Summer you wants that book, and next week you wants this one...

Everything I aquired, read and finished in April

Books Finished:

Pomona Afton Can So Solve a Murder by Bellamy Rose ($$ Kindle)

How to Sleep at Night by Elizabeth Harris (gifted, publicist)

Mansion Beach by Meg Mitchell Moore (gifted, publicist)

Christa Comes Out of Her Shell by Abbi Waxman

Welcome to Glorious Tuga by Francesca Segal ($$ Kindle)

Welcome to Murder Week by Karen Dukess (gifted, publicist)

Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance by Alison Espach

Books Read but unfinished:

Zero Stars, Do Not Recommend by MJ Wassmer = ($$ Kindle) Notes: Ok, I don’t usually talk about it when I don’t finish something, but I did tell y’all about this, so… as funny as I thought this was and as much as I liked the beginning, I just found it too stressful, in the end. I could not see any hopeful way out, although other reviewers assured me that it was so. I could read the end and then go back, which I have been known to do, but I did not. Take that for whatever it's worth, which isn't much.

Books Acquired but not yet read: ($$=I bought it with my own hard-earned cash, 1/2$=I used my author discount, Gifted)

Las reinas de Polanco by Guadalupe Loaeza ($$ in Mexico)

Everyone Is Lying to You by Jo Piazza ($$ pre-order)

Thrown for a Loop by Sarina Bowen ($$ pre-order)

Dying to Meet You by Sarina Bowen ($$ pre-order)

Looky at MEEEEE not buying all the books and then not reading them! Totally fair to buy myself a book in Spanish while I was in Mexico (and I’m getting smarter, this one is short!). Other than that—all pre-orders! And pre-orders are amazing, they’re a gift to future delighted you.

Which is good, because I finished some wonderful delightful fun things this month… and two of them aren’t out yet and I still absolutely 100% think you should order them or reserve them at your nearest library. Notes below. I enjoyed all my reads this month, but what struck me most was balance necessary for a good reading month. I’m reading more books again, and happy about it, but I can’t do a month of rom-coms, or mystery after mystery, or thriller after thriller. I followed Pomona Afton Can So Solve a Murder (Rom-com murder mystery, enjoyable suspension of belief necessary) with How to Sleep at Night (commercial fiction, very grounded in reality) and then Christa Comes Out of Her Shell (I thought it was a rom-com, it wasn’t exactly and also it was—more com than rom.)

I gobbled Welcome to Murder Week in approximately 2 nights, and then I had a problem because I wanted more like this and this is a little indescribable, so I went for something else that somehow combined page-turner with cozy and found Welcome to Glorious Tuga.

And that was enough cozy, which led me to read Mansion Beach and Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance somewhat concurrently. I said last week there would be more on Notes, so here goes: this is maybe best summed up as “don’t buy this if you loved The Wedding People and want more of that” but “do buy it if you love a very voicy narrator and don’t mind a hefty dose of grief”. What the two have in common is that they both center around a very observant protagonist thrust into a situation with a lot to observe, who really needs to find a way to stop observing and start living. But Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance is very intrusive, it demands your attention in a way that I found difficult in a nighttime read, and so it became a book I had to finish during the day or early evening.

Mansion Beach, though… Mansion Beach was perfect. Protagonist to root for, lots of POV characters, all with readable voices, a page-turner of a mystery, far from cozy but not Karin Slaughter either (OMG, I have an advance of her next book and it is a WOW but also SO NOT A BEDTIME READ. She’s like, Silence of the Lambs? Hold my beer. More on that soon.)

Ok, books you MUST PRE-ORDER below, but also a question—do you have to vary up your reads or do you read a bunch in one genre and then have to come up for air? That happens to me sometimes, too.

Mansion Beach, Meg Mitchell Moore. THE PERFECT BEACH READ. I think everyone will be loving this this summer. It’s a page-turner-y multi POV summer saga with everything you could ask for: a beach, a body, rich people behaving badly but also sometimes not behaving badly, parties, drama and just enough gender-swapped Gatsby to think hard about the meaning of the American Dream.

Welcome to Murder Week, Karen Dukess. This book is a delight—cross an old school British cozy with Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and you have this, a delightful page-turner in which you’re totally invested in all that is happening that is also somehow totally free of any anxiety or stress-producing angst.