Nicole Reads A Lot

so many books, so little time

Best Laid Plans by B. Hollidae

Title:All the Little Things Box Set Trilogy
Author:B. Hollidae
PublisherSelf published
Publication Date:April 16, 2019
Publisher's DescriptionAfter spending all her twenties attending the weddings of her close friends and peers and having nothing but bad luck in the area of love despite her best-laid plans, Spring decides she’s done with relationships. She’s skipping the love and marriage and headed straight to the baby carriage with the decision to get artificially inseminated.

But at a table in the farthest back corner of the reception venue of her best friend’s wedding, she meets the best man, Bilal, and they click over a mutual admiration for art and geek culture.

He’s not looking for a relationship. Even if he was, he just broke off an engagement two months before he was supposed to say “I do,” and he’s not willing to talk about it.

Huge red flag.

It’s easy for Spring to overlook, though. Not only is he a nice guy, but he sees past the woman that doesn’t need anyone to take care of her and to the woman who still doesn’t need anyone to take care of her but wants to be taken care of anyway.

What they decide to start together is supposed to be casual, giving Spring a chance to enjoy the fun of a relationship as long as it will last before she carries out her baby plans.

However, slowly but surely, the line between casual and serious starts to blur, and Spring has to start thinking about the tough questions. Do she and Bilal really want the same things out of this? And if they don’t, does it really matter?

Just maybe, for once, what she plans for and what the universe gives her will be the exact same thing. And if it’s not, dare she hope for something better?
My rating:

I was really excited to read this book, because I enjoyed B. Hollidae’s previous series. After the first 50 or so pages, I wasn’t entirely sure that I liked this story as much. Still, I found Spring interesting and the evolution of her relationship with Bilal grabbed my attention. If you also find the book a little slow to grab your attention in the beginning, hang in there. I was glad that I kept reading because the story grew on me as I got further into the book. I liked the descriptions of Spring’s gaming, her job, and the backstory on her family that she went into detail about as the book progressed. I also liked learning more about Bilal; their relationship wasn’t what made them interesting to me, but I did like how they were together. The dialog was pretty snappy and made me laugh out loud a time or two. I liked seeing the evolution of different relationships that Spring had, outside of her romance with Bilal. Her twins sisters were a hoot and I loved their scenes. Spring’s mom was portrayed well, too; without making her annoying, Ms. Hollidae showed the conflicting personality traits that demonstrated the friction between the two women.
One thing that I definitely did not like (and which isn’t unique to this author) is the fact that Spring’s father is only ever described as African. There are 50+ African nations, and some of those countries contain multiple ethnic groups, so it feels cheap not to specify where Aqil came from. Especially because if a character said that their father was European, and followed European traditions, most readers would rightly point out the variety of peoples and traditions that fall under the umbrella of “European” (how similar are the day-to-day lives of most Finns and Turks, for example?). It’s not a deal-breaker, but every time I read “African” instead of a more specific descriptor, it took me out of what was happening. Considering that other facets of life were described and even explained in more detail (such as the fact that, traditionally, black children will call their older cousins “aunt” or “uncle” as a sign of respect), the omission of a specific country/culture felt kind of glaring to me.
It’s hard to remember now, because I enjoyed All the Little Things series so much, but I wasn’t entirely sold on the first novel from the beginning, and it took me a while to get into what was happening. I feel like I’m having the same experience with this series, because I’m already impatiently awaiting book number two. I definitely recommend this novel.
I read a galley of the book, which had not undergone final edits, so while I noticed some issues that should be corrected by an editor, I’m not sure they’ll be in the final product.
I received a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

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All the Little Things Box Set Trilogy by B. Hollidae

Title:All the Little Things Box Set Trilogy
Author:B. Hollidae
PublisherSelf published
Publication Date:January 13, 2019
Publisher's DescriptionAll the little things count in this beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking romance spanning over a period of six years. From high school sweethearts to learning what it means to be in love and a relationship as broken young adults. Read the complete trilogy!

All the Little Things

After fleeing Miami for a new start, Akilah was the last thing 19-year-old Rafael needed.

She was everything he avoided in the past with girls. Opinionated. Assertive. Shrewd. Too curious for her own good. Bold. Daring. The type you didn't want involved when you were running and had something to hide.

He fell for her anyway.

There are a lot of big reasons that Rafael shouldn't be with Akilah. There are a lot of big reasons why he can't be with her.

But shouldn't and can't aren't in her vocabulary. And there are a lot of other reasons, little things really, that Rafael should be with her that outweigh the big things.

But when his past, his abuser, the reason he lived on the streets for three years, the reason he can never go back home, the biggest reason he shouldn't get involved with Akilah, comes knocking on the door, Rafael has a choice to make.

Confront it. Or lose Akilah forever.
My rating:

Since the last two reviews I posted were of books that ultimately did not work for me, and in honor of Valentine’s Day, which I know some people really care about, let me recommend what has to be one of the best series I’ve read in a long time. I fully expect this trilogy to be at or near the top of my (completely imaginary, because I never post it) year end top 10 list, because I am having a hard time imagining a world in which I’d be lucky enough to read works of this quality consistently throughout the year.

I take my entertainment seriously. I’m willing to lose myself in an author’s world, but in return, I like for there to be some substance to the story that I’m reading. This doesn’t mean heavy content, just the feeling that I gained something from the process of reading the book (a joke, a new perspective, it doesn’t have to be anything serious). Often I will finish a book that I found pleasant and struggle the next week to remember what it was that I liked so much about it. This sense is the exact opposition of what I felt when I finished reading the three books in this series. I was sucked into this trilogy early into book one and actually stalled a bit when I was nearly finished with the third book, because I didn’t want the experience to be over. How could anything be this good? This painful? This real? It didn’t make sense, but I also didn’t want it to stop.

I had no idea going into the series what I would be getting into. The description for All the Little Things wasn’t vague, but I wasn’t ready. I will offer trigger warnings for sexual abuse and violence, because these things, and their aftermaths, factored pretty heavily into Rafael and Akilah’s lives. These novels never stopped being entertaining and readable, but also managed to have full conversations about a lot of important issues: abuse; living with trauma; consent; toxic masculinity; body autonomy; racism; poverty. In addition to all these weighty subjects, I also loved getting to see two smart, interesting young people fall in love with and create space in their lives for each other. When Rafael and Akilah talked about their aspirations, fears, and feelings, I felt like I knew them. When revelations were made that one or the other had not expected, I felt blindsided right along with them. I have never in my life use the phrase “book boyfriend” unironically, but if the universe delivered to me a man like Rafael, I’d probably start farting rainbows.

Were these novels perfect? To me, the answer is yes. They were engaging and entertaining and left me feeling hopeful in a way that most books never will. The sense that I had when I’d finished them was of overwhelming joy that books like this exist. That people are writing books that can tell truths and evoke feelings like this.

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Until My Heart Stops

Title:Until My Heart Stops
Author:Mycah Edwards
PublisherB. Love Publications
Publication Date:January 28, 2019
Publisher's Description"I never needed to be rich. I only needed to be happy." - Kenzino Kennedy
Professional athlete, Kenzino Kennedy, had everything, then he had nothing. A trip to his grandmother's hometown provides him with the freedom he needs to answer a simple question - if he strips himself of his ego, who will he be?
Park Carr was the small-town girl who saw life through a kaleidoscope. Everything was beautiful until it wasn't. Despite having her heart broken, she's determined to keep herself open to love, but there's just one problem: she's the victim of a vicious rumor that keeps her holed up at home.
He's a retired NFL player with a desire to dance. She's newly unemployed but hopeful. Together, they have the opportunity to put love to the test so long as they trust their hearts long enough to see that love can be unconditional when it's done right. However, when done wrong, the damage can be just as fatal as when the heart stops.
My rating:**.5

This book could have been so much better. I definitely think that Mycah Edwards is an engaging writer, which is why I’m sad that this book did not work for me. Park, the female protagonist, was disappointing. The betrayal she experienced at the novel’s outset was not her fault, but the way that she related to the people in her life certainly was. She was overly trusting, naive, gullible, martyrish and every other unflattering adjective for a person who lacks the will or ability to think critically about her life and the people in it. The only one of her family members worth anything at all was her niece, yet Park kept sticking her neck out for her other relatives to swing their axes at. Their terrible behavior was entirely on them, but they wouldn’t have been able to keep harming her if she hadn’t allowed them so many opportunities to do so.

Kenz, the novel’s male protagonist, was the worst. THE WORST. He was weak and, despite his wafer-thin veneer of religiosity, had no moral center. Although he lied to himself about his good intentions, he always collapsed at the first sign of opposition or temptation. The only people he was capable of saying “no” to were his grandmother and Park, who were also the only two people in his life who prioritized his happiness over their own. I want to say that Park deserved better, but considering what she was willing to accept from everyone else, what would that even look like for her?

Although this book depressed me because these people were failing so hard at life but thought they were winning, I was entertained enough to read about all of their shenanigans. This is actually how I felt about E’Bay (I KNOW) and Noble’s story by the same author: I didn’t like her characters, their decision-making processes, how the men were totally not about anything at all, and how the women were willing to accept nearly any level of disrespect, but I do find these books interesting. This is definitely a Kindle Unlimited special for me, because I would have been super disappointed to pay for this, but it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant way to pass a few hours.

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Romancing His Rival (Accidentally Yours Book 3)

Title:Romancing His Rival (Accidentally Yours Book 3)
Author:Jennifer Shirk
PublisherEntangled: Bliss
Publication Date:February 11, 2019
Publisher's DescriptionHopeless romantic Elena Mason doesn’t often hate people, but she hates her ex-fiancé’s insufferable best man, Lucas Albright III. She just knows Lucas is the one who talked her ex out of getting married—so Lucas is clearly the cause of all her problems.

And now she’s expected to work with him? Oh, heck no.

Lucas Albright wants nothing more than to make partner at his advertising firm, and he knows he works best alone. But then Elena ends up as his partner on an account that could win him a promotion. He had a great reason to end her engagement, not that she’d ever believe him. Still, he’s willing to try working as a team.

Unfortunately, his new “partner” wants him dead.

Elena knows she’s going to have to give in and work with her nemesis, though nobody said it had to be easy for him. But what happens when fighting starts feeling a whole lot like falling in love?
My rating:**

Romancing His Rival (Accidentally Yours Book 3) by Jennifer Shirk - cover

What did I just read? Or, more accurately, what did I just read 39% of? Because Romancing His Rival was a total DNF for me and that’s as far as I got before I just couldn’t take it anymore. I regularly get emails from Entangled and occasionally open them. This book, newly released this week, sounded interesting to me, so I downloaded and read the sample. It wasn’t a lot to go on, but it held my attention long enough for me to decide to buy it right away. I wish that I had slept on this decision or something. The rest of the book (that I got through) did not work for me. My major problem was that Elena, with her dogged devotion to schedules and recreating the past, seemed way too immature for any romantic relationship, much less marriage.

I don’t have an excessive amount of patience for a lot of things or people. I expect adults to act like adults and for things to make sense, and it annoys me when one or the other of these expectations is not met. At the beginning of this novel I sympathized with Elena, whose wedding had been called off when her Lucas, the best friend of her (now ex-)fiancé Scott, convinced him not to marry her. It seemed like a pretty terrible way for both men to have conducted themselves, and I was totally on her side. Of course, since the advice-giving best man was also the dude she’d be in love with at the end of the book, I knew that there had to be more to the matter than what Elena initially thought and I was looking forward to seeing how the two points of view would be bridged long enough for them to fall in love. That’s going to have to remain a mystery for me (at least for now) because Elena’s odd insistence on recreating her late parents’ relationship struck me as at best immature and at worst fairly creepy. She wanted to get engaged in December because her parents had. Scott’s original proposal was at the top of the Empire State Building, as was her parents’.

Months after Scott broke things off, Elena mostly refused to acknowledge that things were over. She hadn’t gotten back the deposits on the venues and services that had been booked for their wedding, holding out hope that they would reconcile with enough time to still get married. WHAT? Elena’s obsession with meeting what are ultimately arbitrary deadlines and schedules seemed excessively not okay and worried me. Why would a well adult human being behave like this? Lucas, bless him, was kind of a mess, too, but nobody was going to out-kook Elena (or, I suspect, out-jerk Scott), so overall he wasn’t a problem. The way that he ended up in Elena’s life had me rolling my eyes a bit, but I appreciated that he was in a bind that only she could fix.

I couldn’t stop cringing whenever Elena said or thought something that showed how slavishly she tried to make her life fit into the narrow mold of behavior she deemed acceptable. I was embarrassed for her when she told Lucas that she would provide the artwork he needed for his job only on the condition that he help her not only to get Scott back, but to have him propose to her again in December. As Liam Neeson recently learned, probably everyone has thoughts that it’s not great to share out loud, but Elena exhibited the same level of control regarding disclosure of her craziness.

Scott, of course, was totally dismissive of Elena (even though I found her terminally silly, I still wouldn’t have talked down to and about her as he did, especially if I’d once proposed marriage to her). Among other things, he had a problem with the town where she lived, her lack of a college education, her career, and her hobbies (so, basically everything about her), and only found her interesting again once he learned that she would be working with Lucas. More than once, I struggled to understand what it was about this particular man that Elena loved and missed. The early revelation that he had the same job that he father had had upped Elena’s creep factor significantly, especially when his cavalier attitude towards her was contrasted with how devoted she claimed her father was to her mother.

This is a lot of words about a book that I neither enjoyed nor finished. I read for fun, information, and entertainment. This book failed on all of those counts, and probably several more. I am not familiar with the Entangled: Bliss line, so maybe this, like Harlequin Presents, is just not an imprint that I can expect to work for me. It’s too soon to say, but if I find myself having a similar reaction to other books from this line, I might just skip it entirely in the future.

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Pass Interference (Connecticut Kings Book 6) by Christina C. Jones

Title:Pass Interference (Connecticut Kings Book 6)
Author:Christina C. Jones
PublisherWarm Hues Creative
Publication Date:August 16, 2018
Publisher's DescriptionMy bio might speak for itself, but I still have everything to prove.
Everything to gain.
Everything to lose.
On the field, and off.

I’m here for a reason, and Nate Richardson isn’t one of them… except, he won’t let me relegate him to a non-factor. Even knowing what’s at stake, he won’t let me pass him off.

So I’ll adapt.
Open myself up.
Dominate my position.
Defend my right to be here.

Who says a woman can’t have everything?
Or, better yet… who says a woman can’t be a King?
My rating:*****

I have read several of Ms. Jones’ books over the years and I’m consistently amazed by how great of a novelist she is. She never disappoints. Her characters may have different backstories and unique energies, and the romances she crafts are swoonworthy yet realistic. I admired this novel’s female protagonist, Sloane Brooks, since she appeared in Love Belvins’ “Love’s Ineligible Receiver” and enjoyed reading her story. Nate Richardson, her partner, was such a stand-up guy. I’m a bit of a sucker for romances where the dude is overtly invested earlier than the woman, and I appreciated how okay he was with making himself open and vulnerable when that was what Sloane needed from him. As usual, the secondary characters in this novel were great; they were there enough to give the protagonists context, but not so much that they were a distraction from the primary focus of the novel. And although I often wanted to mail Garrett and Eli one-way to the moon, there was enough genuine sentiment behind their worst moments to make me rethink such astronomical postage.

This is such an enjoyable entry into this series. If you aren’t already familiar with the Connecticut Kings series, it might be tempting to skip ahead to this book, but the richness of the story will be more evident if you understand where a lot of the secondary characters started out. These two authors have brought this franchise and world to life and I recommend these books to anyone who’s a fan of well-written romance.

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