It’s Monday. What are you reading?

Posted on by BonnieReadsAndWrites

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? is a place to meet up and share what you have been, and are about to be, reading over the week. It’s a great post to organize yourself. It’s an opportunity to visit and comment and er… add to your groaning TBR pile! So welcome in everyone. This meme started on J Kaye’s blog and then was hosted by Sheila from Book Journey. Sheila then passed it on to Kathryn at The Book Date.

I just finished two audiobooks this past week (At the Coffee Shop of Curiosities and North of Nowhere) while driving for work and driving to and from our future retirement house in Bryson City. They were both fantastic and I’ll be posting the reviews this week. I also read and reviewed a Christian devotional, Bouquet of Wisdom, and that review can be found here.

This coming week, I’m trying to scale down the Netgalley shelf a little bit. First up is The Beautiful Risk by Lynn Hightower, and then California Golden by Melanie Benjamin. I’m also beginning a long read of The Reformatory (576 pages) for Historical Novel Society.

California Golden: (from Amazon) Southern California, 1960s: endless sunny days surfing in Malibu, followed by glittering neon nights at Whisky a Go Go. In an era when women are expected to be housewives, Carol Donnelly breaks the mold as a legendary female surfer struggling to compete in a male-dominated sport—and her daughters, Mindy and Ginger, bear the weight of Carol’s unconventional lifestyle.

The Beautiful Risk: After her husband dies in a plane crash on Mount Blanc, Junie has returned to America. She is grieving her husband, and her dog, Leo, who ran off after the crash, is still missing. Then she gets a call from the man investigating the crash in France. Leo has been seen with a man closely resembling her husband! Junie must return to France to try and find out the truth.

The Reformatory: (From Amazon) Gracetown, Florida, June 1950: Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory. Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. (Based on a real school of horrors in Florida)

My goal for Netgalley is to get 30 days ahead of my list, and I’m not even close right now.

How about you? What are you reading?

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Published by BonnieReadsAndWrites

I love to read and write book reviews in my free time. I review advance review copies of books on Netgalley for various publishers. I am also a reviewer for Historical Novels Review Magazine, the magazine of the Historical Novel Society. I review books from publishers of all size, large to small. I have a special place in my heart for indie authors. I will sometimes post a little writing that I might dabble in occasionally. I also am lucky enough to live in the Smoky Mountains, so I'll be sharing photos of the beauty around me from time to time.

23 thoughts on “It’s Monday. What are you reading?”

  1. You sure accomplish a lot, Bonnie. Good work! I’m currently reading “Once Upon a Time in the Swamp” by C. S. Boyack. It’s well written and interesting.

  2. I am such a slow reader I had to give up on Netgalley, even though they have so many good books.

    The Beautiful Risk sounds like a really good book.

    I just DNF’d a cozy mystery I was hoping would be better than it was.

    Now I am reading The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz but also a middle-grade book called When Hilter Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr. The second book is a very interesting story of a family who had to leave Germany to flee to Switzerland because the father is a famous writer who speaks out against the Nazis. It sounds a lot darker than it actually is.

  3. I’m working on my review stack too. I should be starting September releases this week. Your books do sound interesting. I’m especially interested in The Beautiful Risk. I enjoyed reading North of Nowhere recently too. Come see my week here. Happy reading!

  5. I just finished Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and now I can’t read anything else as it was so good. The best book I’ve read this year. It sticks with you for days maybe even weeks.

    1. I read In the Middle of Hickory Lane last year and I was shocked that I had never read a Heather Webber book before. At the Coffee Shop of Curiosities is also set in a small town and has a slight paranormal twist. I loved it.

  7. As for me I am reading “Beyond Weird Beyond Weird…why everything you thought you knew about quantum physics is … different” by Philip Ball, and Leonberger by Nina Pustova, and “an ecotopian lexicon” by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy, and this is how we grow edited by Yvette Prior.

  8. I’m just finishing up a review for an upcoming poetry collection, Things of Little Consequence, by John Casey. Last night I finished reading the third volume of a flash fiction anthology, The Shadows We Breathe, edited by Sarah Brentyn, which will be released tomorrow. I have one more review to write before I figure out what to read next.

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