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What is it about February that always feels like it lasts half the length of a sneeze?
I had so many lofty goals for the second month of 2025, mainly oriented around cramming as many Romance novels into my brain as possible. Instead, I only managed to completely read three books - only two of which were even Romance novels! - and spent the last two weeks of the month desperately paddling forward to attempt to finish The Boys in the Boat before a book club meeting.
(I didn't make it, in case you were wondering. That book is as long and crunchy as a gravel driveway.)
But being that I was trying to set myself up for success with some of my tried-and-true reading habits for 2025, I did reinvest myself in becoming as much of a nuisance towards my local library Hold shelves as possible, and feelings of reading inadequacy have already began to manifest themselves in copious amounts of audiobook downloads on Libby.
I also spent Valentine's Day combing through some of the ebook selections on sale for Kindle, and walked away with six (!!!) new titles added to my shelves. Did I need them? Absolutely not. But being that February meant bringing back days where the sun was occasionally viewable through the dense Washington cloud cover again, meant that every purchase felt justified with the eventual help it may give me in completing a Summer Book Bingo.
Then again, I'm trying to pare down my TBR in 2025. Someone really needs to tell my brain that we're supposed to be getting rid of books, not adding more!
three stars
The idea that a poor-little-rich-girl would take up working as a full-time rotating nomadic caregiver, only to be hired to "babysit" a grumpy misunderstood forest-man artist by his elderly neighbor, is patently nuts. The 1950s-pinup-style fashion designer insta-bestie, an attractive-and-well-liked Highland-Games-competing mechanic brother, the sensitive younger damsel-in-distress sister who can't stop crying and just wants everyone to get along... these are all the kinds of people who were created in a lab, to occupy small towns in Romance novels and Hallmark movies alike.
And of course, this isn't even counting the whole debacle with his mysterious past. I hope you'll forgive me for spoiling it now, or at least, as much as I can remember: "Mom and Dad were addicts, then mom disappeared, and everyone assumed Dad killed her, and then I got roped into it because I was such an antisocial weirdo about it, but then Mom was alive, but none of us have any contact with her, and then Dad really did murder someone for real, and now he's in jail." I think that's all? And yes, that is the most explanation I can give you, because no, there were still quite a few details that stayed murky without getting cleared up further. It's one thing to have a main hero with an ambiguous and shadowy backstory, but my goodness, that's a lot to absorb.
And yet, the narrative and story is itself very cute. The character interactions between each other feel real, for all that the people themselves just so clearly aren't. It's strange to have such a bizarrely constructed environment laying groundwork for what feel like genuine conversations about relationships.
Of course, at the end we take a hard left turn into Miscommunication and all kinds of dialogue breakdown into the most strange and frustrating types of lost messaging that it almost leaves you a little shell-shocked... and absolutely confident that - had this been anything OTHER than a Romance novel - this couple would have lasted about two seconds beyond Happily Ever After before breaking up for good.
It really would make a fun Hallmark movie, though.
The Bride Test, Helen Hoang
four stars
A hotel maid in Vietnam suddenly finds herself flying to California, after a chance encounter with the mother of a prospective "future husband" decides what the young man really needs in his life is a wife. Who is more of the fish-out-of-water, here: Esme, an immigrant seeking a better life for her and her young daughter - and desperate to find a lead on her American father before her three months are up - or Khai, a man on the spectrum who finds all of his habits and routines upended with a strange, beautiful girl living in his house?
I enjoyed this entry into Helen Hoang's world more than The Kiss Quotient, for sure. It felt more unique; the relationship conflicts, more interesting and nuanced; the surrounding characters, more supportive; and overall, simply more complex and involved interpersonal dynamics. I absolutely loved Esme, and I loved Khai, and the ways that they grew to know and understand each other over time was incredibly lovely.On the whole, my issues with The Bride Test are similar in my reaction to The Kiss Quotient, specifically on the conversation of representation for Autism in Romance. While I do appreciate it, I wish it wasn't treated like something that had to come packaged with all the best character traits in the world to make it still somehow "Romance-worthy." Khai is autistic, and that is both realistic to the world and valid, but he also happens to work for a really great company, own a house, be a total beefcake with a serious gym bro habit, wear expensive clothes, be incredibly handsome, etc. In a way, it's like how Esme has to be shaped like "a Playboy bunny," great at cooking, good at cleaning (constantly without a bra on), but also be whip-smart and passionate about the potential for education, and more, to accomodate that she's an immigrant on a visa, that she has a child from a previous relationship (something that doesn't even come up in their relationship until VERY late in the game), or that she's of a perceived lower status (from a poor village, rather than the city). It almost feels like the representation is treated as something to be overcome with a deluge of personality perks and plusses, rather than something that is simply allowed to be true about a person on its own.
I do appreciate what Hoang has done for portrayals of both characters with autism, as well as the immigrant experience, and even what feels like outreach for other non-historically-protected identities and backgrounds for some of her leads (Michael, in The Kiss Quotient, is a professional escort, while Esme is essentially named as a "mail-order bride" in the context of the story). I just wish her highlighting these unique and complex characters didn't also essentially mean giving them superpowers to somehow be worthy of love and acceptance: Khai would have still made for a compelling hero, even if he wasn't chiseled from marble, just like Esme would still have been a heroine you root for, even if she wasn't described like parts of her were perpetually inflated to the point of being in danger of popping.
I have heard not-so-great things about the third-installment of this series, so I may skip it, but I'd definitely pick up more of what Hoang writes in the future.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni
four stars
To be entirely fair to myself, I can see from the date ascribed to it that it was a late-December read, and I was probably trying to shovel short books into the furnace of my brain at a breakneck pace to try and hit my Goodreads goal by the end of the year.
I do think there's value in something like this, for all that it kind of reads like if The Social Network was produced by the Disney Company: high stakes business conversations that play out in adult, mostly polite dialogue, where the main character is always right, knows how to soothe every problem, and of course, everything works out in the end. This is the sort of things parents might read their fussy Business majors before bedtime. But it didn't become a bestseller because of bad ideas or being too patronizing; in fact, the accessibility of its best business practice ideas and compelling voice are among its strongest attributes.
I don't know if its the most memorable thing I've ever read - clearly - but I was honestly still relieved that I managed to finish one of our work book club reading picks before the actual day of the meeting.
Not exactly the reading month I wanted, but it's the one I had. What did you end up finishing in February? Let me know, in the comments below!
