[January] 2025: Book Review

It’s time to look at the book I read in January! I received an advanced copy of both of these books to review. These are my own words and my own opinions.

The Story She Left Behind by Patti Callahan Henry

★★★★★

 Available to purchase/download on March 18, 2025

I could not put this book down! I wanted to find out more about what happened.

In 1927, Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, a renowned author, disappeared off the coast of South Carolina. She was known for writing a book in an invented language at the age of 12. She left behind a husband and an eight-year-old daughter Clara when she disappeared. When she disappeared, all hope was lost that the sequel would be translated.

By 1952, her daughter Clara is an award-winning illustrator raising her own daughter Wynnie. A stranger from London, Charlie Jameson, contacts her, claiming to have discovered the handwritten dictionary of her mother’s lost language. Clara is skeptical but soon decides to travel to London, with her daughter, to see if it really is her mother’s handwritten dictionary.

When they arrive in London, it is in the middle of one of London’s deadliest disasters, the Great Smog. It wreaks havoc on asthmatic Wynnie, so Charlie, Clara, and Wynnie escape the city and head to the Jameson’s family retreat in the Lake District. It is there that Clara finds the courage to find the truth about her mother’s disappearance and, in the process, uses the dictionary she left behind to translate Bronwyn’s sequel.

Any Trope But You by Victoria Lavine

★★★★

 Available to purchase/download on April 1, 2025

Margot Bradley is a beloved romance author with a dark secret. She doesn’t believe in Happily Ever Afters. She even has a “Happily Never After” file, with alternate endings to her books. All seems to be going great until her computer is hacked, and her secret “Happily Never After” file is leaked during an online interview. Soon, she finds herself canceled by her readers and her publisher. She is left struggling to figure out how to take care of her chronically ill sister Savannah and decides to start writing books about murder. In an attempt to help her sister regroup and focus, Savannah books her Margot a 6-week stay at an Alaskan retreat.

As soon as Margot arrives in Alaska, she finds herself running from a moose and leaping into the arms of Dr. Forrest Wakefield, the proprietor of the retreat. Forrest had not expected to leave his career as a cancer researcher to run an Alaskan retreat, but his father’s illness changed things. He is getting stagnant, and quite frankly, freezing over while caring for his father and running the retreat, until Margot shows up. One adventure after another, and mishap after mishap, force them to spend more time together, and the last thing he wants is another relationship that could threaten the existence of the family-owned retreat.

What they didn’t expect is that they both end up in a romance they tried to avoid.

This was a bit racier at times, and I don’t care much for that, so I skipped over those parts, but it is still a great storyline, and I would recommend it. I did love the book but only lowered the stars because I feel the racy parts were unnecessary, and the point could have been gotten across with less detail.

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