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"Falling for Summer" is a contemporary romance novella in which Amanda, who has blamed herself for 20 years for her kid sister Tiffany's tragic drowning in the lake where they grew up, returns to the lake to come to terms with her guilt. There she meets the sexy Summer, a swimmer who rents out cottages by the lake, who turns out to be Tiffany's best friend.
I like trauma and healing narratives, and with one exception there wasn't really anything wrong with this novella, but though reasonably well-written, with some very appealing descriptions of Summer's wet hair and swimmer's muscles, it left me with an overall meh feeling. I think I wanted it to either be more iddy or less by-the-numbers. I also really disliked the ending.
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On a different topic, if you recall my entry for last week, I am now partway into Jae's FF shifter novel Second Nature, in which Griffin, a liger soldier/assassin dedicated to making sure the human world never finds out about shifters is assigned to investigate a paranormal romance novelist, Jorie, whose in-progress FF shifter novel bears suspicious resemblance to the truth about actual shifters, and really enjoying it. It's more like 80s urban fantasy than current paranormal romance - the romance is the main story, but it's slow burn, there's tons of intricate worldbuilding, and a lot of non-romance relationships.
At the part I'm at now, Griffin (posing as a big cat biologist helping Jorie with her research) has been inveigled into being the buffer between Jorie and her visiting mom, they accidentally got along so well that Griffin and Jorie's mom had a solo lunch the next day so they could pump each other for info on the secretive Jorie, only Jorie's mom is allergic to cats and also to Griffin, so Griffin is sneaking antihistamines into her food while she's in the bathroom so she won't suspect. The book is overall much more serious than comic, but there are some scenes like that which are comedy gold.
I like trauma and healing narratives, and with one exception there wasn't really anything wrong with this novella, but though reasonably well-written, with some very appealing descriptions of Summer's wet hair and swimmer's muscles, it left me with an overall meh feeling. I think I wanted it to either be more iddy or less by-the-numbers. I also really disliked the ending.
( Read more... )
On a different topic, if you recall my entry for last week, I am now partway into Jae's FF shifter novel Second Nature, in which Griffin, a liger soldier/assassin dedicated to making sure the human world never finds out about shifters is assigned to investigate a paranormal romance novelist, Jorie, whose in-progress FF shifter novel bears suspicious resemblance to the truth about actual shifters, and really enjoying it. It's more like 80s urban fantasy than current paranormal romance - the romance is the main story, but it's slow burn, there's tons of intricate worldbuilding, and a lot of non-romance relationships.
At the part I'm at now, Griffin (posing as a big cat biologist helping Jorie with her research) has been inveigled into being the buffer between Jorie and her visiting mom, they accidentally got along so well that Griffin and Jorie's mom had a solo lunch the next day so they could pump each other for info on the secretive Jorie, only Jorie's mom is allergic to cats and also to Griffin, so Griffin is sneaking antihistamines into her food while she's in the bathroom so she won't suspect. The book is overall much more serious than comic, but there are some scenes like that which are comedy gold.