Review: Love and Other Words

Love and Other Words by Christina Lauren
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was really such a good book. Up to this point y only experiences with author(s) Christina Lauren was their 'Boss' series. Which was also very good, but definitely deeply the risqué end of the romance genre. This novel read totally differently and told a more serious and sweeter story their other work. Sometimes it can throw me off when an author writes a story totally different from their more typical style I didn't find that to be the case with this book at all. I was sucked in from the first page and devoured the book in its entirety in under 24 hours.

The books begins with an adult Macy Sorenson desperately trying to avoid a man sees in a local coffee shop. A man she hasn't seen in 11 years but also describes as the love of her life. Flashing back and forth between current day and an 15 year countdown from her summer before 8th grade and the years leading up to their 11 year break the novel addresses the importance people play in a life both with their presence and by leaving us. At it's heart this book tells the tale of a second chance romance but also tells a coming of age story of every kind of love, loss heartache and growing up. This book made me laugh and cry and I didn't want it to be over so quickly. I would absolutely recommend this book to others and look forward to catching up on the authors backlist.

View all my reviews

Review: The Price Guide to the Occult

The Price Guide to the Occult by Leslye Walton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Off the coast of Washington there is an small island and witches live there. A small town's worth of other people also live there but the witches are really the important bit. Well, semi-witches is probably the more accurate descriptor for the last 8 generations of Blackburn women. For hundreds of years this family of witches were powerful but good peeps overall. Unfortunately humans beings aren't known for their high tolerance for magical entities real or imagined. This lead to a many generations of witches being forced to constantly move when their neighbors tolerance levels peaked. So eventually one of these witches, Rona Blackburn, decides she's going to set up a life on a little remote Island where there's not even a dozen other inhabitants. Remote locale hermit lifestyle , all should be good and safe for Rona the witch. Yeah, not so much. Some 18th century drama goes down, there's fires set, babies are born, it's not good. So Rona, sick of all the problems her magic has brought to her life decides she's going to try and bind her powers and keep all the future generations of her family safe from what she's suffered. What results is more like a cruse than a protection and it is passed along to each generations Blackburn woman and then on to her one daughter and so on. Eight generations later our story begins with, Nor, who's chillin, living her life, when one a book arrives at the town psychic shop where she works. A book of available spells, incantation pricing, and an order form. A book of Blackburns spells that have been and should still be unusable due to the Blackburn biding curse. Only it appears Blackburn #8, Nor's mother, has found a way to achieve what ought not be achieved. Also, she's like a supermodel channeling her inner Charles Manson. This is not the best combo and pretty much all hell starts breaking loose from this point on. Good times!


I honestly enjoyed this read. It was a quick fun read that I devoured in pretty much one sitting and that says a lot for a book. I'm ADD to the extreme and this a chronic book jumper. This novel kept my attention firmly in place. It brought to mind books like L.J. Smith's Secret Circle trilogy, and Lana Popovic's Wicked like a Wildfire. I think this book be a pretty good matchup for anyone who has read and enjoyed those stories. I believe this book should be available to the public on March 13, 2018.


View all my reviews