Monday, July 31, 2017

Brief Thoughts: Dream a Little Dream

Dream a Little Dream

by Jill Shalvis
Lucky Harbor #8.5 - a novella
*Part of A Christmas to Remember anthology

~ Goodreads ~

Rating:  4.0 Stars

Melissa has kept every man at a safe distance-especially firefighter Ian, a sexy friend with sexy benefits.  But Ian secretly longs for more.  Luckily, 'tis the season for giving love a chance . . .


I only read Jill Shalvis's Lucky Harbor novella from this anthology, since I'm making may way through the Lucky Harbor series right now.

It's a little off-season for a Christmas story, but let's just call this my "Christmas in July" selection... or something like that.  Like I said, I'm making my way through the series, and this was the next story in line.

This short story really took me by surprise since I haven't quite enjoyed any of the other short stories or novellas in the series.  Dream a Little Dream is heart-warming and sweet, with a lovely emotional twist that kind of puts life into perspective.

Melissa's clumsy attempt at winning Ian back was wonderfully endearing, and hit a lot of pangs in my heart. T he wriggling mass of black lab puppy was a nice bonus.  And Ian's brief family reunion scene packed a nice little punch.

The reason why this short story doesn't get a perfect score is only because I would have liked to see more about Melissa and Ian's relationship, and I would have liked to see someone from a previous book, even if only for a millisecond.

Nonetheless, overall, this was a sweet story, and maybe being short and simple is better than dragging it out and adding too much to the story.

Booklikes-opoly | Game Wrap Up!!

Booklikes-opoly
Booklikes, the book blogging social platform



First order of this wrap up is to give a great big 'THANK YOU!!' to Moonlight Reader and Obsidian Blue for the great game they put together!  Booklikes-opoly was winning, and it has been an outstanding three and a half months of wonderful game play!  I read a few new authors that I will continue to check out books from, and I even managed to finish some book series and cut a lot of my already owned books off my TBR!

And to be honest, even up into April I was still kind of in a reading and blogging slump--a slump that started in November and didn't quit.  Booklikes-opoly changed that and I ended up finishing one book after another, pre-drafting a lot of game play posts, writing reviews... the works.

And to be honest, while I love reading, I think there came a point in the game where I just simply looked forward to the next roll--trying to figure out what book to read for each game space became a thing.

And then there was Magnetic Monkey, Teddy Bear Game Piece, and Peek-a-Boo Penni Penguin...  At first, Monkey was simply supposed to be a random magnetic decoration for my live game board.  But then I started finding reasons to play around, and he somehow became my game mascot!  I'm so delighted that a lot of you enjoyed my game play updates with Monkey and Friends, and so finding a new pose for Monkey became another thing I looked forward to on a regular basis.

So here they are one last time, wrapping up my game play with the final game stats:


Nothing fancy, just chilling around and showcasing the board!


Books Read for BLopoly




Some Final Ramblings

I counted all of the books that I read for Booklikes-opoly, whether or not I finished them, or even read the entire book.  That being said, there were only three books presented above that only counted partially towards the actual game.

False Memory by Dean Koontz was a book that I had started reading prior to the game start.  But the book itself is 700+ pages, and so even as I started participating in BLopoly, I was still reading False Memory.  During an unlucky roll where I ended up, first in Jail Visitor, and then in actual BLopoly Jail, I decided to read what I had left of False Memory to count for however many pages of sentencing I needed.  This worked out wonderfully!  I got out of jail, donated some pages, and then finally finished the darn book!

The Perfect Poison by Amanda Quick was also a book I read for the purpose of donating some pages to the BLopoly prison library.  It was for the Memorial Day extras, and since I wanted to get the book read and turned into the library (as well as so I could move onto the next book in the series), I chose to read all of The Perfect Poison, even though I could only donate 100 pages of it.

The Law of Attraction by N.M. Silber turned out to be my very first DNF book of the game, and for the year.  I didn't make it far, dropping the book at about 26%, which turned out to be about 63 pages.


My favorite reads for the game were the Brothers Sinister books by Courtney Milan.  I didn't read all of the books in this series for BLopoly, only the first and the last, which were my two favorite of the series anyway.  I also loved Deanna Raybourn's A Perilous Undertaking, It Had to Be You and Rumor Has It by Jill Shalvis, and Ravished by Amanda Quick.

The longest book I read would be False Memory Dean Koontz at 751 pages... but I only read part of it for Prison reasons, so I'm not going to count it.  That places the actual longest book I read for this game as Northern Lights by Nora Roberts, at 562 pages.

The shortest book I read was Schoolgirl by Osamu Dazai.

I only listened to two audio books for this game, but I did not have to employ the audio book exception to keep listening while moving onto the next roll... both were finished during the course of that roll due to multiple rolls or being in jail.

I managed to catch up with and/or finish about 9 series during the course of the game:
  • Veronica Speedwell by Deanna Raybourn
  • Aftershock by Jill Sorenson
  • Veronica Sloan by Leslie A. Kelly
  • Brothers Sinister by Courtney Milan
  • The Line series by Kimberly Kincaid
  • Colorado High Country by Pamela Clare
  • The House of Steele by Addison Fox
  • ICE: Black Ops Defenders by Melissa Cutler
  • Extrasensory Agents by Leslie A. Kelly

I didn't read all the books in the above listed series for a BLopoly game space, but the last book in those series were read for the game.

I picked up 7 new authors during the course of the game:
  • Courtney Milan
  • Kate Morton
  • Jean Barrett
  • Leona Karr
  • Lisa Childs
  • Susanna Kearsley
  • Celeste Bradley

The stats could probably go on, so I'm going to cut it off here.  This post is already long enough as is.

I really hope there will be more games like this in the future.

Once again, another great big thanks to Obsidian Blue and Moonlight Reader--for creating this game, for all the work they put into it, for playing along with us, for all the fun new twists... pretty much for all of it!  You guys are the greatest!!


Final Bank, Update Links, Review Links


Final Bank:   $274