Wow, another week has gone by since my last update. Sorry!

I’ve yet to receive my computer from these mysterious repairs, and so have been pretty useless/lazy this whole week. Well, that’s not completely true. I’ve planned a party today for all the new friends I made during the convention, and as you all I know, I love planning things, so this small event has been all I’ve been working on this whole week.

And what does this have to do with this blog? Well, I’ll be sharing some new recipes with you all finally (I know, right?), so that’s got to be somewhat exciting. 🙂

Anywho, over the past few weeks I haven’t had the greatest luck with books, since many of them just weren’t holding my attention. But the few that did, I wanted to do a mini review for. So here goes.

As some of you might remember, I was extremely excited to read The Book of Blood and Shadow because of all the amazing reviews it got. This book had been heralded as a teen The Da Vinci Code, and that’s exactly what it was. Chock full of mystery and suspense, betrayal and heartbreak, Wasserman took her readers on a tour of Prague in attempts to solve a centuries-old secret. Given the fast-paced nature of this story, the ending was the biggest disappointment. It is unclear whether there will be a sequel or a series, but regardless of that, there were just way too many questions and uncertainties at the end for me to be completely happy with it. So that’s why I give it a rating of 3.5 out of 5.

Reviewing Sophie KInsella’s latest I’ve Got Your Number makes me a bit sad. I’m a big Sophie Kinsella fan; I fell in love with Shopaholic back in grade 12, and kept reading her during the depressing drudgery of university, when I needed something light and fun. I’ve laughed and loved every single one of her books, except for The Undomestic Goddess. Unfortunately, this book joins the ranks of that one.

There was actually nothing wrong with this title; it had all the makings of a Kinsella classic: a bumbling heroine, a suave and confident hero, and oodles of misunderstandings and lies. But what this story was missing was heart. There was a lot of potential, but I felt that Kinsella just didn’t deliver. I kept waiting for the funny to start, for my heart to be engaged, but I managed to finish the book more out of loyalty to Kinsella than out of love for the book. 🙁

Last year in my Creative Book Publishing Program, we learned that you can tell when a book is being sold by the merit of the author rather than the work when the author’s name takes over most of the space on the cover. And this is most definitely true here. I’m not sure whether this is a case of KInsella getting too big, but I’ll still try her next book, even after my lukewarm reaction to this one. So that’s why I give it 2.5 out of 5.

The Little Lady Agency read like a Sophie Kinsella book, except it wasn’t. There’s been a surge of these types of books recently, but this one stands out as a funny and heartwarming addition to the chick-lit family.

In true chick-lit fashion, Browne’s book features a cute, but naive heroine, a heartthrob hero, and a whole slew of funny and cute scenarios. Melissa’s adventures as ‘Honey’, the blond bombshell character she becomes to run her agency, are hilarious, yet also showcase Melissa’s insecurities about herself.

As usual though, the fast-paced excitement of the story sort of peters out by the end, and I found myself slightly annoyed by Melissa’s constant negativity. There were so many ways her problems could have been solved, and so the story just got dragged on unnecessarily for 50 pages. So that’s why I give it a 4 out of 5.

All righty, this took me a lot longer to write than I thought it would. It probably had something to do with Goodreads distracting me…

Hopefully I’ll be back sooner than last time, so I can share some chocolate covered goodies with you 🙂

Also, to any new followers of this please, PLEASE click the follow button at the bottom of the screen, on the right hand side. This way you’ll save oodles of time by not having to search up my website and checking to see if I have a new post or not, since the post’s will be directly delivered to your inbox! 🙂

Thanks for reading,

Ikhlas