The Curves Ahead by Kate J. Squires

The Curves Ahead by Kate J. Squires
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Part of a series: No

Read April 2019 (free on Wattpad)

Synopsis (from Goodreads): Curvy Evianna has it all- as the host of a number one talk show, she's adored by millions of Australian TV viewers, has a gorgeous co-star and cash to burn. But the plus-sized model is desperately lonely, battling the body issues that keep her isolated while lusting hopelessly over the delectable man beside her on screen. Realising she can't experience love until she learns to make peace with herself, Evi decides she needs to make some big changes to her life, leaving her safe chair behind the desk and embracing a new adventure. She'll discover self-love, passion and a whole lot about herself as she explores what it really means to be beautiful on the inside.

I struggled with what rating to give this book. There were glaring errors that I'm sure would have been caught by a good editor, but for the most part, I've learned to look over typos and such when reading stories on Wattpad. What was more difficult to bypass was the overt agenda that the author was pushing. While I don't have anything against a heroine who goes on a search for good health and self-acceptance, there were passages in this book that switched from storytelling to full-on teaching mode and it was off-putting.

Still, there were good things that kept me reading to the end. The relationship between our heroine and her personal assistant was warm and engaging. All of the dialogue was vibrant enough that I could hear the Australian accents in my head, and there were many passages that "hit me in the feels", as the kids say. I plan to try another book by this author to see if she has another book that captures all these fun elements without the preaching.

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Series in Progress: The Blessings Series by Beverly Jenkins

The Blessings Series by Beverly Jenkins

Ongoing series, Book #10 published March 2020

I read the first book of this series (Bring on the Blessings) back in 2017 and gave my impressions of it back then. You can read the review here. 

This series, which follows the exploits of the residents of a historic black town in the midwest, is so easy to read that it is like the black equivalent of a Hallmark TV show (Chesapeake Shores comes to mind). There is a town on the brink of bankruptcy, a town savior with a bottomless purse, and a group of kids that need loving role models to turn their lives around. It is a gentle series that is more akin to women's fiction than romance and there is no sex on the page. Unlike Hallmark, Beverly Jenkins does not shy away from serious issues like abuse and broken homes. However, she doesn't linger on them long enough to warrant a content warning and the villains do get dealt with. 

I don't know why it took me two years to get back to the series, but I sped right through books #2 through #9 in the space of a month (April 2019). I'm currently waiting in my library's queue for my chance to chance to check out book #10 because reading each book in this series is like visiting with old friends. This is definitely a series I plan on continuing, and I think it would be a solid choice for a buddy read with your mother or auntie.

The Tea House on Mulberry Street by Sharon Owens

The Tea House on Mulberry Street by Sharon Owens
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Format: audiobook from the library

The Tea House on Mulberry Street is a nice, light bit of women's fiction. The plot follows the owners of Muldoon's Tea Rooms and their troubled marriage, as well as several other people who patronize the tea house while trying to work through problems of their own. Unlike a book such as The Friday Night Knitting Club, however, the characters don't all become friends and insert themselves into each other's lives. Because of this, I could have flipped right past the chapters of characters I didn't care to follow because their stories didn't affect other stories in the book. There was a mix of predictable, unbelievable, and a twist or two that I didn't see coming. One of the predictable storylines was still satisfying because I wanted to see certain characters get their comeuppance.

The narrator for the audiobook was very good. I appreciated hearing an Irish accent in a book set in Belfast; I still can't shake the audiobook I listened to that was set in Australia and used Aussie slang, but neither of the readers did an Aussie accent. I'd rather hear a bad accent than no attempt made at all.

The book includes a recipe for cheesecake, but if this book were on the tea house menu, it would more likely be angel food cake -- a sort of retro dessert that I don't see people eating much these days. The book was published in 2003 but it had the feel of a 1980s movie, especially at the end where the author wraps up everyone's situation. It is also not as racy as some women's fiction I've picked up that has been written in the past couple years. I would have no problem handing this book to my maiden aunt or even my friend who only reads Christian romance.

This was my first time reading a book by Sharon Owens, and I'm on the fence. It wasn't a bad book but I'm not compelled to seek out her other work. However, if it was on the free table at work (yes, my husband's job has such a thing) or I was on a cruise without reading material, I'd pick up another of her books.

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Act Two by Kimberly Stuart

Act Two by Kimberly Stuart
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the story of Sadie Maddox, a classical vocalist who is seeing her CD sales and concert attendance fall as her age rises. Her agent suggests that she pads her bank account by taking a guest professorship in a college music department. However, this means she has to leave her beloved NYC to move to rural Iowa. Will she be able to make the adjustment?

I enjoyed the heroine's biting inner monologue; Kimberly Stuart really brought Sadie to life and I could clearly hear her voice in my head. Having been trained by many years of romantic comedy viewing, to me Sadie sounded exactly like a spoiled diva who would think of Iowa dismissively as a flyover state. She likes shopping and good restaurants and turns her nose up at anything that she views as lowbrow. Yet she rarely says anything harsh out loud, which I appreciated.

However, 24 hours after I finished the book, I found that I wished there had been a little bit more of everything else. I put this on my women's fiction shelf mainly because there wasn't enough of the other elements to classify it differently, in my opinion. Sadie didn't spend enough time with her love interest to call it a romance. There weren't enough scenes of Sadie with her students for it to be a good school story. Sadie didn't show enough growth for it to be a Christian redemption or even a secular redemption story. If any one of those avenues had been pursued a little further, it would have elevated this book. So women's fiction it is for me, by default.

With all that said, I still enjoyed Stuart's writing enough to seek out another one of her books. It definitely passes the "auntie test"; it is not heavily Christian but it is clean. This was a pleasant diversion, even if I felt that nothing much had changed with Sadie in the end.

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The Dirty Book Club by Lisi Harrison

The Dirty Book Club by Lisi Harrison
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

**Read an ARC provided via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review**

Summary (from Goodreads):

M. J. Stark seems to have it all—her dream job as a magazine editor, a sexy doctor boyfriend, and an exciting life in Manhattan—only it’s just an illusion. In reality, she’s still reeling from loneliness after losing her parents and sister. So when a promotion doesn’t go her way and her boyfriend suggests moving out to Pearl Beach, California, to be with him, she jumps at the chance: only to discover that life in California isn’t all beaches and sunshine.


When M.J. finds a mysterious envelope from her elderly neighbor, Gloria, with an invitation to inherit a “dirty book club” started by Gloria and her friends in the 1960s, she and three other women chosen by the original members may just have found a lifeline. As M.J. and the other women bond, each is challenged to rethink her life. Inspired by the women who recruited them, the women in the present-day Dirty Book Club find courage through the power of their burgeoning friendship.

This is your standard women's fiction novel, and that isn't meant as a criticism. Sometimes you want a book that is light and breezy and doesn't particularly break new ground. There isn't anything particularly surprising in the plot. One group of women becomes friends while learning about the lives of another group of lifelong friends who pushed them together. Some of the women go through pretty serious trials, but since they are already long past at the time the novel is set, the book still manages to maintain a fun tone. The book has the pacing of a TV show, so I wasn't surprised to learn that Lisi Harrison worked in development for MTV Networks for many years.

As I suspected, there isn't as much sexual content in this book as the title suggests. There are offhand references to vibrators and orgasms and such, but very little in the way of actual sex scenes, especially in comparison to most contemporary romance novels. Still, based on my highly subjective Auntie Test, this book would be better for your jet-setting flight attendant aunt rather than your more sheltered maiden aunt.

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The Cherry Cola Book Club by Ashton Lee

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Genre: General fiction, possibly women's fiction
Format: Digital audio book checked out from my local library via Overdrive
Read by: Marguerite Gavin
Publication date: April 2013
Heat level: none

Disclaimer: There is an affiliate link for Book Depository at the bottom of this review. If you click through and buy this book or any other book, it would help me out financially. Thanks!

Isn't the cover of this book lovely? I must admit that I added the book to my library wish list based on the title and the cover alone. Anyway . . .

The Cherry Cola Book Club by Ashton Lee is the story of a failing library in Cherico, MS. The head librarian is Maura Beth Mayhew. She got the job right after receiving her library science degree and she is determined to make a go of it, despite the City Council's desire to shut the library down and redirect its pitiful budget towards building an industrial park. In an effort to remind the residents of the library's benefits, Maura Beth starts the Cherry Cola Book Club. Will the book club help Maura Beth save the library and her job?

Although the term "cozy" in the book world usually refers to a type of mystery novel, I think it fits this book well. Nothing violent or too shocking happens to anyone and the only sexual content is so far behind closed doors that you could hand this book to your grandmother without blushing. Because of this, some readers may find the story too slow. It took a while to get to the first book club meeting and the author did bang the drum a bit too much about the benefits of the public library. Perhaps there is someone out there who needs to be reminded of the library's importance to the community, but as a reader who gets at least 95% of her reading material from the local library, I felt like Lee's efforts were lost on me.

Perhaps my sexism or limited education is showing, but I was surprised to find that the author, Ashton Lee, is male. I'm not accustomed to reading this style of fiction written by men. This is an accessible comfort-food sort of book. I would call it women's fiction, but it isn't that highbrow or literary and I'm not sure that Maura Beth, our heroine, goes through that much emotional growth. I would be more likely to recommend to a female friend than a male friend, though, and that is the target for women's fiction.

The very traits that may turn some readers away from this book may attract other readers. I didn't realize until I was halfway through the novel that this is the first book in an ongoing series. For that reason, I can excuse all the character bonding that didn't seem to go anywhere; it was all part of getting the reader to care about the characters so they will want to pick up the next book. I did enjoy reading about small-town life and characters of all different ages. Also, the scenes describing the book club meeting towards the end of the novel moved me enough to add another star to my rating of the book.

Since I did experience this in audio form, I would like to add a word about the narrator, Marguerite Gavin. It is difficult for me to listen to actors doing southern accents because a lot of times there are exaggerated. However, Gavin did a very good job with both the male and female characters. She has recorded over 400 books across a variety of genres, so chances are if you listen to audio books you may have already heard her.

I would say that The Cherry Cola Book Club feels like the first episode of a family TV show of yore. There is a little excitement -- not enough to shock you, but just enough to make you want to pick up the next episode (book) and find out how Maura Beth and her friends are getting on.


The Cherry Cola Book Club on Overdrive
The Cherry Cola Book Club on Book Depository

The Wives' Revenge by Lindsey Hutchinson

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Genre: Women's Fiction

Format: Free digital ARC provided via Netgalley in exchange for honest review

Expected publication date: 01 Jul 2017

Heat level: None

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The Wives' Revenge by Lindsey Hutchinson is the story of the Wednesbury Wives, a group of friends living in a poverty-stricken English village in 1884. This small group is an informal mafia of sorts who can be counted on by the other women of the village to help in situations that the police of that time usually ignored, such as a husband beating his wife. The book spans many years, from the time Violet, the daughter of one of the Wives, was in elementary school until well into her adult years.

I don't know the official term used in the publishing world for this type of book, but I would call it a slice-of-life novel or perhaps a family saga. It doesn't focus on one big problem that needs to be resolved. Instead, there is a series of anecdotes in chronological order that show how the Wednesbury Wives gain power and respect over time. It has a rhythm of showing the reader a problem, telling the reader how the Wives solved the problem, then moving on to the next problem. 

Hutchinson's writing style was troublesome for me at first because I didn't feel like I was there with the characters; it was like someone describing a movie to you instead of you watching the movie yourself. Somewhere around the 30% mark, however, the story became more engaging. I believe the inclusion of more dialogue was the key. I would rather read what the characters actually said than to have the narrative text just tell me that they talked.

While some of the topics that this book touches on (rape, wife beating, abortion, poverty) are pretty serious, there is a simplicity to it that may or may not appeal to certain readers. There wasn't much to set the Wives apart from each other except for their names; the dialogue made them sound almost interchangeable. The ease with which they came up with a solution for every problem may strike some readers as unrealistic. I was able to accept all of that, but there were certain punishments the Wives administered that I had trouble overlooking. 

Despite the flaws I mentioned, this wasn't too bad for a weekend read. If you want to indulge in some escapism that doesn't involve magic or superheroes yet the bad guys still get their comeuppance, you may want to give this a try.

The Wives' Revenge on Amazon

The Garden of Small Beginnings by Abbi Waxman

My rating: 2 out of 5 stars
Genre: General adult fiction, women's fiction
Format: Free ARC through Penguin's First to Read program (no compensation for review)
Expected publication date: 02 May 2017


Disclaimer: There are affiliate links in this post. If you click through and make a purchase, I will get a few coins and my coffee budget will thank you. However, if you are skint and have to borrow the book from your library, I understand.


The Garden of Small Beginnings by Abbi Waxman is a novel about the aftermath of grief. Not the immediate aftermath, but what a person goes through after the casseroles stop coming and friends stop tiptoeing around. Thankfully, it avoids the tendency to make the grieving widow look like a freak because she wasn't ready to start dating a year after losing her spouse.

At the opening of the book, Lilian has been a widow for three years. After her husband's death in a car accident, she had a mental breakdown and had to be hospitalized. With the help of family, friends, and a good doctor, Lilian was able to get back to handling the normal routines of her life like going to her job as a textbook illustrator and taking care of her two young daughters. That was a major achievement, but now the sameness of her life is starting to get to her. That's when Lilian's boss signs her up for a gardening class so she can illustrate a set of gardening guides and a group of new friends comes into her life.

The subject may give the impression that this story is maudlin, but that isn't the case. The banter between Lilian and other characters is lively, while the expression of what it felt like for Lilian to witness her husband's death and go through a breakdown was moving. The little interstitial bits about how to grow different vegetables felt almost like a gimmick, but they don't detract from the enjoyment of the book and are easy to skip.

Stories that revolve around a group of disparate strangers who encounter each other through an activity like a knitting group or a cooking class can suffer from the issue of telling instead of showing. Waxman avoided this problem by showing every scene from Lilian's point of view. Any information the reader finds out about the other characters is the result of Lilian seeing it or hearing it herself. This makes the story feel much more active than when an invisible narrator just tells you everything the characters are doing.

In The Garden of Small Beginnings, Waxman has given us a contemporary view of creating a new life after loss. There is nothing revolutionary or shocking in the outcome of the story, but it is still one that can be appreciated by mature readers who have gone through such a tragedy themselves.


The Garden of Small Beginnings at Amazon
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The Garden of Small Beginnings at Overdrive

Bring on the Blessings by Beverly Jenkins

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Genre: Women's fiction
Format: Kindle e-book
Sweet or hot?: Sweet; there are references to sex but no explicit scenes and a few four-letter words

Disclaimer: There are affiliate links in this post. If you click through and make a purchase, I will get a few coins and my coffee budget will thank you. However, if you are skint and have to borrow the book from your library, I understand.

Beverly Jenkins is an author whose name is bandied about a lot on blogs and podcasts that focus on romance novels. In fact, if those were your only sources of information, you may come to believe that Jenkins is the only black romance author in America. She is certainly the first one mentioned whenever someone asks for romances written by people of color. Because I tend to be a contrary soul, I have resisted picking up any of her books partly for that reason. However, in an effort to break out of my rut and read more black authors, I picked up one of her books. Leave it to me to pick one of the few books in her catalog that isn't a romance! Anyway . . .

Bring on the Blessings starts off with the story of how Bernadine Brown became a multimillionaire and decided to put her money to good use. In her case, that turned out to be buying a town that was deeply in debt. Since it was one of the original townships set up by freed slaves after the Civil War, many people are interested in keeping it alive and preserving its history. Add in a few foster kids and some townspeople who aren't happy about the town's new owner, and you have the setup for this novel.

I would say that this book would be filed under "women's fiction" rather than romance. It endeavors to be the story of the redemption of a town and as such follows an ensemble cast rather than focusing on one hero and heroine. There are slight romantic elements but they aren't the main focus of the book. The majority of the characters, including the romantic couples, are over 30 which makes a refreshing change from the 18-year-old virgins in most of the historical romances I read. Yes, I said "couples" because there are two couples making eyes at each other. One doesn't end up together (yet) and the conflict keeping the other couple apart is solved with one quick conversation. There is a nod to a third possible couple that may get together in a future book.

This is the first book of six, and it feels like it. I didn't get hooked by the story until about 50% of the way into it because the first half involved fleshing out the details already disclosed in the summary. This isn't necessarily a bad thing when all six books have already been published and I can get the next one at the click of a button on my library's website. I would have been more disappointed if I was reading this back in 2009 when it was published and had to wait another year for the next book.

I get the feeling from this first entry in the Blessings series that these will be what I call gentle books. Nothing momentous happens; any conflicts are resolved quickly. Some people may call that dull or unrealistic, but I think there is a readership for books where a white knight (who happens to be a black woman for a change -- huzzah!) sweeps in with a seemingly bottomless purse and a magic contact list to solve all the problems. The key to making this kind of story enjoyable is to create characters that a reader wants to spend time with, and I think Jenkins has done just that. I'll definitely be reading the next book.

Bring on the Blessings at Overdrive
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Bring on the Blessings at Amazon

Farewell, Dorothy Parker by Ellen Meister

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Genre: Women's fiction, fantasy
Format: mp3 audiobook downloaded from public library
Sweet or hot?: Medium; no graphic sex scenes but the F-bomb is dropped several times

Disclaimer: There are affiliate links in this post. If you click through and make a purchase, I will get a few coins and my coffee budget will thank you. However, if you are skint and have to borrow the book from your library, I understand.

This is one of those books that I'm never sure how to classify. It is closer to women's fiction than chick lit or romance. There is a ghost but I wouldn't call it fantasy and it is definitely not horror. There are serious themes but it is too light to be magical realism, which is more literary. I guess I'll just call it "fiction" and move on . . .

Farewell, Dorothy Parker by Ellen Meister is the story of  Violet Epps, a movie critic who writes biting reviews for a prominent weekly entertainment magazine but is timid in her real life. At the start of the story, Violet has several tough issues to face but crippling social anxiety is keeping her from handling them well. She schedules lunch at the Algonquin Hotel, frequent dining spot of Dorothy Parker and the Vicious Circle, to calm herself and gather strength to do what needs to be done. Little did she know that the spirit of Dorothy Parker herself would hitch a ride in her handbag.

I experienced this story on audio and I can't imagine doing it any other way. While Angela Brazil is not one of my favorite narrators, I adored her Dorothy Parker voice. It made me picture bobbed hair, cocktail glasses, and 1930s movies. I don't think I could conjure that voice in my head if I was reading it on the page.

Technically this isn't a novel about time travel because Dorothy Parker is a ghost, but it still hit those beats for me. The conversations between Violet and Dorothy Parker, where they were making comparisons between the culture of the past and the present day, were some of the best in the book. Meister says in the author's note at the end that she is a longtime fan of Dorothy Parker, and it shows in the writing. Meister also did a good job conveying the importance of the events in Violet's life that turned her into a meek, unassuming adult. We as readers do spend a good bit of time in Violet's head revisiting some events but it never feels like a rehash because Meister shows us something new each time we go back.

I'd say that this is a good book for anyone who wants to take a break from all the "murder with a side of pie" mystery novels that seem to be marketed to women my age. Romance is not a focus of the story so you can hand this book to your Aunt Pearl without worrying about sex scenes, but you may want to warn her that the F-word comes up once or twice.

Farewell, Dorothy Parker at Overdrive
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