#HS Readathon Wrap Up

Time to wrap up another Seasons of Reading readathon, and it's no surprise to me that I didn't manage to get even half way through my TBR. In fact, I deviated from it—a book I'd put on hold at the library came in.

Here's what I did read: Her Best Laid Plans by Cara McKenna and the defection, God-Shaped Hole by Tiffanie DeBartolo.

Her Best Laid Plans was a novella, a quick bit of satisfying romance with a heavy dollop of steam. I hadn't expected the story to be so sexual, though I should've, especially knowing McKenna's previous work—but the prior stuff I've read by this author were longer novels where sexual scenes felt more in balance with other themes in the story. In this case, because the story was so short, I wasn't mentally prepared for the depth of the steam that the story contained. Despite that, Cara McKenna knows her way around storytelling. Jamie is a cool, independent American young woman off on holiday and seeking adventure in Ireland where she meets the handsome Irish barkeep, Connor. I love, love, love the way McKenna describes her men. She wrote Connor in a way that was so easy to conjure in my mind—and of course, he was swoon worthy and held my interest! 

I came across God-Shaped Hole on Goodreads and intrigued, requested it through an inter-library loan. It came a day later and I very rudely dropped the Jodi Picoult book I'd started to get to this one instead. This is the type of book I crave—the kind that once you start reading, you don't want to stop. Tiffanie DeBartolo writes the way I like to write (or at least aspire to)—letting her characters think and speak without filters—which in the case of Beatrix Jordan is quite a feisty and sharp-witted manner that gave the story a supremely realistic and gritty flair I simply adored. It's a love story about soulmates, Beatrix and Jacob Grace, two unusual people who find each other in an unusual way. They are quirky characters and so damn amusing together, but the story grapples with some deep themes, one of them as you might allude to by the title, the belief in God—that space inside us all that longs to be filled with a sense of assurance that we aren't alone. Another was forgiveness. It was somber at times, but the writing is, in my opinion, spectacular, and lines like, "Kat’s idea of self-improvement is a good bikini wax" often had me giggling aloud. Highly recommend!

Thank you to Michelle at Seasons of Reading for another great readathon. Hope you will join us next time! Check it out at www.seasonsreading.blogspot.com