Summer Wrap-Up!

So hi, it’s been a few months. The summer was crazy for me, and while I was reading, I didn’t have the bandwidth for more computer time after work.

Let’s start off with what I read in June:

All the Lies They Did Not Tell and The Bookstore Wedding were read to fulfill prompts in the 2025 Keyword Reading Challenge for May (lie) and June (book).

All the Lies They Did Not Tell by Pablo Trincia is about a case of Satanic panic that occurred in this rural area of Italy in the 1990s. It was quite interesting how this all happened even after other cases were known about and how easy it is to influence children.

The Bookstore Wedding by Alice Hoffman is the second book in The Once Upon a Time Bookshop Stories novella series. They are all cute little reads about two sisters and their family bookshop on a small island.

I kept seeing A Wolf in Duke’s Clothing while walking laps in the stacks at work. I finally broke down and checked out the book and then had to read the other two books in the series. I won’t say they are my favorite shifter stories, but they were enjoyable, and Susanna Allen has created her own (at least to my knowledge) lore about shifters.

I don’t know what took me so long to read One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston, but it was one of those books that I couldn’t put down. I loved it!

The Bayrose Files by Diane Wald was read to fulfill a prompt for my library’s reading challenge. Diane appeared on our library’s podcast. It was meh (a rating my book club has started using). It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad either; it was just meh.

The Wager and Austen at Sea were both book club/discussion group picks for the month. Juliet Takes a Breath was for the Graphic Novel prompt for the Read Books By/About Puerto Ricans reading challenge.

I enjoyed The Wager; it was a bit slow in places, but just what these men went through and the fact that some not only survived but made it home to England was amazing. I also went down a rabbit hole on the Lord Byrons, as the one you’re thinking about’s father was on this ship.

Austen as Sea was meh, but I seemed to have enjoyed it more than the rest of my discussion group. There were plot points that I wished were more developed and others that could have been left out for that to happen.

Juliet Takes a Breath was a graphic adaptation of the novel. This was a really good coming-of-age/into-yourself story. It is also a cautionary tale about following an influencer too closely.

Atonement Sky is the newest book in Nalini Singh’s Psy-Changeling Trinity series. I love everything about this series: the world-building, the overarching storylines, and the romances. This book felt like we are heading towards a resolution of a big plot point in the whole series, and I don’t want these books to end but also don’t want her to come up with another major issue to drag it out. I’ll miss this world when she ends it all.

Something So Sweet was July’s keyword challenge book (sweet), and it was not good. I only read it to find out if the town’s inn was going to be sold and everything would work out for the best or if they would have to save the inn for everything to work out. It got to a point where nearly every conversation somehow was either about sex or had some sexual innuendo or context, even two conversations including the FMC’s young son.

All the Sinners Bleed was the August book club pick. It was fantastic and disturbing. Cosby writes so beautifully that you forget for a moment that he is writing a gritty story about corruption, racism, and murder. I need to finish reading his backlog and his new book that came out this year.

The other four books I read in August were ARCs, and reviews will be coming out this month as those books release, but all four of them were good, and I can’t recommend them enough.

-Happy Reading!