Transitive Verve

 After my previous post on romance tropes that I dislike, I wanted this next post to be about a romance writer that I am really enjoying right now, and whom I think deserves some attention! (Note: I don't know her, have never talked to her, am not working for her, etc. I just really admire her writing.) I am currently trying to complete Book Riot's Read Harder challenge for 2022 , and task #7 is "Read a romance where at least one of the protagonists is over 40." When Book Riot sent out their list of suggestions for the task, Olivia Dade's book, 40-Love , was on the list.  As you can tell from the cover, the protagonist is a fat woman. Not merely "curvy," the way some books will describe their protagonists (when really they mean, she has an hourglass figure and flat stomach, a la Kim Kardashian or something), but an actual plus-sized woman. So I saved it to my TBR list. HOWEVER, that was not the book I ended up reading. Teach Me, which is in the same seri...

As a longtime reader of romance, I naturally have preferences about what I enjoy in my books, same as everyone else. This isn't meant to be some sort of revelatory list full of deep insight, but just a share-out of what makes me choose to keep reading a book, and what makes me DNF it. I do want to issue a disclaimer, though, that it's a list that comes from a longtime relationship with the genre. I don't think it's fair to be the sort of person who scoffs at romance, who doesn't take it seriously or see the good in the genre or has read it extensively in good faith (hate-reading doesn't count), and THEN come up with a list of what's not great about it--I'm making this list BECAUSE I love reading romance, and I want to see the good things get better, and the bad things decrease.  So without further ado... romance tropes (or even just literary/fiction tropes) that I'm not in love with, in no particular order: Racial insensitivity  - This one is a ...

  The downside of keeping a book journal instead of writing reviews on a book blog is that sharing those thoughts online isn't quite the same. The upside, though, is that writing a journal entry by hand, instead of typing a review , shifts the gears in my head a little bit about how I want to frame my thoughts. I initially struggled REALLY hard about how I was going to review this book, and then I ended up deleting my draft altogether. And then I thought about deleting this entire blog altogether, because I wasn't sure if I still wanted to review books so much as just ruminate on them, which is why I started a book journal for myself. I don't know if I still want to offer my opinions on books for other people anymore; I want to explore my opinions on books for myself. For now, though, I will just share what I wrote about this book, by posting the pictures of the pages from my book journal. I don't know if I will keep blogging, keep journaling, keep posting my journal o...