Hey friends! Can you believe it’s May already? I just can’t. My head is spinning with all of the things that are going on in life right now, and I haven’t really found a book to grasp my full attention lately. But some of my most anticipated books of the year just released and I’m hoping they will pull me out of this chaotic brain fog… I’m about a third of the way through The Reading List and Book Lovers and Part of Your World are on deck next!
The Love Hypothesis: 3.75 Stars
Yep, I’m being that stingy with my stars this time around. I wanted to love this one SO bad, but most of the book just wasn’t working for me. Olive needs to convince her best friend Anh that she is in a new relationship, so she kisses the first man she sees, not realizing it’s the young professor that everyone thinks is a hardass. As circumstances unfold, Olive and Adam find that having a fake relationship can be beneficial to both of them.
The storyline was cute, the characters were funny, and the representation of science was refreshing, but I struggled to get through it. I found the story to be very slow, I got tired of everything being referred to as fake (fake-dating, fake-girlfriend, etc.), and I had to wait a LONG time for any steam in this book – page 261 to be exact! All of those things were pushing me to a DNF or 3 star at best rating, but then Ms. Hazelwood took me to bed (I mean took them to bed). She can write a sex scene WELL – I just really wish their had been MORE of them and WAYYYY earlier in the book (Yes, I’m impatient).
If you’re looking for a rom-com with a refreshing twist and you don’t mind a slow-burn, give this a try!
Other books with STEM Heroines:
The Kiss Quotient – 4.5 Stars
The Soulmate Equation – TBR
Love on the Brain – TBR (hoping for more steam in this one)
Angel of Greenwood: 3 Stars!
This was our book club pick for April. I read the description weeks before I read the book and completely forgot that it was based on the Greenwood Massacre of 1921. The book reads like a typical YA historical love story for the first three-quarters of the book and then WHAM, hello historical massacre that I never saw coming.
To be honest, I didn’t love this one. I almost quit at 70% because it just wasn’t what I expected, but the last quarter was the best part of the book. In that last quarter, Pink pulled on my heartstrings and I cpuldn’t fathom that this event actually happened. In her authors note, she mentions that she just wanted to write a story about, “a simple, self-sustaining Black community where two Black teens got to freely fall in love.” But after learning of Greenwood and the events that transpired she decided to put her characters there. Once I discovered that, it finally made sense to me why the majority of the story didn’t feel as connected to the massacre in the end. When it was over, the book was done with virtually no resolution for how the people of Greenwood moved forward with their lives – it was just too abrupt for me.
Other YA Historical Fiction books:
Salt to the Sea – 5 stars
Out of the Easy – 3 stars
Code Name Verity – TBR
Looking for more book recommendations? Check out all of my book posts here!
What was your last 5-star read? Do you have any that you would recommend I add to my TBR?
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