The Golden Darter
My Life Through Books
Middle School was a weird mix of classics and Star Wars. I was obsessed with The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux to the point of the book falling apart. I also discovered that while I love Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters can go hang. As for Star Wars... I've read almost every meta-verse book that was published up until the New Order cannon. I can still go into detail and recite storylines of a few beloved books. Hence, my nerd life began.
High school was very paranormal, vampire, scifi, etc. I would literally go online and search for book series that concerned vampires and read everything on the list. We are talking Anita Blake, Charline Harris, Anne Rice, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Tanya Huff, Steven King, etc. This was before they sparkled, ya'll. Early college was philosophical and political theory for school, and mainstream fiction in my personal time. Wicked, Life of Pi, Memoirs of a Geisha. These are the 3 books that pushed me into my next phase, mostly because of how ambiguous I felt about them, and their questionable endings.
Late-mid college I was introduced to LaVyrle Spencer by way of Hummingbird courtesy of a gripe session with my Mom about how depressing the books I had been reading lately were. I've never looked back and have been hooked on the romance genre ever since. I've read and loved a ton of LaVyrle Spencer (who is a little hit and miss), Judith McNaught (of the rapetastic 80s era of romance), and Georgette Heyer (who writes in the vein of Austen). More recently I've discovered the joys of contemporary authors like Susan Elizabeth Phillips.
Lately I've been trying to read more non-fiction. I really do enjoy learning about subjects that interest me, but non-fiction can feel like work sometimes. So I fall back to romance. You just can't go wrong with knowing that there will almost always be a happy ending.
Currently reading
The worst thing I can say about Just One Day is "WHY is this a novella and not a full length novel?! WHYYYY?". Yes, there is a distinct whiny tone to that, and I mean it. This was one of those stories that I read and then can't stop thinking about the next day. The premise isn't one I normally go for, which unfortunately is what kept this on my TBR pile for so long. We are introduced to Andie at her surprise engagement party. Yep, you read that right. Apparently Andie has problems picking winning men in her life, and the one guy she really fell for disappeared after an amazing 24-hrs back when she they were in their twenties (enter Jesse). Her whole crisis involves settling, and when it feels right to do that. And when it so doesn't. By the time she sees Jesse again, I wanted her to keep running as far as she could from the situation she left behind.
I really couldn't believe how much I ended up invested in this short story. Some authors can do a lot with this medium, and apparently Sharla Lovelace is one of them. My only gripes centered around the kind of strange and unnecessary supernatural elements, and how much more I wanted to know about Andie and Jesse. Was Jesse able to patch up the relationship with his son? How did what happened between Andie and Marcus affect the land deal? What did they end up doing with the diner? I even wanted to see the growing pains they experienced in their relationship!
Will definitely be checking out more from the author, pronto!
Copy courtesy of Beyond the Page Publishing, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.