The Calendar Girls is a monthly blog event that was created by Melanie at MNBernard Books, and Flavia at Flavia the Bibliophile, and is now hosted by Flavia at Flavia the Bibliophile, Dani at Mousai Books and Adrienne at Darque Dreamer Reads. It was inspired by the 1961 classic song by Neil Sedaka and created to ignite fun bookish discussions among readers and bloggers.

So, just like the song, each month a new theme is chosen (participants will get to vote between two choices), and participating bloggers get to choose their favorite book within the theme, or the book they think best fits the theme, to talk about in a blog post on the first Monday of each month.

For today’s post, the theme and my selection are:

World Turtle Day:
Favorite Slow Burn of a Novel

world turtle day

WINNER:

Dear Aaron by Mariana Zapata

Check out Dear Aaron on Goodreads

Ruby Santos knew exactly what she was getting herself into when she signed up to write a soldier overseas.

The guidelines were simple: one letter or email a week for the length of his or her deployment. Care packages were optional.

Been there, done that. She thought she knew what to expect.

What she didn’t count on was falling in love with the guy.

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I’m a sucker for a good slow burn, so I’m always on the look-out for new books that are labeled slow burn and when I discovered that this author called Mariana Zapata was known for her epic slow burn romances AND had a book about a pen pal romance (yep, also a sucker for that), I picked up Dear Aaron at lightning speed. And this was just THE BEST slow burn I’ve ever read. The first 70% or so of the book is told completely in letters or texts between Ruby, our main character, and Aaron, the overseas soldier she is writing. So naturally this is a very slow, very character-driven story, as you have the front seat at these 2 people getting to know each other, becoming friends and eventually falling for each other – through their writing. Yep, major swoons here. (Full review here)