Happy Pub Day to all of these new books!
What books are you most excited for this week?
Title: You Say It First
Author: Katie Cotugno
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
Source: Publisher via Edelweiss
Format: Ebook
Release Date: June 16, 2020
Rating: ★★★★
Meg has her entire life set up perfectly: her boyfriend Mason is sweet and supportive, she and her best friend Emily plan to head to Cornell together in the fall, and she even finds time to clock shifts phonebanking at a voter registration call center in her Philadelphia suburb. But everything changes when one of those calls connects her to a stranger from small-town Ohio, who gets under her skin from the moment he picks up the phone.
Colby is stuck in a rut, reeling from a family tragedy and working a dead-end job—unsure what his future holds, or if he even cares. The last thing he has time for is some privileged rich girl preaching the sanctity of the political process. So he says the worst thing he can think of and hangs up.
But things don’t end there.…
That night on the phone winds up being the first in a series of candid, sometimes heated, always surprising conversations that lead to a long-distance friendship and then—slowly—to something more. Across state lines and phone lines, Meg and Colby form a once-in-a-lifetime connection. But in the end, are they just too different to make it work?
You Say It First is a propulsive, layered novel about how sometimes the person who has the least in common with us can be the one who changes us most.
Meg has her life planned out. She has a great boyfriend and she’s ready to go to Cornell with her best friend. She works at a voter registration call centre. Everything changes after her boyfriend breaks up with her. She calls a man at work to help him register to vote, but she learns from his son, Colby, that he died from suicide months before. Meg does something she’s never done before, which is give Colby her personal phone number. Meg and Colby end up making an unlikely connection that changes the paths that their lives are on.
Meg made some bad decisions in this book, but they ended up working out for her. She struck up a relationship with a stranger who she had only spoken to on the phone. She also drove many hours to meet him, without telling anyone. Meg acknowledges that it was dangerous, but she did it anyways. It should have been more clear that she was putting herself in danger by doing this, even though it worked out for her.
Both Meg and Colby had difficult things that they had to face. Colby was still dealing with the death of his father. He found out some things about his father, which changed the way he saw him. Meg lived with her mother, and her father had a new girlfriend. She also had to take care of someone with an alcohol addiction. Suicide and alcoholism were both difficult topics in this story, but I think they were handled well.
I enjoyed this story.
Thank you HarperCollins for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Have you read You Say It First? What did you think of it?
This blog meme is hosted by Book Date. It is a place to meet up and share what you have been, are and about to be reading over the week. It’s a great post to organize yourself. It’s an opportunity to visit and comment, and er… add to that ever growing TBR pile!
This weekend I finished You Say It First by Katie Cotugno.
I’m currently reading Legend (Legend #1) by Marie Lu.
Next I will be reading Stay Gold by Tobly McSmith.
What are you guys reading this week? Have you read any of these books?
Here are my reviews for the week with my ratings:
I did 9 weekly blogging memes:
How was your week? What did you guys read?
The meme that dares to ask what book has been in your bed this morning? Come share what book you’ve spent time curled up reading in bed, or which book you wish you had time to read today! This meme is hosted by Midnight Book Girl.
This Sunday I’m reading You Say It First by Katie Cotugno.
Meg has her entire life set up perfectly: her boyfriend Mason is sweet and supportive, she and her best friend Emily plan to head to Cornell together in the fall, and she even finds time to clock shifts phonebanking at a voter registration call center in her Philadelphia suburb. But everything changes when one of those calls connects her to a stranger from small-town Ohio, who gets under her skin from the moment he picks up the phone.
Colby is stuck in a rut, reeling from a family tragedy and working a dead-end job—unsure what his future holds, or if he even cares. The last thing he has time for is some privileged rich girl preaching the sanctity of the political process. So he says the worst thing he can think of and hangs up.
But things don’t end there.…
That night on the phone winds up being the first in a series of candid, sometimes heated, always surprising conversations that lead to a long-distance friendship and then—slowly—to something more. Across state lines and phone lines, Meg and Colby form a once-in-a-lifetime connection. But in the end, are they just too different to make it work?
You Say It First is a propulsive, layered novel about how sometimes the person who has the least in common with us can be the one who changes us most.
What book are you in bed with today?
This meme is hosted by Steph at A little but a lot. The weekly prompts for 2019 can be found here.
This week’s prompt is Favourite LGBT Characters. Here’s my list:
(All book cover images from Goodreads)
Did you make a Six for Sunday list?
Title: How to Hack a Heartbreak
Author: Kristin Rockaway
Genre: Romance, Contemporary
Publisher: Graydon House
Source: Publisher via NetGalley
Format: Ebook
Release Date: July 30, 2019
Rating: ★★★★★
Swipe right for love. Swipe left for disaster.
By day, Mel Strickland is an underemployed helpdesk tech at a startup incubator, Hatch, where she helps entitled brogrammers—”Hatchlings”—who can’t even fix their own laptops, but are apparently the next wave of startup geniuses. And by night, she goes on bad dates with misbehaving dudes she’s matched with on the ubiquitous dating app, Fluttr.
But after one dick pic too many, Mel has had it. Using her brilliant coding skills, she designs an app of her own, one that allows users to log harrassers and abusers in online dating space. It’s called JerkAlert, and it goes viral overnight.
Mel is suddenly in way over her head. Worse still, her almost-boyfriend, the dreamy Alex Hernandez—the only non-douchey guy at Hatch—has no idea she’s the brains behind the app. Soon, Mel is faced with a terrible choice: one that could destroy her career, love life, and friendships, or change her life forever.
Melanie Strickland works at the help desk for a company that works with startup companies. She is surrounded with men who don’t think she knows how to do her job. Even when she’s not at work, she encounters horrible men on the popular dating app, Fluttr. Melanie decides to make her own website to alert women to the disgusting men on Fluttr, so she creates JerkAlert. However, the start up entrepreneur who she starts dating, Alex, appears on her website. Melanie has to hide her identity as the founder of JerkAlert while also navigating her own relationship with Alex.
This story tackles sexism in the workplace. Melanie was treated horribly by the men in her office, and her male supervisors didn’t see a problem with it. It was actually upsetting to read at times, because the things they did and said were so inappropriate.
Even though Melanie had to deal with sexist men, she turned her life around. She worked very hard to push past the limitations that men put on her in the digital coding world just because she was a woman.
I really enjoyed this story.
Thank you Graydon House Books for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Have you read How to Hack a Heartbreak? What did you think of it?
This is a weekly meme hosted Devouring Books. This week’s prompt is Books with One Word Titles. Here’s my list:
(All book covers from Goodreads)
If you’d like to do this list too, consider yourself tagged!
Did you make a Top 5 Saturday list?
Title: The Gryphon’s Lair (Royal Guide to Monster Slaying #2)
Author: Kelley Armstrong
Genre: Middle Grade, Fantasy
Publisher: Puffin Books
Source: Publisher via NetGalley
Format: Ebook
Release Date: June 2, 2020
Rating: ★★★★
Rowan is now the Royal Monster Hunter, and her twin brother, Rhydd, is destined to be king. But her mother’s cousin Heward is still determined that his children be the ones to inherit the titles, and will stop at nothing to show that Rowan and Rhydd are too immature to properly lead. After the gryphon that Rowan captured in Book One gives birth but then dies, Rowan is left with a baby gryphon she knows she cannot keep. And it grows faster than anyone can imagine . . .
In order to save face after an accident involving the troublesome gryphon, Rowan, with the help of her friends Dain and Alianor, along with an entourage of monstrous companions, must make a journey to the mountains to release the gryphon back into the wild. What starts off as a simple enough task soon becomes a dangerous quest, as the group encounters numerous rare and deadly monsters along the way, including wyverns and ceffyl-dwrs. Nothing is easy when you’re a “monster magnet” like Rowan.
Can she prove herself worthy of the title of Royal Monster Hunter? Find out in this exciting second book in the Royal Guide to Monster Slaying duology!
Rowan is training to be the royal monster hunter in her kingdom. She caught a gryphon in the previous book, and it was allowed to live because it was pregnant. Now the gryphon is having her baby, but the mother dies due to complications. The baby gryphon grows quickly and thinks that Rowan is her mother. When the gryphon goes to extreme lengths to protect Rowan, the kingdom decides that the gryphon has to be killed. Rowan convinces them to let her move the gryphon somewhere else. On Rowan’s new adventure through the country, she meets even more creatures than last time.
I really enjoyed this series. I just found out that this is the final book in this series. I would have liked to see more of Rowan as she gets older. She had to face some more mature issues in this book, such as potential suitors for her and her brother. I love how Rowan is such a strong female character. She heads right into danger to do the right thing, rather than what everyone thinks she should do. She is confident and independent.
I felt like some of the fight scenes were too long. They lasted for a couple of chapters, sometimes, and they became repetitive. One thing that could have made the fights more entertaining is if there were illustrations to go along with them. There are some illustrations of the monsters at the end of the book, but I think the story could have been enhanced with illustrations throughout the book.
This is a great middle grade book.
Thank you Penguin Random House Canada for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Have you read The Gryphon’s Lair? What did you think of it?
This is a weekly meme hosted by Freda’s Voice.
The Rules are:
Today I’m reading How to Hack a Heartbreak by Kristin Rockaway.
Here is my line from location 56% in my e-ARC:
“There you have it fools. Put your fears of eating beaver butt discharge to rest. Though the article said you can buy it on Etsy if you’re so inclined.”
Did you make a post for the Friday 56?
Jill's Book Blog 