I was fully prepared to dislike this book about a professional tennis player since most novels about such things wildly miss the basic culture of the thing they are writing about.  Here, I expected the tennis references to feel like they were written by someone who didn't understand the game at all, but I was quite surprised to find that the book really held up.  I loved the characters, particularly their flaws, and the relationships that developed as the story unfolded.  I love how it tied into Malibu Rising and Reid's other books.  Of all of her books I have now read (Malibu, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones & The Six), this one is my favorite.  The main character is for sure ambitious, rude, self-centered, and intense, but the back story provided makes her personality believable and her actions understandable, if off-putting.

​Recommend.

This had a complicated plot with a story within a story which took a very, very long time to set up.  Even once it was set up, it felt both too complicated and also somehow shallow at the same time.  Many of the plot turns were predictable tropes and somewhat lacked credibility in the context of Victorian English culture. 
Not recommended.

Another predictable and a bit dull light romance in which the cranky, sullen, but hot guy attracts the sweet and somewhat dorky hometown girl only for all of us to discover that his miserable existence is a mask for tenderness and pain that he could have gotten counseling for so as not be go through life being a jerk and hurting people around him.  It was hard not to want to be her friend and remind her that she deserves someone who brings some joy to her life.
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Not recommended.

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Quite possibly the worst book I have read in years, this is boring, full of superficial characters, a predictable plot, and offensive stereotypes.  
​Do not recommend.

This little romance is cute enough.  A high school sweetheart reunification plotline without much too it, the audiobook was free, but was read more like reader's theatre.  I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it.  It was completely innocuous, but also without any romantic substance beyond some teasing and flirting on the phone.  Not a bad free listen for falling asleep to.

Not not recommended.

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This raw and honest memoir of a former White House aid is a fast paced, woman of color "boot-strap" story that I quite enjoyed.  Balancing staying connect to her family and roots with getting her education at USC and then Harvard isn't sugar coated. The anxiety, the ambition, and the loneliness of being the first and only" person in her family to go to college and beyond is endearing while also calling out institutions and processes that fail first gen students.  I particularly love, though, how she portrays her mom as this incredibly resourceful parent hellbent on getting every possible benefit out of every job she had, while still coping with her own trauma and the limits it imposed on her.  Her mom's inability to fully support or even understand the value of a college experience, let alone a $150,000 unfunded master degree, made her so real and it was impossible not to love her as she tells everyone she knows when her daughter gets into Harvard, just as if it had been her own good idea to try for that.  Without glossing over questionable choices her younger self made or dysfunctional family histories or her own internal struggles, this is a story worth reading.  For college professors, in particular, I would imagine that this narrative could provide insight to the experiences of students making their own way in the world.

Recommend. 
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