Frozen in Time - Mitchell Zuckoff

I've read another of Zuckoff's books, Lost in Shangri-La, which is about a rescue of a group of Americans who were in a plane crash in a remote area of New Guinea during World War II and ended up in a village that had very little outside contact prior to the crash and the Americans' arrival.  With Frozen in Time, Zuckoff moved on to another island rescue mission, but instead of the tropics, this one goes to the Arctic, to the glaciers of Greenland.

There are two stories here: the historical, World War II crash-and-rescue story, and the modern story about the attempts to get a recovery mission up and running.  In 1942, a plane crash in New Zealand leaves five men stranded, and the rescue attempts strand nine more in a different location.  And the rescue attempts for the combined crews start stranding and claiming the lives of even more men.  On top of everything, it's not expected that men can live more than a month on the glaciers of Greenland, and winter is bearing down.

I did find this book a little misleading.  I knew several crashes were going to happen in this book, but when the modern chapters started, I got the distinct impression from Zuckoff's narrative that a lot more people died than actually did.  Don't get me wrong, people die in this book--too many.  But Zuckoff gives the impression early in the book that all of the stranded men died, and that the recovery mission was for all of them.  Consequently, I spent much of the book going, "But how do they know this happened this way?"  Well, they know because most the men from the B-17 plane that went down in search of the first plane made it out alive.  The other parts of the story are left more in fog, because those people didn't make it out.

The modern part of the story is mostly comprised of negotiating for funding to get a recovery mission going.  This guy named Lou wants to find the Duck, one of the rescue planes that went out, but he doesn't have the money to do it so he spends his time trying to get the funds from the US military, particularly the Coast Guard (who the Duck belonged to ).  Zuckoff himself ends up pitching in a significant amount of money, at one point even agreeing to use his house as collateral for a loan--though the loan never actually goes through.  This all made me raise an eyebrow at Zuckoff's judgment; while he's perfectly within his rights to spend his money however he wants, I definitely started to wonder how colored this narrative was by his desire to see it through, and I'm not sure that it's the role of the author (Zuckoff was already writing the book when he chipped in the money) to be so financially invested.  Maybe that's weird of me, but I can't quite shake that feeling.

The rescue  mission story is overall interesting, but the modern one is not.  After the fundraising, there's a lot of shifting equipment around on ice, and the end of this is pretty apparent.  Basically, it can only go two ways--they find the plane or they don't, and either way the book isn't long enough to include any sort of cover on the actual recovery mission, rather than the "let's find out where it is" mission.  As a result, I felt kind of bummed and a bit deceived by the end of this, and it's made me a little leery of Zuckoff's other works, though I would still recommend Lost in Shangri-La.

I read this book for the 2017 Popsugar Reading Challenge for the category of "A book with a subtitle," the subtitle being "An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest For Lost Heroes of World War II."

3 stars out of 5.

Reading Challenge Updates

Whew!  Progress!  What a ride it's been.  I'm working on a few more titles for this challenge, too, but I'm making pretty solid progress here.  Have you read anything good recently?

Completed
-A book you've read before that never fails to make you smile.  I was originally going to read Cress by Marissa Meyer for this one, because I really enjoyed it when I first read it through, but then I spotted a book on my shelves that fit this category even better: Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede.  This is a middle-grade book, but re-reading it as adult I found it just as charming as when I actually fit the target audience, though it certainly seemed a lot shorter this time around!

-A steampunk novel.  I've had Boneshaker on my shelf for a while, but never read it because while it was steampunk, something I like, it also had zombies, something I'm not big on.  Things like The Walking Dead have never really intrigued me.  But I read it as planned for this category, and I actually really enjoyed it!  I think the end left something to be desired, as it's not tied up and the next several books in the series don't appear to address the issues at all, but Cherie Priest's alternate universe, set in an extended Civil War-era, was a great direction to go with this.  It actually kind of reminded me of Walk On Earth a Stranger and Like a River Glorious, a bit, though those are YA-western-fantasy and this was adult-steampunk-zombie.  Still, they had some of the same historical flavor to them, and it worked.

-A book you got from a used book sale.  There's this bookstore in Sussex, New Jersey called Broad Street Books and which is owned by a family eerily similar to my boyfriend's.  We make a point of going whenever we're up in the area.  This time, one of the books I picked up was a collected works of Jane Austen.  I was originally going to read Sense and Sensibility from it for this category, but then The Deliberate Reader book club had Emma assigned for March, so I read that instead.  While Austen has a way of creating characters, I couldn't stand Emma herself here, and it really tainted the book for me.

-A book with career advice.  This seemed like it was going to be a terrible category, but then I realized it's actually very loosely-phrased.  First, it's a book with career advice, not a book of career advice--so the advice doesn't have to comprise the entirely of the book.  Also, it doesn't specify that the book has to have advice about my career, which would be terribly boring.  Semantics?  Yes, but useful ones, and it meant that this category didn't end up being a complete drag.  To fill it, I read Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl, a former restaurant critic for the New York Times and editor of the now-defunct Gourmet magazine, among other prestigious positions in the eating world.  I enjoyed the book, and the antics Reichl performed in an attempt to fool New York restaurants into thinking she wasn't herself, but kind of thought that her disguises were just an excuse for bad behavior that she ultimately recognized but never really owned up to.

-A book about an immigrant or refugee.  Stealing Buddha's Dinner, written by Bich Minh Nguyen who came to the United States as a Vietnamese refugee at the age of eight months old, has been on my to-read list for a while, and this was the perfect chance to get to it.  Nguyen manages to draw out the feelings of loneliness and otherness so well that even those who haven't been refugees or minorities can empathize with her situation, all while building up a very nostalgic and food-centered view of the late seventies and the eighties, and created a picture of a childhood that I saw paralleled my own in a lot of ways, making that connection and making seeing her own situation easier even though, in many ways, we are nothing alike.

-A book you loved as a child.  I was planning on finishing this category later, but I got really sick for a few days and so felt it was a good time to read something light and nostalgic--something just like Tamora Pierce's Squire.  Pierce writes such awesome heroines and while the book doesn't quite have the polish of her newer works, Keladry of Mindelan is an excellent role model and I pretty much still want to be her when I grow up, even all these years after first reading the book.

-A book with one of the four seasons in the title. As planned, I read Devil in Spring by Lisa Kleypas for this.  Unfortunately, like its predecessors in the same arc, this one just didn't do it for me.  That good ol' Kleypas magic isn't there, the hero is boring, and the plot is pretty much completely hokey.  Ah, well.  Hopefully after the final book in this series she'll move on to something that can recapture her former glow.



Still to Come
-A novel set during wartime.  Atonement, Ian McEwan

-A book of letters.  The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

-An audiobook.  Anna and the French Kiss, Stephanie Perkins

-A book by a person of color.  The Stone Sky, N. K. Jemisin

-A book that is a story within a story.  Afterworlds, Scott Westerfeld

-A book with multiple authors.  Mutiny on the Bounty, Charles Nordhoff and James Hall

-A book by an author who uses a pseudonym.  Seven Minutes in Heaven, Eloisa James (Mary Bly)

-A bestseller from a genre you don't normally read.  Carrie, Steven King

-A book by or about a person who has a disability.  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon

-A book involving travel.  SEAsoned, Victoria Allman

-A book that's published in 2017.  Given to the Sea, Mindy McGinnis

-A book involving a mythical creature.  Nice Dragons Finish Last, Rachel Aaron

-A book about food.  In the Devil's Garden, Stewart Lee Allen

-A book from a nonhuman perspective.  The Tale of Despereaux, Kate DiCamillo

-A book set in the wilderness.  Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe

-A book by an author from a country you've never visited.  Mornings in Jenin, Susan Abulhawa (Palestine)

-A book with an unreliable narrator.  The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer, Michelle Hodkin

-A book with pictures.  No Reservations, Anthony Bourdain

-A book where the main character is a different ethnicity than you.  A Disobedient Girl, Ru Freeman

-A book with a month or day of the week in the title.  A June of Ordinary Murders, Conor Brady

-A book written by someone you admire.  A Court of Wings and Ruin, S. J. Maas

-A book that's becoming a movie in 2017. Beauty and the Beast, Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont

-A book set around a holiday other than Christmas.  The Thanksgiving Target, Laura Scott

-The first book in a series you haven't read before.  Shadow and Bone, Leigh Bardugo

-A book recommended by an author you love.  The Lace Reader, Brunonia Barry (rec'd by Tamora Pierce)

-A bestseller from 2016.  Magic, Danielle Steel

-A book with a family-member term in the title.  Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Laini Taylor

-A book that takes place over a character's life span.  The Kitchen God's Wife, Amy Tan

-A book from a genre/subgenre you've never heard of.  The Six-Gun Tarot, R. S. Belcher (Weird West)

-A book that's more than 800 pages.  Voyager, Diana Galbadon

-A book that's been mentioned in another book.  Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift (mentioned as Gullible's Travels in Marissa Meyer's Heartless)

-A book about a difficult topic.  Rape is Rape, Jody Raphael

-A book based on mythology.  Olympos, Dan Simmons

Notorious RBG - Irin Carmon & Shana Knizhnik

One of the categories for my 2017 Popsugar Reading Challenge is "A book about an interesting woman."  The clear choice for this, for me, was RBG--Ruth Bader Ginsberg, one of the Supreme Court Justices and the most senior of the liberal side of the court.  I took a few law classes in school and we read many of her opinions--both majority and dissents--during those classes.  Her opinions sizzle.  One of them absolutely slams Congress, essentially saying that the Court shouldn't really be ruling on the issue at hand, but something has to be done about it, and Congress is refusing to do their jobs, so the Court is going to do it.  Wow.  Love it.  But there was a lot about RBG herself that I really didn't know, so this was a great opportunity to fit the book into my reading queue.

This a good overview, I think.  There aren't a ton of books about RBG, which I totally understand because, well, she's still alive.  It's hard to write a comprehensive biography of someone who isn't done with her life and venerable career.  But it gives some background and some insight as to where RBG comes from in the development of her ideals and what she'll do for them.  And it's not just her judicial background and time as a lawyer before that, but her life, too, and there were so many little anecdotes that you would never guess from just seeing RBG or reading her work.  Like her long, loving relationship with her husband, Marty, who cooked all the meals and who RBG once chased around her office with scissors, and who baked cakes for the clerks' birthdays at the Court.

I was surprised to learn a lot of the stuff behind RBG's professional life.  She's actually considered to be a very moderate justice, though she has a firm stance on equality, and is known to be one of the most thoughtful justices.  And then there's how she actually isn't a huge fan of Roe v. Wade; while she supports a woman's right to have an abortion, she felt that Roe didn't come in a great way, that it focuses on privacy rather than equality, and that sweeping decisions like Roe can ultimately be more easily disregarded later on--something that I think we've definitely seen in the recent spate of abortion regulations popping up across the countries which seemingly have nothing to do with actual health regulations.

However, I did have a few issues with this book.  First, it's very short, and consequently very surface-level.  While there are excerpts of some of her opinions that the authors dig into a bit, but I would have liked to see more analysis in general.  It also jumps around in time.  Just when I thought we were firmly into her life as a justice, there'd be a jump that would go back to when she was a lawyer and professor, and it was a bit confusing.  Those transitions also weren't very smooth.  And this is not a book meant to be read on Kindle--the formatting for it is absolutely terrible.

I really did enjoy this book, but I wish it had been a bit less superficial and that it just been organized a bit better.  Still, this offered a lot of snaps of RBG that I don't think most people know about, and they definitely made her more human rather than just the imposing (though tiny) justice who rules from the bench.

4 stars out of 5.

Squire - Tamora Pierce (Protector of the Small #3)

Tamora Pierce was one of my favorite authors growing up.  The first book of hers was actually the second one of this particular series, Page, which I got in a stack of books one of my mother's coworkers gave to me, because someone had given them to her niece, who wasn't a reader.  I didn't even realize it was a series until a couple of years later, when I found this one at a book store!  Pierce has written a lot of books, most of them middle-grade but some of them trending into the young adult category, and all of them about awesome girls and women doing awesome things.  She has a few male main characters, but overall she is very much a girl power author.  This particular book is one of my favorites of hers, and I'd decided to read it for the "A book you loved as a child" category of my 2017 reading challenge.  And since I've been horribly sick the past few days, and being sick always makes me nostalgic for things from when I was sick when I was little (Campbell's chicken noodle soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, anyone?) this seemed like a great time to read it.

The main character in the Protector of the Small series is Keladry of Mindelan, a young woman training to be the second female knight in over a century, and the first to actually train openly as female.  In this third book, Kel has passed out of her time as a page and into the status of a squire, needing to train directly under a knight, though she suspects that no one will choose her because she's "The Girl."  Luckily for her, someone does pick her--Raoul of Goldenlake and Malorie's Peak, the commander of the King's Own (kind of like a mini-army/National Guard sort of thing) and a legend in his own right.  Though Kel dreamed of being the squire of Alanna the Lioness, she knows it's not possible and is thrilled to be Raoul's squire, travelling with the Own and helping those across Tortall.  Along the way, she fights a centaur, rescues a baby griffin that she ends up stuck with, and encounters many characters that appeared in the series preceding this one, such as Alanna herself, Raoul himself, Daine the Wildmage, Numair Salmalin, and so on.  Those slightly-more-than-cameos are one of the reasons I find this particular book to be so enjoyable.  Raoul is an amazing character, a knight who respects Kel for her own worth but doesn't force it upon others and instead helps her to earn respect, though it's often hard-won.

In this series, Kel faces the many challenges of being a girl in what is essentially a man's world.  When Alanna won her shield, she did it disguised as a boy.  Kel, being openly female, faces harassment, gossip, destruction of her property, even the kidnapping of one of her servants in an attempt to make her quit her training.  Kel faces all of this with a cool exterior, even when it enrages her on the inside.  She fights for respect both for herself and for those who are unable to fight for it themselves--hence the "Protector of the Small" name of the series.  Kel is such a great character, being an outsider in so many ways but being unwilling to give up on her dreams or her duties.  When I was little, I wanted to be Kel.  She fights with a glaive, which inspired me to give one of my own main characters a glaive as a weapon.  She knows how to fight with a normal staff as well; I distinctly remember swinging around a broom handle in the front yard, many times, practicing what I imagined to be Kel's staff fighting.  I desperately wanted to be as awesome as Kel is.  I still do, and the very battered, much-read condition of the book shows it.

That said, I haven't read this is in years, and it's definitely a little rougher than I remember.  It was Pierce's third series, and one thing that's cool about her writing is that you can see how she grows as a writer over the course of them.  This book is a little less than four hundred pages long, and it covers four years of Kel's life and her entire time as a squire--that's a lot of ground to cover in a small amount of pages.  As such, she has to do a good amount of exposition and skipping over things, and that isn't always done in the smoothest manner.  She also does a lot of re-hashing of things that happened in the previous books, which I don't really think is necessary in a series.  Additionally, this isn't a book that has a strong central plot.  It's about Kel's time as a squire, but there's not really a single compelling motive here beyond that.  That's something that's pretty prevalent throughout this particular series, thought the fourth book does have a central plot revolving around more than just Kel's general struggles.  This one does set up well for the fourth book, though, with the escalation of hostilities with Scanra and the introduction of the enchanted metal killing machines.

This was such a fast, nostalgic read, and I really enjoyed it once again.  As much as when I was younger?  Maybe not quite that much, but I still think it's an excellent book and compensates well for its weaknesses, and is such a great book for girls in need of a role model who does something other than think about boys.  (Kel does think about boys, but her life far from revolves around them.  Pierce's attitudes towards her heroines and sex, that they engage in it but do so of their own free will and while taking proper precautions, is something that I think is very important to include in books for this age group.)

4 stars out of 5.

Garlic and Sapphires - Ruth Reichl

I read Ruth Reichl's novel, Delicous! a couple of years ago, and really enjoyed it.  Following a young woman who takes a job at a food magazine, only to find it shut down and that she's been left on as the only employee to uphold its "Delicious Guarantee," it's filled with the wonderful food scene of New York City to a woman who hasn't lived there her entire life.  Now, reading Reichl's nonfiction Garlic and Sapphire, I can see where so much of that book came from.

Garlic and Sapphires follows Reichl through her time as the food critic for the New York Times.  Coming from the Los Angeles Times, Reichl is stunned to realize that the restaurateurs of New York are prepared for her arrival, and decides that the only way she'll get a genuine eating experience is to don disguises.  And so begins a string of alter-egos that Reichl draws up, from the happy and flamboyant Brenda to the downright mean Emily to the semblance of her own mother, and more.  Of course, she doesn't do all of her dining anonymously, and the differences in treatment as her very own self and her alternate personas becomes evident pretty much immediately.  When she dines as herself, she's showered with good service, the raspberries on her tarts get bigger, she's showered with a wealth of deserts and tasting dishes.  When she dines anonymously, she gets the experience that pretty much any other diner would get, which varies wildly from place to place.

What I disliked about this book is that, while Reichl revels in her alternate identities, they seem to become an excuse for engaging in bad behavior more often than not.  She sends every dish in a meal back to the kitchen because it's what her mother would have done.  She's unnecessarily cruel to a young couple sitting at the next table over.  She does realize this, in the end, but only because a friend points it out, and she never really takes responsibility for the things that she does while in disguise.  She acts like, when she puts on a wig, fake makeup, and clothes from the thrift store, she actually becomes another person, with no control over her own actions, when in fact that isn't the case.  She never really owns up to this, just decides to put the whole thing behind her, and it made me really not like Reichl as much as a person.  Yes, the anecdotes she relates are entertaining, but underlying most of them is this subtle menace of bad behavior that will never be acknowledged or apologized for.

But one thing is certainly true: Reichl can write about food.  This shouldn't come as a surprise, given her stints as restaurant credit and editor of Gourmet magazine (now defunct), but the descriptions of food absolutely shine in this book.  She can make any meal seem appealing, even, strangely, the ones that she didn't actually enjoy.  It's the specter of good food, maybe, more than the actuality of it that does the trick.  It all comes back to something Reichl says early in the book: that restaurant reviews aren't written for the people that will eat at the restaurants, but for those who never will.  As someone who will definitely never eat at any of the restaurants Reichl describes (if they're still even open; she was the NYT critic in the early 90s) I can appreciate the luscious descriptions she puts down on the page, drawing out every experience as if I were actually there.

There was one more downfall to this book: it's repetitive.  Reichl follows her narrative experiences of restaurants with actual reviews of some of them, which usually tend to rehash a lot of the same stuff she just related.  She does intersperse the reviews and narratives with recipes, her own takes on some of the things that she ate, which helps to break this up, but not enough to completely save the book from its repetitive feel.

Overall, an enjoyable reading experience, but I have some reservations about the repetitiveness and the way that Reichl never really seems to own up to her bad behavior.  I'm interested in reading her other works--Delicious! was just so good--but while I liked this, I couldn't bring myself to love it.

3 stars out of 5.

The Cowgirl Ropes a Billionaire - Cora Seton (Cowboys of Chance Creek #4)

This was one of my choices for the Unapologetic Romance Readers' 2017 Reading Challenge, specifically for the category of "A millionaire/billionaire romance."  I decided on this one because I got it for free on my Kindle at some point and it had been languishing ever since.  I have not read the previous 3 books in this series.

Okay, guys, let me get it out of the way up front: It's not as bad as it looks.  In fact, it was quite good.  But it doesn't really involve a cowgirl.  It involves a veterinarian.  Though there is a billionaire involved.  But the non-cowgirl doesn't particularly want to marry him.  Oi.  Let me start from the beginning.

Bella is a veterinarian living in Chance Creek, Montana.  She owns both a vet clinic and an animal shelter where she takes care of the areas neglected, abandoned, and generally unwanted pets.  Her older brother is the area's livestock vet, and Bella has a bit of an inferiority complex about this, as well as tense relations with her family in general because she blames herself for the loss of half the family farm, and it seems like her brother and father blame her, too, while her mother is torn between the two halves.  But Bella's big heart where needy animals are concerned does not go well with the expenses that are coupled with running a shelter, and she's broke.  In fact, she's about to go out of business...so her assistant/secretary/coworker Hannah signs Bella up to participate on a show called Can You Beat a Billionaire?  The show's premise is that billionaire and a poor person compete against each other; if the billionaire wins, he or she gets to impose some condition on the loser.  If the poor person wins, he or she gets five million dollars.

The billionaire in the scenario is Evan Mortimer, who owns a company that does a lot of stuff but he really wants to get into changing the world through green technology.  His problem is that, unless he gets married within the month, he'll lose his controlling shares and they'll go to his brother, based on an arcane condition in his great-grandfather something-or-another's will (I think) that states the head of the company has to be married.  Yes, it's that trope.  But Evan both acknowledges this is ridiculous and that he wouldn't mind being married to Bella/would like to have a year (the amount of time he has to stay married) to get her to like him, too.  And he's not completely obnoxious, there's some stuff going on behind his issues, so that wasn't so bad.

So, rather than pastures and horses and untied ties, as the cover of the book indicates, the story is actually comprised of Bella and Chase competing against each other reality-show style in Jasper Park in Canada.  They hike, they compete challenges, they are filmed all the time.  This was, in fact, extremely better (to me) than what the cover had indicated.  Too bad I'll have to read that category for the challenge eventually... Sigh.  Anyway, Evan and Bella end up spending quite a bit of time together and grow closer, though each of them still wants to win.  There's no colluding here.  The challenges are the sort of thing that you'd see on something that's a combination of Survivor and, I don't know, something...not Survivor-like.  There's also this behind-the-scenes view that the show isn't as "rough" as they make it out to be, which I liked, because I'm always so skeptical of those shows.  Despite them hiking and kayaking and digging through the woods, they have their meals prepped for them, they have a makeup artist, there's a possibility to win a hot shower...stuff like that.

The writing here was actually decent, too.  Though the book took place over a relatively short period of time, Bella and Evan's attraction seems to grow naturally.  The conflict also seems natural, because the two of them can't communicate in a meaningful way because they're being filmed all the time and any time something goes away from how the show's producer wants, she interrupts and reminds them of contracts, what they might lose, etc.  And as soon as the show is over, they're whisked off and don't really get a chance to wrap things up.  This all made sense in the context.

Some other reviews mentioned a lack of consistency, but if that was an issue with this book, I think it's been resolved by now, because I went into the book with an eye out for those issues but didn't find anything glaring.

Overall, this was cute, and with a romance that seemed natural and a plot that was not as painful or cliched as I thought it would be.  This was a huge relief.  While some of the other books in the series got a raised eyebrow from me (the one after this appears to have a heroine who's escaping Middle Eastern terrorists?) this was just fine.  I don't think I'd go back to it, it was a fine choice for this category.

3 stars out of 5.

Must Love Otters - Eliza Gordon

I've had this book for a while, but finally got around to reading it as part of the Unapologetic Romance Readers' 2017 Reading Challenge.  I slotted it into the category of "A contemporary romance."

Our main character, Hollie Porter, is kind of a train wreck.  She has a job she hates, a boyfriend she doesn't really like, etc. etc.  Much of this is her own fault.  Hollie is incapable of saying "no" to anyone, so she ends up buying groceries for the strange woman downstairs, ended up in her 911 dispatcher job because her father wanted her to get a good union job and she doesn't like blood so she couldn't be a nurse like he is, and dating the lackluster guy because he asked.  After a particularly bad day at work, she ditches the boyfriend, calls out of work, and heads off to a couple's vacation her father bought her as a gift--alone.  And decides to start solving all of her problems by drinking.

There were parts of this book I liked--the description of the scenery, the later portion of the book on the boat--but most of it I found just "eh," and not in a Canadian way.  The thing is, I didn't find Hollie a sympathetic character.  She continually made poor choices and had such derision for everyone around her.  She hates her boss for how much she weighs and how she dresses, her coworker for her collection of troll dolls, her stepsister because she bakes vegan organic cupcakes and is successful...can you see where this is going?  She mocks people (internally) for their weight, for their interests, for pretty much everything that isn't on the exact same wavelength she is on.  When everyone at Revelation Cove warns her away from a guy who pretty clearly isn't what he's presenting himself as, she disregards all of them because she isn't going to let them make her decisions for her--and then is terribly upset when things don't turn out the way she wanted.  Though no one was actually trying to make her decisions and instead was just trying to clue her in on what was actually going on.  And despite being a self-proclaimed animal lover who watches all kinds of nature documentaries, she knows surprisingly little about any animal other than otters (for example, she doesn't know that orcas don't eat people) and seems to hate the animals she encounters in her everyday life...to the point that she considers giving her stepmother's goat (who's not nice, but still) enough drugs to kill him so she doesn't have to deal with him harassing her on her way in and out of her father's house.  Hollie is a real downer for me in this book because she's just so...ugh.

In the last third of the book, Hollie ends up rescued from another stupid situation of her own making (seriously, the girl does not possess a brain most of the time) and falls headfirst into a romantic getaway with a different guy--Ryan, the hot concierge/ex-NHL star.  This part of the book was quite enjoyable.  Hollie seems to put aside her pettiness and embrace her new situation, bantering with Ryan, showing an ounce of gratefulness for once in her life.  Now, was Ryan deserving of this?  Hm... Yes, he does rescue her.  Yes, he is nice to her.  But he also purposefully ambushed her date with the other guy (with some reason, but that doesn't mean it would have been welcomed) and gave her a hand towel to cover up with, rather than a bath towel or robe or something, when she got locked out of her room naked.  And then proceeded to make fun of her for it.  For the duration of her stay.  That's not funny, that's cruel.  But he's like a different person in the later part of the book; it's a strange disconnect, and read like two completely different stories.

And the overly-dramatic climax!  Ah... Yeah, I can't even talk about that.  It was too much.

Overall, I think this could have been a cute concept, but I couldn't stand Hollie for much of the book and have questions about Ryan's worth as a love interest, too.  The part on the boat was enjoyable but for the rest...oi.

2 stars out of 5.