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the austen afffair by madeline bell

4.75 stars ☆ ₊˚⊹

contemporary romance time travel rivals to lovers pub september 2025 (received as ARC) read august 1st-11th 2025

Tess Bright just scored her dream role starring in an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. It's not just the role of a lifetime, but it’s also her last chance to prove herself as a serious actress (no easy feat after being fired from her last TV gig) and more importantly, it’s her opportunity to honor her mom, who was the biggest fan of Jane Austen ever. But one thing is standing in Tess’s way—well, one very tall, annoyingly handsome person, actually: Hugh Balfour. A serious British method actor, Hugh wants nothing to do with Tess (whose Teen Choice Awards somehow don’t quite compare to his BAFTA nominations). Hugh is a type-A, no-nonsense, Royal Academy prodigy, whereas Tess is big-hearted, a little reckless, and admittedly, kind of a mess. But the film needs chemistry—and Tess’s career depends on it. Sparks fly, but not in the way Tess hoped, when an electrical accident sends the two feuding co-stars back in time to Jane Austen’s era. 200 years in the past with only each other to rely on, Tess and Hugh need to ad-lib their way through the Regency period in order to make it back home, and hopefully not screw up history along the way. But if a certain someone looks particularly dashing in those 19th century breeches…well, Tess won’t be complaining.

review

I fell madly in love with this book. It’s so deeply immersive and wonderful and I was hooked from the very start. I went into it thinking it was a silly romcom and was immediately hit with some of the most devastating and realistic depictions of grief I’ve read. I think something it does so strongly with such a large ensemble cast is make every single character memorable. There is never an instance where a side character is mentioned that I have to try to remind myself who they are. They all play their parts in the story well but they also all are memorable characters outside of their roles too. 

Hugh and Tess are some favorite main characters of mine now. I adored their dynamic and their push and pull. They are the perfect kind of opposites attract in my opinion. They have the perfect amount of sweetness with their bite against each other and you root for them so hard from the start too. Hugh is probably my favorite though simply because of the arc he has for readers. You start off thinking he is this kind of closed off asshole and then you learn more about him throughout the story and realize that couldn’t be further from the truth. Even as I say Hugh is my favorite though, I find myself drawn back to Tess and how great of an FMC she is. She’s so fun to experience the regency era through and read the connection that she has to that time period with her mother. The way that she starts to understand who Hugh really is becomes such a wonderful thing to read as well. I was smiling and giggling and kicking my feet for a good chunk of the book. 

My only true complaint that knocks this down a quarter of a rating is I wish that the ending was a bit more drawn out. We get to the final four or so chapters and everything happens so fast. I wish we could have slowed down just a bit and had a bit more time in the last moments of the story with the regency era characters. I don’t wish that Tess and Hugh stayed there longer but just that the last two days or so was written to last over a bit more time to let the readers really sit with those characters one more time. 

All in all, I loved this book. It was an amazing debut by Madeline Bell and I can not wait to read more from her in the future! 

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the love wager by lynn painter

4 stars ☆ ₊˚⊹

contemporary romance friends to lovers pub march 2023 read july 28th-30th 2025

Hallie Piper is turning over a new leaf. After belly-crawling out of a hotel room (hello, rock bottom), she decides it’s time to become a full-on adult. She gets a new apartment, a new haircut, and a new wardrobe, but when she logs onto the dating app that she has determined will find her new love, she sees none other than Jack, the guy whose room she snuck out of. After agreeing they are absolutely not interested in each other, Jack and Hallie realize they’re each other’s perfect wing-person in their searches for The One. They text each other about their dates, often scheduling them at the same restaurant so that if things don’t go well, the two of them can get tacos afterward. Spoiler: they get a lot of tacos together. Discouraged by the lack of prospects, Jack and Hallie make a wager to see who can find true love first, but when they agree to be fake dates for a weekend wedding, all bets are off. As they pretend to be a couple, lines become blurred and they both struggle to remember why the other was a bad idea to begin with.

review

This was cute and solid. I needed something to break my book slump (because that reading goal won’t reach itself) and I knew I could count on Lynn Painter for that. I adore her young adult books so deeply and so I had been curious about her adult ones for a while and finally cracked into this one in an attempt to cure my slump. It did just that within the first two chapters. I was immediately sucked in by the fast pace and the banter and the plot as well. Jack and Hallie were so cute and I loved them so quickly. Lynn Painter writes banter so amazingly well and this is just another example of it. I’m also a big sucker for third person dual POV and so this hit the spot for me with that.  

I’ve heard some complaints about her adult books that they don’t have the same emotional depth as her young adult ones and I completely understand why people say that. My opinion on it is you don’t get as invested in the characters individually as the young adult ones but you do still get invested in the relationship pretty well. A lot of the growth and time on page is shared between these two characters that even with a dual pov aspect you don’t necessarily get to know them too much on their own. You get to know them through the lens of the other and it doesn’t make you as invested as you would be otherwise but it still makes you completely root for the relationship. 

Overall, it’s about on par with her young adult book, The Do-Over and I will be reading her other adult books in the future! It’s a perfect slump breaker and I will probably be thinking about how much I loved Jack and Hallie for quite a few days. 

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big win for my dumb boys of tommen fan ass

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Adam I want to go down on you until you pass out Carlsen

Levi I want to push her against a wall and I want her to push back Ward

Jack How do I make you come Smith-Turner

Lowe Taking it so well Moreland

Eli I'm not going to make it easy Killgore

Lukas You'll take what I fucking give you Blomqvist

Conor Ask me to go deeper Harkness

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some of the main men in the Aliverse

Adam: I want her to know that I care and I’ll do it from afar if I have too

Levi: I am untterly in love with her

Jack: gurl who broke you

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𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐰𝐲𝐥𝐚 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐅𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐤 𝐛𝐲 𝐌𝐞𝐠𝐚𝐧 𝐁𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐧 - 𝟒.𝟐𝟓/𝟓 ☆ . ݁ ˖ˎˊ˗

“What about you? What do you like?” she asked him. He lifted his head and said, simply, “You.”

Premise: The entire town of Eternity was shocked when widowed, middle-aged Twyla Banneker partnered up with her neighbor and best friend, Frank Ellis, to join the Tanrian Marshals. Eight years later, Twyla’s rewarding career patrolling the strange land of Tanria remains a welcome change from the domestic grind of mom life, despite the misgivings of her grown children. Fortunately (or unfortunately) a recent decrease in on-the-job peril has made Twyla and Frank's job a lot safer ... and a lot less exciting. So when they discover the body of one of their fellow marshals near an enormous footprint—and Frank finds himself the inadvertent foster dad to a baby dragon—they are grateful to be back in action. But as danger closes in and Twyla and Frank's investigation becomes more complicated, so does their easy friendship.

Couple: Frank Ellis and Twyla Banneker

Tropes: second chance romance, middle-aged romance, best friends to lovers, widower x divorcee, slowburn (ish)

Content Warnings: violence

Review Below!

Review:

If there is ever a day that I’m not beyond thrilled to return to the world of Tanria, I have been kidnapped and my identity has been stolen. Megan Bannen has created my favorite fantasy world and only continued to build upon it in this book to make me love it even more. I ADORED Hart and Mercy’s book. It’s one of my favorite books of all time. Which is one of the reasons I put off reading this for quite a while afterwards because I did truly fear the second book blues with this series. However, I was pleasantly surprised by it. I will say… I think it will be hard for one of these sequels to be on the same level for me as Hart and Mercy and that’s just a bias I will have for the whole series. But overall, I really did enjoy Twyla and Frank and their story!

It is obviously a big switch to go from the romance of Hart and Mercy to the romance of Twyla and Frank who are much older and have a different dynamic than our previous couple. But I think it still worked so well and it was clear that there was a lot accomplished in the book to set up the next romance as well. I think, for me personally, the main place that this book fell short compared to Hart and Mercy is the pacing and the way the plot intertwined with the romance. Something was off in the flow of this book for me and I think it’s just how it was laid out. The first half of the book was so world-building heavy that it left a majority of the romance to be dealt with in the second half while still tackling the main plot and while I LOVED reading more about Tanria, I think I needed more of the romance in the first half to really flow through the whole book. There is a bit more of a slowburn to this romance than there was in the first book so I don’t mean they have to get together quicker but just that I wanted to feel more connected to the romance throughout. Something that stuck out to me that I think stuck out to a lot of readers is that there isn’t Frank’s POV like there was Hart’s and that did admittedly make me feel a bit disconnected from Frank at times. I wish we had gotten at least some of it because while I loved Twyla and reading what she went through, I wanted to know Frank more too and that was harder to do without a bit of his perspective on things. 

Overall, I really do love this world and the characters that Megan Bannen has given us in it. I love the bits of Hart and Mercy we got in this book and I really do love Duckers so much. I enjoyed the set up of Rosie for the next book and I’m excited to see where she takes us in Tanria next. The way that this added onto the world of Tanria and showed the after effects of what happened in Hart and Mercy really was so wonderful to me. This world has become such a comfort to me and I can’t wait to read what is coming next… even if I fear the time skip that I know is happening.

My Ratings:

Characters - 4.25 ☆ - diverse representation, memorable, multilayered, relatable

Plot - 4 ☆ - epic scope, slow start strong finish, uneven pacing

Setting - 5 ☆ - atmospheric, beautiful, evocative imagery, expansive, immersive world-building, magical, otherworldly, 

Writing Style - 4.5 ☆ - beautifully-written, descriptive, original

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𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐱 𝐕𝐨𝐰𝐬 𝐛𝐲 𝐉𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐜𝐚 𝐉𝐨𝐲𝐜𝐞 - 𝟓/𝟓 ☆ . ݁ ˖ˎˊ˗

“I remember,” he says, eyes on me. The most dangerous phrase when it comes to us.

Premise: Georgia Woodward lives by her lists, none more so than the one about her ex, Eli Mora. It’s full of the ironclad dos and don’ts they’ve been following since she returned to the Bay Area after their cataclysmic breakup five years ago. As Georgia and Eli rush up to Napa Valley to pull off the perfect wedding, their old chemistry comes back in technicolor. Somewhere between cake tastings gone wrong, disastrous DJ auditions, and Eli’s heated attention, Georgia starts recognizing the man she fell in love with before. And if she lets herself break her rules, she might find what they’re building isn’t the something old that ruined them—it’s a chance at something new.

Couple: Eli Mora and Georgia Woodward

Tropes: forced proximity, exes to lovers, childhood friends to lovers, second chance/estranged lovers, yearning

Content Warnings: extensive discussions of anxiety and complicated familial relationships

Review Below!

Review:

The amount of times I cried and laughed and then cried again during this book was lethal. If it had been a drinking game, I would have died of alcohol poisoning. Jessica Joyce’s writing is truly just spectacular. I love books where I don’t want to put it down at all but as a student who tries to balance school and an unhealthy obsession with reading, there was something so refreshing about the writing of this book that worked for me. It sucked me in entirely for when I had the time to sit down and read for an hour or two but it also wasn’t the kind of writing that felt harder to slip in and out of when I did only have a few minutes to read every now and then. I was able to leave it and come back to it several times so smoothly because everything about this book is just written so clearly and beautifully. 

Eli Mora… MY MANNNN. Oh lord I had heard that he was a good book boyfriend and I had seen the David Corenswet fan casts so I thought I was emotionally prepared for him… Only to find out very quickly I was not. I was giggling and kicking my feet so much it was crazy. He’s such a beautifully complicated well-rounded character. His anxiety and the reason behind it just feels so raw and realistic and that’s something I adored about all of the characters actually. Georgia is an AMAZING FMC like truly one of my all-time favorites now. She just is so stellar with all of her quirks and all of her faults and you can’t help rooting for her. I experienced what could only be described truly as “shaking my kindle to try to get her to listen to reason” but in the most positive way. She’s not an FMC that you find unbelievably annoying when she doesn’t get things right but instead one that you want to hug and tell her that it’s okay and I think that speaks a lot to the writing again. Jessica Joyce does a great job having you connect with both Georgia and Eli and honestly, if she didn’t, I don’t think it would have been as strong of a book as it is. 

I was recommended Jessica Joyce from a friend who read her book You With A View but the plot of this one spoke to me a bit more and I ended up picking this one up first. The plot worked so so well for me and I loved the pacing and the concept and the execution and just about everything about it. The ending especially stood out to me and how it was structured because it felt so realistic considering the time frame of the rest of the book and I really loved how it made things flow. However, I can say that after reading this, I definitely will be picking up her other one soon! Because if she can make me feel so much for Eli and Georgia, I can only imagine what other characters she can do that for! Highly highly recommend!

My Ratings:

Characters - 5 ☆ - believable, change and grow, memorable, multilayered, relatable, strong relationships

Plot - 5 ☆ - addictive, clever plotting, steady pacing, well-structured

Setting - 5 ☆ - atmospheric, beautiful, expansive, picturesque, realistic

Writing Style - 5 ☆ - beautifully-written, descriptive, easy to read, witty

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*taps mic* i finally finished another book

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naked alex meet ambien eli

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CUTEEEE

Thank you thank you hehe I’m very happy with it

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Little bit of an update to the theme hehe I was feeling like playing around with it

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mild take - i have deep beef with what fourth wing and powerless did to the younger reading community and how it has shaped what books have come out since

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Eli Mora… you have made the book boyfriend ranking much harder this year…

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Frank may not be Hart but he’s still endearing me greatly

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what the rankings are looking like so far as we hit the approximately halfway mark of the year (this is what my psychosis looks like)

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𝐎𝐧𝐞 𝐆𝐨𝐥𝐝𝐞𝐧 𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐛𝐲 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐞𝐲 𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐧𝐞 - 𝟔/𝟓 ☆ . ݁ ˖ˎˊ˗

“No, it’s because when you speak, he listens. When you smile, he smiles. When you need something, he offers help. When you give him something, he thanks you. You’re peas and carrots—I think you’ve found yourself a lifelong friend.”

Premise: Good things happen at the lake. That’s what Alice’s grandmother says, and it’s true. Alice spent just one summer at a cottage with Nan when she was seventeen—it’s where she took that photo, the one of three grinning teenagers in a yellow speedboat, the image that changed her life. Charlie Florek was nineteen when Alice took his photo from afar. Now he’s all grown up—a shameless flirt, who manages to make Nan laugh and Alice long to be seventeen again, when life was simpler, when taking pictures was just for fun. Sun-slanted days and warm nights out on the lake with Charlie are a balm for Alice’s soul, but when she looks up and sees his piercing green gaze directly on her, she begins to worry for her heart.

Couple: Charlie Florek and Alice Everly

Tropes: forced proximity, friends to lovers, slow burn, second chance (but in a non-traditional way), small town romance

Content Warnings: medical content, grief

Review Below!

Review:

I would give it 7 stars if I could.

Oh… Oh wow. Reading this was the craziest 24 hour experience. I couldn’t put it down. I loved Every Summer After. I really really did. But this blew that completely out of the water. I thought I was a Sam Florek girl but I am very clearly a Charlie Florek girl now. I read this in basically two sittings and genuinely was hanging on every single word that I read. Carley Fortune is a master of that summer “vibe” when it comes to her writing. It was evident especially in the flashbacks of Every Summer After but it’s just overflowing in this book and it’s truly the perfect summer read. Alice wasn’t anticipating Charlie and neither was I!

I left Every Summer After with conflicted feelings on Charlie. Even in that book I thought he was a good complex character but it’s so clear how much thought that Carley Fortune put into his character going into this book. It is marketed that you can read this as a standalone without having read Every Summer After but I think it adds so much to his characterization to see what happened in Every Summer After in much more depth than it is brought up in this book. He’s complex and something that I think really just was so fascinating to me in this book was how much it adds to the Charlie we know in Every Summer After. Like it left me with a desire to go back and reread that first book to just re-examine his character in that through the new lens that this book gave me on him. 

Alice is a fantastic FMC. She’s funny. She’s struggling. She’s sexy. She plays so so well with Charlie from the beginning. Of course, I giggled like a little girl when we got our first bit of Charlie but I was even fascinated with Alice from the first page and I think that says a lot about the writing of these characters and how strong it is. I can’t deny that I have certainly read some books where I stuck around just for the MMC because I despise the FMC but I can honestly say that I would have read this just for Alice too. 

I adored Alice and Nan and loved their dynamics with Charlie. They are such a strong trio to base the book around and of course, I squealed when Sam and Percy showed up as well. I thought that all of the side characters were a great addition honestly. Harrison and John still feel important in the way that you won’t forget them once the book is over while still being barely in the book and Joyce stuck with me a lot more than I thought she would. Alice’s family were all strong side characters as well because they had their parts but even if they were small, they weren’t forgettable at all. I think from having read two of Carley Fortune’s books now, I can tell that she really puts thought into the characters in them and it makes her writing stand out to me. 

The romance and pacing in this book are phenomenal to me. I think it’s the perfect mix of fast-paced feeling but still a slow-burn. You’re waiting so impatiently for the tension to finally snap but you’re also flying through the book at the same time. It’s not rushed but it’s never slow and you really flow through it all. I think that there is a really good understanding of how to make the length of the plot flow from how there are little sections where we are described a series of days in a few paragraphs and then we can spend like three chapters on a single day as well. It takes place over two months and yet the flow of that time feels so natural to read and the romance mirrors that. You get to read their relationship develop very naturally and it makes you want them to get together even more.

This is my favorite Carley Fortune book easily. It’s my favorite book of the year. I still have two more Carley Fortune books to read but I have a hard time believing they could top this honestly. Every Summer After was one of my favorites already but then she just made this its even better older brother (pun intended) of a book and really solidified my spot as a fan of her writing. Charlie Florek, you have bewitched me, mind body and soul. I will always think of you on page 179. 

My Ratings:

Characters - 5 ☆ - believable, change and grow, memorable, multilayered, original, relatable, unforgettable protagonist

Plot - 5 ☆ - addictive, clever plotting, fast-paced, gripping/exciting, satisfying conclusion, steady pacing, well-structured

Setting - 5 ☆ - atmospheric, ethereal, idyllic, majestic, nostalgic, picturesque, realistic, vivid descriptions

Writing Style - 5 ☆ - beautifully-written, descriptive, funny, original, witty

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“A book can’t be 7 stars. It already can’t be 6 stars”

Tell that to my 191 tabs