It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? hosted by Kathryn at Bookdate is a weekly post to share what you’ve recently finished reading, what you’re currently reading, and what you plan on reading this upcoming week.
So here is what I just read, am reading, and what I plan to read next:
What I Read Last Week:
Title: Well Met
Authors: Jen DeLuca
Immediate Thoughts: Cute, unique, and charming!
Rating: 9/10
Publication Date: September 3, 2019
Title: All the Flowers in Paris
Authors: Sarah Jio
Immediate Thoughts: Heartwrenching, hopeful, and moving!
Rating: 8/10
Publication Date: August 13, 2019
Title: The Bromance Book Club
Authors: Lyssa Kay Adams
Immediate Thoughts: Quirky, humorous, and refreshing!
Rating: 8.5/10
Publication Date: November 5, 2019
Title: A Family by Christmas
Authors: Viv Royce
Immediate Thoughts: Amusing, sweet, and delightfully festive!
Rating: 8/10
Publication Date: October 14, 2019
Title: Sidelined
Author: Suzanne Baltsar
Immediate Thoughts: Spirited, spicy, and sexy!
Rating: 8/10
Publication Date: August 27, 2019
What I’m Currently Reading:
For fans of What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell and The Futures by Anna Pitonia, a soul-piercing debut that explores the ways that past and present intertwine, queerness, and coming of age in uncertain times.
In WILLA & HESPER, two young women fall in love. When they fall apart, they unwittingly take the same path to heal from their breakup, seeking answers in the lands of their ancestors. From Tbilisi, Georgia to the war sites of Germany, they discover what can break and what can mend when you look to the past to understand your present.
Willa’s darkness enters Hesper’s light late one night in Brooklyn. Theirs is a whirlwind romance until Willa starts to know Hesper too well, to crawl into her hidden spaces, and Hesper shuts her out. She runs, following her fractured family back to her grandfather’s hometown of Tbilisi, Georgia, looking for the origin story that he is no longer able to tell. But once in Tbilisi, cracks appear in her grandfather’s history-and a massive flood is heading toward Georgia, threatening any hope for repair.
Meanwhile, heartbroken Willa is desperate to leave New York that she joins a group trip for Jewish twentysomethings to visit Holocaust sites in Germany and Poland, hoping to override her emotional state. When it proves to be more fraught than home, she must come to terms with her past-the ancestral past, her romantic past, and the past that can lead her forward.
Told from alternating perspectives, and ending in the shadow of Trump’s presidency, WILLA & HESPER is a deeply moving, cerebral, and timely debut.
What I’m Reading Next:
In a small town where loyalty to family and to “your people” carries the weight of a sacred oath, defying those unspoken rules can be a deadly proposition.
After fifteen years of growing up in the Ozark hills with his widowed mother, high-school freshman Boady Sanden is beyond ready to move on. He dreams of glass towers and cityscapes, driven by his desire to be anywhere other than Jessup, Missouri. The new kid at St. Ignatius High School, if he isn’t being pushed around, he is being completely ignored. Even his beloved woods, his playground as a child and his sanctuary as he grew older, seem to be closing in on him, suffocating him.
Then Thomas Elgin moves in across the road, and Boady’s life begins to twist and turn. Coming to know the Elgins-a black family settling into a community where notions of “us” and “them” carry the weight of history-forces Boady to rethink his understanding of the world he’s taken for granted. Secrets hidden in plain sight begin to unfold: the mother who wraps herself in the loss of her husband, the neighbor who carries the wounds of a mysterious past that he holds close , the quiet boss who is fighting his own hidden battle.
But the biggest secret of all is the disappearance of Lida Poe, the African-American woman who keeps the books at the local plastics factory. Word has it that Ms. Poe left town, along with a hundred thousand dollars of company money. Although Boady has never met the missing woman, he discovers that the threads of her life are woven into the deepest fabric of his world.
As the mystery of her fate plays out, Boady begins to see the stark lines of race and class that both bind and divide this small town, and he is forced to choose sides.
Have you read any of my upcoming reads? What do you have coming up?
