So this is the Russian’s book. When I read the first two books in Lyssa Kay Adams’ The Bromance Book Club series, the humor involving this guy quickly wore out its welcome. I felt it was crass and narrow-minded for the only foreigner in the gang to not even have a name and to be…
One of the greatest gifts of These Times to me has been my discovery of how much I love K-Pop. Short for “Korean Pop Music”, it’s a behemoth industry that I am many years late to the party on, but ever so grateful to be here. The boyband BTS is the major name in this…
My best read of 2020 thus far comes off like a highlights list of AAR’s recent reviews and tags. Sports romance? Got it. Diverse couple? That too. Feminist heroine desperate to succeed at something bigger than herself? All right here. Plus, Stef Ann Holm’s Honey isn’t just any sports romance, but an historical baseball romance…
Anyone who loves Adriana Herrera’s Dreamers series will have fun taking in this brief holiday visit with Ari and Yin, a secondary couple who appear as background characters in multiple volumes of the series. Warm, fuzzy, heartwarming and sweet down to the bone, it’s a perfectly fluffy holiday feast. Denpo Myint (Yin)Thuta and Aristide (Ari)…
Leah Franqui’s Mother Land isn’t quite as interesting as her first novel (America for Beginners), but in its messy, wonderfully insular sense of family, culture and the notion of rebelling against both, it’s quite the unique gem. Rachel Meyer, recently moved to Mumbai with her new husband Dhruv, is experiencing severe culture shock. She doesn’t…
Beware of judging a book by its title. Had I listened to my inner book snob, I would not have read Heidi Cullinan’s beautiful romance The Professor’s Green Card Marriage. I had passed over the novel a few times because I believed the clunky title to be too literal and uninspired for my tastes. But,…
These Ghosts are Family is a spellbinding, beautifully written story about the way generational trauma can harm, form or save a person – and how the ghosts of the past always loom over one’s shoulder. Stanford Solomon is facing down the end of his life with a heavy sense of responsibility. His beloved wife Adele…
The Light After the War is the author’s first novel under the name Anita Abriel although she has been published previously as Anita Hughes. Based on her mother’s life, the book is the story of two young Jewish-Hungarian women who miraculously survived the purges of WWII and in the aftermath struggle to build lives for…
There’s just something about ice skating stories. Calinda Valerio and Ramirez Diaz-Tan met a decade earlier, when they were both regulars at the same Manila rink, she for figure skating, he for hockey. Calinda was twenty, but her parents demanded she not date, lest dating, or marriage, or pregnancy, interfere with her skating career (a…
Promise Me a Dream is a gentle, tender story about two people coming together at a turbulent time in American history. Unsparing when discussing racial violence, it also tells a lovely story of community and first true love. And while I had a couple of issues with the stiffness of its prose, overall it is…