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This is one of the best hate-you-want-to-boink-you-madly scenes I’ve ever read. Loretta Chase has really outdone herself.

Oh no, this book is gonna devastate me, isn’t it?

The prologue made me cry 🥺 Loretta Chase is so good at writing himbo frat boy heroes who are chaos incarnate but have ~feelings~

FUEGO 🔥💀💀💀💀🔥

“His lips took hers softly, suggestively. They clung, teasing her mouth to open to him. He was kissing her in front of Mr. Barrington. He broke away, delivering a soft, hot kiss to the side of her neck, dragging his mouth up to her ear on a hot breath. His teeth closed gently on her lobe. “Behave,” he whispered.”

😱😱😱 I am genuinely surprised by the plot twist.

HORNY FROM PAGE 1 💀

The bits with Alain are painful and it’s like watching a slow motion train wreck.

You know, I understand that this is part of the journey and I totally see what Alexis Hall is trying to do, AND I appreciate this depiction, but it doesn’t make it any more enjoyable to witness — and that’s the fact that Rosaline is kind of a dick, definitely classist and elitist, and I cannot wait for her to come to some self-awareness about this.

I freaking love Harry, he’s such a dork 🥺

I agonize whenever I start a new Duran book, because who knows if she’ll ever write again??? But I needs a rush of feeling in my reading today 😩

I wasn’t going to read this because I ABSOLUTELY hate cooking competition premises and the reviews for this just seemed very mixed, but I was looking for an audiobook to listen to and this narrator is fanfuckingtastic … and you know, this is a blast so far! Never doubt Alexis Hall, I guess!

I am having a *record* slow reading month. Only four books read so far! I think since I started reading romance two years ago, this has been my slowest month. Just very slowly going through the books I am reading and DNF-ing books left and right 🤷🏻‍♀️

After reading The Love Hypothesis, I read a lot of Ali Hazelwood's AO3 fic and really liked her voice and writing — way more than TLH. But something is happening in her trad pub work because it's SO overwritten and her heroines are supremely unbelievable quirks. Every metaphor and simile is beat to death and her characters act like they're in their late teens.

I'm reminded of a couple of things I don't like about small town romances: 1) gatekeeping and a lot of in-group vs. out-group mentality, 2) gender essentialism, 3) white people talking about the sanctity of land that their ancestors have colonized.

Lmao this book is so bonkers in a bad way and so different in quality to book 1, wtf 🤣🤣

Never a good sign when I’m more invested in the secondary romance than the primary one. CW for the secondary romance though, the female character in that pair has an EXTREMELY dark backstory.

The character work is amazing, but I’m struggling with flow and pacing. It feels like sometimes the character work is getting in the way of some of the story happening. I think Meredith Duran has this problem too sometimes.

Damn, only 9 pages in and you can already tell Judith Ivory is a helluva writer. (My first Judith Ivory!)