#TNReads: Real Quick Reviews for Lazy Readers featuring Sonya Lalli

Raina Anand is your typical nearly 30 metropolitan businesswomen. She works too many hours, drinks too much, still has feelings for her toxic ex and all of her friends are starting to settle down. Add to all of her modern issues the fact that she comes from a traditional Indian home. Raina’s grandmother raised her to respect her upbringing which means she wants her married in a traditional wedding to a doctor with two children before her eggs are hard-boiled. Let’s just say time is running out.

While Raina works her way through the list of eligible Indian bachelor’s her grandmother has made, she meets Asher, a former nomad/high school teacher. Through a series of events, they become frenemies and then friends and maybe something more if Raina doesn’t ruin it all first. Believe me, she tries to ruin it.

I enjoyed this modern story of self-discovery, bridging the gap between cultures, and yes, even love.

This book is a slow burn kind of read. My interest wasn’t fully captured until the final 50% of the book. There was nothing wrong with the characters, or the plot necessarily, it just seemed to move very slowly until suddenly there was action everywhere. Much like the characters and their relationships – we don’t know much, and suddenly we know a lot!

I enjoyed this book. I love power-hungry women, I love Asian-inspired fantasy, and I love main characters that kind of suck. A category which a couple characters in this book fit into, most notably, Min.

I’m going to chalk up my confusion to too much happening with too many characters. Each story was interesting in its own right, and maybe splitting them into separate books or having some novellas would have fixed this problem. I’m interested to see where this series goes because of course, that ending has me intrigued. I really enjoyed Nok, Lu, Nassan, and Min as characters and it seems like they have quite an adventure ahead of them. Who will actually become The Girl King?

I know many people who have been plagued by depression since the 2016 Presidential Election. Author Verity Speaks hopes to lighten the mood of the nation with her fictional tale of President Rex Funk and his former model/immigrant wife Natalia.

The First Lady Escapes finds us well into the first term of Funk’s presidency. Natalia, who is horrified by her husband’s attitudes and physique, longs to escape the confines of the White House and reunite with her first love from her home country. With the help of those President Funk despises, a homosexual Mexican immigrant and a transgender nurse/performer, Natalia hatches a plan to leave her restrictive life and disgusting spouse behind.

Verity Speeks novel is bold in its portrayal of a president who gets turned on watching his State of the Union Address and covets the praise of his lap dog like daughter Gretchen, but the prose sometimes crosses from humorous to vulgar. The story overall is fun and takes some unexpected turns but it could have been written with more finesse. In a time when many of us struggle with the current administration, Speeks novel is a whimsical distraction from the daily news cycle.

Echo North is a book that will hook you. Sure, it’s a retelling of a fairy tale, but it’s so much more than that. The Beauty and the Beast vibes are obvious at the beginning, but then the story takes on a life of its own. It was only after reading the acknowledgments that I realized just how many stories this tale uses for inspiration – stories I’ve never heard of that now I intend to seek out.

I loved the world this was written in. Echo is a lovely character and the adventures she goes on are thrilling. But I did have a few issues with this book – the pacing and the motivation. The pacing starts out well, slows down, and then speeds up much too much. The ending happened so quickly that I’m still recovering. The motivation is similar – it’s hard to tell this is intended to be a love story until more than halfway through. Echo squanders a year reading books and exploring when she could have been more believably falling in love and forming plans. Some small details could have changed both these problems, so I’m keeping my rating high, I love the spirit of this story and I’m glad Echo got her happy ending.