I received an advance copy of Treehouse on Dog River Road and i'm so thrilled to review this book! This was a fun, quick read that had me laughing and falling in love with Hannah's family the whole time!

The Treehouse on Dog River Road tells the story of 28 year old Hannah who decides to quit her job and move back to her local hometown in Vermont. Stuck with caring for her sister's two rowdy children, Hannah decides to fill her time with building a treehouse for them. As she works on the treehouse and her new life plan, she can't seem to stop running into neighbor Nathan Wild. This story is about finding one's most authentic life and the things, or people, that make it meaningful.

While I didn't give this book 5 stars, it was still a nice read. It was a very lighthearted story and I absolutely adored the family dynamic that Hannah had. And of course little Nora completely stole the show! My few problems with this book taht kept it at 4 stars were that the dialogue felt a little forced and awkward all the time. I found it difficult to read and feel as though I were actually reading a real conversation. Along with that, the build up with Nathan and Hannah felt very quick and awkward.
Overall it's the perfect read for people looking for something light and fun!

This was a sweet story. I did feel that some parts rushed through the relationship between Hannah and Nathan. The Vermont setting was perfect and the ending tied everything in very well. Overall, it was a great weekend read!

A young, determined woman figures out life and love while staying true to herself in this whip-smart and genuinely witty debut.
Charming and compelling… a beautiful book, wise, heartfelt and full of hope. Witty and delightful, this story is a salve to the soul.

Hannah is at a crossroads in her professional and personal life and she takes a break to assist with her sister's kids while she figures out her life. Of course there's a good looking neighbor --Nathan. I appreciated that this was Hannah's story and she wasn't building her life around a man so you get a good dose of young woman figuring out her life while also finding romance and keeping it all in perspective. . All in all an enjoyable read

Hannah Spencer is laid off from her job and heads to vermont to take care of her sisters children. she decides to build them a treehouse, as she builds the treehouse she decides to chance course in her life, but will Nathan who lives next door change things for her?

I really wanted to love The Treehouse on Dog River Road, but it just wasn't the book for me.

It had a cute premise and sounded promising, but ultimately fell flat. The writing style felt almost like a stream of consciousness, which didn't really work with this story to me. The characters also held promise, but Hannah came off as a little too pretentious and Nathan seemed under-developed. I read the entire book, and I still don't feel like I actually got to know Nathan very well. My favorite character in the entire book was Nora.

As for the plot, it felt a touch disjointed to me. First off, I find it difficult to believe that Ted and Molly would have willingly left their children for an entire summer with a person who has never spent more than a few hours at any given time watching children, even if said person was their aunt. Second, the building of the treehouse felt long and involved. I didn't need to know as much about building material as was written into this book. Third, while the tropical storm was based on real events, it felt like it came out of nowhere and didn't really belong in this story.

Overall, I honestly struggled to finish this book. Based on other reviews, this seems like a hit or miss book for people. Either you're going to really enjoy it or really not enjoy it.

I really enjoyed this book! Good character development, fresh and easily-pictured settings, and just an overly happy book. A typical romance in not so typical packaging.

This was a decent book. I don’t know why it took me so long to get through but overall it was a good read and I enjoyed the way that it ended.

Synopsis: After being laid off Hannah decides to spend the summer babysitting her niece and nephew while their parents go away for work. She hopes that by taking a break she’ll find a new career and know what to do with her life but after deciding to build the children a treehouse her plans get a little more complicated when she falls for the new neighbor.

This book was very fast paced in my opinion and the romance was also a little fast paced. Despite that however, it was really sweet to read and every interaction between them left a smile on my face. Her relationship with her niece and nephew was also really sweet and this book had a lot of funny and heartwarming moments as well. Overall this book was really sweet and fluffy with not too much conflict and I really enjoyed that. It was the epitome of rom-com and I’m a sucker for a happy ending.

Thank you NetGalley and She Writes Press for the digital ARC!

The Treehouse on Dog River Road
by Catherine Drake
Pub Date: 10 May 2022
2.5/5 Stars

Hannah, the MC in the book, loses the job in Boston she hates and heads to Vermont to child sit her sister’s kids for the summer. She wants to use this time to get her head together and find a job in a city she’ll love. She meets Nathan, the guy next door, and decides to have a “summer only” fling. Apparently, she’s good at compartmentalizing her life and has no problem loving and leaving guys.

I totally agree with another reader who commented on the writing style, it was off-putting. I didn’t feel the character development. No heat between the two main characters. The storyline had potential, but it felt formulaic and just a lot of words. One thing that kept tripping me up was that the author rarely used contractions. Even in conversations. I think this made for stilted dialog and a lack of flow.

The kids were cute. I liked Nathan’s character. And the dog, of course. My favorite parts were from the wedding, Nathan’s speech, and Hannah’s conversation with his grandfather. In fact, all the peripheral family characters were charming.

Thank you to #NetGalley and #SheWritesPress for this direct reader copy.

A fun story. Hannah comes to take care of her sister's kids while she is off on an adventure trip to Patagonia. While there she decides to build a tree house for the kids, and meets her hunky neighbor in the process. A sweet summer romance and one that was hard to put down. Highly enjoyed this one and recommend it.

I enjoyed this fast paced read all about a woman at a crossroads, trying to decide where she wants to go in life and how to get there. Some of the things that happen in the book seem highly unlikely, like inviting a woman you’ve just met to a wedding, so much so that the author seems to have to write an explanation herself for why her character did that, and also going back to a stranger’s house you’ve just met the night before to help him clean his house (towards the end of the book) when most likely you’d have gone home from the rescue centre. Also the ending felt slightly unfinished, as though it needed an epilogue, but otherwise it was a very enjoyable read filled with lovely characters

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you to Netgalley & She Writes Press!

After losing her job, Hannah Spencer offers to watch her niece and nephew for the summer while her sister and brother-in-law are in South America for work. She embarks on the task of building a treehouse for the kids. She makes several new friends along with the handsome new neighbor, Nathan Wild, who helps her with her project.

This book really took me by surprise. I thought that it was just going to be a fluffy “girl falls for her handsome neighbor” type of romance but it’s much more than that. While there is romance in the plot, the majority of the storyline follows Hannah and her summer-long journey of finding out what she wants in life. She soon discovers the importance of not only family but friends and community. She’s selfless in the way she so willingly helps others and jumps right in without asking anything in return.

The author’s pacing was great. I read 75% of the book in one sitting. I loved the ending although I’m always hoping for an epilogue. What a fantastic debut! The Treehouse on Dog River Road would make a great vacation/beach read.

I look forward to reading more novels from Catherine Drake in the future.

Mein Leseerlebnis

Es gibt ein paar Dinge, die ich an den Charakteren, denen ich in Liebesromanen begegne, nicht mag. Meist mag ich diese Dinge auch im Leben jenseits von Büchern nicht. Ein Beispiel dafür ist, wenn Menschen ohne Beeinträchtigung aus Bequemlichkeit auf einem Behhindertenparkplatz parken.

Und was macht die Heldin des Buches? Natürlich gleich am Anfang zum Kaffee holen auf just so einem Parkplatz zu parken. An diesem Punkt hat mein Interesse an Hannah rapide abgenommen, wovon ich mich auch nicht wieder erholen konnte. Das lag unter anderem auch daran, dass sich zu viel in ihrem Leben und im Buch allgemein als zu konstruiert und dadurch künstlich angefühlt hat (bezogen auf Charaktere und Entwicklungen).

Darauf aufbauend bin ich nie in einen guten Lesefluss gekommen und hatte wenig Spaß mit dem Roman. Schlussendlich habe ich das Buch aus mangelndem Interesse abgebrochen.

- keine Bewertung -

Für wen?

Schaut in eine Leseprobe rein. Könnt ihr mit Hannah als Charakter in dieser etwas anfangen, könnte “The treehouse on Dog River Road“ etwas für euch sein.

A cute and cozy closed door romance perfect for your summer retreat in the mountains. While I loved the character development, Hannah and Nate’s romance felt somewhat rushed, and lacked some curiosity. That said, Hannah’s journey of self discovery set amid small town charm is worth the read. Thank you to NetGalley and SheWrites Press for the ARC!

Going into a book completely blind—without even really knowing (or remembering) the synopsis—is something I really must do more often. It means I have no idea where the story is even supposed to start and that I’m just letting the story take me where I want it to go. That being said, The Treehouse on Dog River Road was being compared to My Oxford Year, one of my favourite books of the past couple of years, so I was definitely expecting a tragedy of some kind, and though there is a big event that is devastating to some, it didn’t really affect the main characters too much in the long run, so I didn’t feel that emotional devastation like I did in Julia Whelan’s story.

I enjoyed some of the characters in the story, especially the kids, and I appreciated that Hannah really wanted to discover what the next step was for herself without being influenced too much by the guy she was seeing, but I do think she was trying to think of her life a little too objectively. When people make big life decisions, they do considering things like how close they are to their family and what kind of support system they have around them, so for her to be so blunt to the ones around her about not influencing her decision was out of character (and a bit hurtful) of her to say—especially when you think that she was spending the summer with her niece and nephew who had come to rely on her in a way that aunts don’t usually have the opportunity to be relied upon. She was trying to be so practical that it took away from her sincerity a bit.

I loved Nathan’s family—they were a riot and I wish we had more about them in the story. I was hoping Drake was going to give us an epilogue to see how things progressed after Hannah made her decision, mostly so we could see where the Wilds ended up, too.

There were a couple of things I couldn’t get past, though, namely that Hannah’s sister and her husband would take a sabbatical over a summer and leave their young kids (they’re only six and four) in the care of their inexperienced sister for that long. She had never done more than babysit and though their neighbour did do a lot to help her out, their parents were hours away, so Hannah didn’t really have anyone she could rely on in case something went wrong. And I don’t care how much you love your nieces and nephews, going from being a single girl living her life in the big city to a full-time caregiver to two young kids is a big, exhausting job that wouldn’t be as fun as the book made it out to be, and she certainly wouldn’t have had all this free time she supposedly had. This brings me to the part of the book that dragged on for me—the building of the treehouse. There were way too many details about the ins and outs of building the treehouse, down to the kinds of materials she needed and the steps she was taking to build it in the beginning, and then all of a sudden it was done and we barely spent much time with it after that. It was a bit of a strange way to anchor the whole story—I would have rather spent more time with Nathan’s family instead. And then the big event at the end, which was inspired by real-life and was devastating to those involved, was very low stakes for the main characters, so I’m a little confused as to why it was part of this particular story.

There were some very satisfying parts of this book and some very confusing parts of this book, so I had a really hard time figuring out what I thought of it, so maybe you can take a read and help me figure out what I thought. Just don’t go in thinking it’ll be like My Oxford Year because it’s really not like it at all.

3 STARS

Thank you to NetGalley and She Writes Press for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. The blog will go up on my website May 9.

I write books so I know how much of the self goes into writing a book. And as such, I always finish novels that I review. It seems only fair that I should put as much effort into reading them as the authors put into writing them.

Unfortunately, The Treehouse on Dog River Road by Catherine Drake may have taken even more effort to read than it did to write. It is, in short, a lengthy collection of words desperately in need of a purpose, a plot, a story to tell … something.

The protagonist, Hannah, is ready for a change and during some sort of corporate restructure (or whatever, both unclear from the reading and irrelevant to the story), she offers to take a severance package. The author later calls that “being fired” but people who are fired aren’t paid to leave so the author is just wrong about that. It’s one of the many inaccuracies in the book that are insignificant alone but collected become a disease called I-didn’t-fact-check-my-writing-itus. (Another example is when she refers to another character as a project manager and then as a computer programmer. Programmers can project manage but project managers can’t program. Facts.)

For some reason mysterious to anyone who is a parent, when Hannah’s sister and brother-in-law decide to take their sabbaticals out of the country, they decide to leave their 6-year-old and 4-year-old in Hannah’s inexperienced hands for the entire summer.

Absolutely not. Completely beyond credulity. No parent would allow anyone – relative or not – who has never babysat for more than a couple hours to care for two young children around the clock for the entire summer. Wouldn’t happen. And let’s not even delve into the extreme trauma the parents’ abandonment would have inflicted on those little ones.

Good parents and caregivers also don’t leave two young children sleeping in a car (oh but I could see the car from the shop window the whole time /s) while they go into a coffee shop to get a coffee. Seriously? Has the author never seen the news? This is the stuff that deservedly gets people sent to jail. Ridiculous.

So, anyway, back to trying to figure out this book: I can’t decide if it’s a story about a young woman trying to find herself or a really boring romance or a construction manual.

Readers will get extensive guidance on building a vision board – because Hannah doesn’t know where she wants to live or what kind of job she’d like to do and thinks a vision board will help her to find herself. And the author apparently thought we’d all want to know exactly how to build one, you know, just in case we too need to figure out our lives.

Then, without consulting her vision board, Hannah impulsively decides – instead of looking for work – to spend the entire summer building a huge treehouse in her sister’s backyard (with what money? Isn’t she currently unemployed?). Lucky us, we get to read a lengthy treatise on the fundamentals of treehouse construction.

I’ll admit that just like everyone else in the story, I always wanted a treehouse as a child. That doesn’t mean I want to learn to build one. I’m never going to build one. I didn’t need to know that recovered (used) wood is lighter than newer wood. I don’t care that it’s lighter; the story doesn’t care either.

Unfortunately, there are seemingly endless examples of this deep dive into minutiae. It is one of the many problems with this novel, so many problems that the problems have problems. Those problems also have issues – a veritable cascade of catastrophes, if you will.

The author is literal in the extreme, telling us, for example, that two people were holding hands until one let go, which, oddly enough, is exactly how handholding works and we could have assumed that without all the extra detail she provided.

There’s also more than any book’s fair share of cringe. I’d like to know who thought it was a good idea to include a lengthy text chat of cliched jokes about menstrual cycles, using Aunt Flo-like names which appear to have come from 90s movies like Clueless or possibly the 2016 Bustle article I found via Google, when I did a quick search for ‘things to call your menstrual cycle.’

I’d take the cringe examples further but you wouldn’t believe me and I really don’t want you to read this book just to confirm that I’m telling the truth. Instead, we’ll talk about the tropical storm that she felt the need to throw into the end of the story. I couldn’t tell you why. It made no sense to include a tropical storm in the story. I think the author wanted to write about it because it was based on real events but no matter how important real events are, if they don’t move the story forward, they don’t belong in the book.

The romance? Yeah, let’s talk about the romance between Hannah and Nathan. If it were any less romantic, I’d think she was trying to rival the relationship between Lydia Bennet and George Wickham. It’s boring, bland, passionless, and immature. Maybe the author has never read a romance novel. I can’t think of any other reason for this romance to be as dull as an unsharpened pencil. If you’re planning to read this for the heat, I’d recommend that you read an Archie comic because Veronica alone provides more heat.

I wouldn’t advise this author never to write another book. We all become better writers the more we write, after all. But I would heartily recommend that she work with an editor or beta readers who are willing to be honest with her.

I received a digital ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I was given an ARC by NetGalley and She Writes Press in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.

I honestly almost DNF this. The characters were really cute, but the writing style made it nearly impossible to get through. This is written in almost a stream of consciousness style. The whole book is like one big monotone run-on sentence. There was no dimension, and some of the language used was kind of weird. The writing was very juvenile and just generally hard to get through. It also was not really clear what the purpose of the book was-so many different story arcs were begun but not really ever finished. In general I really did not care for this at all.

This book is a little outside of my usual reading, but I was nicely surprised. The story was really sweet and I found myself enthralled by the main characters and hoping for them to get the ending they both deserved. While the install meetings of Hannah and Nathan felt a little stalkerish, I can totally relate to the awkwardness they were both experiencing. This is one of those books that’s going straight to the top of my recommendation list.
Thank you netgalley for an advanced copy of this book.

A sweet and funny read . She just got fired and will spend her summer taking care her sisters kids while she and her husband had to travel abroad for their jobs . While spenting time with the kids she deside to built a treehouse in the back yard . The neighbor is a very handsome man and they soon start to date . But at the end of the summer she will leave so she can find a new job . Will she stay and be with him or will she leave to chase her dream ?
I received this book from net galley and the publisher as an ARC. Thank you! All thoughts and opinions are my own

If you want something that is easy to read and gripping then look no further than this book.

In this book we meet Hannah who is a 28 year old woman who wants nothing more than to change absolutely every single thing about her life.

We also meet Nathan Wild who is had just moved back to his home town of Vermont after having lived in the city for over ten years and he is very happy and content in his life and doesn't want to change a single thing.

Suddenly Hannah is laid off from her job and decides to head for Vermont for the summer to help take care of her nieces and nephews, time to find out what she wants out of life and the direction when wants her life to go next.

Can I just say that the back drop of Vermont is absolutely stunning and the author really does a great job at describing it so you really feel like you are right there in the beautiful mountains with the characters.

It is here that Hannah and Nathan meet and their love story unfolds.