five things Friday: June TBR

While I've managed to find time for reading with some sick days at home, there hasn't been much time for writing, with the rest of my time taken up by Mr. Freddie - first with holding him for hours on end while he was feverish and a bit miserable, and then with playing and strolling with him when we were feeling better but still in our quarantine period. So the June reading list is arriving late, but I'm excited about my reading plans for the month (hopefully some of it will now happen at the beach!!):

Good variety of stuff for the month here... First, Seven Days in June is a well-reviewed romance with depth that I got on a Kindle deal a while back and have been saving for this month, because with a title like that, it just seemed right, of course. And also I'm always interested in one that is set in the publishing/writing world. 

Then I've got some contemporary fiction from the always-reliable Emma Straub with her new release, This Time Tomorrow, and then a bit of a genre crosser with Portrait of a Thief, which sounds like it will have elements of a thriller novel + immigrant identity/experience. I love books with an art history twist, and especially a heist so I'm very intrigued by this one. Speaking of thrill, the memoir Nowhere Girl sounds like one of those stranger-than-fiction type of life stories (the subtitle is A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood, so I feel like that says a lot...). It was well reviewed on Sarah's Bookshelves Live, so I'm intrigued and it's time to finally get around to it (another Kindle deal snag).

Finally, I'm hoping that Peter & Hendrik finish up their evening read-aloud of Hollowpox, the 3rd in the Nevermoor series, so that I can have a turn with it; I read the first installment of this fantasy middle grade series last summer and enjoyed it fine, but then I got around to picking up book #2 last month and now I am IN - what a fun and interesting read it was, and now I'm very eager to pick up #3!

And as for a recap of my May books: I read all of them and enjoyed to varying degrees - Olga Dies Dreaming joined my top reads of the year list so it was definitely my best of the month, aside from How to Find Your Way in the Dark, a 5-star read for me.

• The Murder Rule: I really love Dervla McTiernan's Cormac Reilley series, so I was excited to see she had a new book coming out - but a little worried that like Tana French's initial foray outside of the detective series I love her for, it might be a little disappointing to me. In this case, it was and it wasn't: while my general preference is for a detective procedural, this is a bit more of a psychological twister (but not crazy twisted) with a legal aspect - but in the end that combination ended up coming together for me. The book starts with Hannah transferring to a new law school in order to try to join their chapter of the Innocence Project and work on a particular high-profile murder appeal; it's clear that she has ulterior motives having to do with something in mom's past but unclear at first exactly what that's about. As her chapters alternate with diary entries from her mom's teenage years, it gradually becomes clear what the instigating event in her mom's past was, and what it has to do with the case that Hannah is trying to sabotage. It took me a little while to get into because I found Hannah and Laura both kind of unlikeable/annoying (partly as a rule follower I have trouble with stories about people being duplicitous!) but then the twist partway through the book got me both very interested and more sympathetic to Hannah, and I was hooked by the end. The latter part also had more of the legal investigative/courtroom type thriller than the psychological, and I was more interested in that part. So in the end, a solid read, and I can see a lot of people enjoying it. E-copy received from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. ★★★.5
• Friends and Strangers: J. Courtney Sullivan's writing is the kind of very readable East coast/dysfunctional family/motherhood character study that doesn't have tons and tons of plot but feels really relatable and somehow unputdownable. This one is about a new mom, Elisabeth, who has moved out of NYC to a suburban area, her husband's hometown, and is struggling with a bit of an identity crisis in all this change, and with not knowing anyone in her new neighborhood. To try to get back to her writing career she hires a babysitter from the local college. Sam is a good girl who comes from small-town Midwest roots, unlike a lot of the prep school elites who are her classmates. She seems really ready to grow up and have an established life, but she definitely still has some of the immaturity - in both carefree fun and also some shortsightedness - of a college student. I found it really fascinating to see the ways these characters quickly developed a close relationship, and how they perceived each other's lives with a rosy tint, which was colored by their own current hopes/dreams/frustrations - especially so because I have been on both ends of this, as a babysitter going to other women's homes in college, and now in motherhood coming full circle and hiring local college girls myself (and always wondering how OLD do they think I am?!). Lots of it (minus some of the racial issues, but still including issues of privilege and power dynamics) reminded me a lot of Such a Fun Age, with the mom/babysitter relationship, and some of the (occasionally squirm-inducing) connections that Elisabeth tries to have with Sam, in her loneliness and her attempt to reconnect with her younger years. Also reminded me of books like Meg Wolitzer's The Female Persuasion, with the female friendships and college-to-grown-up transitions - and also the very compulsively readable character-driven fiction. ★★★★
• Booked on a Feeling: a rom-com with a bookish title and setting is always something I'm game to check out. This one has the childhood friends-to-lovers trope, which I enjoy for how well the characters know each other's history and hopes and dreams, but there's a lot of angst about ruining a friendship that can get a bit tiresome to me. In this particular one I enjoyed the banter of the old friends + the checklist-loving protagonist and her project to help out a struggling indie bookstore while she's on leave from her law firm for a mental health break, and I also enjoyed all of the food and cooking references, particularly to all of the delicious-sounding Korean food their families make. An enjoyable read for entertainment, but not one that particularly stands out to me among the rom-coms I've read lately. E-copy received from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. ★★★
• Olga Dies Dreaming: at its core, this is a sibling story - a sister and brother of Puerto Rican heritage whose activist mom left them when they were teens to become a sort of fugitive revolutionary, and how this has shaped their lives and career paths as a wedding planner for the rich and a congressman and their sibling relationship. They're in their 40s now and haven't seen her since that time, and they just hear from her from time to time in letters critiquing their life choices. The characters are really well done - flawed for sure, but you can see where Olga and Prieto are coming from and still hope things turn out despite some of their iffy (and sometimes illegal!) choices and their self-destructive tendencies in romantic relationships... I loved the scenes with their larger family, the clear love for each other and strong connection to their area of Brooklyn; both the family relationships and the scene-setting felt vivid and real. And their mother, though physically absent in almost the entire story, is still this larger-than-life figure in their recollections of childhood moments and through her letters, which I thought was just one really well done aspect of the writing overall. What I liked even more than that about the writing: beyond being just a character-driven dysfunctional family story, there's actually a decent bit of plot pacing and suspense in the politics (you get some Russian mob types, some scheming wealthy people blackmailing congressman Prieto, even some FBI agents looking for info on their mom), all set against the backdrop of Hurricane Irma and the devastation it brought to the island. This all made the story extra engaging - though admittedly I was a bit confused at times regarding the Puerto Rican politics and US policies, a clear indicator of my own lack of knowledge. I'm still thinking about this one a couple of weeks after finishing, so my waffling on whether to put it at 5 stars may end up bumping it up! ★★★★.5
• The Verifiers: this is described as a contemporary, digital-age whodunit, and it was fun/intriguing/clever, for something a bit different in content and in tone from anything else I've been reading lately. Claudia Lin is a queer, Chinese-American 20-something (this all plays into the story) who gets a new job as a "verifier" for an online dating agency, checking into whether how people represent themselves on dating apps is accurate. When a new client goes missing, Claudia secretly goes against her employer to try to investigate - but it's hard to know what's fact and fiction when it comes to who people are behind their user names, and whether anything sinister is actually going on... The overall sort of modern/snarky tone and attitude of the protagonist and family issues and sleuthing actually reminded me a lot of Magic for Liars, so definitely recommend this one to fans of that one (see my review here); and while the tone is very different (not thrillery or romancey) it also reminded me a bit of books with a focus on online matchmaking apps like John Marrs' The One or even a little bit Christina Lauren's The Soulmate Equation. The mashup of (immigrant) family expectations drama + meta-mystery (as an amateur sleuth Claudia keeps thinking about what the star of her favorite cozy mystery series would do) + exploration of the online matchmaking concept and how the online age affects our personal/relationship choices made for an interesting read, though one I had to pay more attention to perhaps than I expected with a "fun" mystery to get what was going on. ★★★.5

What was your best book of May? Got any great beach/pool reads on the docket for June?

Sharing on Show Us Your Books.