Melissa Rose

Tag: books

  • Review: All the Missing Pieces

    by Catherine Cowles

    Star Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

    Quick Take: Loved! A super engaging story that has a little bit of everything—crime, romance, tragedy, humor. It also combines one of my favorite romance tropes—enemies to lovers—with a good mystery.

    Favorite Quotes: “Be safe, Chaos. It’s going to piss me the hell off if you end up dead.” (212)

    “If I break my neck pulling this ridiculous stunt, I’m going to haunt your ass.” (266)

    I loved this book! It has a little bit of everything—crime, romance, tragedy, humor. It also combines one of my favorite romance tropes—enemies to lovers—with my love of a good mystery. It kept me guessing until the end. I lay awake at night trying to solve it, and I couldn’t.

    I worried this meant that the big reveal might be a let down with a completely left-field perpetrator, but it wasn’t. The answer made sense in the world of the novel and was all the more satisfying since I couldn’t guess it.

    Brief synopsis: Losing her twin sister compels Ridley Sawyer to become a nomadic true-crime podcaster, driving her camper van around the country in the hopes of helping solve cold cases that are similar to her sister’s disappearance—and that she suspects could be connected. When she arrives in Shady Cove for her next assignment, she’s met with resistance from the small, tight-knit community, and her biggest detractor is the town’s smoking hot sheriff, Colter Brooks.

    With the growing popularity of true crime in recent years and the heated debate around its ethics, I loved the way the book handled this contentious topic with such care, openness, and thoughtfulness. In short, there’s a right way to do true crime that can bring communities together, find justice for victims and their families, and potentially pave the way for healing. There’s also a wrong way to do true crime, which exploits these tragedies for personal and financial gain and in the process, dehumanizes victims and their families while forcing them to relive the worst moments of their lives.

    In All the Missing Pieces, the community of Shady Cove is suspicious that Ridley falls into the latter category, that she’s only digging into the town’s painful history to get more followers for her podcast and boost her own popularity. But one by one, they see how passionate Ridley is about justice, and that the purpose of her podcast is to garner enough interest in cold cases to uncover new, previously missed details that could be the key to solving them. In doing so, Ridley hopes to give families closure and stop the perpetrators of these crimes from hurting anyone else. The community bands together behind her, especially when they learn that Ridley’s own sister was kidnapped and never found. The book nearly had me in tears several times as Ridley confronted her trauma and helped Colt do the same.

    The only reason I didn’t give this book five stars is because I often found the language lacking. While there were some good quips throughout, the novel had a lot of sticky sentences the editor in me itched to simplify. There were also several chapters that ended with hokey and maddening cliff hangers. I’m not against cliff hangers in general, only when they’re used to trick the audience into thinking something terrible is about to happen (e.g. Ridley thinks someone is hiding in her closet waiting to attack her, but turns out it was just her cat).

    My last main critique is that some of the sex scenes felt logistically absurd (they’re standing in the middle of a room and he’s holding her with one arm, really?). But I can hardly hold it against Cowles when this is a recurring issue I see in many romance books, and the scenes were still sexy and fun.

    Overall though, All the Missing Pieces tells a super engaging story that manages to be both incredibly moving and a lot of fun. I’m definitely interested in reading more by Cowles.

    I’m really hoping for a spinoff with two of the secondary characters (I won’t say who to avoid any spoilers). And I think there’s a good chance we’ll get one. Cowles sets it up perfectly.

  • Review: The Rose and the Yew Tree

    by Mary Westmacott (aka Agathie Christie)

    Star Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

    Quick Take: Absolutely stunning. A provocative meditation on life, love, worry, what it means to be a person in the world, and whether there are new possible ways to navigate it that we’d never considered.

    Favorite Quote: “You really loved her. You loved her enough to leave her alone.” (p. 245)

    After hearing that Agathie Christie wrote romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, I immediately checked out one of these books: The Rose and the Yew Tree, first published in 1947 by Arbor House.

    It’s definitely not a romance, but I’m still including it in my romance recommendations because it is about love and obsession and relationships, subjects I imagine interest many romance readers.

    I was truly surprised by how much I loved this book—it’s one of the best I’ve read in the past few years. I didn’t really know what to expect going into it, having only read Christie’s detective novels. While I enjoyed many of them, they never truly captivated me, and they certainly never moved me the way The Rose and the Yew Tree did.

    This novel gripped me pretty much from the beginning, with its acerbic wit juxtaposed with stunning insights on love, life, and death. It somehow manages to be incredibly funny as well as beautiful and tragic. It has everything.

    HarperCollins (which later republished the book) provides this synopsis: “Everyone expected Isabella Charteris, beautiful, sheltered and aristocratic, to marry her cousin Rupert when he came back from the war. It would have been such a suitable marriage. How strange then that John Gabriel, an ambitious and ruthless war hero, should appear in her life. For Isabella, the price of love would mean abandoning her dreams of home and happiness forever. For Gabriel, it would destroy his chance of a career and all his ambitions!”

    To me, this synopsis fails to capture the book’s essence. It completely leaves out the narrator, Hugh Norrey, who himself becomes enchanted by Isabella. Hugh relocates to the country with his brother and sister-in-law after a terrible car accident destroys his ability to walk, have sex, or do much of anything for himself. Hugh is drowning in self-pity and despair when he meets Isabella, but as he gets to know her, he rediscovers his will to live again. Through him, we get provocative meditations on what it means to be a person in the world and whether there are new possible ways to navigate it that we’d never considered.  

    It was Hugh’s experience and reflections that stuck with me and stood out more than any romantic encounter between Isabella and John Gabriel. While they both feature prominently in the book, it’s primarily through their respective relationships to Hugh. Their own tryst doesn’t even come up until the book is nearly over.

    What captivated me most about The Rose and the Yew Tree were Christie’s incredibly vivid, specific, and authentic character portraits. It was these portraits that propelled the book forward more than plot, which I believe categorizes the book as literary fiction more than anything else.  

    For me, so much of this book is a meditation on worry—the futility and perhaps even the self-indulgence of it. It’s not just that worry can prevent us from enjoying life; worry can also impede us from really seeing the world around us and the people in it. We instead see them filtered through our own experience rather than their own, putting ourselves at the center of other people’s lives.

    The book is also a mediation on love and what it means to truly care for someone. It’s not about obsession or passion or lust. It’s about seeing them for who they really are and not just accepting them, but appreciating them for it. Allowing them to live their life the way they see fit, even if that means that you’re not a part of it. And in the world of The Rose and the Yew Tree, loving someone so purely can bring its own kind of happiness.

    I can’t remember the last time I flagged so many quotes from a book. Here are a few of my favorites:

    “I’ve always suspected that a sense of humor is a kind of parlor trick we civilized folk have taught ourselves as an insurance against disillusionment. We make a conscious effort to see things as funny, simply because we suspect they are unsatisfactory.”(Arbor House first edition, p. 175)

    “We, all of us, use imagination and speculation as a means of escape—a way of getting outwards, away from ourselves. Isabella doesn’t need to get away from herself. She can live with herself—she’s in harmony with herself. She has no need for a more complex way of life.” (p. 119–120)

    “Is there any bitterness like the bitterness of a fool’s paradise? All that communion of mind with mind, our thoughts that leapt to complete each other, our friendship, our companionship: illusion—nothing but illusion. The illusion that mutual attraction between man and woman breeds. Nature’s lure, Nature’s last and most cunning piece of deceit. Between me and Jennifer that had been the attraction of the flesh only—from that had sprung the whole monstrous fabric of self-deception. It had been passion and passion only, and the discovery shamed me, turned me sour, brought me almost to the point of hating her as well as myself. We stared at each other desolately—wondering each in our own way what had happened to the miracle in which we had been so confident.” (p. 27)

  • Review: Tangled Up In You

    by Christina Lauren

    Star Rarting: ⭐⭐⭐.75

    Quick Take: A little silly and even at times absurd, but overall really fun and entertaining, with two romantic leads who truly bring out the best in each other.

    Favorite Quote: “Observing the world through Ren’s eyes made Edward realize how often he didn’t really pay attention to what was going on around him. He moved through life constantly on the offense and went into every interaction with an objective. It meant he missed the details, missed the moments that made life worth living.” (p. 226)

    This contemporary romance novel centers on Ren, a sunny 22-year-old who’s spent her life largely isolated from the world on a farm with her controlling parents. When she leaves to go to college—her first time ever going to school—she meets Edward (aka Fitz), her sexy, guarded classmate with a secret criminal record he’s trying to expunge.

    When they embark on a cross-country road trip together over spring break, Fitz shows Ren the wonders of the wider world, while she shows him the beauty of navigating that world with an open heart.

    Truthfully, I was a bit lukewarm on this book at first. Ren’s innocence and naivety initially made her feel incredibly young—to the point where she felt even felt like a child, so I couldn’t picture her as a love interest, nor did I want to. It also took the sexual tension much longer to really surface than I typically prefer from romance novels. But once Ren’s childlike innocence began to fade and she really began to embrace her sexuality and attraction to Fitz, I was hooked and couldn’t put the book down. Ren and Fitz really brought out the best in each other and balanced one another so well.

    I also really appreciated and enjoyed how incredibly smart, strong, and capable Ren was. There were so many things she could do that Fitz couldn’t, from recovering their stolen wallets to fixing their broken-down car. Rather than feeling defensive and insecure, Fitz just admired and respected her for it. I loved that dynamic and how it upended gender stereotypes.

    Without spoiling anything, I’ll acknowledge that some of the plot points felt a little ridiculous and really stretched the bounds of credulity, but you know what? It was fun and I’m here for it. I did wish the ending went on a bit longer—I would’ve loved a full-on epilogue. Without it, the ending felt a tad rushed. This and the slow start prevented me from rating the book four stars, but overall this was such a fun and entertaining read with a lot of heart.

    Fun fact: The novel was inspired by Tangled. I didn’t realize this until reading the acknowledgements, but now that I know, it makes so much sense.