#TNReads: Real Quick Reviews for Lazy Readers featuring Kristen Proby

This book is a solid 3.5 stars. I loved Savannah – her voice was clear, she’s smart, driven, sassy, and relatable. But I didn’t find the story in general to be the most compelling. I couldn’t tell what the story was supposed to be about…there was a small romance plot, family drama, and school drama. And while it’s fine to have offshoots of the plot, it was hard to focus on which was the most important. And while that’s kind of how life goes, it doesn’t make for the most readable story.

I think this is a great read for teenage girls who are having trouble with self-acceptance, or body image, or who struggle to relate to the rest of their family, but I might have been just a little too old to fully relate! Or maybe it’s just the problems I already mentioned – I need a more fleshed out plot. I would love to read more about Savannah and George. This might be a book that needs a sequel…

Franny, Court and Mikal live on a frozen planet that is covered in a dust that blocks the sun. It’s a planet where everyone is split into a cast system based on the date they’ll die. It’s a planet where no one escapes their fate. Until they do. As they each wake up after their death days they realize that they can feel everything that the others feel. Every emotion, every pain, every longing. They’re connected in a place where they can’t stay. They concoct a plan to escape the planet that takes them on a series of tests that introduces new characters, but never allows them to really be known beyond their tight circle. There’s love, family betrayal and adventure. Everything I look for in a good YA. I can’t wait for the next one.

London Watson is a Tony Award-winning Broadway actress whose career has been cut short by a tragic house fire that took the lives of her parents. One moment she’s taking the stage by storm, the next she’s orphaned, severely injured, and unbelievably rich thanks to her inheritance. Finn Cavanaugh is a successful Manhattan attorney who handled London’s parent’s will, and fortunately for all of us, owns the home next door to London’s in Martha’s Vineyard where she’s recovering. London and Finn have instant chemistry, but it’s the way they care for one another through life’s hardships that really sells All The Way.

Through London’s recovery, drama with her addict brother, and pressures from Finn’s career and family, they find their way to one another. People bring a lot of baggage to relationships when they meet in their late thirties, but Kristen Proby navigated those challenges believably. If you’re looking for a solid contemporary romance with a few twists and turns along the way, All the Way is for you.

Tallulah James’ unconventional childhood is made up of the stuff that would send most of us into years of therapy. The James children, Tallulah, Griff, Walden, and Dharma, are “free range”, not because of a parenting philosophy, but due to the cavalier attitude of their mother and mental illness plaguing their father. The guidance the children receive from their grandmother may be their saving grace, but family secrets and small-town gossip are hard to overcome with genteel southern tradition as your only weapon.

Set in the tumultuous 60’s and 70’s amid war protests and the civil rights movement, Crandall uses skillful storytelling and beautiful prose to unfold the stories of Tallulah’s childhood, and her return home as an adult drawn back by a new family tragedy. The Myth of Perpetual Summer will make you ache and root for the James family as they ultimately try to find the balance to both overcome and embrace their family legacy.

Lady Eva is a talented architect, on a ship to America to oversee the construction of what will be the grandest hotel in New York City. There’s only one problem; she’s designed it under the name of her famous architect father, who is suffering from dementia and no longer able to work. With their finances in dire straights, Eva is desperate to maintain the deception that her father is the true architect, as no hotel owner would trust a woman to take on a project of that size.

After a steamy, scandalous encounter on the ship with a mysterious stranger, Eva arrives in New York, where things become awkwardly complicated when she learns that the gorgeous stranger who she got to third base with is also Philip Mansfield, her new boss. Sexual tension junkies, rejoice!

I enjoyed this book so much. It has strong themes of feminism, women for women, and equality. Philip and Eva have great chemistry, and I love how the author always sneaks in a love scene at a famous New York building. The New York Gilded Age has never been more steamy!