I am on my version of summer break (yay grad school!) and so I am going to take advantage of this and read & review all the books! Let’s see how many books I can get through in the month of July – plus however many reviews I go back and write that I forgot about during the chaos of the past few months.
The Charmed List by Julie Abe
Thank you to NetGalley, St. Martin’s Press, and Wednesday Books for an ARC of this book. All opinions in this review are my own.
A YA book where there is magic, but it is subtle real-world magic, it all takes place in places I know and grew up in, and there is a ton of diversity in characters? Yes, thank you, I will read this book now! This book is a great summer friends to enemies to lovers read, it is not overly long/drawn out, and incredibly realistic for a book that has fantastical elements. Or are they really so fantastical? I will happily read this book again when I need something on the lighter side but still want to be drawn in to a complex story. I will note, that there is quite a bit of discussion related to parental death, and so if that is something that can upset you, be aware of that. It is important to the plot, but I think it was handled in a really great way. Overall, I really enjoyed this book and I look forward to reading other things Julie Abe writes!
Circling Back to You by Julie Tieu
Thank you to NetGalley and Avon Publishing for an ARC of this book. All opinions in this review are my own.
I enjoyed this book – not as much as some of the others in this genre & with these tropes, but definitely more than others I have read. It is a friends to lovers, own voices, miscommunication trope, will they/won’t they book, and it fills the void of a lighthearted read if that is what you are looking for. I appreciated the cultural elements of this book, considering I don’t come from a Chinese background, it was nice to have Julie incorporate her culture into the book, thus making it stand out from other books I have read in this genre. But overall the book was a little too trope-y for my taste – though this isn’t fundamentally a bad thing! It just wasn’t what I think I was looking for when I was reading right now. It has a HEA/HFN, but it was unique and I appreciated that. Overall this was a nice read.
Stuck With Him by Danielle Owen-Jones
Thank you to NetGalley and Bookouture for an ARC of this book. All opinions in this review are my own.
I don’t know why I expected this book to take place in NYC but I was very excited that it took place in Liverpool instead. Why? Just for the change of pace and getting to read a different writing style & trying to remember what different words mean!
This book is a fun time. It is very much enemies to lovers, and you can tell every time there is a shift in the relationship. The things they fight over is amusing, and much of the time you want to just yell at them to just talk to each other already! though you know it won’t happen. Lucy did start to frustrate me with some of her workaholic tendencies and jumping to conclusions, but she does get better. Zack is just….Zack. This was a nice, quick read that was a pleasant getaway for a couple days, and I wouldn’t be upset to go back to this world and revisit some of these characters.
As If On Cue by Marisa Kanter
I enjoyed Marisa Kanter’s last book, and this book was all about theater – so of course I had to read it! Plus Jewish MC’s, enemies to lovers who are childhood friends, and play turned musical? Everything seemed like it was exactly what I would love. Unfortunately the female MC drove me up all of the walls, and I have such mixed feelings about the miscommunication trope, if it is done well I don’t mind it, but this was not it for me.
She felt entirely too self-absorbed and unwilling to have an adult conversation about anything for me to find her sympathetic, even when she was potentially in the right & was being wronged by someone. She did so much shady stuff to people and had a hard time seeing how her actions were hurting others, that it was frustrating. I get that she is supposed to be a teenager (16? 17?) but still, she was the most immature person out of the bunch, even compared to her 12-year-old sister. The big climactic moment towards the end of the book gave me so much second-hand anger/frustration/anxiety/etc. that I had to actually go on to Goodreads and see if it was going to turn out the way I thought it was because I was about ready to put the book down and not pick it up again.
Now, I have to say, due to all of these extreme reactions I was having, it cannot be denied that Marisa Kanter is a great writer – because I was invested in this book and having these strong reactions. I just wish that the diversity (outside of Judaism) wasn’t relegated to such secondary characters and brushed off as set dressing. I wish some of the more annoying traits and hard core miscommunication had been dulled down a bit. This book had so much potential for things that I wanted and it just slid a bit short of my expectations.
Freeze Fresh by Crystal Schmidt
Thank you to NetGalley and Storey Publishing for an ARC of this book. All opinions in this review are my own.
I really try to review cookbooks by cooking at least 1 thing out of the book, and then judging the ease of the cookbook based on that. I don’t think it is fair to judge a cookbook on its theoretical merits – how easy it is to read, how many different types of recipes there are, what kinds of ingredients are needed, etc. Because I don’t cook as much as I would like, I try to give some leniancy due to this as well, since people who cook more might have an easier time, but I feel that cookbooks should have at least some all-levels friendly recipes. That is the basic mindset for me writing this review.
I requested this book because I really wanted to find ways to use more fruits and vegetables without them going bad – since it gets really expensive to buy produce and it can be cheaper to buy in bulk, but then it can go bad before I use it. Again, not necessarily the best cook, and my lifestyle isn’t always conducive to cooking meals every day. Unfortunately the aspect of this cookbook that was telling me how to freeze/store produce was mostly things I already knew/could easily look up, so that wasn’t super helpful compared to what I was expecting. What I did get from this cookbook was a lot of recipes on how to prepare ingredients into things, to then freeze, to then pull out and cook with, or to take things and freeze them, and then pull them out and cook with them and have them ready to eat. This made making a recipe really hard because it was a 2-day process minimum if I wanted to try making a recipe so that things could freeze, and I had to find something I wanted to cook more than just trying to freeze produce.
I ended up trying to make the pizza sauce recipe, and the biggest issue I had was that it called for 12 cups of deseeded cherry tomatoes. Do you have any idea how many tomatoes that is? I didn’t. I did learn how to deseed tomatoes, and I learned that I could replace cherry tomatoes with paste tomatoes for this recipe, but then I was on my own. I spent forever trying to look up how many tomatoes I needed to buy, what kind of tomatoes paste tomatoes were, and then realized that I had to roast the tomatoes for 90 minutes after deseeding them before I could even start the next part of the process. I learned that paste tomatoes are another name for Roma tomatoes, and so I bought four large Roma tomatoes based on my best conversion, and that ended up making 1/12 of the recipe, which meant I had to 12th everything else – which I couldn’t do since part of it called for a teaspoon of things, which is incredibly hard to divide, so I just measured with my heart. Once the sauce was ready it was supposed to sit overnight in the fridge before freezing, which would then be used for cooking.
Moral of the story is that conversions in this book are incredibly difficult, and there wasn’t really a good guide for that. This is not necessarily the most user-friendly book when it comes to preparing things unless you have a lot of time and are preparing things for far in advance and have a lot of produce on hand. While the pizza sauce turned out delicious and we all enjoyed it, it was 3 hours worth of work to make and then we didn’t even get to eat it until the next day, and it barely made enough for 3 slices of matzah pizza. I don’t know if I did something wrong, but that is a different issue. I think this is a great book for people who have a lot more skills than I do, and maybe some day when I have more time I will be able to use this book in a lot better ways.