Happy Tuesday, it’s book of the week day again. and I think maybe the Deanna Raybourn was my favourite-favourite last week – but that’s the eighth in the series and the given that i’s nearly the end of June and thus the end of Pride month, it’s maybe fitting that the last BotW of the month is a queer romance.
Dream On, Ramona Riley is both a small town romance and a normal person and famous person one. When Ramona’s mum ran away, teenage Ramona helped her dad with her baby sister until Ramona left for college. Then when her dad was involved in an accident, she dropped out and gave up her dreams of a career in costume design to come home and help her family again. But now Olive is about to leave for college and Ramona’s best friend wants her to give up her job in the local diner and pursue her dreams again. And it just happens that this summer there is a big budget Hollywood rom-com coming to film in town, that might give Ramona the chance to kickstart her dreams. The only problem is that one of the stars of the movie is Dylan Monroe, the actress daughter of two 90s rock stars and also Ramona’s first kiss, one magical night back when she was a teenager, and now Ramona has to teach her to waitress and other Normal People things.
I realise that that seems like it’s already quite a lot of plot, but actually it really is just the set up and there’s loads more that happens after that and I’m not spoiling anything. This has got the same sort of witty dialogue that Ashley Herring Blake’s previous series Bright Falls has – and actually in a delightful crossover between the old series and the new, the movie that is being filmed is based on one of Iris’s books. It’s got a culture clash between the small town life and the famous people one, Dyland has got a lot of issues about her upbringing that she’s working her way through and the two heroines are keeping so many secrets from each other it’s a wonder they manage to sort it all out satisfactorily at the end, but they do, and I’m almost convinced that they’re going to manage to make it work despite their very different life experiences. It’s got quite a lot of sex scenes in it – more I think than the Bright Falls series and some language in them that I don’t love, but hey, each to their own, at least nothing was described as oozing or dripping…
I’ve already got the second in this series, Get Over It, April Evans, on the shelf after my trip to Gay’s the Word, whcih was actualyl the catalyst for reading the first one, and there is a third (and maybe final?) book in the series, Take a Chance, Sasha Sinclair, coming out in September, so you never know by the end of the year I may even have read the whole series! I definitely enjoyed this one enough that I won’t delay reading the next one too long.
I bought this in Saucy Books back at the end of last summer, but I’ve seen it in a bunch of other bookshops since then too. And it’s available on Kindle and Kobo too.
Happy Reading!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 