Roger Hyttinen

The story follows Samiah Brooks, a tech genius whose boyfriend Craig, as she discovers, has also been dating two other women. Enraged, she confronts him in a restaurant where he is on a date with one of the other ladies – the same restaurant reservation that she booked for their date that he canceled earlier that evening. A video of her explosive confrontation ends up going viral on YouTube.

But on the positive side, she ends up forming a close friendship with the other two women, London and Taylor, and they create a pact not to date any men for the next six months; instead, they’ll use that time to work on themselves on and their dreams.

What Samiah didn’t count on is sexy Daniel Collins, the new hire at the tech company where she works, Trendsetters. She tells herself that she will not allow herself to become distracted by Daniel, though that’s a lot easier said than done, and pretty soon, she wonders whether Daniel may be too good to be true.

This could be the case as we slowly learn that Daniel is indeed not who he says he is, that he’s on some sort of undercover assignment at Trendsetters, thus keeping a massive secret from Samiah. It doesn’t help matters that he starts to fall for Samiah as well, causing him all sorts of guilt and anguish because of the need to deceive Samiah.

Now given that the story starts out with Samiah being deceived by a three-timing boyfriend, the deception issue is especially touchy here, and Daniel is positive that this isn’t going to end well. What’s nice is that we go back and forth between both Samiah and Daniel’s POV, so we get the story from both sides.

I loved the workplace vibe in this story – it definitely sounds like the type of place I would love to work at. I also enjoyed the conversation about why Samiah is such a perfectionist — how she has to work twice as hard as her coworkers, being black and a woman, and how her work always, always has to be perfect the first time because it’s unlikely she’ll get a second chance. Unfortunately, too much of this is still true today in many instances. But I did like the book’s message about diversity and equality in the workplace. I believe Daniel is multi-racial — Korean and Black if my memory serves, so there’s excellent representation with both characters.

All in all, this is a fun own-voices rom-com with strong, admirable characters and a touch a mystery, which adds extra intrigue to the narrative. I thought there was excellent chemistry between the two protagonists, and I also enjoyed the friendship theme that ran throughout.

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This was such a fun, unusual book. It follows our main character Lillian who is a bit down on her luck at the moment. She is then summoned by her wealthy best friend Madison to her mansion, where Madison offers her a position: to work as a governess for her husband’s one-year-old twin children, Roland and Bessie.

Up until now, they were homeschooled and living with their mentally unstable mother until she recently passed away. But there’s a catch. Apparently, the twins spontaneously combust whenever they are agitated, setting fire to pretty much everything around them; though the fire doesn’t harm them at all. Lillian also has to keep the kids’ “ability” a secret as their father, Senator Robert, vies for Secretary of State.

It’s also worth mentioning that the children, who are suffering from trauma brought on by their mother, are wild, with violent tendencies leading to biting and attacking people and then…the flames come.

So Lillian agrees to be their nanny, and we follow her and the fire children over the course of the summer as she slowly establishes trust between the nearly feral kids and herself. She begins to realize that she needs these extraordinary kids as much as they need her. She begins to fight for the kids’ best interests as feelings of protectiveness arise within her, and the kids provide her with a new sense of purpose.

And as the story moves towards its explosive conclusion, Lillian has to make an enormous decision that could affect her and the kids’ lives forever.

So I really, really loved this quirky little book about exploding children and, ultimately, acceptance. It was wickedly funny, charming, and endearing — an all-around feel-good yet odd story with a super weird storyline, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

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This is a historical fiction novel that was a recent Book of the Month Club selection and alternates between four different characters over the course of a single day in Paris in 1927. There Jean-Paul, a heartbroken journalist who continually searches for his missing daughter; there Camille, the maid of Marcel Proust who, when asked to burn all of his notebooks kept one for herself, Guillaume, who owes a debt to a crime boss and if he doesn’t pay up by the end of the day, will be killed and Souren, an Armenian refugee who performs puppet shows for children, some of them a tad on the grisly side as he relives his tragic past via his shows.

We get their stories through a series of flashbacks, and we see first-hand the secrets, regrets, sadness, hopelessness, and betrayal that each character is carrying. Via the book’s short chapters, we get a glimpse of their past and present, their life journeys, their heartbreak, their life lessons. There’s a lot to untangle with these highly complex and damaged characters.

The author dives into numerous themes in this novel: war, love, loss, grief, murder, guilt, secrets, deception, and loneliness, which an undercurrent of hope beneath it all. This was an elegant, evocative book with beautiful lyrical writing, which had a melodic flow to it, and I found each character’s backstory to be utterly compelling.

We also have some cameos by Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, Maurice Ravel, and Josephine Baker, which added a bit of extra interest to the story.

The four characters’ stories come crashing together in a rather explosive and shocking way at the end of the book. Now I will say that the ending was left open to interpretation, so if you like everything completely and nicely wrapped up at the end, then this may not be the book for you.

But if you like historical fiction and/or Paris, then you may want to give The Paris Hours a try.

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