Summer Reading Celebration

4.75 stars. I loved this book! Emma and Justin have my heart!

Harry Potter At Home is a Pandemic initiative and I highly recommend that you enjoy it while you can! Harry Potter is read “by familiar voices” with a wide range of HP movie and stage actors reading chapters, and other familiar famous actors as well. It is so well done! And the readings with new voices make the words fresh again. This is available on a website as a video but I prefer accessing it using Spotify and just listening while I go about my day. It is free, and such a pleasure to listen to. Add this to your audiobook listening plans!

Great continuation of the series. A nice escape with a fun mystery.

3.5 stars. It was an okay and fun book.

I really enjoyed this book. The action, the suspense, the intrigue, I enjoyed it all. Treylen is training to be an assassin to the Queen of Iverna. Trelyen and his bond mate and dragon Rime have been training at Coop's Abbey for a long time hoping to be called up to service to the Queen in the countries war against the Jaul Empire. When he finally gets the call, he heads to the Dragon's Hide Inn for some more training before taking up his mission to find a scribe helping the enemy. But once at the Dragon's Hide Inn, it is clear that to complete his mission he still has a lot to learn and more enemies than he can count that want him dead. This is a great start to a fantasy series that I am looking forward to completing.

4.75 stars. I’m sad that I’m done with this series. Chestnut Springs will be a dear place in my heart!

I love Emily Henry. Finally getting around to reading her earlier works. I really enjoyed this one! Alex and Poppy have been friends since freshman year of college and take an annual summer trip. Most of the time on a budget but always with lots of fun and hijinks. The story is told going back and fourth between past summer trips and the present day summer trip. Julia Whelan did an amazing job with the narration for this book. I can't be sure if I loved it equally or more than Book Lovers but I sure did love this! I cried a little and laughed a bunch because it was the perfect read for this summer. If you love Emily Henry, this one is not to be missed!

I found this book to have some parts that were extremely enlightening and some parts that were too long. I liked how she utilized certain books like The Bbluest Eye, Possession and The Last Samurai to drive different parts of her narrative. Sarah was affected by the many readings or re-readings of these books. Some destroyed her, some made her look at the world differently before and after her breakdown and depression diagnosis. Sarah described perfectly the many ways we interact with what we read and how our love or obsession with books help reveal in us our faults and the lies we like to tell ourselves and others. They also can help us find ourselves in ways we wouldn't or couldn't imagine especially certain characters that were unrelatable at one point in life are totally relatable now. I love to read and this book had some really interesting perspectives on reading but especially the debilitating effects of depression.

Cole and Alastor have an ongoing rivalry. They both are are serial killers. Alastor is brutal and messy, Cole is precise and surgical in his precision. Their rivalry has bled over into the art world as well where they vis for supremecy. Mara is an aspiring artist, working three jobs just to make ends meet. One night, after a gallery event, she is kidnapped and her captor slits her wrists and leaves her for dead. Cole stumbles upon her but chooses not to help her. Mara survives only to find herself caught in the cross hairs of two killers. One of the killers becomes obsessed with her but can't decide why and the othe becomes obsessed with making her death permanent. I enjoyed this story and if you are interested in dark romance, this one is worth a read.

I picked this series up after viewing a recommendation video Katee Roberts put on IG. So far, it’s packed with romance and magic, and is yet to disappoint.