Book Review: By Any Other Name by Lauren Kate

By Any Other Name by Lauren Kate
Genre: Adult Fiction (Contemporary Romance)
Date Published: March 1, 2022 
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

From # 1 New York Times bestselling author Lauren Kate comes an enemies-to-lovers romance about an editor, her bestselling author, and one life-changing secret.

What she doesn’t know about love could fill a book.

With a successful career as a romance editor, and an engagement to a man who checks off all ninety-nine boxes on her carefully curated list, Lanie’s more than good. She’s killing it. Then she’s given the opportunity of a lifetime: to work with world-renowned author and her biggest inspiration in love and life—the Noa Callaway. All Lanie has to do is cure Noa’s writer’s block and she’ll get the promotion she’s always dreamed of. Simple, right?

But there’s a reason no one has ever seen or spoken to the mysterious Noa Calloway. And that reason will rock Lanie’s world. It will call into question everything she thought she knew. When she finally tosses her ninety-nine expectations to the wind, Lanie may just discover that love By Any Other Name can still be as sweet.

By Any Other Name by Lauren Kate is a stand alone romance. I’m going to split this book, because I didn’t like the beginning very much. Lanie wasn’t likable. Ryan wasn’t likable. There were political name droppings that I’m really tired of seeing in fiction the last few years. Tell me which side of the fence your one Without telling me which side of the fence you’re on, right? Wrong. I don’t care. I wish authors would just stick that crap in their bios and be done with it. So yeah, I was a smidge annoyed during the first half. The second half was much better! It was the book I was wanting from the beginning. I loved their story, and with the addition of Elizabeth and Edward? So cute! It has the predictable fun and warmth of a Hallmark movie which I really needed. In fact, it would make an excellent Hallmark movie! 

Check out my reviews of other books by this author!

Lauren Kate is the internationally bestselling author of the Teardrop novels, the Fallen series— Fallen, Torment, Passion, Rapture, and Fallen in Love— and The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband.

To learn more about Lauren Kate and her books, visit her website.You can also find her on Pinterest, Goodreads, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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Top 10 Week! My Favorite Quotes of 2016

I love posting my favorite quotes! This is a list of my favorite quotes from books I read in 2016. They're in no particular order. You can click each image to read my review of that book.

Top Ten Week!

Monday: My Favorite Books of 2016

Tuesday: My Favorite Book Quotes of 2016

Wednesday: My Favorite Book Covers of 2016

Thursday: My Favorite Book Boyfriends of 2016

Friday: Books I’m Looking Forward to in 2016

Playing Catch Up! Unforgiven by Lauren Kate

Playing Catch Up has really been helping me through my ever growing TBR list. I'd like to welcome all other blogs to participate too! If you do, be sure to post your links in the comments section. I'd love to see your Playing Catch Up Reviews, and I'm sure others would too!! *wink*

Want to know more about Playing Catch Up? I'll tell you all about it here!

Unforgiven (Fallen #5) by Lauren Kate
Genre: Young Adult (Paranormal/Fantasy Romance)
Date Published: November 10, 2015
Publisher: Delacorte Press

It’s the book FALLEN fans have been waiting for: Cam’s story, the brooding, bad-boy dark angel readers love.

High school can be hell.

Cam knows what it’s like to be haunted. He’s spent more time in Hell than any angel ever should. And his freshest Hell is high school, where Lilith, the girl he can’t stop loving, is serving out a punishment for his crimes.

Cam made a bet with Lucifer: he has fifteen days to convince the only girl who really matters to him to love him again. If he succeeds, Lilith will be allowed back into the world, and they can live their lives together. But if he fails…there’s a special place in Hell just for him.

Tick-tock.

Spread your wings and cry as bad boy dark angel Cam finally reveals his anguished heart in the epic new FALLEN novel, UNFORGIVEN. 

Unforgiven is the fifth book in the Fallen Series by Lauren Kate. Unforgiven gives us Cam's story. I always felt this draw to Cam, so I'm glad he's gotten his own book. I enjoyed the series in the beginning, then gradually became disenchanted with it as it went on, but Unforgiven drew me back in, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I actually forgot all about Lilith being in the original story(if she was), so I can't remember how I felt about her then. It's been so long since I read it, but I enjoyed reading her character and learning her history along with Cam's.  I'm glad I finally read this one!

Unforgiven by Lauren Kate by Random House Kids

Check out my reviews of other books by this author!

Lauren Kate is the internationally bestselling author of the Teardrop novels, the Fallen series— Fallen, Torment, Passion, Rapture, and Fallen in Love— and The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband.

To learn more about Lauren Kate and her books, visit her website.You can also find her on Pinterest, Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter.

Book Review: Teardrop by Lauren Kate

Teardrop (Teardrop #1) by Lauren Kate

Genre: Young Adult (Fantasy Romance/Mythology)
Date Published: October 22, 2013
Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers

Never, ever cry...

Seventeen-year-old Eureka won't let anyone close enough to feel her pain. After her mother was killed in a freak accident, the things she used to love hold no meaning. She wants to escape, but one thing holds her back: Ander, the boy who is everywhere she goes, whose turquoise eyes are like the ocean. And then Eureka uncovers an ancient tale of romance and heartbreak, about a girl who cried an entire continent into the sea. Suddenly her mother's death and Ander's appearance seem connected, and her life takes on dark undercurrents that don't make sense. Can everything you love be washed away?

Teardrop is the first book in the Teardrop series by Lauren Kate. The premise was interesting, and the story was entertaining. My problem was: I didn't relate to, connect with, or particularly like any of the main characters. The romance was pretty instant with Ander, but not consistent to one guy or the other as she seems to have sparks with both him and Brooks at some point or another. I think this is going to turn into an odd kind of love triangle. At least, that seems to be the path it's taking to me. I liked how Atlantis was brought into the story. That was an interesting aspect. The story as a whole was entertaining. I just wish I had that something with one or any of the characters, but it just wasn't there, and that makes it hard to really get into a story. So, will I read the next book? Probably not, but hey, I never say never.

So this was it:
Dusky amber sunset. Humidity tugging on lazy sky. Lone car hauling up the Seven Mile Bridge, toward the airport in Miami, toward a flight that wouldn’t be caught. Rogue wave rising in the water east of the Keys, churning into a monster that would baffle oceanographers on the evening news. Traf-fic stopped at the mouth of the bridge by construction- suited men staging a temporary roadblock.And him: the boy in the stolen fishing boat a hundred yards  west of the bridge. His anchor was down. His gaze hung on the last car allowed to cross. He had been there for an hour, would  wait only moments more to watch— no, to oversee the coming tragedy, to make sure that this time everything went right.

The men posing as construction workers called them-selves the Seedbearers. The boy in the boat was a Seedbearer, too, the youngest in the family line. The car on the bridge was a champagne- colored 1988 Chrysler K- car with two hundred thousand on the odometer and a duct- taped rearview mirror. The driver was an archaeologist, a redhead, a mother. The passenger was her daughter, a seventeen- year- old from New Iberia, Louisiana, and the focus of the Seedbearers’ plans. Girl and mother would be dead in minutes . . . if the boy didn’t mess anything up. His name was Ander. He was sweating. He was in love with the girl in the car. So here, now, in the soft heat of a late Florida spring, with blue herons chasing  white egrets through a black opal sky, and the stillness of the  water all around him, Ander had a choice: fulfill his obliga-tions to his family, or— No. The choice was simpler than that:Save the world, or save the girl.The car passed the first mile marker out of seven on the long bridge to the city of Marathon in the central Florida Keys. The Seedbearers’ wave was aimed at mile four, just past the midpoint of the bridge. Anything from a slight dip in temperature to the velocity of the wind to the texture of the seafloor could alter the wave’s dynamic. The Seedbearers had to be ready to adapt. They could do this: craft a wave out of the ocean using antediluvian breath, then drop the beast on a precise location, like a needle on a turntable, letting hellish music loose. They could even get away with it. No one could prosecute a crime he didn’t know had been committed.Wave crafting was an element of the Seedbearers’ culti-vated power, the Zephyr. It wasn’t dominance over water, but rather an ability to manipulate the wind, whose currents were a mighty force upon the ocean. Ander had been raised to re-vere the Zephyr as divinity, though its origins were murky: it had been born in a time and place about which the elder Seedbearers no longer spoke.For months they had spoken only of their certainty that the right wind under the right water would be powerful enough to kill the right girl.The speed limit was thirty- five. The Chrysler was going sixty. Ander wiped sweat from his brow.Pale blue light shone within the car. Standing in his boat, Ander couldn’t see their faces. He could see just two crowns of hair, dark orbs against the headrests. He imagined the girl on her phone, texting a friend about her vacation with her mother, making plans to see the neighbor with the splash of freckles across her cheeks, or that boy she spent time with, the one Ander could not stand.The whole week, he’d watched her reading on the beach from the same faded paperback, The Old Man and the Sea. He’d watched her turn the pages with the slow aggression of the terrifically bored. She was going to be a senior that fall. He knew she’d signed up for three honors classes; he’d once stood an aisle over at a grocery store and listened through the cereal as she talked about it with her father. He knew how much she dreaded calculus.Ander didn’t go to school. He studied the girl. The Seed-bearers made him do it, stalk her. By now, he was an expert.She loved pecans and clear nights when she could see the stars. She had horrible posture at the dinner table, but  when she ran, she seemed to fly. She plucked her eyebrows  with bejeweled tweezers; she dressed up in her mother’s old Cleopatra costume every year for Halloween. She doused all her food with Tabasco, ran a mile in under six minutes, played her grandfather’s Gibson guitar with no skill but plenty of soul. She painted polka dots on her fingernails and her bed-room walls. She dreamed of leaving the bayou for a big city like Dallas or Memphis, playing songs at open mikes in dark-ened clubs. She loved her mother with a fierce, unbreakable passion that Ander envied and struggled to understand. She  wore tank tops in winter, sweatshirts to the beach, feared heights yet adored roller coasters, and planned on never get-ting married. She didn’t cry. When she laughed, she closed her eyes.He knew
everything about her. He would ace any exam on her complexities. He had been watching her since the leap day she was born. All of the Seedbearers had. He had been watching her since before he or she could speak. They had never spoken.She was his life.He had to kill her.The girl and her mother had their windows rolled down. The Seedbearers wouldn’t like that. He was certain one of his uncles had been charged with jamming their windows while mother and daughter played gin rummy at a blue- awninged café.But Ander had once seen the girl’s mother shove a stick in the voltage regulator of a car with a dead battery and start it up again. He’d seen the girl change a tire at the side of the road in hundred- degree weather and barely break a sweat. They could do things, these women.
 More reason to kill her, his uncles would say, shepherding him always toward defend-ing his Seedbearer line. But nothing Ander saw in the girl frightened him; everything deepened his fascination.Tan forearms dangled out both car windows as they passed mile marker two. Like mother, like daughter—  wrists twisting in time to something on the radio that Ander wished he could hear.He wondered how the salt would smell on her skin. The idea of being close enough to breathe her in gripped him in a  wave of dizzy pleasure that crested into nausea.One thing was certain: he would never have her.He sank to his knees on the bench. The boat rocked under his weight, shattering the reflection of the rising moon. Then it rocked again, harder, signaling a disturbance somewhere in the water.The wave was building.All he had to do was watch. His family had made that very clear. The wave would strike; the car would flow with it over the bridge like a blossom spilling over a fountain’s rim. They  would be swept to the depths of the sea. That was all.When his family had schemed in their shabby Key West vacation rental with the “garden view” of a weedy alley, no one had spoken of subsequent waves that would wash mother and daughter into nonexistence. No one mentioned how slowly a corpse decomposed in cold water. But Ander had been hav-ing nightmares all week about the girl’s body’s afterlife.His family said that after the wave it would be over and Ander could begin a normal life. Wasn’t that what he said he  wanted?He simply had to ensure that the car stayed under the sea long enough for the girl to die. If by some chance— here the uncles began to bicker— mother and daughter somehow freed themselves and rose to the surface, then Ander would have to— No, his aunt Chora said loudly enough to silence the roomful of men. She was the closest thing Ander had to a mother. He loved her, but he did not like her. It wouldn’t happen, she said. The wave Chora would produce would be strong enough. Ander would not have to drown the girl with his hands. The Seedbearers weren’t murderers. They were stewards of humanity, preventers of apocalypse. They were generating an act of  God. But it was murder. At this moment the girl was alive. She had friends and a family who loved her. She had a life before her, possibilities fanning out like oak branches into infinite sky. She had a way of making everything around her seem spectacular.Whether she might someday do what the Seedbearers feared she would do was not something Ander liked thinking about. Doubt consumed him. As the wave rolled closer, he considered letting it take him, too.If he wanted to die, he would have to get out of the boat. He would have to let go of the handles at the end of the chain  welded to his anchor. No matter how strong the wave was, Ander’s chain would not break; his anchor would not be  wrested from the sea floor. They were made of orichalcum, an ancient metal considered mythological by modern archae-ologists. The anchor on its chain was one of five relics made of the substance that the Seedbearers preserved. The girl’s mother— a rare scientist who believed in things she could not prove existed—  would have traded her entire career to un-cover just one.Anchor, spear and atlatl, lachrymatory vial, and the small carved chest that glowed unnatural green— these were what remained of his lineage, of the world no one spoke of, of the past the Seedbearers made it their sole mission to repress.The girl knew nothing of the Seedbearers. But did she know where she had come from? Could she trace her line backward as swiftly as he could trace his, to the world lost in the flood, to the secret to which both he and she were inex-tricably linked?It was time. The car approached the marker for mile four. Ander watched the wave emerge against the darkening sky until its white crest could no longer be mistaken for cloud. He  watched it rise in slow motion, twenty feet, thirty feet, a wall of water moving toward them, black as night.Its roar almost drowned out the scream that came from the car. The cry didn’t sound like hers, more like her mother’s. Ander shuddered. The sound signaled that they had seen the  wave at last. Brake lights flashed. Then the engine gunned. Too late.Aunt Chora was as good as her word; she’d built her wave perfectly. It carried the whiff of citronella— Chora’s touch to mask the burnt- metal odor that accompanied Zephyr sor-cery. Compact in width, the wave was taller than a three- story building, with a concentrated vortex in its deep belly and a foaming lip that would dash the bridge in half but leave the land on either side intact. It would do its work cleanly and, more importantly, quickly. There would hardly be time for the tourists stopped at the mouth of the bridge to pull out their phones and hit record.

When the wave broke, its barrel stretched across the bridge, then doubled back to crash into the highway divider ten feet ahead of the car, precisely as planned. The bridge groaned. The road buckled. The car swirled into the whirl-pool center. Its undercarriage flooded. It was picked up by the wave and rode the crest, then shot off the bridge on a slide made of roiling sea.Ander watched the Chrysler somersault into the face of the  wave. As it teetered down, he was appalled by a view through the windshield. There she was: dirty- blond hair splayed out and up. Soft profile, like a shadow cast by candlelight. Arms reaching for her mother, whose head knocked the steering  wheel. Her scream cut Ander like glass.If this hadn’t happened, everything might have been dif-ferent. But it did:For the first time in his life, she looked at him.His hands slipped from the handles of the orichalcum an-chor. His feet lifted off the floor of the fishing boat. By the time the car splashed into the water, Ander was swimming toward her open window, fighting the wave, drawing on every ounce of ancient strength that flowed through his blood.It was war, Ander versus the wave. It bashed into him, thrusting him against the shoal bottom of the Gulf, pummel-ing his ribs, turning his body into bruise. He gritted his teeth and swam through pain, through coral reef that slashed his skin, through shards of glass and splintered fender, through thick curtains of algae and weeds. His head shot above the surface and he gasped for air. He saw the twisted silhouette of the car— then it vanished beneath a world of foam. He nearly  wept at the thought of not getting there in time.Everything quieted. The wave retreated, gathering flot-sam, dragging the car up with it. Leaving Ander behind.He had one chance. The windows were above the level of the water. As soon as the wave returned, the car would be crushed in its trough. Ander could not explain how his body rose from the water, skidded across air. He leapt into the wave and reached out.Her body was as rigid as a vow. Her dark eyes were open, churning blue. Blood trickled down her neck as she turned to him. What did she see? What was he? The question and her gaze paralyzed Ander. In that be- wildered moment, the wave curled around them, and a cru-cial chance was lost: he would have time to save only one of them. He knew how cruel it was. But, selfishly, he could not let her go. Just before the wave exploded over them, Ander grabbed her hand.
Eureka

Check out my reviews of other books by this author!

Lauren Kate is the internationally bestselling author of the Teardrop novels, the Fallen series— Fallen, Torment, Passion, Rapture, and Fallen in Love— and The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband.

To learn more about Lauren Kate and her books, visit her website.You can also find her on Pinterest, Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter.

Book Review: Rapture by Lauren Kate

Genre: Young Adult (Paranormal Romance )

Blurb:

The sky is dark with wings. . . .
Like sand through an hourglass, time is running out for Luce and Daniel. To stop Lucifer from erasing the past, they must find the place where the angels fell to earth.
Dark forces are after them, and Daniel doesn’t know if he can do this—live only to lose Luce again and again. Yet together they face an epic battle that will end with lifeless bodies . . . and angel dust. Great sacrifices are made. Hearts are destroyed.
And suddenly Luce knows what must happen. For she was meant to be with someone other than Daniel. The curse they’ve borne has always and only been about her—and the love she cast aside. The choice she makes now is the only one that truly matters. In the fight for Luce, who will win?
The astonishing conclusion to the FALLEN series. Heaven can’t wait any longer.

My Review:

Rapture is the fourth and final book in the Fallen series by Lauren Kate. This book kept grabbing and dropping my attention. There would be a few pages where action was happening and I'd get a few answers to questions I'd had from the beginning then it would completely lose my interest with what seemed to be more of page filler type material. Issues I had with the previous book carry over to this book plus a few more are added.  Unfortunately, going into detail about these issues would also be spoilers to the story. There are a couple things I can mention. In Passion, we are given some history on Cam. I've always liked Cam and felt there was more to his story and involvement with Luce. Since he rarely spoke in Rapture, I still feel like there is something that we haven't been told. With this being the final book in the series, I can only imagine this was a weak way of setting Cam up for his own series. Second, there is a new character introduced in the very end named, Nora. Of all names, why would you pick the name of a main character from another popular fallen angel series? Though that's not a major issue, it bothered me quite a bit. Probably because I was already frustrated with the book as a whole and that just added to it. The ending was okay, and I'll leave it at that. There are a few twists throughout the story. You will see most of them coming. Most importantly we finally learn how Luce and Daniel first met! I really wanted to like this last book. I fell in love with the characters in this series. They are lovable and fun, and I grew so attached to them. Overall, I expected more from this final book and was left very disappointed. This series has a loyal following, and just because it wasn't for me doesn't mean it won't be for you. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Check out my reviews of other books in this series & by this author!

To read more about this series and the author, visit the Lauren Kate Website.

I received the ARC of Rapture by Lauren Kate from the publisher through Net Galley for review. The opinions are my own.