this for the first time. “Because it’s all...Christmasy and magical, only then it’s not, and everything sucks?”

Let It Snow is collection of three interrelated novellas that take place during a major snowstorm over the Christmas holiday in the fictional, East-Coast town of Gracetown. In “The Jubilee Express,” written by Maureen Johnson, Julie (Jubilee) is stranded on a Christmas Eve train traveling down to Florida to spend the holiday with her grandparents, as her parents were arrested for participating in a toy riot. In “A Cheertastic Christmas Miracle” by John Green, friends Tobin, JP, and the Duke fight their way through a massive snowstorm to hang out with stranded cheerleaders at the local Waffle House. And in “The Patron Saint of Pigs,” written by Lauren Myracle, Addie tries to purchase her friend’s teacup pig while struggling with a major heartbreak.

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Review: Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

Published: 2011, Plume

Genre: Adult Romance, Realistic Fiction

Source: Purchased

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Money and time, those were the two things that he always heard people complaining about, and he had plenty of both. There wasn’t anything Lincoln wanted that he couldn’t afford...

What more did he want? Love, he could hear Eve saying. Purpose. Love. Purpose. Those are the things you can’t plan for. Those are the things that just happen. And what if they don’t happen? Do you spend your whole life pining for them? Waiting to be happy?

Lincoln, Jennifer, and Beth all work for the Courier newspaper during the end of the twenty-first century in Omaha, Nebraska. Beth and Jennifer are good friends and continue their conversations through their work emails during the day. Neither of them knows Lincoln, but he’s getting to know each of them very well, as his job for IT is essentially reading through all the work emails that get flagged and issuing warnings to the senders.

When Jennifer and Beth’s emails start getting flagged, Lincoln knows that he should send them both warnings, but the messages are so interesting that he doesn’t at first. He loves their friendship with each other, and is starting to fall for Beth himself. But he’s never even met Beth, and certainly can’t introduce himself as the person who looks forward to reading her private messages each day.

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Review: Unsticky by Sarra Manning

Unsticky by Sarra Manning

Published: 2012, CB Creative Books

Genre: Adult Romance

Source: Purchased

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We're broken. It's like we have all these jagged edges that scare other people off, but when we're with each other, our jagged edges fit together and we're almost whole.

From an outsider’s perspective, it may appear as though Grace Reeves is living the fashionista’s dream. She works for Skirt, a London-based fashion magazine, she breathes fashion, and she wears many of the latest trends.

The problem is that she cannot afford this lifestyle. At all. She lives in an apartment building that should probably be condemned, her credit card debt is so high that she’s afraid of even opening her mail or listening to her voicemail, and as for her glamorous job? She basically does the grunt work.

When super rich art mogul James Vaughn offers her an usual proposition - become his mistress, receiving a generous allowance each month and access to elite events - it doesn’t take Grace too long to accept his offer. And for a while she thoroughly enjoys the perks of being Vaughn’s mistress, even if she isn’t too crazy about Vaughn himself. But Grace soon learns that her new lifestyle doesn’t magically solve all the problems in her life.

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Review: The Chocolate Thief by Laura Florand

The Chocolate Thief by Laura Florand

Series: Amour et Chocolat, #1

Published: 2012, Kensington Books

Genre: Adult Romance, Contemporary

Source: Purchased

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A thief who stole chocolate but not his laptop? He might have to marry her. He could feel himself falling in love just at the idea.
He hoped she had worn black leather pants.
 


Cade Corey is heiress to a multimillion dollar chocolate empire. Every minute thousands of Americans eat Corey Bars (sold for 33 cents at Walmart). The Corey empire also owns a significant percentage of all the cacao plantations around the world. Cade has spent her whole life working for the family business, and decides she wants to help the company grow even more by creating an artisan chocolate line, preferably with the name of a famous Parisian chocolatier attached to it.

Sylvain Marquis is widely considered to be Paris’ premier chocolatier, and so Cade travels to France to proposition him with a business arrangement. Sylvain, however, has no desire to sell out–or to lower himself to make chocolate that would be sold at grocery stores. Although their meeting is less than ideal, Cade remains in Paris to seek other potential business partners. But Cade finds she cannot stay away from Sylvain’s chocolaterie, nor can she get him out of her head. And, unbeknownst to her, she haunts Sylvain’s thoughts as well. And his chocolaterie. Parisian chocolate may have brought them together, but a relationship between them will be anything but easy.

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Review: Austenland by Shannon Hale

Austenland by Shannon Hale

Published: 2010, Bloomsbury USA

Series: Austenland, #1

Genre: Adult Romance, Contemporary

Source: Purchased

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At a very young age, she had learned how to love from Austen. And according to her immature understanding at the time, in Austen’s world there was no such thing as a fling. Every romance was intended to lead to marriage, every flirtation just a means to find that partner to cling to forever.

Jane Hayes has a bit more than a healthy appreciation of Jane Austen’s works. What Jane Hayes has could actually be more easily classified as an obsession. It’s caused her to have unrealistic expectations of today’s men, and she’s not the only one who has come to that realization.

From her great aunt’s will, Jane learns that she has been given an all-inclusive three week vacation to Pembrook Park, a place that reenacts life in Regency England for paying customers. Jane decides to allow herself three weeks of pure wish-fulfillment at Pembrook before ending her Austen (more specifically Mr. Darcy) obsession.

Despite possessing a strong appreciation of Jane Austen, I haven’t read many stories that pay homage to her works. After quite enjoying a few of Hale’s other works, I decided to give this one a try. I can relate to wish-fulfillment and the desire to experience life from a different era. And as Jane herself says best:

“If you were a woman, all I'd have to say is 'Colin Firth in a wet shirt' and you'd say 'Ah.’”

I enjoyed the intermixing of reality and fantasy, true depth and superficiality. As much as Mrs. Wattlesbrook, the proprietress of Pembrook Park, tries to replicate an authentic Regency experience, the experience is only as good as the people participating in it. Newly christened as Jane Erstwhile, it does not take Jane long to realize that, much as she’d like for it to be real, she’s simply interacting with actors and other people who possess sad addictions to the lifestyles found in Jane Austen’s stories, and that she’s one of them.

My main complaint is that Jane simply isn’t very memorable, nor are any of the relationships she’s had. Between each chapter, Hale adds short sections recounting Jane’s history with her thirteen past boyfriends. These sections were surely intended to help readers form a better understanding of what caused the severity of Jane’s Austen-like romantic ideals. And perhaps they do to some degree, but they do not help develop Jane’s character in any substantial way.

Nor is Jane’s transformation as satisfying as it could have been. From Jane’s first misgiving during her three-week stay at Pembrook Park, I had a pretty good guess of where the story was heading and how being there would ultimately affect Jane’s development. Expecting certain events to occur did not necessarily hinder my enjoyment of those events while I was reading. Jane’s lack of solid characterization did, however. Besides her obsession with Jane Austen’s works, I had trouble understanding her character. She finds herself involved in flirtations with two men, and she wants each of them to see her as herself, not as Miss Jane Erstwhile. And yet even I as a reader had trouble determining exactly what makes Jane tick.

This is the first book I’ve read by Shannon Hale that caters to an adult audience. While amusing, this story lacks much of the charm I found in The Goose Girl and Princess Academy. From what I’ve read of Hale so far, I think she’s better at writing for children and young adults. That being said, this will not be my last Hale book; it is likely, however, that this will be the last adult book I read from her.

Despite all my criticism, I did enjoy my time spent reading Austenland. It functions well as a work of fun, light-hearted chick lit, and reading this was a perfect break from a project I had. It’s pure escapism, just as Pembrook Park itself is supposed to be. But any deeper meanings fell flat for me. I suppose this is worth the read, but it’s not really worth spending any more time thinking about it once the last page is closed.

Rating: 2.5 stars

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Review: The Drake Equation by Heather Walsh

The Drake Equation by Heather Walsh
Published: 2013, Amazon Digital Services
Genre: Adult Contemporary, Romance
Source: From the author
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“There’s actually a calculation of how many planets might contain intelligent life. Do you want to know what it’s called?” he said.

“What?”

“The Drake Equation.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. And no relation, in case you were wondering.”

She smiled.

For the past few years, Emily Crossley has worked for GeoForce, the only environmental nonprofit organization in her area of Connecticut. Mostly surrounded by those who espouse similar political and economic views, Emily deals with those who disagree by simply avoiding a discussion of those topics. At the annual Give Up Your SUV for a Day event hosted by her company, however, Emily meets Robert Drake. He works for the local SUV distributor Bell Motors and is everything she despises about conservative politics. And yet she also cannot deny that there is some sort of connection between them.

The Drake Equation is essentially about the relationship that forms between the two as they gradually test the limits of what really matters to each of them and what beliefs they’re willing to sacrifice.

I’m not much of a fan of politics, and neither do I tend to read many books expressly billed as adult romances, but I decided to take a chance with Heather Walsh’s new book. And although there were a few missteps along the way, I still am glad I had the opportunity to read this.

As anyone will notice who reads the book’s blurb, politics and political ideology are abundant in this novel. Through Emily and Robert, readers may expect to find two extremes. However, that’s not quite the case. Sure, Emily has strong liberal beliefs that border on closed-mindedness, but the same cannot be said for the more conservative Robert. Because of this, I actually felt as though I understood Robert’s character a bit more than Emily’s (ironically, since the story is told from her perspective). Not only has Emily never really accepted any challenges to her beliefs, but she has also never paused to consider exactly why she believes in these basic liberal ideologies.

While an interesting and relevant premise, the ideological differences are mainly expressed through debate. At times, this led to the book feeling very dialogue-heavy with little rest provided through description or other information. After Emily and Robert become a little more established in their relationship, other issues are brought to the forefront: namely Robert’s workaholic tendencies. It is his overcommitment to his work, rather than their political differences, that actually creates a wedge in their relationship.

The book’s resolution focuses more on Robert’s time management tendencies and Emily’s struggle to understand her own wants and needs, effectively sidelining their political issues. This was not a big issue for me, as after a while I started to tire of the intense political debates, but this is a marked difference from what I expected the book to be about. Here politics seem to act more as a vehicle for bringing Emily and Robert together and then takes a back seat to other, more personal issues. Once again, not necessarily a bad thing but certainly worth noting.

For a fairly short novel, Walsh is quite ambitious in just what she wants to portray about the modern romance. It’s about politics and belief systems, until suddenly it’s not. It’s about Emily’s journey to find herself, Robert’s struggles to balance his work life with his personal life, and identifying many other little parts that come together in a successful romance. I appreciated how Walsh really tried to identify the many factors that tend to complicate modern-day relationships, but at times I felt as though the issues being addressed came across as too wide-spread.

Although I would have liked to see certain aspects of the book condensed and others expanded upon, it’s clear that Walsh can write. From an aesthetic standpoint, The Drake Equation is very eloquent and well-written. I just wish a bit more time was spent deciding just what readers are supposed to get out of this story. As it is, I can see this working for readers who enjoy more heavy stories, and stories that start to question what people value most in their relationships, even if it doesn’t quite end up answering anything specifically.

Rating: 2.5 stars

Disclaimer: I received this review copy from the author, but that in no way affected my opinion. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to review this, Heather!

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