The Faculty Lounge by Jennifer Mathieu

How it begins:  "You really had to hand it to Mr. Lehrer. While dying at work is never ideal, he had the decency to do it during his off period. And not only that, but at the start of it, too, giving the clerks in the main office plenty of time to find someone else to cover Ms. De La Rosa's Spanish II classes, even as they scrambled to figure out who should be telephoned when an eighty-two-year-old substitute teacher lies down on a ratty couch in a high school faculty lounge and dies."

So begins the school year for several teachers, old and new, the principal, his vice principal, the janitor, and others at Texas's Baldwin High School. This book explores the lives of these teachers, their frustrations, disappointments, griefs, humorous mishaps...and their love of teaching. It also highlights the current state of public education and the idiocy that often occurs within it. There's a scandal or two, snarky emails, clashes with parents, and even an unexpected romance.

The Faculty Lounge is a novel of friendship and found family. And it's very entertaining. My dad taught junior high school for over 30 years, and I work at an elementary school, so I found this book both funny and realistic. There are moments in it that made me laugh out loud, and other moments that made me want to weep and shake my head in sympathy. I liked all the characters and how Mathieu weaves their individual stories together. Each chapter is told from a different POV, but it comes together so well! For me, this was a 4.5/5 star read. 

Happy Reading!

A fun beach read...

Here's the thing about writing Happily Ever Afters: it helps if you believe in them.

Here's the thing about me: I did until the day of my father's funeral.

At 29, January Andrews has already written four romantic novels; her fifth is due at the end of the summer, but she's finding it hard to believe in love ever since she found out her parents' happy marriage wasn't as perfect as she once thought. Being at her father's beach house--the one she didn't even know he owned--isn't helping. Especially when she discovers that Augustus Everett, her old college writing nemesis, is living next door. Gus writes serious 'literary' fiction and has always scorned the happy endings in her stories. Only it turns out he's suffering from a bout of writer's block, too. So they make a deal:  January will try her hand at writing something more serious while Gus pens something romantic and happy. Whoever gets their novel published at the end of the summer will be declared the winner. But spending the summer together just might bring them something even better than winning the bet. It just might bring them love.

Things I loved about this novel:

💚 January and Gus are well-developed, three-dimensional characters, not just predictable cliches.

💙 Their humorous banter.

💜Their romantic writing field trips...and the funny mishaps that occur along the way.

💚 Their honest and heartfelt conversations.

💙 How the awkwardness of their past relationship changes and deepens into friendship and then love over the course of the novel.

💜 The happy ending. (Of course!)

Things I didn't love:

😕 Umm...I can't really think of anything.

To Sum Up:

Beach Read by Emily Henry was the perfect summer read for me. It's entertaining. And it never made me roll my eyes in frustration at the characters... or at the bumps in their relationship. It's well-written. It's romantic. And it made me smile. As a fun summer beach read, I'd give this one 4.5/5 stars (even though the beach is hardly ever mentioned). 

Happy Reading!