“Former.ly” is a quick, easy read about the super toxic frat boy culture of a social media tech startup, and the developer who gets swept up in its meteoric rise and fall. Former.ly is a social media website that combines Livejournal with Facebook, where a user can upload their life story, their secrets and accomplishments, and the information only goes live upon their death. It’s a memorial curated by the person before they are deceased for the benefit of those they leave behind. Which is a really interesting concept on its own, but also has the perfect foundation for the kind of mystery and drama the synopsis hints at. Except the website functions mainly as set dressing to the main character, Dan, and the eccentric founders of Former.ly. Because, unfortunately, the part of the synopsis that says there are “unexpected consequences” when these profiles go live, never materialized.

I really liked this latest Hazelwood romance at the start. Scarlett, with her anxiety and perfectionism, her sarcasm and understated humor started off as a much more grounded character than the usual quirky scientist. While this book takes place in college, I liked that the characters didn’t feel like children which helped a lot given that, of the Hazelwood books I have read, this one seems to have the most in terms of sexual encounters. And they are steamy scenes, even if I had issues with their aftercare routine, but more on that in a second. But for a book that started so strong with a FMC that felt so different from her previous books, I still ended up disappointed.

It's always a fascinating experience to go back through an author’s backlog once you’ve fallen in love with their recent work. I adore the Brown Sisters and their romance series, it’s secured Talia Hibbert as one of my favorite authors. So, of course, after finishing those books I went back. And in “The Princess Trap”, you can really see where Reuben walked so Red, Zaf, and Jacob could run. In this contemporary romance, you have the fake engagement trope in spades along with a very heavy case of insta-lust between Cherry and Reuben after he visits the Academy she works at. He’s a prince in disguise so of course he doesn’t tell her exactly who he is when he takes her out to lunch, and of course it doesn’t come up when they get a little frisky in the alley before getting to Cherry’s apartment. It’s not until a paparazzi catches them that Cherry really learns who Reuben is and agrees to the engagement scheme to protect him, herself, and also pay for her sister’s college expenses. Cherry is a wonderful example of how Hibbert keeps true to her strong, big, beautiful, and incredibly capable female lead characters. And while Reuben possess a lot of the characteristics that later MMC in Hibbert’s books posses much more strongly, I think were you really see Hibbert’s growth is how her romantic leads help each other grow in some capacity. Cherry certainly helps Reuben through his trauma, but there’s not much for Cherry to do growth wise.

“An American Marriage” is multiple stories wrapped together, and I don’t say that because there are three POV characters. You have the messy relationships of Celestial and Roy, Andre and Celestial, and then the relationships between them and their parents all under a magnifying lens highlighting every flaw. Then you have the story of the gross injustice in our justice system that incarcerates a disproportionate amount of Black and Brown men, and how that incarceration upends not just their lives, but the lives of their families and disrupts a whole community. Sometimes, these two stories came together, and other times they didn’t, which made this book hard for me to put my finger on if I liked it in its entirety, or just certain parts. So, let’s talk about the characters first and the “romance” aspect. Beware, this is a long one!

“The Nine Minute Diner” is a fascinating concept—a novella that focuses on the brief moments before a fatal robbery in a diner from the perspective of the sixteen patrons there at the time. As each person gives their account of events, they explain to the police recorder how the events of their life brought them to that particular diner on that day just before the traumatic events occurred. It’s up to the reader to decide how reliable each narrator is when they both give their account of the crime, and the events of their life up to that moment. While each of the sixteen characters have a distinct personality, not all were necessary as it tended to spread the unifying incident between each character far too thin.