I have decided to participate in this round of the Smutathon hosted by Riley Marie on Booktube! I’m just very much in the mood for a little smutty romance so this readathon came about at the perfect time! I will try to get to the group book and I have chosen 4 prompts from the Smutathon TBR wheel!
Group Book – Tangled Vows by Anna Stone
Non Contemporary – Famine by Laura Thalassa
Fake Romance – Real Fake Love by Pippa Grant
New to You Author – Pretty Little Savage by Lucy Smoke
Quickie (under 130 pages) – A Whisper in the Dark by Jessi Elliott & K.J. Sutton
Bea Schumacher is a devastatingly stylish plus-size fashion blogger who indulges in her weekly obsession: the hit reality show Main Squeeze. The fantasy dates! The kiss-off rejections! The surprising amount of guys named Chad! But Bea is sick and tired of the lack of body diversity on the show. Since when is being a size zero a prerequisite for getting engaged on television? Just when Bea has sworn off dating altogether, she gets an intriguing call: Main Squeeze wants her to be its next star, surrounded by men vying for her affections. Bea agrees, on one condition–under no circumstances will she actually fall in love.
I loved Bea as our main protagonist. She’s witty, fun, well spoken and still is constantly making mistakes but owning them and moving forward at all times. I loved the fact that she’s such an advocate for plus sized people yet still has her own insecurities when it comes to dating and men in general, especially under the contrived circumstances of a reality dating show. I think anyone in her situation would think and react quite similarly to her and I loved how raw and accurate the depictions were.
The format of the book was fantastic and definitely kept me engaged. From the production emails to the call sheet and the messages in the fan group chats, it gave much needed depth and contrast to the book and set a fast pace as well. At first the pacing felt too fast especially when we are meeting all of the men. I couldn’t really differentiate between them all and was forgetting which was which. I kind of wanted more of a slower introduction and a more thorough background of all of them but it made sense how rushed things were in terms of the plotline.
At times I got a little bored with all of Bea’s indecisiveness. Agonising over every single detail of the dates and whether or not the men were in this for the right reasons which again is valid but it did kind of get on my nerves. She comes across as such a boss bitch from the way she dresses and how she articulates herself but the journey to the end did drag a little.
Lauren’s indiscretion really got on my nerves. I feel like all the trust we built with her over the course of the storyline was shattered and I really feel like Bea should of been more hurt about it. She forgave her really quickly and given the context we receive from her earlier behaviour when she is confronted with similar situations she would of reacted differently. So that was a little weird for me as well.
Overall I highly enjoyed this book. It was really nice having some more fat representation in books and I feel like this is highly underrated!
Maggie returns to the house made famous by her father’s bestselling horror memoir. Is the place really haunted by evil forces, as her father claimed? Or are there more earthbound – and dangerous – secrets hidden within its walls?
I was definitely enthralled right from the start. From learning about Maggie and how she doesn’t remember any of the events over the 20 days her family spent in Baneberry Hall. Getting the truth from her mother that it was indeed all a lie only to go back and see that maybe what her father wrote was true.
There was a sense of eeriness and unease that wove its way throughout the course of the plot line and definitely added a bit of depth and atmosphere, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Just from reading Riley Sagar’s previous words I knew that the twist wasn’t going to be supernaturnal and their would be a solid explanation to the events that took place and I was pretty much correct.
Maggie as our main protagonist was wonderful. She had the perfect amount of drive to figure out what was really happening but also opened herself up to other explanations that added that sense of mystery. I wish we had touched a little more on the other characters in the book. Again I knew inevitably they would have more of a significance to the storyline than what we were getting at the start and I would of liked to learn more about them.
The jumps between present day and the narrative that Maggie’s father wrote was very well done and again just gave me more incentive to want to read on and figure out what was going to happen next. Riley Sagar has a way of manipulating the reading into thinking that these mysterious, otherworldly events really could of happened only to turn that on its head and have plausible explanation that was staring you right in the face.
I highly enjoyed this book. It was a little predictable at the end there but I was still surprised by a few of the twists and turns and it gave me hella spooky house vibes!
These are 10 really popular books that I will probably never read! I have really started to hone in on my reading tastes over the last few years and I just know I am most likely not going to like these/will never read them anyways so…
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Amy Leigh Reads 