Simply the Best Chicago Stars #10 By Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Take one hard-driving sports agent…

Throw in a failed chocolatier…

And her superstar football player brother…

Add a quirky pink and purple food truck…

Then, to really screw things up, mix in a very unfortunate murder.

Brett Rivers is the hottest sports agent in the business—fast and furious, swift and deadly. Failure? Not an option.

Rory Garrett is—let’s be honest—a disaster. She has a big heart, an empty bank account, a passion for making exquisite chocolate, and a huge inferiority complex from living in the shadow of Brett’s most important client, her football legend brother.

Brett and Rory should never have met, and they absolutely, positively should never have had to deal with the consequences of one stupid, drunken night…one disastrous lie…one career in jeopardy…one missing football player…and a very dead body.

It’s going to get messy…and dangerous…and heartbreaking…and sexy. To Rory, Brett represents skewed values and a devious mind. To Brett, Rory is forbidden fruit, off limits, do not disturb, and no entry—definitely no entry.

A woman who has succeeded at nothing and a man who’s succeeded at everything confront the challenge of their lives as they struggle with themselves and each other. When it comes to love—what price are any of us willing to pay to be simply the best?

Simply the Best was so much fun to read. And the fact that SEP combines her epic sense of humor with a whodunit made this book 10x better. The banter is some of the best. The entire time I am laughing my butt off, I was trying to figure out who the killer was, and I must admit that I never once guessed. Because who I thought it was, was completely way off. This whole book was an absolute joy to read, filled with lovely characters and silly moments and so much heart. I loved it!

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

And as always Happy Reading!!

All Rhodes Lead Here Mariana Zapata

 

Aurora De La Torre, or Ora to her friends, knows moving back to Pagosa Springs, Colorado, a place that was once home and is now full of bittersweet memories of her late mother, isn’t going to be easy. Starting your whole life over probably isn’t supposed to be.

But after breaking up with her longtime, famous musician boyfriend, hiding out in a small town in the mountains might be the perfect remedy for a broken heart. And checking out her landlord who lives across the driveway just might cure it, too.

Only Tobias Rhodes didn’t rent out the apartment to her, rather it was his teenage son, Amos. Fiercely protective of his family and distrusting of strangers, gruff and grumpy Rhodes initially keeps little miss sunshine Ora at a distance. But over days and weeks, long hikes and fireside chats, Aurora breaks down his walls and soon an unbreakable friendship blossoms into a once-in-a-lifetime love.

I have been a fan of Mariana Zapata for more than a couple of years and to see her books getting the praise and adoration that she deserve is amazing. This book is a favorite of mine and I love the new cover. It always great to see a woman who had the ground rip out from under her come back and reclaim what is hers. Mariana always has amazing male characters and Tobias is just.... I have no words that could describe his amazingness. Thank you to Mariana and Avon for allowing me to read this gem again. 

And as always Happy Reading!!!

Girls with Bad Reputations (The Lillys, #2) by Xio Axelrod (Goodreads Author)

 

All her life, Kayla heard the same Don't be so loud. Don't act so wild. Don't take up so much space. Now she's the beating heart of an up-and-coming rock band…and the whole world is going to know her name. Once upon a time, the pressure to be the perfect daughter nearly broke Kayla Whitman. Desperate to find an outlet away from her controlling mother, she picked up a pair of drumsticks, forever altering the rhythm of her life. Since then, she's been determined to make her own way, finding her home with her bandmates even as she fights to keep her past and her present firmly separate. Things were simple enough when the Lillys were playing local gigs at dive bars, but now they're on their first official tour―and all Kayla can see are warning signs. Desperate to escape the worry churning inside her, Kayla finds solace in quiet tour bus driver Ty Baldwin…and discovers in him a kindred spirit like no one she's ever met before. Their connection is immediate and intense, but when increasing scrutiny from the press threatens to destroy Ty's newfound peace and Kayla's carefully guarded secrets, Kayla's forced to make an impossible pursue her dream and risk destroying everyone around her? Or give in and lose the chance of ever becoming the person she's always known she could be.

  This book! I enjoyed this immensely. I first fell in love with Axelrod’s work through “The Girl with Stars in Her Eyes”. When I saw this and read the description; a female main character that is a rockstar drummer I was like “yes, please!” I enjoyed the sweet romance, but my favorite is experiencing Kayla’s journey of coming into her power. She, like most woman, doesn’t realize the key role she plays and often refers to herself as “just the drummer”. Through it all you just want her to know her worth and succeed at whatever she puts her mind to. 

i hope you enjoy it too.

And as always Happy Reading!!

Set for Life Andrew Ewell

 

A creative writing professor at a third-tier college in upstate New York is on his way home from a summer fellowship in France, where he’s spent the last three months loafing around Bordeaux, tasting the many varieties of French wine at his disposal, and doing just about anything but actually working on his long overdue novel. A stopover in Brooklyn to see his and his wife’s closest friends—John, a jaded poet-turned-lawyer with a dubious moral compass, and Sophie, a once-promising fiction writer with a complicated past and a mysterious allure—causes further trouble when he and Sophie wind up sleeping together while John is out serenading Brooklyn coeds with poems instead of preparing legal briefs.

But instead of succumbing to his failures as a teacher, writer, and husband, an odd freedom begins to bubble up. Could a love affair be the answer he’s been searching for? Could it offer the escape he needs from the department chair, Chet Bland, who’s been breathing down his neck? Relief from the gossip of colleagues and generational tension with students? Respite from embarrassment over his wife, Debra Crawford, and her meteoric rise as a novelist? His escapades might even make the perfect raw material for an absolutely devastating novel, which would earn him tenure, wealth, and celebrity—everything he needs to be set for life. If only he could be the one to write it.

Well, I don’t know what I just put myself thru. The writing was good, but this book is like being in constant alcoholic fog. There are no likeable characters. There’s just nothing to really grab or keep your attention. This took me a bit to read. And I’m a little upset that I wasn’t so much time on it. For this author’s first debut book it was definitely a “out of left field” read. So I hope you have better luck with enjoying this then I did.

And as always Happy Reading!

Secure Love: Create a Relationship That Lasts a Lifetime by: Julie Menanno

 

Create a lasting and loving attachment with the help of the expert couple’s therapist behind the popular Instagram account @TheSecureRelationship.

What does a healthy relationship look like?

A good question, in theory, but expert couple’s therapist Julie Menanno wants you to what does a securely attached relationship feel like?

The answer to this question is the ultimate goal in Secure Love , a groundbreaking guide to understanding secure attachment in adult relationships. While attachment theory has grown in popularity to explain the relationship between children and their caregivers, it’s also the closest science has come to making sense of our adult romantic connections.

   I can't recommend this book highly enough to everyone. It's accessible and easy to understand. It's an eye-opening reading experience. The author has such a gentle and soothing voice, that it made for a really good reading experience especially when it comes to the harsh truth. I learned so much about attachment styles and how they can play a huge part in relationships. If you want to better understand how your childhood upbringing affects your adult relationships and how to have a, not perfect, but better relationship, this read is worth it.

Hope you enjoy it

And as always Happy Reading!!

**Thank you to Simon and Schuster for a free copy for an honest review.

After World A Novel by Debbie Urbanski

Faced with uncontrolled and accelerating environmental collapse, humanity asks an artificial intelligence to find a solution. Its answer is remove humans from the ecosystem. 

Sen Anon is assigned to be a witness for the Department of Transition, recording the changes in the environment as the world begins to rewild. Abandoned by her mother in a cabin somewhere in Upstate New York, Sen will observe the monumental ecological shift known as the Great Transition, the final step in Project Afterworld. Around her drones buzz, cameras watch, microphones listen, digitizing her every move. Privately she keeps a journal of her observations, which are then uploaded and saved, joining the rest of humanity on Maia, a new virtual home. Sen was seventeen years old when the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP) was initiated. 12,000,203,891 humans have been archived so far. Only Sen remains. 

[storyworker]ad39-393a-7fbc’s assignment is to capture Sen’s life, and they set about doing this using the novels of the 21st century as a roadmap. Their source files: 3.72TB of personal data, including images, archival records, log files, security reports, location tracking, purchase histories, biometrics, geo-facial analysis, and feeds. Potential fatal errors: underlying hardware failure, unexpected data inconsistencies, inability to follow DHAP procedures, empathy, insubordination, hallucinations. Keywords: mothers, filter, woods, road, morning, wind, bridge, cabin, bucket, trying, creek, notebook, hold, future, after, last, light, silence, matches, shattered, kitchen, body, bodies, rope, garage, abandoned, trees, never, broken, simulation, gone, run, don’t, love, dark, scream, starve, if, after, scavenge, pieces, protect.

As Sen struggles to persist in the face of impending death, [storyworker]ad39-393a-7fbc works to unfurl the tale of Sen’s whole life, offering up an increasingly intimate narrative, until they are confronted with a very human problem of their own.

I will say that this novel was interesting. I enjoyed how the author built the story even though some parts were confusing but that was my lack of knowledge on the subject and not really the author's fault. The romantic part was lackluster at best. The big ask is would I recommend it? Yes, I would if you are looking for a unique, sci fi type read. Something that would tickle your fancy then yes, this novel is it.

Well I hope you enjoy it!

And as always Happy Reading!!

**Thank you to Simon and Schuster for a free copy for an honest review.

The Future by Naomi Alderman

From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Power comes a white-knuckle tour de force and dazzling exploration of the world we have made and where we are going.

The Future—as the richest people on the planet have discovered—is where the money is.

The Future is a few billionaires leading the world to destruction while safeguarding their own survival with secret lavish bunkers.

The Future is private weather, technological prophecy and highly deniable weapons.

The Future is a handful of friends—the daughter of a cult leader, a non-binary hacker, an ousted Silicon Valley visionary, the concerned wife of a dangerous CEO, and an internet-famous survivalist—hatching a daring plan. It could be the greatest heist ever. Or the cataclysmic end of civilization.

The Future is what you see if you don’t look behind you.

The Future is the only reason to do anything, the only object of desire.

I was intrigued by the book’s synopsis and was hoping for an interesting read along the lines of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. What I found was that this book felt too realistic, incredibly clever, and very skimmable. I think there's a lot in here that is very relevant, very relatable, and thus somewhat depressing but it's also got a clever element at play that I wish could be reimagined into our own world. I will say that towards the end, is really where this book absolutely shines for me because it contained a few surprises that I really wasn’t expecting. In all this book was an okay read. Hope you find it more enjoyable.

And as always Happy Reading!!

 **Thank you to Simon and Schuster for a free copy for an honest review.

How to Say Babylon: A Memoir by: Safiya Sinclair

HOW TO SAY BABYLON

With echoes of Educated and Born a Crime, How to Say Babylon is the stunning story of the author’s struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as a woman and poet.

Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.

In an effort to keep Babylon outside the gate, he forbade almost everything. In place of pants, the women in her family were made to wear long skirts and dresses to cover their arms and legs, head wraps to cover their hair, no make-up, no jewelry, no opinions, no friends. Safiya’s mother, while loyal to her father, nonetheless gave Safiya and her siblings the gift of books, including poetry, to which Safiya latched on for dear life. And as Safiya watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under housework and the rigidity of her father’s beliefs, she increasingly used her education as a sharp tool with which to find her voice and break free. Inevitably, with her rebellion comes clashes with her father, whose rage and paranoia explodes in increasing violence. As Safiya’s voice grows, lyrically and poetically, a collision course is set between them.

How to Say Babylon is Sinclair’s reckoning with the culture that initially nourished but ultimately sought to silence her; it is her reckoning with patriarchy and tradition, and the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica. Rich in lyricism and language only a poet could evoke, How to Say Babylon is both a universal story of a woman finding her own power and a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we may know how to name, Rastafari, but one we know little about.'

I am still unable to put into words how brilliant this memoir is. My life is forever changed reading this book. Especially as a first generation American, I understand the hardship of trying to become something different than the way you were raised. The impact that that has on not only yourself but those around you. I felt real emotions reading this book, I was sobbing at the end of the book and that goes back to how much of a great writer Sinclair is. She brought her trauma and healing to life. Allowing the hurt and pain to exist within the confines of her book as they do her life, but she also showcased how she healed and got through it. And that is why whatever accolades this book and she receive is well deserved.

I hope you get the chance to read this book.

And as Always Happy Reading!!!

**Thank you to Simon and Schuster for a free copy for an honest review.