atria books

Speedy Reviews

In an effort to continue reviewing every single ARC I receive (for the second year in a row) while simultaneously not burning out from the effort, I’ve decided to implement what I’m calling Speedy Reviews. Here I will briefly review more than one advanced copy received recently – largely books that I don’t feel necessitate a long-winded review. Without further ado, I give you : Speedy Reviews.

Book: All the Men I’ve Loved Again
Author: Christine Pride
Publisher: Atria Books
Year: 2025
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “It’s 1999 and Cora Belle has arrived at college ready to change her life. She’s determined to grow out of the shy, sheltered daddy’s girl who attended an all-white prep school in her all-white suburb. What she’s totally unprepared for is Lincoln, with his dark skin, charming southern drawl, and smile. Because how can you ever prepare yourself for the roller coaster of first love?
Just when Cora thinks she’s got everything figured out, a series of surprises, secrets, and a devastating tragedy sends her into a tailspin. In this wake of this tumult, a new man enters her life. Cora is once again thrown by the strength of her feelings, this time for Aaron, the enigmatic photographer who seems to understand her like no one else. With her whole heart at stake, Cora is pulled between two loves : one that’s comfortable and one that’s true.
Twenty years later, Cora is all grown up and has made it a point to avoid any serious relationships. Being alone can’t break your heart. But then an unexpected reconnection and a chance encounter put her right back where she started. The same two men the same agonizing decision. Finding herself in this position – again – will test everything Cora thought she knew about fate, love, and, most importantly, herself.”

Review : All the Men I’ve Loved Again is a well written read about the ups and downs of first love, particularly first love when one is so, so young and so, so naive about the world, like Cora, a first year college student (when we meet her). And while it was well written, I found it to be an incredibly slow read. I had a hard time connecting with the characters, perhaps because so much of the book is taken up by Cora’s relationship with Lincoln. There was a small attempt made at creating backstory and friendships with Cora’s roommates, but the vast majority of the plot is Cora’s relationship with Lincoln. And while you might think, based on the synopsis, that this story would bounce between Lincoln and Aaron…it really doesn’t. There are whole relationships formed, strange friendships made, hints dropped, and storylines that simply don’t play out, the synopsis tells us more about Cora’s background than the actual book does, and the time we spend between Cora and Aaron is minuscule. All the Men I’ve Loved Again feels disjointed and disconnected from the reader, but beyond that, by the time I’d finished I was left with the glaring question of whether this story needed to be told. And to answer that question, the best I can say is, I don’t think it did. It felt like a story that had nearly nowhere to go and I don’t feel like it ultimately ended up being worth my time. It was well written, I’ll say that. But it wasn’t something that kept me turning the pages.

Finally, if you choose to read All the Men I’ve Loved Again, know that there are mentions of abortion, miscarriage, stroke, hospitalization, loss of a parent, and cheating.

Book: Zom Rom Com
Author: Olivia Dade
Publisher: Berkley Romance
Year: 2025
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “When Edie Brandstrup attempts to save her seemingly harmless neighbor from the first major zombie breach in years, she’s stunned to be saved by him – and his ridiculously large sword – instead. As it turns out, Gaston “Max” Boucher is actually a super-old, super-surly vampire, and he’s unexpectedly protective.
The pair soon unravels a sinister conspiracy to set zombies loose on the world (again), and despite the awful timing, Edie finds herself falling for the vampire who’s helping her save humanity. As she and Max battle their foes side by side, Edie must decide whether having a love worth living for also meaning having a love you’d die for – and, in a world that grows deadlier by the minute, whether that’s a risk she’s willing to take.”

Review : Zom Rom Com is a surprise of a book, weighing in at just shy of 400 pages, with complex world-building and a cast of characters it’s hard not to love. As someone who isn’t the world’s biggest fan of zombie storylines, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this creative and exciting rom-com from Olivia Dade. In a world where humans, superhuman, and supernaturals coexist together, it’s perhaps not the biggest surprise that there might be zombies existing in this plane of existence, yet I found the concept of zombies to be funny and inventive within the world Dade’s created. Every aspect of this book could have taken a gristly or even bleak turn, but Dade managed to keep things light and fun all the way to the final page. The banter between Edie and her super hot vampire neighbor Max is enough to keep the pages turning, but the complex and well thought out plot behind a zombie outbreak, and even the reasoning behind why zombies exist in the first place, is really what kept me turning pages. There’s a good build up of will-they / won’t-they that lasts for at least the first 100 pages that adds to the building enjoyment, and while this is a romance novel, there’s an incredibly amount of plot creation and fantasy work involved in this novel, from start to finish. I did feel there were a few plot holes and inconsistencies, but nothing that detracted from how much I genuinely enjoyed this book. Without giving any spoilers away, the ending more than leaves room for at least one additional novel, though I suspect there could be more!

Before reading this book, if you choose, this novel discusses the loss of family members, romantic betrayal, and chronic illness. And – yay! – this book included plus-size inclusion!

Middletide Review

Book: Middletide
Author: Sarah Crouch
Publisher: Atria Books
Year: 2024
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “One peaceful morning, in the small Puget Sound town of Point Orchards, the lifeless body of Dr. Erin Landry is found hanging from a tree on the property of prodigal son and failed writer Elijah Leith. Sheriff Jim Godbout’s initial investigation points to an obvious suicide, but upon closer inspection, there seem to be clues of foul play when he discovers that the circumstances of the beautiful doctor’s death were ripped straight from the pages of Elijah’s own novel.
Out of money and motivation, thirty-three-year-old Elijah returns to his empty childhood home to lick the wounds of his fertile writing career. Hungry for purpose, he throws himself into restoring the ramshackle cabin his father left behind and rekindling his relationship with Nakita, the extraordinary girl from the nearby reservation whom he betrayed but was never able to forget.
As the town of Point Orchards turns against him, Elijah must fight for his innocence against an unexpected foe who is close and cunning enough to flawlessly frame him for murder. For fans of Where the Crawdads Sing, this scintillating literary suspense seeks to uncover a case of love, loss, and revenge.”

Review : Okay, Middletide is my first DNF (did not finish) of the year. And while I would normally not review a book I didn’t finish, I’m trying to be better about reviewing every advanced reader copy I get this year; while this may be a shorter review than most, I’m going to let you know why I chose not to finish this one. I had immediate red flags right from the start with the author’s note to the reader explaining that while Sarah Crouch took inspiration from the Lummi and Navajo Nations, the indigenous group she writes about is fictional. There was something about fictionalizing a group of people that didn’t sit quite right with me, something that continued to itch at the back of my mind as Crouch introduced us to Nakita and her father, to members of the fictional Indigenous group who also happen to be Christians (her father being the Christian pastor on the fictional reservation). The more I think about it, the more it rubs me the wrong way. Not only was the narrative not served by a white woman writing in a fictionalized Indigenous narrative, but the insistence that they be Christian rather than connected to their Indigenous beliefs felt off balance, at best. I think it’s also worth mentioning that Crouch wrote Nakita as living in a three story home on the reservation, take that how you will.

Crouch puts a great deal of emphasis on her main character, Elijah, being a homesteader; surely through her long-winded descriptions of the food he makes for himself and the plant-life that surround his small off-the-grid-esque cabin she earned the “for fans of Where the Crawdads Sing” title from the synopsis. However, if you’ve been here for a while you might remember that I gave WTCS a 2.5 stars for it’s lyrical writing and I still chose to give Middletide half a star less. Where WTCS crafted an effortlessly beautiful story full of natural elements and wonder, Middletide felt like effort. Crouch included so many drawn out descriptions of Elijah’s food that it became repetitive and frustrating early on, but when Elijah began killing his own food with equally long winded discussions about his bow and arrow, well, this vegan was out.

**Spoilers Ahead**

I was willing to overlook and plow through some of the frustrations I’d come across, hoping to find a quality murder mystery at the heart of this debut novel, but when the narrative took a swift turn into the unbelievable, I flipped to the end, discovered the twist I predicted immediately was true, and shut the book. Crouch asks the reader not to suspend belief, but to be so carried away by cozy conversations about food that we forget the nature of the characters she’s crafted for the reader. When the narrative changes on a dime, it becomes hard to reconcile who we’ve come to see with what she’s asking us to believe – and the real kicker is, if you’ve been reading thrillers for some time, it’s especially hard to reconcile because the plot eerily mirrors another’s work. Jumping from Elijah’s third person narrative to the diaries of a woman he’s been seeing, Crouch asks us to believe that Elijah has been an unreliable narrator and instead believe the diary entries we’re reading, which do not correspond with the third-person telling we’ve been getting until this point. I have a hard time with this, as Crouch is asking us to believe that she is the unreliable narrator as the author of a third-person narrative. Had Elijah’s perspective been first person, I would have had an easier time believing his account might not be entirely truthful, and the twist would have taken hold. Instead, the diary entries we read are so out of sync with what we’ve come to know over one hundred-some pages that it’s impossible to believe them, which is unfortunate because the plot twist reminded me immediately of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. And sure enough, when I flipped to the back of the book…the diary entries were faked in order to frame Elijah for murder.

Advice : This book certainly has an audience that I think might enjoy it, and if you fall into the homesteading, living off the land, the main characters date but don’t even kiss for months, kind of camp, well this might be for you. If you aren’t, or you’ve read Gone Girl, don’t bother. You already know how it ends.

The Other Black Girl Review

Book : The Other Black Girl
Author : Zakiya Dalila Harris
Publisher : Atria Books
Year : 2021
Rating : 4.5 out of 5 stars

Synopsis : “Nella Rogers is an ambitious young Black woman trying to make her mark at the legendary Wagner Books. Needless to say, she is thrilled when Hazel joins the team and is eager for the friendship she assumes will be just around the corner, easy, and immediate. but when a moment of support goes horribly wrong (in a very public way), Nella retreats and finds herself watching and questioning Hazel’s every move. Urgent, propulsive, brilliant, and hilarious, The Other Black Girl is a psychological masterpiece, where micro aggressions and gaslighting turn a company’s “civilized” atmosphere into a slowly unraveling horror.”

Review : The Other Black Girl was a slow burning, psychologically thrilling, completely haunting novel. I’m torn, generally, between love and hate for a book who jumps between characters; it’s either done well or it’s not, there’s very little middle ground. Harris nearly-perfectly executes this technique (nearly, hence the .5 rating) throughout the entirety of the novel but lost me briefly at the end with a chapter that was not entitled and left me trying to guess who the character was supposed to be – probably the point of the chapter, but ultimately it felt disjointed. Aside from the minor disjointedness from the final chapter, the rest of the book read easily and enjoyably. Finally, a thriller that doesn’t follow the same, old, stale routine. It’s a miracle.
I loved the pacing of this book. It’s not clear it’s even entering into the world of thrillers and horror until you’re well into it, setting the stage for a deeply personal encounter. All of the build up had a point, it all lead to a conclusion that was surprisingly twisty, and I never once felt like there was story just for the sake of filling pages. I’m grateful when I find a book that engages details that further the plot rather than a book I come away from wondering why I read half of what I read.
Harris leaves us wanting more as she wraps the book up and for that I’m both frustrated and glad. I wish there was more! I still have questions and there are characters I was hoping to hear more from, but it doesn’t feel empty or come across as incomplete. It reads like a good book should: realistically (as much as can be expected from a thriller / horror novel). Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t always want a book to tie up a story into a neat little bow, they read as stilted and unlikely. Harris proves that you can have an unlikely story without creating a book that feels unlikely.

Advice : If you like thrillers, psychological movies, or an unexpected ending, you’ll love The Other Black Girl. It is a truly well written novel that will suck you in and keep you coming back for more. I highly recommend this book!