Thanks to NetGalley for the free digital book for an honest review!
This book was just confusing to me all the way through. The characters love for each other didn’t feel authentic. They barely dated and got together so quickly I don’t think it was plotted out very well. I did like the idea the author was going with, with her selling caskets and him working for death but I think it could have been thought out more. Felt very rushed for me the whole time, and yet slow at the same time. Very hard to explain, I had to dnf this about 80% through because I just couldn’t make myself keep reading.

i was very intrigued seeing the summary for this book, but it fell a little bit short for me. i liked the premise and all the ideas put into this story, but the pacing was slow. i did not feel as much chemistry between nora and garrett as i would of liked to. it was good to read the way that the story approached the topic of grief, it was more realistic than other times i’ve read. overall, i had an enjoyable time reading! i just wish we got a little bit more with the characters!

thank you to the author, netgalley, and random house publishing/dell for the opportunity to receive an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

What an interesting concept to build a story around. Thank you to NetGalley and Dell for inviting me to this early read!

I forgot to send my review for this but this was pretty unique overall. Very quirky! It took a second to get into but it was worth the read!

After her parents pass away, Nora takes over the family business selling caskets. Nora’s going through the motions and seems content to stay that way when Garrett stops into the shop and asks for directions. Little does she know that isn’t the last she’ll see of him because Garrett comes back in just to ask her to go out with him and despite her trepidation, she finds herself saying yes. The two hit it off and end up in a whirlwind romance that has Nora thinking about forever and taking a front seat in her life again.

But just when everything seems perfect, Nora finds out that Garrett works for death. And if that wasn’t enough to trigger her unresolved grief, the fact that he has done nothing to prevent residents of Rabbittown from passing and been hiding it from her makes it even worse.

Despite Nora’s moments of immaturity, self-destruction, and just plain head-in-the-sand stubbornness, I love how the author was able to write a rom-com but kept her depiction of love close to real life. I think it’s important to remember that Nora’s life looks completely different than it did a year ago and she's still trying to figure out who she is and what she wants after grief has changed so much. It makes sense that what Garrett does is hard for her to cope with and that she regresses instead of accepting it immediately.

It’s refreshing to read a romance novel where love doesn’t magically fix all your problems or mean your relationship will work! This author does a great job of showing the reader that you have to learn to communicate, figure out what’s important to you, and if you love this person enough to choose them every day.

This book's pacing did feel slow at points but I enjoyed the unique plot line of this story with Garrett working in Logistics and Johnny Chandler getting into the middle of everything. I also loved the real life feel of this book and the dashes of fantasy thrown in. You really feel like you're in Rabittown with the storylines for supporting characters and small town drama thrown in. I definitely found myself wondering about when we’d get updates on those throughout the story (GO LINDA, IYKYK).

All in all, I can’t wait to see what comes next from Lauren Evans!

Rating:
⭐️⭐️⭐️ ½ / 5
🌶️🌶️ / 5

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for allowing me the chance to write an honest review of the ARC for Casket Case!

Review will be posted to Goodreads then shared via twitter and instagram on 5/6/24

This just wasnt the book for me, I had a hard time getting into it, I did love much about it. It is in a small town so I think I was hoping for more

The novel is a blend of humor, suspense, and a bit of the macabre, which altogether creates a charmingly quirky reading experience. The author created a character that is witty, sharp, and a bit unconventional, which makes following her adventures all the more entertaining. Her role as an amateur sleuth in the curious and sometimes comical world of funeral homes provided a fresh and intriguing setting that I hadn't encountered in other books in the genre.

I guess I was hoping it would be less morbid? Which is partly my bad, the summary was pretty clear. I had really good experiences with similar books—The Dead Romantics, Love of My Afterlife, The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy—so I was intrigued and wanted more!! This book differed in a few key ways from those though, and it made me realize just why I loved them (and didn’t love this one).

In The Dead Romantics, most of the dead people were ghosts which I highly preferred, as they seemed a bit further removed from death. In Love of My Afterlife, the afterlife was romanticized and I LOVED how it made me feel. There was even a (secondary) romance happening IN the afterlife. The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy was morbid, yes, but it never lost the romance even amidst the ZOMBIES!

Casket Case, however, was alive humans actively dying with no reassuring afterlife talk (it was out of his "jurisdiction”). So everyone—including me—was just sad and confused. The book claims that the dying people get closure from people like the hero, but that’s still leaving a LOT of unclosed wounds!! The poor families!!! Having a solid knowledge of the afterlife would’ve at least made it all feel less morbid, like give me proof that grandpa gets to reunite with his wife, etc!!!

I also had issues with the stiff dialogue, clunky writing, and instalove romance. The writing was all tell and no show. Not to mention, the romance as a whole was wildly paced: sex by 25%, “I love yous” by 35%; breakup by 60%, kissing another man at 70% because it's suddenly a love triangle, getting back together at 95%. At the end, she was separated from the hero for so long and wasn’t even really thinking about him, and he didn’t even have an arc at all. So much so that I was actively rooting for the wrong side of the love triangle??? That guy at least had chemistry with and a personality!!

Overall, it was not the right book for me and definitely not the right time. I’ve recently experienced some personal loss, and this book was just too morbid for the moment. The morbidity wasn’t necessarily the book’s fault (it’s clearly stated in the summary), but I still wasn’t a fan of the execution. The concept, however, was still intriguing and I liked the Death details…more than the romance, which is where the book fully fell apart for me.

⭐️.75/5 .5🌶️/5


CWs: Death of a sibling (past; recounted) (cancer), fatal car crashes (multiple; past and current), heart failure, death of a grandparent (current), death of parents (past; recounted)

I received an eARC via NetGalley. All opinions are honest and my own.

Casket Case (amazing name for a book btw) is a cozy small town romance between a casket seller and an employee of death. As you could imagine, the themes of death were prevalent throughout, and I really loved how the author explored them.

While it started off pretty slow, the romance came in hot and heavy between Nora and Garrett. I feel like their challenges were overcome appropriately, and I was super invested by the end. I loved the twist of a love triangle with a funeral home competitor, and finding out his motives.

The epilogue actually devastated me, I had become very attached to all of the characters in the book.

Really cute and fun read!

I recently finished reading Casket Case, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The book had a unique and intriguing premise that I found captivating. The author did an excellent job of blending spooky and cozy elements with the small-town southern setting and the main characters' careers. As someone who lives in the South near many small towns like the one depicted in the book, it felt special and extra homey.

While I found the instant love connection between the main characters, Nora and Garrett, to be cute and attention-grabbing, I also felt that they progressed too quickly in their relationship. Moreover, their conflict was never fully resolved, which left me a bit disappointed. Nonetheless, I loved the epilogue, which provided an excellent and sweet conclusion to the story.

I thought this was a great story about loss and moving on. Based on the cover I expected something a little lighter.

Nora has just returned home to take over running her family’s casket business. She had her life perfectly planned out and all of the sudden she finds herself on a completely different path. One thing she does know is that she is tired of death. And machine her surprise when she meets Garrett and falls in love only to find out that he works for Death!

This book follows their love story. It is an emotional story of loss and how people deal with all aspects of death. We also get to see exactly how Garrett gets his Joab and what exactly he does for Death.

I absolutely loved Garrett. There were parts of the story where i felt so bad for him. He was so understanding and patient.

I really liked the book, it definitely gave me some new perspectives on the way i look at loss. Not a light read but a good one nonetheless.

The concept of this book was very imaginative, I haven’t read anything like it in a long time.

It was a bit predictable, but in a cozy way. The main characters were both interesting enough, and I found myself rooting for them to stay together.

The pacing slows a lot around the halfway point, but it picks up again at the end. The epilogue was FANTASTIC!

The premise sounded really interesting and not similar to anything I've read before, but much of it fell flat for me. While I liked the characters together, sometimes it felt like they just really didn't really care for each other that much and they just ignored some of the issues without resolving them. Overall it was ok, but not great.

I REALLY enjoyed this book! While it is packaged as a romance, it is also a book about love of family and love of hometown. I loved the main characters Nora and Garrett. I felt like their relationship was real and flawed and did not feel rushed for the plot. This book also deals with grieving and death and how it is part of life. While a book about death might not be everyone's cup of tea, how it is handled is touching. I have already recommended this book to a friend!

DNF - I really loved the premise, but the execution here was lacking. I found the insta-love to be way to instant, and I did not like that Nora thought "Is he an alcoholic? Or a Drug addict?" when Garrett asked her out and then DESPITE THESE THOUGHTS agreed to go out with him. It came off judgy from Nora and then pointless based on her own decisions.

Had the relationship had more time to develop, I think I would have loved this!

Thank you to Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine for the ARC!

This book has a really interesting idea behind it, but I've got to say, it didn't quite hit the mark for me. The story took a bit to grab my attention, and even when it did, the characters didn't pop off the page like I hoped they would. The pacing was kind of uneven throughout the book, which made it tough to get really excited about what was happening. It's a solid first book with a neat concept about a woman falling for a guy who's got a pretty bizarre job with Death, and there's a bit of romance that's not too much, but the whole thing could've used a bit more charm and spark.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing an ARC of this book, this review is my objective opinion. I liked this book, and felt it was a solid debut novel with a great premise. Nora is running her family's casket store in small-town Alabama, which she took over after both parents died in a car accident about a year prior to the story. Garrett is a sophisticated and mysterious gentleman who appears in town and is cagey about his job. They meet and grow romantically attached fairly quickly. She's pretty insecure and neurotic, which is consistent throughout the book. His pattern is to keep distance in his relationships because of his job, but maybe Nora is worth changing that pattern for. We know from the description that he works for Death but just what is it that he does? As Nora and Garrett's relationship grows, questions arise and Nora struggles to reconcile what she suspects about Garrett's job with her feelings for him.

So while I liked the book, I didn't love it. I really liked the premise but the pacing felt off for me for almost the whole book, which made it hard for me to want to keep reading. It took awhile for me to get invested in the story and even then there was a flatness to the characters that I struggled with (Garrett especially). The writing seemed most peppy later in the book when Nora was interacting with Johnny (a childhood acquaintance who ran his family's funeral home business). To me, Johnny felt more engaging than Garrett on-page, which seemed a disservice to the character who was supposed to be the male main character. Also, it seemed like it took too long for the story to get into the actual details of Garrett's job. Considering his job was revealed in the book's description I genuinely didn't think it would take as long as it did (about 30-40% of the way in). His job was a central part of the romantic conflict but it didn't take as much of a front seat as I thought it would. Rather, most of the story development focuses on Nora's personal growth and her feelings about living back in her hometown and running her family's business (and on deciding her romantic future). And there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not what I thought I was getting going in.

There was some humorous phrasing that made me laugh out loud, frequently from the way Nora saw the world and her struggles. She had a wry voice at times that I really enjoyed, but I don't think we saw enough of it to make this book really shine. There were some twists that I didn't see coming and I won't spoil for you, which gave the story a much-needed edge. As I said, this was a good debut and I would read further work from this author, but I would love to see a bit better pacing and ability to keep the reader's interest in future books.

While the book's premise was intriguing, I must say that the execution fell short of my expectations. The idea of a woman who sells caskets at her family business falling in love with a man who works for death is unique and has the potential to be a captivating story. However, in my opinion, the book seemed to lack the charm and excitement that I was hoping for.

Nora, our main character, is very one-note and that note is: anxious. She's a chronic overthinker, and the pages read like a stream-of-consciousness panic attack. I don't find an issue with characters who struggle with anxiety, as someone who struggles with it myself, but it's so hard to follow the constant circles Nora talks herself into. This is especially relevant when she finds out what Garrett, our MMC, does for a living. She faults him constantly for working for death despite being in the business of death herself. This is an understandable issue; however, it didn't need to take up as much of the plot as it did.

This is much more of a cracked-door romance. It's not a closed door, but it's not overly indulgent. Sex is mentioned; there's some heavy petting, but nothing explicit.

I really struggled with the love triangle that was introduced way too late. After asking for space from Garrett for working for death, she now forms an attachment to her rival, whose family owns its own funeral home. It's hypocritical and tough to get on Nora's side for this one. It was fun to have Johnny and Nora's banter, which was better than her and Garrett's. Johnny and Nora had more chemistry and spark, but the heart wants what it wants.

I don't want to discount this book, though. Its handling of death and grief was touching, and I really enjoyed Nora's grandpa as a character. He offered sage advice and helped Nora navigate her difficult feelings.

I would give it a 2.5, adjusted to a 3 for Goodreads and NetGalley.

Thank you to Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine, Netgalley, and Lauren Evans for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was such a cute, fun, lighthearted read! Quite fast paced and gets straight to the point. However, I found the chemistry between the two main characters slightly lacking.

The characters alone were quite fun. The story was fun, had its moments, and was overall enjoyable. I thought I would enjoy this book a little more than I did, however.

I want to personally thank NetGalley, as well as the author, publisher, and anyone else involved in providing copies, for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Reviews will also be submitted to Goodreads when possible.

What a quirky cute little read. Nora is a grieving young adult that took over her parent’s lives after they passed away and Garrett is in logistics. Nora lives in a small town and never seems to get out while Garrett travels for work all the time.
Just when it seems that maybe they’ve got it figured out death gets in the way again.
I wasn’t sure going into this how I was going to feel since the majority of this book deals with death, dying, processing that etc… but it actually surprised me how much I just enjoyed the cute little story and some how at the end of it, I ended up feeling a little better about death and the way I process it.
The story had it all! Laughs, warm fuzzy, eek, sorrow, love, spice, a few surprises, and some crying. I would recommend to anyone looking for a quirky meet cute read, especially around spooky season!