Nicole Reads A Lot

so many books, so little time

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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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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White Hot: A Hidden Legacy Novel by Ilona Andrews

Title:White Hot (Hidden Legacy #2)
Author:Ilona Andrews
PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
Publication Date:May 30, 2017
Publisher's DescriptionThe Hidden Legacy series by #1 New York Times bestselling author Ilona Andrews continues as Nevada and Rogan navigate a world where magic is the norm…and their relationship burns hot

Nevada Baylor has a unique and secret skill—she knows when people are lying—and she's used that magic (along with plain, hard work) to keep her colorful and close-knit family's detective agency afloat. But her new case pits her against the shadowy forces that almost destroyed the city of Houston once before, bringing Nevada back into contact with Connor "Mad" Rogan.

Rogan is a billionaire Prime—the highest rank of magic user—and as unreadable as ever, despite Nevada’s “talent.” But there’s no hiding the sparks between them. Now that the stakes are even higher, both professionally and personally, and their foes are unimaginably powerful, Rogan and Nevada will find that nothing burns like ice…
My rating:****.5

Book cover of White Hot by Ilona AndrewsI enjoyed reading Burn for Me when it was released in 2014, so I was very excited to see that the next two books in the series were going to be published in short succession in 2017. I’ve read way too many books in the interim, so I knew that I was going to have to reread the first book in order to prepare for White Hot. I’m so glad that I did. First, I got to enjoy the world building all over again. The setting of this series is top-notch! Next, I was reminded of how intense these books are. While they can be read in a single sitting, especially if you are as obsessive as I am about good books, they are not at all light books. Although there is a fair amount of humor, as with most of Ilona Andrews’ books, there’s some seriously dark shit in these novels, is what I’m saying. Reading the first and second books in this series back to back allowed me to see the characters grow and evolve from where they were at the beginning of the first novel. I loved the authors’* attention to detail; seemingly minor statements turned out to mean a great deal. As a person who loves words and communication, I appreciate it when everything that is said has meaning.

Nevada has progressed so much over the course of these two books, and I felt like a proud mama, watching her navigate through situations that very few people expected her to survive, let alone succeed in. Likewise, I’ve enjoyed watching Rogan open up about his experiences and attempt to rejoin a world that he had mostly left behind. The Baylor family is remarkable, and learning more about them has felt like a treat.

If you haven’t read the first book in this series, why not??? You definitely can’t read the second without the table-setting that was done in the first, but also, Burn for Me is just a really good book. If you’re the type of person who hates to read incomplete series, start reading the first two books in mid-July, so that you’ll be all caught up by July 25, when Wildfire, the final book in the series, is released. I hope to review that one as well, but I’m already pretty positive that I’m going to love it.

This book was provided to me through Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.

* – Ilona Andrews is the pseudonym of a husband and wife team, so I’m not misusing the apostrophe here, promise!

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Manna Tree by Savannah J. Frierson

Title:Manna Tree
Author:Savannah J. Frierson
PublisherSJF Books LLC
Publication Date:November 15, 2016
Publisher's DescriptionA night of celebration ends in tragedy, shocking Cole Patterson to his core. Cole's brother breaks his promise not drink and drive and causes a fatal accident with three casualties. Guilt compels Cole to stay and greet the victims’ family, shouldering his brother’s guilt since his brother was no longer there to do it himself. Yet when he sees Margot Reed, something other than grief and guilt fills his soul.

If Margot never sees the inside of a hospital emergency room again, it will be too soon. She barely registers the haggard, yet expensively tailored man trying to give his condolences, her attention completely on the sole survivor of the wreck—her brother. The hospital machines are too loud in her ears, and she nearly collapses under the weight of her sorrow. But Cole is there to support her that night, and he doesn’t seem inclined to ever stop. Margot can’t bring herself to mind, either.

Can people brought together by mutual sadness find their way to happiness and joy, or will grief and guilt be too much for them to bear?
My rating:****.5

I enjoyed this book quite a lot. Ms. Frierson is a new author to me, but I saw the blurb on Amazon and was happy to find out that this book is available through Scribd. I read it in one night and was only sad that I finished it. I really liked seeing how the romance Margot and Cole’s romance unfolded. Sometimes, when authors have characters get together in the wake of traumatic events, I find the stories hard to connect to. That wasn’t the case here; I appreciated that Ms. Frierson never went for easy answers or cheap melodrama, and clearly gave careful consideration to her characters’ situations. It was refreshing to me, how much depth the characters had, even those who one might be predisposed to love or hate upon first mention or appearance.

Margot, being both black and several years older than him, didn’t initially believe that Cole could be interested in her. I loved how much Cole appreciated Margot’s differences and life experiences and made a place for himself in her life and heart. Aaaah!!! I’m swooning just thinking about it. This was one of the most satisfying interracial books that I’ve read. I didn’t come out of it feeling like either character was fetishized, and appreciated that they could have frank conversations about their differences without harping on them to an unbelievable degree.

I now want to read everything that Ms. Frierson has ever written! This is just the book to get me out of a rut caused by reading too many terminally silly books in too short a timespan.

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Blue’s Beauty by Bailey West

Title:Blue's Beauty (Bluette Men Series Book 1)
Author:Bailey West
PublisherSelf-published
Publication Date:December 2016
Publisher's DescriptionRoman 'Blue' Bluette falls in love with a woman. He plans on spending the rest of his life with this woman but circumstances prevent that from happening. He settles on being alone for the rest of his life and focuses his energy on other things until he meets her.
She is an unconventional woman in the sense that she loves girly things like pretty clothes and manicures but she is also just a comfortable hanging out with the guys, arguing about sports and riding motorcycles. She believes in love but her encounters with it so far have left much to be desired. She wants someone to love her and to take care of her. She almost considers settling for one or the other until she meets him.
Can they love each other through their brokenness to find true happiness?
**This book is part of a series but it is a standalone novel. No cliffhangers.***
My rating:****

bluesbeautyIn terms of the storyline, this book was a 4 star read. It wasn’t without flaws, but the author wrote a compelling religious romance that I didn’t hate (and I generally can’t stand religious romances). Zenetta was a great character, and I really loved Blue’s evolution. Blue’s Beauty was surprisingly funny and possessed an underlying sweetness that touched me and made me feel more invested in what was happening than I normally do when reading romance novels. While I am not usually a fan of closed door romances, the steamy scenes in this book almost seemed de trop; the novel seemed so full to me that the scenes that raised the sensuality level didn’t actually feel necessary.

The book’s editing was frankly awful, and I was kind of shocked at how many errors abounded in this book. While I would 100% read the next book in this series, I really hope that Ms. West has a lot of success and can get her books edited professionally – I am confident that better formatting, grammar, and attention to detail could only enhance the experience of reading her work.

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