Review of Dangerous Alliance, by Jennieke Cohen

Dangerous Alliance

An Austentacious Romance

by Jennieke Cohen

HarperTeen, 2019. 429 pages.
Review written September 25, 2020, from a library book
Starred Review
2020 Sonderbooks Stand-out:
#8 General Teen Fiction

Here’s another fun variant on Jane Austen! This one is a romance for teens set in England during the time that Jane Austen had published the first four of her books, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Emma.

Our heroine, Lady Vicky Aston, has read and loved Jane Austen’s novels and relates her own life to the events in those books. But there’s a dark side in Vicky’s life that we don’t really see in Jane Austen. Vicky’s sister Althea has fled from her husband, Lord Dain, because he is horribly abusive. The same day that she comes back to the family home, Vicky is attacked in the countryside and fortunately rescued by Lord Halworth, a young man she grew up with but who lived for years on the continent and didn’t answer her letters.

Vicky’s father is determined to get Vicky a divorce, but it’s going to be difficult. At the same time, they need to get Parliament to make Vicky his heir instead of Althea, because if Althea is the heir, the estate would be under Lord Dain’s control. However, Vicky can’t be the heir unless she gets married. So her parents give Vicky a mission: to find a husband during her season in London.

Meanwhile, there are some more attacks. There are misunderstandings. There are accidents that don’t seem like accidents. There are odious suitors and a couple of very nice suitors. But who can Vicky trust? And who is behind those attacks?

It’s all in good fun – while at the same time showing us glimpses of the dark side of the Georgian era and how little agency women actually had.

Another delightful excursion for Jane Austen fans.

jenniekecohen.com
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Review of Kiss Carlo, by Adriana Trigiani

Kiss Carlo

by Adriana Trigiani
read by Edoardo Ballerini

HarperAudio, 2018. 16 hours, 2 minutes.
Review written June 3, 2020, from a library eaudiobook

I listened to Kiss Carlo as a Skip-the-Line loan for an eaudiobook during the Covid-19 pandemic, when I’m listening to audiobooks on my phone (instead of CDs in the car) for the first time in my life. So I didn’t have to wait for an available copy, but I had to finish in 14 days, and my status as a library employee wouldn’t help me fudge that. This meant a little extra time doing puzzles!

The book is a historical novel about a big Italian family in South Philadelphia shortly after World War II. Nicky Castone has been engaged to his girl Peachy for seven years. She even waited for him during the war. He drives a cab for his family’s taxicab company, which is in a feud with another branch of the family and their taxicab company. Nicky is an orphan, but his aunt and uncle love him as their own. He’s also looked after by Hortense Mooney, the black dispatcher at the cab company. She tells Nicky that Peachy isn’t right for him.

Another plot thread deals with Calla Berelli, who is taking over her father’s theater, which runs Shakespeare plays year round. The theater is struggling, and the rise of television isn’t helping. Nicky’s been doing odd jobs at the theater for a long time, wherever he’s needed, and one night – which happens to be the night he finally told Peachy he was working at the theater – an emergency calls an actor away, and Nicky, who’d been prompting and knew all the lines, had to take the part.

In that moment, Nicky begins to realize that acting makes him feel alive. His fiancée is not at all pleased, which eventually tips Nicky off that maybe they aren’t right for each other after all.

But the path Nicky travels takes many twists and turns from there, including impersonating Carlo, an ambassador from Italy scheduled to be an officiating dignitary at a jubilee celebration in a small town in Pennsylvania. Nicky does it to escape Peachy’s angry father, and Hortense accompanies him as an American government official to lend him credence.

Okay, after that paragraph – let me give up trying to explain the plot. But it’s all in good fun. Some of the turns the plot takes are maybe a little unlikely, but the story is enjoyable. The big strength is in portraying the close-knit Italian-American community and the various characters along the way.

The narrator did a great job voicing the characters, expressing their characters with enough consistency that I could tell who was speaking by the voice used, and with a nice use of accents.

This was a light-hearted listen that still pulled you into the world of the book.

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Review of Frankly in Love, by David Yoon

Frankly in Love

by David Yoon
read by Raymond J. Lee

Listening Library, 2019. 10 hours on 8 compact discs
Review written December 30, 2019, from a library audiobook
2020 Asian/Pacific American Award for Young Adult Literature Honor
2020 William C. Morris Award Finalist

2020 Capitol Choices Selection

Frank Li is a senior in high school whose parents came to America from Korea before he was born. His parents want him to marry a nice Korean girl, and they have someone in mind. They’ve stopped talking to Frank’s older sister because she married an African American man. Frank’s best friend Q is African American, and they don’t mind that, but they want their children to marry someone Korean.

This audiobook explores the expectations and assumptions Frank and his friends have to endure. I like the way Frank, who’s telling the story, describes white folks as “European Americans” – because that seems only fair.

Frank has grown up going to “Gatherings” – where his parents and other friends who came to America from Korea get together with their families. The kids call themselves the “Limbos” – because they’re not quite seen as American and not quite seen as Korean.

When Frank falls in love with a European American girl, he works out a fake dating arrangement with Joy Song, one of the Limbos who his parents are pushing him to spend time with. Joy has had a Chinese American boyfriend for years, but hasn’t told her parents. If she and Frank pretend to go on dates with each other, they have a cover for spending time with their own beloved.

The scheme seems simple, but neither one can quite bring themselves to tell their real date. And things rapidly get more complex.

This is a fun story with lots of poignant moments. This book makes you think about relationships, and not only romantic ones, but also relationships with friends and family.

DavidYoon.com
ListeningLibrary.com

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Review of How to Find Love in a Bookshop, by Veronica Henry

How to Find Love in a Bookshop

by Veronica Henry

Pamela Dorman Books (Viking), 2017. First published in Great Britain in 2016. 340 pages.
Review written April 6, 2019, from a library book

I picked up this book because I was looking for something light and fluffy after reading the first two books of The Broken Earth trilogy, by N. K. Jemisin, where all life on earth is probably coming to an end. This book filled the bill nicely. It’s not just the main character who finds love in a bookshop, but several other couples as well.

And there is some richness to the story, despite it being essentially about everyone getting nicely paired off. Emilia’s father purchased Nightingale Books in a small town near Oxford when he was a widowed young father with a small baby on his hands. Now he is dying, and Emilia has come back to the place she grew up to carry on the bookshop in his place.

We learn how much her father and his shop meant to the people of the town – and all the romance that has happened and is happening in and around the bookshop.

My one quibble is that a few of the happy couples are in relationships with someone else at the beginning of the book, and I’m less enthusiastic about falling in love with someone who’s supposedly committed to someone else. In fact, we get the story of an affair that played out over years and we’re told it ended happily, with no one getting hurt. As someone who’s been cheated on, I always feel like authors are cheating the reader when they write about an affair where nobody gets hurt. Let’s just say I’m super skeptical.

But it was all nice for these characters, and the author even got me feeling sympathetic toward the couple in question. Read this if you want a story of book lovers finding each other and a lot of ultimately happy love stories. As for me, it sustained me to tackle the third book in the science fiction trilogy about the earth being torn apart.

veronicahenry.co.uk
penguin.com

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Review of The Upside of Unrequited, by Becky Albertalli

The Upside of Unrequited

by Becky Albertalli

Balzer + Bray (HarperCollins), 2017. 340 pages.

This is a nice solid contemporary teen romance – or teen not-romance. I related to Molly, the protagonist, because I was all about unrequited crushes when I was 17.

Okay, maybe I didn’t have as many as Molly, who’s had crushes on 26 different guys. But I know the feeling of watching seemingly everyone else pair up, and wondering if it will ever be your turn.

The book starts out when Molly meets Mina, of all places, in the restroom at a club. Mina is exactly the type of girl who Molly’s twin sister Cassie falls for.

Sure enough, Cassie and Mina hit it off. But though Cassie has plenty of experience, she’s never had an actual girlfriend before. When it happens, Molly starts feeling left out.

And Cassie decides she’s going to get Molly a boyfriend. And she’s chosen Mina’s good friend Will, who is admittedly hot. But meanwhile, there’s this sweet geeky guy working at Molly’s new summer job. Cassie points out that while Molly has never been kissed, she’s also never been rejected. Maybe she needs to put herself out there? Cassie will make sure it happens!

This is all set during the summer of 2015, when the Supreme Court made same-sex marriage legal – and so Molly’s and Cassie’s two moms decide to get married. The family has a wedding to plan!

Like I said, I related to the plight of unrequited love. You don’t see it often enough in young adult books! Though my heart went out to Molly – because all of her friends were talking about sex – who had it and what it’s like, guys and girls both – just emphasizing that she seems to be the only one with no opportunity. It felt realistic for a modern teen – but I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with that. So Dear Reader, be warned – this is a sweet teen romance, but there is a lot of talk about sex.

But this is indeed a sweet story. I loved the characters. I loved the joy of the girls’ moms when they could get married. (Living in Maryland, they drove past the White House to see it lit up with rainbow lights.) The twins had some other close friendships and I enjoyed the way those were portrayed, besides the pressure when everybody seems to have their own idea of who Molly should fall for.

And I do like the look at this question – Can anyone possibly fall for a girl whose own grandma calls her fat? Aren’t unrequited crushes much simpler?

beckyalbertalli.com
epicreads.com

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Review of The Simplicity of Cider, by Amy E. Reichert

The Simplicity of Cider

by Amy E. Reichert

Gallery Books, 2017. 309 pages.
Starred Review

Here’s a nice romance for adults, with interesting story, setting, and characters to go along with the romance.

Sanna Lund has inherited a gift for making cider – she sees the juices of their family’s different apple varieties in different colors. She can mix them by color and know how the finished product will taste. They’ve owned the orchard for generations, but now it’s down to her and her father. They’re going to try to sell Sanna’s cider in larger batches.

But they hit financial snags – and then Sanna’s father gets injured. They have to hire help even in the off-season, but that still may not be enough to pay bills.

The help they hire is Isaac and his 10-year-old son Sebastian (Bass). Isaac is trying to give Bass one last summer to be a kid before he tells him the bad news about Bass’s mother. Sanna gets off to a prickly start with Bass, but Isaac may be exactly what their orchard needs. Meanwhile, Sanna’s brother is urging them to sell to a developer and someone’s harming the heirloom trees that Sanna loves.

Now, the evil developer plot line sometimes veered toward melodrama, but mostly things stayed interesting and realistic. I liked that Sanna is 6 feet 3 inches and as distinctive as that implies. I had to mentally adjust to her point of view in several scenes! All the characters are richly drawn.

The author blurb says she “likes to write stories that end well with characters you’d invite to dinner.” That sums up her books rather well – except that I would be sure her characters were the ones cooking the dinner! This is a thoroughly enjoyable story, and I feel like I have indeed had dinner in the friendly company of these characters.

SimonandSchuster.com
amyereichert.com

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Review of When Dimple Met Rishi, by Sandhya Menon

When Dimple Met Rishi

by Sandhya Menon

Simon Pulse, 2017. 380 pages.

When Dimple Met Rishi is an adorable teen romance. Dimple Shah has a passion for coding and web development. She has gotten accepted to Stanford and is super excited about attending – even though she’s sure about her parents that “the only reason they had agreed was because they were secretly hoping she’d meet the I.I.H. [Ideal Indian Husband] of her – no their — dreams at the prestigious school.”

For the summer, Dimple wants nothing more than to go to Insomnia Con, where participants “come up with a concept for the most groundbreaking app they could conceive during their month and a half at the SFSU campus.” It costs a thousand dollars, so she’s a little suspicious when her parents readily agree.

Meanwhile, Rishi Patel is looking at a picture of Dimple, a girl his parents have picked out for him to get to know. She is the daughter of their long-time friends who are from the same part of Mumbai as they are. And to get to know her, he can attend a summer program in San Francisco….

Rishi is very traditional and appreciates his parent’s loving concern for him. Naturally, he assumes Dimple’s parents have filled her in, too, and that she’s amenable to these plans.

So when Rishi sees Dimple at Starbucks as soon as he gets on campus, he tries to joke about their meeting:

“Hello, future wife,” he said, his voice bubbling with glee. “I can’t wait to get started on the rest of our lives!”

Dimple stared at him for the longest minute. The only word her brain was capable of producing, in various tonal permutations, was: What? What?

Dimple didn’t know what to think. Serial killer? Loony bin escapee? Strangely congenial mugger? Nothing made sense. So she did the only thing she could think to do in the moment – she flung her iced coffee at him and ran the other way.

Well, despite that inauspicious beginning, what follows is a sweet romance. I would have liked Dimple to resist a little longer, but the way things unfold is quite plausible and a lot of fun.

Now, I do have some skepticism regarding Insomnia Con. But I haven’t done any research – perhaps there does exist a web development program like that where a lot rides on a talent show (really?) in the middle of the program. Perhaps working in pairs never runs into trouble of two people both passionate about their app idea. Some of the subplots worked out a little too neatly as well.

Now, in case my readers need a warning, yes, they have sex – that’s pretty standard in teen romance any more, even when both participants are from families where they know their parents don’t want that for them. The book doesn’t dwell on it – or on any consequences of how it affects their relationship. (They give lip service to thinking about it before they do. And they think about it maybe a day.)

But make no mistake about it – I thoroughly enjoyed this book – enough that it kept me reading all through the night.

This is a sweet story about a girl with a passion and what happens when she finds herself falling in love, against all her plans. Combined with a story about a boy whose well-laid plans get shaken up when confronted with an actual person. Very fun.

sandhyamenon.com
simonandschuster.com/teen

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Review of Duels & Deception, by Cindy Anstey

Duels and Deception

by Cindy Astey

Swoon Reads (Feiwel and Friends), April 2017. 345 pages.
Starred Review

Oh, these Cindy Astey Regency romances are so much fun! In this one, we meet Lydia Whitfield, a friend of our heroine from Love, Lies and Spies, but you don’t have to read the first book to enjoy this one.

Lydia thinks of herself as not romantic at all. Before he died, her papa picked out the man she should marry, Lord Aldershot, so their estates could be joined. Lydia wants to draw up a contract about the arrangements between them – and gets kidnapped! Her carriage is diverted, while the handsome young law clerk is in it. He is shortly thrown out, but after Lydia is imprisoned in an abandoned barn, Mr. Newton comes to rescue her.

Together they seek to investigate who was behind the nefarious plot. But whoever it was wants to destroy Lydia’s reputation with knowledge that she was out all night in the company of a young man. Unless she will give in to blackmail.

Meanwhile, Lydia’s drunken uncle is guardian of her estate together with a lawyer who’s showing signs of senility. And Mr. Newton’s friend got himself embroiled in a duel.

Lydia’s a delightful heroine and it’s lovely to watch her figure out she might think romance is a good thing, after all.

Here’s how the book begins. You get a nice taste of Lydia’s character. It also leads up to the carriage accident, caused by her uncle, which is where she first meets Mr. Newton.

Had Miss Lydia Whitfield of Roseberry Hall been of a skittish nature, the sound of a rapidly approaching carriage would have caused considerable anxiety. As it was, the driver behind her did nothing to stay her steps. Besides, she recognized the bells on Esme’s harness and Turnip’s nicker of protest – poor creature hated to canter. The vehicle could be none other than the family landau.

However, as the nickering changed from protest to panic, Lydia was certain the carriage was now descending the steep hill too quickly. The road from Spelding was rocky and rutted, especially in the spring, and it made for a rough ride. Most drivers took it at a walk.

But not this driver.

This book was simply tremendous fun. If you like Jane Austen at all, this is more fast-paced, but still gives you a lovely taste of that world, with remarkable characters you’ll enjoy spending time with.

swoonreads.com

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Review of Love, Lies and Spies, by Cindy Anstey

love_lies_and_spies_largeLove, Lies and Spies

by Cindy Anstey

Swoon Reads (Feiwel and Friends), New York, 2016. 344 pages.
Starred Review

This book had me from the first paragraph, which is:

“Oh my, this is embarrassing,” Miss Juliana Telford said aloud. There was no reason to keep her thoughts to herself, as she was alone, completely alone. In fact, that was half of the problem. The other half was, of course, that she was hanging off the side of a cliff with the inability to climb either up or down and in dire need of rescue.

A page later, Juliana does hear someone approaching.

Please, she prayed, let it be a farmer or a tradesman, someone not of the gentry. No one who would feel obligated to report back to Grays Hill Park. No gentlemen, please.

“Hello?” she called out. Juliana craned her neck upward, trying to see beyond the roots and accumulated thatch at the cliff’s edge.

A head appeared. A rather handsome head. He had dark, almost black, hair and clear blue eyes and, if one were to notice such things at a time like this, a friendly, lopsided smile.

“Need some assistance?” the head asked with a hint of sarcasm and the tone of a . . .

“Are you a gentleman?” Juliana inquired politely.

The head looked startled, frowned slightly, and then raised an eyebrow before answering. “Yes, indeed I am –”

“Please, I do not wish to be rescued by a gentleman. Could you find a farmer or a shopkeep – anyone not of the gentry – and then do me the great favor of forgetting you saw me?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I do not want to be rude, but this is a most embarrassing predicament –”

“I would probably use the word dangerous instead.”

“Yes, well, you would, being a man. But I, on the other hand, being a young woman doing her best not to call attention to herself and bring shame upon her family, would call it otherwise.”

Well, it soon becomes apparent (as the roots give way) that Juliana must settle for the help of this gentleman and his friend. However, it so happens that the gentlemen also don’t want their presence on the cliff generally known, so all parties agree to pretend to be unacquainted, should they encounter one another again.

You will not be surprised that they do encounter one another again.

Juliana is an 18-year-old young lady getting ready for her first Season in London with her cousin. But Juliana is determined that she is not looking for a husband. No, her time in London is a cover for an opportunity to find a publisher for the research she and her father have done on lady beetles. Juliana has no intention of getting married and forsaking her father to do his research without her.

Meanwhile, someone is passing messages to Napoleon, and the handsome gentleman of the cliffside is on their trail. That trail increasingly brings him in proximity with Juliana, since the noble family she’s staying with has some not very noble members.

This book is tremendous fun from start to finish. Juliana is capable, independent, and intelligent – yet somehow manages to get into multiple situations where she needs to be rescued. Those situations ended up being so delightful, I couldn’t hold them against her.

This is a Regency romance with a little spying thrown in. The clause on the cover puts it well: “In which plans for a season without romance are unapologetically foiled.”

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Review of Winter, by Marissa Meyer

winter_largeWinter

The Lunar Chronicles, Book Four

by Marissa Meyer

Feiwel and Friends, 2015. 827 pages.

Ah! The Lunar Chronicles come to a satisfying end in this book. If you have read this far, I don’t have to say anything to get you to read the final volume, so let me make some comments about the series in general.

What I loved most was the fairy tale parallels. Cinder paralleled “Cinderella,” Scarlet paralleled “Little Red Riding Hood,” Cress paralleled “Rapunzel,” and this final book, Winter, parallels “Snow White.” However, all the characters from each of the previous books are still in the story – and by the final book, elements from Snow White’s story seemed forced. (Whereas in Cinder they arrived in natural and clever ways.) In particular, the part about the poisoned apple seemed totally unnecessary in the overall scheme, and I didn’t really believe that a disease would progress the way this one was portrayed.

But I do like the character of Winter, and even her status as Queen Levana’s stepdaughter worked well. I do like that each of the main characters is very different from the others.

I still didn’t really believe in the wolf-human hybrids, which has been a problem for me since Scarlet. I didn’t particularly like the additional information we got about that in this book – didn’t make it easier to believe.

At first when I opened this book, I thought, okay, we’ve got four couples. Two have matched up with the one they love but have some obstacles between them. Two are in love but haven’t admitted it to each other yet. And I knew all four would get together by the end of the book, and I thought that was a bit much. But I have to hand it to Marissa Meyers – she kept each romance distinct and interesting. All four plotlines are definitely not simple!

In fact, if anything the plot was a bit too convoluted with all those characters to juggle. But that did keep things from being at all boring or predictable and kept you turning pages. She is one of those authors who gives you a lot of interior monologue – which means it takes a little longer for actions to happen. This book is more than 800 pages long, since that’s what it took to tie everything together. In some spots, we were following three different sets of characters in different places, so that slowed things down, too.

However, all that said – in this book pulling all the threads together, Marissa Meyer accomplishes a well-earned Happily Ever After. Though I was able to put down the book and go to sleep, I was never even slightly tempted to set it aside altogether, and I began reading the same day my hold arrived. We’ve got life and death situations and the fate of earth at stake. We’ve got an intrepid band of rebels who go deep into the tyrant’s territory. Can they win the day?

marissameyer.com
thelunarchronicles.com
macteenbooks.com

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