Review: Glorious Rivals - Book #2 The Grandest Games Series - Jennifer Lynn Barnes - July 2025 If you’ve been around The Phantom Paragrapher for any length of time, you know that Jennifer Lynn Barnes is one of my absolute favorite authors. Usually, her books are "one-sitting" reads for me—I fly through the puzzles and the prose like my life depends on it. However, I have to be honest with you all: Glorious Rivals was a bit of a strange experience In this latest installment of the Inheritance Games saga, we are whisked away to Hawthorne Island. Seven players have arrived, each carrying their own heavy baggage of secrets and motivations, all desperate to win "The Grandest Game." The stakes are exactly what we’ve come to expect from this series: millions of dollars are on the line, but so are hearts and lives. The players are forced into a high-octane race to solve a myriad of mysteries while trying to survive the increasingly dangerous twists and turns of the is...

Review: Caraval - Book #1 Caraval Series - Stephanie Garber - September 2016 I had recently finished the Once Upon a Broken Heart series and the first book mentioned a little bit about Jack's relationship with someone named Donatella.  At the time of reading the first two books, I didn't realize that there was a prequel series with the first book being Caraval. This month on Bookstagram, a group of friends were doing a buddy read and since I had a copy on my bookshelf, I thought I would make it a priority to read this month. I also needed to get the Once Upon a Broken Heart world out of my head. I went in blind to Caraval and have to admit it was a darker book than the Once Upon a Broken Heart series and then reading this book, the female character Scarlett frustrated the hell out of me. She was so whiny and was very much playing the victim-blaming game and she was so self-righteous and wanted to control everything. I just wanted to shake her and scream for her to wake up. I gu...

Review: Seven Dirty Secrets - Natalie D. Richards - November 2021 One of my favorite YA thriller writers is Natalie D. Richards, I find she is this generation's Christopher Pike and Lois Duncan. All three of these authors are famous for their slasher-type stories and revenge-filled thrillers. Think along the lines of movies like "I Know What You Did Last Summer" or "Valentine". The late 90's/ early to mid-2000's slasher films. In Seven Dirty Secrets, we meet seven friends who each are hiding a dark secret of their own as the seven of them a year ago went on a rafting wilderness trip, but only six returned home safe and sound. The seventh is said to have died. Seven Dirty Secrets takes place one year after the rafting trip and it is our main female character Cleo's birthday. Cleo is obsessed with forensics and mysteries and is hoping to get a scholarship to study forensics and she is hoping that no one will find out what happened a year ago as that co...