Funny Story by Emily Henry – ARC Review

 

Title: Funny Story

Author: Emily Henry

Genre: Romance

Publishing House: Viking (Penguin General UK)

Synopsys (from Goodreads): A shimmering, joyful new novel about a pair of opposites with the wrong thing in common.

Daphne always loved the way her fiancé Peter told their story. How they met (on a blustery day), fell in love (over an errant hat), and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it…right up until the moment he realized he was actually in love with his childhood best friend Petra.

Which is how Daphne begins her new story: Stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only person who could possibly understand her predicament: Petra’s ex, Miles Nowak.

Scruffy and chaotic—with a penchant for taking solace in the sounds of heart break love ballads—Miles is exactly the opposite of practical, buttoned up Daphne, whose coworkers know so little about her they have a running bet that she’s either FBI or in witness protection. The roommates mainly avoid one another, until one day, while drowning their sorrows, they form a tenuous friendship and a plan. If said plan also involves posting deliberately misleading photos of their summer adventures together, well, who could blame them?

But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex…right?

Rating: 4/5 stars

 

A huge thank you to the publishing house, Viking (Penguin General UK), for inviting me to take part in the blog tour for this book and for providing me with an E-Arc through NetGalley.

All opinions, however, are completely my own.

 

TW: toxic parents, emotional abuse, absent father

 

This review will be completely spoiler-free

 

Hey there guys, today I’m here with a review of a book from one of my favourite authors ever: Emily Henry. I know this book has come out a month ago, but life got in the way, so better late than ever, here we are with my review of Funny Story.

I have read every single Emily Henry’s romance book, and I love her writing style, her wittiness and her plots. I always say that she’s for me in romance literature what Taylor Swift is for me in music, since they both touch a lot of emotions that I feel with all my heart.

Henry’s books have always been 5-stars reads for me (with the exception of Book Lovers, which still remains my least favourite one). I have to say that sadly this one wasn’t a 5 star for me either. I expected a bit more from it, and while this was still better than most books I’ve read this year, since it is Emily Henry, it didn’t blow my mind. I would still read Henry’s grocery list, though, there’s no doubt in that.

This book is very fun (no pun intended) in its premise, since it follows Daphne, who was dumped by her ex-fiancé. He wanted to get together with his best friend Petra, who was Miles’ girlfriend. Miles is our other main character. In an act of compassion, and equally hurt by what happened to them, Miles offers Daphne, who’s temporarily without a home, to go live with him. You can imagine what happens from there.

I really liked Daphne and Miles’ characters, they had all of the characteristic I search in an Emily Henry’s novel, they were witty, they were still searching themselves, and their banter was top notch. I truly think no one can write a dialogue like Miss Henry. But I didn’t believe in their romance like I believed the other ones in her books. If I have to choose one couple from Henry’s books who probably has broken up after the epilogue, I’m sad to say… this one would be it. I just didn’t feel their tension, or a big chemistry. I felt a lot of affection between them at the end of the book, but I don’t know if it was love yet.

Also, there was a fake dating trope that lasted for the span of literally two seconds, it was thrown there, and it was never picked up again.

But while the romance didn’t totally convince me, what really got to me, and that even made me shed a tear or two was Daphne’s relationship with her father. Henry’s always got the best side-plots in romance books, and that’s something I really appreciate. The love story between the two main characters is not the only focus, and she got, also in this book, to examine some family dynamics that were heavy to read, but I think really formative for the growth of our main character. At the end of the book, I think Daphne found a little bit of the hope she had lost of the beginning of the story and that was beautiful to see.

Okay guys, that was my review for Funny Story by Emily Henry, I highly recommend it if you are in search for a romance with good banter and a good side plot.

Thank you so much for reading,

The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers by Sarah Tomlinson – ARC Review

 

 

Title: The Last Days of the Midnight Ramblers

Author: Sarah Tomlinson

Publishing House: Flatiron Books

Genre: Fiction

Synopsis (from Goodreads): Perfect for fans of Daisy Jones & The Six and Almost Famous, a gripping debut about the complicated legacy of a legendary rock band and the ghostwriter telling their story

Three Rock & Roll icons. Two explosive tell-all memoirs. One ghostwriter caught in the middle.

Mari Hawthorn has just landed the biggest job of her ghostwriting career. Anke Berben, the legendary model and style icon, needs someone for her hotly anticipated memoir. In the 1960s, Anke reveled in headline-grabbing romances with three members of the hugely influential rock band The Midnight Ramblers. The band became as famous for their backstage drama as for their music. Outside of the bandmembers themselves, Anke is the only one who fully understands the tangled relationships, betrayals, and suspicions that has elevated the Ramblers to mythological status. That could not be clearer than in the enduring mystery around the death of Mal, the band’s lead singer and Anke’s husband, in 1969.

In the decades that followed, rumors have swirled about Mal’s demise, but Anke and the surviving members of the Ramblers have all kept silent. Until now. As her ghostwriter, Mari must ingratiate herself with Anke, coaxing out the stories she needs to write a memoir worthy of such an important band. Mari is deft at navigating the fatal charms of the rich and famous, having grown up with a narcissistic, alcoholic father. But she soon stumbles upon secrets more explosive than anyone could have imagined. It’s now not just about celebrity tell-alls–this is about redemption.

Rating: 2.25/5 stars

Publishing Date: 13^th of February 2024

A huge thank you to NetGalley and the publishing house, Flatiron Books, for providing me with a digital ARC of this book, in exchange for an honest review.
All opinions, however, are completely my own.

 

TW: alcohol, drugs, mentions of suicide, mention of sexual assault, cheating

 

This review will be completely spoiler free

 

What do you do when you get the chance to accept the work of a lifetime as a ghostwriter and you have to pen the memoir of the most famous muse who ever existed?
That’s the question that Mari rushes to answer, and of course she says yes, when she’s given the opportunity to work with Anke Berben, a legendary muse of the most famous 70s band, The Midnight Ramblers. She’s a charismatic figure, and she carries the secret of how her husband, Mal, the singer of the aforementioned band, died. His body was found at the bottom of their swimming pool, but is it really all there is to this mystery?

As soon as I got the chance to collaborate with the publishing house to write a review about this new release, I was so excited. Fictional memoirs about fictional bands are some of my favourite things to exist (see Daisy Jones and The Six, for example), but I’m sad to say this book did not quite land for me. From the synopsis I was expecting a glamorous tale about a band at the top of the world in the 70s but sadly that’s not what happened.

This is of course not a bad book, but it’s just something very different from what I expected. The tale takes on a turn that resembles a thriller story, with Mal’s death becoming the main center point of Mari’s life, and so also of the reader’s reading experience. She becomes obsessed with this band, and that is quite interesting since she’s ghostwriting a story about them, but her wanting to discover this secret at all cost, at some points felt very out of touch and repetitive in my eyes.
The music aspect is somewhat non-existent, and that quite bothered me, since the main theme of the book revolves, again, about what was described as one of the biggest bands of the days past.

I also had quite a bit of a problem with the main character, and that is also connected with the obsession she comes to have with this unsolved mystery. I think she is very unlikable, but not in a way that you feel the writer wants her to be unlikable (at least that’s what I gathered from it), it’s more like her mind is completely taken by this that she forgets about the people around her, and really nothing else matters beside her work. She comes off as someone who would do anything to reach her fame, and while she forms some connections with some members of the band, at the end I never found her motivations selfless. And again, her compulsion about Mal’s death was just too much, considering she didn’t even know him. She was just quite murky to me.

The aspect that I came to enjoy the most was the dive into the ghost-writing world, something I’m not familiar with, but that I found fascinating, not in the method acting way Mari seems to adopt, but in general. I was curious to get to know more about it and I would have liked to read even more about this particular topic.

In the end, I think sadly this book wasn’t the best one I read on this topic, but if you feel like you might like a bit of a memoir about fictional rockstars mixed with a bit of a thriller aspect, you might still want to pick this one up.

And with that, we have come to the conclusion of this review. I hope you enjoyed it.

Thank you so much for reading,

 

 

This Spells Love by Kate Robb – ARC Review

Title: This Spells Love

Author: Kate Robb

Publishing House: Penguin General UK

Genre: Romance

Synopsis (from Goodreads): A young woman tries to heal her heartbreak by casting a spell to erase her ex from her past, but she wakes up in an alternate reality where she’s lost more than she wished for in this witty, whimsical friends-to-lovers debut.

What if one little wish changed everything?

When Gemma gets dumped by her long-term boyfriend, she reacts the way any reasonable twenty-eight-year-old would: by getting drunk with her sister, kooky aunt, and best friend, Dax. After one too many margaritas, they decide to perform a love- cleansing spell, which promises to erase Gemma’s ex from her memory. They follow all the instructions, including a platonic kiss from Dax to seal the deal.

When Gemma wakes up, she realizes that this silly spell has worked. Not only does it seem that she never dated her ex, but the rest of her life is completely unrecognizable. The worst part: Dax has no idea who she is.

To reverse the spell and get back to her old life, Gemma must convince her once-best-friend-now-near-stranger to kiss her. But as she carries out her plans, she finds herself falling for him—hard. Soon, Gemma begins to wonder whether she even wants to go back to the way things once were. What if Dax was The One all along?

Rating: 2.75/5 stars

Publishing Date: 5^th of December 2023

A huge thank you to NetGalley and the publishing house, Penguin General UK, for providing me with a digital ARC of this book, in exchange for an honest review.
All opinions, however, are completely my own.

TW: fire, alcohol, injuries

This review may contain some minor spoilers

 

This Spells Love by Kate Robb is a romance novel which contains some elements of magical realism, and which is described as a friends-to-lovers story.
It follows Gemma, a girl in her twenties who gets dumped by her long-term boyfriend. Desperate to forget everything about him, she decides to perform a magical spell in her aunt’s bookshop, not truly believing it is going to work. Her sister Kiersten and her best friend Dax are going to help her. The only trick? To seal the spell Gemma will need a kiss, and Dax is right there to help.

Except that the next morning Gemma wakes up and she’s in another dimension where her ex-boyfriend is not her ex-boyfriend and Dax doesn’t remember her. To reverse the spell she needs Dax, to whom she is now a complete stranger, to kiss her. But when you start to have feelings for this person, is going back really the best option?

On paper, this story had all of the elements to be a favourite book of mine: a bit of magic in a romance novel and the friends-to-lovers trope.
Sadly, in the end this novel didn’t quite work for me. It was fun to read, and I would be curious to read other books by this author, since this is her debut work, but in the end a lot of things didn’t quite meet my taste.

A lot of it comes from my expectations but also how the novel was promoted: this is not a friends-to-lovers novel, or at least not as much as it was advertised. I thought the alternate dimension part would be shorter, but basically it takes up almost all of the novel. So, since as you can see that Dax in that dimension doesn’t know her, the trope is basically non-existent. And also, the chemistry they have in this other world is completely unjustified to me. Sure, Gemma has known Dax for years (another version of him), but Dax doesn’t know Gemma at all, and he falls in love with her after he sees her in his shop, where she entered when no one was there, passing as a thief in his eyes. So romantic, right?

I would’ve been fine with a scenario where after this accident they get to know each other better, but they are basically smitten from minute one, so you get that this didn’t seem very believable for me. And we don’t talk about a fling, we talk about love love. The smut was great though, I have to give that to this novel.

The end was just so confusing to me, there were some aspects that I will not spoil that did just not make sense. I get that the romance is the main aspect of this story, but why would you use a magic system in some way if you’re not going to use it properly? I mean, I guess I’m being picky, but it didn’t work for me.

But there are also some aspects I particularly enjoyed in this novel. The first one was the humor, this book was funny without being silly, and I absolutely appreciated it. The banter between the characters was good and I had fun while reading it, so there’s that.

The aspect I appreciated the most though was the depiction of Kiersten and Gemma’s bond as sisters. It was so heartwarming to see, and for sure my favourite thing in the entire novel. I’m an only child, and the sibling relationship always fascinates and moves me. They were always there for each other, and they always lifted each other up, but they also didn’t shy away from having serious conversations about some issues between them. It was inspiring to see and it made me a bit envious to not have an older sister myself.

In conclusion, I’m sorry to say this novel didn’t particularly work for me, but if you like romance novels with alternate universes, and a dash of magic, this could be the one for you.

So this is the end of this review. I hope you enjoyed, and I will talk to you soon.

Thanks for reading,

Together We Rot by Skyla Arndt – ARC Review

Title: Together We Rot

Author: Skyla Arndt

Publishing House: Viking Books for Young Readers

Genre: Horror (YA)

Synopsis (from Goodreads): A teen girl looking for the truth about her missing mother forms a reluctant alliance with her former best friend…in exchange for hiding him from his cult-leading family.

Wil Greene’s mom has been missing for over a year, and the police are ready to call the case closed–they claim she skipped town and you can’t find a woman who wants to disappear. But she knows her mom wouldn’t just leave…and she knows the family of her former best friend, Elwood Clarke, has something to do with it.

Elwood has been counting down the days until his 18th birthday–in dread. It marks leaving school and joining his pastor father in dedicating his life to their congregation, the Garden of Adam. But when he comes home after one night of after a final goodbye with his friends, already self-flagellating for the sins of drinking and disobeying his father, he discovers his path is not as virtuous as he thought. He’s not his father’s successor, but his sacrifice. For the woods he’s grown up with are thirsty, and must be paid in blood.

Now on the run from a family that wants him dead, he turns to the only one who will believe him: Wil. Together, they form a reluctant partnership; she’ll help him hide if he helps her find evidence that his family killed her mother. But in the end they dig up more secrets than they bargained for, unraveling decades of dark cult dealings in their town, led by the Clarke family.

And there’s a reason they need Elwood’s blood for their satanic rituals. Something inhuman is growing inside of him. Everywhere he goes, the plants come alive and the forest calls to him, and Wil isn’t sure if she can save the boy she can’t help but love.

Rating: 3/5 stars

Publishing Date: 29^th of August 2023

A huge thank you to NetGalley and Viking Books for Young Readers for providing me with a digital ARC of this book, in exchange for an honest review.
All opinions, however, are completely my own.

 

 

TW (could be spoilery, so in case skip them): body gore, abusing parents, cult, disappeared mother, murder

From this point on this review will be completely spoiler-free

 

“Together We Rot” is a book I was lucky enough to read in advance thanks to the publishing house, and while I enjoyed it still think, even after months I read it, that it could have given me more. I’m totally in the minority here, since this book has such a high rating on Goodreads, but it left me with wanting something more. Let’s talk a bit about it.

The premise of this book was so interesting in my eyes, it is an eerie story following two former best friends in a small town, but something happened between them and now they don’t talk to each other anymore. Wil’s mother has been missing for quite some time, and while the police consider the case closed, she thinks it’s far from it, and she blames Elwood’s family for that. Elwood as in her former best friend.

Elwood, on the other hand, has a very strained relationship with his pastor father, but he still decides, on his 18^th birthday, to join his congregation, the Garden of Adam. This entails no longer having a social life, and dedicating his life to whatever is going on in his father’s church, even if he doesn’t completely understand it. Not that he has a choice. His father can be very violent if he’s being disobeyed.
But what Elwood doesn’t know is that the woods crave blood, and that his role in the congregation is not what it seems. Not sure about what he’s gotten himself into, he has no choice but to run back to Wil, the only one who had always had doubt about his father. He has to run, but at the same time something inside of him is growing, something he can’t escape from…

On paper this book has everything I could possibly want, a small town folkloristic setting, lyrical writing, and what seems to be a lovely former friends to lovers plot. So what actually didn’t quite work for me?
The book is not very long, not even 300 pages, and for this reason I think there isn’t a lot of background for the characters and their motivations. As a story, it is beautiful. The writing is really good, hence the 3 stars. But I would have liked to empathize a bit more with Elwood and Wil. While I understood that what was happening to them was awful, and while I felt for them, I can’t say that these characters will stay with me forever, and I think this is mainly because of what I found to be a lack of characterization and a lack of deeper understanding on my part of their motivations.

One thing I really enjoyed was Wil and Elwood’s former friendship, and how it shattered. I think the author did a really good job of that, and their reconciliation wasn’t fast at all, I was satisfied on that part.
There is a bit grumpy girl, sunshine boy in this book if you like this trope, but just remember it is embedded in a horror story.

Talking about the horror part, this surely focuses mostly on bodily horrors, but it doesn’t shy away from deeper themes such as murder, the disappearance of a parent, on page descriptions of parental violence and abuse, and cults. So, while it is sold as a YA, since the character are teens, I would advise a younger audience (and not only) to read the trigger warnings before picking this book up. This is a general advice I have for this book, but in reality I believe that for every book.

Okay guys, these were my thoughts about “Together We Rot” by Skyla Arndt. If this is something you think could appeal to you, I still recommend picking this up, I think the idea behind the plot is really beautiful, if you like horror novels.

Thanks for reading, talk to you soon,