Humor – Home Sweet Houser

Crashing the A-List by Summer Heacock

July 9, 2019 homesweethouser

Out today!

What a fun, witty, and clever book! After a string of thrillers and historical fiction novels, I absolutely needed this book. It provided a ray of sunshine through the heaviness.

Crashing the A-List is about a girl who’s down on her luck. The publishing house she works for gets bought out and she loses her job. She ends up desperately taking a job cleaning out storage units that have been abandoned (think reality TV’s Storage Wars). And she stumbles upon some interesting stuff that might just change the course of her life. In an instant she finds herself blackmailed into being the fake girlfriend of a heartthrob celebrity and the rest is hilarious history.

Summer Heacock injected the perfect amount of humor into this story. There were so many times I stumbled upon witty sentences that took me a second to process, but then made me chuckle uncontrollably. I thought the funny moments were infectious. The romance was cute and not too terribly predictable.

Is the book super realistic? Maybe not so much. But I did feel like while I was reading, a rom com movie was playing in my head. I could totally see this being taken to the big screen.

Overall, I loved this one and appreciated some reprieve from the dark and sinister I’ve been reading lately. A perfect book for light summer reading if you’re looking for a few laughs.

-I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, Summer Heacock, and MIRA Books for the opportunity to review.-

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Audiobook Review, General Fiction (Adult), Humor, Mystery

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

June 26, 2019June 27, 2019 homesweethouser

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

I’m a little bit late to the party on this one since it published in 2012 but I’ve been wanting to read it for a while so I was excited when I was able to get ahold of it from the library.

If you’re looking for something fun, quirky, unique, different, and in its own wheelhouse, Where’d You Go, Bernadette is the perfect choice.

Bernadette’s daughter Bee wants to go on a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette is still adjusting to living the life she never wanted in Seattle, Washington and may be on the verge of a mental breakdown. And when Bernadette disappears, Bee is forced to weave together clues to where her mother has gone.

Told in the form of emails, letters, memos, transcripts, the format was ultimately the best and worst thing about this book. I am always a sucker for authors who write in a unique format other than strictly prose. I love the level of creativity. And I think I would have enjoyed this book’s format a lot more if I had read it rather than listened to the audio. Because on audio it did become a tad hard to follow.

But, that being said, the narrator, Kathleen Wilhoite, was one of the most fabulous narrators I’ve ever heard. She totally did the characters justice in voice, personality, and spirit. So even though the format made the audio version challenging, the narrator made up for it in storytelling.

At times, I did struggle to understand how all the pieces of the story fit together and flowed. And while it did come together in the end, there were portions of the book where I found myself zoning out because I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. That being said, I think if I were to read it again, I would probably appreciate it much more than the first time around.

Ultimately, although my numeric rating is on the lower side, I would still highly recommend reading this book just for the experience. It’s a gem.

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General Fiction (Adult), Holiday, Humor

Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners by Gretchen Anthony

October 22, 2018October 24, 2018 homesweethouser

Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners by Gretchen Anthony

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway and what a great win it was!

Just published last week, Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners is a quirky, holiday read about a Midwestern family with its share of issues. Violet is the matriarch (we all know one) who needs everything to be perfect at all times, lives for appearances, and couldn’t be more traditional. Her daughter Cerise is a lesbian (gasp!) who is pregnant with child (double gasp!) and Violet does NOT know how to deal. What ensues is Violets incessant desire to find out how Cerise conceived and who the “father” is despite Cerise insisting that it doesn’t matter. Her and her partner Barb are the baby’s parents, and that is that.

Although Violet is a politically incorrect nightmare, the way she was written was quite humorous. She was a trip through the whole book, pushing and prodding and poking until she got her way.

The one downside…. there was a secondary story line written from the perspective of Richard, a family friend, and quite frankly, I wasn’t super invested in that story line. I didn’t see how it related and felt like it was kind of a “filler.”. Others may disagree as the story eventually ties in.

On another note, the physical book was beautiful. The pages had jagged edges and gave the appearance of letters bound into a book with a “worn” feel. Which was perfect given the fact that interspersed throughout the pages of text were Christmas letters written by Violet to the family over the years.

This book is heartwarming. It is humorous. It has a great holiday feel. It comes highly recommended.

Thank you you Goodreads, Gretchen Anthony, and Park Row Books for my giveaway copy!

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