ALL the ROMANCE I Read | Weekly Reading Wrap Up #19

追加: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Hello everyone. My name is Jen and welcome to the book Refuge.

[00:00:12]All right, hello my friends and welcome to another weekly wrapup. And this week of May, I'm fully into both the Ever After aon and the Mafia Readathon, which is going on right now. In fact, I'm gonna do my best to stay on task for this because I want to be joining reading sprints with my lovely friends today and I still had to get my videos filmed before I'm able to. So, we're going to do our best to stay on task with this and then get on to the sprints with my friends here. So, I have, I believe, eight things to talk about. Um, and it's going to be a great one. So, let's get into it. I need to take a drink first, though. Oh my gosh.

[00:00:55]Okay, so the first thing that I read was a fanfiction. I know, no one's surprised. This one is called In This and Every Hold on, I actually got to read it because I mess up this title every time. In this and every life, I choose Us Every Time by at FNFA. Okay.

[00:01:15]And this is one I was very excited to read. Okay. Um, and I have a couple other with this variation that I want to get to soon.

[00:01:23]because I just think it's such a cool twist on everything.

[00:01:28]But this one is what if it was Shane who was in the plane crash instead of Ilia.

[00:01:34]Right? You guys know I've read a whole bunch at this point. By a whole bunch, I mean like five or six where Ilia either actually has the plane crash or people really die in the plane crash or they get stranded in the wilderness. I've read a few of those and I've liked them, but I wanted to read some that take a twist on that twist as it were. Right.

[00:01:53]And so in this one, it is after their fight. This takes place during the long game when not everyone knows about them yet. And Shane and Ilia have a fight and it's Shane who has to go on a plane ride. Though in this one, it's a charter flight. And he's supposed to be flying um from Ottawa to somewhere to do a like promo or to do an ad campaign. And they hit some bad weather and the plane crashes. And there was three people on the plane. There was two pilots and there was Shane and one of the pilots dies and the other pilot is actually this woman who is a I can't remember what she was. I should have wrote it down but basically she had military training. Shane is very hurt. Um but they both survive and they have to survive I think like five or six days in the wilderness before they get rescued.

[00:02:43]And so we have you know the setup where they were fighting beforehand. So, of course, um Shane is or Ilia is distraught about it. He definitely has some selfharm thoughts going on and it was just really intense. But in this one, Shane being lost doesn't last for too long. And then most of the story is about them healing and kind of speeding up their decision to tell everyone that they're together because Ilia didn't keep his cool very well while Shane was hurt. So, I enjoyed this one so much. My only critique, which is some that I, you know, I really try not to critique fanfics too much. I think that it went on a little past when it should have for what we were doing, but it does, I think, try to play out the rest of the long game um and how things would be different if it was Shane who was hurt instead.

[00:03:37]Okay. Then I had King of Gluttony by Anna Wong, which I definitely didn't want to get too behind on this one. I love this series. This is book six in the Kings of Sin. And I really had no idea where this one was going to go. I really don't look at the promo or stuff for these. But this one is actually a family friends, but they are childhood rivals to lovers. Um, and they actually went to like the same boarding school.

[00:04:03]Um, and they kind of have had crushes on each other at different times, but they mostly are like rivals. the rest of the family gets along well, but these two, sorry, I have the um Barnes & Noble edition, and it is like shiny, so it's hard to see in my light. So, this one um is Sebastian and Maya. And so, the way it works is that his family owns like restaurants and her family actually does like um frozen foods. And they end up their two families um do a collab where his family is going to come up well not like his family directly but like they're going to come up with recipes that can be made into frozen dinners that are like chef quality. So definitely a possible thing that happens. But they both do the marketing for their family's companies and so they're forced to work together. Um, and there's also this pressure on Maya because she's the oldest in her family and she's not yet married. And so at some point in the book too, she ends up getting an ultimatum from her family that if she won't um get married then on her own, then they are going to do an arranged marriage for her. So that gets added into the tangle as well. So yeah, I believe that Maya is from well from like a Indian American family I think is what she is. Um but it was just a really really cute one. I loved it so much. Um and I just thought it did really well. I love the narration. I didn't have an advanced copy of this one. This was me purchasing both of these. Um I usually get arcs for this series, but I didn't for this one, which is totally fine. and Anna's changed up her arc team and I probably wouldn't have gotten to it any earlier anyway as you will see with new releases and me but um the narrators were Sonila Nankani and Connor Craze and Connor is um are they French? I think his family is French cuz he has like an accent the whole time in here. But yeah, it was really sweet relationship between them and yep, I gave this five stars and it was a three on the spice scale and it was quite the slowburn. There was also a scene where like they get lost in the wilderness together. I won't spoil how, but it was very cute uh twist on things.

[00:06:31]Then I had my Patreon read, which was The Devil in the Deep Blue Sea. So, you know, there's an exclusive review of this available on my Patreon for everyone. The only thing I want to share here because to me it's not a spoiler.

[00:06:45]It should have been warnings. There are a lot of triggering content in this book. And the original cover of this book was a hunky man cover. So could go either way. There could be dark content, could be contemporary, could be whatever. This book is literally sold as an enemies to lovers romcom you've been searching for. My uh pick for it was because it was a ex-boyfriend's brother, which was the prompt for the month. It was ex ex's something. So, ex-boyfriend's dad or boyfriend or sister or whatever. And there was this one. Um, and this literally says it's a romcom. The trigger warnings in this include parental unaliving of themselves, drug use, um gaslighting, um controlling someone's food, um a parent with cancer, a parental death.

[00:07:36]Like there is a lot of triggering content and truly it's only the first third of the book that even has comedic stuff in it at all. So, in my opinion, without like, you know, I really talked about that in my review of it for them that I didn't hate this book. Like, again, I don't want to tell the whole thing cuz it is an exclusive review, but like my point in saying that is not that I hated the book or any of that. It's that this book is extremely mismarketed.

[00:08:06]And from what I remember of the other book I've read in the series, too, like most of Elizabeth Oor's content is heavier. So saying this is a romcom is stupid in my opinion and I'm just saying that. So moving along. Next up I had another fanfic and this one is from a fanfic author that I've basically downloaded all of their hauloff fix and I just read them for a pickme up um because they're pretty short usually.

[00:08:32]And this one was the same. This one was called caught by surprise and it's by peace liies. So I think I've read four fixs from peace liies at this point.

[00:08:40]Like I said, they've written quite a few. This one was only about um 34,000 words, I think, is this one. Uh but so like 180 pages is what it was on my Kindle. And this one was cute. It was a AU with speed dating in it. And Shane is a physical therapist who actually works with athletes. And Ilia is a sports agent particularly for hockey. So we still see a lot of the characters we love. They just work in um so like Ilia's the agent for them which is so cute. Like I love it. And they both end up going to a speed dating event that is meant for um men seeking men uh an LGBTQ event. Um and they have an instant connection and then they what happens is at the end of the event you can share who you want their number and they both only put each other down. And so then the person who was running it, which was Harris, by the way. Harris was the one doing the matchmaking, um, he set them each other's phone numbers. So, it's a really cute relationship between them.

[00:09:48]Um, and one of the fun parts of the book, too, is that as they're really getting to know each other, they end up there's a snowstorm coming to the area, and so they end up doing a weekend sleepover during a snowstorm. It's really cute. Shane is a cat dad in this one. Love it. Um, and it's funny. I ended up reading two books in a row with cat dad. Did I? Did the other one?

[00:10:13]Anyway, he's a cat dad in here. So, highly recommend this one. Really low stress. Loved the different jobs that they had. Ilia in this one. So, the way they did this is that they they both would have been in hockey is how it worked. Shane in this story ended up getting too many concussions his senior year of of school and had to bow out of hockey, but he really loved physical therapy and so he ended up going to school for that. Ilia still got drafted, but he got injured in like his second year. Um, and so then he became an agent. And so they at one point even talk about um that Shane would have been in the same draft year as Ilia, but he wasn't. And then Ilia was drafted, but only played for like two seasons. So it's really funny cuz they have this thing about like, wow, what would it have been like? We would have known each other in another life. So I liked that about this one a lot. Highly recommend it. It was a great time.

[00:11:20]Okay, then I had a new release which was The Rule of Three by Sarah Kate. This is book two in the Salacious Legacy series, and I was so happy to get one of the character exclusive arcs. I love it.

[00:11:34]Thank you so much, Sarah. Um, and I got a cute little kit of everything. I shared it in my most recent book haul for this. I adored it. So, this book I obviously read it as an ARC and as a um I had the ALC of this as well. And this was narrated actually by like a full cast. Um but the main three in this one were Brand Brandon Francis, Teddy Hamilton, and Simone Lewis. And this throppple ends up getting stuck in an elevator together at the beginning. Um and there there's more going on with all this. Like Freya wants to be a chef and she ends up doing she's friends with Julian's sister Julian Cade being the oldest son of Daisy and Ro Ronin. Um and he's been running the sex club with Jack and he caused a lot of problems for Jack in the first one. um he is kind of stuck up and very uh elusive and he really only likes having sex using the free use wall at the club which means he doesn't have to befriend or talk too much with anyone. Um so definitely likes to be reclusive here. Um, and then yeah, Freya is going to do the anniversary party for Ronin and Daisy, and Julian, he likes her too much, so he starts causing problems for her because yeah, he's that kind of a little by the way.

[00:13:00]Um, and then there is Archer Wild, who lives in the same building as Julian.

[00:13:07]And so the three of them end up stuck in an elevator together and it forces them to kind of talk and then they end up their relationship starts building from there. Now I was enjoying this a lot.

[00:13:21]This does also have some kinks that not everyone is comfortable with. I know some people were freaked out by how water sports were used in here, but I was not. Claire Sarah Kate put this in the right place and in my opinion it was handled very well. It's only in one scene. Um, and let's just say once Julian asks Archer to mark him in the shower, if you don't want to read what happens, just skip to the next chapter and you don't really have to worry about it. But it was used as a form of like non-permanent branding or marking in here because one of the kinks that Archer has is marking his territory and branding though he knows you know there wouldn't be like hot iron use like he likes to leave hickeys or he likes to leave marks like that kind of thing. Um and I thought it was handled really well in here. that what the biggest drawback for me was cuz I did end up giving this a fourst star one is I felt like we cover a lot of time like there will be a there's at one point a sixmonth time jump okay and I feel like we didn't get to see the character growth then like we see some important moments that help shift them in the right direction but then we skip forward in time and then when we have the third act conflict in here. It happens over a situation that I think should have been talked about between them months before.

[00:14:53]So, the fact that we skipped ahead 6 months and then they have this issue, it makes me think that wow, they weren't getting to know one another at all, like what was happening. Usually Sarah Kate is very good in her throppples at me believing each relationship within the polyamorous thing. And in this one, I feel like she would give them a little moment together and then we would skip time and you're just supposed to assume they continued getting closer. And I think that I just expect more from her.

[00:15:22]That's my bottom line of it. I expect more from her with the type of stories that she writes me. So I love this was good. The narration was great. It had some really good um hot sex, some emotional stuff in here as well. The heroine is actually a virgin in this one until a certain point. Um, so yeah, I gave it four stars. It's a four on the spice scale.

[00:15:46]Okay. Then I read Take My Name for one of my patrons. Um, she wants me to do the Willow Branch series and it was great. I haven't read a Brooke Montgomery in a while cuz I didn't start this series yet. Um, and she wants this series done. So, this one is actually a marriage in trouble or like second chance. Um, these were high school sweethearts and they got married when they were young, but then the heroine went to start her career and the hero obviously couldn't drop everything and come with her and also her family didn't really want them to be together either.

[00:16:19]So, I think she kind of let them push each other apart. but she's engaged to someone else at the beginning. And so she goes back to her hometown to try to get a um let's say a legal like or a mutual divorce from the hero. And he just straight up is like, "No way. No way am I letting you go. I'm keeping you." Blah blah. And she's like, "Well, I could force it to happen." And he's like, "Well, then do it. Why haven't you? You like why are you here asking me when you could force it to happen?" So he convinces her to give him seven dates in a in a week, literally. Give me seven dates and if you still want this divorce at the end, I will sign the papers and it'll be done for. Um, and so then we get to see our hero try to woo his wife back to him. And I thought this was handled really well. Um it I mean the the author right at the beat says that if you have issues with um cheating um that maybe you won't like this, but it says they participate in some sexual activities while she's still engaged, but she is married to the hero.

[00:17:31]So, it's really the author saying like there's they're married on paper and there's no actual cheating between them because they had like gotten apart. Um, but you may feel like she's kind of emotionally cheating on her fiance.

[00:17:48]That's there. So, just know that if those things bother you, like just don't read this at all. I was warned about that by my by my patron before I started it. and the scenario in the book like well the heroine I think kind of too easily gave up their relationship at the start.

[00:18:06]I like how it ended up and how this played out and I thought it was a cute time and I love a cowboy. I love the nosy family. I love how his family was like we're going to help you win her back including making baked goods to try to win her over. Um and all that fun stuff. So, this was another four-st star read for me and I gave it three on the spice scale. Oh, fun little tidbit. Both the heroine and the hero have pierced genitals. If that is something that appeals to you, this book will fulfill it for you. Okay. Then we have Let Me Ruin You by LJL Ryder. So, now we are entering the mafia part of this. I have two books that I have finished so far for the Mafia Readathon. um as of today and Let Me Ruin You by LJL Writer is a fanfic and it is a mafia slash like brought Ilia and Shane is an emergency room doctor which I love because last week I read one where Ilia was a uh a pediatric surgeon. So definitely love our boys as doctoring men. And in the beginning of the story, Shane is working a shift with Hayden at the hospital and Ilia comes in with an injury because he does some underground fighting. He is also a man on the run from his brother.

[00:19:28]So, what happened in this story, just to set it up quickly, is that Ilia and Alexi were the son of their father in the Brava. And when the father died, Alexi should have been the one to inherit it all cuz he was the oldest.

[00:19:44]But the father thought he that Ilia would be better. Ilia didn't want anything to do with that. But to take succession, Ilia can't just hand it over and his brother can't just kill him because then they wouldn't respect him. I don't know. It was supposed to be a weird thing. So Ilia is basically on the run with Svet Lana and Svet Lana is a hacker and a badass in this and so they've been living kind of underground and everything. um and hiding from Alexis's men who are trying to drag him back. Also, Alexi knows that Ilia had a boyfriend at one point and that he is at least bisexual and he thinks that is despicable and actually tortured Sasha once um to try to I don't know scare Ilia out of being bisexual cuz that's how that works. Um, so Ilia is also fearful ever of anyone. He loves being targeted by his brother. So he's never gotten serious with anyone. But once he ends up on the table with Shane Hollander looking after him, Dr. Hane Shane Hollander looking after him. It definitely changes his tune just a little bit and he starts to let's say be a bit more reckless at the fights he goes to to have an excuse to go to the emergency room. And now Shane literally wants nothing to do with him at the start. And it's kind of great because Ilia tries to get him to go out with him so many times and Shane is just like no. But he does wear him down eventually and um things get uh things get a little spicy, let's just say. But this is definitely one that was a grumpy sunshine. And Ilia in this almost reminded me at times of like of like Nico. he's not as feral or like force you into scenarios things, but in his persistence and in his teasing and in his trying to get under his skin and then Shane definitely felt very heavily onto that neurode divergent and like closed wall that like Bran Bran kind of has in that book. So, there was that dynamic for me that I really liked, too, where Shane is just like, "No, no, no.

[00:22:07]I'm not interested in men." And Ilia just charms the pants off of him. So, really enjoyed that one. And I'm hoping to actually do, it won't be a video. It will be a post on my Instagram that is Hollander Mafia Rex soon. I have a couple more I need to read, but I liked that one a lot. Okay. And then the final thing that I finished, see, look at me.

[00:22:30]I told you we were going to keep it up this week. But also, nothing really pissed me off this week or was super great this week. So, like minus my fanfics, which I don't rate them, all of my reads were basically four star books this week. So, that's part of the reason why I'm going through it a bit faster, too. But the other book I finished so far for the readathon is Death by Michelle Herd. This is the third book in that Mafia series, which I can't remember the name of the series, but it is book three, and this one is about Santiago and Kiara. Now, if you've been reading the books in order, you'll know that Kiara supposedly ran away in book one, which caused Grace to have to marry Dominic. Um, although Dominic didn't really want to marry Kiara anyway. We find out at the beginning of this book what happened to her, and it is absolutely devastating. So, first up, major trigger warning for for not penetrative essay, if you get my meaning, but essay and just awful behavior. Um, so Kiara was actually taken by one of her father's bodyguards. Okay. And the same day that she was gone, like her father was killed a couple days later. And this man forced her to text her sister saying that she had just run away cuz she couldn't handle it and she's sorry but she ran away which had at the time seemed so odd when you're reading it because she was like I'm not going to force my sister to marry Dominic. But then she ran away which forced her sister to marry Dominic. Although again Dominic already wanted to marry her and was trying to make it happen. So, it just seemed like, wow, her sister really ran away. That is crazy. But she was texting her and even talking to her on the phone. And we discover that Kiara was forced to do all of that. And she was abused and like trained um and kept as a slave by this man for months and months.

[00:24:42]And it isn't until a certain point in the book where she escapes and Santiago actually is in the area doing another operation and he finds her. And Santiago has actually been on the lookout for his woman because he was there was kind of this fortune telling that he would find his woman um by a certain time. And so he believes in that stuff and so he's been looking for her. And so when she stumbles across his way and he sees that it is also a woman who needed rescuing because that is something that he does by the way he um has this whole island where he has made a safe haven for people he's rescued from sex slavery which is wonderful.

[00:25:30]It's so beautiful. I love that. And so he is very well equipped to help Kiara deal with everything going on. Like literally he has an island with a hospital, with a school, with he's used all his money for all the contracts he's taken and the things that he's done and taking down these traffickers to make this safe haven for people. So yes, there are things about this that flow way too smoothly. That's something Michelle Herd does, okay? Like if you're reading this book and you're like, "Oh my gosh, that all just worked out too easy." Well, that's kind of how Michelle Herd does things. So, don't read her if you want it to perfectly follow logic, let's just say.

[00:26:09]But I do think that it takes its time uh by like showing time has passed. Even if we do skip through steps, it might feel like um you know, like we skip ahead in time and now she's feeling a bit better and she's getting more comfortable. But their relationship moves like Santiago's in love with her immediately cuz he believes she's his faded mate and stuff like that, which I know might be more than some people can handle, but I think they take their time with the sexual things and with her realizing that she can trust him. It's just there's not a lot of page count.

[00:26:47]It's just we show time passing for them.

[00:26:49]So, and also her being reunited with her sister and the guilt her sister has that she didn't look for her. So, there's all those things that have to get dealt with. But yeah, that was my second book for the readathon. It got me a lot of points. So, that was great. So, yeah, today and tomorrow I'll still be reading Mafia. And then I will share the the point totals and everything.

[00:27:13]tomorrow on the live show, which if you're watching this, it'll actually be the same day at 400 p.m. Central. I'll reveal the mafia higher ary and the uh point levels everyone needed to hit and everything. So, anyho, I'm going to wrap this up, like I said, cuz I'm going to go do reading sprints. I know this one was quicker, but I don't really have more than this to say, so it's fine that it went a bit faster today. So, thank you so much for watching. Make sure you like this video, subscribe to my channel, and we will see you in the next one. Bye.