 Hello my name's Jackie and welcome back to my channel. I'm an aspiring writer and I'm also a reader and I thought today I might do a reading wrap up with everything I've read in Q1 of 2021. Now for the past couple of years I've read about 75 books a year. This is actually the first year in a while when I haven't done a target on Goodreads and the reason for that was because even though I think reading and reading widely is really important for writers, I feel like writing is more important and one of the things I noticed happening last year because I started a new job last year which was a bit more taxing than my old one, more rewarding as well, but there was more of my brain power involved. I found that there were some points when like I was focusing on trying to get my reading quota up when I could have been focusing on writing. So this year I'm just taking it as it comes. So far I've read 17 books so I think if I keep up that pace for the rest of the year it'll be about 68 books but I haven't had the best reading luck this year and I have lost my enthusiasm a little bit. I do tend to have spurts of one or two weeks where I just won't read anything so fingers crossed that improves in the coming months. But anyway let's get into my books from the first quarter of 2021. The first book I read was The Case of the Missing Marquess which is the first Inola Holmes book. Now for those of you who aren't familiar with this series Inola Holmes is the younger sister of Sherlock Holmes so Sherlock and his brother Mycroft are both in their 30s I think by now and Inola is 14 in the book and the book starts when her mother goes missing and she decides to go and find her. Now what prompted me to read this was that I actually saw the film on Netflix so the film ages Inola up a little bit it has um I don't remember what her name is but the girl from Stranger Things and I found the film really enjoyable. Now if you watch the critical drinker channel on YouTube I think you called it fanciful fluff which I agree with but it was still really enjoyable and one of the things I liked about it was one how it handled like a cozy mystery but with a YA detective and two how there were two parallel plots and these are both things that not so much the cozy mystery though there is an investigative element but definitely the parallel plots this is something I was struggling with in my fantasy hot mess project so when I saw the film I was then inspired to get the book to basically see how this was attacked in writing and what I realized in hindsight was it probably wasn't attacked in the best way because what happened in the film was that the two plots were searching for the missing mother as well as this Marquess who has run away from home and it turns out there's someone who wants to come and kill him who clashes with Nola and the two parallel plots don't actually happen at the same time like basically one gets put on hold so she can address the other one and that is one way to approach it but I don't know if it's the best way. In terms of the book unfortunately I didn't enjoy the book as much as the movie this is probably just because it was aged down it was a middle grade book I also felt there wasn't as much to the plot and Nola didn't have any personal connection with the Marquess from memory I think she sort of just heard he was missing and then decided to look for him which made no sense because she already had this like investigation where she was following her mother's trail so why should she just put that on hold I felt like that was handled much better in the movie. The other thing was there are a few things in the book where like Nola sort of commented on not being that clever or not like her brothers and she demonstrated that with some of her actions and I think it would have been more engaging if she had have been a bit sharper like she was in the movie so I ended up giving this three stars if it had have been for a YA audience I probably would have knocked it down to two but because it is a middle grade book you do expect plots and characters to be a little bit simpler. The next book I read was Stray Souls which is the first book in the magical anonymous series by Kate Griffin. Now I came across Kate Griffin under one of her other pen names Clare North last year when I read the first 15 lives of Harry August which I thought was really cool like if you like Blake Crouch type of novels I highly recommend it so because I enjoyed it so much I decided to look at her other books and discovered she has three different pen names and Kate Griffin is her one that's for more fantasy things so magical anonymous is about a girl who is able to walk through walls and doesn't realize she's actually a shaman and because she can do this strange thing and she assumes other people in London also have strange things happening she sets up a Facebook group called Magicals Anonymous where they all have their weekly meetings and talk about the struggles of the magically inflicted at the same time something dark is happening in London Graydon is a spirit who sort of watches out for souls in the late hours of the night early hours of the morning and apparently she has gone missing and her dog he is out looking for his mistress and killing people as you do so basically what happens is they need a shaman to help fix this they need someone to represent the soul of the city and save it and there's a goblin who is the second best shaman in the world but everyone hates him because he's a goblin and not the easiest guy to get along with so he decides that it's going to be this girl's mission to do it so the book follows her trying to investigate what's happening with the city and her teaming up with the different members of Magicals Anonymous to sort it out so this was quite an interesting book the characters of Magicals Anonymous tended to be more caricatures than anything else like as a vampire who's incredibly squeamish and very focused on hygiene and wants like someone to have a full health check before he takes any of their blood type of thing and that was quite fun and not something you often see in fantasy but because of that I feel like we almost had two separate books so there was the one with all the quirky characters of Magicals Anonymous and then there was the one of there's this dark force trying to kill the city of London and they almost didn't go together a lot at the time like once we got into this darker plot and things started moving any time we went back to someone's quirky introduction and there were generally like sort of one one and a half page chapters where they did their Magical Anonymous intro so it's like hi I'm Sharon hi Sharon and here's a bunch of paragraphs about me and well that was cool and quirky on its own I felt like it really slowed down this plot and it drained the sense of urgency I felt there was also this element where so one of the parts of being a shaman is sort of you can become at one with the city and Sharon the main character the shaman when she became at one with the city she sort of like disappeared almost and could hear everything that was going on so you'd have one line of someone's thoughts and what someone was doing and another line and it was a really interesting way to do it but it did grow quite tiresome by the end of it and in the last maybe 25% of the book I sort of felt like I was really slogging to get through it so this is something that started as a five star read for me but by the end like I was really tired of the tangents I was really tired of the rambling and even though it was it was very intentional on the author's part I felt and it was very consistent with each of the characters by the end I did feel like I was working to get through it and it wasn't really my cup of teas so after I finished I gave this three stars the next book was Take a Hint Danny Brown now this is where I started my like rom-com book focus for this quarter because I was struggling with books I wasn't feeling that enthusiastic personally the start of 2021 wasn't great for me I wasn't a bit of a funk and feeling very homesick for most of January so I started looking for books purely that would make me feel good so Take a Hint Danny Brown was recommended by various booktubers and it had good ratings and good reads so I gave it a try now this is one of three books that are about the different brown sisters and their romances however they are stand alone so you can read this without having read the previous one which is what I did so Danny Brown's a lecturer at a university she's very ambitious about getting published and teaching and so on and she is very anti-commitment she is a fan of one-night stands and flings but doesn't really want to settle down meanwhile the fear is one of the security guards at the university and he's sort of had a thing for Danny forever like every time she walks in it's like his heart stops and she's so beautiful and it's really sweet seeing him right about her so the inciting incident is when there is a fire drill in the library or the part of the campus where they both work and Danny gets trapped in an elevator and she doesn't realize it's a drill she thinks there's a fire and she's trapped and she's going to die the fear goes out and does his thing like making sure everyone's out of the building notices she's not there and then runs back in to get her he ends up prying open the elevator and like carries her out it's all very swoon worthy and then a bunch of pictures get snapped and they get shared online and suddenly they go viral as a couple and it turns out the fear has like a charity he's trying to get up off the ground so this publicity could be really good for him so they decide they're going to fake it as a couple like for the next month or so until the news cycle dies down so he can get the benefit from it what happens is obviously they fall for each other so this was really engaging it started really well I thought there banter was great really steamy tension between them what I didn't love was when we got to the third act and there always has to be a third act complication so they break up and then find each other again and it felt incredibly contrived to me like I felt you know the relationship was going really well and Danny sort of created a problem just so there would be a problem for me it just didn't feel organic and because of that that last third of the book was really unsatisfying I almost feel like it would have been a better book if we just finished when they were happy rather than creating drama for the sake of drama so I think it would have been a four star because that ending I also knocked it down to three stars so a lot of three star reads so far the next book I read was This Savage Song by Victoria Schwab and this was a reread I was like at the point where I'm like okay I need something reliable that I know I love so I previously read this in 2016 I think and this was my first time revisiting it this savage song is said in a world where bad deeds lead to monsters so if you kill someone that generates a monster if there's an active mass terror that creates a monster and it's in a city that is divided into two halves one is one where people pay the leader of the that half of the city to be safe and the other one is one where you know monsters run freely but it isn't where monsters run freely but there is like a police force that's taking care of them and trying to keep people safe it's also not corrupt because one of the things we learn about the safe side of the city is it's not the best system so our two main characters are Kate Harker and August Flynn and they are actually children of the respective ruling families so Kate has been away at boarding school for years she's been rebelling and trying to do more and more wrong to eventually go back home to be with her father and she wants to basically prove that she is as monstrous as him so she's a regular teenage girl in a world of monsters who wants to be monstrous meanwhile August is a monster he is a Sunni which is a monster that's created from acts of mass tragedy and they use instruments or music to eat people's souls and they can only eat the souls of sinners and where his character starts is actually from the opposite point of Kate so he is a monster and he wants to be human and just wants to pass as human and he gets his opportunity to do this when he is sort of sent undercover to the same school as Kate Harker and pretends to be a human boy amongst all of the human students so the two of them connect and become friends and then one day there is an attack on the school where August's family has been framed and they need to run and survive while they figure out what happened so I just really love this book I like the characters I find the world fascinating I like the different types of monsters I am a fan of evil father figures as you may have gathered from powerless and yeah in general it's just a good fun read the other thing was this time I was actively reading it as a writer rather than a reader because it is from two points of view and my fantasy hot mess has two main point of view characters so I wanted to see how an author I like Victoria Schwab in a book that I like this savage song tackled that and one of the things that was really interesting was that there wasn't a lot that happened before the midpoint of the book like it was very slow paced so like the first 10 chapters were maybe all one day with the two children preparing to go to school before they met each other and I found that to be really interesting just seeing how you can pass time so slowly yet still keep readers really engaged by having an interesting world and on my side I think one of my weaknesses is probably that I try to do too much there's too much action and it can probably move a bit too quickly so it was just an interesting reminder to see that so as I mentioned this was a reread I already knew I loved the book and I gave it five stars again the second time round the next book was the litigators by John Grisham now I've never read any John Grisham before and I'd always been under the impression that he was a thriller writer and this book was not a thriller like it was sort of a dark legal comedy and I loved it but it was not what I was expecting so the litigators is basically about three lawyers first one whose name might be David he is in his late 20s I believe he's working at a big corporate law firm and he works like 800 hour weeks he never sees his wife and even though he's getting paid well for it he's like slowly dying in this job the other two lawyers are partners at their own company and they're like ambulance chasers their office is down the road from a really dangerous intersection and basically every time there's a crash at the intersection they're ready and waiting there handing out their cards to the people involved just so they can sue someone one of the lawyers the older one he is just happy with this line of work it works they can reliably predict their income if he is fine just coasting along with what they've got the other one though is really ambitious and he wants to get into like some Aaron Brockovich what do they call a mass lawsuit class action so he wants to get involved in the class action because he's heard that they pay really well when they work so that's everyone at the start of the book and David our young lawyer decides he's had enough and his he quits his job goes out gets smashed and then happens to stumble across the other guy's law officers and offers his services so he joins them as a third lawyer meanwhile our ambitious lawyer he is visiting one of their clients who's died and obviously wants to be involved in the will or something I can't quite remember and one of the people's relatives making comment that oh they died because they took this drug and the lawyer starts investigating and sees there's already been some suspicion around this drug so what he decides with no research whatsoever is to start contacting all of their clients say that this drug is bad it causes problems and they're going to do a class action lawsuit and this poor new lawyer who's come from like corporate where everything's done perfectly is sort of thrown into this world where they really don't have any idea what they're doing we get to see the point of view of the company that produced the drug and how they're planning to fight this and it's just um it's just a book about biting off more than you can chew and trying to keep it all together even as you're watching it unravel in front of you so it was a lot of fun and I gave it four stars the next book I read was The Rapture by Liz Jensen and this is like a climate change apocalypse type story so it said now or not too distant future and the world is getting noticeably hotter and just more and more things are going wrong with the planet and the main character is a psychologist who is wheelchair bound following a car accident I think two years before the book starts and she has just been employed by a psychiatric institution I think it might just be for children and the main patient she is assigned to is a 16 year old girl called Bethany who's been locked up because she killed her mother and she has never said why one of the treatments they tried on her in the past was electric shock therapy and what happens after she has this electric shock therapy is she starts to have vision and she's able to predict things that will go wrong in the planet so she predicts a hurricane in Argentina I think she predicts something somewhere else and then she predicts like the event that's going to start the environmental apocalypse and what's interesting is that this girl is like in a psychiatric institution so everyone thinks oh it's just illusions it's not real but what happens is the different things she predicts all start coming true and then Gabrielle the main character she ends up in a relationship with a man who I cannot remember what he does this is the problem of waiting until the end of the quarter to review your books that he he does I think he is a physicist at a university so he has some insight into how some of the things Bethany's predicting might happen and as they start investigating it they realise that there's more and more merit to Bethany's predictions and they need to find a way to warn people without coming across as crazy as a lack of a better word if people know where these predictions are coming from no one will believe them so it's sort of this spiral of desperation where they try to find someone who'll take them seriously and basically try to prevent the world from ending all in all I thought this book was very good the characters were believable I did have one like little pet peeve which was that Gabrielle kept referring to like the man she gets involved with as the physicist and it's like you know this guy you've had sex with this guy surely you can say his name like it just seemed really strange to be using like someone's job title to describe them when it's like you know it's someone you know intimately that was a very small pet peeve there was also something which was believable but also personally frustrating which was how much Gabrielle put herself down she had a lot of insecurity about her ability to be seen as an attractive woman and to be a partner to this man since her accident and I get that it's relatable but it was also incredibly frustrating I just wish we had more women with good self-esteem in books and I never know whether I should be docking points for something I just personally find annoying when it's not an objective flaw with the book but it was something I found personally annoying so all in all I thought this was really good it was fascinating take on climate change the whole Bethany situation was really interesting and also like quite heartbreaking when you hear her backstory so this was four stars for me. The next book was Six Wakes by Merl Affidie now Merl Affidie actually has a podcast called I Should Be Writing which I highly recommend I think she posts twice a week now and it's just um it's just nice to have a bit of a laid-back discussion about writing especially when you're not feeling motivated Six Wakes is a book about clones in space so it starts when there are six clones who are manning a spaceship that's taking a whole like thousands of humans I think to colonize a new planet and these six clones wake up in their incubators and they see that all of their old bodies have been killed and they don't know why so generally what happens in this world is that clones get cloned into new bodies that are like 20-year-old versions of themselves but all of their memories are saved and preserved to put into the new body what's happened this time is that their memories haven't been backed up since they first boarded the ship 25 years ago so they have no idea what's happened in the last 25 years and what culminated in this event which led to everyone being killed so this book is really cool because on one hand you've got this closed mystery like they're all on the spaceship they're not going anywhere you've got these six people who don't know if they can trust each other and then you've also got flashbacks to each of their lives over the past like two to four hundred years I think they're all I think all the clones are between two and four hundred years old so yeah you get to see their backstory what you realize is that there are connections between them which might not immediately be apparent you learn that people aren't who they think they are so soon interesting lots of fun I gave this four stars and I can't remember why I didn't give it five maybe I should maybe I should bump it up the next book I read was The Hating Game by Sally Thorn and when I was looking for just a fun rom-com that I would love that would make me forget about life this was it I loved it so much so the main characters are Lucy and Joshua who both worked for competing publishing houses that were merged about a year before the book starts they are both assistants to the CEO of their respective companies which means the CEOs are both locked in offices and they sort of have the same shared workspace in front of the respective officers so the book is from Lucy's point of view and she feels like they've never had a good relationship she thinks Joshua hates her and so she spends her day filling up with like games that they play together so things like trying to imitate each other in the mirror or trying to annoy each other in different ways and her goal has always been to make him smile or to get some sort of reaction out of him because he always seems so serious and stern and basically everyone in the office is terrified of him because he's not a personable guy this changes one day when in the elevator she is wearing like a sexy little dress to get under his skin and he kisses her and it is a really good kiss and she can't stop thinking about it afterwards and this sort of turns into like a love hate flirty banter type of thing which leads to her agreeing to go with him to his brother's wedding as his date and it's a little bit hard to say any more than that without giving it all away but it's an enemies to lovers type of romance it's done really well it's a lot of fun and I highly recommend it so this was a five-star read for me now after this because I love the hating game so much I decided to read Sally Thorne's other book which is 99 percent mine and unfortunately I didn't like this one as much so 99 percent mine is about Darcy and Tom and from Darcy's point of view she is living in her late grandmother's house and needs to fix it up to sell it to split the proceeds with her twin brother her childhood friend Tom is going to be working on the house and fixing it up with his construction company and she has lots of feelings for Tom and lots of urges for Tom and finds him absolutely delicious and she is insatiable in her desire this was also well written there was a lot of humor it was engaging what I didn't like about it as much was that there was no real relationship like the fun thing about the hating game was they sort of had they had this kiss and then there was flirting then there was sort of this warming up or fake relationship which built up to the wedding weekend when she was posing as his girlfriend so even though like they hadn't declared their love for each other or it wasn't officially a relationship we got to see them being a couple and all of the fun that that entails whereas 99 percent mine was mostly just Darcy was longing for Tom and thinking about how hot he was and there wasn't even like really kissing or touching or any of the fun stuff you want when you read a romance so it got to is it a spoiler when I say the couple in a romance book get together but they got together at the end and I felt like it would have been better if that had happened earlier and there was some other conflict that meant they couldn't stay together or they couldn't admit their feelings to each other rather than waiting until quite late in the book to actually get together so because of that I gave this one three stars though I do really like Sally Fallon's writing style so when her next book comes out I will be trying it the next book was you deserve each other continuing with my searching for rom-coms that will make me forget life so this book is about Naomi and Nicholas who are getting married in about a year's time I believe and they've gotten to the point where they can't stand each other anymore the book is from Naomi's point of view and a lot of the beginning of it is all about what he does wrong and why he's so annoying and how he makes her feel bad about herself and she has the brilliant idea that maybe rather than trying to be like sort of a martyr in the relationship like she's trying to be the good girlfriend the good wife maybe she should just like start being really bad to him until it gets to the point where he dumps her and the reason he needs to dump her is because she has already had to put like a lot of money into the wedding and so on and I believe she thinks his parents will make her pay for it if she calls it off so she needs him to be the one who to call it off so the premise of this book is that these two people start being really horrible to each other but they start being their genuine selves as well when they're being horrible to each other and they realize how perfect they are for each other and I thought that was such a good premise like I was really on board for that I feel like it didn't quite work with the execution and the reason for that is because I don't think the author committed to each stage of the relationship needed to go through so first we get the intro where Nick seems to be this awful guy who would want to be with him then Naomi starts being like really annoying to get back at him he never really fights back that much like he does a couple of small things but not really to like not really at the same extent it's not clear that he's trying to get out of the relationship and then later it becomes really clear that he really does still love her and he wants to work on the relationship and so then you've just got Naomi who's sort of going back and forth like oh I have this soft spot for him but now I'm going to go back and do this horrible thing but oh I have this soft spot for him and I feel like it would have been much cleaner if they had the you know Naomi hates Nick she decides to get back at him there's this full-on feud where they realize that oh they quite respect and like this other side of the person then they start having the soft feelings and then lovey-dovey lovey-ness can you tell him a rudder I think if it had been like that sort of cleaner structure it would have worked but instead there was a lot of going back and forth between am I trying to make him hate me or do I love him and have this soft spot for him and that meant yeah just because it was going back and forth there wasn't that clean transition it often didn't feel like a plot was moving forward so for that reason I gave this three stars the next book I read was Jurassic Park which I never actually read before and I loved it I thought it was so interesting so clever there was so much about dinosaurs that I didn't know and just the perfect illustration of how you know people's hubris has real consequences it's almost like a modern-day Greek tragedy in that men think they can overcome nature and nature always wins and there's a lot of interesting discussion on like science and whether because you can do something you should do something which I personally found quite interesting because I think that's something I'd like to incorporate in my own YA Superheroes meets the Russian mafia book powerless because some of the discussion there is around the science around the super gene mutation and how that should be used and whether it should be used in other ways so my writer side really appreciated it for that reason in terms of pace instructor and story I thought it was really well paced you know the stakes were high and the pace was fast yet we were also able to take moments to talk about the philosophy of it a little bit more the science behind Jurassic Park a bit more so it was really well balanced it was only one thing that I didn't like about this book and that was the granddaughter character who was so annoying like I get that she's meant to be what a six-year-old girl something like she's quite young and I get that that means she'd be whiny and she'd get bored and she'd go you know stupid t-rex nanananana like that type of thing like I think that's totally fine what annoyed me was that she had like brushes with death then immediately after went back to being completely annoying and whiny it wouldn't be quiet it's like you think after three or four brushes with death where a t-rex tries to kill you you would shut up like yes I get that she's young and annoying but even like children learn very quickly often like that's what they're famous for their brains are far more malleable than adults are and I don't think it's unreasonable to think that maybe after a couple of times where she complained or made noise and that drew the diet source attention maybe she would start being quiet I think as a woman the fact that it was a female child and the male child like had his shit together I think that also bothered me a bit though there was also an age thing there like I think the older child was maybe 12 but yeah in general I just found she was whiny to the point where it stopped being necessary or believable so because of that I gave it four stars if her character had have been a bit more tolerable it would have been a five star read the next one was another rom-com attempting to find the same magic that I found with the hating game and it was to have into hoax now this is a regency era romance between violet and james I believe and they get married after an illicit moment on a balcony that's by her mother but it turns out to be all right like they really love each other so it all worked out well in the end until something happens between a prologue where they met each other and chapter one where the book starts and something happened that has soured their relationship and we're not sure what but they're at this point where they don't really speak to each other anymore they reside in separate rooms of the house and they're only five years into their marriage which is a bit disappointing anyway james goes out to his country house one day and has an accident on a horse and violet gets a letter saying that this accident happened she panics she gets in a carriage she goes out to meet him and ends up coincidentally meeting him at an end when he's on his way back because he woke up almost immediately and no one sent her a letter to let her know and his reaction to her coming out after him is sort of like why did you bother and she thinks it's you with that understandably and goes okay well i'm going to let you see how it feels to worry about someone so she goes and hires an active to pretend to be a doctor to say she's dying of consumption to make him worry so like you deserve each other I thought this one had a really interesting premise where she was going to make him realize how much he loves her and appreciates her by making him worry about her the problem is once there was that setup it felt like the author didn't really know where to go from there because we have this moment we have the diagnosis and then what happens next like violet doesn't end up being like bedridden for the entire thing she sort of says oh it comes and goes in waves and I feel better so she goes out to bowls and things and yeah it just it seemed to lose momentum after that and just ended up being the two of them bickering for a while until she came clean and they got together so it ended up being a bit unsatisfying so three stars the next one was the kiss quotient now this is about a woman called Stella who is on the autism spectrum and she struggles to relate to other people and she has struggled to have a relationship because of that and she doesn't find the idea of sex or physical affection particularly appealing one day one of her colleagues makes a comment of oh well practice makes perfect type of thing and she takes that to heart and decides to hire a male prostitute Michael to teach her how to kiss and do all of that sex stuff and they ultimately really click and end up getting together but of course they have personal issues they need to overcome like she doesn't tell him that she's on spectrum um he also has his own issues around his profession and his family and his dreams and so on this was finally another five star romance for me it was a lot of fun the characters had so much chemistry I thought Michael was amazing and how understanding he tried to be I think Stella's portrayal was really good even being someone who's not on the spectrum it was really easy to identify with how uncomfortable and awkward she was there was also this incredibly uncomfortable moment when she met his family for the first time and basically put her foot in her mouth but couldn't stop and couldn't figure out what was wrong until afterwards and everyone was upset and I was just I fell for her so much in that moment so this was a five star read for me and because I liked it I then went to look at Helen Hohing's other book which was one moment the bride test now the bride test is in the same universe and it follows not one of the main characters but one of Michael's like friends brothers so sort of extended family who also happens to be autistic it starts in Vietnam where his mother is looking for a bride for him and she basically wants to send someone back to the US for the summer who is going to assist with her difficult son who isn't really interested in romance and will just be single forever if she doesn't do anything about it she ends up finding a girl who takes other name Esmeralda or Esme who really wants to go to the US because her father's American and she thinks she might be able to track him down if he's there so she goes over determined to make him like her and it's this interesting dynamic where she wants to make him like her but he is not really approachable he's different to other men she's known in the past he doesn't really understand her think she's a nuisance but then when she's gone or she leaves like he worries about her and feels like she's a missing piece so it's really nice to see how that relationship develops and there are also some quite entertaining moments like after the first time they have sex and it's his first time doing it and he doesn't really know what he's doing so he goes to his friends for advice and just um like understandable but also you know you're laughing with them not at them so this was just another enjoyable feel good romance and another five star read for me it was exactly what I was looking for at that time. The next book I read was Us Against You which was actually the second book in a series and I did not realize this however I feel like I could read the second book without having read the first one. It is about a town called Beartown which is somewhere in the US I think in a forest and there's a neighboring town called Hedley and both of these are hockey towns with big hockey teams and there's an ongoing rivalry between them. The book starts when Beartown's star hockey player is leaving the town after having raped the daughter of the not coach but I think general manager of the hockey team after that the council decides to get rid of the Beartown hockey team and it sort of destroys what like it destroys the soul of the town and anyway politics gets involved and they bring in a coach from the outside and they get the Beartown team up and running again but the book is basically about all of the small stories of the individual characters in the town as these two towns are having a rivalry. There was a lot that was good about this book I thought the insight into what it's like to be in a small town that only really has a sport to live for was interesting as someone who's never been a sports person it was interesting to get that new perspective some of the individual characters' stories were really moving it was a lot of the best bad decision moments like there was no way a lot of the characters could win with the cards they were dealt you know seeing the make the best decision they could at the time even though there wasn't a good option was interesting too. What bothered me a bit was the writing style so there was a lot of breaking the fourth wall with lines like you know it's not that kind of story or she didn't bring a gun with her and she was going to wish she had and that sort of thing which is foreshadowing where the book is going and I think you sparingly that can be really effective but this happened so many times throughout the book like by the end I was really impatient with it I'm like I know it's not that kind of story you've told me that it's not that kind of story I know these guys are not going to end up being happily ever after when it comes to one of the stories in there so yeah other than that it was really good but the writing style was really frustrating and tiresome and generally I would be in a scene really enjoying it and then he would take us out of the scene to comment on the philosophy behind a fight or foreshadowing something that was going to happen or there was even a fake out with like a character's death that ended up being another characters and I um by the time like that was the big moment of the book and by the time we got there like my engagement had completely fizzled out because I was so sick of all of these it's not that kind of story moments or she didn't do this and would regret it later or they didn't know this decision would change everything like that kind of thing I think yeah again if it's you sparingly great but if not it gets a bit tiresome so because of that I ended up giving it three stars and I don't know if I'll read the other one in the series just because even though I am interested in learning more about this world I don't want to deal with that writing style anymore the next one was emirate has never been in love which is by a romance author named Anita sunday she does mail mail romances a lot of which are sweet and I really do like sweet romances and this is the first book in the new series that's going to be based on Jane Austen books I was like yes sign me up so this book is supposed to be based on emirate the main character is a little bit clueless and is trying to match up all of these people around here while missing the signals for who everyone's interested in meanwhile nightly is the mister nightly he is his best friend's dad so older man slightly taboo type of dynamic who's sort of looking down on not looking down on emirate but like fondly looking at emirate going yeah you have no idea what's going on I think the premise for this was interesting but I feel like it was far too short a book to try and include the plot of emir as well as this develop this romance at the same time I ended up feeling like there were just too many characters getting to heat track of I didn't really care what happened to any of them if I didn't already know the plot of emirate I might have found it a little bit hard to keep track because I did know the plot of emirate I knew exactly where everything was going and because we spent so much time on the emirate plot like we're two different matchmaking scenarios with I think Harry who's the Harriet character it was just like there just wasn't enough time to build the romance and I'm reading this because I want to see the romance I want to see emirate and nightly get together so give me that already so I ended up giving this book two stars as a result I think either Anita Sunday should have done a longer book that could incorporate both Emma and the romance or she should have just done a straight up sweet male-and-male romance and then the final book I read in Q1 was Hot British Boyfriend so again I was looking for a feel-good rom-com type books Hot British Boyfriend is about a girl Allie who in the summer before senior year I think or maybe junior year sometime in American high school she is flirting with this guy at the juice bar where she works and then is invited to his party where he's going to make an announcement about the girl he likes and because they've been flirting she assumes it's her and so he gets up with the microphone and begins saying oh there's this girl I want to tell her how I feel and she just gets overwhelmed with excitement and runs up to him going oh of course I'll be your girlfriend and he's sort of like um wasn't talking about you and it turns out the entire time he's been interested in her friend who works at the juice bar with her so poor Allie is mortified all of this is recorded and shared on Instagram that becomes what she's known for and she doesn't know how she's going to face school when they go back for the new term but it turns out her friend Crystal who's with this guy now she was going to go to the UK for a semester and she decides not to because she's got this new boyfriend so Allie goes oh I can go to the UK instead so she goes to the UK and one of her goals is to get a hot British boyfriend while she's there and in her first weekend she's at the market and it sees a hot British guy and they end up going out the problem is that Allie is so focused on becoming the girl who likes everything he likes that they never really develop a real bond she's too busy trying to be what she thinks he wants rather than being herself so this book had both pros and cons like pros I think it does genuinely capture the teenage experience and that awkwardness and how moments like that are so waterfying when you're in them one of the things I really love about YA is how everything is so important and emotions are so heightened because when you're that age it's your first time going through everything whereas if something like that happened to me now like I'm in my 30s I'd be like whatever I was an idiot people witnessed it it's gonna happen again we all know this it's fine whereas when you're 16 17 it's like that is the end of the world and I think that was captured very well what I didn't like was the whole relationship between Allie and I think the guy is James because like I said she's pretending to be someone else the entire time and it's not even that she was pretending to be someone else it's just that she felt like it was necessary and didn't even question it so she was learning about cricket to please him and all of this stuff to please him yes it's identifiable but it really annoys me it's like what I said about one of the other books earlier it would be really nice to just have a girl with good self-esteem who is happy to be interested in her own stuff and own her own stuff and if a guy likes it great and if he doesn't he's not the right guy for her and admittedly that couldn't be the case with this book because her journey is supposed to be realizing that he's not right for her for this reason but it was still very frustrating to read I think maybe honestly I don't even know if I would have had patience for it when I was younger I was never um I never really cared about boys when I was younger and definitely wouldn't have been changing my personality to make one like me so I think yes the moral of the story is good you shouldn't have to change yourself for a guy but it was just painful and annoying to read however many pages 200 pages of her doing this and making her friends her second priority when her friends actually know who she isn't care about her and yeah she does come around at the end but it was a bit tiresome to get there so this was another two star read for me so that is everything I read in q1 of 2021 strong rom-com focus much stronger than usual and I would love to find more books like the hating game that I love as much so if you have anything that's in that vein that's written really well that has good chemistry between the leads and you know it's just sweet I like I like sweet please let me know in the comments if you have any other recommendations of good books you've read lately please also let me know because I am always looking for new things to read other than that I will see you next time bye