madeline's reviews
776 reviews

 full review to come, but this was such a fun return to buck's creek with - thank god - a little more steam than the last one!

thank you NetGalley and Edelweiss for the ARC! 

I'm withholding this review in solidarity with the HarperCollins Union members currently on strike. I support their right to a fair contract.

Thank you Harlequin and NetGalley for the ARC. 

I'm withholding this review in solidary with the HarperCollins Union members currently on strike. I support their right to a fair contract.

Thank you Harlequin and NetGalley for the ARC. 

I'm withholding this review in solidary with the HarperCollins Union members currently on strike. I support their right to a fair contract.

Thank you Harlequin and NetGalley for the ARC.

Someone on Twitter said this book was HOT so obviously I bumped it up the TBR. Full review to come, but 1 - accurate, and 2 - it was also so fun. 

Thank you Berkley and Edelweiss for the ARC!

I like good food writing, and I certainly found this to be good food writing. I just don't think that Sen's totally accomplishing what he's set out to do here. In the introduction, Sen speaks a lot to capitalism and gender, two forces one cannot ignore in understanding how these women (and mostly women of color) experienced the food industry. But somehow, there's really no analysis of how most of these women came to cooking: through the gendered expectation that women cook to provide for their families.

I think this is most striking in two places - firstly and more subtly, in the way that many of their marriages fell apart when they began cooking for an audience outside the home, and secondly and more obviously in an aside where Sen writes that Madeleine Kamman's early exposure to cooking was her mother taking care to provide a home-cooked meal while on a 90-minute lunch break from a local factory. It's interesting to me that Sen doesn't choose to think more critically about traditional gender roles in the lead-up to these women's careers. And it's not like he doesn't have the space: each piece is 20 or 25 pages long, and the meat of the book clocks in at under 160 pages.

Sen's clearly talented, and I think the work he's beginning here is good and necessary. It's just unfinished, and there was room and talent for much more.

I love the premise of this series - a group of sisters-by-adoption have an all-women mariachi band. It’s great to see a different family dynamic and musical set-up! I skipped the first book and I definitely recommend not doing that, I definitely felt like I was missing some pieces.

This book just didn’t get all the way there for me. I think the Spanish was integrated in a way that felt clunky and unnatural to me - one of my pet peeves is someone saying something in the non-English language and then repeating themselves in English, which never feels like something people actually do, and this book falls prey to that. And while I really liked Cat and Patricio as separate characters, I didn’t always buy their chemistry. It’s meant to be kind of a forbidden romance, but I think Cat’s reasons are flimsy, and Patricio is all in on her from day one (which I do love). This would have been 4 stars for me, but the ending is a ridiculous miscommunication, and that knocked it down to three stars for me. 

Thank you Montlake and NetGalley for the ARC!

Another hilarious rom-com from Alison Cochrun, this time a sapphic holiday romance! 

Last Christmas, Ellie spent one day with gorgeous Jack and fell head-over-heels for her - just to have the whole thing blow up. This Christmas, she's a former-animator, current-barista in need of cash. And her coffee shop's landlord, Andrew, needs to get married and will pay Ellie to be his wife. They just have to convince his whole family at their Christmas gathering that they're in love. Easy enough.

But Andrew's sister is <i>the</i> Jack, who may or may not remember her, and Andrew's obviously in love with Jack's best friend, and Ellie's definitely still in love with Jack, and of course, nothing is going to be as simple as it seemed.

This was a great, light Christmas read, one of several Holigays novels out this winter! I didn't find it as propulsive as The Charm Offensive, but I still had such a wonderful time watching all these idiots admit to being in love with each other. You can't go wrong with this!

Thank you Atria and NetGalley for the ARC!

Martha Waters: there's a fake haunting in this book
Me: give it to me immediately.

Each installment in this series brings me literally so much delight, including this one. It's full of Martha's trademark wit, humor, and tenderness - these two characters are so careful and kind to one another once they figure each other out, and it's such a joy to watch them work through what it means to be married to one another. And this book is <i>funny</i>, too. I was cackling the whole time! Martha's voice is so clearly her own, and each book is a more entertaining farce than the last one.

My only wish for this book would be that these two got their acts together a little earlier: Martha writes more slow-burn, low-steam romances, but I wouldn't have minded another kiss or two earlier. Still, I loved this book from start to finish, and I am truly salivating at the thought of FINALLY (finally, finally) seeing West and Sophie get their happy ending.

Thank you to Atria and Edelweiss for the ARC!