This was a HOT book! I really enjoyed the curvy, confident heroine. She was a little extra and I loved it. This was a quick and dirty story with a great love story set in one of the best cities in the world: New Orleans! I will definitely be reading more by this author.

Really enjoyed this romance story.
Love the characters,dialogue twists,romance.
A story about finding love and believing that you are good enough to get it from unlikely people
Great romance.
Voluntarily reviewed.

I read this book straight through in one sitting. It was that good. Its brash, gutsy at times a bit rude and crude. But i liked it. Other times its angsty, deeply philosophical, unapologetically romantic. And i liked it! This book had so much more depth to it. The main characters, Avery and Declan are real hotheads with hidden soft sides. I love that Avery is an engineer!!! Way to go, girl! Declan is a talented musician. When they come together sparks fly.
The writing was well done, characters were believable and fun to watch.
Highly recommended!

Appreciation to NetGally for arc in exchange for honest review.

Moonlight & Whiskey
By Tricia Lynne

The romance reader world is quite large. You are always seeing blurbs about new books and being encouraged to follow new authors. And if you’re like me, yeah, you’ll occasionally try out a new author but mostly you stick to your tried and true. At least until that new author gets some traction. I heard the buzz around Whiskey & Moonlight. Especially about the first couple of scenes (and believe me they were NOT wrong) so I took a chance and decided to give this book a go.

Usually, this is where I give a snippet of the book. You know tease you into wanting to read it for yourself. Read the blurb for the book. READ IT. It is that and SO MUCH MORE. From the very beginning, this book had me. I want to be Avery. Her…personality, spirit, mojo? I don’t know what to call it but it leaped off the pages. Tricia Lynne did such a fantastic job, not just painting a picture of the main characters, Avery & Declan but the sub-characters? JUST AS WONDERFUL. Not only were the characters phenomenal but the way Tricia Lynne built the story and the locations and the ambiance….all of it just melded together into perfection.

I will finish by saying for her first book Tricia Lynne knocked it out of the park, home run, touchdown, whole in one and all those other sports analogies that mean this book IS THE SH*T! You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you’ll pull out a notebook to write down all the great phrases tossed around in this book!! As for me? I’m going back to read it again!!!

A sweet and sexy story of love and demons. Avery and Declan collide and the sparks fly. They set out on a tenuous journey of discovering each other. Coming from places of self doubt and past disappointments neither are willing to commit anything more than their bodies and a short term relationship. Fate has a different plan for them and they have to adjust. It is a steamy, angsty read that will blow your socks off. The scenes are vibrant and beautiful and will leaving hankering for a trip to find your own sweet ending.

Choking on angst and cliches

I would like to thank Tricia Lynne, Loveswept/Penguin Random House, and NetGalley for allowing me to read a free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book definitely wasn’t to my taste. I requested it several months ago and can’t remember what appealed to me about it to begin with, but I don’t usually get into the sexually graphic, angsty, uber urban young-and-free type of books that are trendy in romance the last several years. The exception could be Jay Crownover’s books, but I haven’t read one in a long while. Maybe if I read one now I’d find them pretty angsty, too. (Which reminds me to check the library for new ones… *runs search* *gasps* There are! Yesss….) I guess I have a hard time relating to that type of story, being a reserved rural farm girl surrounded by family and friends who hold their traditional values in a white-knuckled grip. Plus these books tend to be spilling over with angst, immaturity, and melodrama, all of which I have little patience for. On top of that, a lot of them read like fanfiction—which is why many of them are ebooks.

Does this one fit that bill? In my opinion, yes. The book revolves around characters who could power the east coast with their angst, and the story is full of cliches:

Overly sensitive lead characters who blame their failings on mommy and daddy issues? Check.

Rich characters who don’t care how much money they’re spending? Check. (To be fair, it’s mentioned that the heroine, at least, grew up on a budget and keeps to one herself when she’s not spoiling herself on vacation. I can let that one go, even though she earns a six-figure salary. But the others? Not so much. I mean Jesus, I could become a billionaire and a $3,000 dinner or $1,300 vinyl would still make me feel ill.)

Spunky best friend sidekick who encourages the heroine to be irresponsible and calls it “fun”? Check.

Rock band composed of super hot guys who could make it big but choose not to because the only people who want to be famous are egotistical losers who have nothing else going for them? *deadpan stare* Check.

A supposedly strong woman letting a man get away with being an asshole because he’s sex on a stick? Check. I don’t care if he was just trying to rile her because he had some weird kink for getting dressed down by her. He was pretty much encouraging her to be an asshole, which made them both assholes. While it was amusing to watch her snap back at him—the first couple of times—the dignified thing to do would have been to just get up and walk away because she had better things to do and better people to spend her time with.

The leads jumping to RIDONKULOUS conclusions about one another having been intimate with other people, which makes no sense and undermines the intelligence they’ve shown up to that point? Check.

One or both of them spiraling down beyond rock bottom in a super pathetic fashion that nullifies any respect I have for them? Check.

One or both of them being disgustingly arrogant and rejecting the other to save him or her from a terrible relationship and therefore life? Check.

Hero and heroine talking marriage the moment they make up, which is totally out of character? Check.

Characters regularly talking about songs and bands, most of which I’ve never heard of nor give two shits about? Check.

*sigh* Yeah. I can only assume this manuscript got picked up because Lynne’s writing style is fantastic; she knows how to use words to great effect. Narrative-wise, though, this was incredibly lazy storytelling. After only about a third of the way, I started checking my progress to see how much was left. By halfway, I was skimming if not skipping pages. I have to wonder if a developmental edit was done on an early draft; if so, that was money down. The. Crapper.

As for specific gripes, here are a few that topped the list.

That first chapter where we get to watch…crap, what’s her name? *thinks hard* Shit. *looks it up* Avery. Where we get to see Avery have her ass waxed—that was completely unnecessary. Not because I’m a prude, but because it was largely useless to the narrative. 1: It didn’t need to be mentioned that Avery liked to watch porn, because that information has nothing to do with the plot. It barely had anything to do with her character. She could still have stood transfixed and appreciative while she watched that couple have sex in the alley; it could have been explained then that she simply enjoyed visuals, which there’s no shame in, just as she casually mentioned it to Declan later. 2: Getting waxed—or at least our witnessing it—was similarly unnecessary. Other than a few crude comments about feeling sweat in her butt crack, her lack of hair down there is never brought up again that I recall, not even during the many graphic sex scenes.

Sure, that first chapter was making the point that she was willingly stepping outside her comfort zone in an effort to—well, to more or less relax and have fun, though I don’t consider ripping the hair off my lady bits to be either relaxing or fun. That point could have been made in ways that suited the character and the narrative better—such as her forcing herself to leave her desk and walk away from work despite fires cropping up that she would normally bend over backward to put out. If Lynne wanted Avery’s arc to involve standing up to the jerks at work, that’s cool, but you have to show us the starting point, or we’re not going to appreciate the end point; that climax won’t affect us. Yeah, she was always on her phone and went to that odious party, but we should have gotten a glimpse of her ugly work life right off the bat. You have to demonstrate the “normal world” before the character goes on their journey so the reader can gauge and appreciate the changes.

Next, the switching POVs. This was a major red flag of inexperience. You can’t start switching POVs between the heroine and hero in the last quarter of the book. If you do, it better be for a damn good reason, otherwise it’s sloppy, jarring, and irritating. If you wanted us to see things from Declan’s POV, you should have started that shit at the beginning. Starting it at the end like that was just…really weird. It was also weird when Declan suddenly developed self-esteem issues toward the end, at the party. For over half the book he was an alpha male afraid only of falling in love—another cliche—then one pompous jackass in a suit looks down his nose at him and he figuratively curls into a ball, rocking and blubbering about how he’s not good enough for her? God, that was annoying. Embarrassing, even.

Lastly—because I really don’t want to think about this book anymore—if you’re going to have a heroine who’s plus-size and, more importantly, have her plus-size-ness be a big part of her character and factor into her relationship with the hero, go big or go the fuck home. Don’t give her a “relatively flat” stomach or one small roll when she sits or say she’s got a mere thirty pounds on a model. A six-foot model who’s retired and doesn’t have to count calories yet is still pretty goddamn thin is—what? 120, 130? 140, tops. Add thirty pounds on a woman who’s taller than average at five-seven? Overweight, yes. Chubby, absolutely. Shake-the-ground-when-you-walk fat? No.

In that vein, you wanna know what really pisses me off? The cover. The woman is completely hidden. All you can see is her hand, jawline, and part of her shoulder, all of which look pretty damn slim to me. It’s just sad, a story that revolves around a self-love theme doesn’t even reflect that theme on the cover. Because thick women don’t sell, huh? No one wants to have to look at that in the bookstore. I mean, barf. *rolls eyes*

My advice to Lynne would be to study story: theme, setup and payoff, rule of three, arcs for both character and narrative. She’s a great writer, obviously talented, and she could become a wonderful novelist with some practice. It’s just unfortunate people are going to pay to read that practice. Also, get a different developmental editor. Or seek one out if you skipped it.

My advice to the publisher? Put a fucking plus-size woman on the cover of a book that’s about a fucking plus-size woman. Jesus Christ. Also, putting an ampersand in the title is really annoying for metadata. Just use the word “and.”

noapologybookreviews.com

This fun title had me in the emotions from the beginning. Avery is a take no prisoners leading lady. She's brash, snarky and self deprecating. I was waiting to see what she would say next after she first opened her mouth. Declan is the man for her... From their meet cute to the first rockstar performance, you can feel the pull between the two of them. There is frustration as their own insecurities manage to cause problems at every single opportunity, but when you combine these two with Ms Lynne's ability to make New Orleans a living, breathing character, you've got a winning combination. This is one of my favorites this year. I'd love to see what happens with the other Blacksmith characters I fell in love with.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this book will make it to my Top 10 of 2019. I know, I know...it’s only February but I can not adequately say how much I loved this book. NOLA is my favorite city and I felt like I was right back there reading this book. The descriptions brought me back to my time on the French Quarter. The characters are beautifully rounded and leave me praying that we get more of them in future books. Declan and Avery’s love story was beautifully written!

Meh. I've read better, and I've read worse.
This wasn't anything new or fresh. You've got the badboy rocker with demons and the "not like other girls" girls who are soulmates and you know exactly how it'll all play out. It started losing me around 60% with all the dark-side-light-side and "demons" talk. I also didn't care for how crass/crude the characters were. It's not my cup of tea and felt unnecessary.

Good story, engaging characters. I liked the Nola setting. The juxtaposition of the main character’s work and play personas was interesting..

By day Avery is a straight laced business woman, who keeps her true self under wraps, for fear of her co-workers seeing the real woman that lies beneath her modest pants suits. In her work world she knows you have to keep your head down, work hard, and don't make waves to become successful, and she has mastered that. But at what cost?

With her upcoming vacation she plans to let loose a little, and let the woman trapped beneath the suit out for a bit to breath. Which also means the suits will be staying home in her closet, and her sexy clothes will be on full display, and hopefully play nicely into her little plan. She needs the company of a man, and she is hoping her well accentuated curves will lure one in. But nothing could have prepared her for the uber sexy, tattooed rocker that finds his way into her heart and her bed...

Moonlight and Whiskey is a sizzling debut that satisfies on many fronts! It comes brimming with loads of angst, sexiness, and gut-wrenching emotion to give your heart a good squeeze and leave your knees weak. This engaging story line and it's sassy, confident heroine kept me enthralled from start to finish, at times she had me feeling like I was right along with her on her little adventure. I just cannot say enough good things about this one, the writing was impeccable, characters were superbly crafted, and it spoke volumes to my heart and fed my spirit! Highly recommend!!

I requested an advanced copy of this title from NetGalley, and I am leaving my honest and unbiased opinion.

Wow, I loved it! From the very first page, this novel just sucked me in and would not let me go till the very last one. I just loved Avery, I loved her confidence and her sass. Declan was all that and a bag of chips. I loved the chemistry between the two. It was so good. I love when a novel can make you laugh, feel like your heart is going to break and then leave you with a smile on your face. This novel did that for me. I loved it! I can't wait to see what this author writes next.

Moonlight & Whiskey by Tricia Lynne is sin and spice and everything naughty and nice! It had me laughing out loud and shedding tears.

This is the first book I read by this author and it won’t be the last.

A story of learning how to love oneself flaws and all.

Avery works as an engineer. She is very staid and plain but she also moonlights as a sassy, sexy, foul-mouthed woman. On a trip to New Orleans, she plans to let loose her playful and care-free side.

Here, she meets Declan, sexy and kind, he is also the lead singer of a rock band. He also seems “in” to her. But is he really?

As the heat and passion rises between Avery and Declan, so do their protective walls. Will they be brave enough to believe in themselves as well as the epic love that awaits them if and when they do?

From the first chapter, I was engaged. I saw myself in Avery. Being a bigger woman myself, I could draw parallels and understand her motivation, reasoning and fear.

Avery was funny, sassy, sweet and an absolute firecracker! I loved her character even though I must say, there were times where she made me angry.

Declan, OMG! He is such a sexy man! A man that we all aspire to have. He helps his woman feel like a woman. He also helps build confidence where it lacks in Avery simply by treating her the way a woman is supposed to be treated.

This couple without a doubt was meant for each other.

I also cared about the secondary characters in this book and hope they will each get their stories told.

This was a funny, down to earth read with all the feels. A story of being happy and comfortable in your own skin and of reclaiming your power as a woman to feel sexy and desirable at any size.

An amazing read not to be missed!

I received an ARC via NetGalley of this book. All thoughts an opinions are my own.

What I liked about this book is that it was about a "curvy" girl and the struggles that she faces as the friend of a more traditional thin model when it comes to meeting men. Avery is also smart (engineer), and sassy (she doesn't let anyone talk down to her even though she has the same insecurities as anyone). There's definitely some steamy scenes, and Declan, the man who is interested in Avery, is an interesting character who clearly is both attractive and intelligent. You will definitely root for Avery, but this is certainly a more steamy romance than a sweet chaste one!

This book has EVERYTHING you could possibly want. It’s funny, sweet, and just an all around great read. I recommend this book

This book was great. I really enjoyed the plot line, it was hot and sexy. I couldn’t put it down.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own

Avert Barrows resolves to cut loose and overcome her insecurities during a girls trip with her best friend Kat to New Orleans where she literally bumps into the lead singer of BlackSmith, Declan McGinn. Tall, dark, and tattooed, with a body made for sin who prefers his women as curvy as his guitars, Avery has a choice to make but will she play it safe or place her trust in the hands of a man who’s as tempting as the devil himself?

Tricia Lynne’s first novel ”Moonlight & Whiskey” undeniably hits the mark. The descriptive scenes, the laugh out loud moments, the <i>oh so</i> sexy scenes and dialogue between the leads were thus far the best part of the series. It’s nice for a change to see a curvy heroine in a romantic comedy who is strong, smart, and capable of accomplishing things without the help of a man. Avery is a breath of fresh air and is a perfectly flawed human being. It was easy to relate to her character and to get a sense of what she feels throughout the story. Everyone has insecurities, Avery included, and Declan does everything in his power to make it known that she is a sexy independent woman who shouldn’t self-doubt herself and encourage her to embrace the curves. Sure it’s obvious that Avery is working on rebuilding her confidence however we can’t leave out Declan, who has issues of his own that he’s attempting to resolve.

The few negatives that I will mention is Avery attitude. Yes, we know she’s a badass and we understand she’s a spitfire, but some situations in which she lashed out was uncalled for and immature. Also the constant back-and-forth ‘I hate you. I love you’ between the leads were a little too much and repetitive. And should I bother mentioning the instant love? No, let’s not. Moreover, some scenes were a bit over the top, dramatic, and unrealistic which was a big no-no for me.

Overall, this author’s first series is worth the read if you’re looking to venture off to a book that’s unlike your typical romance novel.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Beyond amazing I enjoyed this book so very much. The characters and storyline were fantastic. The ending I did not see coming Could not put down nor did I want to.

A new to me author Moonlight & Whiskey by Tricia Lynne. A spicy book that I couldn't put until until I finished. Likable characters and great storyline. Enjoyed the setting in New Orleans. Two girls go to New Orleans on vacation. I hope there will be a sequel to the book. I look forward to reading more by author.

Moonlight and Whiskey by Tricia Lynne was a different type of story and a different kind of romance. The writing style and interaction with the characters described were interesting and unfamiliar. Avery and Declan meet in New Orleans during Avery's vacation. I loved Declan's character and how Avery's hot temper and potty mouth turned him on. Avery was so different in her outlook about life. She is in a male dominated business and must prove herself by "being one of the guys". She also had some major body hang ups due to how she was treated in life by the male population. She just had a lot of hang ups and it got a bit much in the story. I wanted to yell "Enough already!". I did enjoy the setting and the detailed descriptions. The sex was hot too! If you like something a little different than the typical romance and you don't mind the story content to be bit raw, then this one is for you.