Lauren V > Recent Status Updates

I enjoyed this for the most part. June and Maven were adorable together. Dallas and Maven were precious.

My biggest complaint is that when it comes to sports romances where the FMC is works for the team, it is *always* her job on the line when they get exposed. It irks me every time.

I didn't read Shawn's book but the way he treated Dallas and Mae after finding out bothered me too.

Finally at a point where I can read again after the most chaotic stretch of work.

+1 for the NWSL mention early on!

I forgot about the insane shenanigans here.

I really enjoyed this one. Paloma always had something iin her background from the bits and pieces of herthat we'd gotten in previous books. And Bennett always had something there beyond being Rhys's best friend.

The back and forth timeline was done in a way that made sense and was easy to keep up with.

I will say, this is one that I don't think I could have read in one sitting - some of the topics are *heavy*.

The best part of this was the dog. And Oliver.

This was infuriating. The timeline was hard to keep up with, the interludes did basically nothing, they knew each other for SIX DAYS over *ten years*, had zero chemistry and the inability to communicate for 2.5 seconds was astounding.

And I'm not even going to start on journalistic ethics because holy wow just no. Half of that "profile" wasn't even about him. Sigh.

This one sounded like a good idea but the execution so far has been a struggle with the timeline and the random blog/interviews/articles interspersed (without dates so you can't figure out where they fit into the timeline).

Parts of this were cute and felt raw and real, like the entire burnout part of the storyline. And I really enjoyed those parts. However.

-The HS drama didn't really feel dramatic enough to have caused the fall-out that it did.

-The "journalism" near the end: this is not at all how this works for a major publication. The lack of accuracy annoys the hell out of me.

-the spicy scenes: just no.

This one took a minute to get into but once I did, I didn't want to put it down. I "one more chaptered" myself for over an hour (naturally).

The story is bittersweet because you know pretty quickly that one aspect of this isn't going to end well. Jo and Sasha though...it was a beautiful way to watch them fall in love. The song lyric chapter titles were perfect.

(And as a writer, the burnout aspect hit home.)

I was giggling and kicking my feet for so much of this. The book within a book was so much fun (and really, I'd read it at this point?) and the back and forth was so entertaining.

I wasn't a huge fan of the third act breakup being so late in the book and it was fairly obvious what it would be but the rest of the book was so good that I'll let that part go.

The shenanigans here got progressively more ridiculous but it was so fun and entertaining to read.

This was a cute book, but was a tad on the slow side (ironic, ha). It felt like not a ton happened in the middle section, which made it a little bit slower to actually get through. The ending was cute though and I did enjoy it.

This fell flat for me. The pacing was slow and they swung between wanting to communicate everything to nothing so often it drove me insane. It didn't feel like there was anything external from them getting back together, ehich they both clearly wanted almost from the get-go. Just overall did absolutely nothing for me.

The pacing is still very slow and the story itself feels flat. Second chance is usually not awful for me but this one is doing pretty much nothing for me overall.

Not quite sure how I feel about this one yet. But it's also on the shorter side so, in theory, it should be easier to get through.

This had so much potential for me but only halfway delivered. The pacing was off - the first nearly 300 pages were dedicated to one semester and then it picks up and the chaos for the last 100 or so was the second semester.

The student/teacher relationship almost ended in me DNFing this book.

This would have benefitted with fewer characters or at least fewer plotlines to keep up with, several of which fizzled out

There are too many characters to try and keep up with here and the teacher/student "relationship" is bothering me. The fact that book summary talks about this gossip app as the main part of the story but it takes 200+ pages to get to it also annoys me.

The entire sideplot of a student/teacher relationship or whatever is going on between Simone and East could have been left behind, 1000%.

It's interesting but the pacing is a bit slow right now and the POV switching without knowing who it is irks me. (I also hate the formatting of chapters starting in the middle of pages but that's been an issue with EH books from the get-go.)

Being back in Story Lake was utterly delightful. Potatoing shenanigans, Goose finding new ways to torment Zoey, Bertha the racoon is a ninja and the Bishop family? Gage and him coming to terms with just how much Laura's accident impacted him. Zoey getting her diagnosis and realizing, slowly, that she isn't broken. Didn't love the third act break-up but the grand gesturing was so very *them* in the end.