This year, the Book Bloggers’ Novel of the Year Award (BBNYA) is celebrating the 50 books that made it into Round Two with a mini spotlight blitz tour for each title. BBNYA is a yearly competition where book bloggers from all over the world read and score books written by indie authors, ending with 10 finalists and one overall winner.
If you want some more information about BBNYA, check out the BBNYA website, https://www.bbnya.com/, or take a peek over on Twitter @BBNYA_Official. BBNYA is brought to you in association with the @Foliosociety (if you love beautiful books, you NEED to check out their website!) and the book blogger support group @The_WriteReads.
A historical mystery novel taking place during the height of WWII
Thank you so much to TBR and Beyond Tours and Ellie Marney for allowing me to be part of this experience and also providing me with complimentary ARC and media kit!
A mixture of gothic historical fiction, murder mystery, and haunting supernatural elements
Thank you so much to TBR and Beyond Tours and Adalyn Grace for allowing me to be part of this experience and also providing me with a complimentary ARC and media kit!
Incredibly cute new-adult love story with a generous serving of feminism
Thank you so much to TBR and Beyond Tours and Kaitlyn Hill for allowing me to be part of this experience and also providing me with a complimentary eARC and media kit!
Book Information
Genre: NA Romance Publishing Date: April 5, 2022
This summer, Reese Camden is trading sweet tea and Southern hospitality for cold brew and crisp coastal air. She’s landed her dream marketing internship at Friends of Flavor, a wildly popular cooking channel in Seattle. The only problem? Benny Beneventi, the relentlessly charming, backwards-baseball-cap-wearing culinary intern–and her main competition for the fall job.
Reese’s plan to keep work a No Feelings Zone crumbles like a day-old muffin when she and Benny are thrown together for a video shoot that goes viral, making them the internet’s newest ship. Audiences are hungry for more, and their bosses at Friends of Flavor are happy to deliver. Soon Reese and Benny are in an all-out food war, churning homemade ice cream, twisting soft pretzels, breaking eggs in an omelet showdown–while hundreds of thousands of viewers watch.
Reese can’t deny the chemistry between her and Benny. But the more their rivalry heats up, the harder it is to keep love on the back burner…
For a list of warnings, tropes, and representation for this book, check out its page on BookTriggerWarnings.com.
About the Author
Kaitlyn Hill is a writer, reader, and sweet tea enthusiast who believes that all the world is not, in fact, a stage, but a romance novel waiting to happen. Her debut novel Love from Scratch comes out 4/5/22 from Delacorte Press/Penguin Random House.
Kaitlyn has a BA in Sociology/Anthropology and German Studies, which means that she can tell you way too much about the Communist Manifesto in Karl Marx’s mother tongue. Before landing on writing, she worked in roles from city government intern in a small German town to Haunted Mansion Maid at Walt Disney World, and most recently, at her hometown public library.
Aside from books, Kaitlyn’s favorite things are giraffes, ABBA, and excessively long naps. She lives with her real life romance hero in Lexington, Kentucky.
If you’d like to follow along with the rest of the tour, you can find the tour schedule here.
Y’all, this romance novel was so incredibly cute. I was literally grinning my face off at the end when a particular scene happened and that one scene single handedly elevated my rating half a star. I want to start off this review by mentioning that this is pegged as a YA romance novel, but I would definitely say it is a NA romance instead, as I’ve written above. The main characters are both 18 and recent high school graduates. The novel follows these two interns as they’re thrust into a sudden workplace partnership filming cooking videos under a segment titled Amateur Hour. I don’t know about you, but all of that screams new adult to me.
There are so many glorious tropes thrown into this one. We have workplace romance, food themes, and rivals/workplace competition. While there were a few tropes that I could have definitely done without such as workplace misogyny (a particularly taxing trope for me as a queer woman of color in a cis-het white male dominated field) and miscommunication (boo!), the main and supporting characters were just so lovely that I couldn’t really be upset for long.
One of the many things that I think this book handled really well was feminism. Misogyny and sexism in the workplace and on the internet is something that basically every woman can attest to. This book tackles this head on and fights back in a way that I was particularly proud of. We had some fantastic male allies come to bat as well as a healthy dose of women supporting women. While I do think it could become a bit preachy at times and that there could have been a bit more intersectionality with trans/non-binary folks, I thought it was really well handled.
This is definitely a book that I’ll file under comfort reads for future sad times. I see myself revisiting these characters and this story multiple times in my future.
Love From Scratch is out now, so if you’re interested, definitely check out some of the links listed above!
A fun and entertaining read that is perhaps too short for its own good.
Foreword
Thank you so much to Rachel at https://www.rachelsrandomresources.com/ and Kate Moseman for allowing me to be part of this experience and also providing me with a complimentary digital copy and blog tour media kit!
If you’d like to get a copy of A Good Demon is Hard to Find, you can find it on Amazon here.
About the Author
Kate Moseman is a writer, photographer, and recipe developer who lives in Florida with her family and enjoys going to theme parks as frequently as possible.
Sometimes, a date from hell is just what you need…
When Erin thoughtlessly lays a curse on Mark, her cheating ex-husband, she doesn’t expect a well-dressed Great Earl of Hell to show up in her kitchen to fulfill the curse (and make damn good coffee while he’s at it).
Andromalius specializes in wickedness and revenge. He’s ready, willing, and able to rain down hell on Erin’s ex—but when Mark announces a hasty new marriage, Erin needs more than just revenge.
She needs a date to the wedding.
Fans of Good Omens, Lucifer, and The Good Place will love this wickedly funny paranormal romantic comedy!
Review (No Spoilers)
Let me start off by saying this book was a hoot from the start. The characters, plot, and dialogue are all ridiculously funny and I was laughing from the very first chapter. In fact, it would have been a 4-5 star read if it wasn’t for one blaring problem: it was too short.
Now, there are a lot of short novels that are totally amazing but that’s not what I’m talking about here. What I mean when I say it’s too short is that there are very important parts that are just kind of glossed over. The two biggest examples of this are 1) when a certain paranormal being is introduced with very little background/setup and 2) the very end of the book.
I can’t go into much more detail about the first example without spoiling things so I’ll just leave it at that. As far as the ending goes…there just kind of wasn’t one. Frankly, when I got to the last chapter and read the final sentence, I was super confused because I had no idea what had just happened. I felt that while the ending provided a conclusion to the “main plot”, it left the more important questions unanswered.
All in all, if you’re looking for a fun and quick read, I’d definitely recommend trying out this book. There is a continuation scheduled to come out later this year and I will definitely be on the lookout for that. Hopefully it will provide me not only with answers, but also with and a whole lot of laughs.
Feel free to check out the other blog posts on this tour! The dates and blog names can be found below.
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