Happy Friday! Are you excited for the weekend? It has been a somewhat long week and I haven’t been feeling the best. Either allergies are starting to kick in or I’ve been fighting off a little cold, so I’m looking forward to relaxing a bit this weekend and reading a couple of books. I have one that I need to finish and another one that I’d like to read throughout Saturday and Sunday. If I have time I’d also like to start a book that my coworker is letting me borrow. It’s a true crime book and apparently it’s pretty scary, so we’ll see how long I last.
Usually on Friday I post a Daily Diaries update, but my week has been the most uninteresting week ever. The most exciting thing that I did was go to the dentist for a cleaning, so instead of writing a week’s worth of, “Went to work, came home” I thought I’d talk about a couple of books that I have read or listened to.
First up is And We Stay by Jenny Hubbard, which is about a teenage girl who starts to attend a boarding school after her boyfriend pulls her aside and then takes his own life in the school library. This book was described as a mix of verse and prose. If a verse novel isn’t your thing, but you are interested in the premise, I would still recommend that you give this novel a chance because the verse was, for the most part, limited to one poem after each chapter. This novel was a little on the slower side, but I thought it worked really well in the novel. It set the stage for what was to come in the book and felt natural to Emily’s life. This novel tackles some difficult topics but, again, I think it does so in a natural way.
I listened to the audiobook of Lost Voices by Sarah Porter. This is a “reread” for me. I would like to read the next two books in the series, but it’s been a few years since I read this one so I wanted to refresh my memory. This book is about a fourteen-year-old named Luce who joins a clan of mermaids. In the world of Lost Voices, girls who are abused or abandoned become mermaids and use their beautiful singing voices to sink ships. When Luce becomes a mermaid, she’s gifted with an extraordinarily beautiful voice that is the envy of the mermaids, but she doesn’t want to use her voice to drown the humans that pass by. I really enjoyed the narrator for this book and thought that it was a good one to listen to. I love the unique take on mermaids in this book and I also like that they’re dark mermaids. Also, the setting is in Alaska, which is awesome. Cold weather mermaids!
The final book that I read is Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight, which is about a single mother who goes to pick her daughter up from school and finds out that she has jumped off the roof of the building and is dead. Kate doesn’t believe that her daughter committed suicide, so she starts to look into her daughter’s death and things take off from there. This book was a bit of a slower start for me, but it totally reeled me in and I was definitely hooked once the story picked up. I have the ebook version of this novel and eventually bought the audiobook as well, so that I could listen to it on the bus when I wasn’t able to read. I saw a few of the revelations coming and I even guessed one of the bigger revelations early on, but then talked myself out of it and thought, “Trust your instincts, Crystal!” when I realized that I would have been right. I loved the twists and turns in this novel. I also liked that the author played around with different formats. There were text messages and emails throughout the novel and I love writing like that. I highly recommend this if you’re looking for a mystery to read–or just a book in general. This is my first book for the #scsbc14 Semi-Charmed Summer Book Challenge.
What have you read recently?
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