I’ve decided I need to get serious about tackling my backlist ARCs. I lasted on this project for approximately 10 days and have since derailed myself and have been reading pretty random books, mostly new ones. Hopefully writing these reviews will get me excited about my project again. Let us all cross our fingers. Anyway, all three of these books are available for you to read! Going Bicoastal by Dahlia Adler is a really fun sliding doors YA coming of age/romance situation that I really, really enjoyed and is a perfect choice for Pride month. Honey by Isabel Banta is a debut novel about the life of a pop star in the early 2000s and it was a hard read, but one I really appreciated. Finally, I read Total Dreamboat by Katelyn Doyle, which is a vacation romance that was… definitely a book that I read. So let’s talk about them!
Going Bicoastal by Dahlia Adler
One thing that I’ve learned about myself is that I absolutely love a Sliding Doors story. In fact, if you have any recommendations for sliding door books, please drop those in the comments section because I want to start purposefully interspersing them in my reading life. Anyway, Going Bicoastal is about Natalya Fox, a teenager who has to make the decision if she’s going to go to LA to stay with her slightly estranged mom for the summer or if she’s going to stay in NYC with her dad. She has a great cast of friends, both original and ones that she makes during the sliding doors portions. In the LA chapters, she is working at her mom’s company, which is like a publicity type of situation and then in NYC portions, she is mostly babysitting in various forms. There is a love interest in each segment and I wound up really enjoying both of them. Once the Sliding Doors start, each chapter alternates which city and life you are in.
I really, really liked this book. It’s a YA, which isn’t something that I read very often anymore, but this book is perfect for Pride month! Natalya is bi and her sexual orientation doesn’t disappear when she’s in a relationship with a boy, just like it’s very present in her relationship with a girl. I liked the familial relationships with both Natalya’s parents. I did prefer one of the city storylines to the other, but in a way that I’m not sure is fair. But regardless, I think if you’re still willing to read YA, I would definitely recommend this. Also, content wise, this is giving upper YA/NA in my opinion if you’re considering it for a young person in your life.
Oh, also, I listened to this on audio and I thought the audiobook was really well done. I was always clearly oriented to where I was by the narrator and it worked really well for me. I think Mara Wilson was fantastic.
Honey by Isabel Banta
This book starts in the 90s, with Amber Young living with her mom who is an alcoholic and her older brother. We don’t spend much time with her before she gets the call about joining a girl group band, but we definitely spend enough time to really ground Amber in a way that makes her feel real. The book and its plot really take off in 97 with Amber joining Cloud 9. We then proceed to follow Amber throughout her music career and there were times when I worried this book was going to veer too closely to the CWs that we know happened to many famous women during that time period, but for the most part it didn’t dive too far into them.
I can’t really articulate my feelings about this book because at the end of the day, this book was really outside of my comfort zone. I love books about music, but I also love books that have a central romance and this one has a lot of romance in it, but not really in a way that gives romance novel. That said, I did like it overall, when I remove the element of my enjoyment in it. If you haven’t picked it up yet, I think it’s a book that may make you think and would probably make a good book for the cusp of summer/fall.
The audiobook is narrated by Brittany Pressley who delivered a really great performance as always.
Total Dreamboat by Katelyn Doyle
Hope Lanover is going on a cruise with her best friend and she is not excited about the cruise ship because she’s thinking of noroviruses and things like that, which is perhaps fair, but she’s literally on a free vacation and so I was automatically a little annoyed. Her best friend is a content creator who has been invited on this cruise ship for a brand deal and has brought Hope alongside her. On day one, Hope has a meet cute/disaster with Felix Seagrave, a British chef, who is on vacation with his family to celebrate his parents anniversary. He’s a recovering alcoholic and she’s recovering from heartbreak. The two of them keep running into one another and wind up having a good bit of chemistry and seem to really connect.
Unfortunately, I think I’m too cynical to have fallen for this book the way I would have liked. There is so much happening during the seven days of this vacation. These two get together, break up, reconnect, and break up again. It’s a lot to be packed into seven days for me as a person. There are so many different plot lines going on. We do, of course, have some time post vacation, but in a way that made me really feel like this book should have just leaned into being a fiction book rather than a romance. After loving Just Another Love Story, Katelyn Doyle’s first contemporary romance novel, I really wanted to love this, but unfortunately, this one just didn’t hit for me.
Kelli Tager and Russ Bain did do a great job with the narration though. The book was easy to listen to even when I wasn’t really enjoying the content, which is sometimes all you can ask for.
Closing Thoughts
Have you read any of these books? I would love to know other people’s thoughts. I need to spend some time reading the reviews for these books because I am so curious to see what worked and didn’t work for people with each of these books. I hope if you haven’t read them yet, that these reviews helped you decide if you should move them onto, off, or up your tbr! (Or to continue leaving them off your radar, I suppose.) Anyway, let me know your thoughts!
xx
firewhiskeyreader 