Hello Readers! I don’t think I’ve ever been so late to post a wrap-up. Life has been a busy hot mess lately—from tornadoes to health scares to party planning to NBA Finals—which has left me no time for blogging OR reading. Keep reading if you’d like the gory details or skip ahead if you’re only interested in the books. 😃📚

The weather here in Texas has been unpredictable and stormy. We were awoken early in the morning at the end of May to our phones shouting at us with a tornado warning, which had us scrambling. Thankfully it was downgraded just as it reached us, but it still contained high winds that ripped off shingles and tore down trees. While we were hiding in the bathroom, it started to rain on us, and we knew our roof had taken a hit. Soooo we’ve had days of cleaning up things and hosting insurance adjusters—our roof looks like a patchwork quilt—but I’m just thankful it wasn’t worse!

Then my 84-year old father overdid it working to clean up his yard after the storm and had to be care-flighted from our smaller-town emergency to a bigger hospital. Thankfully it turned out to be a reaction from a recent minor surgery and not as serious as they originally thought. He was able to come home the next day!

A happier, though bittersweet event, my youngest has graduated high school, and while all my kids have been homeschooled and graduation for us is a little different than a public graduation, I’ve still been busy organizing photo sessions (my husband was a photographer in his past life, so you’d think this would be an easy task, but it wasn’t! 😃), making announcements, and party planning—all while we’ve also been glued to the Dallas Mavericks as they became the Western Conference Champions and made it to the NBA Finals! My husband and son have been big fans for years, and during the pandemic I started looking up from my books to watch the games more, eventually converting to a full-fledged fan. 🤩

📚All that to say, I haven’t posted in a looooong time and my reading has been very scarce—and this will probably continue through the rest of the month. I did manage to read 3 books (all ARCs) and one short story, for a total of 1,045 pages in May. But my haul was bigger than my wrap-up!

Let’s see what I read and what I added to my TBR in May!

(Link to synopsis on Goodreads through the book title.)

May Wrap-Up

I started the month reading Katherine Center’s latest The Rom-Commers. While Center has been one of my favorite authors, I haven’t loved her last few romances. I found it harder to connect with these characters, but checking out other reviews, it seems to mostly be a me-thing.

➤My Rating: ★★★½
➤My Review
➤Published June 11, 2024
➤Popsugar Reading Challenge Prompt – A book about a writer

I was hopeful another one of my favorite romance authors would restore my faith in love, but while I enjoyed Lia Louis’ newest romance Better Left Unsent, I still didn’t enjoy it as much as I did her past books, all of which got five stars from me. I had a hard time believing in the love interest, but I did adore the main character.

➤My Rating: ★★★.75
➤My Review
➤Published May 21, 2024

It fell upon a brand-new-to-me author to have me swooning again. Tarah DeWitt completely charmed me with her latest romance Savor It. From the small-town Oregon setting to the heart-swelling romance to the delicious food, I was hooked!

➤My Rating: ★★★★
➤My Review
➤Published May 21, 2024

Lastly, I read a short story since my attention span was limited. I read Xingu by Edith Wharton to fulfill a very specific prompt on my Popsugar Reading Challenge. I had no idea what this story was about, but it’s about a women’s book club that takes themselves very seriously!

➤My Rating: ★★★★
➤Published in 1916
➤Popsugar Reading Challenge Advanced Prompt – A book that starts with the letter “X”

May Book Haul

I added four physical books, four eARCs, and one free ebook!

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Pre-orders

There are only a few authors I pre-order books for and they tend to publish at the same time. I added Carley Fortune’s latest romance This Summer Will Be Different and Christina Lauren’s The Paradise Problem, which I ordered from Blackwell’s in the UK so I could have a paperback copy. 😉 Now I just need to make time to read them.

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Paperbackswap Books

I also added two books through paperbackswap.com:

• My Imaginary Mary by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows – Which also contained a nice surprise when it arrived—it was signed by all three authors!
• Heart-Shaped Hack by Tracey Garvis Graves

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eARCs

Having enjoyed Peace Adzo Medie’s previous novel His Only Wife, I accepted the invitation to read her newest book Nightbloom in anticipation of the paperback release.

Synopsis:

Author of Reese’s Book Club Pick His Only Wife, Peace Adzo Medie returns with a moving novel about the unbreakable power of female friendship.  After two inseparable young friends in Ghana become estranged, one moving to the U.S., only a crisis can bring them back together and reconnect their bond.

When Selasi and Akorfa were young girls, they were more than just cousins; they were inseparable, they would do anything for each other, they implored their parents to let them be together, and there was no one else who each confided in.

Then Selasi begins to change and become hostile and quiet; her grades suffer, she loses interest in everything, and she begins to build a space around herself, shutting Akorfa out. It will be years before Akorfa learns what has happened, and in the intervening years, the two will become estranged. Only a crisis can ultimately bring them back together.

A riveting depiction of life, class, and family in Ghana, an eye-opening story of life as an African-born woman in the U.S., and an assured follow-up to a much-heralded debut, Nightbloom is above all an accessible and powerful novel

Expected June 13, 2024

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I couldn’t help being intrigued by the invitation to read Devil is Fine by John Vercher, a novel about grief and race, with some magical realism mixed in. The early ratings are great and I’ve already read the first few chapters, which had me hooked!

Synopsis:

Still reeling from a sudden tragedy, our biracial narrator receives a letter from an attorney: he has just inherited a plot of land from his estranged white grandfather. He travels to a beach town several hours south of his home with the intention of selling the land immediately and moving on. But upon inspection, what lies beneath the dirt is far more complicated than he ever imagined. In a shocking irony, he is now the Black owner of a former plantation passed down by the men on his white mother’s side of the family.

Vercher deftly blurs the lines between real and imagined, past and present, tragedy and humor, and fathers and sons in this story of discovering and reclaiming a painful past. With the wit and rawness of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Devil Is Fine is a gripping, surreal, and brilliantly crafted dissection of the legacies we leave behind and those we inherit.

Expected June 18, 2024

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I was very happy to be approved for Laura Dave’s next novel, The Night We Lost Him. I was a big fan of The Last Thing He Told Me, so I have high hopes for this one, as well.

Synopsis:

From the author of The Last Thing He Told Me—the #1 New York Times bestselling blockbuster and the Goodreads 2021 Thriller & Mystery Winner—comes an epic love story wrapped in a riveting mystery.

When the patriarch of a famed hotel empire dies under suspicious circumstances, his daughter and her estranged brother join forces to find out what happened, unraveling a larger mystery about who their father really was.

Liam Noone was many things to many people. To the public, he was an exacting, self-
made hotel magnate fleeing his past. To his three ex-wives, he was a loving albeit distant family man who kept his finances flush and his families carefully separated. To Nora, he was a father who often loved her from afar – notably a cliffside cottage perched on the California coast from which he fell to his death.   

The authorities rule the death accidental, but Nora and her estranged brother Sam have other ideas. As Nora and Sam form an uneasy alliance to unravel the mystery, they start putting together the pieces of their father’s past—and uncover a family secret that changes everything.

With Laura Dave’s trademark combination of soulful suspense and evocative family drama, The Night We Lost Him is a riveting page-turner with a heartbreaking final twist you’ll never see coming.

Expected September 17, 2024

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It’s not the holiday season without an Emily Stone romance! I was happy to be approved to read her next one, A Winter Wish.

Synopsis:

When an unexpected inheritance forces two total opposites to work together, Lexie must decide if Theo is going to push her out—or pull her in for the kiss of a lifetime—in this heartwarming holiday novel from the author of Always, in December and One Last Gift.

IWhen Lexie learns of her father’s death, she doesn’t know how to feel; they’ve barely spoken in the last ten years. And she’s even more confused when she discovers he’s left her half of his holiday travel company, a successful niche business specializing in trips that explore the holiday traditions of cultures all over the world.

Meanwhile, the other half of the company has been left to her father’s handsome but bad-tempered young executive, Theo. And the will stipulates that the two of them must find a way to run the company together for a year before they decide its fate.

Lexie intends to leave once the year is over, even though, as a wanderer herself, she finds the company’s mission more compelling than she first thought. And a work trip to sizzling Spain reveals a chemistry between Lexie and Theo that is impossible to deny.

There may have been some snap judgments made about each other. But mixing business and pleasure isn’t always a good idea.

Expected October 15, 2024

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Free eBook

My Amazon First Reads choice for May was Meet Me on the Bridge by Sarah J. Harris. I didn’t love the sound of any of the books available, so I went with the romance, of course! Let me know if you’ve read this book or author!

How was your reading month? Let me know in the comments!

Happy Wandering!