March 2023 Wrap Up

On 2023-03-312023-03-30 By JolieIn ARC, Ballantine Books, book review, Crooked Lane Books, Dancing Lemur Press, Del Rey, Independent Book Publisher's Association, Level Best Books, Member's Titles, Minotaur Books, NetGalley, Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine, Sourcebooks Casablanca, St. Martin's Griffin, St. Martin's Press, Wednesday Books1 Comment

Here is what I read/posted in March.

As always, let me know if you have read any of these books and (if you did) what you thought of them.

Books I Read:

**ARC from Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine, Ballantine Books**

**ARC from St. Martin’s Press, St. Martin’s Griffin**

**ARC from St. Martin’s Press, Wednesday Books**

**ARC from St. Martin’s Press, Minotaur Books**

**ARC from Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine, Dell**

**ARC from St. Martin’s Press, St. Martin’s Paperbacks**

Books I got from NetGalley:

**Read Now from St. Martin’s Press, Wednesday Books**

**Read Now from St. Martin’s Press, St. Martin’s Griffin**

**Read Now from St. Martin’s Press, Minotaur Books**

**Invite from St. Martin’s Press, Minotaur Books**

**Wish granted from Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine, Del Rey**

**Invite from Level Best Books, Independent Books Publishers Association, Members Titles**

**Wished granted from Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine, Del Rey**

**Invite from St. Martin’s Press, Wednesday Books**

**Invite from** **Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine, Bantam**

**Wish Granted from Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine, Ballantine Books**

**Limited time Read Now from Sourcebook Casablanca**

**Wish granted from Sourcebooks Casablanca**

Books I got from Authors/Indie Publishers:

Giveaway Winners

**Goodreads Giveaway Winner through William Morrow—Hardcover**

Books Reviewed:

The Things We Do To Our Friends—review here

Too Wrong to Be Right—review here

The Shadow of Theron—review here

Mad Honey—review here

A Paroxysm of Fear—review here

The Last Lap—review here

Mr. & Mrs. Witch—review here

Missing Clarissa—review here

What Have We Done—review here

Off the Map—review here

Solomon’s Crown—review here

For Our Soul—review here

AI—review here

Not That Kind of Ever After—review here

The Fake—review here

Peril in Paradise—review here

Yours Truly, The Duke—review here

Hotel of Secrets—review here

Reading Challenges

Buzzword Reading Challenge (words in the title like secret, secretive, secrets)—A Dangerous Secret—Finished 3-6-2023

2023 Sami Parker Reads Title Challenge (A book with one of these words in the title: Ice, Snow, Flurry, or Blizzard)—Ice—Finished 3-6-2023

Cover Scavenger Hunt 2023 (Food)—The Obituary Society—Finished 3-10-2023

The StoryGraph’s Onboarding Reading Challenge (read a book from your StoryGraph recommendations)—Beautiful Demons—Finished 3-10-2023

The StoryGraph Reads the World (Cuba)—Of Women and Salt—Finished 3-12-2023

The StoryGraph’s Genre Challenge (a sapphic romance)—She Who Became the Sun—Finished 3-22-2023

Beat the Backlist 2023 (about dragons or robots)—The Glow of the Dragon’s Heart—Finished 3-22-2023

Scavenger Hunt TBR Book Challenge (what is the most common letter in the title of the last book you read for this challenge. Find a book with a title that starts with that letter)—Even the Moon has Scars—Finished 3-23-2023

Scavenger Hunt (the prettiest book in your TBR)—The Watchmaker’s Daughter—Finished 3-23-2023

Popsugar Reading Challenge 2023 (A book about a vacation)—The Swap—Finished 3-24-2023

2023 TBR Toppler (the first book in a series)—The Last Artifact—Finished 3-26-23

2023 Monthly Themes (March of the Memoirs)—In the Dream House—Finished 3-1-23

2023 Reading Challenge (A book in a series you already started)—Catching Fire—Finished 3-27-23

2023 ABC Challenge (C)—Contained—Finished 3-6-2023

Romanceopoly 2023 (Killer crescent: read a mystery or thriller of your choosing)—Malevolent—Finished 3-1-23

2023 TBR Prompts (a book written about women in STEM or a book with a strong female lead)—Vicious Delights—Finished 3-28-2023

Bookish Travels—March 2023 Destinations

On 2023-03-30 By JolieIn book review2 Comments

This meme is what it says: Places I travel to in books each month. Books are lovely and take you to places you would never get to. That includes places of fantasy too!!

Bon Voyage!!

Please let me know if you have read these books or traveled to these areas.

United States

**New York (Haverford, Limerick, Johnstown), Connecticut (Ashford, Canterbury, Bayfield)**, **Pennsylvania (Philidelphia)**

**Iowa (Iowa City), Pennsylvania (Philidelphia, Allentown)**, **Georgia (Savannah)**, **Indiana (Bloomington)**, **New York (New York City)**

**Louisiana (New Orleans, Algiers Point, French Quarter, Port Sulphur)**

**Florida (Key West, Orlando)**, **Georgia (Atlanta)**

**California (post-apocalyptic Sacramento)**

**Washington D.C., West Virginia, Pennsylvania (Chestertown, Philadelphia), Florida (Miami)**

**Nebraska (Auburn), Wyoming (Rock Springs)**

**Hawaii (Maui, Maalaea Bay, Lahaina, Wailuku)**

**Oregon (countryside), California (Los Angeles)**

**Massachusetts (Boston)**, **New York (New York City)**

South Africa

France

**Paris, Aquitaine, Rouen**, **Nantes, Brittany, Rennes, Poitiers**

England

Montriga

Scotland

**Scottish Highlands, Arach Caim, Glasgow**

Ireland

**Dublin, Tralee**, **Wicklow Mountains, Donegal, Ballybunion**

Argentina

Cuba

Mexico

The Afterlife

India

Canada

China

**Southern Henan (Huai River Plains, Zhongli, Wuhuang, Anfeng, Anyang, Lu, Jiankang, Bianliang), Hichetu (Shanxi)**

Austria

Erlanis Empire

Spain

**The Cantabrian Mountains**, **Los Picos De Europa**, **Costa Brava**, **Toledo**

Turkey

Italy

Morocco

Holland

Gibraltar

Panem

**District 12, District 11, District 8**, **Capitol, District 13**

Isle of Midnight

Angawunde

Not That Kind of Ever After by Luci Adams

On 2023-03-21 By JolieIn ARC, book review, NetGalley, St. Martin's Griffin, St. Martin's Press2 Comments

Star Rating: 3

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press, St. Martin’s Griffin

Date of publication: March 14th, 2023

Genre: Romance, Contemporary, Chick Lit, Fiction, Contemporary Romance, Adult, British Literature, New Adult

Purchase Links: Kindle | Audible | B&N | AbeBooks | WorldCat

Goodreads Synopsis:

Fairytale meets feminism in Luci Adams’s Not That Kind of Ever After, a frothy adventure of one woman’s journey to claim happily ever after in times of serial dating, swiping right, and the quest to find your soulmate…

Bella Marble’s life isn’t what she imagined. Instead of an author, she’s receptionist at a small press. Instead of happily married, she’s single, and her lovey-dovey parents are divorcing. And to top it off, her best friend of twenty-nine years, Ellie Mathews, is moving out and marrying the heinously boring Mark. (He’s not worthy of her. No one could be). Bella feels rudderless, only slightly soothed by time spent with Ellie’s (not hot) brother, (he’s not hot) Marty (okay, he’s hot. But he’s also the aggravating brother she never had—right)?

When Marty recommends Bella stop looking for “the one” and just have fun, Bella finds a new, empowered side of herself. But when she posts a fairy-tale retelling of a disastrous one night stand on a storytelling app, all of a sudden, Bella has become B.Enchanted. And she’s gone viral.

Now, Bella’s in a fight with Ellie, her new roommates are so, deeply, weird, and the pressure is mounting to find new fairy tales to write about—but she’s got to live them first.

First Line:

It came, unlike me, while I was riding backward cowgirl on what must have been the hairiest man in London.
Not That Kind of Ever After by Luci Adams

Not That Kind of Ever After is the story of Bella and how her life fell apart, got put back together, fell apart again, and got together again. Bella’s life isn’t what she thought it was going to be. She would be an author, live an extraordinary life, and be married. Instead, she’s a receptionist at a publishing house, isn’t living her dream life, and is single. In a matter of days, her life gets turned upside down when her best friend moves out and gets engaged to a man Bella can’t stand. Then she finds out her parents are getting divorced. But there is an upside to everything. She is rewriting her bad dates as fairytale retellings on a storytelling app, and she has gone viral. But as soon as she thinks she has everything, things come crashing down. A fight with her best friend, being rejected for dates (which means no stories), and weird roommates litter her life now. Can Bella get out of her way and get back on track? Or will she be stuck in the same rut forever?

I was not a fan of Bella. Oh, at first, I liked her. She was funny and seemed like a great friend. But she began to wear on me after a chapter (yes, a chapter). She was high maintenance and not in a good way. She always had to be the center of attention and literally pouted when it wasn’t on her (Ellie’s moving out/engagement party). And lastly, she was highly immature. I could have dealt with the other faults and liked her. But it was her immatureness that ruined her character for me. Put it this way, I felt for Ellie’s fiancee and her roommates.

I did like that the author took Bella’s romantic hijinks and had Bella turn them into romance fairytales. It gave me a fresh way of looking at the fairytales and a giggle.

The side characters were well-written in Not That Kind of Ever After. I sympathized with them because I didn’t know how they tolerated the drunken, immature mess that Bella had evolved into.

Bella did experience character growth during this book. There was a point in the book where Bella realized that maybe she was doing everything to herself, and she tried to fix everything. It was nice to read that, but the damage was done in my eyes with her. Like a real-life person, I didn’t want a character to be a constant drama llama, and Bella was.

The romance angle of the book was interesting to read. While I think I figured out who Bella ended up with, I needed clarification. So, I wouldn’t label this a HEA with her on the romance front.

There is a lot of sex in Not That Kind of Ever After. What I liked is that the sex experiences ran the gauntlet. They went from bad to good to out-of-this-world fantastic. The author even threw in a menage for Bella to experience.

The end of Not That Kind of Ever After was interesting. I liked that the author wrapped everything up. I am not going to get into anything other than that, other than the ending was very fitting for the book.

I would recommend Not That Kind of Ever After to anyone over 21. There is language, mild violence, and sexual situations.

Many thanks to St. Martin’s Press, St. Martin’s Griffin, NetGalley, and Luci Adams for allowing me to read and review Not That Kind of Ever After. All opinions stated in this review are mine.

If you enjoyed reading this review of Not That Kind of Ever After, you will enjoy reading these books: