“Those years you think you’ve wasted simply mean the ones ahead of you have tripled in value. You’ll make them count. You’ll get everything you can out of every minute.”
– Girls Just Want to Have Sun, Jo Lyons
This week, for the very first time, I was approved for an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy). As an avid reader on my 33rd book this year, I have heard so much about ARCs and how amazing they can be to get a early access to books that are not released yet. I finally took a plunge last year to set up a profile on NetGalley, a website described by themselves as ‘a platform for booksellers, librarians, educators, and media professionals to discover and recommend books’. In exchange for an honest review, you can be approved by authors and publishers for early access to books. Despite launching my profile I never actually got round to fine tuning the details to make me appealing, but this week I decided to go for it.
I requested a few books that I liked the look and sound of, along with some written by my favourite authors, despite knowing I didn’t really have enough experience to be approved for those. However much to my surprise, I got my first approval back the same day, with Girls Just Want to Have Sun by Jo Lyons, which is due to publish on 14th June. Described as a laugh-out-loud, sun-soaked romantic comedy full of mishaps, mayhem and margaritas. It is the first in a series of 3 books called The Girls, this story follows Connie’s journey of self discovery.
This book was categorised as a 3* read for me scoring 3.3/5. I am using the PEACH rating system which was curated by Erin Smith (@erinmith.art on Instagram) which looks to rate Plot, Empathy, Artistry, Characters and Heart out of 5 each. Once you have a total, you then divide this by 5 in order to convert it to a star rating. You can see Erin’s video here on how she devised this plan and more about how it works.
*Spoiler Alert*…here is my review for the book.
This book was a rollercoaster! Amazingly I could literally envision this entire book and I haven’t even been to Benidorm. That being said, Connie must literally have the worst luck in the world. If I was Matteo I would be sending her straight home on a plane cause she seems like very bad news. The first few accidents seemed funny and a bit fated but they just kept happening! I really felt sorry for her at points as she was clearly struggling with grief and depression and noone was really supporting that, but overall the trip definitely seemed to help her find herself even if it did all happen within a week. The Dollz were absolute characters and honestly chaotic, they never seemed to make any progress and I couldn’t really grasp what they were adding to the story positively. Although I definitely want friends like Ged & Liam! I weirdly don’t really know what to think of this book but it definitely gave me some giggles.
Overall my first experience reading an ARC was great. The book was easy to read and I really enjoyed the NetGalley experience. Once my profile was complete I found it really easy to browse the available books and put in my applications. I posted my review on Goodreads & on NetGalley, and will also post to Amazon the day after publication. I have since been approved for another ARC, so am really excited to continue on this journey. I will be posting my book reviews here from now on too, so definitely stick around if you’d like to follow my reading journey.
Love, Beth x
Beth's Notebook 
I hadn’t heard of ARCs until you told me but it’s really cool to get a sneak peek. Feels like you are part of a special inner circle!
LikeLiked by 1 person