You know how it is sometimes, you just want some easy reading, a little romance and some nice characters… Coming off the back of the very long All Souls trilogy and finishing the reasonably lengthy fourth book of Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles in a week (which I’ll post a review on soon), I needed something easy and fluffy 🙂 And, that’s what I got with the books that I read in the last few days.

First up was US-set YA romances from the ‘Grover Beach Team’ series by Anna Katmore and Piper Shelley (not sure why only one author name appears on the cover…) The first one, ‘Play with Me’ had been a random free download from Amazon before Christmas. It’s a quick, neat story of first love and frustrations with male best friends, set in summer holidays at high school. Told in first person from POV of Lisa Matthews, there’s lots of sarcasm and banter between the characters, which makes for a fun read and the issues and action of the book seem nice and realistic. Definitely YA, with some language and romantic scenes that turn up the heat over and above a quick peck – but nothing that would have E. L. James worrying. Rating 4*

‘Ryan Hunter’ is the second book in the series, and tells the same tale from Ryan Hunter’s POV (surprising, eh?) It’s a nice twist on the first one and gives you some nice missing scenes that show the other side of the story from ‘Play with Me’ – oddly enough, having liked Ryan in the first book, being inside his head, I came away not liking him quite as much, but that’s often the same when you take away the romantic goggles that you’ve viewed a character through in  reading the first book. By the end of this, I was ready to move away from Grover Beach, but overall, they were really well written books, with good characters and some nice high school romance. Rating 3.5*

My last fluffy read of the week was a novella by Kat Latham from the London Legends series. Unwrapping Her Perfect Match was a freebie download from Christmas – unsurprisingly, set during the holiday season.

For a novella, it was a good length and had great characters that had some decent depth and you were able to get drawn into the story quickly. It wasn’t a straight-forward cheesy romance, there were some nice elements that held the story together and actually aside from the romance elements it would hold together as a story in itself. A nice, fast read, perfect if you’re looking for a quick adult romance, with some definite adult scenes and quite a lot of swearing – one of the MCs is a rugby playing giant of a man, don’t expect him to say “Oopsy Daisy” just because he’s British 🙂 Rating 4*