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July 1, 2021 By Melanie Sweeney Leave a Comment

June Book Roundup

An orange block with three book covers for Seven Days in June, The Road Trip, and Very Sincerely Yours and a block of text that says Melanie's June Book Roundup.

We are halfway through 2021! Can you believe it? If things continue as they have gone thus far, I’m on track to read about 120 books this year, which, as a historically slow reader, kind of blows my mind. (I still read slowly. Audiobooks help, but I also simply read for more hours of the day than I used to.)

I’m also about to run out of space in my reading journal, which has unfortunately been discontinued, so if you have any recommendations for great ones, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll be stuck using a regular journal and formatting the pages in some fashion… Real problems, I tell you.

This month, I read ten books, primarily in audio. #AudiobooksCount #AudiobookDefenseLeague

As always, I’ve transcribed the excerpts below. I did my best to punctuate them accurately, but I apologize for any mistakes.

My standouts also happen to all be June releases, so place your holds now if you’re a library patron as these are all pretty hot, new titles.

An aqua-colored book cover with an illustrated young man and woman leaning on opposite sides of a red Mini Cooper with luggage inside. She's wearing overalls and has short, purple hair. He's in khaki shorts and a white t-shirt with brown hair, looking over the roof of the car at her. The title is The Road Trip in script at the top with the author, Beth O'Leary printed at the bottom. The tag line reads, "This is going to be one bumpy ride." — Look at the fresh summery vibes in this cover

My first favorite book this month was Beth O’Leary’s The Road Trip. I was looking forward to it after loving her debut, The Flatshare, and I liked this one even more.

The setup here is pretty great. Addie and Dylan broke up almost two years ago. Now, they’re each on their way in separate cars to a mutual friend’s wedding in Scotland. Romance reasons place Dylan’s car directly behind Addie’s near the start of the trip, and he accidentally rear-ends her. They, along with their passengers (Addie with her sister and another acquaintance, Dylan with his best friend, Marcus), wind up all cramming into Addie’s Mini Cooper to complete the long drive to the wedding.

One fiasco after another slows them down, prolonging the awkward reunion and forcing them deal with unresolved feelings. And the tension isn’t only between Addie and Dylan. Addie has about as much emotional baggage with Marcus, who played a key role in the events of the past. Through yo-yo-ing timelines, we get the full story of Addie and Dylan’s relationship and breakup alongside their present-day ill-fated road trip.

First of all, I’m a sucker for second chance romances. I don’t always love how heavy these books can be on flashbacks or full-on Then and Now timelines, but I do enjoy the unfolding of details about what went wrong the first time and getting to see the characters change to make it work this time. It’s the dark night of the soul or low moment but right there at the beginning of the book. There’s something deeply uplifting, when the story is handled well, about seeing what is usually just that last stretch where they have to make amends, change their ways, etc. as the meat of the story.

Early in the book, once they’ve begun the drive together, Dylan thinks, “If one could harness secrets for energy, we wouldn’t need petrol. We’d have enough grudges in this car to take us all the way to Scotland.” This right here is my catnip. Secrets, grudges, and no way to avoid them!

This particular book hits these buttons for me, but it also does something a little more complex in how it uses Marcus. Marcus is charismatic, wealthy, and loyal, and he and Dylan have been through some experiences that have really bonded them. Their friendship is also toxic and co-dependent. Dylan’s take on Marcus is this: “He brings out the bravery in me. With Marcus by my side, I’m somebody. The sort of man who throws caution to the wind, who defies his father, who chooses [to study] poetry when he ought to know better.”

It’s clear in the past storyline that whatever Marcus does to augment Dylan’s life, he also pretty easily influences and leads Dylan around. Prior to Addie, the two men slept with the same woman, essentially sharing her and highlighting a lack of boundaries in their friendship. When Dylan gets serious with Addie, Marcus grapples with the changing dynamic in his own relationship with Dylan in ways that undermine Addie.

I was pleasantly surprised by this nuanced portrayal of not only such a unique male-male friendship within a romance novel, but also the acute representation of the toxic aspect of it and how forgiveness plays out in more than the romance. Dylan asks Addie when you should give up on a person, and she replies easily, “When they’re bad for you.”

It’s not that simple in Dylan’s eyes. But we learn that, in the present storyline, Dylan and Marcus went through their own breakup of sorts after things fell apart between Dylan and Addie. Marcus is so central to Dylan as a character and to what happens between Dylan and Addie that it really feels like the book is about the whole triad rather than just the couple. I found it very complex and satisfying.

I always note favorite lines or moments in a reading journal, but this book is odd in that it wasn’t hugely quotable for me despite being very funny and sharply insightful. The humor often comes from relatable asides from the POV characters, things that genuinely made me chuckle to myself, as well as from the disjoint of “straight man” POV characters dealing with somewhat absurd people and situations. Overall, it’s a funny book that also goes to some heart-wrenching places.

Content notes for mental illness, sexual assault, stalking, and toxic relationships, but even with some heavy themes, this is an uplifting summer read.

A book cover with a beige envelope in the background and an illustrated man and woman, sitting atop a large red typewriter. She has a short brown bob hairstyle and wears a yellow dress with blue shoes. He has brown hair, a blue suit jacket and tie, and gray pants with a pop of yellow socks. The title is in script across the top in red and blue lettering: Very Sincerely Yours. The author's name, Kerry Winfrey, is print at the bottom in red. — “You dress like hot Mr. Rogers.”

Next up is Kerry Winfrey’s new release, Very Sincerely Yours, which actually reminded me a little bit of Beth O’Leary’s first book, The Flatshare. This one also gives us a main character, Theodora, aka “Teddy,” who has just gotten out of a relationship with hallmarks of emotional abuse, including damaging criticism and forced isolation from her friends.

Teddy is strengthened by those same friends in the aftermath of the breakup, and she embarks on a mission to do something that scares her every day in the hopes of rediscovering herself and finding some direction. She also begins to email the host of Everett’s Place, a local children’s puppet show, who happens to look, as one side character notes, like “a hot Mr. Rogers.”

Everett has his flaws – mainly, he’s a workaholic and a perfectionist, and his drive to make his show a success sometimes back-burners his relationships – but he is a refreshing male main character in that he has emotional intelligence and relationship skills that are typically coded feminine. He is a hero who doesn’t need to be saved, fixed, or trained to be on equal emotional footing and able to love the heroine well.

I have a theory about a crop of newer heroes like Everett, but my main guess about why they work (for me anyway) is that these dudes don’t require as much effort from their potential romantic partners. Often, they are the ones helping the heroine get her messy life back on track. In other words, they are doing the work heroines (and real-life women) have been doing forever. They have solid support systems in friends and family. They go to therapy. They can talk about their feelings.

In Everett’s case, he straight-up teaches children how to manage their emotions in healthy ways. He takes his role very seriously in his daily life, not just when he’s on camera. In a moment of self-doubt, when he feels unfulfilled but can’t figure out why, he tells himself, “Buck up, you idiot,” but quickly backtracks “because he would absolutely destroy someone who told any of his child viewers something like that.”

Instead, he tells his reflection, “It’s okay to feel your feelings.” It doesn’t solve his problem, which is more complicated than what a lot of his viewers need help with, but it’s a nice moment where we see a man treating himself tenderly and earnestly exploring his deeper feelings, even though it feels kind of unnatural at first, and I don’t know, I find that remarkably beautiful. This is something we could afford to normalize.

By contrast, Teddy has been mired in her ex’s criticism and neglect. “When I was with Richard,” she confides to Everett, “I didn’t ever feel like he was really listening to me when I talked, or like he valued what I said. It seemed like I was some sort of instrumentation for him, like a hood ornament on the BMW of his life. And when I saw your show for the first time, I couldn’t get over the way you talked to kids, like they mattered. Like you saw them all for the people they were, not for the people you thought they should be.”

This book really sings during Teddy and Everett’s email exchanges. They’re snappy and funny and playful, and they lay an honest and authentic foundation for their relationship. I particularly love when Teddy feels anxious about joining her boss at her jazzercise class – a new thing that scares her – and Everett first muses about going to the class himself. He ponders whether a very tall man like him would be unwelcome to the women in that space – another moment of self-awareness and empathy – then shifts to encouragement, writing, “I hope you gain so much strength through jazzercise that you’re able to dropkick your shitty ex in the face.”

A book cover with a blue background and pink and red blobs over a black and white photo of a Black man and woman. He embraces her from behind, face turned down toward her shoulder, and her head leans back against him. The title is printed in white: Seven Days in June. The author, Tia Williams, is printed in teal. — “She was a fire he’d started ages ago…”

My last great read this month was Tia Williams’s Seven Days in June. I know writers aren’t supposed to write about writers, but as one myself, I’ll admit to loving it. My favorite romance is still Beach Read, also a book about two writers, and this one is a great new title in that vein. And hey, it’s also a second chance romance!

At seventeen, Eva and Shane, both in the throes of pretty rough childhoods, meet and share an intense week together. They fall fast and hard, only to split just as quickly under traumatic circumstances. Now, as adults, they are both successful writers. He’s a literary darling. She has a rabid fanbase for her fourteen-title paranormal erotic romance series. By chance, they reunite at a book event and realize the passion they once had is still there, mixed in with unresolved hurts. The bulk of the book takes place during the week of this reunion with several glimpses into the week from their past.

I have never dropped more bookmarks than I did in this book. It has so many great quotes, and there’s an entire scene I’d transcribe in its entirety in my reading journal if I had the space. I can’t share from that scene (if you’ve read it, it’s the café scene when they first talk as adults) because it would spoil one of the book’s main plot twists, so instead, here’s an example of something I love in books about writers, when things get a little meta: “‘I’ve changed.’ His confident smile made it believable. ‘I think this is what writers calls a character arc.’”

Also, this bit of wisdom from a side character: “Prose before bros.”

This book tackles so many Big Things. Eva struggles with chronic, debilitating migraines that she masks as much as possible to do book events and to parent, even when she has to “mother from bed.” Eva articulates the differences between what women in the industry have to do versus men – being present on social media, networking, doing events, while Shane can disappear and stay relevant. At one point, when her series gets optioned for a film adaptation, she has to deal with a prospective director wanting white actors to play her Black characters. Both Eva and Shane have deeply traumatic histories encompassing addiction, self-harm, sexual harassment and assault, neglect, etc. Eva has worked very hard to end generational trauma for her own daughter. Shane has similarly put in the work to get and stay sober and make a meaningful difference in the lives of kids like him. They are both messy in authentic ways, but they are trying.

Audre, Eva’s daughter, is an unexpected standout character. She brings a lot of levity and heart to the book. It’s clear that Eva’s determination to give Audre a life of secure attachment and love has resulted in a girl with exceptional emotional intelligence and the related vocabulary to go with it. She is a perfectly delightful blend of wise-beyond-her-years sage to adult and child characters alike – she has a hilarious side hustle as a therapist to her prep school peers – and TikTok savvy tween who dresses to express her moods and still needs her mom. She steals every scene she’s in, and I’d frankly read a whole book of her doling out life advice.

I love this moment when she and Eva are arguing, and Audre declares that she only does art because she’s great at it, but it’s not her real dream. “My dream is to be a celebrity therapist, possibly with a nail salon franchise, which you’ve never supported BTW.” It’s a moment that reminds Eva and the reader that Audre is still a child despite her confidence and adult vocabulary.

The central romance is really beautiful, of course, and there’s an interesting structural choice in the final chapter/epilogue that I’ll be thinking about for a while.

There it is, folks. My June Roundup. I hope July and the second half of the year bring you some wonderful reads!

June 2, 2021 By Melanie Sweeney Leave a Comment

May Book Roundup

May here in Texas has been rainy with no reprieve on the horizon, but while my kids have gone a little stir crazy, it’s been pretty good for reading books. I read fifteen books, including romance, women’s fiction, a pretty great middle grade fantasy novel, and two nonfiction books about homeschooling. Let’s dive in!

An illustrated book cover for Float Plan with a sailboat on the ocean over a yellow background. A man with a prosthetic leg and a woman face each other from opposite ends of the boat. — If you have pandemic-fueled wanderlust, you’ll love this trip through the Caribbean!

I kicked off the month with a book I’m pretty certain will end up on my Best of 2021 list this December, Float Plan by Trish Doller. Ten months after Anna’s fiancé dies by suicide, she sets out on the sailing trip he planned for them to take through the Caribbean. She struggles through a rough first leg of the trip and realizes she needs to hire a more skilled sailor to help her hit every island stop on Ben’s detailed itinerary. Enter Keane, an expert sailor whose prosthetic leg has limited his opportunities but not his ability on a sailboat. He offers to help Anna for a drop-off later in the trip. (Also, *alert* he’s Irish.)

Okay, so first, be warned there is a suicide note on page one. I was skeptical about how a romance was going to develop from this beginning in a way that felt believable and, frankly, okay. Anna’s grappling with Ben’s suicide is not a minor part of the book, and while I think Doller takes great care in handling the subject matter, the characters do occasionally have thoughts about Ben’s suicide that are realistic and emotional, if not always entirely free from judgment. I don’t read these as authorial judgments, given the sensitivity elsewhere in the writing.

My favorite romances often have a central thread of grief woven through them. What can I say? I’m a sucker for angst. This one explores that range of pain and happiness thoroughly and with acute insights. Anna begins by following Ben’s itinerary to the letter, so it’s no wonder that every mile she sails, she considers what the trip and her life would have been like with him. “The never knowing is lodged in my heart like a stone, a constant dull ache that throbs during moments like these, when I wonder what our future would have been.” But over the course of the trip, she starts to deviate from the plan. She goes places that weren’t on his list and bypasses others entirely and eventually understands “how sadness and happiness can live side by side within a heart, and how that heart can keep on beating.”

The only way I think the romance part of this works is as a slow burn. It’s a very slow burn, and I was glad for it. It’s also one of the few romances I’ve read where I thought the two characters were very well matched and wanted them to make a relationship work while also being entirely okay with them going their separate ways if that was the outcome. A huge portion of the book is centered around Anna’s journey through her grief and toward finding her own way in the world, gaining true competence at sailing and overall self-sufficiency. She needed Keane after that first rough solo journey, but she truly comes into her own, and it’s so empowering to read.

I knew there would be a point when they fought or separated for whatever reason, (spoiler alert, I guess?) as is usually the case, but while that dark moment often reads as loss, depression, pain, and darkness, this book opens up in a truly breathtaking way. I was so moved and so willing to go anywhere Trish Doller wanted to take me, both through her vivid descriptions of the Caribbean and on the emotional ride.

And it looks like she’s adding at least two more books to this fictional world. I can’t wait to see what she writes next.

An illustrated book cover that lists Emily Henry, the author, at the top, and People We Meet on Vacation across the middle. It's a bright orange cover with green palm trees and two figures reclining in pool lounge chairs. — It speaks to me.

My most-anticipated book of May was Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation. I went in with tempered expectations because I didn’t want my love of Beach Read to make me disappointed by an otherwise great book, and that was a good call. It didn’t push Beach Read out of my favorite spot, but it definitely earns a place in my top reads for this year so far.

Poppy has “Millennial ennui” despite having a great career and her life basically in order (“My life turned out how I hoped it would, and now I just miss wanting something”), and her solution is to repair her decade-old friendship with Alex by going on one of the annual summer trips they used to take before something happened in Croatia two years ago and they stopped talking. The story unfolds with yo-yo-ing timelines, splitting between the current summer and summers past, so we see their friendship grow and change while present-day Alex and Poppy navigate what feels like a point of no return. This trip will likely change everything.

The best part of an Emily Henry book is the crackling banter between her main characters. The things they say to each other, usually funny in the moment, get further mileage as call backs and inside jokes, ones that bond them to each other but also bring the reader in on the dance in a rare, magnetically intimate way that feels a little like falling in love yourself. One such inside joke: on a past trip, a gallery employee tries to sell them a $21,000 bear sculpture they could never afford, arguing that “when art speaks to you, you find a way to make it work,” and after that, the question, “Does it speak to you?” becomes the criteria for every bizarre or embarrassing souvenir they might buy.

But these little jokes also pay emotional mileage. Present-day Poppy worries, “It’s possible that all those little moments that meant so much to me never meant quite the same thing to him. It’s possible that he didn’t reach out to me for two years because, when we stopped speaking, he didn’t lose something precious the way that I did.”

There is also weirdness deeply embedded into the characters, a weirdness that endeared them to me immediately and which gives the book a warm and tender essence. This is a weighted blanket in book form. When Poppy role-plays picking Alex up in a bar, he tells her he doesn’t live around here, and “even if I did, I have a cat with a lot of medical needs that require specialized care. Makes it hard to get out.” This, it turns out, is true. And the cat’s name is Flannery O’Connor, which probably gives you a good glimpse into the academic-minded “study in control” that is Alex Nilsen.

“I love when you get weird,” Poppy tells Alex, speaking for us all. He replies, “You make me weird. I’m not like this with anyone else.” Don’t we all want to be seen as our strangest, most uninhibited selves and loved for it? Don’t we all want to know someone so well that we get a version of them reserved only for us?

This book is swoony as hell is what I’m saying. It speaks to me.

A yellow book cover with a heart and DNA strand below it. Christina Lauren is listed at the top and The Soulmate Equation at the bottom. — Would you want to know if your partner was your genetic soulmate??

I was saving Christina Lauren’s latest release, The Soulmate Equation, so I’d have a likely solid book to fall back on when needed, but I gave in and read it right at the end of the month. No regrets!

Jess is a freelance statistician and single mom who is starting to feel lonely despite having a charming kid, engaged and loving grandparents, and one of the best friends I’ve seen in a book in a while. Dr. River Pena is a geneticist and CSO for an emerging company, GeneticAlly, which predicts soulmate matches from genetic markers. (I’m summarizing, but it’s real science-y!) Jess finds River uptight and rude, but his sample (it’s just saliva!) gets flagged as a diamond level match with her. The algorithm gives them an unheard of 98% likelihood of lasting happiness together. Despite River’s scientist skepticism, this is his life’s work, so if the algorithm is wrong about him and Jess, it could threaten everything. He and his company’s executive board ask her to spend some time getting to know River, hoping to confirm the findings, and to be available for PR that would use their match to boost the company, which is about to go public.

It’s pretty hard to pull off a modern story that hinges on fate, or in this case, seemingly iron-clad science. What I love about this book is that the characters routinely ask the big questions. If you love someone, but you find out your compatibility rating with them is low, would it change how you feel about the relationship? Or, in Jess and River’s case, does a high number sway you to feel something you otherwise wouldn’t have been open to? How much weight do you give the algorithm, and how much choice is left in the face of something so persuasive?

I love that River identifies right away what Jess’s priorities are, how she operates, and what she needs. When she winds up in a bind and every other person in her orbit can’t step up like usual, he tells her, “I want you to call me for help without an apology on the tip of your tongue.” They are attracted to each other physically, but he marvels at her competence at her job, too. They share a respect for the honesty of good data.

I also love the friendship between Jess and Fizzy, her romance novelist best friend, who mines daily interactions for material and pushes Jess to not feel guilty for wanting just a little bit more for herself beyond her work and her child. She’s the one who convinces Jess to enter her sample into the database in the first place. Their relationship feels just as fated to me as Jess’s relationship with River, unconditional and iron-clad, but also, as becomes important with Jess and River, too, a chosen relationship. I laughed out loud when Jess confesses to Fizzy, “I’m lonely, and I feel like such an asshole complaining, but you’re always going to be a bigger asshole than I am, so I can complain to you.” We all need a Fizzy in our corner.

Instead of writing in-depth about one more book, I want to quickly shout out some other titles I really enjoyed this month.

A blue, illustrated book cover for Talia Hibbert's Act Your Age, Eve Brown, with a lavender-haired woman embracing a man, the suggestion of sheet music trailing behind her. — “Surprise! I live here.”

I laughed hard and often at Talia Hibbert’s latest Brown Sisters book, Act Your Age, Eve Brown, and in fact transcribed an entire scene about the invasion of ducks in a pond that ends with the hero exclaiming, “Christ, woman. Read a waterfowl blog!” Someone somewhere needs that tattoo. The gist is that Eve needs a job, and after doing poorly in the interview for a chef position at a B&B, she accidentally hits the potential employer with her car. She winds up working for him and living on the property, and he never stops reminding her that she HIT HIM WITH HER CAR.

An illustrated book cover of Seekers of the Wild Realm by Alexandra Ott with a young girl summoning green magic and looking at a white dragon among trees. — Magic. dragons. and challenging gender norms. A perfect combination.

My kids and I also really enjoyed Alexandra Ott’s Seekers of the Wild Realm, which is a middle grade book about a girl who wants to be her village’s first female seeker and a boy who trades her the training she’s been excluded from in exchange for her help with a baby dragon he’s not supposed to have. There are dragons, magic, and beautiful friendships – and no super scary parts for sensitive hearts. The next book will be out in a couple weeks, and we’ll definitely be reading that one, too. We are currently reading her other series, Rules for Thieves.

A book cover for The Brave Learner by Julie Bogart with the subtitle, "Finding Everyday Magic in Homeschool, Learning, and Life" and a photo of a young child sitting on a colorful staircase. — There’s a free journal that pairs with the book on her website, too!

And finally, I’ve seen Julie Bogart’s The Brave Learner recommended all over the place in homeschooling circles, and I finally got my hands on a copy. Whether you homeschool or teach children in a more formal setting or are a parent whose kids are educated primarily outside the home, this book is so valuable! We often say that we want our children to love learning, but Bogart interrogates that claim early on in the book and argues, “When adults ask kids to love learning, they’re asking children to find academics pleasurable so that adults will be relieved of the obligation to nag.” What we really want, usually, is for our kids to joyfully cooperate with what we have already planned for them. But education isn’t something we should do to our kids. Bogart gives practical tips for fostering that elusive love of learning by meeting kids in their own interests, letting “way lead to way,” and inviting them in with mystery, surprise, enchantment, and more. I recommend it whole-heartedly.

On to June!