obsidian_blue's reviews
3046 reviews

Loved this! Full RTC.

Doing this as part of a buddy read, so going to wait for my fellow readers to catch up before I post a full review. 

That said, I really need to read more of Meredith Duran's historical romance books. I loved this one and the other one I read last year too.

Full review: Loved every minute of this book. Duran really writes great historical romances with a heavy emphasis on the historical part of things. She doesn't just have women or men of the time get random notions about things when society in England was set the way it was. I loved how this played a lot into the class system at the time as well as the lack of women's rights. The love scenes didn't hurt either. I absolutely loved both Simon and Nell. 

"A Lady's Lesson in Scandal" follows Nell Whitby who breaks into an Earl's home believing he may have assaulted her mother and left her pregnant with her. However, when Nell finds out that she's been stolen away by the woman she thought was her mother and is the rightful heir to a fortune, things for her turn on their head. The current Earl (Simon) proposes they marry. He has the title, but needs money, and she has plenty of it.

Most of the book follows as Nell gets her "lessons" in how to be a lady and falls for Simon and he starts to see a different side of society because of Nell.

Honestly, this was lovely. There's no big mystery going on. This isn't some bad undercover mystery that has been what I have been reading lately. It's just two people falling in love and driving each other up the wall. There is some side plot, but it's towards the end and it doesn't take away from the book at all. 

The book just goes on and on and on and it's just not very interesting. I was actually rooting for a murder or something to just liven things up. 

Full review: Honestly this was awful. I don't want to spend a lot of time on a full review except to say skip this. There were too many things going on and you end up not really caring for any of the characters at the end. Apparently anything can be forgiven if you just go family enough at the end.

I honestly liked most of this book, but at one point you hit a plot point that just had me going really and it just never really regained it's mojo to me. I gave this four stars because as I said, the one plot point had me going but why a few thousand times and I just tossed my hands up. Also, I really needed a better epilogue than what we got. Sorry, I know that I am one of those annoying readers that likes things wrapped up and spelled out, but I do. 

"Missing White Woman" follows Breanna. She's in New York City for the first time with her new boyfriend Ty. Breanna has a bad case of arrested dreams (not development, dreams) because of something from her youth that continues to cause her mother to harp all over her. She's feeling a bit stressed about Ty, and the fact he seems obsessive and stressed over work. Staying at their AirBnB has her stressed though, because a local woman, named Janelle Beckett (the missing white woman of the title) has gone missing and many in the AirBnB neighborhood knew her. Breanna feels like the neighbors are hostile (outside of one). And when she's about to leave, she goes downstairs and finds a dead body in the rented home and her boyfriend missing.

Things I loved, I absolutely loved us slowly finding out what happened to Breanna and why she's reluctant to trust anyone and why she does not want to give up on Ty. Also, it was great to see her establishing a....friendship I guess we can call it with someone she has not spoken to since college. Watching Breanna doing her own investigation into the neighbors, Ty, and even Janelle Beckett was great. Garrett tosses in a podcast host who was one of the first to sound the alarm on Janelle missing into the mix and plays with how social media makes every white woman out there to be a victim. I loved how this all came together.

The flow of the book really does work there until we get towards the 90 percent point of the book. I also thought the development of Breanna into someone that has to learn fast about social media and how to make it work in her benefit was great. 

That said, as I said earlier, towards the end, I hit a hard stop period, went back and went, um what a few times. It just took me a bit out of the story. And as I said above, the epilogue was a letdown. I really needed it told from Breanna's point of view.  

Child. No.

I can't believe how bad this was. And honestly there was a lot there that would have made for a gripping thriller/horror. Foley I swear needs to go back to basics. Please just write one character. One. Develop them. Do first person point of view. The many characters and the journal entries were just so bad. And the ending. I just went...that's clever and that's all I had. The very very ending I am talking about it. I wonder if she wrote that last line and worked backwards from there. 

"The Midnight Feast" starts with a fire. Someone or something started a fire at the newly opened uber rich hot-spot called "The Manor". There's a body that is bashed upon the rocks. Locals feel vindicated (we don't know why) but then the book jumps back to a few days before solstice and then we do a countdown to the day/night of the fire and the so-called "Midnight Feast" and we also get some way way flashbacks to a journal that a mystery guest has found and reads.

The characters we follow are:
THE FOUNDER (Franchesca) she's a long hot mess that you can see coming a mile away.
THE HUSBAND (Owen) who is exhausting in so many ways.
THE MYSTERY GUEST (Bella) a guest at The Manor who is drawn back to this place for mysterious reasons.
THE KITCHEN HELP (Eddie) a local who works in the kitchen and wants to keep it from his parents. 

Honestly, I don't want to waste my time with any of the above outside of saying that Foley does not know what to do with any of them really. Bella's mysterious reasons takes so long to unpack you just don't care in the end, and I had a real hard time with the gaping plot holes and the deus ex Machina we get in the end with that whole thing. Eddie is written way younger than he is. Owen and Franchesca at one point had me going, what in the world was even the purpose of this whole thing? Outside of coincidences or something I guess.

The setting of The Manor would have worked better if we actually got more into the lore around the woods surrounding the place. The journal entries didn't do it for me. And speaking of the journal, why would someone need to dig up a journal that would "reveal all" when it's something they already knew? I think the worst scene from me was when one person gave it to another person and was like just keep reading. How about you just tell them?! 

The ending as I said was a hard shrug. But the clever line reading and the tie back to some mysterious things and wording came into play. Honestly, maybe she should have just written this a as a short story, that may have worked better. 

Updated June 25, 2024: Great re-read. You can see my original review below. I was in the mood for some comfortish reads because I have a lot going on personally right now.

Updated review January 28, 2021: Just did a nice re-read of this one. Still really enjoyed this one and enjoyed it. Though as I said in another review I have noticed that most of Meaney's characters are kind of dealing with similar circumstances across books. We have May dealing with being cheated on which a lot of her characters deal with in her books. We have Marjorie who is similar to a lot of her older female characters that is dealing with an ungrateful child. It's not a bad thing, I just didn't see it until I did my re-reads.


Original review:

Wow. I can see why many are calling Roisin Meaney the new Maeve Binchy. I really enjoyed this one a lot.

We get to follow a cast of characters through one week taking place in the Kilpatrick, Ireland. Not everyone gets a happy ending, and some people still seem to be obtuse as hell at the end of the book, but I really enjoyed this one.

The main characters are:

May, dealing with heartbreak, moved to Kilpatrick and doing odd jobs to support herself and her father.

Pam, takes care of May's father while she is out at work and is dealing with some things with her husband Jack which are causing her to be worried about their future.

Bernard who is the local florist and scared that someone is out to get him and his live in lover are a couple who are dealing with someone who is focused on hurting them because they are gay.

Paddy who is in love with May though he's never formally met her.

Paul who is ready to throw away his life due to a fling.

Carmel who is obsessed with Paul.

Marjorie who doesn't know how to talk to her daughter anymore.

There are some other characters that we get to see in this one, but I don't want to spoil too much. I really did enjoy everyone (even the characters who were doing terrible things).

The writing was really good and I got a kick out of following these characters for a full week. I loved the ins and outs of everyone and how everything ends up being connected in the end around a single event.

The flow actually is good in this one even though we go back and forth between characters. Meaney does a good job with everyone's voices so no character sounds exactly like the other one. She also helpfully makes sure she calls out who is "speaking" when the passage switches between people. I didn't find that necessary though to include due to how different everyone sounds.

The setting of Kilpatrick felt small at times, but I think it was supposed to due to us following about 10 characters (here and there) throughout the book.

I loved how the ending we get leaves things up in the air, but we can guess what happens next. I would love to read about this group in a sequel someday. 

 Did Not Finish-40 percent

I really could not get into this. I know it's because of how Evaristo chose to write the book. It just felt like a lot of words were coming at me with no end in sight. I really only got up to 40 percent before I just gave up.

I get that each chapter was supposed to follow a different woman, but I just had no sense of who anyone was. Once again, the wall of text didn't help. And then we were thrown into another character. I just feel badly that I did not like this at all. I do love to read Black authors and support their work, but the writing style and lack of development just was not a winning read to me. 

orry no billionaire control freak romances for me in 2024 and beyond. The whole story icked me out.  I didn’t feel like it even leaned into the Christmas aspect of the book as much as the hero was a terrible guy, but genius so it waved away the red flags.

Full review: a woman, Jamie, returns home to spend Christmas with her father. He tells her to walk (during a snowstorm) to their neighbors to borrow a freaking pan. There she meets her best friend's brother, Marc, who she hasn't seen in a while. The long and tedious story follows Jamie first meeting Marc, and her realizing he had feelings for her. But because of her own reasons (good ones honestly) she doesn't trust it.

Look Marc is not a good character. Too much is told about how he was just mean and nasty to his sister, but never to Jamie til she rightfully sided with his sister once, and then he just had a rude nickname for her. Everything is pretty much excused cause he was a secret genius and now a billionaire. The whole story was weird and I hated it.

I liked that Hawkins tried a different direction on this, but ultimately the book dragged to the point I didn’t care what was happening to anyone. I guessed and was right, but ended up not really liking the characters we do get to see in this one. 

Full review:

"The Blue Hour" follows Julian Becker. Julian is an art curator who is focused on deceased artist, Vanessa Chapman. Julian's boss, former/or weirdly still friend, Sebastian Fairburn is determined that his foundation which was bequeathed all of Vanessa's art works, gets everything owed to it. Vanessa's former companion Grace, won't speak to the lawyers that Sebastian has hired, and now he's ready to play hard ball when a human bone is found to be part of one of the works that Vanessa created. Julian is ordered to go visit Grace on Eris, off the coast of Scotland. 

Long story short, there's not a lot of people to like in this one. I know like or dislike doesn't really matter if the book is good, but since the book dragged, it was a chore to keep going to find out what would happen to people I either disliked or was not invested.

First, Julian, I think Hawkins was smart to make him one of the anchors of the story. His obsession with Vanessa Chapman comes shining through, he's pretty similar in fact (somewhat) to Grace when it comes to that. 

Speaking of Grace and her story, it takes a long time to get going and I didn't think it fit with what we know of Vanessa. What I mean is that Hawkins sets up Vanessa as a person that does not form relationships, does not really need anything but her art, so the whole meet up with Grace and becoming bosom buddies did not work at all. It felt off. And then Hawkins ties herself into knots I think trying to over explain every little thing. 

The book jumps back and forth between Julian in the present, Grace in the present, and then her remembering the past, and the diary entries of Vanessa Chapman. 

The flow was up and down. Maybe because every time we got to Grace, it felt like the book came to a brutal stop and you were just forced to read about someone who reminded me of Hans Christian Anderson and his relationship/friendship with Charles Dickens. If you don't know about it, look it up, it's funny and messy and yeah, I was on Dickens side there. The other characters we hear about don't really get developed. We get to see Vanessa's estranged husband via Grace's point of view, and also Vanessa's writing, but he felt like a cartoon character to me. 

The setting of Eris should have worked, but it didn't, probably because it just felt like one big room after a while. I didn't get a Gothic setting at all from the book and or any vibes from Shirley Jackson's works at all.

The ending was pretty bad. I just didn't believe it and it leaves so many issues that I just went bah. I think Hawkins was going for too many "twists" but at least with this book, you could see them coming. I just didn't think that Hawkins did a great enough job of selling us on the friendship between Vanessa and Grace. And there's a whole spoiler I won't get into now, but once that was revealed I went, okay I definitely don't buy it now.

<b>Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.</b>

I am a glutton for punishment. I was curious if book #2 would be better than book #1 and I am sorry to say not even a little. This is filler. This was not necessary. I think Roberts could have done a duology and been done with it because nothing about this series is remotely exciting. I love romantic paranormal suspense when done the right way, but from the beginning this series had lackluster leads and a random woman popping up to murder brides. 

"The Mirror" is the second book in the Lost Bride Trilogy that follows Sonya as she travels back to the past to see a bride murdered. Recommend that readers read book #1, otherwise you are going to be lost. Sonya is not the only one who can go through the mirror, her cousin Owen can too and they go back in time to witness the wedding receptions which left the brides dead. 

Sonya's main goal is to just figure out how to rid her home of the ghost and avenge the brides who were murdered, but honestly most of the book is about super mundane stuff. I do think that the problem in this book and like in many of her others is that she's stopped developing characters in order to describe shit we don't care about. It's bleeding over into her JD Robb works too. I get she loves renovating and talking about colors, and whatever it is, but I do not freaking care. Just like book #1, there's zero chemistry at all between Sonya and her love interest, Trey. They suck. So does Chloe and Owen. 

I honestly at times thought about some of Roberts earlier works and it felt like this was an old old draft she polished off because it just does not work at all. I was over the men being protective. Sonya being stubborn, the jumping back and forth showing us Hester Dobs, and even more backstories on the murdered brides.