Quick Synopsis – A dashing ghost hunter and the bookseller who made up the ghosts he’s chasing wind up entangled in more ways than one.

Song This Reminds Me Of – Walking in a Winter Wonderland by Ella Fitzgerald

Publication Date – Oct. 08, 2024

Content Notes – This book depicts graphic anxiety/panic attacks. There is also a lot of abandonment issues and infidelity (not main characters).

Spice Rating – 🌶️🌶️🌶️

Overall Rating – ⭐⭐⭐out of 5

Review – Haunt Your Heart Out is like a cute Hallmark movie with a little bit of actual sex thrown in. Lex manages the local secondhand bookstore, but her dream is to own it and offer things like open mic nights. James is in town with a documentary crew when he stops into the bookstore. There is immediate chemistry and honestly, the main characters are cute the whole book, though there is a miscommunication trope (not my favorite), this is a true romance and is happy ending compliant.

Even though this book is called Haunt Your Heart Out, it takes place during early winter (Nov/Dec), which kind of bothered me. It just seemed like a better opportunity to focus on Halloween. The secondary plot of the book focuses on how Lex feels abandoned. Her parents followed her sister and left Vermont to live in California. Her family is always pressuring her to abandon the bookstore and her home to move to California to “meet her potential”. Throughout the book, we see contentious phone calls between Lex and her mom. This part felt a little overdone to me. Lex is 32 and is still fighting with her mom because her parents JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND. Lex mentions she goes to therapy and has since she dropped out of college. You’d think her therapist would have tried to give her better tools to work with her family. Lex, get a better therapist.

The main storyline, the romance, was cutesy but relied on the ghost stories too much for me. Lex used to have a vlog that followed the haunted happenings of her hometown in Stowe, Vermont. James felt connected to that vlog, and he convinced his business partner Julian to shoot a documentary there. Of course, the hauntings weren’t real, and the plot hinges on Lex tricking Julian. It just seems silly that a 30-something-year-old man who works in film wouldn’t recognize certain tricks.

This is a cute romance with some family drama. I didn’t love some of the secondary plot, but overall a fast love story.

Thanks to NetGalley and Alcove Press for the advanced copy, all opinions are my own.