September was the birthday month and I always read some KA on my birthday so she is making another appearance in a monthly wrap-up. Are we shocked?

An odd reading month, read some fun new books and ended the month reading utter trash. I had a great time though so that’s all the truly matters! 😀

Complicated by Kristen Ashley – 5⭐

I’ve reread this book three times in 2023.

Standard KA stuff really. Alpha male, sad lead female, alpha male behaves like a douche not once but twice, he grovels, she forgives, HEA follows. It’s standard but to be honest I can’t get enough of it. One of my favourite things about KA is the fact that her lead females are not 20 year old virgins but a lot of the time women over 30 who have actually had a life before they met the alpha male who is gonna cause emotional upheaval before she gets her the HEA!

Standard is often comfort and this is one of my all time favourite comfort reads

Rock Chick Rescue (Rock Chick #2) – 4⭐, Rock Chick Redemption (Rock Chick #3) – 5⭐, Rock Chick Renegade (Rock Chick #4) – 5⭐, Rock Chick Revenge (Rock Chick #5) – 4⭐, Rock Chick Reckoning (Rock Chick #6) – 5⭐& Rock Chick Regret (Rock Chick #7) – 5⭐by Kristen Ashley

More comfort rereading, I needed something after my holiday to Croatia. I miss looking forward to it! 😦

Things We Left Behind (Knockemout #3) by Lucy Score – 4⭐

Really enjoyed their journey, Lucian and Sloane’s love/hate relationship actually made me laugh out loud more than a few times and their journey into a romance played out well. The third act breakup was a bit meh for me. I liked the dropping in on the therapist though. I’d have liked more of him.

What’s odd about these books is that for slowish burn the engaged and married all happens a bit too quickly for my liking. The villains’ are also very much like caricatures but the whole thing is very OTT in the best kind of way so I mean it makes sense that the villains are like something out of a comic book.

This was a nice little trilogy and I think it ended well. I wouldn’t be mad if there was more stories from Knockemout!

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing (The Wolfverse #1) by Sam Hall – 4⭐

Good lord this was scorching!! Sam Hall has lots of books, what a great find! 😀

This was recommended by someone I follow on Instagram and it did not disappoint.

I will say that I’d prefer if the 5 alpha’s weren’t brothers and it was more an everyone involved kind of thing but you can’t have everything!

Also shoutout to Candy. She was awesome.

Fighting the Pull River Rain #5) by Kristen Ashley – 4⭐

I actually enjoyed this more than I thought I would.

Hale was a bit of a pill.

Kind of loved Elsa.

There were a few things I feel weren’t needed in it. Really getting tired of the insistence this author has with adding light to moderate BDSM into her books where they really don’t seem needed. No kink shaming and I often enjoy it in my books, I just feel like a lot of it is forced with her books.

I’m still not over the shit show that was Genny in Making the Match and I hated any of the page time she or Tom got.

Will I stop reading this series?

Very unlikely to be honest.

I love the opulence of it and Bold and Beautiful vibes.

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain – 5⭐

A wild ride. A bit annoyed about the mussels. I love mussels.

I don’t think Anthony Bourdain would have been easy to be either in a relationship with or friends with. I think he was fascinating and lived life without many boundaries and that is actually commendable (this is coming from a person who obsesses and worries about EVERYTHING) but I feel like it would be a lot to deal with all the time. Chaotic is a word that springs to mind.

One thing is for sure, and we learned this in the years after he wrote this, he was an amazing storyteller, afraid of very little and absolutely charismatic, a pretty good combination for someone who became a famous travel/food documentation.

Nero (Alliance #1) by S.J. Tilly – 4⭐

I think this is my first mafia romance in about 10 years and it was fabulous fun.

Nero is a godsdamn lunatic and I loved it!

As the dedication says:

“To all my ladies who see those walking Red Flags as a pretty shade of pink… repeat after me, only when the men are fictional.”

Looking forward to King, I’m going to save it for a day I can sit down and read it all in one go. Apparently King is an even bigger Red Flag than Nero and I can’t wait to find out how that is even possible! 😀

This was a Reddit r/RomanceBooks recommendation, if people are looking for yet another way to get recommendations I’ve found that sub to be super informative lately.

The Stopover (The Miles High Club #1) – 1⭐, The Takeover (The Miles High Club #2) – 3⭐, The Casanova (The Miles High Club #3) – 2⭐, The Do-Over (The Miles High Club #4) – 1⭐& Miles Ever After (The Miles High Club #5) – 2⭐by T.L. Swan

Honestly these books are legit terrible, to me they read like Elon Musk/Real Life Billionaire fan fiction.

Why then did I binge read them all in four days?

Well, perverse fascination I guess! I honestly wanted to see if they could possibly get any worse. Answer? They could.

I enjoy a good billionaire romance from time to time but the MMC needs to have some kind of idea how a real person behaves. The ones where they are super philanthropic and respectful of the average Joe are my favourites.

All these men were awful.

Their inner monologues were 100% what I think the inside of Elon Musks head sounds like and that’s not a place anyone wants to be. The way the thought/spoke/treated about people just doing their jobs was frankly disgusting.

Also, I found the fact that mommy dearest makes an appearance in each book to offer pearls of wisdom to her disgusting sons to be laughable. I mean we are told countless times that they were sent to boarding school from a super young age so she didn’t raise them so her talking about how so and so was such a way as a child is ridiculous.

The Unwanted Wife (Unwanted #1) by Natasha Anders – 3.5⭐

I enjoyed this, it was angsty and had a large amount of well deserved groveling. I love that Theresa didn’t just give in and forgive Sandro. She really made him work for it.

The plot and backstory was a little thin. The reasoning behind the whole thing felt a little weak. I’d have liked a prologue with the wedding actually. I think it would have cleared up a few issues.

Still, worth a read, especially if you enjoy a good grovel MMC.

I’m absolutely one to judge a book by it’s cover and the cover for this is enough to put me off ever reading it, only for a Reddit thread I’d have completely dismissed it. Really needs work!

On-hold

The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont

I probably should have put two and two together on this one but I hadn’t read the synopsis and didn’t realise the narrator was ‘the other woman’ and that the affair in the title was covering much more than Agatha Christie’s disappearance.

I’m not dnf’ing this one because I liked the writing and I am intrigued but I need to be in a better headspace for the narrator.