Review: Up All Night by Annabeth Albert (Mount Hope #1)


Note: An advance reader copy (ARC) was provided by the author.

Up All Night is the first book in Annabeth Albert's brand-new small-town M/M romance series, Mount Hope, which is set in a fictional Oregonian town by the same name. The series is about a close-knit group of friends who come together after one of them becomes a widow and single father to four kids. One of those friends is Sean Murphy, a forty-three-year-old divorced man with two adult children and a former fire captain back in Seattle. Moving back to Mount Hope allowed him to be closer to his parents while also being there for one of his closest friends and his family. When Denver Rucker, the thirty-eight-year-old short-order cook at Honey's Hotcake Hut, offers him a ride and a shower, Sean can't refuse--not when he wants to explore the draw between the two of them. Knowing that being in Mount Hope is temporary for both of them, Denver and Sean decide to engage in a fling. But then feelings start to creep in--the kind of feelings that are more about forever than just for now. Will they choose to stay and fight for it?

As always, Annabeth Albert delivers the feels with her latest series starter, and she's given the series a cast of characters that make it easy to want more from them. Sean and Denver were an interesting pair, and it was clear why they were as hesitant as they were to engage in anything past a one-time hook-up, especially on Denver's end. I liked seeing them forge a friendship amidst the non-platonic feelings they had developing between them. As good as the one-on-one time they had was, I also thought that their interactions with those who were closest to them were great because it helped firm up the foundation of the series as a whole. My hesitation in giving this book a higher rating has to do with how easily Sean jumped into the initial hook-up with Denver and then everything else that followed. Then there was Sean's relationships with his son and daughter, which was supposedly close but there wasn't much of it on the page. Still, Up All Night was an entertaining beginning to this new series and garners four stars.

Release Date: 28 March 2024

Date Read: 20 March 2024

Learn more about Annabeth Albert.

Pre-order Up All Night on Amazon.

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