Welcome to Sarah's Bookshelves Live. I'm your host, Sarah Dickinson. Join me every other week as we get real and sometimes a bit snarky about books and reading. Let's get rolling.

Welcome to the Winter 2025 Circleback episode, where we discuss books we shared in the winter preview now that we've had a chance to

read them, or at least attempted to read them. And Catherine is joining me as always for these

episodes. Welcome back, Catherine. Hi, thank you. How did your winter reading

turn out? You know what? Really pretty good. For once, I have no complaints. This is shocking.

I know, isn't it shocking? I usually want to whine about something. I mean, I had a couple issues

with my picks, which I'll get into, but overall, I had a 75% success rating and a five-star

book. So I'm really pretty happy. And that is an increase from last year. That's great. I am on your

train. I had a really good winter. Yay. Yes, I had a for the first time ever, mind you, 100% success rate. Yay. You have done that before, but I have not. Right. So now we both have done it. Wow. That's huge. But it's a little misleading because I will say a

couple of my successes were like right at my success bar. So I have one 3.75 star book and then a couple

fours. But four's still good. I'll take fours. Oh, four is great. And I had two five-star books.

All right. Here's how we'll do this today. We each shared eight books in the winter preview.

And I will first briefly mention the two books I had already read when we recorded the winter preview.

Catherine, you had not read any of your books when we recorded.

So I'll briefly mention those two for me, and I'm not going to share my full thoughts on those

since you've already heard them. And then we will go on and update you about how all the other

books we shared ended up panning out for us. So the first book I'd already read

was the intense love story involving ice dancing. And that's the favorites by Lane Fargo.

It came out January 14th. This was four and a half stars for me. I thought it was scandalous and

dramatic, cutthroat, hot, immersive, horrifying, but most importantly, it was addictive and riveting.

This book has been everywhere since it came out. It was a book of the month pick. It's been all over Instagram. A lot of people in our Patreon community have been reading it. And it's been interesting to see the reactions. Some people think it's

fun and deliciously scandalous like me. And others have been turned off by the totally over-the-top melodrama.

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