ARC Book Review: The Beautiful Maddening by Shea Ernshaw

May 31, 2025May 25, 2025 GoodeyReadsLeave a comment

Rating: ★★★
Audience: NA Fantasy Romance
Length: 304 pages
Author: Shea Ernshaw
Publisher: Simon Teen
Release Date: June 3rd, 2025
Image & Other Reviews on: Goodreads

BOOK SUMMARY:

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Shea Ernshaw comes a haunting romantic contemporary fantasy about a teen navigating her family’s love curse that blooms with their enchanted tulips every year.

Seventeen year-old Lark Goode wants only one to escape her small town of Cutwater and the history of her family name. It’s a history that began during the Dutch tulip mania of 1636, when Lark’s ancestor stole the last remaining tulip bulbs and fled to America. But when the tulips bloomed on American soil, madness sprouted from their snowy white petals.

The madness was love.

Now, generations later, the Goodes remain cursed—the unnatural flowers outside their home causing locals to fall helplessly in love with anyone carrying Goode blood in their veins. While her brother embraces the strange power, Lark wants nothing more than to be free from it.

But when she meets a boy who seems unaffected by the family curse, Lark finds herself falling headlong into a feeling she’s spent her whole life trying to avoid. Yet, all curses and magic come with a price, and the town of Cutwater soon sinks into a dangerous sickness tied to Lark and the ill-fated tulips.

To save the town, Lark will need to sacrifice everything—even true love—to break the spell. Because in the Goode family, love has a way of destroying everything.

Thank you Simon Audio for the gifted audiobook and Simon Teen for the ARC.

UTTERLY BORING.

Y’all. If you catch me reading a Shea Ernshaw book from this point on please take it out of my hands and throw it across the room. I have read five book and enjoyed two and those are not good bookish odds in my mind.

I was really bored with this plot line. There wasn’t anything to it. Mysterious flowers, a dark family past, and an attempt at new love that doesn’t even end in what I considered a satisfying way. I struggled to get through the audiobook and it was under nine hours. NOW the narrator was great, no issues there, it was the book.

This is missing an edge of any sort. And better expansion of thoughts and themes.

Overall audience notes:

NA Fantasy Romance
Language: mild – moderate
Romance: vague open door
Violence: mild

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Book Review: A Wilderness of Stars by Shea Ernshaw

February 25, 2023December 19, 2022 GoodeyReadsLeave a comment

Rating: ★★
Audience: YA Fantasy
Length: 400 pages
Author: Shea Ernshaw
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Release Date: November 29th, 2022
Image & Other Reviews on: Goodreads

BOOK SUMMARY:

An illness cursing the land forces a teen girl astronomer to venture across the wilderness in search of the stars’ message that will, hopefully, save them all.

If magic lives anywhere, it’s in the stars…

Vega has lived in the valley her whole life—forbidden by her mother to leave the safety of its borders because of the unknown threats waiting for her in the wilds beyond. But after her mother dies, and Vega sees the fabled twin stars in the sky, it’s an omen she can no longer ignore, forcing her to leave the protective boundaries of the valley. But the outside world turns out to be much more terrifying than Vega could have imagined. People are gravely sick—they lose their eyesight and their hearing, just before they lose their lives.

What Vega keeps to herself is that she is the Last Astronomer—a title carried from generation to generation—and she is the only one who carries the knowledge of the stars. Knowledge that could hold the key to the cure. And so when locals spot the tattoo on Vega’s neck in the shape of a constellation—the mark of an astronomer—chaos erupts as the threats her mother warned her about become all too real.

Fearing for her life, Vega is rescued by a girl named Cricket who leads her to Noah, a boy marked by his own mysterious tattoos. On the run from the men who are hunting her, Vega, Cricket, and Noah set out across the plains in search of the cure the stars speak of. But as the lines between friend and protector begin to blur, Vega must decide whether to safeguard the sacred knowledge of the astronomer. Or if she will risk everything to try to save them all.

Thank you to Book Club Favorites for the gifted copy.

WHAT?

Do y’all remember that scene from Friends when Joey is acting in a play and a spaceship ladder comes to take him away to safe the Earth (or something like that?). THAT IS HOW THIS BOOK FELT.

I was first very much confused by the time/era/or is this pure fantasy situation. I only barely grasped it at the end. It’s a slooowwww read. SLOW. And with a big lack of dialogue I spent most of my time skimming hoping some kind of action or anything of true note would take place.

Instead, our FMC spends the book running away from this one group of people out to catch her and make her help them survive. That’s it.

And then the ending????? I DON’T EVEN KNOW. At least I can say I was definitely shocked by how that unveiled itself and perturbed at how it ended.

Bleh, okay, I’m done.

Overall audience notes:

YA Fantasy?? / Sci-Fi??
Language: some strong
Romance: very vague open door
Violence: med-high
Trigger/Content Warnings: loss of loved ones, weapons violence, kidnapping

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Book Review: A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw

May 12, 2022January 17, 2022 GoodeyReads1 Comment

Rating: ★★★★
Audience: Mystery
Length: 368 pages
Author: Shea Ernshaw
Publisher: Atria Books
Release Date: December 7th, 2021
Image & Other Reviews on: Goodreads

BOOK SUMMARY:

Travis Wren has an unusual talent for locating missing people. Hired by families as a last resort, he requires only a single object to find the person who has vanished. When he takes on the case of Maggie St. James—a well-known author of dark, macabre children’s books—he’s led to a place many believed to be only a legend.

Called “Pastoral,” this reclusive community was founded in the 1970s by like-minded people searching for a simpler way of life. By all accounts, the commune shouldn’t exist anymore and soon after Travis stumbles upon it… he disappears. Just like Maggie St. James.

Years later, Theo, a lifelong member of Pastoral, discovers Travis’s abandoned truck beyond the border of the community. No one is allowed in or out, not when there’s a risk of bringing a disease—rot—into Pastoral. Unraveling the mystery of what happened reveals secrets that Theo, his wife, Calla, and her sister, Bee, keep from one another. Secrets that prove their perfect, isolated world isn’t as safe as they believed—and that darkness takes many forms.

Hauntingly beautiful, hypnotic, and bewitching, A History of Wild Places is a story about fairy tales, our fear of the dark, and losing yourself within the wilderness of your mind.

WELL THAT WAS TWISTED.

If you have the option, definitely go with the full cast audio book. I’ve read Ershaw’s young adult books and liked the atmosphere, but often felt they were slow. Reading with the audio book helped speed things up and I think this was an awesome adult debut.

This story was wiiiiild. And so trippy. Started off really creepy and dove into things I didn’t see coming. I was actually blindsided by the twist at the end. An interesting choice, but I thought worked well in the case for the plot. Which is fine, I’m good with that. I thought there were plenty of likable characters. All of the main characters were easy to read their stories, I wanted to cheer for them and help them get out.

Very much bewitching, I liked the tidbits of magical realism too. It made sense and completed the story better than without those extra pieces. I liked this one soooo much better than her young adult books. This hooked me enough that I’m back to wanting to read whatever Ernshaw writes next. Always great writing, spooky atmosphere, and a small dash of romance and whimsy.

Overall audience notes:

Mystery / Magical Realism
Language: little
Romance: multiple vague open-ish door
Trigger/Content Warnings: suicide by overdose, grief/loss depiction, loss of a loved one, execution by hanging, physical altercations, manipulation and gaslighting

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Book Review: Winterwood by Shea Ernshaw

July 2, 2020March 4, 2020 GoodeyReadsLeave a comment

Rating: ☆☆☆ 1/2
Audience: Young adult urban fantasy
Length: 336 pages
Author: Shea Ernshaw
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Release Date: November 5th, 2019
Image & Other Reviews on: Goodreads

BOOK SUMMARY:

Be careful of the dark, dark wood…

Especially the woods surrounding the town of Fir Haven. Some say these woods are magical. Haunted, even.

Rumored to be a witch, only Nora Walker knows the truth. She and the Walker women before her have always shared a special connection with the woods. And it’s this special connection that leads Nora to Oliver Huntsman—the same boy who disappeared from the Camp for Wayward Boys weeks ago—and in the middle of the worst snowstorm in years. He should be dead, but here he is alive, and left in the woods with no memory of the time he’d been missing.

But Nora can feel an uneasy shift in the woods at Oliver’s presence. And it’s not too long after that Nora realizes she has no choice but to unearth the truth behind how the boy she has come to care so deeply about survived his time in the forest, and what led him there in the first place. What Nora doesn’t know, though, is that Oliver has secrets of his own—secrets he’ll do anything to keep buried, because as it turns out, he wasn’t the only one to have gone missing on that fateful night all those weeks ago.

For as long as there have been fairy tales, we have been warned to fear what lies within the dark, dark woods and in Winterwood, New York Times bestselling author Shea Ernshaw, shows us why.

From New York Times bestselling author of The Wicked Deep comes a haunting romance perfect for fans of Practical Magic,where dark fairy tales and enchanted folklore collide after a boy, believed to be missing, emerges from the magical woods—and falls in love with the witch determined to unravel his secrets.

VERY ATMOSPHERIC.

Well, I’m a bit disappointed in this because I think I hyped it up too much. I had heard how great it was and while I did like some parts it mostly fell flat for me.

I loved the atmosphere of Ernshaw’s novels. I feel the cold air, snow, witches, and everything else. She builds a well constructed small world that you can let yourself into. I liked getting the history of Nora’s family throughout the book and the mystery it left in solving what Nora’s gift would be.

Overall though, I found myself skimming portions. I thought it got really repetitive over the story line. Yes, there was a boy missing and a boy dead. And this fact was said over and over and over again. I wanted the characters to do something about it, not mention it one more time. When the action started to pick up in the last third of the book is when I was most invested in the mystery of the woods.

I did not see one of the twists coming because i had planned on a whole different scenario. I really enjoyed this and thought it fit right into the plot. A little bit creepy, a little bit sad, but the ending was great. I liked how it was written and gave the happy ending I’m always searching for.

Oh yes, the romance. I always struggle in one-book fantasy romances. I always think more should be added. In this case, I appreciated that the romantic aspects didn’t play a HUGE part, but were subtly woven in. They had a dark and charming aspect together that added to the whole vibe of the book.

Overall audience notes: