I feel like a broken record saying I can't believe summer is over, but I can't believe summer is over!
Okay, so I know that technically it's still summer until September 22nd. However, once school is back in session, summer has essentially ended. And once I'm back working, my reading habits adjust to a schedule with less down time as well as less mental capacity for heavy reading.
Before we jump into the reviews, here's a quick check-in of how I'm doing with my recent reading lists
- What's New On My TBR - I did an updated TBR list back on July 17th, and so far I have read two out of the ten books I shared. I currently have one of the titles on hold with my digital library app and have Manslaughter Park at the top of my reading queue.
- Summer Reading List - This list featured fifteen titles total. I have read four so far. I should point out that this list includes my August book club pick (which I haven't started yet).
- Spring Reading List - This one is still holding steady at two out of ten titles read. I have read the first two chapters of Hurt Me by C.G. Blaine, but I just wasn't into it.
- Winter Reading List - This one is still holding at five out of ten titles read. I am about 1/3 of the way through Love and Ruin, but it's really long and quite serious so it's going to take me awhile to finish it.
This reading roundup covers roughly two months of reading. As always, I am not including the books and/or series that I reread, but if you're interested I spent a bit of time with the Curse of the Gods series by Jane Washington and Jaymin Eve and am currently rereading Crea Reitan's Wonderland: Chronicles of Blood series.
Author: Barbara O'Neal
My June book club pick was the perfect read for summer. It's about two sisters, Kit and Josie, who reconnect after one of them fakes her death. Kit has spent more than a decade believing her sister died in a terrorist attack, but when she and her mother see who can only be Josie in the background of live news coverage of a New Zealand nightclub fire, Kit travels to New Zealand in the hopes of finding her. Josie, meanwhile, has created a meaningful life for herself complete with loving husband and kids. The character development in this book was amazing. Kit and Josie were so well-crafted. And I absolutely fell in love with Javier. You can read my in-depth review here.
Author: Marie Mistry
This was a fantastic final book in a truly beautiful series (I started reading this back in 2023!). Here's a series synopsis so as not to spoil anything for those who wish to read it. Rose was raised in the human world where she believed she was sick and weak. In reality, she is the lost queen of Faerie and must return home to unite and save the realm. Together with her guard, Rose travels the kingdom, gathering allies and reinvigorating the land with her magic. However, the Fomorian king will stop at nothing to bring her down and take control of all Faerie.
Author: Grady Hendrix
This book had been on my radar for awhile, and when it became available on my library app, I immediately dove in. For a vampire novel, this was not what I was expecting. When I hit the "3 Years Later" page about halfway through the book, I nearly lost my mind. That scene with the rats, though...shudder. That one almost lost me, but I'm glad I kept going. Okay, so a brief summary. Patricia and her four friends (Kitty, Slick, Maryellen, and Grace) have formed an unusual book club; they only read true crime and horror stories. When James Harris moves into their neighborhood, he masterfully manipulates his way into Patricia's life. When children start to go missing in the nearby black community, Patricia discovers James with one of the victims and goes to the police. What follows is truly heartbreaking for Patricia -- her husband forces her to start taking mental health meds, she becomes estranged from her children, her friend group falls apart. Then, three years later, she "wakes up" and refuses to stop until she's put an end to this monster once and for all.
Author: Rainbow Rowell
Shiloh and Cary were best friends in high school but fell out of touch with each other after graduation. However, when the third member of their friend group gets married, the two are thrown back together. Now, Shiloh is a divorced mom of two living back at home with her own mother, and Cary is a career Naval officer trying to take care of his mom from afar. Just like always, the timing couldn't be worse. The book is about their 'slow dance' around each other with lots of flashbacks woven in to provide relevance. This book was a bit odd for me. I enjoyed it, but it wasn't an easy read for me (despite only taking me the better part of a day on my own to get through). It was relatable but also not. I kept asking myself what was wrong with Shiloh -- her weird touches, pokes, and pulls were strange and unexplained other than by saying she was "too much" for most people. She was aggressively and ignorantly opinionated (however, she did mostly grow out of that), anti-social to the extreme (she did not grow out of that), and had an obsessive need to control everything in a way that felt highly manipulative. She clearly suffered from anxiety, but she also wasn't doing anything about it. Cary, the MMC, had severe communication issues, especially with Shiloh, and that led to 99% of their problems.
Author: Bonnie Garmus
It's rare for a book to move me to tears, but this one did, and not because it was sad, though it certainly had sad parts all throughout, but because it was genuinely moving in a way that I was not expecting. Elizabeth is a female scientist trying to make it in the 1960s. Things are finally looking up when she meets and falls for Calvin, a brilliant coworker whose name has star power. When he unexpectedly dies and Elizabeth learns she's pregnant, her life takes a downhill turn. A chance run-in with a tv producer leads to Elizabeth becoming host of an afternoon cooking show, Supper at Six, which becomes a nationwide phenomena. I feel the need to admit that it took me a bit to really get into this book. The first half or so felt like it really dragged, and the part with the cooking show was not in the first half at all. I do understand the point behind the first part of the book -- the second half would not have been nearly as good without it, but still. The first half was slow. There was also a lot of science, so much so that sometimes I didn't know what they were talking about. Science really has never been my subject. That aside, this book was about a movement and the empowerment of women.
Author: Susana Lopez Rubio
This was my July book club pick, and I've got mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I did enjoy the book. On the other, I'm not sure if I would recommend it. It's a historical romance set in Cuba in the 1950s when the mafia ruled the streets. Patricio and Gloria are a pair of star-crossed lovers who are seemingly not meant to ever be together. This book was packed with history, but as I mentioned in my full review, it felt a bit unnecessary and at times distracting. The book is meant to be about Patricio and Gloria, but quite a bit of it focuses on the times when they aren't together. A huge portion of the book takes place during the Cuban Revolution, but it felt like background noise instead of the prominent event I know it to be.
Wolves of Midnight books 1-3
Author: Becky Moynihan
I really enjoyed this trilogy. Nora is a natural-born werewolf who can't shift. Desperate, she goes to witches for help freeing her wolf, but when they discover that she hosts a full spirit, they try to capture her so that they can separate the spirit from her. Kolton is alpha of the most powerful werewolf pack in North America. Like Nora, Kolton hosts a full spirit. His two sisters and top two members of his pack do as well. Kolton takes Nora under his protection in exchange for her marrying him (in name only). He wants to marry someone he doesn't love and not take a mate because he doesn't want to end up like his mother who went feral when her soulmate died. There are two more books in this series -- book four focuses on Kolton's sister Vi and Griffin, while book 5 focuses on Nora's best friend Brielle and Jagger.
Author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
This was a deep, almost depressing read. The subject matter was difficult, and it didn't quite have a happy ending. This book is definitely not for everyone. In fact, I almost didn't keep reading because it was just so sad and full of grief. The ending line is gut-wrenchingly heartbreaking. Honestly, I don't know that I would even recommend this one, and I love this author. Essentially, this book is about a 26-year-old woman whose husband dies nine days after they elope and how she processes her grief after a whirlwind, intense romance. This book is not told in chapters but in months. The timeline is non-linear but everything happens within the same 12 months. The present day starts in June, but the story of Elsie and Ben's romance, which dates back to January, is woven in in a way that makes sense in November. The big conflict in the book is the fact that Ben did not tell his mother about Elsie at all, so Elsie and his mom do not meet until his death. Throughout the book, they develop a relationship and help each other to grow and move forward through not only this tragedy but their past traumas as well.
Author: J. Kearston
This was a fun and quirky duet. Ever is a mimic, a type of supernatural that can temporarily take other supernaturals' power and use it herself. However, not only does she not know what she is, but she also doesn't have a clue that supernaturals of any kind exist until she ends up in Mercy Ridge, a sanctuary city for supernaturals. That's where she winds up after leaving her cheating boyfriend, Adam, who's also been trying to steal the universal video game console Ever's been designing (his eventual comeuppance is pretty great). Once in Mercy Ridge, Ever meets the men who are her fated mates; each comes with their own set of trauma and problems. She's also approached by another buyer for her game console who also wants her to develop a cure for his wife's deadly illness and who will stop at nothing to get her to comply. There is a side plot development toward the end of the second book that I'm hoping will lead to a spin-off book.
Author: Jodi Picoult
This book will be on my best books of the year list for sure. Jodi Picoult is definitely a master, and this historical fiction book has made me question all I thought I knew about William Shakespeare. The premise of this book lies in a literary theory that Shakespeare was not the author of the many works attributed to him. Of course, hundreds of years later, this is nearly impossible to prove, but Picoult makes a good case (read her author's note at the end of the book!) and weaves a compelling tale of what might have happened. Her main characters, surprisingly, are not Shakespeare but rather Emilia Bassano, the first published female English poet and one of the people thought to be behind the Bard's quill, and her modern-day ancestor, Melina Greene, an aspiring playwright struggling to break into the male-dominated world of theater. Melina has crafted a play around Emilia that is chosen as a finalist in a small theater competition, but a "mistake" on her application leads the notoriously sexist artistic director to believe that the author is male. In a move that parallels Emilia's potential involvement with Shakespeare, Melina convinces her best friend, Andre, to pose as "Mel" while she pretends to be his assistant.
BONUS -- I don't usually include the books and series that I don't finish, but I spent a good bit of time on each of these so felt they were worth mentioning.
Reborn series (books 1-3)
Author: M. Sinclair
This is the second time I've tried this series, and I got much farther than last time, but ultimately I just could not connect with the main character, which is really disappointing since I usually really enjoy this author. Mia is a phoenix shifter who was held captive by a religious cult for most of her life. When her mother finds a new boyfriend, they leave the cult and move to the west coast where Mia meets a flight of dragons. Turns out they're her mates, along with a wolf shifter (which I found super random). Mia was supposed to be innocent and naive thanks to being kept completely isolated her entire life, but so much of what she did and said was the exact opposite, so her character was a bit confusing. She also was so hyper-focused on her clothes that it was annoying (there's nothing wrong with that really, I just didn't need pages dedicated to her describing every item of clothing she went through). I also thought that there was too much time spent on inner monologues, for all characters, especially considering how much of those inner thoughts were repetitive.
Emberhold Academy series book 1-2
Author: Frankie James
This series has such an interesting premise behind it, but quite frankly the writing style and lack of editing made it so hard for me to get through. I did enjoy the characters for the most part, although I felt like the way they conversed with each other was completely unrealistic (nobody calls each other "bitch" as much as these girls do in casual conversation as a term of endearment -- it was maddening, honestly). I might pick up the third book at some point; like I said, the concept behind the plot is interesting and not something I've read before, but it's really difficult for me to get into a story when my brain is constantly in "edit" mode because the grammar and mechanics are so bad, and unfortunately that's not something I can just turn off.
Shadowed Souls series book 1-2
Author: Madison Cole
This series started out so promising, but the third and final book felt like it deviated from the actual plot, and I quit reading out of frustration. I truly didn't understand why the characters were doing what they were doing. Anyway, here's your synopsis: After a childhood of horrific abuse at the hands of her father, Avery has spent the last last ten years of her life rarely leaving her adoptive family's mansion, but when her adoptive mother is killed in a car accident, her adoptive father enrolls her in college against her wishes, as well as those of her hateful stepbrother, Wyatt. Despite Wyatt's best efforts, his friends welcome her into their group, eventually moving her into their house when they discover Avery not only has a stalker but also that her deranged father has been released from prison and wants her back.
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