Thirty-something me has no patience for gutless heroines pining after oblivious idiots.

I still love tropes pining and angst, but first give me a character I can stand to watch pine. Give me someone who isn't afraid of living and going after something she wants and give me a real reason why she should pine in silence instead. Don't give me "for four years she was his doormat and loved every second of it because of his kids." 

The rating wavered between one and two stars, but I've read worse. Much worse. 

It's a difficult trope to get right, friends to lovers with a beta hero, and Morgan didn't quite manage it.

For two people so clearly battling with mutual attraction for years, apparently, the transition from friends to lovers was more difficult than it needed to be. The author threw in unnecessary obstacles or plot twists on their way to get Fletcher and Lexie admit their feelings to one another. 



I didn't understand why Sean, the brother between the couple, needed to be villanised the way he was. He wasn't shown to be the best friend to Fletcher he was told to have been, and his brotherly teasing of his twin sister went just a little too far for the story. I now wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that Sean is gay. 


On my list of nitpickings is a mention of that shower sex: For two people intent on saving lives they need to pay more attention to saving the Earth, which is to say: TURN OFF THE WATER FIRST!



Thank you.


The trope and the film trailer are what got me to read this book. I love friends to lovers stories but I forgot Ahern writes these gimmick books. I should have remembered what happened with P.S. I love you, which is in part an epistolary novel: I didn't like it. I hated Love, Rosie.

Rosie's and Alex's story is told wholly through letters, emails, notes from teachers and online chats as well as the odd birthday and Christmas card. Except it's not, because the epilogue is in plain prose. I guess Ahern herself realised just how superficial and emotionally disconnected novel she'd written.

Apart from a certain vocabulary trick, each and every letter writer sounded exactly the same. I also had to suspend my disbelief for a few gutless plot twists that kept the story going two hundred pages after it should have ended.

I laughed at times, but that wasn't enough to make up for the gratuitous fat and slut shaming.

The frustrating thing about Ahern's bad books is that I can see them being adapted into good films. I certainly liked Hilary Swank and Gerard Butler better than I liked Holly and Gerry on the page.

If it looks like an infodump and if it walks like an infodump it is an infodump.

I do love the trope, but I hate the writing. I hated it in their Cut & Run books and I hate it here. It's disjointed despite logical progression of the story and the constant switching from two different points of view (clearly written by two different authors) makes it seem like the characters share a mind and are repeating some things over and over.

Such a shame, not really.

I'm DNFing on page 13 because the most important thing about becoming an assistant coach to a high school baseball team is to dress for the part. I smell gratuitous UST building ahead.

Wolf-shifter Sissy Mae Smith and lion-shifter Mitch Shaw have been close friends for quite some time. So when Mitch is shot, Sissy volunteers to help hide him from his would-be killers. Only problem is that this consists of holing up in middle-of-nowhere Tennessee with Sissy's extended family, who is none too happy about her being back in town.

This wasn't my favorite from Laurenston, but it wasn't bad. Watching Mitch and Sissy circle each other was highly entertaining, but I never completely felt the attraction between them. This is probably because I don't care for the way Laurenston writes her lion shifters. Nine times out of ten I just want to strangle them. However, I have to say that Mitch was much more enjoyable than Mace and Brendan were in The Mane Event. I would recommend this to people who have read and enjoyed other works by Laurenston, but wouldn't advise someone to start reading the series with this one.