Yes, Chef by Grace Reilly
Goodreads blurb: The Bear meets It Happened One Summer in this delicious new romance from USA Today bestselling author Grace Reilly, in which a down-on-his-luck chef and a determined social media maven strike a reluctant deal to bring a beloved restaurant back to life.
If you can’t take the heat…get out of the kitchen.
After a public meltdown in the dining room of one of Manhattan’s most elite restaurants, Chef Jack Hartman is back in his South Florida hometown. Angry, grieving, and saddled with the unwanted storefront his late mentor left him, his life is spinning out of control. And that’s before Poppy Winfield, the blond, bubbly, utterly infuriating daughter of his former boss, shows up at his dock.
Poppy needs to escape. From her disapproving family, her horrible ex-boyfriend, and her reputation as someone who has never taken anything seriously. But more than that, she wants to prove herself—and she has just the plan to do it. Unfortunately, that plan involves Jack Hartman, the most arrogant, prickly, intimidating man she’s ever had the pleasure of throwing a shrimp at.
She knows Jack is desperate to come back from his unceremonious firing, so she proposes a deal: working together to open a revamped version of his mentor’s restaurant. He’ll handle the menu, and she’ll use her skill as a social media influencer to sell the hell out of its grand opening. If she and Jack can make the restaurant a success, it’ll be an accomplishment no one can deny—and a ticket for them both to return to New York.
Jack is intrigued, but only on his terms: if Poppy’s going to work for him, she must learn the ropes of the entire business. Including how to cook. From him.
As sparks fly both in and out of the kitchen and tensions reach a boiling point, Poppy and Jack are left wondering–could they be a perfect pairing? Or is this whole experiment a recipe for disaster?
This is an ARC review thanks to a gift from the publisher.
my take: 3.75 out of 5. I liked this one, although a few things didn’t quite work for me. I found it surprisingly emotional, and what I loved most was how the relationship felt almost therapeutic, with both characters helping each other heal and grow. Also, any book that spends half its pages talking about cooking, eating, and describing delicious food is already starting from a position of strength with me. The food scenes were wonderful and added so much warmth and atmosphere to the story.
That said, some elements felt a bit over the top. The romance was very intense at times, and I think it could have been toned down a little without losing any of its emotional impact. For me, some of the more exaggerated romantic choices pulled attention away from what was otherwise a genuinely sweet and heartfelt love story. Overall, though, I enjoyed it and especially appreciated the emotional journey the characters shared.
Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt by Ben Reeves
Goodreads blurb: Travis is Death in the modern world. He wears jeans and a T-shirt and lives in a small, grey town. His job is to offer people comfort in their final hours of life. He’s stoic, gentle, and a little naive, despite everything he knows. He’s young and handsome, despite who he is. Each death he witnesses is meaningful to him; he listens, never judges, and most importantly, never tries to change anyone’s fate. He knows that every life must eventually end to maintain the balance of the universe and he respects the cycle.
Then he meets Dalia, a midwife, and her boisterous eight-year-old daughter Layla, who live across the hall. As Dalia and Layla come to embrace Travis, it becomes more difficult to maintain the detachment that’s allowed him to function for so long. Their time together teaches him what’s truly important in life—and what might be irrevocably lost in death.
Written with radiant warmth, wisdom, and compassion, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt is a timeless story about appreciating life, accepting its end, and finding our place in the universe—especially when it feels most impossible—that will resonate with anyone who has ever loved and lost or worried at time’s passing.
This is an ARC review thanks to a gift from the publisher.
my take: 3 out of 5. I feel like either I didn’t get this book, or it just didn’t get me. There’s so much love for it, and on paper it has all the ingredients of a book I should have adored. It tackles beautiful, emotional themes and clearly wants the reader to feel deeply, but for whatever reason, I never connected with it on that level.
This is the kind of story I expected to wreck me. I cry at the majority of books I read, including plenty of light romances, so I genuinely thought I’d need a box of tissues beside me for this one. Instead, I barely felt anything. I never formed a strong emotional connection with the characters, and because of that, the story’s exploration of loss never hit as hard as I think it was intended to. Everything felt oddly distant and detached.
Part of the issue for me was the structure. There were so many characters and perspectives that I never felt like I got enough depth with any of them. Even the characters we spent the most time with felt just out of reach. The writing felt somewhat disjointed, and I often found myself more confused than emotionally invested.
That’s not to say there weren’t moments that worked. There were a couple of scenes that genuinely broke my heart, and I actually loved the twist near the end. Those moments are what ultimately raised my rating. But overall, this was a disappointment for me. It felt like the kind of book I should have loved and should have been deeply moved by, yet instead I felt strangely disconnected, occasionally bored, and ultimately left wondering why it never clicked.
It Could Have Been Her by Lisa Jewell
Goodreads blurb: Lisa Jewell brings the suspense to this shocking new thriller about a lost dog, a missing woman, and a house of long buried secrets.
Jane Trevally is walking her dogs on her country estate when a small white terrier appears, alone and with no sign of the teenaged girl he’d been staying with nearby. When the teenager is reported missing, Jane offers to return the dog to his registered owner, hours away in London. Arriving at a run-down house called Thornwood in the deepest backwaters of Hampstead, she is immediately on alert—because Jane has a dark history with this house.
The man who answers the door is not the man that Jane remembers from her past. He is cagey, and claims to know nothing about the missing teenage girl. Then, through the window of the house, Jane catches a glimpse of a haunted-looking woman.
Conjuring her memories from twenty-five years ago, Jane knows this unsettling house holds the key—to the missing teenager, to her own traumatic story, and to the dark secrets of the past.
This is an ARC review thanks to a gift from the publisher.
My take: 3.5 – although I enjoyed it in the end, It took me way to many false starts to get into this book. Usually with Lisa Jewel I go in and cant stop reading and here it was not the case. However once i passed the 50% mark I got invested and I was in for the rest of the ride and finished it quite quickly. IS it my favorite Lisa Jewel book? not even close, but it is still entertaining and the twists were fun if not completely out of left field.
Instant Classic by Kate Fagan
goodreads blurb: From the author of the USA TODAY bestseller and Reese’s Book Club Pick The Three Lives of Cate Kay comes an enthralling new novel about a young movie director who bets her career on making a film about an overlooked trailblazer in women’s basketball and in the process finds her own voice.
With only one more film under contract after two flops, movie director Marion May is at a career crossroads and in desperate need of a win. It feels fated when at a Lakers game she meets Jaz Jones, a magnetic WNBA player, who pitches her on an idea. Jaz tells Marion about her coach, Harper Kidd, a once-brilliant athlete whose legacy was erased before it could truly begin.
In the 1950s, Harper Kidd was a rising star on the Hanes Hosiery team until the end of the season when everything unraveled, and she was forced to leave the game she loved. Only decades later, when a young, fiercely talented Jaz enters her world, does Harper find her way back to the court—and to herself. As Marion sets out to write and direct Harper’s story, the project becomes something more. Immersed in a lineage of women who fought to play, to love, and to be seen, Marion begins to confront the parts of herself she’s long kept hidden.
Kate Fagan’s Instant Classic is a radiant love letter to women’s sports and queer identity as well as a gripping narrative that explores how the stories we tell can bridge decades, heal old wounds, and lead us back to who we truly are.
This is an ARC review thanks to a gift from the publisher.
My take: 4 – This feels very much like A League of Their Own, but for women’s basketball, and I absolutely loved that vibe. At its heart, it’s a beautiful story about female friendships, relationships, and the lives of women on and off the court. At the same time, there’s a compelling present-day romance that keeps the story moving and makes it hard to put down. If you enjoy sports stories with a great sapphic romance, this is absolutely a book for you. It’s beautifully written, completely engaging, and I read it in a single day because I couldn’t stop turning the pages to find out what would happen next.
Clutch by Emily Nemens
Goodreads blurb: Emily Nemens’s Clutch follows a group of five women, friends for twenty years, as they go through the biggest challenges of their lives, asking: When you’re hanging on by your fingernails, how can you extend a hand to the ones you love?
As undergrads, Reba, Hillary, Carson, Gregg, and Bella formed the kind of rare bond that college brochures promise—friendship that lasts a lifetime. Two decades later, the women are spread across the country but remain firmly tethered through their ever-unfurling group chat. They’ve made it through COVID and childbirth and midcareer challenges, but no one can anticipate what’s coming down the pike.
The five women converge on Palm Springs for a long overdue Gregg, who has forged a path as a progressive Texas legislator, is facing a huge decision about her political future. Reba, who moved back to the Bay Area after decades away, is deep in IVF treatments while caring for her aging parents and navigating a San Francisco she hardly recognizes. Hillary’s medical career in Chicago is going great—but at home, her husband’s struggles with addiction have derailed their life. In New York City, Bella faces the biggest case in her career as a litigator while her home life crumbles around her, and across the river in Brooklyn, Carson is working on a new novel as well as forging a possible relationship with the father she’s never met.
Twenty years into their shared friendship, the stakes are higher than ever, and they must help one another reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult. Clutch is a big, beautiful, and deeply absorbing novel that asks how much space and heart we can give to our friends and our families, and what space we can save for ourselves.
my take: 3 out of 5. A great premise, a book I wanted to love, but somehow it didn’t gel as much as I wanted to so I just strongly liked instead. I wanted it to go faster, but I did love the women and all the connections that they had and how they handled their issues. The narration is weird both in timing and how it goes back and forth, and its not the most straightforward to follow. Also why are two of the women’s name so evidently male, it was strange at the beginning whilst i was doing audiobook.
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