Tag: family dynamics

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 #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 #19: The Verifiers by Jane Pek

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Started: May 2nd
Finished: May 13th
TSM Rating: 3/5

The Verifiers was an interesting read. It’s a niche organization that specializes in tracking online dating matches. It follows the story of Claudia Lin, who works for a mysterious agency of private investigators on steroids.

The story begins with a client, Iris Lettriste, who comes to the agency to discover the truth about a man she has matched with. As Claudia and her colleagues, Komla and Becks, look into this mystery man, Irs shows up dead. Thus begins Claudia’s spiral into a world of mystery and intrigue like the detective novels that she loves so much.

At the core of this story is human connection and relations. How do we see ourselves? How do we see each other? Which version of ourselves is true: the version we show the world or the version we keep to ourselves? In all of that, how does this affect our ability to find true love?

Claudia’s interest n working for Veracity is purely for the investigation aspect of the job. She has no interest in finding a relationship for herself, nor does she really foster her relationships with her friends and family. That’s not to say that she doesn’t love them and appreciate their place in her life, but, as is brought up by both her brother and her sister, she takes a lot for granted. Granted, she does some of that because she doesn’t seek the attention given to her, i.e., her mother constantly tries to set her up with a nice Chinese boy (Claudia is a lesbian), and her brother tries to find her a perfect corporate job.

As she goes down the rabbit hole to discover what really happened to Iris Lettriste, Claudia finds that everyone is hiding something, even from the people who are supposed to know us best. Her investigation also raises the question of how far we are willing to go to protect the people that we love and who claim to love us back.

It’s a fun, if not at times frustrating, mystery as Claudia always seems to be behind the proverbial eight ball, even when it seems like she’s figured everything out. My favorite part of the book was the subplot of Claudia looking into her sister, Coraline’s boyfriend, and the discoveries she makes about trust, truth, and how far some are willing to go in their own selfish pursuits of success.

TSM Book Club Book #18: Well Played by Jen DeLuca

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Started: April 26th
Finished: May 1st
TSM Rating: 3/5

So this was the second book in the Well Met series. I wanted to like it, but I didn’t love our heroine, Stacey. She is the stereotype of a ‘basic white girl,’ and I’m not here for it. Much of the book felt like it was trying hard to give her more depth while playing up her love of pumpkin spice lattes and her obsession with social media.

While her email exchange with Daniel is so sweet and creates a better slow burn than Well Met did, but it all falls apart because of the compounding lies. By the big grand gesture moment, I was checked out. Daniel isn’t a great leading man. He’s a liar, insecure and has no backbone. There are two instance where he is given the opportunity to stand up and fight for her and he doesn’t take them. He shuts down. Is that really what we want to see from the person we love and who is supposed to love us?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for girls executing the grand gesture instead of being on the receiving end of it, but in this case, it wasn’t deserved or earned.

Read this one because we get a healthy dose of Emily and Simon mixed it, but Stacey and Daniel are not the couple for me.🙅🏽‍♀️