Never Have I Ever by Joshilyn Jackson

One Sentence Summary: A woman named Roux makes a game of blackmailing a woman named Amy but doesn't expect Amy to be such a challenge.

Number of Pages: 340

Rating: 4/5 stars

Review: Never Have I Ever by Joshilyn Jackson wasn't super exciting at first. (It started with a women's bookclub meeting getting catty and made me feel a little uncomfortable but not necessarily interested.) However, the book got better quickly and was fun to read. It had several big twists I didn't see coming, and the second half was way better than the first. The one dislike I had was this: why didn't the main character just tell the truth? I kept thinking that would immediately solve her blackmail problem, so that distracted and annoyed me some. If she told the truth then there wouldn't be much of a story though, so I get it. Never Have I Ever was a good read, and I'll be reading more of this author's books in the future.

Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller

One Sentence Summary: A woman in 1969 spies on a couple who is staying in the same dilapidated English mansion.

Number of Pages: 317

Rating: 2.5/5 stars

Review: Bitter Orange by Claire Fuller has some problems. The first third of the book suffers from being wayyyy too descriptive of the setting, which prevents any sort of momentum from being developed. The middle third of the book suffers from lack of events. The woman and the couple she spies on eat and drink and smoke together. A lot. In fact, that's pretty much all they do. The entire book suffers from just not being that interesting. The author does a good job of having gradual reveals and shocking little twists, but by the time those happen in the last third of the book I am just not invested in the characters or the storyline. Bitter Orange isn't unreadable, but I am pretty disappointed in what I thought would be a good read.