Fellow book addicts, I have such a great thing to share. An author posted about it and now I’m so excited. Have you heard of Amazon First Reads? You can get a Kindle ebook for free before it comes out with your Prime membership! I’m over the moon about this. I love books, clearly, and since I’m a library patron I often have to wait a long time before I can read a new book. But this program helps with that, and it’s still free. Yay!

October’s First Reads pick is Liz Talley’s Room to Breathe and she’s the author who shared about the First Reads program. Make sure to follow authors on social! It’s the best way I’ve found to discover new programs and find out about book giveaways. I also highly recommend GoodReads for this same purpose. I follow authors on both, as they don’t always cross post their content.

Did you miss October’s First Reads opportunity? GoodReads is currently holding a content to giveaway 100 Kindle copies of this very book! You can find all the details here. You have to enter today! It’s the last day! Best of luck to you.

Room to Breathe introduces us to Daphne, a children’s book author on the uptick who is shaking her whole life up. Some changes she welcomes, while others are obstacles. Her strained relationship with her daughter, her attraction to a younger man…these are things she wants to fix. With dual narrators of Daphne and her daughter Ellery show both sides of the family conflict, and how even mom’s aren’t perfect.

This book is full of well developed and interesting characters. Each character is vibrantly crafted and interesting. Even when Ellery is, shall we say, needing improvement, we can still see growth and depth to her character. Learning to fend for oneself and build a life is no small task, but sometimes listening to Ellery’s narration requires a bit of grace from the reader. But we have all behaved badly, and Ellery is a complex and interesting character. I had a hard time with some of the character’s choices, but overall each character behaves as they’ve been built to. But no one is perfect, and these characters are realistically flawed.

The landscape is beautifully created and Talley’s writing truly make you feel like you’re sweltering in Louisiana’s humidity or toiling under a Texan sun. I do wish this vineyard were real, because I would definitely want to visit it.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. It’s a bit like reading a rom-com where the romances are the second plot and the family relationship is the primary plot. Talley crafts this world and its inhabitants well, and I enjoyed spending time in it.