What I’m Reading (7.19.21)

Happy Monday, friends! My weekend was really lovely. I got to go to afternoon tea with two friends and while I’m not much of a tea drinker, I really enjoyed myself. The tea was surprisingly good and the food was delicious. And it was just so fun to get all dressed up! I also had game night with the fam and spent some time strolling around Barnes & Noble.

I finished three books last week and liked them all! Here are my reviews:

The Breakdown Lane by Jacquelyn Mitchard (★★★☆☆)

This is my book club’s pick for July and it was quite an interesting read. It was published in 2006 and I was curious if the writing would hold up. For the most part, it did, although there was definitely some troubling language like the r-word being thrown out by the teenage character too many times to count. The novel is ostensibly about Julieanne, an advice columnist and mother of three whose world is rocked when her husband suddenly announces that he wants to take a “sabbatical” from their life and go “find himself” alone. Right as this happens, Julieanne is diagnosed with a serious illness that causes her to rely on her friends and husband’s parents more than ever. The novel is told from the perspective of Julieanne and through journal entries of her son, Gabe, who is 15. It was a good novel, but there were times I wanted a bit more nuance from Julieanne’s husband who was just a really bad dude with nothing redemptive about him. (Which made it hard to feel anything for Julieanne when she was so upset with him leaving.) I listened to this book on audio and kinda hated the narrator so that also tempered my enjoyment of the novel. (It really needed a male voice to narrate Gabe’s part; the female narrator switching to a super deep male voice—which always made me think Gabe was much older than he was—was rather silly.) All in all, a good novel but not one that had any sort of impact on me.

A Lady by Midnight by Tessa Dare (★★★★☆)

This is another winner from Tessa Dare! This novel, the third in her Spindle Cove series, tells of the love story between Kate and Thorne. Kate has been at Spindle Cove (a little sanctuary for the “misfits” of the world) for a while after breaking free from a boarding school that was no good for her. She’s searching for family and love and acceptance. Thorne arrives in Spindle Cove with his militia and is quickly drawn to Kate for reasons to be revealed later. This novel involves a precocious family filled with their own brand of “misfits,” a fake engagement, and a really crazy ending involving a duel and medieval weaponry. I loved every minute I spent with Thorne and Kate, especially watching Thorne’s walls come down as he learned how to love Kate well.

Untamed by Glennon Doyle (★★★★☆)

I went into this book with low expectations, only because so many people had rated it so highly, and when that happens, I can convince myself there’s no way it can live up to the hype. Especially for self-help-type books. While not a 5-star read for me, Untamed was definitely a book that I would wholly recommend. In this book, Glennon discusses the time in her life when she decided to make some serious changes, namely divorcing her husband and marrying a woman. It’s a book about wrestling with faith, motherhood, her queer identity, and this new family she was developing between her, her ex-husband, her new wife, and their three children. It was a book that I read at a time when I’m also wrestling with a lot of things and I found so much comfort in Glennon’s words. She made me feel seen and loved, made me hopeful, made me recognize that living in my truth is the most important thing. While there were certain aspects of the novel that made me scratch my head (basically any interaction with her kids because, quite honestly, the conversations seemed fabricated to fit into the mold of the point she was trying to make), overall, I really liked the book and I think it’s definitely one to read if you’ve ever wrestled with your faith or your identity.

What I’m Reading This Week

I started How to Find a Princess by Alyssa Cole last night, so I don’t have too much to say about it right now. I have very low expectations, though, as the book has a 3.59 rating on Goodreads, which is very low. This is the second book in her Runaway Royals series and I didn’t love the first novel, so I’m hoping the second one is better.

Also on my list this week, I’m starting The Stationery Shop by Marjan Kamali on audio and will be dipping into Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge.

What are you reading?