This book was an easy read. The author does a great job of hooking you in from the start, and describing characters and their world. I really appreciated the dialogue and liveliness of supporting characters, as well as the main character. Some parts i didn’t love- how many fake engagement stories can one read? It’s a retelling of a story, not sure if that happens in the original or not. I will have to read that book next. All in all, a very easy breezy beach read for sure.

Thank you to Simon and Schuster and NetGalley for this Advance Reader’s Copy.

This is a book for someone who likes to read to get away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. It is about escaping your life in order to live. It’s about dealing with illness and suffocating parents - but also about letting yourself craft another identity through running away and accepting a fake proposal, and following your passions at a university.

If you loved Nicola Yoon’s Everything Everything for the idea of love opening doors for you (like, literally helping you leave your house), then this is for you. If you are a hobby or professional ornithologist and loved the fake dating trope in Birding with Benefits (Sarah T. Dubb), you literally have to read this. To me, When the Forest Dreams is the perfect marriage of both these books. Though the official bio will also connect it to L. M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle - I just haven’t read that one.

For me, I LOVED this one particular delicious, serendipitous twist at the end. But I must say that I was struck by some descriptions and dialogue. I wasn’t sure what to think about a couple references, like a duck being described as “looking like a little Chinese man wearing the most wonderfully crafted kimono.” As for dialogue, I feel like sometimes people tend to talk in a bit more truncated lines, so examples like this maybe didn’t feel the most natural, “Jake whispers in my ear, ‘Just pretend to drink it. It’s pretty awful and watch out, it’s strong.’” This writing style also loves its semi-colons; however, I think the rule is that both clauses need to be full sentences. This was not the case on the rare occasion, like this line: “I roll my ankles, and I feel a twinge in my right ankle; the same one I sprained.” I understand this is an advanced copy, though, and don’t hold that too much against the text - to be honest, it became an interesting point to count the semicolons. I kinda liked that.

#WhentheForestDreams #NetGalley

I enjoyed the book. It was a bit of a slower pace than what I normally read, but the author did a great job ensuring the reader gets invested in the characters.

What a darling book! It’s a story of self-discovery woven with romance and sprinkled with...birding. I thoroughly enjoyed both the story and its characters. Emma is such a wholesome and likeable protagonist, and I think many of us can relate to the feeling of boxing ourselves in and not quite living up to our fullest potential.

Before reading this, I hadn’t heard of The Blue Castle, but it’s now firmly on my to-read list.