Haunted Ever After

 Haunted Ever After- Jen DeLuca

Berkley

Release Date: August 13, 2024

Rating: 📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: Small Florida coastal towns often find themselves scrambling for the tourism dollars that the Orlando theme parks leave behind. And within the town limits of Boneyard Key, the residents decided long ago to lean into its ghostliness. Nick Royer, owner of the Hallowed Grounds coffee shop, embraces the ghost tourism that keeps the local economy afloat, as well as his spectral roommate. At least he doesn’t have to run air-conditioning. 

Cassie Rutherford possibly overreacted to all her friends getting married and having kids by leaving Orlando and buying a flipped historic cottage in Boneyard Key. Though there’s something unusual with her new home (her laptop won’t charge in any outlets, and the poetry magnets on her fridge definitely didn’t read “WRONG” and “MY HOUSE” when she put them up), she’s charmed by the colorful history surrounding her. And she's catching a certain vibe from the grumpy coffee shop owner whenever he slips her a free slice of banana bread along with her coffee order. 

As Nick takes her on a ghost tour, sharing town gossip that tourists don't get to hear, and they spend nights side-by-side looking into the former owners of her haunted cottage, their connection solidifies into something very real and enticing. But Cassie's worried she’s in too deep with this whole (haunted) home ownership thing… and Nick's afraid to get too close in case Cassie gets scared away for good.

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When Cassie decides to leave Orlando and buy her own house after years of rentals, a historic cottage in the costal town of Boneyard Key seems like a great idea. Granted, the town leans a little hard on the touristy haunted vibe, but as a Florida native, she understands how tourist dollars make decisions. Things get a little weird when her laptop refuses to charge- even though other electronics are just fine- meaning she has to go down the street to the local coffee shop to get any work done. The bright side of that is the coffee and banana bread are great and the shop owner may be a little phone obsessed and rough around the edges, but he's pretty cute too. When the magnetic poetry words on her fridge start moving without her help and coffee shop owner Nick confirms that the haunted vibe is more than just a tourist thing, Cassie has to question whether she's cut out for living in Boneyard Key. 

I absolutely love Jen DeLuca's Well Met series (Renaissance Faire romcom!) so as soon as she announced she was doing a new book (beach town ghosts) I was there. And Haunted Ever After doesn't disappoint. Cassie is a big city girl trying to start a new chapter in a tiny town and has more to get used to than learning that you can only get pizza delivery on days when the owner feels like working. DeLuca made her someone I could connect to and like right away, and I was pulling for her to make the adjustments she needed to make to handle living in a permanently haunted town.

Cassie's chemistry with Nick was there from the beginning, and he was a fun person to introduce us to the town. The only one in his family to love Boneyard Key, poor Nick has some abandonement issues to work through, which might be why his closest friend is a texting ghost. On the surface he seems to roll with everything life hands his way, but he isn't fooling anyone- except maybe himself. He settles for casual because he's afraid to get close to anyone. Is Cassie going to be the next person to disappoint him, or be the one he can risk it all for?

Jen DeLuca's relaxed and humorous writing style, witty character banter, and delightful characters all stand out in Haunted Ever After. The quirky small town of Boneyard Key is a character all its own and I'm hoping for several more books to take place here so I don't have to leave it any time soon. 

A definite must read for Jen DeLuca fans and all romcom fans!

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party

 

Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures & Accidentally Upended the World- Edward Dolnick

Scribner

Rating: 📚📚

Synopsis: In the early 1800s the world was a safe and cozy place. But then a twelve-year-old farm boy in Massachusetts stumbled upon a row of fossilized three-toed footprints the size of dinner plates—the first dinosaur tracks ever found. Soon, in England, Victorians unearthed enormous bones—bones that reached as high as a man’s head. 

Outside of myths and fairy tales, no one had imagined that creatures like three-toed giants once lumbered across the land. And if anyone conjured up such a scene, they would never imagine that all those animals could have vanished hundreds of millions years ago. The thought of sudden, arbitrary disappearance from life was unnerving and forced the Victorians to rethink everything they knew about the world. Celebrated storyteller and historian Edward Dolnick leads readers through a compelling true adventure as the paleontologists of the first half of the 19th century puzzled their way through the fossil record to create the story of dinosaurs we know today.

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If you're looking for a carefully explained, well-thoughtout, and logical, chronological explanation of how the Victorians accidentally created paleontology, discovered dinosaurs, and rethought everything they knew about the world- this is not that book.

If you're just interested enough in the idea of discovering dinosaurs where the world had never acknowledged them before, and wondering how Victorian science dealt with that, where any book is a good starter, then Dolnick is probably as good a start as any.

I am by no means an expert on dinosaurs. But I'm a huge reader of everything related to Victorian history and hadn't come across a book devoted to describing the fossil craze of the Victorian period and how it changed the scientific thought process. So the title hooked me. From Mary Anning to William Buckland to Richard Owen, this book introduces you to the English (and one or two French) who thrilled in hunting fossils or those happier in museums trying to understand fossils. It explains the original Victorian view that nature, science, and religion all fit happily together. Fossils and the startling idea of dinosaurs began to erode those views, despite how hard a few clung to them. Before Darwin threw his new explanation of evolution onto the scene, people were already prepared for the change in thinking he was suggesting.

My problem wasn't the more simplistic approach Dolnick took in his explanations or way of writing. Everyone has their own style and the reader can get used to it if the story is good. Or the number of times he would lament about how if only those early scientists had had access to the kinds of equipment etc. that modern scientists have. Which seemed like kind of the point to me. When you're discovering something, you work with what you have. It was the unbelieveable amount of repetition in the book. Read a chapter and then had to take a break for a few days? No problem, you could read the next one and not have missed anything. Different words, saying exactly the same thing. It was like he couldn't figure out what version of a chapter he liked better, so he just left them all in. Occasionally new things would come in, a new person would be introduced, etc. Then they would get the same repeat treatment, hammering away at the reader until I had to skim sections to be able to move forward at all. By the time we got to the famous dinner party in the Crystal Palace dinosaur statues I was pretty numb to all of it.  

Overall, a fantastic idea for a research idea and book, very poorly and repetitiously executed. Definitely made me not want to pick up another book by this author, but did make me interested enough to look through his biblioghraphy to see if anyone had done a better job of writing on the subject.

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review