oitb > Recent Status Updates

What a freaking prologue. Meredith Duran 🙏🏼

This white author cannot stop calling her Asian heroine a robot, statue, and every other synonym you can think of to describe how cold she is. I hate it when white people think they’re doing a great service to diversity but end up using basically the standard pre-baked racist stereotypes 😡

I’ve been having so much trouble reading this month (my book count is in the single digits and it’s usually a dozen or more), but I’m so into this book.

This book is soft and lush and beautifully written, but I may have finally come across a book that’s TOO interior? TOO MUCH inner monologue and rumination?

Mary Jane Wells 🫶🏼 Her French accent is very good.

The pace at which this relationship developed makes 0 sense. It’s not instalust but somehow at 32% the hero is already an emotional mess about the heroine being in danger. Sigh.

I’m enjoying this so far but fear I may have to tap out because dentistry as the foundational topic that ties two characters together is so fucking boring to me, and unfortunately the heroine’s intense anxiety is giving ME anxiety 😔

I kept waiting for the scene that was in the prologue to happen and wondering where it went, until I learned that Kleypas CUT THE ENTIRE SCENE in her rerelease of this book and it removes so much context from this relationship. I hate that so much.

My brain is exploding with thoughts about this book. Seriously, this book is wild, so different than any other HR I’ve read, and any other Sherry I’ve read. It’s also so fucking sad — angst, sure, Sherry always does that, but this is proper fucking sad. I NEVER hear people talk about this book when people talk about Sherry, and that’s a shame.

This book is wild.

If I have one complaint about Sherry Thomas, it’s her overreliance on telling stories based on flashback and my complete lack of enjoyment in that as a storytelling device.

I’m rereading this for the first time since I first read it in 2020, and it’s better than I remember it being? The story is slightly darker than Kleypas’s books of the recent past.

My one of six remaining Sherry Thomas historical romances 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

Really impressed with the writing in this, esp for a debut (though ya never know with romance, could just be another pen name for the author!). Either way, I’m enjoying!

The soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend in this is the worst dingus I’ve ever read, though sadly, there are probably thousands of straight guys who are actually like this IRL 😒

I think this is the grouchiest heroine I’ve ever read 🤩

There are some books where you can just feel that the author had a great time writing and this is one of them, for sure. Every line sparkles.