Category: TSM Book Club

TSM Book Club selections/reviews

TSM Book Club Book #28: Practice Makes Perfect by Sarah Adams

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Started: July 7th
Finished: July 11th
TSM Rating: 5/5

This was such a lovely follow-up to When in Rome. Sweet Annie and Broody Will have such endearing chemistry right from the start that it was hard to put this book down.

Basic backgrounds, Annie is the youngest sister of Noah Walker, our hero from When In Rome, and Will Amelia’s favorite bodyguard. Thus when our story starts, they meet again on what happens to be a mortifying moment for our heroine. Her date is in the process of ditching her when Will walks in with a date of his own.

From the beginning, it is clear to everyone — except Annie and Will, of course — that they are in love with each other. So much so that the town starts a petition to end the non-existent relationship, which forces them into a fake relationship. And feelings bloom.

Annie is on a journey to come out of her shell and be seen by her family and everyone else in town as a one-dimensional, happy-go-lucky girl. Will just wants to do his job — protect Amelia in the month leading up to her and Noah’s wedding — and get out of this very close-knit, incredibly nosy town.

I love the way these two fall in love. Knowing Will allows Annie to find the confidence to stand up for herself. Sometimes it only takes one person really seeing you to help you see yourself.

I was looking for the perfect person with the perfect traits and the perfect timing, when really all my heart actually wants is to be filly known and loved. Someone to share the quiet moments with — someone to turn to when everything is good or everything is bad. Someone who wouldn’t be mad if I snuck in to see him before the wedding and ruined traditions — but who’d be just as eager to be with me as I’d be with him. Someone like…Will

Annie, Practice Makes Perfect, pg. 317

Coming into this, Will was the anti-relationship guy…until he met a girl who helped him see that not all relationships have to be as volatile as his parents.

Last night as I listened to Annie talk about the kind of future she wanted, I felt that relentless tug in my chest again. Not because I want the harvest-parties and soccer-games life she mentioned, but because I want the ability to dream a life with someone like Annie where my immediate thought isn’t: But how is it going to fail?

Will, Practice Makes Perfect, pg. 107

This book is as much about facing the past as looking toward the future. Both Annie and Will have to overcome traumatic childhoods to become who they need to be for each other. I loved this one more than When in Rome. There was so much more charm with Will and Annie. So much more sweetness. Definitely a must-read!

TSM Book Club Book #27: Will They Or Won’t They by Ava Wilder

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Started: July 1st
Finished: July 6th
TSM Rating: 5/5

This was one of my most anticipated books of the year and I wasn’t disappointed.

I’m going to be honest, I loved Shane instantly, but it took awhile for Lilah to grow on me. She was such a frustrating character to root for. And this is coming from someone who can get lost in her own mind and feelings from time to time.

These two had such an epic meet cute at the beginning. Eyes meeting across a room, instant “this-one-is-going-to-be-different” attraction.

She realized belatedly that she’d gone too long staring at him without saying anything. He was still watching her, the corner of his mouth quirking up in amusement. Dimple, she thought stupidly, involuntarily.

WTOWT, pg. 10

Then a slow burn get together that goes down in flames. Which for most relationships is just the end, but the rebuilding of that fire from the cinder was epic. Ava Wilder really makes you work for their reconnection. She makes them work for it.

It would have been so easy for her to have these two characters fall right back into bed with angry, hateful sex right at the beginning, but that’s not what this couple is about. That first meeting was epic and life altering. It’s not something you want to mess up twice.

While Lilah is tough and emotionally reserved, Shane is softer and kinder, and emotionally available. He’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, his reaction to Lilah abruptly dumping him was immature at best. Most of his actions come from a place of hurt and fear.

What Ava Wilder does best with this and her first novel, How to Fake it in Hollywood, is building the anticipation and allowing her character space to grow and work on their flaws.

She suddenly understood, with a nauseating surge or regret, what a precious thing she’d been so careless with all those years ago, too blinded by distrust and self-loathing to see it standing right in front of her, if only been brave enough to reach for it.

WTOWT, pg. 182

I enjoyed this book so much. It was totally worth the wait.

TSM Book Club Book #30: How To Talk To A Widower by Jonathan Tropper

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Started: July 24th
Finished: July 31st
TSM Rating: 4/5

This book was definitely different from the romance I’ve been reading lately. Don’t get me wrong, there is lots of love in this book, but not romance, which was why I picked it. Just for something a little different.

Doug is in mourning. He’s 29 years old and his wife died in a plane crash. He’s a man set adrift, unanchored, unable to find his way back to dry land. He’s allowed himself to descend into the morasses of grief and hopelessness, avoiding the rest of the living world, including his stepson who has lost his mother and is also adrift in his grief.

Throughout the book he repeats these four sentences:

I had a wife. Her name was Hailey. Now she’s gone. And so am I.

How to Talk to a Widower, multiple pages

As he’s stuck in this rut, his pregnant twin sister decides to leave her husband, while his baby sister is planning to marry his friend, whom she met while sitting shiva for Hailey. On top of it all, his father had a stroke and is only lucid enough to be remember that Hailey has died about five percent of the time.

Grief is a funny thing. It has no schedule or timeline. It can put you in a strangle hold so tight that it feels like it will never let go. But with time, patience, and little grace you can get there.

While Doug isn’t quite a lovable protagonist, you do feel for him and the depths of his despair and his apprehensions about moving forward and on and what that means for his wife’s memory.

TSM Book Club Book #29: The Duchess Effect by Tracey Livesay

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Started: July 11th
Finished: July 22nd
TSM Rating: 4/5

Another highly anticipated read for me. While I liked it, I was so frustrated with Dani in this book. I understood her motivations, but I wanted her to make different choices. Prince Jameson wins by being charming, kind, and sexy.

The Duchess Effect is the sequel to American Royalty. Jameson and Duchess are still riding high in the early stages of their romance, although they’ve spent most of their time behind closed doors and away from the public. It’s easy to be in love and make promises when you aren’t putting your relationship to the test by letting it exist in the real world.

It’s the test and how Duchess responds to it that almost breaks them. Instead of trusting that Jameson would help her and show up for her, she decides to hide the truth from him.

At the beginning of the book, they make a pact to stay out of each other’s professional lives. To keep their relationship solely about them, but when Duchess’s professional future becomes unfortunately tied to Jameson, she does. There are several moments when she can come clean but chooses not to out of a misguided — albeit based on past trauma — belief that he’ll leave her.

For his part, Jameson is a little bit obtuse about certain things. He publicly declared to the media that he and Duchess were in love but then tried to put them back in the box by avoiding the press. Jameson doesn’t fully grasp what kind of pressure truly being together puts on Duchess. Also, there are points where different parts of her personality come out — Spades, anyone — and he internally balks as if she doesn’t contain multitudes.

Overall, I liked the book. It was a worthy follow-up and answered many questions left open in the first book.

TSM Book Club Book #26: Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood

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Started: June 25th
Finished: June 29th
TSM Rating: 5/5

I feel smarter when I read Ali Hazelwood’s books. And also dumber.😂 Hazelwood has he PhD in neuroscience so naturally all her characters are women and men of STEM. She infuses science into her books and when her protagonists get together they nerd out on all their combined science knowledge. Makes me which my brain understood it all better because I actually do love science.

In Love, Theoretically, we meet Elsie who uses her natural instinct to make herself anything anyone wants her to be to make extra cash as a fake girlfriend, while working at several different universities around Boston as an adjunct professor. When our story starts she is attending the family party of her fake boyfriend, Greg. Now, this isn’t your typical fake dating scenario where the two people involved are secretly hot for each other. Nope. In this case, the object of Elsie curiosity is Greg’s brother, Jack.

When her fake dating world and her very real academic profession collide during the biggest interview of her career, Elsie has do everything she can to keep it from falling apart. On the evening of her meet and greet dinner with several members of the MIT hiring committee, Elsie runs into Jack, who also happens to be, she finds out, he academic nemesis. She stuck between a rock and a hard place because the Elsie he knows is very different from who she actually is, and she can’t tell him the whole truth without betraying Greg’s confidence.

I know it sounds crazy and a bit complicated. That’s because it is and all the best romance novels kind of are. As the two spend more time together, however, the more Elsie realizes that she doesn’t have to be something specific for Jack. She can just be her without fear of judgement, although its a very hard thing for her to believe. It’s the beautiful thing about their relationship.

It’s like he’s trying to puzzle me out without changing me — and that’s impossible. That’s not how people are, not with me.

Elsie, page 13

“…Except I don’t care much about other people, but I can’t stop paying attention to you.” He shrugs. There is something so utterly, disarmingly honest about him. “So I look.”

Jack & Elsie, page 245

While Hazelwood’s books have very explicit sex scenes — I recently learned the phrase open door vs. closed door and she is VERY open door — all of her characters tend to skew more towards the asexual end of the spectrum until they meet that one person who awakens their desires.

While Jack and Elsie start spending time together fairy early in the boo,, it takes them awhile to build the trust needed to get to that point. The way Hazelwood allows their relationship to unfold and progress with stops and starts adds an element of realism to their story that doesn’t exist in most romances. The stops happen because they are getting to know each other, because they are struggling to take it slow and fighting their basest instincts.

“…And I need you to keep us in check. I need you to pace us, because wherever it is we’re going…I’m here. I’m already right here.”

Jack, page 377

Ah! She’s so good. Her male protagonists are so deeply emotionally behind the hyper intelligence and masculinity. If only all men had that level of emotional intelligence…

Read it. And read everything Ali Hazelwood writes. Because, like Tessa Bailey, her writing is perfection.

TSM Book Club Book #25: Unfortunately Yours by Tessa Bailey

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Started: June 19th
Finished: June 25th
TSM Rating: 5/5

I cannot stress enough how much I love Tessa Bailey. Her books are so fun and funny and sexy. Her female leads are strong and self-assured and vulnerable. Her male leads are built for these women. They add a softness to them, even with their simplistic brute strength. Bailey perfected these characteristics with Natalie and August.

We first met these two in Secretly Yours, on the night Julian and Hailey get it on in August’s vineyard — good times. 😂 Natalie and August were hot and contentious from the moment they met each other. They are both strong-willed and quick-witted.

In Unfortunately Yours, the quick-witted banter is definitely still there. So is the sexual tension — which is really something Bailey excels at, which makes the pay off totally worth it.

What makes August so beautiful, aside from matching wits with Natalie, is the way he sees her. The way he loves her without fulling realizing he does. The man calls her a kaleidoscope!

He’s a kind, soft soul inside a big, muscly, ex-Navy SEAL exterior. He is masculinity at it’s peak, what with rescuing a family from a flood and flipping tires, but Natalie bring out his softness.

For her part Natalie, is in self-preservation mode at all times. Growing up in an emotionally bankrupt wealthy family, she learned to keep her feelings to herself, even though expressing and accepting love is something she wants desperately.

When these two enter into a marriage of convenience, it doesn’t take very long for them to break the “no sex” rule that Natalie puts on the table as they got very close to doing just that in a chair…on a crowded train.🥵 It also doesn’t take August very long to realize that he has deep, forever kind of feelings for Natalie. She eventually comes around too.

“…I worry about her. You know?” … “Sometimes she looks sad and I goad her into a fight just to get the kaleidoscope Turing in her eyes again. And when it comes back, it’s a lot easier to concentrate.”

August, page 129

What I love best about Bailey’s female characters is that even in their stubborn resistance to love, when they finally give in, its such a relief, like slipping into your favorite comfy sweatpants after a long day.

Natalie stood poised poised on the edge of a canyon being asked to walk a tight rope to the other side. But the longer she looked into his seeking eyes, the steadier that rope became until it turned int a full-fledged bridge. “I do it too,” she whispered in a rush, “I count the minutes until we’re breathing the same air again.”

Natalie, page 259

Read Tessa Bailey. Everything has ever written and every thing she will write. She’s fun and dirty and sweet. Everything is good romance should be.

TSM Book Club Book #24: Yours Truly by Abby Jimenez

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Started: June 11th
Finished: June 18th
TSM Rating: 5/5

Abby Jimenez is such a beautiful writer. She weaves hope and humor so seamlessly with dark topics that it’s sometimes easy to forget the serious nature of her characters’ issues.

Yours Truly exists in the same universe as Part of Your World, focusing on Ali’s best friend, Briana Ortiz, as she navigates finalizing her divorce, caring for her chronically ill brother, and competing for a promotion at work. Her competition? Jacob Maddox, a newly hired doctor in the emergency department.

After making a terrible first impression, shy, anxiety-prone Jacob writes Briana a letter. Nothing romantic, but an apology and a do-over. She finds it so endearing that she writes back, and they continue this back and forth, building a connection and a foundation of friendship.

I knew for her they were probably just notes…But for me it was a lifeline. An outstretched hand while I was falling, an umbrella in a downpour. Friendship in a hostile place.

Jacob, page 96

Then start fake dating, and miscommunication and misread feelings ensue. Even when they both show each other how much they love and consider and are “harmless” to each other, they both doubt that the other could have real feelings for them.

While Jacob deals with very real social anxiety, Briana is plagued by abandonment issues that threaten their fragile relationship.

“…I gave Nick the part of me I don’t give anyone. I gave him the kind of stupid, innocent love that you can only give before you better. He got the best of me. And I’ll never find that me again”

Briana, page 119

Even with all they have going on, I loved the way these two characters curled up into each other and found comfort. They both saw how fragile the other was and approached the relationship with kindness and vulnerability. They built a support system for each other in the most beautiful way.

And being liked by Jacob meant something because he was so shy. It’s like when someone else’s pet comes to sit with you instead of their person, and you feel like the chosen one. It made me feel a little special, like he saw something in me. Though I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what that was.

Briana, page 165

It was weird to say, but she made me feel alone — the way I felt when I was by myself. Calm and unaffected… I liked being alone. With her.

Jacob, page 205

I love how Jimenez allows her characters to be utterly flawed and to work their way through those flaws instead of miraculously being cured at the end. She acknowledges that we are all a work in progress and that only time and patience can make anything better.

TSM Book Club Book #23: Love at First by Kate Clayborn

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Started: June 2nd
Finished: June 11th
TSM Rating: 4/5

Love at First was such a sweet book about family, life, death, and learning how to allow yourself grace and love. Nora and Will are as charming as enemies as they are alluring as a couple. Their neighbors and friends — their found family — provide levity and perspective that helps elevate this from just another “enemies to lovers” story.

Both our protagonist are suffering from their own form of grief. Nora has taken on her Nonna’s apartment and responsibilities as the HOA president. While Ben has hardens himself to the long ago loss of his parents and the recent loss of his uncle, which is what brings him back into Nora’s world.

They are both hesitant, too, about love and loving each other. Nora, out of tightly-held loyalty to her grandmother, Will out of fear of dangerously losing himself in someone like his parents did.

Love at First is a great lesson in what different kinds of love look like and what love could be, of you give it a chance.

“Not every love you have is the kind like you had with your nonna. Or like the kind you have with me or Emily, or Jonah. Or anyone in this whole place, with the exception of that new man downstairs, I guess. Love can’t always be a sure thing from the start.”

Marian, page 237 (Kindle)

Reading as they navigate the rocky terrain of falling in love was quite beautiful. Unlike most enemies-to-lovers books, you never got the feeling that they actually didn’t like each and you knew if they just got out of their own way, it would be spectacular. And in the universe where this relationship continues, I like to think that it is.

“Nora Clarke, I loved you from the first time I didn’t see you, but I don’t think that matters half as much as the fact that I love you now. I don’t think it matters as much as the way I know I’m going to love you forever.”

Will, page 292 (Kindle)

TSM Book Club Book #22: The Direction of the Wind by Mansi Shah

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Started: May 22nd
Finished: June 2nd
TSM Rating: 4/5

It is only by pure coincidence that the last two books I picked up to the end of May featured protagonists struggling with mental health issues with varying degrees of severity. Both deal with heavy topics of suicide, depression, loss, drug abuse, and parental abandonment.

Direction of the Wind tells the story of Nita and Sophie Shah, a mother and daughter told twenty years apart. They both grew up in similar circumstances but with drastically different experiences.

The story opens with Sophie mourning the death of her beloved father. Losing him brings her back to her mother’s death as a child. When she overhears her aunts speaking of her mother leaving, not dying, it sets Sophie on a journey that is equal parts heartbreaking and hopeful.

Twenty years before Sophie’s journey, Nita takes one of her own. Overwhelmed by her community’s expectations of her as a wife and mother and driven by a growing desire to be an artist, she packs up as much as she can and leaves her marital home, and boards a plane to France.

While Mansi Shah doesn’t label what precisely is wrong with Nita, she is clearly suffering from depression and has been for most of her life. It seems that being forced into marriage and motherhood only exacerbates her condition, weighing her down in a way that feels inescapable.

After a while, though, she begins to feel the same trapped feeling in France as in India. Trapped by circumstance. Trapped by things beyond her control, and she can’t figure a way out.

She had felt trapped in her life in India, but now she was learning a new form of being trapped and wondered if people were always trapped by something, no matter what they did or where they were.

Direction of the Wind, page 88

As with Recipe for Persuasion, another woman struggles with motherhood, what it means to be a mother, and how to do what is best for her child. For Nita, it was leaving because she felt herself beginning to resent Sophie. She left to save her daughter from her “darkness,” as she put it.

They were the most serious thing that could happen in one’s life. Children highlighted every trait you lacked. And if you were not meant to be a parent, they stole your spirit in a way you could never get back.

Direction of the Wind, page 136

While it’s a story of family, it’s also a story about friends who become family to both Nita and Sophie. They both have strangers come into their lives when they need them the most. For Nita, it’s Dao. For Sophie, it’s Manoj and Naresh.

The words “I’m here for you” had a power in them that was greater than any other, even the phrase “I love you.” “I’m here for you” showed solidarity and acceptance and conveyed in the best way possible that one was not alone.

Direction of the Wind, page 222

Family is complicated. Expectations are complicated. Secrets are complicated. Mansi Shah weaves Sophie and Nita’s sorties together so well; each chapter picks up where the other left off, as Sophie follows right behind her mother, missing her by just a few steps rather than two decades. While the story has dark moments, there is always hope just around the corner.

TSM Book Club Book #21: Recipe for Persuasion by Sonali Dev

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Started: May 22nd
Finished: May 31st
TSM Rating: 4.5/5

It is only by pure coincidence that the last two books I picked up to the end of May featured protagonists struggling with mental health issues with varying degrees of severity. Both deal with heavy topics of suicide, depression, loss, drug abuse, and parental abandonment.

First up is Recipe for Persuasion, whose lead, Ashna Raje, spends her whole life doing what she can to make her father happy much to her own detriment. She also spends most of her life angry with her mother for abandoning her time after time.

On the brink of losing her restaurant, typically reserved Ashna, through some coaxing by her best friend and cousin, ends up a chef competing on a celebrity cooking show in order to win the money to save it. The show’s premise is to pair a professional chef with a celebrity, and much to her surprise, Ashna is paired with her high school sweetheart turned professional soccer player Rico Silva. For his part, Rico has his own struggles as he never really got over Ashna and the abrupt ending to their relationship. When we meet him, he has reached the point where he has to confront his past in order to move forward.

On top of all this, Ashna’s whirly-gig of a mother, Shobi has chosen this moment in Ashna’s life to come back and try to fix things with her. Ashna has spent her life building walls to protect herself from her mother bouncing in and out of her life. To protect herself from her parents’ fighting. Even when her father commits suicide, she builds walls around herself to keep herself protected from disappointment and disappointing.

Throughout the book, we see her struggle to maintain control over her life and struggle as she tries to be a stronger version of herself. She needs to be that version of herself as she confronts the past with Shobi and Rico.

Recipe… epitomizes the phrase, “Sometimes you have to go back to move forward.”

I loved it for how it examined mother-daughter relationships and even what it means to be a mother. Shobi’s struggle to find work-life balance and to reconcile her own feelings about being a mother and wife and what she was forced to give up to reclaim her independence.

This was the problem with motherhood, the part Shobhan didn’t understand — why did it have to be an all-or-nothing game? Weren’t mothers human?

Recipe for Persuasion, pg. 269-270

I also loved the depth of love Ashna and Rico have for each other, even after twelve years apart. Love, real love, can stand the test of time and distance. The word Dev uses over and over to describe how Ashna and Rico feel about each other is essential. I loved how perfectly and succinctly it sums up what they are to each other.

Sometimes when people leave you, you get so caught up in trying to convince yourself that you can cut them out of your life that you think you’ve actually figured it out. You keep moving. You ignore the feeling of being chased, even as you can’t stop running and running to get away. But then you realize that you haven’t moved on at all. Those who are essential to you have always been an absence. Even when you refused to acknowledge it, their void was always there.

Rico, Recipe for Persuasion, page 344

This was such a good read. Even with some of the darker themes, there was a lot of hope and love infused into the story. It should be noted that this is the second book in a series. I didn’t realize it until I started this one, but the stories are stand-alone. I’ve already added Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (the books are Sonali Dev’s reimagining of Jane Austen classics).