Book Review: Vintage & Vogue by Kelly & Tana Fireside

Rating: 🌟🌟

I found this book to be okay. Vintage and Vogue by Kelly and Tana Fireside didn’t really deliver in the ways I thought it would.

Meet Sena Abrigo. She’s a wealthy tech whiz with roots in the Arizona-Mexico borderlands. Then she finds herself in Owen Station with plans to pull the small town into the future. She just has to get someone named Hazel Butler on her side.

Meet Hazel Butler. She works at the Owen Station library, is the granddaughter of Irish immigrant miners, and inherited the little house she lives in. She is also determined to protect the historic legacy of her town.

When the two women meet, it sets off an explosive series of events and exposes an ugly truth lying just beneath the town’s surface. Will it threaten their chance at love and their lives?

I did not feel the connection between the two main characters. I felt like there was a lot of telling readers about their connection versus showing. Secondly, I thought the authors were going to really focus on the small town dynamics, racism, complicated histories, and entitlement. I was really hanging on because I was waiting for the moment of importance (showing how messy and complicated the real world can be) but it never came.

As a female BIPOC who lives in a small town, I really feel bummed on that large missed point and if that wasn’t the intention of the authors, I wish they had leaned away from those themes and stayed closer to the romance theme instead.

Thank you to NetGalley and Bold Strokes Books for a temporary e-ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Publication Date: 13 June 2023 Publisher: Bold Strokes Books ISBN: 9781636794488 Format: EPUB Genre: Romance, LGBTQIAP+

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