Book Report: Summer Reading Recap
I miss when summer reading programs came with a personal pan pizza.
Hello and happy September! Aka, the official beginning of autumn in my book. But before we can dive headfirst into pumpkin spice and crispy leaves, I wanted to recap and debrief everything I read over the summer.
I managed to read 12 books between June and August, which feels pretty good to me, as I’ve really struggled to read a ton in recent years. All in all, I enjoyed most of what I read immensely, which always helps.
Here are reviews of everything I read, month-by-month!
June
All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers
★★★☆☆ 3/5
Bottom Line
I liked this book. It was… fine. I’ll be honest, if I had realized beforehand that it was written by a true crime podcast host, I probably would have skipped it. Something about that feels just a bit too voyeuristic for me (and I do like true crime content! I’ve just tried to be more conscious of what I consume these days).
All in all, I think it had exactly one too many plot twists. I found the ending frustrating and a bit unnecessary, personally. Overall it was a compelling story, even though it largely felt like a thinly veiled rehashing of the Jon Benét Ramsey case, or like the Kidz Bop version of Sharp Objects.
Summary
When Margot was six, her friend and neighbor, January Jacobs, was reported missing from her bed and found dead just hours later. The vicious crime rocked the small town of Wakarusa, IN, and the resulting rumor mill destroyed the rest of the Jacobs’ family’s lives over the intervening decades.
Now, twenty years later, Margot has grown up, moved to the city to become a hard hitting reporter, and finds herself back in Wakarusa to care for her uncle with early-onset dementia. Her career is flatlining, and she feels suffocated being back in this tiny, secretive town she had longed to escape. But when a five year old girl from the neighboring town disappears under similar circumstances to January all those years ago, Margot is determined to find out the truth of both crimes – before it’s too late for them all.
Read If You Like
True crime podcasts, small towns with dark secrets, JonBenét Ramsay documentaries.
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
★★★★☆ 4/5
Bottom Line
I decided to give Ms. Sally Rooney another try after Normal People left me less than impressed, and I’m so glad I did! I really enjoyed this book. The characters were realistically flawed, but overall had likable, relatable qualities that I just felt were missing from Normal People. I almost want to re-read that book, or watch the Hulu series, to see if I was just in a bad mood the week I read it, but idk. Anyways, reading this during the second Trump administration (gag me) really hit different with the ongoing themes of the past and the future and when history ended, and all that good stuff.
Summary
This book follows four people in their late twenties/early thirties in Ireland – Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon – as they grapple with the complexities of modern life, of becoming or not becoming everything you thought you’d be, and the feeling of having come of age at the end of history. Eileen and Simon have had an on-again, off-again flirtationship since they met as teenagers, neither able to avoid the other, nor be with them entirely. Alice is a successful novelist coming off of a bad mental health crisis who just wants to hole up in a large country home when she meets Felix, a warehouse worker, and spontaneously asks him to accompany her to Rome. The four of them come together, fall apart, destroy and build each other up again countless times, all while trying to figure out if there is beauty worth fighting for in this world, or if they’re the last of a dying breed.
Read If You Like
Being sad, thinking philosophically about the modern era and all it’s bullshit and beauty.
July
Emily Henry’s Entire Bibliography
I'm not going to individually review each book, because the bottom line would be roughly the same – 5 stars, I loved it, it made me laugh and cry and reminded me that I do in fact love rom-coms.
Instead, I’ll rank them from most to least favorite:
August
Happy People Don’t Live Here by Amber Sparks
★★★★☆ 4.5/5
Thank you NetGalley and Liveright for the opportunity to read and review this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Bottom Line
I adored this book, first and foremost. It was heartfelt, beautifully written, and completely unexpected – like a mix of Gilmore Girls, Coraline, and The Haunting of Bly Manor. Sparks offered a fresh take on the concept of ghosts and hauntings, which was really intriguing to me. Plus I'm a sucker for a plucky girl detective character.
Summary
It follows the story of Fern and her mother, Alice, as they move into a dilapidated apartment building in Minnesota. The building houses a cast of eccentric but believable characters and absolutely brimming with ghosts – faint smudgy spirits, some mere wisps of smoke, others nearly full bodied apparitions. Fern can see them; Alice cannot. Alice is much too preoccupied staying one step ahead of her past to have much patience for Fern's girl detective antics, especially when Fern claims to have found a dead body in the dumpster that no one else had seen.
This book was an intimate portrait of mothers and daughters, of family, both found and born into, and of the lengths people will go to hide their secrets. It really felt like it was written for me specifically, leaning into, and ultimately subverting, all my favorite tropes. Sparks' writing had a poetic cadence to it but never felt overwrought or overbearing that I found incredibly captivating, as well as the use of multiple points of view.
Read If You Like
Nancy Drew, complex mother-daughter relationships, plucky girl detectives, Shirley Jackson
Mayra by Nicky Gonzalez
★★★★★ 5/5
Bottom Line
A beautiful, eerie, haunting look at girlhood and first loves and the devastating unreliability of your own memory and sense of self. The lush, Florida Everglades setting, the vast, mazelike house, and creeping sense of unspecified terror and wrongness had me hooked from the first sentence.
Summary
Ingrid always felt mousy, meek, and anxious next to Mayra, her loud, brash, fearless childhood best friend. Though it’s been years since the two have spoken, when Mayra calls late one night with an invitation to a weekend getaway at a house in the Everglades, Ingrid spontaneously accepts. She makes her way into the heart of Florida, the gaping maw of the Everglades swamp hiding all manner of creatures intent on swallowing her whole.
When she finally ends up at the ancient farmhouse, she finds Mayra to be almost exactly like she remembers from childhood. The reunion is marred by the arrival of Benji, Mayra’s new and oddly unsettling boyfriend who is intent on being the perfect host. But Ingrid sleeps like the dead in the labyrinthine house, where time seems to stretch and compress until she can’t remember much of her life outside of the lush, leafy forest that surrounds the property…
Read if You Like
Shirley Jackson, Southern Gothics, House of Leaves, unreliable narrators, the concept of the past as a haunted house, and endless hallways of doors that may or may not lead to different dimensions.
Sloppy by Rax King
★★★★☆ 4/5
Thank you NetGalley and Knopf for the opportunity to read and review this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Bottom Line
Reading Rax's essays feels like getting coffee with your funniest friend who always has a crazy new story to share. She perfectly balances humor and heaviness, whether she's writing about shoplifting from Brandy Melville or cyberbullying strangers on the wild west of the Neopets forum. Her prose is sharp, witty, and laugh out loud funny, while still being approachable and down to earth in the best way. I adored her first essay collection, Tacky, when it came out in 2021, so I was really excited to read this one, and it did not disappoint.
Summary
In this essay collection, Rax King explores bad behavior – from addiction and recovery, begrudging self-improvement, and the terrible habits we can’t help but cling to. With her trademark irreverent wit and humor, she covers topics like her long-standing struggle with alcoholism (which runs in the family), her early days being a stripper to pay for college, cyberbullying people on the Neopets forums, and shoplifting from Brandy Melville. It’s an examination of and love letter to those little vices we can’t quit, things that scratch a mean little itch in our brains.
Read if You Like
Essay collections, commentary on the early 2000s/modern day culture, messy protagonists.
If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You by Leigh Stein
★★★★☆ 4.5/5
Thank you NetGalley and Ballantine Books for the opportunity to read and review this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Bottom Line
I LOVED this book. I loved the ambiguity of it (is something supernatural going on in this house, or is this simply a case of a young women being exploited while experiencing psychosis). It had plot twists and turns I didn’t expect, and the underlying satire/commentary on social media influencing and Tiktok especially had me laughing and cringing along. It was so on the nose (I also loved the narrative choice to only refer to the main social media platform as “The Platform” instead of just calling it Tiktok).
Summary
Dayna is 39, unemployed, and has just been dumped by her boyfriend via a Reddit r/amitheasshole post. At her wit’s end, she agrees to take a job offer from a man she hasn’t spoken to in twenty years. If she can help Craig turn his crumbling, mid-century mansion into a thriving (and profitable) TikTok hype house, he can raise the money to restore his family’s home back to its former glory, and Dayna can reclaim her career after years of aimlessness and underemployment. There’s only one problem: Becca, a teenaged tarot influencer, has vanished from the house after amassing a huge following on the platform, and Craig refuses to let Dayna investigate her disappearance.
When they receive the opportunity for a life-changing marketing campaign, Dayna hatches a plan to find Olivia (and fulfill her brand collaboration contract) behind Craig’s back. But just as Dayna experience twenty years before as a much younger woman, this house has a bizarre effect on some people. And by the time they find Becca, it might be too late for all of them.
Read if You Like
Tarot, potentially cursed bloodlines, commentary on social media influencers, bunnies.
I’m so happy to read this! Your book recommendations are exactly what I love reading and I appreciate your candor. I just added several to my Libby app. Happy People… in particular is looking really good.