notTheAudience

@pretensesoup @willaful Katherine Center's latest ("Hello Stranger") leans hard on prosopagnosia for the plot, but apparently Center did a good bit of research to back it up. (Also kisses only, which is not usually my preference, but I like Center's books too much to mind.) @romancelandia @romancebooks

@willaful Anyway none of this in any way affects the quality of the story or the relationship between the main characters, and Kennedy is good at a lot of the things that make romances which are fun to read. It's just like those moments in a movie where the background scenery is clearly from a different city, and you're like, wait a minute... @romancelandia @romancebooks

@willaful The hardest thing to swallow in this book is one of the major hurdles; supposedly one of Briar's fictional rivals collapsed financially and was absorbed by Briar, so now their hockey teams need to be combined (and somehow this is a problem for the men's team but not the women?). This isn't a thing that happens often, so I can't say it's not accurately portrayed... but it's not a thing that happens often.
@romancelandia @romancebooks

@willaful Briar is supposed to be "Ivy" but then Yale - one of the most recognizable Ivy League schools - "isn't in their conference." The courses of study and the fraternity-centric campus culture also aligns more with big state universities than typical Ivy atmosphere; it often feels more like a Southern football school inexplicably plonked into New England. One game description alternates the opponent between Northeastern and Northwestern.
@romancelandia @romancebooks

@willaful I have friends who are scientists who said they couldn't enjoy e.g. Ali Hazelwood's "Love Hypothesis" because the way the science is portrayed kept knocking them out of the story. So far I've been able to get along with the fictional universities in these college hockey series, like Kennedy's invented Briar U, but for some reason in this book I feel like there are more holes in the scenery than usual.

@romancelandia @romancebooks

@willaful In print, doing a re-read (30+ years later) of James Clavell's Asian Saga, triggered by a comment from someone on another forum. Expecting the books to be horrifically racist, and indeed the characters are, but the books are more just... about people who are various grades of awful. Listening to Elle Kennedy's latest, "The Graham Effect", which, if you like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you would like. Very on-brand for Kennedy. @romancelandia @romancebooks

@willaful I was lucky to get a low number in the holds list for Ali Hazelwood's YA "Check & Mate" which released on Tuesday. It lines up with the observation I've read that "YA is trending older" (the characters are largely 18+) but aside from that it's good to see that PG-13 Hazelwood is as engrossing to me as NC-17 Hazelwood. She can really draw you in to the story *and* move the story along; I could chuck a chess set through the plot holes but I barely care. @romancelandia @romancebooks

@willaful @romancelandia @romancebooks @lenoreo I’ve had Dax on my TBR for a while, I’ll be curious to hear what you think of it.

@willaful I was way down the holds list for Beth O'Leary's new one, "The Wake-Up Call", but then it appeared available at another library so I grabbed it. Plot's just started to get bubbling there. O'Leary's been hit-or-miss with me in the past; when she's good, she's really good, so I'm hopeful. Listening to Tarah DeWitt's "Rootbound" and waiting to figure out if I like the main characters - not clear yet. @romancelandia @romancebooks

@willaful @romancelandia @romancebooks and I’m late to the party on this one, but I’m reading Sangu Mandanna’s “The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches”, because I read her two mid-grade “Kiki Kallira” books to my daughter this summer and was surprised to find this on her website when I looked for more. All three are delightful, even though “witches” isn’t really a trope I’ve been embracing otherwise. (I guess both of these romances are out of my usual zone.)

@willaful @romancelandia @romancebooks I’m listening to Alison Cochran’s “The Charm Offensive” for a book club; tonight I found myself searching “Leland Barlow” to figure out if this background character was a real pop star I was unaware of, or a fictional one (fictional: the top result is a GR thread of people discovering this exactly the same way I did.)

@Anthro_CLH @lenoreo @Diva007 @romancelandia @romancebooks Now this is the kind of question that helps me understand the classification. @OliviaWrites has a lot of cinnamon roll characters, but Alex has a snarky, slightly bitter sense of humor that doesn't quite fit. Is he on the border? His buddy Marcus is equally capable of being sweet, but built his withdrawn and chilly side for self-protection. (Loving this discussion.)