When I Cast Your Shadow - Sarah Porter

My rating: ⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Dashiell Bohnacker was hell on his family while he was alive. But it’s even worse now that he’s dead…

Ruby. Haunted by her dead brother, unable to let him go, Ruby must figure out whether his nightly appearances in her dreams are the answer to her prayers—or a nightmare come true…

Everett. He’s always been jealous of his dashing older brother. Now Everett must do everything he can to save his twin sister Ruby from Dashiell’s clutches.

Dashiell. Charming, handsome, and manipulative, Dash has run afoul of some very powerful forces in the Land of the Dead. His only bargaining chips are Ruby and Everett. At stake is the very survival of the Bohnacker family, bodies and souls…"

I was kind of on the fence about how to rate this because the genre isn't my favorite. I went back and forth for a bit because did I not like it because it simply wasn't my bag or did I not like it because it wasn't as good as other books? Ultimately, I have read other books in genres that I don't particularly love and enjoyed them, and more specifically I have read books of this genre that I didn't expect to enjoy and did...so I went with the two-star rating. This book had some promise, but I just couldn't get into it. 

My issues with the book. For starters, I am a huge baby when it comes to scary stuff, and this struck zero fear into my heart. It was obviously supposed to have some creep factor to it, but it did nothing for me, and I'm sorry but if it did nothing for me, the person who was terrified out of her mind by Signs, of all movies, then it wasn't scary. Second, the whole premise of what was going on was just so convoluted and weird that I couldn't get into it. Give me something to follow, man. Anything. Finally, there was way too much mention of how incredible and charming and wonderful Dashiell was and what podgy, lumpy, boring assholes Ruby and Ever were in comparison. Hard pass on reading a repeat of that every other chapter for an entire book. We get it. People thought Dashiell was hot and Ruby and Everett don't compare. Move on. 

I know I said finally, but just as a bonus--there was some really weird incestuous shit thrown in, which.......ew. Why? Not the best read ever. 

Foolish Hearts - Emma Mills

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"A contemporary novel about a girl whose high school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream leads her to new friends—and maybe even new love.

The day of the last party of the summer, Claudia overhears a conversation she wasn't supposed to. Now on the wrong side of one of the meanest girls in school, Claudia doesn't know what to expect when the two are paired up to write a paper—let alone when they're both forced to try out for the school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

But mandatory participation has its upsides—namely, an unexpected friendship, a boy band obsession, and a guy with the best dimpled smile Claudia's ever seen. As Claudia's world starts to expand, she finds that maybe there are some things worth sticking her neck out for."

Alright...I loved this book, but I am going to preface it by saying that it could be the white-girl version of The Way You Make Me Feel. It was a little bit weird because I read both of them at the same time, and there were legit times where I confused something from one book with something from the other. Don't get me wrong, they were both unique and wonderful in their own ways...but the basic plot was remarkably similar, and I thought it was an insane coincidence that I happened to start reading both of them on the same day.

That being said--adorable. It's hard to get into my thoughts on the book without spoiling stuff, but it was pretty much just sweet from start to finish. Watching old relationships evolve and new relationships grow, seeing friendships between people who had known each other for all or most of their lives...wonderful. The fact that Claudia plays an MMORP game with her best friend, older brother, older sister, and brother-in-law as a way for them to all "spend time" together even though they may not actually be together? LOVE. Claudia's humor was the perfect level of sarcastic, and Gideon Prewitt was so goofy and hilarious that there were moments in the book that had me literally laughing out loud. This book was easy to get lost in, I had a hard time putting it down.

The Way You Make Me Feel - Maurene Goo

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Clara Shin lives for pranks and disruption. When she takes one joke too far, her dad sentences her to a summer working on his food truck, the KoBra, alongside her uptight classmate Rose Carver. Not the carefree summer Clara had imagined. But maybe Rose isn’t so bad. Maybe the boy named Hamlet (yes, Hamlet) crushing on her is pretty cute. Maybe Clara actually feels invested in her dad’s business. What if taking this summer seriously means that Clara has to leave her old self behind?"

I read an advanced reader copy of The Way You Make Me Feel by Maurene Goo (chosen partially because of the beautiful cover!), and now I can't wait to read her other books. Her characters, especially Clara and her dad, are incredibly well-developed. I loved the Gilmore Girls comparison between Clara and her dad because it was so accurate and their relationship, even when they were upset with each other, was wonderful to read about. Goo's writing felt so real--the clashes between two high school girls, the awkwardness of a new crush, the struggle as you form new relationships and outgrow others...all fantastic. As an added bonus, the food descriptions made me wish the KoBra was a real foodtruck. Do not read while hungry. ;) 

Love and First Sight - Josh Sundquist

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐


From the cover:

"On his first day at a new school, blind sixteen-year-old Will Porter accidentally groped a girl on the stairs, sat on another student in the cafeteria, and somehow drove a classmate to tears. High school can only go up from here, right?

As Will starts to find his footing, he develops a crush on a sweet but shy girl named Cecily. And despite his fear that having a girlfriend will make him inherently dependent on someone sighted, the two of them grow closer and closer. Then an unprecedented opportunity arises: an experimental surgery that could give Will eyesight for the first time in his life. But learning to see is more difficult than Will ever imagined, and he soon discovers that the sighted world has been keeping secrets. It turns out Cecily doesn’t meet traditional definitions of beauty—in fact, everything he’d heard about her appearance was a lie engineered by their so-called friends to get the two of them together. Does it matter what Cecily looks like? No, not really. But then why does Will feel so betrayed?"

I stumbled across this book by Josh Sundquist when on the hunt for a new audiobook, and I was immediately intrigued. I've never read a book where the main character was blind before, and I was interested to read a story from the perspective of a person without sight living in a sighted world. I wanted to love it. I really did. 

I didn't.

There was nothing inherently wrong with the story...Will is nervous starting at a mainstream school after attending a school for the blind for most of his life. His first day, as demonstrated by the summary, gets off to a rocky start. Fortunately, that rocky start leads to his making friends--yay! These friendships develop throughout the story, and as they do, he develops a crush on one of them--awesome! Cecily is nice and intelligent but also shrouded in mystery because people bully her and his friends get super weird when he asks what she looks like. GULP! The drama...the intrigue! What's wrong with Cecily?! (Seriously though...I felt like the "what does Cecily look like?!" storyline vastly overshadowed the "holy shit, I have a chance to get a surgery that has only ever worked on like twenty people" storyline)

Ultimately, my biggest issues with this book were 1. that I found Will insanely unlikeable and 2. that the ending was incredibly sugary sweet. I'll also throw in the minor third issue that in family that is pretty clearly super rich (dad gets home from work early at the beginning of the book, so they just go out and buy a Tesla, for god's sake), Will's mom sold her car for money to fund a road trip. For real?! "My ATM limit wasn't that high." Go inside, fool...you could easily have gotten enough money to pay for gas and hotels without selling your damn car. Not my favorite book ever.

Nightingale - Kristin Hannah

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"In love we find out who we want to be.
In war we find out who we are.

FRANCE, 1939

In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France...but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When France is overrun, Vianne is forced to take an enemy into her house, and suddenly her every move is watched; her life and her child’s life is at constant risk. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates around her, she must make one terrible choice after another. 

Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets the compelling and mysterious Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can...completely. When he betrays her, Isabelle races headlong into danger and joins the Resistance, never looking back or giving a thought to the real--and deadly--consequences.

With courage, grace and powerful insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah takes her talented pen to the epic panorama of WWII and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the women’s war. The Nightingale tells the stories of two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France--a heartbreakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the durability of women. It is a novel for everyone, a novel for a lifetime."

Oh, Kristin Hannah, you know how to paint a word picture. I'm not going to go into great detail on the plot of this book...it's about World War II, I think we can all extrapolate the gist of the plot. All I'm going to say is that every second of the book was full of emotion and that if you're a fan of historical fiction or books that make you feel sometimes horrible and sometimes wonderful feelings, you should read it. Seriously. Read this book!

Now a Major Motion Picture - Cori McCarthy

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Unlike the rest of the world, Iris doesn't care about the famous high-fantasy Elementia books written by M. E. Thorne. So it's just a little annoying that M. E. Thorne is her grandmother—and that Iris has to deal with the trilogy's crazy fans.

When Iris gets dropped in Ireland for the movie adaptation, she sees her opportunity: if she can shut down production, the Elementia craze won't grow any bigger, and she can finally have a normal life. Not even the rascally-cute actor Eamon O'Brien can get in her way.

But the crew's passion is contagious, and as Iris begins to find herself in the very world she has avoided her whole life, she realizes that this movie might just be amazing…"

I received an advanced reader copy of Now a Major Motion Picture by Cori McCarthy and was intrigued by the description, although after reading it I feel like the summary kind of buries the lead and doesn't really prepare the reader for what to expect. Iris is forced to take her younger brother to Ireland for the filming of Elementia's first movie after his therapist thinks it's a good idea and her father doesn't want to take him. More than just finding it "a little annoying," Iris is angry and openly hostile toward anything to do with the fantasy world...so how will she react when she finds herself surrounded by a cast and crew that, for the most part, is composed of devout "Thornians," as Elementia fans refer to themselves? As it turns out, not well...but the closer she gets to the cast and the film's director, the more she finds her attitude shifting. Unfortunately, filming is fraught with issues and the movie does not seem to have the support of the film studio backing it. Will Iris have a change of heart in time to appreciate her time in Ireland? Or will the studio cancel filming before she has a chance to realize how precious it is?

Things I loved about the book:

-Iris and Eamon were great characters. Eamon was intriguing from the start, and even when Iris was at her most pessimistic and unlikable I still found myself understanding where she was coming from and sympathizing with her.

-Cate and her strong-woman agenda. I will admit that it got a little over-the-top at times, but overall, I'll give a resounding "hell yeah" to a strong, confident woman who commits herself to teaching another young woman the importance of being strong, speaking up, and lifting other women up.

-The relationship between Iris and her brother and the way that it evolved as the story went on. I loved seeing him get more independent and watching them gain a new appreciation for each other after everything they had been through together.

Things I was a little more meh about:

-The fantasy element. In a world where mind-blowing fantasy worlds exist, it always seems risky to me when a book creates a bestselling fantasy series compared to the works of real-life fantasy bestsellers. The Elementia descriptions included in the book didn't necessarily detract from the story for me, but they also didn't add much to it. The book/movie could have been about anything and provided the same element to the story. 

-The ending, man. I'm not going to give anything away, but things wrapped up a little too neatly for me, especially after the overblown ups and downs throughout the book. Speaking of...

-The overblown ups and downs throughout the book. I like a book with some drama. Ask anyone in my book club, and they'll tell you I love a story that makes me emotional. But holy hell, the wild swings from "everything is perfect" to "the world is falling apart" from page to page practically gave me whiplash. Toning it down a notch would have gone a long way to making the characters' experiences more relatable.

Overall, I think this is an ok read. There were things I didn't particularly love about it, but for the most part I enjoyed it. It gets into emotional stuff without getting too heavy, makes you love the characters, and is perfect if you're looking for a light, quick read.

Spellbook of the Lost and Found - Moira Fowley-Doyle

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the front cover:

"One stormy Irish summer night, Olive and her best friend, Rose, begin to lose things. It starts with simple items like hairclips and jewelry, but soon it's clear that Rose has lost something much bigger, something she won't talk about, and Olive thinks her best friend is slipping away.

Then seductive diary pages written by a girl named Laurel begin to appear all over town. And Olive meets three mysterious strangers: Ivy, Hazel, and her twin brother, Rowan, secretly squatting in an abandoned housing estate. The trio are wild and alluring, but they seem lost too—and like Rose, they're holding tight to painful secrets.

When they discover the spellbook, it changes everything. Damp, tattered and ancient, it's full of hand-inked charms to conjure back things that have been lost. And it just might be their chance to find what they each need to set everything back to rights.

Unless it's leading them toward things that were never meant to be found..."

When I discovered that Moira Fowley-Doyle had another book, I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. I loved The Accident Season, so I had high hopes for this book. Spellbook of the Lost and Found definitely lived up to my expectations. The book focuses on three groups of friends--Olive and Rose, Laurel, Ash, and Holly, and Hazel, Rowan, and Ivy--in the aftermath of their town bonfire as everyone discovers their things are going missing. As diary pages start popping up all over town and the lives of these three groups begin to intertwine, the reader discovers that something darker than missing trinkets might be going on... This world had the same spooky, other-worldly feel to it as The Accident Season, the characters were just as nuanced and captivating, and the story constantly had me wanting more.