Netgalley Archives - Proud Book Reviews

September 19, 2022June 19, 2022

Hot Desk – Zara Stoneley

This book contains:

Depicts life after COVID-19 lockdown
Minor unwanted advances appropriately handled and stopped
Minor child custody dispute.

Alice is excited to return to work after the second COVID-19 lockdown. She’s desperate to return to some form of normalcy and gain some of her own space back. She’s the second youngest of four sisters who lived under each other’s feet until she finally moved out after uni. At which point she moved into a share house with 4 roommates, got a boyfriend who didn’t mind rearranging and disposing of her possessions and her younger sister kept helping herself to her clothes.

Jamie is a bit of a mystery to us. He sits opposite Alice every day at work, seems to irritate her no end and has questionable tastes in women.

After the second COVID-19 lockdown, We Got Designs has returned to the office. Unfortunately, they’ve lost several clients and things are tight financially now. They make a deal with another company to share their office space and have their staff job share their desks with a hot desk policy.

They’re pairing up staff to share a desk on alternate days to help reduce costs without laying off staff. For Alice, she’s been assigned to share a desk with Jamie and lose yet another bit of personal space.

My first thought is that this is THE FIRST BOOK since the COVID pandemic started that actually talked about it. While I know it hasn’t been easy for people (my city has been in lockdown for more than 260 days between April 2020 and November 2021, when I wrote this review, yes I know, major delay in writing this and releasing it, sorry!), I can’t believe that by November 2021 this is the first time any book I’ve read has mentioned the pandemic. I mean, it’s a GLOBAL pandemic that has affected million and millions of people in all sorts of unimaginable ways.

How has no book before this even mentioned masks, social distancing, forced working from home, mass deaths or just generally the way our lives have changed?

I love that the whole premise of this romance was how COVID impacted us, changed us and what we’ve learnt about ourselves and our loved ones. While I know there are lots of ways to address this, I loved how this based those learnings on something that almost all of us can relate to.

Being forced to stay at home for a period of time due to a pandemic. Isolated from everyone except those we share a home with. Not to mention the fear and panic I’m sure many of us felt during this time. It was so refreshing and I’m so grateful we’ll have at least one book out there that depicts the realities we’ve all faced over the past two years.

August 8, 2022July 30, 2022

Pirate’s Protector – Lisa Kessler

This book contains:

Murder
Torture
Mind control
Theft
Manipulation.

Duke is the loyal and protective First Mate of the Sea Dog crew. He’s steadfastly avoided romantic entanglements for the past 200 years, even with many of his crew mates falling in love, because he doesn’t want to watch them grow old and die.

Annika is a mermaid that’s been around on Earth for a couple thousand years, and yet has maintained minimal contact with humans until now. After some incidents that happened with her family, she’s pretty much alone on Earth and was quite happy like this until she met Duke and he somehow managed to sneak past her defences.

Annika seeks out the Sea Dog after following it in from the Atlantic at the end of the previous book (Pirate’s Paradox) thanks to the Atlanteans giving her comb to them. When she can’t find it, she’s forced to confront someone on the crew in the hopes of finding it, which turns out to be Duke’s position.

After Annika shoots Duke in an attempt to get her comb back, he offers to help her in exchange for answering questions about mermaids. After accepting his offer of help, Annika and Duke work together to find an unlikely enemy, unexpected returns and the missing comb.

Another highly enjoyable and exciting read where Lisa adds twists to old folklore and myths to create her own universe. My only fault with the details is about the chemical make up of Neptune.

If it’s a gaseous planet, made up of the same gas components as water but in a gas form. How do the mermaid swim? And how do they breathe underwater?

And another one that just bugged me coz I’m odd. How do they sleep underwater?

All probably irrelevant and don’t impact the story but my woozey brain as I read this while quite sick struggled to comprehend and make the connections, or just move on from these details.

In terms of the story itself, it was full of twists and turns with a major development that I didn’t see coming. Well, I did, but then Lisa added a comment that made me change tack and it turns out I was right initially. So, I got a small shock when that was revealed!

After learning more about Captain Flynn in this, I’m now quite excited for his book to come out so I can find out what happens on his romance/relationship front!

August 1, 2022June 19, 2022

Pirate’s Paradox – Lisa Kessler

Diana is a psychic local to Savannah who’s helped the crew in the past, even if only a couple have met her before. She’s strong willed and refuses to let a man get in the way of what she wants from life, especially after the stunt her ex pulled on her in college.

Caleb is the Sea Dogs navigator and has his head 100% committed to science and the tangible world. With multiple doctorates in a range of fields, he considers himself an expert in many areas. Yet when he starts getting dreams he can’t explain, his answer is to stop sleeping to avoid the nightmares.

Diana and Caleb are getting very similar dreams that are pushing them out to sea by some unknown force. Diana convinces the crew of the Sea Dog to go to some coordinates in the middle of the Atlantic telling them it’ll stop the tsunami that she believes is coming to Savanah.

From all the research they’re all doing to try and understand what’s out there, it looks more and more likely that Atlantis has something to do with it.

I was a bit hesitant about how I felt about this in a few ways, but then in others I quite enjoyed it.

The hint of something to do with Atlantis had me suckered in, but then the development of Caleb and Diana’s relationship felt odd to me. That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it. There was just something that kept niggling at the back of my mind that I couldn’t quite place.

In the end I think I enjoyed the Atlantis vibes more than the romance. That seemed to intrigue me so much more than the romance did. Or maybe I’d been on a binge of romances at the time and so the Atlantis stuff just caught my attention more coz it was a bit different. I’m not sure.

Still a great book, and it reminded me I still haven’t gone back to the start of the series to read those. Hopefully in 2022 I will get around to doing that.

July 25, 2022June 19, 2022

Pirate’s Promise – Lisa Kessler

Greyson is a Scottish pirate who’s over 200 years old and has been living in Savannah since their ship sunk just off the coast. He loves his crew and will do anything to protect then, which is how he first ran into Aura.

Aura is an Agent for Department 13 and hates Greyson after he blew her last mission. Since then, she’s been desperate to prove herself and secure hew position in Department 13 since she feels like it’s on edge and could be taken away at any moment since Greyson blew her cover.

Greyson and Aura are teamed up together to find the elusive blade that thirsts for blood and has been discovered missing from the Department 13 vault. Since taking a mythical sword that can cut through any material on an international flight from Scotland to DC wouldn’t be smart, let alone challenging to get through customs, they sailed the Sea Dog all the way from Savannah to Glasgow.

Once there, they need to find and retrieve the sword, without getting killed.

I’m really enjoying this series. The development of the characters, the levels to their personalities and the trauma they’ve experienced in the past is so well thought out. While I haven’t read all the earlier books to get a sense of whether their personalities and histories are consistent, I certainly got the sense they were.

Even the little details Lisa includes about how they became the person they are today is amazing. I really should go back and read the first three books, and of course keep an eye out for the remaining books!

November 29, 2021November 21, 2021

Strictly Come Dating – Kathryn Freeman

This book contains:

References to cheating spouse
References to a severe health problem
Death of a parent.

Maggie is a 37 year old GP with two young girls — Penny and Tabby — and an ex who barely even calls to speak to Penny and Tabby. She’s locked herself down to her life revolving around ensuring Penny and Tabby have everything that she wished she’d had growing up. Being as organised as she is, it means everything fits to a schedule and she doesn’t do spontaneous things.

Seb is 27 and has returned home from Australia to help care for his dad as he recovers from a heart attack. He’s the carefree, no roots, go with the flow king of guy who is everything Maggie can’t stand.

Seb has returned home and is staying with his sister when he comes home one Saturday night to find his sisters and their friends all watching Strictly Come Dancing. He’s immediately drawn to Maggie and finds ways to insert himself into her life. Whether it’s helping Penny with homework, emergency childcare or making sure she has a suitable dance partner, he’s there.

Meanwhile, Maggie is fighting with every instinct in her body to keep away from Seb. He’s charming and always ready to be there, but he’s 10 years younger. While she fights with the public perception of her being with a much younger man, not to mention how it’ll impact her daughters, Seb keeps fighting his way in.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to read this!

I got this off NetGalley what feels like a year ago an I’ve FINALLY had time to read it. I’m sure I read some good reviews at the time so I’m kicking myself that I left this so long coz I loved it!

It was so much fun to read, and because Kathryn spread the romance out over like 6 months, it didn’t feel rushed. It felt organic and real which made it all the better.

The little steps they both took, the challenges they faced together, the respect they had for one another the whole time was amazing. Even when they had their moments, they reacted like I think most of us would, but then found ways to reconnect, communicate and move forwards.

And the epilogue! OMG!

I couldn’t have asked for a better ending. It just felt perfect for every character.