It is getting to that fun time of year where I start trickling out some of my thoughts on the BIG summer reads this year! This summer you can expect an OVERWHELMING amount of incredible books to enjoy poolside or with your feet up in the backyard!
Today I’m here to share about SEVEN amazing reads that you can pick up now (or start pre-ordering for your summer beach reading)!
While you’re here, be sure to print out the 2019 MomAdvice reading challenge worksheet and join our free online book club! You can check out the 2019 MomAdvice Book Club picks over here. Don’t forget to send me a friend request over on GoodReads for more great book reviews!
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What will you be picking?? I decided to go with Necessary People this month!
Here are 7 must-read books I tackled in April:
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishing house for providing an advanced copy for review. All thoughts and opinions are my own!
Looking for a novel that you just won’t be able to put down this month? The Girl He Used to Know is a beautiful contemporary fiction escape that features a really incredible love story with characters that seem to lift off the pages.
Annika is an English major at the University of Illinois. She struggles to make sense of social situations and college, in particular, is a very scary time.
When she joins the chess club, she immediately beats Jonathan Hoffman, who can’t help to be captured by Annika. She is different than any girl he has ever been with, a worthy chess opponent, and she’s stunning (without even being aware of it!). They begin a beautiful relationship together, but an unforeseen tragedy forces them apart and ends their relationship.
One decade later, Annika and Jonathan are reunited and happen to be living in the same town. The two begin rekindling what was lost, but must also address why they lost each other in the first place.
Annika is a character that you can’t help but to fall in love with and you also can’t help rooting for these two to work their relationship out. Graves rounds out her story with beautiful supporting characters that help Annika navigate the world in really incredible ways. I can fully admit that I may have teared up in a few places in this sweet read.
Definitely add this one to your book bags this summer! I have a feeling you will love Annika & Jonathan as much as me!
I’m recommending this one for fans of The Light We Lost!
5 out of 5 Stars
Recursion by Blake Crouch (pre-order for June 11th!!)
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishing house for providing an advanced copy for review. All thoughts and opinions are my own!
Dark Matter is one of my favorite science fiction book recommendations to give and ended up making my top ten books list in 2016. To say that I had HIGH expectations for the next Blake Crouch novel would be putting it mildly.
I am so happy to say that this book DID NOT disappoint!
In this story, Barry Sutton is an NYC cop who has been investigating the phenomenon the media has called, “False Memory Syndrome.” It is a mysterious affliction that makes its victims mad with memories of a life that they never lived.
Helena Smith is also trying to understand memory and wants to find a way that it can be captured, through her work as a neuroscientist. Inspired by her mother’s struggles with dementia, she has decided to study memory and focus on a piece of technology that will allow people to preserve their most precious memories.
As Barry begins searching for the truth, he discovers what happens when we play God with memory and how Helena’s technology has helped to create this False Memory Syndrome. While sheltering ourselves from our most devastating memories, by rewriting our history, Barry & Helena begin to realize how altering memories can change our identity, our relationships, and how altering circumstances doesn’t always yield the results we are after.
When the technology gets into the wrong hands, they realize how it can destroy the world, as they know it, and they will stop at nothing to get it back, forced to repeat their lives over and over again, to try to change their circumstance.
Once again, Crouch blends science fiction with a thriller pace and a beautiful love story. His storytelling is masterful and the suspense is so incredibly good in this one.
I immediately passed this book on to my husband who loved it just as much as me. I am so glad I got to screen this and feel confident recommending this one to our Dark Matter fans.
If you haven’t dipped your toes yet into the science fiction world, I have a feeling you will find this to be a compelling read that will pull you right out of your literary comfort zone.
What are you waiting for?
Be sure to pre-order this for June!
5 out of 5 Stars
A couple of the ladies in our book club were RAVING about, Chronicles of a Radical Hag, and managed to convince me to order this for my trip.
I read a lot of Landvik’s earlier books so I knew she approaches stories with a lot of heart and humor, something she does well again in this latest novel.
Haze Evans is a local legend, writing as a columnist for over fifty years, for the Granite Creek Gazette. Her past columns were filled with liberal ideas and her column was nicknamed the “Chronicles of a Radical Hag,” by conservative readers. She lived without censorship and would reply to her naysayers with tongue-in-cheek recipes to help them melt away their misdirected anger, unafraid to speak her mind about anything and everything.
Haze is unexpectedly hospitalized though and unable to write her column. This is when Susan, who works for the paper, has her son (Sam) help work at the paper for the summer and Sam begins discovering that this older lady’s stories are brave, hilarious, and her political struggles are not too different than today. He finds these columns so fascinating, in fact, that he begins sharing them in class and other kids begin to look forward to Haze’s storytelling AND the hilarious and heartfelt replies from people who read her column.
I am recommending this one for fans of Dear Mrs. Bird or anyone who needs a little bit of humor mixed in with the heaviness of the political world.
Landviks’ trademark humor really shines in this book and you can’t help reading these columns and responses with a smile, especially when a younger generation is discovering how history is repeating itself today.
4 out of 5 Stars
The Floating Feldmans by Elyssa Friedland (pre-order for July 23rd!!)
Thank you to the publishing house for providing an advanced copy for review. All thoughts and opinions are my own!
I’m such a sucker for dysfunctional family stories and The Floating Feldmans is a fun one, if those are your cup of tea too!
The premise of this one is that Annette Feldman has decided that she is going to book a cruise for her entire family, in honor of her 70th birthday! It has been over a decade since they have all been together and getting them all on a boat has them trapped into oodles of family time together.
Each of these siblings has come on their boat with an extra set of baggage though (sorry, I can’t resist a good pun!) and this luggage harbors a lot of old secrets and the terrible kinds of hurts that only a family member can seem to hold against you.
Some have grown up for the better, some have secrets that threaten their future, and the grandkids just might have a couple secrets of their own.
Told from alternating perspectives, this is over-the-top fun and had me laughing out loud at various points.
If you just want a fun escape, add this one to your beach bag. I’m recommending this one for fans of, This is Where I Leave You.
4 out of 5 Stars
Thank you to NetGalley and the publishing house for providing an advanced copy for review. All thoughts and opinions are my own!
I never thought I would be such a sucker for a good love story, but I was completely head-over-heels for, How to Walk Away, and Center’s beautiful writing. The author is now back with another beautiful love story, perfectly named, Things You Save in a Fire.
Center’s uses her husband’s firefighter background to craft the story of Cassie Hanwell. In this fictional story, she is the only female firefighters in her Texas firehouse and is respected by her colleagues and boss. After a public incident though, that taints Hanwell’s image, she finds the timing of her estranged and ailing mother’s request to move to Boston lines up with when she needs to step down.
She joins the Boston firehouse and finds the environment to be a bit of a “boy’s club.” Her ability to separate her work from her personal life has never been an issue, but Cassie has never seen a guy like the rookie that she must train with on her new job. Cassie has built up walls for a reason and the rookie seems to be disregarding them, no matter how hard she tries.
This is a later coming-of-age story where Cassie must resolve her old hurts with her mother, confront the issue of aging parents, and admit why she has been unable to be close to anyone because of a traumatic incident in her past.
That’s not all though…she also must fight off someone who is stalking her and doesn’t want to see her succeed at the fire station.
These characters are deeply flawed, just like we are, and Center’s does an incredible job making them feel real and relatable.
The love story, I have to say, is FIRE and you can’t help but root for these two brokenly beautiful people to love each other.
Definitely, pre-order this one for your summer stack!
I’m recommending this beautiful read for anyone who is a Taylor Jenkins Reid fan! I know you will love it too!
5 out of 5 Stars
Little by Edward Carey
Have you joined our free book club yet? Even if you aren’t looking for a discussion, it is such a great place to connect with your fellow bookworms. This month we dove into Little , a historical fiction novel about Marie Tussaud. Marie was an orphan in the 1700’s who ended up being taken in by an eccentric wax sculpture and develops a growing curiosity and fondness for the art.
To pay for her food and shelter she begins as an apprentice and later tutors a princess on the art of creating wax sculptures.
Does Tussaud and wax figurines bring to mind any famous tourist attraction?
Carey writes AND illustrates this unusual novel that reminded many of our book club participants of a good old-fashioned Dickens novel.
Learning about the craftsmanship that went into these wax figures, particularly back in those days, was equally fascinating and horrifying.
As someone who appreciates the wildly weird, I was really taken into this element of the story.
Admittedly, this was a slow starter and took awhile for me to get into and I can’t say this book would be for everyone. For me, the beauty in historical fiction is always the rabbit trails it leads me on and this one was a fun find for exploring the art of wax sculpture, a subject that I would have never really thought to explore.
Our chat ended up being an excellent one so I would definitely recommend this for any of your own upcoming book club chats.
4 out of 5 Stars
Not many of you could probably guess that I’m an old-fashioned theater nerd….well, maybe you could?
This is one reason why I was so excited to dive into the contemporary novel, Trust Exercise, this month. This was a big buzz book for Spring and has gotten a lot of positive press, in particular, about it’s exploration of the #metoo movement, told through these reflective stories.
I am having a hard time reviewing this one because the concept was brilliant, but I felt like the entire plot could have been tightened up entirely. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it. The writing, while excellent, didn’t always have a story that I felt entirely connected to.
This novel is set in the 1980’s at a highly competitive arts high school. Along with the talent and greed to get ahead, hormones are raging and relationships between students began to splinter and friendships are tested.
In a spiral of events, Choi begins to flip the plot on its head that makes everything flip upside down for the reader. What you think may be happening, isn’t happening, and a new perspective on the story changes the plot entirely.
It is these new glimmers of truth that allow the reader to see that everything is not as it seems and the power that comes to play in the arts world.
I can see this leading to heated discussions in book clubs about our own past experiences with adults and teachers, in particular, in the arts community. The changing narrative, in itself, becomes a trust exercise into itself.
Not only are the kids doing these trust exercise in their classroom, but Choi is giving us an exercise in who to believe.
Had the plot been tighter, I could see this being a 5-star read, simply for the value of the discussion and the smart twists Choi uses. I struggled to connect though as the chapters felt a bit clunky at times and I found myself having difficulty to keep attention through it.
For reference though, I listened to this one on audiobook! It might lend itself better in print format and I still found the topic and plot twists to be solid. I can’t wait to see what Choi writes next.
3.5 out of 5 Stars
Read With Me This Year
January 2019 Must-Reads
February 2019 Must-Reads
March 2019 Must-Reads
What did you read this month? Looking for book ideas? Check out our entire Book section of the site! Don’t forget to friend me on GoodReads! xo
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