It took me about two pages to bond with Mona. She loves animals and hates Trump. She is my kinda gal. Mona runs the Brightside Animal Sanctuary in a small town in western Kansas. She’s recently been hit by a hate crime - the burning of her barn and graffiti on the walls of other buildings. She’s been estranged from her daughter, Ariel, for six years. But when Ariel learns of the hate crimes and that Mona has put the sanctuary up for sale, she returns home.
The book made me realize my east coast prejudices. You mean there are actually liberals in Kansas?
None of the characters are perfect. Both Mona and Ariel make dumb mistakes that hurt the other. They have no idea how to communicate with each other and neither can really forgive. The book made me feel incredibly sad for these two hurting and hurtful souls.
At times, the book drags. But Mandlebaum has an ability to paint a scene so I could easily see it with my mind’s eye. She reminds us of all that animals have to teach us, if we would only pay attention.
My thanks to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for an advance copy of this book.

Ok, how can I not love a book about a pet rescue? How is that possible?

The main reason is that the two main characters were not likable. At least for me. The secondary characters were great, though. I would probably like to have read stories about them.

The secondary reason, how are animals not the main part of the story? These were such a small part of the book. And when mentioned, they were being mis-treated by the main characters or were living in filthy conditions, because the main character couldn’t keep up with the necessary cleaning and care, or they were dying. This was really frustrating to me and overshadowed the entire rest of the story.

Definitely not my favorite and if there was a second book (I don’t think there is), I would not read it.

Thank you #NetGalley for offering this book for an honest review.

I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would. When I first started it, it was strewn with political elements. I know Trump supporters would probably have been turned off from the very start.
I think it is an enjoyable story. My favorite element was that of the animals. My biggest struggle was that I just really didn't care about any of the characters. The story ended with a few unanswered questions. What happens to the animals? Does Ariel stay there?

This was a cute story with a great all around plot. This is something that is out of my normal reading scope, however I chose it to gain a little more diversity. I literally could not put this book down once I picked it up and found that it had a lot of mystery to it.
I like the detail that was used and found it was easy to get into the story and relate to the characters.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for an eARC of this book!

The Bright Side Sanctuary has run into a bit of trouble, and Ariel hasn’t been back since she left in the dead of night six years ago. Ariel’s estranged mother, Mona, is selling the sanctuary and finding new homes for its animals. In the midst of her own personal struggles, Ariel decides it’s the right time to come home. This upends everyone in Ariel’s life. Chaos ensues!

I sat with my feelings on this one for a bit before writing my review. Oh, how I wanted to love this book. Ultimately, I felt the characters were haphazardly developed and there were no resolutions to the multiple crises introduced.

As other reviewers have mentioned, I found the characters to be largely unlikable. I don’t know that I’ve ever come across a character in a book that I’ve actively hated (okay, maybe Dolores Umbridge) but I HATED Dex and Buddy. The chapters Dex narrated made me want to claw my eyes out. I almost stopped reading after the chapter where Dex compares his feelings of love for Ariel to IBS symptoms and his feelings of regret to flatulence on a cake. It’s been days and I’m still cringing about how bad the analogies were in that chapter.

I think this book had a lot of potential. I’m glad that we got a lot of insight into Mona and Ariel’s relationship. I wish the book would have focused more on that and the rebuilding of their family rather than spending so much time on Ariel’s romantic relationships just for nothing of substance to happen with respect to them.

This book is a quick read, and may be enjoyable for those who love animals and are looking for a breezy piece of women’s fiction.

A heartwarming lovely book. Sense of humor mixed in made it great. This book resonated with me, and left me feeling complete at its end.

Unfortunately this book was not for me. I thought there would be a heartwarming storyline about animals and the sanctuary since that’s basically what the name says. All I really saw was a bunch of politics and drama. I feel the title is very misleading. I do however encourage you to read this for yourself if you are looking for a whole bunch of politics in a book. There are a lot of great reviews, do get you might like it.

I was given this book in exchange for my honest review.

I requested this book without even reading the summary- due to the pretty cover and the title. I actually expected this to be a non-fiction book, but was pleasantly surprised that it was a novel. I really enjoyed the story and it was nice to read about Kansas since I’d recently moved away from there. I was disappointed, however, because there were quite a few loose strings I would have liked tidied up a bit more. Overall, it was a quick fun read! Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this!

Writing: 4.5/5 Characters: 5/5 Plot: 4/5

After a false start I ended up loving this book — it just got better and better. Kansas. An animal sanctuary. The nature of home, love, forgiveness, and understanding.

Mona runs the “Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals” in rural Kansas with a single devoted employee on a shoestring budget. Her daughter Ariel left years ago to find a life of her own but is drawn inexorably back when news reaches her of a deadly fire at the sanctuary.

I almost stopped reading after the first chapters. Trump has just been elected, and the sanctuary fire is set by what appears to be a stereotypical “bad guy” (think swastikas, racists, Fox News). Not my kind of thing. Instead, the story delves into the people and all the connections between them. It looks at how personal histories (both good and bad) shape people and how each individual has to continually work to understand their own motivations, mistakes, and desires. The writing is excellent, depicting life in a (poorly funded) animal sanctuary in vivid detail — the animals, the work, the squalor, the caring.

The plot is unpredictable, all of the characters are engaging and fully fleshed out, and the environment is intriguing and very real. Highly recommended.

Some good quotes:
“…how unfortunate it was that they didn’t kiss the way humans did, how they could never really hold a loved one in their arms. So few animals even had lips.”

“…because caretaking seemed like the only reasonable occupation in a world that needed so much care.”

“She had always admired this type of woman — women like her mother, like Sunny — who naturally exuded authority. They navigated the world with confidence, looking for things to improve, whereas Ariel moved through the world on tip-toes, expecting someone to reprimand her, to tell her she was doing something wrong.”

“Out here, we have to work with nature. It’s our boss. Our livelihood. Out there, people see nature as this dying thing they need to protect — this thing totally separate from themselves, from the world of people.”

“The animals are weird at night. You’d be surprised how many of them are awake — like they’re all dressed up and ready for church.”

“Maybe that’s the ingredient they’d been missing all along — the ability to say the squishy stuff other families had no problem tossing around.”

“Even in the moments of greatest anger, behind the flames there was always love. If anything, love was the air that stoked the blaze.”

“It seemed both absurd and unjust, that murdering animals made you rich while caring for them made you poor.”

“You know, my mom used to have this saying. She’d say ‘Mona, sorry is like a sponge. You can use it to clean up your messes, but the more you use it, the dirtier it gets.’”

“Dex would catch her looking at him, a shimmer of contempt in her eyes, as if his penis alone had engineered the electoral college.”

“It was something she’d noticed since the election: everyone was eager to dole out little kindnesses wherever possible, as if, deed by deed, they might tip the scales of the world toward goodness and restore some measure of order.”

I’m honestly not sure why I am seeing so many good reviews for this book. I think 2 stars is generous but I didn’t give it one because I didn’t have to put it down and stop reading entirely. And the writing is good, just not the story. There is just nothing memorable about this story. The political rhetoric was unnecessary and added nothing to the story. Honestly it got a little annoying after a while. The story lines don’t really wrap up which is one of my biggest pet peeves in books. It was a mystery-type cliffhanger that left you wondering. It felt a bit like the author got bored with her own story.

This book had a lot of really great qualities to it, but also a few that I was not particularly fond of. Let's start with the good stuff!

I loved Becky Mandelbaum's ability to create complex characters and portray their confused emotions. After reading the synopsis, it is easy to understand just how confused some of these characters are feeling about their emotions. Ariel and Mona are trying to heal a broken relationship mother-daughter relationship, Dex wants to figure out who is fiancee is, and Ariel also has to figure out herself. Each of these storylines was just different enough to help the story come full circle.

I also loved the setting - Bright Side Sanctuary. It was easy to picture the work and love that went into working with the animals. The house and property were also prone to chaos and unsettling feelings, which lent itself to the personal aspect of the character's story.

It also wasn't just a simple place that had a few cats and dogs. The inner workings of the sanctuary in the ways that Becky described it, really helped open up my reader eyes to see what had been going on and what the roots of deeper-lying issues were.

Now to the part that I wasn't so fond of. This book has a lot of political statements peppered throughout. If you don't mind that stuff, you will love this book! But for me, the political statements didn't feel completely connected with the storyline. I felt like they were almost a subplot or sidebar, but not actually enhancing anything. Usually, I read over the political stuff without even realizing it is there, but this felt very pointed and jarring for me.

Overall, a good story with deep characters who are struggling to understand themselves and one another.

After disappearing suddenly from her mother's life six years ago, Ariel returns after hearing a report that a fire was set at her mother Mona's Animal Sanctuary. Over the years Ariel has felt guilt over how she left her mother and her first love Gabriel. She has started a new life with her fiancee Dex, who has no clue about her life prior to when they met.

"The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals" by Becky Mandelbaum brings us a story between mother and daughter and reconciling to ourselves what we want in life. It does move slowly and it took me longer than most books to read and I had to make myself finish reading it. The animal personalities were well written and were one of the most enjoyable parts of this book. As a warning to anyone conservative - this book is filled with liberal ideologies and very anti-conservative. I personally prefer politics be kept from my fiction reading as I get enough in the media. There is also a lot of anger in this book between characters which made it hard to keep engaged.

Thank you to Netgalley and Simon and Shuster for the chance to read this book as an ARC.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and the author, for an ARC of this book, in exchange for an honest review.
This was Becky Mandelbaum’s debut novel but you would never know it.
It was a beautifully written story that had me laughing and crying.
I can’t wait to read what she writes next.

I enjoyed reading this book. It was easy to see why Ariel had left her childhood home, especially considering how much attention Mona gave to the Bright Side Sanctuary rather than to her own family. Mona seemed a bit controlling of her daughter, seeing as she didn’t want Ariel to go away to college, but with a full-ride scholarship, how could she say no?

Moving to a new city and starting a new life isn’t always easy, but sometimes going home is even harder. When Ariel discovers there was a fire at the sanctuary and her mother will have to sell it, she heads back to the Bright Side. Between her estranged mother, her first love, and her fiancé, there is a lot of drama and things don’t quite turn out how she expected.

I do think the story ended a bit abruptly though. I just wish the relationship between Mona and Ariel felt more complete by the end, but I guess it was left open-ended because they were just beginning to rekindle what had been broken for so many years. Still, I definitely recommend this book and think others would really enjoy it.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3348093524

I received this book as an advanced reader copy from NetGalley. It sounded like a great story with an animal sanctuary and mother daughter relationship. It fell flat for me, I liked the way the animals were cared for in terms of trying to get them adopted but the mother seemed like a hoarder of both animals and stuff. For me, reading about animals in less than ideal situations is not light reading.

Ariel has been away from home for six years, and hasn't spoken to her mother since the day she left. In her case, "home" is also home to dozens of animals: dogs, cats, horses, pigs, llamas, whatever shows up on their doorstep. The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals has been Ariel's mother's passion project since early in her marriage to Ariel's father, but Mona's passion has also caused some unexpected distance in her human relationships, namely with Ariel's father and Ariel herself. When Ariel decided she wanted to go to the other side of the state for college (where she got a full ride scholarship), Mona refuses to give her blessing, hoping Ariel would stay closer to home instead. The rift seems almost irreparable, until Ariel sees the news that the Sanctuary has been vandalized, including arson to the barn, killing a couple of horses. She decides it's time to mend fences and heads for home.

Meanwhile, Ariel's fiance Dex has no idea she grew up on an animal sanctuary, and when he asks Ariel if he can go home with her to meet her mother, she denies his request. What Ariel doesn't want Dex to know, is that she used to be in love with Mona's only employee, Gideon, and she doesn't know what it will be like to see him again. She also never told him she grew up at an animal sanctuary, a fact she's always carried a measure of shame about.

To me, the premise feels very much like classic '00s rom-com Sweet Home Alabama: Girl hides past from current lover, has to go home to settle things before moving forward (a premise I fundamentally cannot understand, because I'd never be able to keep my history hidden like that from a potential spouse. But this is not about me, is it?). However, Bright Side outshines that typical trope by using multiple perspectives in the narrative (y'all know I love a multiple perspective). Not only are we seeing both Ariel and Mona's side, but our third perspective comes from Dex, which was unexpected to me. He could easily be written off as a dopey, one-dimensional character (and in some ways, he still fills that role), but the fact that we see where he's coming from and get to see inside his head and past, adds so much to the complexity and nuance of this story.

Other things I loved include:

- all the animals, DUH. I love how each animal is so tenderly cared for, named, and loved throughout. They each have a personality, too.
- the 2016 setting, just after the election. The first scene of the book has Mona stealing a giant Trump sign from her distant neighbor's yard. It's crazy to me how many contemporary books have come out in the last four years that don't reference our current political system. It's so pervasive and BONKERS in our daily lives, how could it not effect every single story? I mean, I get it. That's not what every story is about. But it's not what this story is about either. And it's refreshing to have it included, somehow validating all my feelings about it.
- the surprisingly non-stereotypical side characters. I particularly loved Joy and Big John, both of whom could so have easily fallen prey to the villain role, but instead had such goodness in them.
- the beautiful writing: Mandelbaum, a native Kansan, describes the land in particular with gorgeous language.

I was taken by this character-driven story, and found myself thinking about them throughout the day. I think this book will find lots of readers happy to devour it. I will post my review on my blog (shecantstopreading.wordpress.com) and my Bookstagram account (instagram.com/shecantstopreadingblog) a week before the publication date and will update this review with links at that time.

This was a miss for me. I agree with the politics of the narrator, and I love animals and have always wanted to live on a farm, so the cover and premise alone drew me in. But once I began reading this, it just felt forced. I appreciate the chance to read an advanced readers copy and review it.

I received this book from Net Galley for free in exchange for a fair review. This was more of a coming of age story, written from different viewpoints of a mother, daughter and fiancée. It painted a very true picture of an animal rescue along with the lack of money, smells of cat and dog urine and animal hair all over your clothes that go along with a one woman rescue. I probably wouldn’t have read it once I realized it was a coming of age story (generational gap for me) but underlying was the theme of mothers and daughters. Well written and will appeal to everyone who likes this genre.

Gut feelings are there for a reason.

My personal gut threw up some caution flags almost as soon as I started reading the synopsis. But in the name of expanding my horizons and understanding that I was attempting to read this book to find out if it was suitable for more people than just myself, I requested it anyway.

I am always more thankful than I can express, when I am approved for an ARC, and it was no different when I received the approval for this book.

So I began the first page with an open mind.

Unfortunately, this book still left a bad taste in my mouth. Not only are the opinions and actions of the main protagonists almost entirely polar opposite to my own, but it was just an angry book. I really couldn't make myself read passed 10%.

Again, I am thankful to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book early. And I am sure there are many who will enjoy it. But it was simply not suited to me in the slightest.

*I received this book from NetGalley as an advanced reader's copy.

I love animals, and have volunteered at rescues for a good portion of my adult life. So I thought this was going to be right up my alley. Sadly, it really wasn't, and while I can appreciate where the author was trying to go with this book, it just didn't do it for me.

Ariel left her mother and life six long years ago. Wanting something different than the animal rescue she grew up at, she headed off to college and found herself in a different life. After issues at the rescue though, she returns to see if she can try to mend things. But relationships were broken and strained during those years, and the rescue has troubles that it may not survive.

I can't say there's really too many likable characters in this book. In fact, maybe the only likable ones were a few of the side characters. Everyone else, well, I guess they were realistic with all of their numerous flaws, but all of those said flaws made it so I didn't particularly care about them or how their life turned out. It also made me question what's acceptable or not in a relationship, because some of the things that Ariel's mother did sounded almost neglectful in terms of raising her but yet that was glossed over or later made out to not be that bad. I get forgiveness, but not at the sake of not changing for the better. But maybe that just makes the book realistic in that regard too with the characters putting up with more than they probably should have.

The writing was actually well written in terms of pace and style. But a major complaint of mine is using pop culture or real-life (non-historical) events and people. As much as I can empathize with the feelings the author was trying to express, I think it means the book won't age well. It's also just jarring to have to sift through musician names, politicians, etc. I think if they had been done in more general terms the book wouldn't feel as stuck in a point of time and be more universal. Another point of contention for me was the way things were resolved; since I didn't care about the people that much, I wasn't that invested in the ending. But the animals, that was the main reason I read the book and I didn't feel like they were ever more than just a part of the setting. The one shining moment for me was Hippo (a dog at the rescue's) story and it was a very, very small part of the book.

If you're looking for imperfect characters who are navigating through a complicated relationship, this is the type of book for you. If you're looking for something involving animals and feel-good emotions and aspirations, this is not the book for you.

Review by M. Reynard 2020