Hello and happy Tuesday. Do I like to come here and tell you about the books I didn’t finish? Not at all, especially when they were sent to me in exchange for a review. Did I hate them so much I couldn’t read them all the way through? No, but I’m not in the mood to force myself to read a book that I will end up rating three stars and forget as soon as I’m done with it. I do want to thank NetGalley, the authors and publishers for this opportunity, and I hope that my review can lead the right readers to these books.

I think From Bitter to Sweet by Sheridan Jeane is the perfect book to read when you don’t want to put a lot of (or any) thought on the actual words that are on the page. Say you want to read a romance that introduces the love interest in the very first sentence because you actually get to read about him before the main character is even introduced. Say you want to be told repeatedly how said main character and said love interest used to have a crush on each other when they were in high school but never said anything until they meet again because the love interest’s sister convinces the main character to hire the love interest to work on her house. Oh, you do want that? Okay, well, then you have From Bitter to Sweet, although I probably described the plot of like ten thousand other romance books out there. It wasn’t worth my time and/or braincells.

The Broken Hearts Club by Susan Bishop Crispell would’ve had me obsessed when I was in my early twenties. Before going to therapy and developing some emotional maturity. This is YA, so characters are not expected to be emotionally mature, but this main character could’ve had a whole Netflix documentary about her. Basically, she’s been in love with this guy for years, but he’s always had a girlfriend whom he loves (and we know this because our main character can read people’s auras and see the actual love around them). So naturally, the main character decides to create this whole fake relationship with a guy who she dated last summer…and she uses his actual name and everything. Everything else, though, is fake. She takes pictures of the supposed gifts he sends her and creates a fake profile for him so that she can impersonate him…do we see where this is headed? Like, I’m sorry, but no regular sixteen year-old is that smart, and if she were, it’s probably because she’s a sociopath.

The Modern Girl’s Guide to Magic by Linsey Hall is one of those books that’s meant to give off cute and quirky vibes, but that forces that so much that it ends up being annoying. Picture Jess from New Girl, but she’s a witch and she’s bad at being a witch because she can’t control her powers. Was this problematic? No, but I didn’t want to read about a witch in her twenties or thirties saving her magical village and falling in love with the guy who literally gets introduced in the first chapter so we know is going to be the love interest.

I guess the title Ms Perfectly Fine is fitting because Kate Callaghan’s book was just that, fine. Alright. Okay. Did I find anything structurally wrong with it? No. Did I find that the author wrote the character as childish and annoying while the love interest was this put-together successful adult? I totally did. Sadly, I don’t think it was intentional, I think sexism is so ingrained in the way we see relationships that we normalize the dynamic of the stubborn, immature woman who has little going for her and the serious man who has a promising job and an even more promising life. It’s perpetuating gender roles and gender stereotypes, which yes, is a structural problem, but not one that is going to get solved by me giving a romance one star. What I can do is stay critical of this issue and point it out to other potential readers.