Plain Jane Wanted by Rose Amberly

 I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

What a heart-warming happy read! Overall, this was a lovely book and a fun journey to read with fun characters and a fantastic setting.

The best thing about this book, in my mind, was the setting. I totally want to live on the island of La Canette. It sounds beautiful and is the perfect place for a romance story. 

I enjoyed the plot- it was very usual for a cozy-romance novel, which made it pretty predictable, but in this case, I don't mind so much. That's part of the enjoyment of cozy-romances: you know where the book will end, but you don't know how the characters will get there.

The characters were well written: Millie especially. She grew and developed a lot throughout the book. George grew mostly in the last 20 pages, which is frustrating. It would have been nice to see the growth spread out a bit, to convince me that he really did change. I would have like to been invited to the conversations between him and his father at the end to understand and watch their relationship develop. I think that would have been fun. 

The biggest issue I had reading this book was the typos. Letters were missing from words, and more frequently (like twice per page) there was a space after the first letter of a word. That made it frustrating to read. Each time that happened, I would be taken out of the story, simply because this glaringly obvious mistake caught my attention.

I also struggled with the change in fonts the author used to show the narrator's thoughts. I understand why the author did that, but it took me away from the story. I was distracted by the different fonts, especially George. His was always capitalized, which made me think he was always shouting, which is obnoxious, especially when he wasn't angry but just thinking. I would have preferred a different way of showing character's thought. 

The Suicide Killer by Zach Lamb

 I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

It took a while for the plot to get going and for me to warm up to the plot, but when I did, it was fun to follow the story and guess what would happen. It's nice that I didn't expect the ending, but it's also unfortunate because I didn't necessarily like the ending, nor did I think that it fit with the story. 

I was disappointed that the story had no hero, no main character, no protagonist. It was difficult to figure out which character I should pay attention to, which character's story I should follow the closest, and which character I should care about. That meant that I didn't really care about any of the characters which does make it hard to connect to a story. 

This book was also pretty gruesome, which I don't like, but I think that was made clear in the genre and book description. I just didn't expect it to be as gruesome as it was. 

Another challenge was the cadence of the writing. It was very forced and stiff. I think one minor issue that caused that was a lack of contractions. He often said "I will" instead of "I'll," and I think that makes it much harder to imagine the characters as people. It was robotic sounding. 

The overall plot and story is fun, especially if you're a fan of Criminal Minds or any of the CSIs.