Time for another round of Yvo’s Shorties! This time around two books I had high hopes for, but both ended up being a disappointment for me.

Title: Shipped
Author: Angie Hockman
Genre: Contemporary, Romance
First published: January 19th 2021
Publisher: Gallery Books
Finished reading: May 20th 2021
Pages: 336

“People are the problem. But they can also be the solution.”


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Okay… I guess that didn’t work as well as I hoped. I’ve been hearing mixed things about Shipped, but as I always enjoy a travel element as well as an enemy-to-lover trope, I decided to give it a go anyway. I mean, having a romance story partly set during a cruise to the Galápagos Islands sounds fantastic, or am I wrong? I still think the premise of this story is very strong, but the execution sadly fell rather flat for me. First of all I have to say that this didn’t feel like a true enemy-to-lover story at all. It’s more like a ‘one way anger’ based on a misunderstanding and the two hardly even interacted until the cruise started. On top of this, the bickering felt rather bland and the whole ‘enemy’ part of the story was just hardly there. The transition to the love part felt quite cliche and abrupt too, and sadly sparks didn’t fly but instead fizzled out before really burning. I did love the descriptions of the different Galápagos islands as well as the focus on the wildlife, which probably saved the story for me. There were some funny moments too, but as a whole I can’t say I was impressed… The fact that I found Henley to be highly annoying and Graeme rather bland didn’t really help either. A bonus point though: having a nice guy as a main character AND no explicit sexy scenes. I do have to say that the final chapters kind of came out of nowhere though and didn’t fit the rest of the story at all. In fact, this new angle only distracted from what could have been a final save to make this romance read more interesting and, well, romantic.

Title: Every Vow You Break
Author: Peter Swanson
Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Suspense
First published: March 23rd 2021
Publisher: William Morrow
Finished reading: May 20th 2021
Pages: 308

“Maybe that was her excuse. There were signs, but they were little ones. And now the water was boiling.”


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Right. I probably should have known this was going to happen considering the low rating and the pile of negative reviews stacking up… Still, the three Peter Swanson books I’ve read in the past received a nearly perfect rating, so I had some hope that I would be in the minority and that I would somehow enjoy my time with Every Vow You Break. Instead, it became clear really early on that this wouldn’t be the case. Almost as soon as I met the main character Abigail, I knew I wasn’t going to like her. Her personality is truly despicable, and then I’m not even talking about the whole cheating angle and her basically reasoning that she did nothing wrong by sleeping with another man just before her wedding. I didn’t particularly care about reading about her past escapades either, and I honestly only kept reading because I was curious about that ridiculous and farfetched final part of the story people kept talking about in their reviews. And you were all right: the story goes absolutely bonkers once the two are on their honeymoon on the Heart Pond Island. It almost seems like you are reading two completely different stories squashed together into one, and the unfolding events are both highly unbelievable and way over the top. Instead of adding suspense and giving the story a dangerous edge, I mostly ended up giving my eyebrows a workout by raising them over and over again. Unlikeable characters, very annoying view on cheating, very dragged out first part, a second part that reads more like a bad amateur horror movie…  Oh yes, I definitely understand the low rating now and I still can’t believe this story was written by the same author that has three books on my favorites list.

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