Rocky end to my reading month
Feb. 24th, 2026 07:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearThe Forever Home by Erica James seemed like a sure-fire win for me.
Second chances, found family, interesting female protagonists, a cute dog...
And for the first two thirds, I largely enjoyed it - despite large sections of summary background, a very perky audiobook narrator and the three main narratives feeling rather disconnected.
I had some issues with one of the main viewpoint characters - Cassie - because she shared a lot of my worst flaws, which made her hard to warm to, particularly since she spent a lot of time thinking about what a terrible person she was but not doing anything about it.
But it was an easy listen and I was invested enough and liked most of the characters enough to want to find out what happened to them.
And then it took a turn. A terrible, terrible turn, which just got worse and worse in a way I really didn't expect from a book that had 'heartwarming' and 'delightful' plastered all over the cover...
I wanted to give up on it but I had to see it through so that the storylines weren't abandoned in my head at their lowest points. And apart from a huge (and blatantly lampshaded) coincidence very near the end, I was happy with where the book ended up.
But how it got there - just no.
Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler has been on my shelf for a while, and on and off several recent monthly TBRs. I finally got around to giving it a try, but I gave up pretty quickly because it was very dreary, with an awful lot of summary and very little direct action - and I couldn't see either of those points improving much as the story went on (though I could be wrong about that).
Copper Script by KJ Charles was recommended to me by a fellow BookTuber and I gave it a try in audiobook form at the gym. But the story didn't grab me and I found the way the narrator did all the character voices really off-putting, so I didn't get very far with it.
Second chances, found family, interesting female protagonists, a cute dog...
And for the first two thirds, I largely enjoyed it - despite large sections of summary background, a very perky audiobook narrator and the three main narratives feeling rather disconnected.
I had some issues with one of the main viewpoint characters - Cassie - because she shared a lot of my worst flaws, which made her hard to warm to, particularly since she spent a lot of time thinking about what a terrible person she was but not doing anything about it.
But it was an easy listen and I was invested enough and liked most of the characters enough to want to find out what happened to them.
And then it took a turn. A terrible, terrible turn, which just got worse and worse in a way I really didn't expect from a book that had 'heartwarming' and 'delightful' plastered all over the cover...
I wanted to give up on it but I had to see it through so that the storylines weren't abandoned in my head at their lowest points. And apart from a huge (and blatantly lampshaded) coincidence very near the end, I was happy with where the book ended up.
But how it got there - just no.
Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler has been on my shelf for a while, and on and off several recent monthly TBRs. I finally got around to giving it a try, but I gave up pretty quickly because it was very dreary, with an awful lot of summary and very little direct action - and I couldn't see either of those points improving much as the story went on (though I could be wrong about that).
Copper Script by KJ Charles was recommended to me by a fellow BookTuber and I gave it a try in audiobook form at the gym. But the story didn't grab me and I found the way the narrator did all the character voices really off-putting, so I didn't get very far with it.
