When I went to write up my June book reviews, I realized I had never published my May reviews! So here we go -- an extra meaty books post today to cover two months of some pretty good reading -- inclduding three five-star books in June!

May Books

Five Stars

Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I wasn't sure how I'd feel about reading a book where the pandemic plays such a major part in the story line, but holy cow this book was good. There's a twist about half way through that I just never saw coming, and this book was just a great look at how the pandemic upended so much in our lives and changed dynamics in relationships. I couldn't put it down despite the heavy subject matter.

Four Stars

Book Lovers by Emily Henry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After a book about the pandemic, I was ready for something light and really fun and Emily Henry delivered. This book is a Hallmark movie in book form. Big city girl visits a small town with her sister, bumps into her work nemesis, has several awkward, but kind of flirty encounters while trying to complete the bucket list her sister put together for the trip. Just a perfectly fun and easy read.

The Summer Place by Jennifer Weiner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The conclusion to Jennifer Weiner's summer series was such a fun and kind of wild book. My only complaint was in the beginning there were a lot of characters' points of views to keep track of, and I couldn't always remember who was who. But I eventually figured it out and loved following all the family drama that came from one character deciding she was going to marry her pandemic boyfriend and starting to plan a wedding a her grandmother's house on the Cape. I loved the call backs to some of the previous Cape Cod books. A really fun, summer read! Highly recommend!

We Were Never Here by Andrea Bartz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a great book even though at times I really wanted to throttle the main character Emily for continuing to put herself in questionable situations. I actually got to see the author speak a few days after I finished the book, and she talked about how it was important to write the best friend character Kristen to have some redeeming qualities and motivations so that readers just didn't hate her off the bat. I thought she did a good job of that and the dynamics of this friendship kept the book really interesting.

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This murder mystery was fun because of the characters -- all in their 70s -- who meet weekly to discuss murder cases. When a murder happens right on the property of their retirement home, they jump into action to try to solve the case. The characters are just really delightful, and their quirks and intricacies make them a group you root for even as they are sneaking around and potentially compromising evidence. This book scores points for being something very different in the crime genre.

The Chicken Sisters by K.J. Dell'Antonia
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was such a fun and fast read. Two sisters and their dueling fried chicken joints square off on a reality tv show called Food Wars. Producers’ questions stir up some old family secrets that kept things interesting. Really enjoyed this.

Three Stars

One Two Three by Laurie Frankel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book started out a little slow, and for a while, I wasn't sure I was going to finish it. Things really picked up around the halfway point, and I was glad I stuck with it. I have to assume the premise of this book was based around the water crisis in Flint. In the fictional town in the book, the water supply is damaged by a chemical plant and many people die or suffer from suffer disabilities as a result. The plant shut down, but a generation later is trying to reopen promising this time everything is safe. The story is told from the perspectives of three sisters who live in town and who have directly suffered the consequences of the tainted water. Once it got going, it was a good story.

June Books

Five Stars

Every Summer After by Carley Fortune
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

You know those books when you are just sad they are over because you don’t want to leave the characters behind? That was this book. It jumps back and forth from present day and the summers of Percy’s childhood on a lake as she makes friends with the neighbors, Sam and Charlie. When Sam and Charlie’s mom dies, Percy is called back to the lake, even though she hasn’t spoken to either brother in 12 years. This is just a wonderful book about growing up and making choices and learning to live with the outcomes.

The Hotel Nantucket by Elin Hilderbrand
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was another book I was so sad to finish. I loved the characters, and I didn't want to stop reading their stories. I also know that with each new Elin Hilderbrand book, I'm inching closer to her last one. I'm truly dreading her retirement because I just love the stories she tells and the characters she brings to life. This book focuses on a cast of characters striving to get the newly reopened Hotel Nantucket off the ground and earn an elusive "five-key" rating from a hotel reviewer. The hotel is haunted by a friendly ghost named Grace, and she's honestly one of the most fun characters in the book. Highly recommend for a fun summer read.

Beautiful Little Fools by Jillian Cantor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After reading Half Life last year, I was so excited to read Jillian Cantor's latest book where she retells the story of the Great Gatsby through the eyes of the female characters. This book was great. It was fun to imagine the back stories for these women and how they all come to overlap and meet each other and Gatsby. If you're looking for a book to read, I can't recommend this enough.

Four Stars

The Shore by Katie Runde
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book really pulled at my heart strings. It's set in Seaside, NJ and I read it while sitting on the beach in DE. It follows a family that owns shore rental properties. Business is going well until Margot's husband develops a malignant brain tumor that completely changes his personality. Over the course of the summer, Margot and her two daughters grapple with their impending loss and what will come after.

River of the Gods: Genius, Courage and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile by Candice Millard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is definitely outside the norm of what I typically read, but it was really interesting to get a deeper look at exploration and colonialism in Africa through the lens of the hunt to find the the start of the Nile River. The author focuses on two men from England who are given the task that many others have failed, and she pulls you along on their journey as hardships and egos threaten to derail the search.

Three Stars

Theatre of Marvels by Lianne Dillsworth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The premise of this book was really interesting, but I thought it was slow at parts and would sometimes not hold my attention. Zillah is an aspiring actress who lands a role in a variety show because of her skin color depicting the “Great Amazonia.” As the owner of the variety show looks to expand, Zillah realizes the lengths he will go to to exploit people for his profit in 19th century England.

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I've ignored this blog for basically the entire month of May because I didn't want to write another, "I'm dealing with a nagging injury" post. I kept hoping maybe if I waited just one more week, I could write the "I had this annoying injury, but some time off fixed it and I'm good now" post. But alas, that is not the case. And since this blog has been heavy with book and house updates, and seriously lacking in running updates, I didn't have much to say. 

So here we are, about a month later, dealing with the same hamstring injury I had at this time last year, plus that nagging tight hip flexor that cropped up last summer. Basically I'm falling apart from the waist down. 

The hip thing I've waxed poetic about over the last several months and all the stretching and strengthening work I've been doing to try to alleviate that issue. 

And wouldn't you know it, while I was focused on building strength to help fix my hip issues, I tweaked or pulled or in some way hurt my left hamstring again. I can't place exactly when I first noticed the hamstring tightness creeping in, but by early of May it was pretty clear this wasn't just a tight muscle that needed some extra TLC. 

After my last attempted run, sometime in early May

So for the next several weeks I backed off big time, no running, no lower body strength training, and then eventually even my walks around the neighborhood had to go because walking hurt. I added ice, I took anti-inflammatories. 

But now I'm headed back to the orthopedic doctor and likely another round of PT because I feel like I've got a bit of a chicken and egg situation going on here. What kind of rehab stuff do I need to be doing for my hamstring and my hip? Did my hamstring issues last year, that eventually seemed to heal with time, cause my hip issue that started last August? Or are those things unrelated?

Did my hip issue cause this most recent hamstring issue? Am I messing with my form really badly to accommodate one of these injuries and that is causing the other to worsen? And how in the world do I treat two different injuries on different sides of my body?

Normal PT stuff usually focuses on correcting the muscle imbalances I have on one side to fix the other side. But when I have stuff on both sides what do I do? What do I prioritize? And how in the world do I not lose all my strength and general fitness in the meantime?

I'll be curious what the doctor says, and I really look forward to when I can stop sitting on an icepack every day while I'm working. 

I'm a bit late with my April book update, but I'm excited to say that after two really lackluster months of reading, April rebounded. I read a lot of books I really enjoyed. All but two were mystery/thriller types, which is definitely my favorite genre. 

Here's what I read:

Four Stars

Her Last Affair by John Searles
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is billed as a psychological thriller, but it's much more a slow burn than the fast-paced thrillers I typically read. In this book, three characters are trying to recapture lost love of their youth. There's recently widowed Skyla, who is losing her sight and trying to find a tenant for her rental property. There's Linelle, who is bored in her marriage and is curious when an old flame reaches out on social media. And there's Jeremy, who's sent to Providence for a work assignment where he looks up a past fling. Throughout the entire book there's a deep undercurrent that something isn't quite right in any of the story lines. I loved the way the author brought everything together at the end.

You'll Be the Death of Me by Karen M. McManus
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sometimes YA mysteries are the best thing to pull you out of a reading slump. When three students play hookie, they stumble on a dead body and quickly become people of interest. So they scramble to find the real killer to clear their names. Fun and fast and a bit unbelievable, but still good.

False Witness by Karin Slaughter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love a good Karin Slaughter mystery. This one took some turns, and it was a good story of two sisters trying to take down a man from their childhood who has been terrorizing women since his teen years.

The Cousins by Karen M. McManus
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another fun YA mystery. Three cousins are summoned to the family resort on an island their grandmother owns that their parents have been banished from for years. But there’s some weird stuff going on and they set out to figure it out. Really enjoyed this book.

The Golden Couple by Greer Hendricks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love these two authors and was so excited to pick up their newest book — especially because it was set in DC. This definitely lived up to my expectations of their twisty thrillers. I figured out part of the twist, but then the book took like two more turns and I didn’t see the ending coming.

Three Stars

Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life by Christie Tate
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book seemed to be released to a good amount of praise when it came out for so openly addressing therapy. It was an interesting read, but also at times it seemed really out there to me some of the approaches used in the group therapy sessions.

Sister Stardust by Jane Green
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was looking forward to Jane Green’s newest book, but I thought it started out a bit slow and took me a while to get into it. It follows a young girl from outside London growing up in the late 1960s. She meets new friends and gets swept up in the party scene in Morocco. The book picked up after a little bit, but I didn’t love it as much some of Green’s other books.

The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was excited to read this after all the good reviews, but I thought it was only so so compared to the other book I read about the disappearance of Agatha Christie. This book was written from the perspective of the woman having the affair with Christie’s husband, and I just didn’t find her likeable, which is probably why I didn’t love this as much.

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