it's my girls' world

Yay for Friday! This gorgeous, sometimes sunny, sometimes rainy weather is just perfect for all the reading I've been doing lately... Here are just a few of my recent reads. 

 So I drank the blogger Kool Aid and read Where the Crawdads Sing. Well actually, I listened to it. A quiet town in North Carolina, a "Marsh Girl" who basically raised herself and a murder that she is being blamed for.  The writing was very detailed, I found myself in the marsh, on the edge of my seat for many parts and felt all the feels for this orphan. The ending blew me away as well. Very surprising.

THis book and the author's style of writing was akin to Judy Blume, one of my favourite authors of all time. I immediately put her other two books on hold in the library. It's set in the city, focused on and around the time of the Obama campaign and two aspirational politicians and their wives. The author really captured the hopefulness of the entire Obama campaign- I'd recently read Becoming and it really did read the same way. I thought it was brilliant, detailed, nuanced, realistic and complicated!

When perusing Amazon, I realised that Kristin Hannah was a very highly author whose books I'd never read. This one  was about family and friends dealing with the early death of  a mom and the damaging years that followed. I couldn't read all of it at one time. It was emotionally complex, heart wrenching and eventually hopeful. 

I really needed a lighter read after the previous one,  so this one by Nancy Thayer totally did the job! A marriage, a blended family, lots of beach fun, summer eats-- a quick read that gave me all the summer feels!!!

This novel by Jojo Moyes was another great one. Two totally opposite people whose lives-- well, they kinda suck-- they get together on a road trip with two teenagers en tow and a smelly dog. Funny, relatable and an unlikely love story with dips and turns along the way, this was another good one.

What's been on your bookshelf lately?