Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the complimentary ARC. All opinions provided are my own. #SundayShelfie + Review You know that thrill you get when someone’s writing is just really, really good? I had it often when reading Cat Sebastian’s The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes. Sebastian is someone who’s writing I just *delight* in, to an extravagant amount. There are so many lines in this ARC that I wanted to share as evidence of how good it is—like one about cake & religious icons—so many moments when I felt a smile growing & also greedily thought, I *H A V E* to get a copy of this for my shelves. This book picks up action-wise during and after The Queer Principles of Kit Webb, taking Marian Hayes and Rob Brooks as its focus. After shooting her duke bigamist-husband, Marian “kidnaps” the charming Rob Brooks (formerly a highwayman who has been presumed dead for a year) & they travel to visit her sick father & prepare for any fallout from the shooting. TPCoMH is a rich & sexy cornucopia of tropes: 🖤 Road Trip 🖤 Some Epistolary 🖤 Forced Proximity 🖤 Oops I blackmailed you to lovers 🖤 A tiny bit of the forbidden (though that’s not really a big dissuasion bc our leads have big IDGAF energy) 🖤Some Deception Plot & a dynamic between MCs that honestly makes my wings soar & my whole reading persona lusty: she is severe & uptight & authoritative & he LOVES IT & thinks she is PERFECT. When I tell you I loved how this became part of their intimate moments... There’s so much to love about this romance: the humor (honestly I cracked up all the time), the care (from both of them), Marian’s fierceness & what this book says about motherhood & parenting in general, the found family this group makes 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺, & what it means to choose yourself. I loved it & adored it. 5 ⭐️. Release date: 06/07.
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Thanks to the author for the complimentary ARC. All opinions provided are my own. Somewhere there’s a bar called Moonies where people can drink, sing karaoke, & fall in love… In this latest novella in Anita Kelly’s Moonlighters series, Wherever Is Your Heart, MCs Mal & June build a long-building slow fire into something bigger & lasting. As Anita Kelly tweeted last week, this book is “a quiet tribute to mutual pining, soft butches, growing old, & taking a chance during Pride. (Doesn’t that sound amazing?) This book is so good. The writing is gorgeous & feels real (that’s a description that might not mean anything specific to you but it feels like something particular to me 😆) & it’s often funny. I love the pacing, how Anita relays info about Mal and June’s long history, & the idea of a simple road trip that’s actually a momentous step/moment for two people. This whole novella is soft but packs a punch. 5 ⭐️. Out now.
A big thanks to Berkley for gifting me a complimentary copy of the ARC and inviting me to be part of the tour; all opinions provided are my own. SYNOPSISNamed a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Newsweek ∙ Oprah Magazine ∙ Marie Claire ∙ Parade ∙ PopSugar ∙ BookPage ∙ BookBub ∙ Betches ∙ SheReads ∙ Good Housekeeping ∙ BuzzFeed ∙ and more! Two best friends. Ten summer trips. One last chance to fall in love. From the New York Times bestselling author of Beach Read, a sparkling new novel that will leave you with the warm, hazy afterglow usually reserved for the best vacations. Poppy and Alex. Alex and Poppy. They have nothing in common. She’s a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart—she’s in New York City, and he’s in their small hometown—but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together. Until two years ago, when they ruined everything. They haven't spoken since. Poppy has everything she should want, but she’s stuck in a rut. When someone asks when she was last truly happy, she knows, without a doubt, it was on that ill-fated, final trip with Alex. And so, she decides to convince her best friend to take one more vacation together—lay everything on the table, make it all right. Miraculously, he agrees. Now she has a week to fix everything. If only she can get around the one big truth that has always stood quietly in the middle of their seemingly perfect relationship. What could possibly go wrong? MY REVIEWI knew Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation would be a beautifully written way of messing with my heart. Poppy Wright & Alex Nilsen are opposites attract unlikely best friends who have spent almost every year since college going on one major summer trip together. But two years ago, in Croatia, something happened that caused a divide between them, & they haven’t spoken since. After prompting, Poppy realizes she can trace her “last” happy moment to being w/ him, so she reconnects & asks him to go on a trip to Palm Springs. She hopes that she’ll be able to find her lost travel-journalist mojo & rekindle a beloved friendship she’s missed. But of course even when he says yes it’s all more complicated than that. There’s so much to love about PWM: Alex is really nice & dependable & wear khakis & is also a secret weirdo, but only around Poppy. Their relationship is built on inside jokes & moments when they’re only themselves around each other. On tenderness & respect & the more than 1, less than 15% of Poppy’s feelings that are romantic in nature. Yeah right . It’s an ache & a tenderness to see all of the ways they’ve been in love for so long. Their HEA, told from present day & a series of flashbacks, is hard won, & Henry really builds up that tension, showing how they both wanted (want??) different lives. But maybe there’s some overlap. I read each chapter with bated breath, frequently checking how long the chapters were because I wanted to move ahead in the present day story & get them to kissing . By the end, I felt assured that they really knew each other, that figuring things out might not be the easiest thing in the world but the only thing for people who love each other so much. Funny, emotionally lovely & also difficult for someone like me , this book is poignant & as beautiful as I thought it would be. I hope that Alex & Poppy are enjoying a (vaccinated) summer trip soon. 5 ⭐️. Out today!CW: ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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