The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston:
I was intrigued by the concept of this book - young woman inherits apartment from aunt and discovers it sometimes sends her seven years into the past, where she meets the man who was living there then, but only sees him intermittently.
And the execution was largely well done. I often find I struggle with books that are set in the real world with a fantastical twist, especially if the characters don't respond to the weirdness in the way you'd expect. But here, the stage was set well but the protagonist properly freaked out the first time it happened. And the way the story was woven together mostly worked.
This is a 'proper' romance book, though, where there's no story left if you take the romance aspect out of it - and I'm coming to conclusion that I generally want more from a book than that. It did start to feel repetitive and as if it was being unnecessarily dragged out by the halfway point - and I have to admit I did listen to most of the second half on double speed, just to find out what happened.
I wasn't overly keen on some aspects when the timelines started overlapping. And the death knell for being on board with the relationship was when, after the first time they had sex, the male love interest leaned down and whispered, "Good girl" in the protagonist's ear...
I also felt like the grief aspect of the story didn't have a proper throughline, which meant it lost some of its impact along the way. And, not wanting to spoil anything - I would recommend checking the content warnings.
Still, I slowed the audiobook back down to normal speed again for the very end, which I felt worked pretty well and almost got me in the feels.
So, a bit tricky to rate, as I can't say I was fully invested, but I did want to see it through and was glad I did.


Almost A Crime by Penny Vincenzi:
I've read seven other Penny Vincenzi books in the last ten months and really enjoyed all but two of them. I was hoping this would be on the positive side - and it was! I know what to expect from these books now - hundreds and hundreds of pages of rich, privileged, often despicable people, doing largely terrible things to each other, but in a wildly compelling and highly entertaining way - occasionally with a bit of real emotion thrown in to keep me fully engaged.
And that is absolutely what I got from this book. It's got adultery, betrayal, complex family dynamics, problematic relationships, breakdowns, political shenanigans - you name it!
There's also a lot to do with trauma and motherhood, which is a common theme for this author - and I would definitely check the content warnings before diving in.
It dipped a bit around halfway, when everything I'd expected to happen had already occurred and I was worried the second half would be really dragged out - but then it went in multiple really surprising directions and I was very satisfied with how everything turned out in the end.
One thing I found interesting was that the main 'reveal' was really obvious to me right from the start - but then I realised it wasn't meant to be a mystery for the reader. It was more a case of the tension building around anticipating how the characters would react when they found out the truth - and that was done very effectively.


The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson:
The first page of this book is an extended in-joke about the opening line of Anna Karenina, so the author sets out her stall early...
It's about a very pretentious, very dysfunctional family, made up of largely unlikeable characters - which can go either way for me.
The central figure, Ray Hanrahan, is absolutely appalling and most of the other characters spend all their time bending over backwards to placate and appease him, which I found quite difficult to read. I was initially keen to carry on, to find out whether any of them managed to escape him by the end. But the desperation and unnecessary self-sacrifice got too much - weirdly managing to be both painfully realistic and also ridiculously unrealistic at the same time.
I struggled to reach my prescribed 50 pages (to give a book time to hook me in) and then gave up.

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The Royal Correspondent by Alexandra Joel tells the story of Blaise Hill starting a job in journalism in Australia in the late 1950s but moving to the UK to cover a royal wedding, with a dangerous secret dogging her heels.
Started out really fun, though a lot more thriller-y than I was expecting, with organised crime and spies thrown in with the royal wedding and upper class events. I loved all the stuff about newspaper production in the late 50s and early 60s, as well as all the discussion of gender politics and class inequality. The main plot doesn’t start until a third of the way in, but I enjoyed all the build-up.
The romance aspect started to go badly awry in the second half, as well as the thriller aspects really ramping up. But once I stopped being annoyed that the book wasn’t what I’d expected and just leaned in, it was a lot of fun and the ending brings everything together pretty well.

We had a great weekend, gaming at a youth hostel near Telford - and I played three games that were new to me.

Wyrmspan is a variant of Wingspan, only with dragons instead of birds - and it turns out theming makes a big difference to me when it comes to games. Or at least - I had it in my head that I didn't really like Wingspan, but my review from playing it for the first time in 2020 says otherwise... Anyway, I really enjoyed Wyrmspan, even though we didn't finish playing until after 1am... It's a game where you have to collect resources to obtain dragons and then place them in your caverns in such a way that they combine to provide you with more resources and points. It's a good combination of sort-of worker placement and pattern matching that really appeals to me - and the art is gorgeous!

I also played another game that's linked to one I know well - Quacks & Co: Quedlinberg Dash, which sits in the same universe as Quacks of Quedlinberg, but is a very different game. It's much simpler, as it's designed for kids and is a fairly straightforward racing game, rather than the push-your-luck style of the original. It's very cute, though, with great art, fun characters to play (I was the donkey) and a certain amount of strategy in building a bag of tokens that will work well to advance your piece in the race. Not very challenging, but a lot of fun.

But my favourite new game of the weekend was a card game dating back to the 1930s, called Plus and Minus. Each player has a mat with spaces for the numbers 1 to 25 and you have to get each of your four pieces from the top to the bottom in order to win the round. You do that by playing a card from your hand and adding its value to the one played by the person before you. If you end up moving a piece further than 25, it has to go back to the start. We played five rounds and I didn't do particularly well, but I really enjoyed it and would love to play again.