Tackling TBR

by M.T. Morgan

Thanks so much to the author and Hambright PR for the gifted advanced e-copy of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts. All opinions are entirely my own. { partner }
My reviews and content can also be found on Goodreads, StoryGraph, on Instagram @Tackling_TBR, and on TikTok @TacklingTBR.

Publication Date: November 11, 2024

Genre: romance, dark romance

Tropes: dark romance, enemies to lovers, bully romance, childhood best friends, kidnapping, good girl, hockey

Page Count: 224 pages

Book Blurb

Blaise
He was once my hero, but that was a long time ago… before I left him.
I never expected him to show up in my life again. Especially as my new roommate.
The boy I once loved is now a brutal hockey player with a taste for revenge and reckless abandon.
I’m indebted to him, and he expects me to pay in the form of blood, tears and humiliation.
But once the games begin, I find myself falling into old habits I thought were buried.
Out of all the bad ideas I’ve had in my life, Desmond Rickman has always been my favorite.

Desmond
I had a heart once… until she smashed it, leaving nothing but a hollow spot in my chest.
I never expected to see her again. Especially not in my turf, in my apartment, as my new roommate.
She may have held my heart once upon a time, but now I hold all the cards.
She’s indebted to me, and I’ll make her pay for ruining my life.
Old emotions are like scars, slowly fading and never disappearing. And she’s bringing them all to the surface.
If there is a God, he designed Blaise Sheffield to bring me to my knees.

Review: 3 stars

TW: dub-con, non-con, violence, murder, light BDSM, mention of drugs, bullying, humiliation kink, burn play, somnophilia, blood play, kidnapping

When your former, childhood best friend, quite literally from the opposite side of the tracks, disappears from your life only to pop back up years later as your new college roommate – you get a truly dark and twisted bully romance. Right? Sure, why not.

I will go into this saying that bully romances aren’t really my thing – as a queer woman, if I have to watch one more gay/bi character end up in a forever relationship with the person who used to bully them for being gay, I just might throw something.
Obviously that’s not the storyline here, but I mention this to say – take this rating and review with the grain of salt that comes with reading a book where the primary trope is one that I’m predisposed to not loving and wasn’t expecting when I picked up the book.

That being said, I did enjoy the rest of the book well enough.

Blaise is a really fun FMC. A girl with a difficult childhood and dark secrets, working to better herself and her situation, and building a future career based around helping others do the same – all with a lot of sass and cute cotton candy pink hair. Love that for her.

The book itself is a pretty quick read, with fairly short chapters and a quick paced plot that jumps in with both feet right from the word go.

I’d say that if bully romances are your thing, definitely pick this one up – I think it’s probably a pretty good one. But if you’re just going in expecting the dark romance without the side of bullying, maybe be wary.

Link to purchase on Amazon:

by J.S. Wood

Thanks so much to the author and Hambright PR for the gifted advanced e-copy of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts. All opinions are entirely my own. { partner }
My reviews and content can also be found on Goodreads, StoryGraph, on Instagram @Tackling_TBR, and on TikTok @TacklingTBR.

Publication Date: February 24, 2026

Genre: romance, contemporary romance

Tropes: friends to lovers, single parent, slow burn, he falls first, friend zoned, found family, golden retriever MC

Page Count: 312 pages

Book Blurb

After finding out his friends find his nonstop quest for love to be a little excessive. Derek has decided to put a stop to dating altogether. 

Now, he’s stuck in a no-go zone just in time for someone new to enter the friend group.

Elizabeth is a single mom who has been out of the dating pool for a long time, but when she meets Derek, the sweet and caring friend of a friend, she thinks things are about to change. 

When things don’t go quite as she expects, she accepts his friendship and begins a journey to help him reinvent his father’s failing hardware store to keep the legacy alive. 

Spending hours together working, they begin to see that their feelings are not so easily brushed aside and when push comes to shove, their friendship blossoms into a romance they’ll never forget. 

But when things get hard for the hardware store, and real life starts to butt in to their relationship, they have to decide if they can weather the storm, or if things will end for good. 

Review: 2.5 stars

TW: discussion of loss of parent (off page, prior to events)

There were a lot of things to really love about this book.

I really liked Elizabeth as our FMC – I mean, a sweet single mom who goes to the mat for her friends and family? What’s not to love?

I thought it was SO SWEET that Derek turned out to have a connection to Elizabeth’s past. Truly is there anything sweeter than a second chance romance or a childhood crush coming back into your life?

I also really loved reading the parts about Elizabeth helping Derek to turn things around for his hardware store.
A storyline about two characters bringing their different expertise or passions together for a good cause or small business (think: the handsome local contractor helping rebuild the old inn that she just inherited from a distant relative) will almost always be an automatic win for me.

But all of that being said, there were also some things that made this a somewhat challenging read for me.

Among the tropes that I have a hard time with, or that I can only take in small doses before it starts to get to me a bit, are a miscommunication trope, a third act breakup (when it doesn’t feel like it makes sense within the plot), and an extended friend zone. And this book had all three in spades.

While the concept of a friend zone in real life immediately annoys me (but that’s a soap box for another day), I understand its place as a trope in romance books and media. It’s an easy way to build up the tension of a slow burn and to explain away why a romance might be a bit slow to start without making a reader want to yell.

But everything in moderation. By the time these two characters finally talked to each other (hello, miscommunication trope) enough to take each other out of their mutual friend zoning my kindle told me that I was literally 46% of the way through the book. And this isn’t exactly a short read, sitting at 312 pages.
It was just entirely too long for me, and by the time it was resolved with a single, simple conversation, I just sort of found myself rolling my eyes at the whole ordeal.

The other thing that made this a tough one for me has to do with the way Derek, our MMC, seemed to be made to act like an asshole (through some almost toxic masculinity-leaning remarks and actions) in order to manufacture a third act breakup that felt a bit forced for the sake of the trope rather than feeling necessary or natural in the storyline that had been built up until that point. I’m not saying that there’s no way a third act breakup could have worked here if that’s what the author wanted, but I personally felt that the way that it did didn’t really feel like it fit with the vision of Derek that the whole book had given me up to that point.

All of those are very personal things that I could very well be the only one bothered by. And any one of them on their own wouldn’t have caused any real issues for me. But the combination of all three just left large portions of this book feeling long and drawn out for me, and like I was just reading in order to get through until the next, sweeter parts.

Overall I didn’t love or hate this book, it just ended up being okay for me. I wouldn’t have any trouble recommending it to friends or fellow readers if I knew that it fit tropes or a style that they were looking for, but I would probably first make brief mention of the issues that I had with it to make sure they wouldn’t have the same struggles that I did.

Link to purchase on Amazon:

by M.K. Oliver

Atria Books

Thanks so much to the author and Atria Books for the gifted advanced e-copy of this book via Edelweiss+ in exchange for my honest thoughts. All opinions are entirely my own. { partner }
My reviews and content can also be found on Goodreads, StoryGraph, on Instagram @Tackling_TBR, and on TikTok @TacklingTBR.

Publication Date: February 17, 2026

Genre: mystery, thriller, fiction, dark humor, contemporary, crime, adult

Page Count: 384 pages

Book Blurb

A whip-smart and darkly funny crime novel—perfect for fans of My Sister, the Serial Killer and The Maid—that follows a wife and mother with a deadly secret that she must suppress if she wants to maintain her picture-perfect façade.

Meet Lalla Rook. Lalla has a lot on her plate: She needs to guarantee her husband makes partner, secure her dream house in Hampstead, and get her daughter into a prestigious prep school. And on the afternoon she stabs a stranger seven times after he breaks into her living room, she has a four-year-old’s birthday party to host.

With an unambitious partner, two demanding children, and a barely adequate large house in a nice (if not quite fashionable) part of town, Lalla’s life isn’t quite perfect yet. And she can’t pretend she hasn’t missed the adrenaline rush that comes with transgressing. Besides, as a wife and mother, she’s already an expert multi-tasker. So, disposing of a body, framing a friend, and being the world’s best mother can easily be managed alongside the usual domestic minutiae.

It’s just that her husband Stephen seems distracted, her daughter’s drowning of the class hamster is affecting her academic future, and then there is the unexpected intruder. Who is this man and what does he want from her? Because Lalla has a past she’d rather keep hidden—and the sudden appearance of the police means that avoiding them will be yet another task to cross off her to-do list.

Funny, calculating, hypercompetent, and ambitious, Lalla is your next favorite antiheroine. Just don’t mention it to her mother-in-law.

Review: 3 stars

TW: murder/death, violence, dub-con/non-con in marriage, domestic violence, stalking, blackmail

Lalla Rook certainly isn’t a woman that I’d like to get on the bad side of.
As far as main characters go she isn’t exactly the most easily relatable, but I think that that’s part of what made her so much fun to read. She is quick, calculating, and cold – not exactly the ride-or-die lady that I need in my life – but for better or for worse she certainly knows how to get shit done. And, despite her many MANY moral shortcomings, I still felt myself rooting for her to get her happy ending.

I will say that overall the book wasn’t a perfect read for me.
While I definitely appreciated the short chapters (there’s something so satisfying about being able to tell yourself that you read a few chapters, even if in reality it was only about 20-30 pages), the book still felt a bit too long at times.
I loved the moments of dark humor that were sprinkled throughout the book, but I do wish that there had been just a little bit more of that and really leaned into that side of the story and character. I think that it would have helped a bit, at least for me personally, in those handful of times that it felt a bit like it was dragging.

I think that, in the end, this read was squarely middle of the road for me. I did definitely enjoy it, and would recommend it to friends – but it probably won’t be making my top reads of the year.
And while I look forward to watching the upcoming adaptation whenever it releases, I don’t know that I’ll be picking the book back up for a reread any time soon.

Link to purchase on Amazon: