The ending of Butterfly in Frost will divide readers. Some will applaud the author for the surprising twist, and delight in re-reading sections to see all the hints she had sprinkled in along the way. Others will feel the twist was wholly unnecessary, and hate the way it ended.

I’m definitely in the latter camp — I was totally into this book up until that twist, and even though I can see the signs Day had left throughout the story, the abrupt shift in tone still felt like a cheat.

To be fair, a lot of my disappointment was because I came into Butterfly in Frost expecting a quick, breezy, sexy romance. I’ve read only the first Crossfire novel, and so am not super familiar with the author’s work, but from what I remembered, I thought I knew exactly what to expect: hot alpha male meets shy female and sparks go flying.

And for a lot of this novel, that’s exactly what I got. Teagan is a plastic surgeon and former reality TV star looking for a quiet life after being with a jerk of an ex-boyfriend. Garrett is her sexy new neighbour, a photographer and an alpha male who basically barrels into Teagan’s life and tells her that he knows she has the hots for him. Both characters are also dealing with past traumas — Garrett with the death of his son and Teagan with her past relationship. Their chemistry is off the charts hot, their emotional connection strong, and I was totally on-board with this story of super hot sex turning into something with more emotional depth.

There was a bit of…not even insta-love, but insta-connection, which felt a bit odd, but I willingly suspended my disbelief to keep enjoying the story. For example, I can buy an immediate physical connection, but there were moments where Garrett and Teagan were able to somehow intuit what the other was thinking or feeling, which seemed pretty sudden given that he’d moved next door so recently. There was also a sex scene where Garrett — despite being a total alpha throughout — seemed oddly hesitant to touch her in certain places. He kept asking for permission to touch her in certain ways, and despite her loud and enthusiastic consent, he still took things very slow. This felt odd, but to be honest, also kinda sweet, and while it took me a bit of getting used to, I kinda liked the unexpectedness of a total alpha male in real life wholly handing the woman the reins in bed. All the odd points eventually make sense by the end, but I also wonder how much more they would have meant if we readers had known the twist much earlier.

One minor quibble is how Teagan’s best friend reacts to learning that Garrett’s a grieving parent. Suddenly, she stops inviting him over to dinner and feels super uncomfortable talking to him at all, because she no longer knows how to act around him. That seemed a bit extreme, and outright unbelievable. I can understand feeling awkward at a child’s funeral, or not knowing how to comfort a parent immediately after their child’s death, but Garrett was hardly still in the throes of grief. He was very matter-of-fact in telling them about his son, and then moved on to talking about other things, so Teagan’s best friend suddenly no longer wanting to hang around him just made her seem like a real jerk.

Overall, I think readers will definitely have strong feelings about this book. I loved the relationship between Teagan and Garrett, but the twist just didn’t work for me. I found it gimmicky and wish we’d just been told about it from the start. As well, given the first person narration, having it under wraps for so long just raised more questions that the book didn’t really answer. (Was the narrator lying to us, and if so why? Or did the narrator not know / not remember the twist herself, in which case, yikes, and that’s a whole novel in itself.)

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Thank you to Thomas Allen for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely love stories that take the reader behind the scenes on the making of a movie or TV show, so the second-chance romance Twice in a Blue Moon definitely hooked me in. It’s about an actress, Tate Jones, whose big career break happens to be a starring role in a movie written by Sam Brandis, the man who’d broken her heart fourteen years ago when she was eighteen.

I loved the relationship between Tate and Sam, and how the authors managed to make Sam do something that’s both utterly unforgiveable yet also completely understandable. As Sam says at one point, the worst thing he ever did was for the best reason he ever had. While that kind of statement often strikes me as a pathetic excuse, this is one situation where it’s actually true. Up until Sam and Tate meet again, I honestly thought that the incident that broke them up years ago would turn out to be a big misunderstanding, because I couldn’t imagine how Tate would be able to trust Sam again after such a major betrayal. I’m glad the authors decided to keep Sam truly responsible for that betrayal, because it made for a much richer, more emotionally complex romance.

There’s a point where Tate states that she hates what Sam did to her in the past because it completely changed the trajectory of her life and made it impossible for her to trust anyone again, Yet, she also admits in frustration that after knowing why he did it, she can’t completely hate him anymore. I absolutely love this emotional tension within her, because it feels so true, and it really puts up a somewhat insurmountable-but-maybe-not hurdle that the hero and heroine have to make a conscious decision to move past in order to achieve their happily ever after.

There’s also a subplot about Tate’s father, who’s both a total asshole and a sad little man struggling to remain relevant. I hated him as much as I loved the role his character played, because he gave both Tate and Sam a common villain to band against. He belittled Tate’s talents in such a passive-aggressive manner that it took a while to realize why something he said was actually an insult, and he constantly took credit for her accomplishments. He was basically riding her coattails to reclaim his own fading stardom, and it’s a testament to the strength of Tate’s relationships with her friends that her confidence wasn’t more affected than it was.

The movie making itself was fantastic. I loved the story Sam wrote, and how it was connected to the story of his own family. I thought the awkwardness of the filmed sex scene felt true-to-life, as I can imagine just how unsexy it must be to film something like that. I could have done without the red herrings of other love interests (Tate’s co-star and a woman Sam speaks to on the phone), especially since those plot threads were dismissed fairly quickly. But most of all, I loved the secondary characters, especially Tate’s co-star (hot and charming, but totally professional and friendly), her best friend (funny and fiercely loyal — TBH, I was hoping for a romance between her and the hot co-star), and her manager (smart and savvy, but he also genuinely cares for Tate’s welfare — I wanted much more of him).

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an e-galley in exchange for an honest review.

The Queens of Animation is the fascinating history of women animators and storytellers who worked at Disney at a time when most women were relegated to inking and colouring men’s work. Nathalia Holt has a vibrant and engaging narrative style, which delves right into the minds and hearts of the women she writes about, and makes their experiences come to life.

As a lifelong Disney fan, it was troubling to see how sexist Walt Disney and his company were. Holt shares the story of Brenda, a talented artist and animator who went to school with Walt, and whose soft-spoken demeanour made it especially challenging to survive as the sole woman in a story department filled with loud and sometimes obnoxious men. For example, story development meetings were designed for extroverted staff members, where ideas are shared and everyone shouts down everyone else to give their unfiltered opinions on the idea.

Once, during a particularly intense meeting where co-workers critiqued Brenda’s idea, she ran to her office to escape — and instead of giving her the space she clearly needed, her male co-workers, including Walt, actually ran after her to demand she return to the meeting. It’s a horrifying experience, and it’s a sign of Brenda’s strength that she made it all the way to her office before breaking down. Worse, Walt is then quoted as saying that this display of emotion (read: weakness) was a prime example of why he didn’t like hiring women. Not because his other staff were unable to adjust their approach to Brenda’s gentler personality, but because Brenda (and presumably other women) ‘couldn’t handle it.’ Even worse, years later for reasons that I don’t think we ever learn, Brenda comes back from a holiday to find someone else in her office, and that’s how she learns she’s been fired. As Holt points out, her old schoolmate Walt didn’t even have the decency to fire her to her face.

Even more extroverted women found the work environment challenging. One, who was young, often had to fend off unwanted advances from co-workers, and coped by sketching herself running away from an oversized, leering Mickey Mouse. When the second woman (after Brenda) was hired to join the story department, the guard refused to let her in, and even after she entered, her co-workers refused to sit with her. When she looked for Brenda, hoping to find a friend in the only other woman in the department, Brenda was nowhere in sight — because she’d come to hate story meetings and did her best to avoid them. And later, even as more and more women came to work in Disney animation, their efforts were often unacknowledged, so that each new generation of women came to think they were among the first.

Holt also shares the story of Mary, a talented artist known for her watercolour style work. She managed to get a job at Disney because her husband worked there, but her talent made her a favourite of Walt’s, which then led to jealousy and resentment from her co-workers, including her husband. At one point, Walt personally invites her to a highly coveted work trip, and her husband practically throws a tantrum because his wife got to go and he didn’t. Mary’s one of the few women in this book where we get a much deeper sense of her life beyond her work at Disney, and Holt paints us a heartbreaking portrait of Mary’s unhappy marriage.

I love how Holt highlights how important female friendships were for the women who worked at Disney, and how challenging it was sometimes when broader issues challenged those friendships. One example is the animators’ strike in the mid-20th century, where a pair of animators who were close friends found themselves on opposite sides on the strike. They also happened to be roommates, and so went in to work together every morning, with one of them joining the picket line and the other crossing it. Holt does a good job in showing how even those who didn’t strike were likely aware of the injustices the strikers were fighting against, but they were too scared of losing their jobs to join the picket line.

It’s a troubling, at times rage-inducing, history, and I’m just happy that this book finally turns a well-deserved spotlight on these women’s work. Thankfully, the book ends on a happy note, with the story of Frozen, which was the first Disney animated feature film written, directed and led by women. I loved reading about the sister summit that the film’s team organized, where women throughout the company came together to share stories about sisterhood and their loving-and-complicated relationships with their sisters. I remember watching Frozen with my sister, and how much we both related to Elsa and Anna’s relationship. Thanks to this book, I know now that that’s largely because of the women of Disney sharing their own experiences of sisterhood, and more importantly, because of the team of Frozen listening to these experiences, and bringing them to life in Elsa and Anna.

There’s likely a long way to go for Disney — and to be fair, lots of other companies — to be truly inclusive for women. Hopefully, books like this help begin to bridge that divide, and raise awareness of how much women have been doing for years, and how much their accomplishments have been minimized in favour of their male colleagues.

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Thank you to the publisher for an e-galley in exchange for an honest review.