Tag: religious themes

book round-ups, Recommendsday

Recommendsday: March Quick reviews

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Another month, another batch of mini reviews. I’ve already written about so many books this month, I was almost surprised that I had anything left to write about, and yet here are three more…

Weather Girl by Rachel Lynn Solomons

Ari is a weather presenter at a Seattle TV station. Russell is one of the station’s sport reporters. Both of them are being driven mad by their bosses. Ari wants Torrence – the station’s star meterologist – to give her more mentoring but Torrence is too distracted by fighting with her ex husband – the station’s news director Seth. Russell wants off the college sports beat and onto pro sports, but Seth is paying too much attention to his fight with his exwife to take him seriously. After a disastrous Christmas party, Ari and Russell decide to team up to try and get Torrence and Seth back together. But over the course of their plan, the two of them end up spending a lot of time together too… I liked this a lot more than I liked the first book in the series – for some reason the romance in this just clicked for me. Ari and Russell make a great couple and each of them have valid reasons for avoiding relationships, but they work through them like sensible people (for the most part) rather than having dramatic Big Misunderstandings all the time. I also loved the fact that it had a Jewish hero and heroine – which is something I’d like to read more of! Lots of fun – would probably have been BotW if I hadn’t read Better Luck Next Time the same week.

With Love from Rose Bend by Naima Simone*

Owen is a former football player in hiding from the world after the accident that caused him to call time on his career. Leo is hiding from adult relationships by being constantly busy running her family’s business. Leo wants Owen to judge a contest at a town festival – but when she turned up at his house to ask him, she realises he’s the man she has a steamy one night stand with a year ago. And it gets slightly more complicated than that as a fake relationship element is added to the mix too. I’ve mentioned before that I like a sports romance and I also like a competent heroine and this ticked my noses in that front. Lovey weekend afternoon reading!

Sex Cult Nun by Faith Jones

Now this is a weird one. I’ve included it here because I think some of you will have seen it on my lists and known exactly why I was reading it – my ongoing interest in weird religious stuff -and wondered why I haven’t written about it’s so now I am and here is your answer: it is brutal. It’s bleak. It’s filled with child abuse, child sexual abuse, sexual abuse, neglect. But it’s also not as well written as say Educated and I don’t think the author has really come to terms with what happened to her, so it doesn’t actually really get you anywhere or give you a takeaway at the end. So it ends up just being a lot of really grim abuse without as much breaking away from it as you want/expect/hope.

And that’s the lot – and I know that’s a bit of a downbeat note to end on, but I couldn’t make any other order of the reviews feel any better!

American imports, Book of the Week

Book of the Week: Bring on the Blessings

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I really enjoyed my reading last week – writing the Diverse Romance post sent me off down a rabbit hole of library loans and kindle bargains and mailing list freebies and they all really lifted my mood.  So it’s fitting that one of the authors I mentioned in that is my pick this week for BotW.

Cover of Bring on the Blessings

Bring on the Blessings is the first in Beverly Jenkins’ Blessings series.  It tells the story of Bernadine Brown who, when she  catches her husband cheating on her on her fifty-second birthday, takes him for half of his (vast) fortune and uses it to buy a struggling town on ebay with a view to turning it to give foster kids a second chance at life.  This story introduces you to Bernadine, the historic black township of Henry Adams, Kansas, and its residents.  Bernadine is trying to pay back her blessing from God (the cash from her divorce settlement) by doing some good and paying it forward and giving back is the main theme of a lot of the storylines.    As well as Bernadine, there are five foster children from across the country and the families that are going to look after them, as well as various other town residents.

First thing to say: This is not a romance.  It has romantic elements, but there is no Happily Ever After for anyone at the end of Bring on the Blessings. What it does have is the set up and first phase of an overarching plot for the series and some incremental progress into resolutions for each of the story threads. I’ve struggled a little bit to figure out exactly which genre it fits in to to be honest, but Goodreads lists its as Romance, Fiction and Christian Fiction and Amazon lists it as Small Town and Rural Fiction, African American Fiction and African American Romance, all of which gives you a bit of a flavour of what is going on.

I absolutely raced through this. The characters are engaging, the plot has enough peril to keep you reading but without being stressful. And I think possibly the cleverest thing about this is the way it weaves all its messages together in a way that doesn’t become overpoweringly About The Message.  It may be more overtly religious than most of my reading, but it’s not saccharine or too preachy.  It’s also got a wry sense of humour tucked in there as well. I mentioned in my post last week that Miss Bev is a giant of the romance genre and this totally shows why. Addictive reading that suits the romance reader in me, but which isn’t wholly romance.  It’s sort of like a whole load of the subplots from a romance novel bundled themselves together into a book.  And that’s a good thing. I went straight on from book one to book two (thank you library) which says a lot about how much I was enjoying life in Henry Adams – and how keen I was to find out what would happen next – and I would have gone on to book three, but then I got distracted…

I borrowed my copy of Bring on the Blessings from the library, but it is available on Kindle, Kobo and in paperback in the UK – although I suspect the latter may be a special order job.

Happy Reading!