Category: women's fiction

BLOG TOUR} Here for the Drama by. Kate Bromley | ARC Review

Welcome to the blog tour for Here for the Drama by. Kate Bromley!

My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

Title: Here for the Drama

Author: Kate Bromley

Format: eBook (NetGalley)

Pages: 352

Publication Date: 6/21/22

BUY HERE: Bookshop.org | Harlequin | Barnes & Noble | Amazon | Books-A-Million | Powell’s

Publisher: Graydon House Books

Categories: Contemporary, Romance, Playwright, Theater, Rom-Com, Women’s Fiction

Disclaimer: **I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.  All thoughts and opinions are my own.**

Thank you to Graydon House Books for giving me a chance to read this eARC in exchange for an honest review!

This summer, it’s much ado about everything.

Becoming a famous playwright is all Winnie ever dreamed about. For now, though, she’ll have to settle for assisting the celebrated, sharp-witted feminist playwright Juliette Brassard. When an experimental theater company in London, England decides to stage Juliette’s most renowned play, The Lights of Trafalgar, Winnie and Juliette pack their bags and hop across the pond.

But the trip goes sideways faster than you can say “tea and crumpets”. Juliette stubbornly vetoes the director’s every choice, and Winnie’s left stage-managing their relationship. Winnie’s own work seems to have stalled, and though Juliette keeps promising to read it, she always has some vague reason why she can’t. Then, Juliette’s nephew Liam enters stage left. He’s handsome, he’s smart, he is devastatingly British, and he and Winnie have sizzling chemistry. But as her boss’s nephew, Liam is definitely off-limits, so Winnie has to keep their burgeoning relationship on the down-low from Juliette. What could go wrong?

Balancing a production seemingly headed for disaster, a secret romance, and the sweetest, most rambunctious rescue dog, will Winnie save the play, make her own dreams come true, and find true love along the way–or will the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune get the best of her?

Content Warning: death of parent, divorce

I found this to be a sweet romance with a likable main character who is clearly in love with theater and working on the play that hopefully will make her a famous playwright. For now she is an assistant to Juliette Bassard who is what Winnie aspires to be. They have a best friend type of relationship, which I found endearing. Juliette, Winnie and Roshni the second assistant all take a trip to London for a staging of Juliette’s most famous play and a lot of things happen while they are there.

I’m more of a musical than play kind of person, but I found the playwriting and staging process in this book quite fascinating. You can feel the passion in Winnie and Juliette as one is beginning her career as a playwright and then other is coming into a time of transition. Of course there is a dog is in this story, just makes the story even sweeter, because Ollie is a sweet prince! The romance is sweet as well, there is some heat between Winnie and Liam but for the most part, it’s a relationship between two mature people who may have met each other at the wrong time – at least the wrong time to start a relationship and for them…it works out because they are mature to let one another go.

Of course this can’t be a story about drama and theater without drama. Juliette has a whole past in London and it comes back to haunt her. Winnie has her own things to deal with like finishing her play, figuring out her life after London and what to do about Liam. Juliette and Winnie also confront things about their relationship but in the end it all works out beautifully. I thought the epilogue did a great job to give us a very happy ending.

There were some parts that I found slow and I felt like Juliette and Winnie’s relationship was the main focus of this story as opposed to the romance growing between Winnie and Liam. It is very much a story about Winnie’s life journey.

Why you should read it:

  • you love drama, theater, plays – I found Winnie’s passion for playwriting really come through in her character
  • it’s a story about friendship, romance and life’s journey
  • it has a cute dog named Ollie

Why you might not want to read it:

  • this is more women’s fiction than romance, so if you expect full on romance, this is not it

My Thoughts:

I was pleasantly surprised with this story but I did wish there was more romance between Winnie and Liam. Winnie is a woman in her late 20’s trying to figure out her career, trying to not give up on her passion and having some romance in the process – I found her sweet and relatable. I would categorize this as more women’s fiction than romance though, but regardless I thought it was an enjoyable read and it has a great happy ending.

📚 ~ Yolanda

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

KATE BROMLEY lives in New York City with her husband, son, and her somewhat excessive collection of romance novels (It’s not hoarding if it’s books, right?). She was a preschool teacher for seven years and is now focusing full-time on combining her two great passions – writing swoon-worthy love stories and making people laugh. She is also the author of Talk Bookish to Me.

Author Website

Twitter: @kbromleywrites | Instagram: @katebromleywrites | Facebook: @katebromleywrites | Goodreads

BLOG TOUR} Nowhere Girl: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood by. Cheryl Diamond | ARC Review

Welcome to the blog tour for Nowhere Girl: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood by. Cheryl Diamond!

“A riveting tale of trauma and resilience.”

—People Magazine

My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

Title: Nowhere Girl: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood

Author: Kate Bromley

Format: Paperback

Pages: 320

Publication Date: 6/14/22

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Categories: Memoir

Disclaimer: **I received this book free from Algonquin Books in exchange for an honest review.  All thoughts and opinions are my own.**

Thank you to Algonquin Books for giving me a chance to read this eARC in exchange for an honest review!

Cheryl Diamond had an outlaw childhood beyond the imaginings of most. By age nine, she had lived in more than a dozen countries on five continents and had assumed six identities as her parents evaded Interpol and other law enforcement agencies. While her family lived on the run, she would learn math on an abacus, train as an Olympic hopeful, practice Sikhism and then celebrate her bat mitzvah, come to terms with the disappearance of her brother, become a successful fashion model, and ultimately watch her unconventional yet close-knit family implode. Diamond’s unforgettable memoir, NOWHERE GIRL: A MEMOIR OF A FUGITIVE CHILDHOOD (Available in Paperback: June 14, 2022; $16.95), is a harrowing, clear-sighted, and surprisingly humor-filled testament to a childhood lost and an adulthood found. With its page-turning candor about forged passports and midnights escapes, this is, in the end, the searing story of how lies can destroy a family and how truth can set us free.

Diamond, whose acclaimed first book, Model: A Memoir, earned her accolades as “America’s next top author” in The New York Times Style Magazine, begins her story with her earliest memories as a four-year-old in India. Even at that tender age she had been schooled by her complicated and controlling father to never make a mistake, never betray the family, and never become attached to a place or other people. As the family continent-hopped, switched religions, paid for everything in cash, assumed new names time and again—always one step ahead of the law—young Cheryl (then called Bhajan) developed the burning need to achieve and win approval. By twenty-three she had seen so much of the world, but only through a peculiar lens that had somehow become normal. And she was plagued by fundamental questions: Who am I? And how can I find the courage to break away from the people I love most – because escaping is the only way to survive.

Content Warning: all kinds of abuse, illness, sexual harassment, incest

I haven’t read a memoir in awhile but I found the premise of this story very intriguing. When I was reading Cheryl/Bhajan’s story I for one was amazed that she could remember so far back into her childhood and with so much detail. I don’t remember anything at age 4! But her childhood is unique, scary, and quite traumatic.

I found it to be a very quick read, especially in her early years because she and her family were on the run and traveled so much, barely setting roots anywhere – their whole life was one of multiple identities, loads of lies and I can’t imagine how they even kept it up. Of course eventually things fell apart.

A lot of the chapters end abruptly but I think that works for the most part because their life was always changing but by the end I felt like the story like chapters of her life, were fleeting. Like as a reader, I never got to put down roots into the story also, with her life in her 20’s really felt like it sped by quickly. There was modeling, then Cheryl seeing her dad for what he truly was and suffering from Crohn’s disease but it all seemed so rushed.

I can’t imagine the abuse all of them went through trying to please their father. And what kind of upbringing is that for children? I felt horrible for Cheryl and her siblings. Their whole family was so toxic. All her life it seems she was trapped – it was nice to see there was a happy ending and healing.

Why you should read it:

  • a family on the run – pretty wild story
  • to see how it ends and if they get caught
  • Cheryl’s determination to heal from her traumatic childhood

Why you might not want to read it:

  • it’s a quick read but a lot of the chapters also feel rushed and abrupt – there were times I wondered how true these details were, especially when she was young
  • her father is a horrible man

My Thoughts:

Overall, I found this memoir pretty entertaining but also scary and sad. I don’t wish that kind of lifestyle on any child and it was just sad to read about what she went through – even if she had happy memories, there were so many scary ones that she had to internalize all her childhood. I’m glad she came out of the experience alive and learning how to heal with therapy, and knowing who to cut from her life.

📚 ~ Yolanda

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Cheryl Diamond is now a citizen of Luxembourg and lives between there and Rome. Her behind-the-scenes account of life as a teenage model, Model: A Memoir, was published in 2008. Diamond´s second book, Naked Rome, reveals the Eternal City through the eyes of its most fascinating people.

“A shocking rollercoaster ride of a story that shares secrets of life on the run but also asks big questions about what family means and who we truly are, no matter what the name on a passport might say.”

—Town & Country

“Within the autobiographical subset of children-overcoming-adversity that was defined by Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle (2005) and Tara Westover’s Educated (2018), Diamond’s tale might just be the most mind-blowing of them all.”

—Booklist, Starred Review

“Like Tara Westover’s Educated, Cheryl Diamond’s memoir tells the harrowing story of how crippling a childhood can be under the despotic narcissistic rule of a controlling father….”

  —New York Journal of Books