The Masks We Wear & The Masks We Break - Honest ARC Review
- Brittany Townsend
- Jul 13, 2021
- 4 min read
Social media has introduced me to the amazing world of ARC (Advanced Readers Copy) reviews via sites like NetGalley and BookSirens. In exchange for early access to a book, I spend my time reading, digesting and providing an honest review. This helps new authors and new novels a chance to get ratings on Amazon and Goodreads before hitting shelves. Thing is, I usually select books from a list and it's a fairly detached process.
I joined BookTok (a TikTok sub-community focused on book reviews, recommendations, trend videos and general bookish support) in February of this year. TikTok is an amazing platform for indie authors to promote their books to a broad audience and to gain beta and ARC readers for their novels. I'll throw my name in the ring for a chance to be part of an ARC team when it calls to me, and sometimes I get lucky.
Well, I had the profound honour in June to be pulled into an ARC team for Lee Jacquot to read and provide feedback on the second book in her Emerald Falls series. When she asked if I wanted to be part of her Street Team, I figured "why not?!" and got busy promoting on my Instagram stories.
Part of my due diligence to authors, especially when asked to review the second or subsequent novel in a series, is that I always read the first books to establish myself well into the story. So you get a double dose of reviews here!
The Masks We Wear
Published February 2021
★★★★☆
Try to remember, not all storms come to disrupt your life. Some come to tear everything down, so you can build something new.
TW provided by the author: graphic consensual sex scenes, physical abuse by a parental figure, bullying scenes
Spencer and Liliana were summer childhood friends. Best friends. Inseparable. Until inexplicably they drifted apart. When Spencer moves to Emerald Falls permanently, their relationship changes drastically. Liliana, now called Lily, is detached, cruel. She works to make his life a living hell and Spencer doesn't honestly know why. Will they be able to settle their differences? Or will this forever alter their relationship?
I must admit I was unsure about the "Bully Romance" trope. As a teenager, all too often I was on the wrong side of spiteful words and harmful actions, and I wasn't sure how I would react to this being put on paper. Some of the actions taken by Lily were cruel and unreasonable - I sympathized a lot with Spencer while he endured her treatment.
Lee has a talent of twisting her prose. She presents her characters initially in a certain light - in Lily's case: cruel, detached, popular, controlling. As you get invested in the dislike of the characters, she starts to chip away at their smooth exteriors to show the fragile child underneath. It shows wonderful depth of understanding into the human psyche - that people wear masks daily to hide their hurts and their fears. Some may come across as cold and calculated, while others are nervous and fearful.
I won't reveal too much of the character development, as this is a book I feel that readers need to experience first-hand.
The Emerald Falls novels are standalones in their own right - you don't need to read all of them to gain an understanding or linear construct of events; however, readers meet Remy and Blaze, the shining stars of The Masks We Break in her first novel. We see their friendships and interactions with Spencer, Lily and the other cast of characters. We even see some subtle interaction with each other. This, in itself, lends to an exquisite intertwining of events and personality development. So, despite not leaning heavily on each other, I would highly suggest that readers dive into both Emerald Falls offerings.
The Masks We Break
Published July 2021
★★★★☆
Our dreams are dreams because, in our heads, they are perfect, without flaw or struggle., but once we achieve those long-sought-after fantasies, they morph into nightmares. They are tainted with the inability to live up to all we thought and riddled with problems we didn't perceive
TW provided by author: physical abuse, graphic consensual sexual scenes, parental neglect
Remy is a shy and nerdy young woman who is perfectly happy with a nose in a book and keeping a busy academic schedule. Blaze is a quiet, stoic man who fights to keep his image while shouldering the future of his father's company while maintaining status as football star and popular college student. Truly opposites - or are they?
Underneath their generic exteriors, there are depths to both characters that lend to well-thought-out trauma and motivations. Family obligation and duty. Need for perfection. Wanting to belong, but not wanting to be tied down due to commitments to study/family.
Lee has this talent of bringing real-world problems to the page. I was that over-achieving perfectionist in high school which turned into a mal-adjusted young adult trying to navigate university and a social life all while trying to adult at the same time. Plain to say that it did not work. I feel that Lee does such a great job at capturing the feelings surrounding the desire to please family tradition while trying to find your own path.
Not to mention the magnetic attraction on the page - whew!
As I mentioned before, though it's not imperative to read The Masks We Wear prior to jumping into this book, it does provide some insight into the brief interactions between Remy and Blaze during high school. The tension. The changes in demeanor over the 3 years between Point A and Point B. When I first received snippets of some of the... racier... encounters, I was concerned that they would be placed during high school-era Remy & Blaze, but I was pleasantly surprised to see these interactions taking place in a much more mature and suitable setting of college.
I look forward to reading the third installation in the Emerald Falls series! Thank you, Lee, for trusting your team to read and provide positive feedback on these truly vulnerable stories. I can't wait to see what you have in store for Amora!
Visit Lee's Goodreads profile HERE. She can be found on Instagram at @authorleej
LINKS TO THE BOOKS:
Amazon (both available with Kindle Unlimited):
Goodreads:
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