Book Review: The Letter Tree by Rachel Fordham

FIVE STARS

I loved this book. Just everything about it. I especially loved the idea of two strangers exchanging notes, using a hole in a tree as a mailbox. Issac and Laura knew each other as children, but after Laura’s mother passed away and a family feud ensued between the Campbells and the Bradshaws, their friendship ended. It was all about loyalty to family.

It started when Laura hid some poetry in the tree. She didn’t want anybody to see it. Then Issac, still a rapscallion of a kid, found it and left a note in its place. He didn’t know who had written the poem and when he left his note, he didn’t sign his name. When Laura went back to the tree to retrieve her work, she found the note instead. This started a campaign of writing notes and letters between them that revealed their hopes, dreams, and what was in the hearts to another person they did not know. But their words mattered. What was said carried each of them through some difficult times as well as some happy times. They got to see what was in the heart of the other without something like physical attraction muting the importance of that. What isn’t to love about that?

Laura Bradshaw is a bit of a recluse, mostly because her father doesn’t want her going out with the wrong people and putting a mark on the family name. Her mother is gone and her best friend is the housekeeper, Mrs. Guskin, and Laura’s pet macaw, who has a colorful vocabulary. She loves books and animals and spends a lot of time at the zoo, mostly to drop letters in the tree to pick them up. She doesn’t tell anyone, but Mrs. Guskin knows something is up and lays money aside to help Laura pay for admittance to the zoo. Laura is caught up in fairy tales and longs for a prince to save her, but it seems her prince is Abel, rather than the letter writer. She wants to please her father and he likes Abel… you get where this is going.

Issac, on the other hand, is a socialite. He’s seen with the right girls at the right time and gets noticed. He knows his father wants him to take over the shoe factory someday and plans for that, but he discovers he has other talents. His father doesn’t give him a whole lot of responsibility and it drives him nuts. He wants to do something and be his own man.

It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted two characters to get their happily-ever-after like I wanted Issac and Laura to get theirs. The family feud was their biggest obstacle, but there were other things that were holding them back, too, that made the two of them turn into amateur detectives, another element of the book that I enjoyed.

Ultimately, this is a book packed with emotion, revelations for everyone that I didn’t expect, and a true love wins ending. The epilogue was fantastic and had me laughing out loud.

Great read!

*I received a complimentary copy of this book from NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Book Review: The Duke She Married (The Atwood Sisters, #1) by Jessie Clever

FOUR STARS

Lucas Bennett, the Duke of Greyfair or the Ghoul of Greyfair needs an heir and in order to get that, he needs a wife. It sounds simple enough to the average guy, but he’s horribly scarred from a fire and that makes things a bit more challenging. In addition to that, rumors abound that he murdered his wife. Yeah, getting a new wife was going to be easy for him. He arranged to get one of the Atwood sisters, none of whom he’d met, and ended up with Amelia.

Amelia was everything I like in a heroine. She was sweet, compassionate, innocent, didn’t judge anybody, knew her mind but wasn’t overbearing, and even a bit vulnerable. She wasn’t at all what Lucas had expected, but he needed her, even if he didn’t realize it, and she needed him even if it was just for someone to love and accept her.

This story rocked on every level. There was angst, steam, and it was wonderful to watch these two fall in love and heal each other at the same time.

The reason I’m giving it four stars is because there was one big character description of Lucas that was missing…at least, I didn’t see it and there were plenty of opportunities to provide it, even as a reminder. There was no mention of his hair color. We got reminders of his blue eyes and his scars, but nothing on his hair color. I know it sounds trivial and petty, but I love it when I can see the characters in my head. It helps me connect with them.

Still a great story and I will continue with the series.

This has nothing to do with the review or the rating, but who is the guy on the cover? Lucas was scarred on the right side of his face. The guy on the cover is as handsome as all get out, but he isn’t Lucas.

Book Review: Ride the Savage Sea by Mallory Burgess

FOUR STARS

I liked this book a lot, but I didn’t love it. I liked Thom okay until he hit Cecily and the way he kept running away from everything made him totally untrustworthy. She moved the heavens and the earth for him and he did not deserve it.

When they met, she was seventeen and he was at least twenty years older than she. When this book was written in 1985, that was a thing and didn’t bother most readers, I guess. It’s always been a point of contention for me, even back then. These old perverts bed down with these teenagers, tell them they love them, build up their hopes and dreams, get them knocked up, and then they die later in life, leaving these women to be widows for years. It doesn’t seem fair.

I digress.

Thom first meets Cecily at a ball and was taken with her, of course, but he does a rescue when Denys de Uvedale tries to rape her while the members of the house party are out hunting. Denys and Thom get into a bidding war for her with her brother, Owen, and Thom wins. SOLD!

Cecily is part of the queen’s court and shares a room with Denys’ wicked sister, Leilah, who is so mean to Cecily and is a great antagonist, as is Denys and especially Bryan Cabot, the banker from Scotland. I would say her brother, Owen, may be a villain, too. He started out genuinely caring about Cecy and here well-being, but got lost in the greed and lust of the court.

Cecily was a strong character and I liked her, but she was always chasing after Thom and putting her life at risk for a man who’d given her a fist to the face, said cruel things to her, raped her, and abandoned her. He didn’t deserve even one thought from her let alone compassion or love. He wasn’t worth it. His apologies lacked depth and had no meaning. His self-deprecation and whining about what a bad guy he was…well, he got that part right. That’s’ about the only thing he got right.

This book scores in all other areas, though. I liked Cecily and Sir Walter Raleigh and their friendship. They were closer than normal friends would be; closer enough to be more than friends, but it worked.

There was adventure, sorrow, angst, and steam, good guys and some really bad guys. Had I liked and trusted Thom, this would’ve been a solid five star read, but he was too old and abandoned Cecily when she needed him the most. He’s a zero as a hero.

Book Review: Son of Thunder (Heavenly Wars #1) by S.C. Mitchell

FOUR STARS

I wasn’t crazy about this book. It came up on a list of freebies for my birthday and I was in a reading slump and decided to give this a try. I needed something different and I got it. It wasn’t a horrible book and I did enjoy it overall, but every time I read Jord’s name, I thought of Chris Hemsworth as Thor in the movies, who was actually Jord’s father in this book. I guess that’s fanfiction for you, not something I normally read, but this was okay.

Jord is the son of Thor. Meghan is a curator at a museum–I think she was a curator. The book was so long, I forgot what her job was. She worked in a museum for sure and that’s how she met “Professor Thorson”, who was actually Jord. He came to check out some artifact that had mysteriously showed up at the museum. It was his father’s belt and his father was missing. Yes, that’s it. The belt attached itself to Meghan and that kept her linked to Jord, who was on a quest to find his father.

I’d heard of Ragnarock. I did watch the Thor movies, only because Chris Hemsworth is hot and I liked the stories about Thor, but I didn’t really know what it was. I wasn’t sure even as this story unfolded and finally googled it then the light came on.

This sort of thing really isn’t my genre and I don’t want to leave an unfair review. I did like the story. It was full of action, some suspense, a bit or romance, and it would be easy to see it as a movie. With that being said, there was a scene in the book that stuck with me. Meghan asked how the gods were created and Jord told her humans created the gods. They needed something to believe in. That made me think. There’s probably some truth to that, although I don’t doubt the existence of an all-knowing, all-seeing God that cannot be destroyed. Even the Norse gods believe that. I think one of them said something to the effect that there is a power higher than them.

Regardless, I did enjoy the book. I really loved Jord, Meghan, the rest of the good gods, and I didn’t like the evil god, Loki and his pals. It was intended to be that way and the book was successful in that way.

The short story at the end was pretty good, too. Requiem for Poseidon. I had no idea Poseidon was dead or that he had a garden beneath the sea. Nor did I know that two gods could meld into one and become a reckoning force to destroy evil. Can they undo that once it’s done?

This was a good read and a pleasant diversion.

Book Review: Warrior Queen (Guinevere Book #4) by Fil Reid

FOUR STARS

I have to admit that I have never given King Arthur and/or Guinevere much thought. Of course I’ve heard the legend of King Arthur and his sword and I know Guinevere played a big part in all of it, but until I read this book, I didn’t realize just how important she was. There are doubts that either Arthur or Guinevere even existed, so to think that they did made for a lively story.

Legend or not, I loved King Arthur. He was strong, handsome, a good and faithful husband who loved his wife and family (stepbrother excluded), and a fair and honest High King. Guinevere was most definitely his right hand. He knew she was from another time and respected her point of view on many topics and treated her as an equal rather than property. She angered him a few times, but it never lasted long.

Guinevere was the warrior queen. She was able to defend herself and lead men probably as well as her husband, but she never let it go to her head and she never usurped his authority. Even if she was a warrior, she was a mother, a wife, a friend, and loved Arthur with so much passion that it leaped off the pages, even with the closed door scenes.

I gave this book four stars for two reasons and both due to the blurb.

1. I hate it when I pick up a book that’s in a series only to find out that I needed to read the previous books. There was no mention of that in the blurb. The author did a pretty good job of trying to bring the reader up to speed, but I know I missed so much. I missed Guinevere doing the time travel, meeting Arthur, the two of them getting married, and how was it she was so close to Merlin? I know she was madly in love with Arthur, but I got the feeling she may have been a little in love with him, too. I wasn’t totally lost, but I would’ve enjoyed the story much more had I read the first three books.

2. Quote from the blurb:

Can there be a happy ending for Gwen and Arthur, or is it written in stone that he must die?

Why ask the question if you aren’t going to answer it? The story ends with a bit of a cliffhanger, but it has nothing to do that question. I kept reading because I wanted to know and now I never will.

This really was an amazing book. There was war, angst, grief, and love. I chuckled a few times, cried more than I thought possible, and cared about the characters, especially Merlin. I want to be his friend.

This would have been a five star read had the blurb not been disingenuous and misleading. The previous books in the series really should be read before reading this one. Writing the blurb is harder than writing the novel itself, but so much lies on it and I feel a little cheated that I didn’t get the answer to that question.

Still a great read!

*I received a complimentary copy of this book from NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.