A Karen Swan novel is almost inevitably a promise of escape to an exotic locale and the luxurious lifestyles of the super rich. Her books are full of heart, and a wonderful delight to lose oneself in. The Spanish Promise is one such book. It tells the story of a wealth counsellor, Charlotte, who is hired by a wealthy Spanish family to convince a woman they’d never met to give up her claim to a massive inheritance from the family patriarch. To do so, Charlotte travels to Spain mere days before her wedding, and learns that the truth behind the inheritance is more complex than she and the wealthy family had initially believed.

I enjoyed Charlotte’s story. I loved the travel to Spain and the luxurious estate she ends up staying in. I also loved meeting the unwitting heiress Marina, and seeing the reveal of her connection to the Mendoza family unfold. The subplot about Charlotte’s love life — her impending marriage to a man she doesn’t really love and her coincidental reunion with an old flame — is tied in well to the main plot and to Charlotte’s personal growth as a character, but was nowhere near as interesting to me as the rest of the story.

Rather, the story that really hooked me was the secondary storyline, set in 1930s Spain and featuring a woman named Nene living during the Spanish Civil War. Nene belongs to one of her region’s wealthiest landowner families. Her best friend growing up is a boy named Santi, whose family works at the estate, and while Nene herself strongly believes that wealth shouldn’t be conflated with worth, her background prevents her from fully being part of Santi’s world. The tensions between Nene’s and Santi’s families erupts as the Civil War breaks out, and Nene must decide where she stands.

I absolutely loved Nene’s storyline, and often found myself wishing to hurry up Charlotte’s sections so we could get back to the historical part of the story. I loved Nene’s friendship with Santi. I hated what her brothers did to Santi’s family just as much as I hated what Santi did in retaliation. I feared for Nene’s safety during the Civil War, and felt for her as events unfolded with seeming inevitability. Nene’s storyline and Charlotte’s eventually converge, and Swan does a good job in showing us the parallels between both heroines. But it was Nene’s story that kept me hooked, and that formed the emotional core for the story.

The Spanish Promise is a wonderful escape and a moving story about family and love. I loved it.

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Thank you to Publishers Group Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Jean Harlow Bombshell is the first in a series about a celebrity biographer, Charlotte Donovan, who takes over her boss Justine’s latest project — a biography on 1930s film star Jean Harlow — when Justine suddenly drops dead in a cafe in chapter one. Before she dies, Justine tells Charlotte that several people have been harassing her about the manuscript, and Charlotte soon finds herself having to fend these people off. Worse, Charlotte also seems to be stalked by a woman who looks very much like Jean Harlow, and she has to figure out what’s going on and keep herself safe, all while finishing Justine’s manuscript in time.

I love cozy mysteries, and I find 1920s / 1930s Hollywood glamour totally fascinating. I hadn’t realized Jean Harlow was a real person until I googled her about halfway through this book, and I love that the author chose to focus on a lesser known star. Jean Harlow also died pretty suddenly, and had some tragic twists in her life, all of which makes for rich possibilities for a mystery. I like that Charlotte wants to distinguish herself from Justine by delving a bit deeper into the ‘reality’ of her subject rather than simply repackaging the known stories — apart from helping drive the plot (it leads to Charlotte digging deeper into potentially dangerous territory), this is also a nice reminder of the humanity behind the glitz and glamour of the celebrities being discussed.

The mystery is good and moves forward at a nice, quick pace. I love the team up of Charlotte and Kate, how strong their friendship seems, and how well they work together to uncover the various clues. I also like how nerdy some of the investigation became, with a lot of focus on the research needed to learn about a long-dead celebrity’s life.

The book also delves a bit into Charlotte having Lyme disease. I hadn’t realized before that Lyme disease could be chronic, and while I’d heard of it, I didn’t really know what the symptoms were. So I really liked how the author incorporated it into the story and showed us the various ways in which it affected Charlotte’s daily life, without ever treating her as an invalid because of it.

I enjoyed this mystery, and I look forward to reading more of the series. As a side note, it turns out the author was inspired to write this because she is related to Jean Harlow. How awesome is that?!

Author Q&A

1. From the Author’s Note, I see you were inspired to write this because of your family connection to Jean Harlow. Are you a fan of her movies? Which is your favourite and why? 

I was not really familiar with her movies until my fascination began. One weekend I watched TCM all weekend because it was a Jean Harlow weekend. I think my favorite is “Dinner at Eight.”It shows off her comedic talents–she could have been one of the great comedic actresses if she hadn’t died so young. I think that’s where her true gift was.

2. What fascinates you about 1920s/1930s Hollywood stars? And why do you think that era still has a lot of appeal to readers?

It was such an interesting era in film making–right before, then during, the Hayes code, which became the rule for popular film making for decades when it came to sex, profanity, and so many cultural “definitions” for lack of a better word. things like adultery were frowned on, of course, and one of the rules was you couldn’t make aa comedy about adultery. so there were things like that hemmed in a lot of talent.

Of course, Hollywood was at its most glamorous and it still had this shroud of magic and mystery around it. The stars had secrets–and for the most part they were kept. Their stories were spun so tight by the studios sometimes it’s hard for a biographer to go back and get the truth. I think for as much as many of us are glued to social media to see what next big feud erupts between the stars, or some other scandal, a part of us still enjoys imagining and not really knowing all the gritty detail about a celebrity’s drug or sex problem. In fact, I think what’s left out is much more intriguing. Some of us like to wonder.

And then there’s whole richness of the story telling and film making of the 1930’s in particular. The quick-witted banter. The fashion. The innuendo. All just so fascinating when compared to what’s out there today.

3. Your other mystery series feature scrapbooking and crafts. How was writing this book different, in terms of research and any challenges you may have faced?

It was very different from the start.  The voice in this novel is very different than in my craft mysteries, which are light-hearted. While this isn’t a “dark” mystery, like Gone Girl, or something in that vein, it’s far more gritty than my cozies. So at the time, I was writing both kinds–a cozy and this traditional mystery and would really have to work at keep the voice true. I listened to different, more jazzy and bluesy music and read darker mysteries. That’s not to say this voice isn’t more natural for me. I think it is. That’s one of the surprises I found when writing this. I enjoyed the challenge of it. Another challenge was that its set in New York city, a place I’ve spent a lot of time, but my characters live there and I wanted it to ring true, so I had my daughter, Emma help me with that. She is a student at Marymount Manhattan and knows the city very well. In terms of research, there’s a lot out there on Jean Harlow. The trick became to figure out what was good and what wasn’t. There a great deal of just plain trash written about her.

4. Totally unrelated to the book, but I see on your website that you once had 28 cats. What was that like? 

Crazy, right? I don’t recommend it. We had something five or six cats and they all had kittens one spring. It was amazing. I watched several of the cats giving birth and loved all of the kittens. it was so hard to give them up! We lived way out in the country in Pa. We found good homes for all of the kittens and even a few of the mama cats.

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Thank you to the author for an e-galley of the book in exchange for an honest review, and for doing the Q&A!

When Dimple met Rishi is one of my favourite YA romances. There are books I love so much I know I’ll keep them on my shelf for years, and there are books like Dimple that are so good they simply demand to be shared with someone else. I knew immediately that I wanted to share Dimple with my book-loving teenage niece in the Philippines, and kept my copy for months until I found someone who was travelling to the Philippines and could deliver it to her. It’s sweet and super kilig and I just fell heads over heels in love with the characters.

There’s Something about Sweetie is even better. The romance between Sweetie and Ashish is super sweet and believable, and I was moved by the subplots regarding their relationships with their respective families. I squee’d and I cried, and while Ashish wasn’t quite (to me) the book boyfriend that his brother Rishi was, I absolutely felt for him and for Sweetie and wanted so much for both to find their happy ending.

More than that, however, Sweetie is the YA romance I wish I’d read as a child. I’ve always been a big girl, and growing up, big girls were rarely the heroine of love stories. I remember loving the Sweet Dreams book A Little More to Love, but like many stories starring plus-size heroines, so much of the story focused on her insecurities about her weight. On the flip side, I recently read On the Plus Side by Alison Bliss, where the plus-size heroine was so kickass and confident about her weight that I couldn’t quite relate.

In contrast, Sandhya Menon managed to find a wonderful balance with Sweetie’s character, and manages to make Sweetie’s weight an ever-present reality without making it the focus of her reality. As a plus-size woman, I related hard to this, and I wish this book had existed when I was younger.

There’s a great scene where Sweetie refers to herself as “fat.” Ashish immediately tells her not to call herself that, and she responds that “fat” is simply an adjective and it’s only society that attaches a value judgement to it. Which is wonderful and woke, and I hope lots of teens reading this take it to heart.

I love that Sweetie’s fatness is a characteristic and not her defining feature, and most of all, that it doesn’t equate to unhealthiness. She’s a kickass track star, and one of the things that attracts Ashish to her is how awesome she looks when running.

I also love that all the problems with Sweetie’s fatness have to do with external social pressures, specifically with her mom’s constant desire for her to lose weight and the judgement Sweetie gets from her mom’s judgemental friend. I love that the mom’s friend is judgemental not just about Sweetie’s weight, but about other things as well, as this shows that it’s really not so much Sweetie’s appearance that’s the problem as it is the woman’s sense of entitlement to judge others. I especially love that the mom herself, while unreasonable and flat-out wrong at times, is not wholly cruel. Menon does a great job in showing how the mom genuinely wants what’s best for Sweetie, and just has the wrong idea about what that is.

There’s Something about Sweetie is on my list of favourite books this year, for so many reasons. Read it, read it, READ IT!

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an egalley of this book in exchange for an honest review.