gracescanlon's reviews
730 reviews

The Land of Lost Things by John Connolly

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

4.25


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Gilded Mountain: A Novel by Kate Manning

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emotional inspiring sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0


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Practice Makes Perfect by Sarah Adams

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emotional funny hopeful lighthearted medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

An utterly adorable, slightly steamy (closed-door) romance!

I didn't read the precursor to this novel, When in Rome, but Practice Makes Perfect stands perfectly well on its own.

I can't believe that first guy, Mr. Khakis-and-no-effort-or-personality, had the gall to call Annie boring! Any time the story was told from her POV, I found myself laughing out loud at least twice. She's a total hoot! I could completely understood the ideas her family and the town at large had about her and the boxes they put her in could chafe over a lifetime of living in Rome. Annie was hilarious, interesting, smart, original, and caring, an excellent female MC.

Will was a sensitive and sexy, but not flawless, male MC. His imperfections made me love him, because he felt real. I loved how he sees Annie - really sees her - and how amazing she is, from page one. He doesn't want her to change, and he's right that she neither should nor needs to change.

The sibling relationships were all lovely. I thought the opposite reactions Will and his brother had after their upbringing was both an interesting contrast and quite believable. Their opening up to one another was a heartwarming moment. The love between Annie and her sisters, especially with their wholehearted addition of Amelia Rose to their ranks, was a delight. I love seeing women support and love and have fun with one another!

Man oh man, I didn't know that a closed-door romance would be so...steamy. I don't know how Adams flustered me so fully without any explicit scenes, but she did, and I'm impressed!

Steamy without being explicit, but also funny and adorable, I'd definitely recommend Practice Makes Perfect!

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Write for Your Life by Anna Quindlen

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funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.5

Need Me by Tessa Bailey

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emotional hopeful lighthearted fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Pacing was uneven and overall too quick, but my biggest gripe was the lack of tension length, caused in great part by the brevity of the book. The romance scenes would’ve packed a much stronger punch if the tension had been stretched out — you’ve got to build desire for there to be a payoff! Also, I’m not a fan of this representation of insta-love. 

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The Cloisters by Katy Hays

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dark mysterious tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

This just didn’t hit for me. 

Strike one: The story was odd, as was the main character. Also, the narrative voice continually switched from conversational to more lofty prose, often from one sentence to the next and back again. Many of the more conversational ones were actually dependent clauses, which brought the immediate shift in tone from literary fiction-esque sentences to non-sentences into even sharper contrast. 

Strike two: The book touched on issues around those who grew up with money and those who didn’t, but didn’t delve deeply into them. This was fine, actually, as the MC idolized the old-money characters for most of it. However, her shift in opinion of those types of characters neglected to address topics like entitlement and never knowing financial struggle or hardship. She did, however, shift her thinking on theft from such people. So to see one side of her opinion about the “haves and have-nots” change, but not the other (at least not on the page), rang insincere. 

Strike three: The entire book was so predictable that when it met the tired tropes and twists without deviation, I was truly in disbelief — disbelief that anyone could be that unoriginal. 

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The London Séance Society by Sarah Penner

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challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5


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The Madwoman Upstairs by Catherine Lowell

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adventurous challenging emotional mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0


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Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

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emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

Fantastical, profound, funny, whimsical - I want very much to be friends with Jenny Slate, even more so now than I had before reading Little Weirds.
The Wonder State by Sara Flannery Murphy

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Another new favorite! I’ve added so many to that list this year, and it’s been such a delight.

The Wonder State combines my favorite story elements within its pages: the Southern Gothic, friendships, magical realism, and a quest. It’s an utterly captivating and enchanting story about a group of six unlikely friends on a quest for local magical locations during their senior year of high school. It also follows the continuation of that unfinished quest 15 years after high school graduation, after one of them goes missing. 

In The Wonder State, Murphy touches on many important themes, including classism, poverty, addiction, and abuse, among others. Her characters, their prejudices, insecurities, and struggles, are all believable, especially in their teenage minds. She has a talent for capturing the moral complexity of the human person - no one is wholly good or wholly bad. Murphy shows through her characters that people make mistakes (it’s inevitable); it’s what they do after making that mistake that determines if they are more of a good person or bad person. 

I found putting this book down difficult, even if moments before picking it up I was ready to turn out my lamp and sleep for the night. I always seemed to read the whole of at least two or three chapters every time I began to read it. 

The ending, though I can see how some might find it disappointing, was perfection - to me.  It was, after all, the falling action. I loved how quiet the ending was, how peaceful and hopeful - a perfect contrast and conclusion to a high-tension story. 

I have only one more word: Brava!!!!!

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