This book is so perfect for spooky season and I absolutely loved it. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced copy.

Thank you NetGalley and Alcove for the e-arc!
Well this ended up being such a fun read for fall! Halloween is my favorite holiday, and I am always on the hunt for more spooky romances, so this was PERFECT for me. This book is a mix of ghost hunting and paranormal investigations with cozy bookstores and adorable small-town charms; really the perfect Hallmark rom-com set up! Also, unexpected bonus of queer rep, as I didn't see that before reading, so it was a pleasant surprise (Lex is a pan, and James is bi). There are also a bit of Christmasy vibes thrown in, which was unexpected as well.
Overall this was such a cute story! I flew through this in one day, and I highly recommend enjoying some fall-flavored coffee, cocoa, or tea while reading as, from experience, it enhances the vibes!

Thank you, Alcove Press and NetGalley, for the advanced copy of Haunt Your Heart Out.

This was a cute read. I loved the mix of spooky time at Christmas. Every reader loves a character who wants to open their own bookstore. The banter between the characters was adorable. Overall the characters were likable. The story kind of faltered in its pacing. The book tended to get a bit repetitive and slow. Near the end, it was hard to keep my attention.

This was a cute, cozy romance perfect for the spooky season! Hallmark movie vibes with forced proximity (my fave) and I had so much fun reading it!

Haunt Your Heart Out is a pumpkin spice latte in book form: sweet, cozy, plenty hot, and perfect for the chilly days of fall! This was a fun and cozy novel that holds at its center two people learning to accept love.

Spooky & Spicy!! Now's the perfect time to read this sweet romcom from Amber Roberts. All the ghost stories plus the spirit of Christmas, a little bit of everything for the holiday lovers. And they are just stories, not actual paranormal activity just fyi. I love the way the relationships drive the story, not just the romantic ones but familial relationships and friendships. Both MCs have stressed relationships with their families and we see how that affects each of their life paths and the way they see things. Lex has dealt with anxiety for a long time and feels like everyone leaves her behind so she's hesitant to start a relationship with anyone who doesn't plan to stay in her beloved town, but James makes it hard to stick to that plan. Plus, James has the CUTEST sidekick in his dog Lulu so really who could resist? Lex and James are cute and funny, with lots of banter and silly moments, but also tons of tender ones. It's a very cozy, sweet read and I love the way James and Lex seemed destined for each other since he's working on a documentary based on ghost stories and her old vlog is one of the driving factors for his crew choosing Stowe as their filming location.

*small town romance
*ghost stories
*LGBTIA+ rep
*mental health rep
*found family

If you're looking for a feel-good romance with small town vibes, amazing friends, a lovely local book store, and a very cute dog, check this one out!

Thank you Alcove Press for the DRC via NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This book would be perfect for November. It has the cozy spooky vibes of October, but also the wintery and romance vibes of December.

It was a cute small town romance, but the plot was a bit boring. There were too many random moments that felt more like it was there to fill out empty space and not actually important for the story.

The relationship between the main characters felt a bit too fast, but very cute.

I really liked the idea and the premise of the book, but it didn’t meet my expectations. It’s a quick and easy read, so I would still recommend it if you are looking for something with a mix of spooky and wintery/christmasy.

I definitely thought this was a Halloween/October book based on the cover and title, but it’s actually set in wintery Vermont!
Lex works in a small bookstore and is instantly attracted to James, who’s passing through with a ghost hunting documentary crew. Lex, who in the past had staged some hauntings for a popular vlog, decides to help them out by faking some paranormal activity. In doing that, she starts a chain of events she’s afraid will ultimately come back to haunt her, especially as her feelings for him deepen.
This was a fun read that, in addition to fake hauntings and flirty banter, deals with difficult family dynamics, especially parents and living up to their expectations.

✨🪦✨ Haunt Your Heart Out ✨🪦✨

What do you get when you mix a Haunted Happenings (possibly fabricated) vlog, a Ghost Hunter and one overly caffeinated Bookseller? One heck of a love story! Haunt Your Heart Out is packed full of ghost stories, small town charm, mental health representation, ride or die friendship, complicated family relationships and a very cute dog!

👻 Paranormal Investigations
💖 Bookseller x Ghost Hunter
💻 Haunted Happenings Vlog
🍁 Small Town Vermont
📚 Cozy Bookshop
☕️ All the Coffee
❤️‍🩹 Healing
🪦 Walks in the Graveyard
🔦 Investigation Tampering

This was such a cute read and perfect for spooky season! Thank you so much TBR & Beyond Tours & Alcove Press for sending me a copy!

I enjoyed sections of this book - the MC’s love of books, the sexy scenes, the fun ghost play- but overall it felt a bit rushed. I had a hard time really falling for the main love story and really understanding the timeline. Overall it was a good read but I’m not sure it’s one I’ll come back to.

I really enjoyed this one! I’m a big fan of Amber Roberts, and I think this is a really lovely , cozy romance that’s perfect for fall or winter! I love the characters, setting, and story of this one

This was an odd one for me. I loved the anxiety rep of the female main character, Alex. It was very truthful in its representation and felt uncomfortable a lot of the time. I imagine this will be one of those books where she is named ‘unlikeable’ for this reason.

However, the plot felt like it wasn’t paced to keep the story engaging, moving forward, or creating chemistry. It often felt like many of the moments, miscommunications and misinterpretations of information were just thrown in there just so we could get to the end, but didn’t serve much purpose other than to slow the book down.

For this reason, the chemistry between the two characters started out strong, but then fizzled out toward to end, where it almost felt like the climax of their relationship had already happened by 30%.

It does all end with a happy ending of course, but its predictability and strange pacing meant that it all felt redundant by the end.

Overall, the story held fantastic anxiety representation of a 30+ pan woman searching for home, in a town that felt a bit like stars hollow with a giant cemetery.

Thanks to NetGalley, Alcove Press, and the author for the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

2.5 stars rounded up.

This was a bit too Hallmark-y for me, and I feel like I probably should have picked up on that vibe more when I read the description of the book and saw that it was set in a small Vermont town and the FMC worked at a small bookshop. The story was cute, and I enjoyed the characters for the most part. There was just enough spice for it not to seem excessive, in my opinion.

My biggest qualm was that this wasn't marketed as a Christmas book. The title HAUNT YOUR HEART OUT and then the cover art showing them in a graveyard, plus the podcast about ghost stories all give off Halloween vibes, but this book is set during Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that really threw me off and added to the Hallmark-ness of it all. I probably wouldn't have requested this title if I had known that it was more of a Christmastime book.

Haunt Your Heart Out by Amber Roberts is a fun and spooky romance with a unique paranormal twist. I enjoyed the dynamic between Lex and James, and their adventure. I would recommend this book for lovers steamy contemporary romance, with a tricky web of lies and the threat of it all unravelling, and tension-filled banter between the love interests.

3.5 stars

I really enjoyed this book. It felt like a cute hallmark movie but with some spice. I like how it incorporated spooky with Christmas.

I had really high hopes for this one, but alas.

I loved the setting: small, cozy Vermont ski town with locals who live and breathe the small town life. A bookstore manager who wants to purchase the book store but is experiencing a ton of money struggles and strained family relationships, including keeping the house her grandfather gifted her up and running. She is a clear commitment-phobe because living in a tourist town means that people will always leave.

Enter James: documentary filmmaker. World traveler and ghost hunter.

My issues were:
• personal opinion but I found the dialogue very cringy
• for a short book there was a ton of what seemed to be really unnecessary detail and not enough dialogue
• she went from commitment-phobe to relationship girlie a little too quickly? Like she went to kissing him in public when they meet up so fast that it made all of her commitment issues seem really flimsy
• both MCs have issues with their parents, and as someone who also does, I totally get it. But Alex was so incredibly immature. She was giving Lorelei Gilmore fighting with Emily because Emily just wanted to throw money at problems to fix them and Alex hated it. But she honestly sounded like a petulant 18 year old most of the time

Cute, but not very memorable!

I found myself speed reading at the end to just hurry up and get to the point.

This was a surprisingly cute spooky romance read for the season. Even for a spooky(ish) Christmas read. Since it takes place during December in Vermont.

Although, I wish there were more spooky aspects. Especially if you’re going to fake hauntings to make a podcast and documentary. At least they could have been more realistic and scary(ish). The bridge scene had promise. Could have done so much more with it.

I love the concept of collecting books with little messages in them. I will now be looking in every used book I see. I think I may even start writing a little message in books I gift.
And the little notes Lex’s grandfather left inside the walls of the house for his wife. How romantic.

All in all I did enjoy this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Alcove Press for this gifted egalley in exchange for my honest review.

Heat Factor: Jalapeño poppers

Character Chemistry: The banter doesn’t quite hit

Plot: Ghost stuff, bookstore stuff, family stuff

Overall: This book is all over the place

First thing’s first: this is more of a Christmas special than a Halloween one. In fact, I would call this a Hallmark Movie Romance, except from the point of view of the local instead of the Big City Girl Who Needs to Learn About Community. (In this case, the Local Girl already has community, but doesn’t quite realize how big it is.) So if you’re reading for ghosts because it’s October, this might not be it. It’s more about ghost stories than actual ghosts. And there’s just as much time spent on Christmas with the family as there is on the ghost story conflict.

Second thing’s second: I almost DNFed this one, about a quarter of the way in. It’s written in that contemporary first-person narrative voice that I find exceptionally irritating. (See my review of Four Weekends and a Funeral for more details.) The heroine is severely lacking in self-awareness and suffers from anxiety, and while I empathize with her struggles, I did not enjoy sharing a headspace with her. Plus, the hero has smirk energy. Also the heroine is like, “Let me recommend this obscure book to you, stranger in my used book store,” and gives the hero…Slaughterhouse Five. Pretty sure everyone read that in high school.

But then I decided to read one more chapter and was suddenly just invested enough in all the conflicts to read the rest.

However, just because I persevered does not mean I’d recommend this one. It felt like a book with a bit of an identity crisis—plus the main character made too many wild leaps of logic for my taste.

Details, you say? Yes, I’d be happy to share some.

Lex is the manager of a used bookstore in a small town in Vermont. She loves her home and the store, but also carries a ton of resentment toward every single person who leaves: her older sister and parents, her boss (who snowbirds in Florida), and every single tourist who comes to ski. And, of course, her love interest, who has an out-of-state license plate and is therefore not here to stay. Before I continue, I want to highlight Lex’s resentment of the tourists, because it is VERY present in the book. As she narrates, she frequently makes offhand comments about the people who are just there to ski and…is she aware that she lives in a tourist town? That maybe there might not be the infrastructure for all of these people to stay permanently? That even if they’re not buying used books, they are supporting all the other local businesses? It’s not even that the book delves into issues that plague vacation towns, like lack of affordable housing or service workers who commute in or overburdened infrastructure. Lex is just mad that they come and then leave. (This whole thing is probably meant to be an offshoot symptom of her abandonment issues with her parents, but it was mainly distracting.)

James is part of a team in town to film a documentary about local ghosts. They came to this particular small town because of an old vlog about hauntings…that Lex ran when she was in high school. The catch? Lex made up all the ghosts.

If you think that this potential conflict sounds like a big ole nothingburger, you would be right. And also wrong. Because it SHOULD be a big ole nothingburger, but in Lex’s mind it isn’t. It’s like she’s not even paying attention when—on their very first date—James pops into the back of a ghost tour being filmed for the documentary, pretends to see a ghost to rile up the crowd, and then goes about his day. Or when James tells her that they’re not there to debunk whether ghosts are real but to explore what ghost stories mean to people. So Lex gets her friends to help her stage elaborate hauntings to convince James and his team that the ghosts Lex talked about were actually real.

Just. Why?

Given that there is plenty of real conflict—Lex is having financial troubles, Lex wants to buy the bookshop where she works, Lex has a fraught relationship with her family, Lex knows that James isn’t in town for the long haul—there was no reason to add this extra layer of manufactured conflict. It honestly just makes Lex seem clueless and self-absorbed.

(Sidenote: maybe she’s meant to be clueless and self-absorbed, because many of her interactions indicate that this might be the case. Oh really, you had no idea that your best friend was thinking of leaving town? You literally tell the reader, the first time you introduce your best friend, that she feels trapped in this small town.)

Maybe the issue was not so much that Lex made wild leaps of logic. Maybe it’s that she’s an unreliable narrator, and the things that seem illogical to me are really her being unaware / lying to herself / going through an anxiety spiral. However, because I’m not primed for an unreliable narrator when I pick up a romance novel, the end result felt clumsy.

And it’s hard to get over a hero with smirk energy.

I voluntarily read and reviewed a complimentary copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. We disclose this in accordance with 16 CFR §255.

This review is also available at The Smut Report.

Another cute rom com with some nice fall/autumn/cozy aesthetics. I liked the idea of a romance between a book seller and a ghost hunter, though there wasn't anything that really blew me away and the conflicts of her crafting hauntings to keep him in town felt pretty manipulative when there were plenty of other things that could have been a conflict. It definitely feels like a Hallmark Christmas film in formula and romance progression, which isn't a bad thing by any means. If you are looking to round out your seasonal reading and are looking for something fluffy and charming, add it to your list!