E-galley Review: Stop Ghosting Me by Tara Sivec

I received this book for free from the author in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Stop Ghosting Me by Tara Sivec
on October 17, 2022
Genres: Adult Holiday Romance, Adult Romantic Comedy
Source: the author
Format: E-galley
My Rating:
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Blurb:

Harvest Grove News:

Another Halloween season is upon us! As usual, please be mindful of the movie fans traveling from Vine Street to Cinnamon Way. 

Favorite bar owner, Ford Prescott, is back in town for his yearly stay, making this his sixth October in Harvest Grove! Be sure to welcome him warmly when you see him at the Wicked Pub and Grub. Single ladies – try not to overwhelm the poor man with so many baked goods this year. 

Sidney Tanner wants residents to know her Severed Head Succulents will be buy one, get one free before the countdown to midnight begins on October Eve. Since it’s likely she’ll be in jail at some point that night, please text her your orders. 

Still seeking volunteers for various events around town:
*Someone to organize pumpkin carving night at the Gore House. 
*An extra, bloody cheerleader for the yearly viewing of The Babysitter’s Last Halloween. Costume will be provided. 
*A brave soul to keep an eye on the Tanner girls this month. We don’t want a repeat of last year’s corn maze incident, or the mashed potato fiasco in poor Jarvis’s yard previously.

We assume Ford will be volunteering for that last one, since he and Sidney are always joined at the hip when he’s in town. A little bat tells me these October best friends will be heating things up in town this year. Sparks will be flying–no offense to Colleen or the Tanner girls who set her garage on fire–and these two might just be carving out some time for love this Halloween! 

Fasten your sheet belts, Harvest Grove! Let’s hope when the clock strikes midnight on October 31st, our dear Sidney won’t be ghosted again…

My Review

Okay, I have always been a big fan of the Scream movies. I mean I named the first dog I bought for myself as a grownup after the main character, although I spelled it Sydney instead of Sidney. So I loved all the plays on that series with this book. Like the main character’s name being Sidney, and her love interest’s last name was Prescott, so if she married him, she’d be Sidney Prescott, the main character from Scream. Even funnier is that because this Sidney is such a horror movie and all things to do with the Halloween holiday fan, as is the town she lives in, she also gets the humor in this!

As usual we have the hilarious snarky banter and behavior of all the characters. We have the usual colorful variety of characters in the town and families. And something Tara Sivec does in her books that I love, is making even the people you just know you are going to hate into crazy characters that you kind of like a teeny bit, or at least enjoy their parts in the story. I won’t mention exactly who it is, but there is one family member at the end that cracks me up every time I think of something they said or did, and I was sure I would hate them. Oh, and one of the lines that cracked me up too much was: Itchy-bod Crane. And I loved when she was arguing with the little kids.

Sidney’s pledge to never actually have a real relationship made sense with what her family had been through with her father and uncle. But I loved that she still had some good memories of her father, that he was at least a good dad, even if not a faithful husband. And her family’s way to handle the anniversary of their deaths as well as her sister and cousin’s service of investigating and getting revenge on other unfaithful people was hilarious, and something that could probably only come from the mind of Tara Sivec. So thank god for Tara Sivec writing and sharing her crazy ideas with us!

It also makes sense why Ford felt the way he did, with his family and what had happened to him. I was anxiously awaiting his side of the story, so once we got it, I was pleased to find out how he felt about her and that this was going to be the year. He was all alpha, wanting to take care of her, and the letter he got from his brother at the end, and how it made things so much more like the completed puzzle he made by staying finally, yeah, this sentence rambles on, I just don’t know what to say except how much I loved that little extra bit!

There was the added part of the setting in that there was a cult like horror/slasher film that was celebrated the whole month of October in this small town, and while it definitely contributed to so much of the story, it wasn’t the main theme, and I liked how it was done. I also want to try so many of the baked goods mentioned in this, that the single women, and some men, of the town would deliver to Ford when he visited in October. And Sidney’s behavior with all of those Tupperware containers cracked me up. As an October baby, I love Halloween and the whole month, and this story was a perfect read for me this month!