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Summer Reading Recommendations - Our Book Reviews


Curated by Ashley Dickson-Ellison (@ashley_dicksonellison)


I've been working on my summer reading TBR stack, and I find our book reviews to be a great place to start when working on new lists! Today I'm sharing several reviews that would be seasonally appropriate for summer as well as ones I'm hoping to read this season.


"Katherine Center’s What You Wish For is devoted to the pursuit of joy. That doesn’t mean it’s always a joyful novel--in fact, it opens with a tragedy that broke my heart. What it does mean is that Center is exploring, on every page, what we can do when it’s tough to be joyful, when our lives seem to be out of our control, when the world seems to be against us. How do we find joy then?


"Elementary librarian Samantha Casey has not led an easy life, but she’s finally found her happy place. She loves Kempner School, which is a tight-knit, welcoming place. She has a best friend, Alice, who is both incredibly nerdy (math t-shirts!) and insanely cool. By moving to Galveston, she’s escaped the horror of an embarrassing and unrequited crush on Duncan Carpenter, a brilliant teacher and free spirit from her last school. And she has Max and Babette Kempner, the founders of the school, her mentors, and her (unofficially) adopted parental figures." Click to read the full review.


You can also check out our episode where we talked with author Katherine Center, 134: How to Find Joy - Discussing WHAT YOU WISH FOR with Katherine Center.



"Welp. I think I am on a food book kick. Last week I brought you Stanley Tucci’s nonfiction memoir, Taste: My Life Through Food. This week I am bringing you Kim Fay’s fiction delight Love & Saffron: A Novel of Friendship, Food, and Love. Ya’ll, I could not put this book down. I loved it oh, so much. This is a slim (200 pages, but it is a small book!) largely epistolary novel chronicling the friendship between two women, Joan, a 27-year-old food aficionado living in Los Angeles and Imogen, an older woman in her 60s living in Washington State, in the early 1960s." Click to read the full review.



"I texted a picture of the first page of Brandy Ferner's Adult Conversation, about the protagonist's inability to have a few minutes alone in the bathroom, to Sara and Ashley and just said "Page 1 of Adult Conversation is promising. 😂” Their responses? "Heehee. I like that!" and "😂😂😂 So painfully like my own reality. 😳💩🤣” That conversation, friends, sums up my feelings about this book: it's funny, I like it, and it's SO much like the reality of the lives of mothers everywhere.


"The novel is about April, a stay-at-home mom of a two year old and an eight year old whose only time alone is when she goes to the dentist for a filling. Her husband Aaron loves her and tries to be understanding and helpful . . . but he doesn't REALLY get it. He doesn't understand why April doesn't want to be affectionate or why she gets upset when he has to work late or why she worries so much about what the kids are eating..." Click to read the full review.


We also had a chance to talk with author Brandy Ferner; you can check out that conversation here.



"Party of Two, the fifth book in Jasmine Guillory's loosely connectedThe Wedding Date series, is a joyful read. I loved the main characters, Olivia and Max, and we watch the development of their relationship from alternating perspectives, which I think is fun in romance novels.


"Olivia--who first appeared in The Wedding Date--is an attorney who just moved from New York, where she was a small part of a big law firm, to L.A. to start her own firm with her friend. She's staying in a hotel until her house is ready and having a drink at the bar one night when she meets Max, a handsome guy with a great sense of humor. They have a good conversation, and then Olivia goes to her room, amused to turn on the television and see the guy she just met. It turns out that Max is a public figure, a first-term Senator. She laughs and then shrugs it off. Then, by chance, they see each other at an event a few weeks later, and Max starts to woo Olivia. She's willing to see him again but isn't looking for anything serious . . . until (of course!) romance ensues." Click to read the full review.



"Somehow, That Summer is only my third book by Jennifer Weiner, but I definitely need to dive into her backlist because I devoured this novel. I could NOT put it down. It’s (1) a great summer read (and it’s finally feeling like summer!); (2) a book with an important social issue at its core; (3) a suspenseful revenge story; and (4) a sweet, sincere romance.


"That Summer is the story of three women: Diana, Daisy (whose real name is Diana), and Daisy’s daughter Beatrice. The novel opens with Diana, a fifteen-year-old girl working as a mother’s helper for the summer at Truro. She loves the job and is gaining confidence in who she is and who she wants to be, thrilled to have found friends with whom to bond and older boys with whom to flirt." Click to read the full review.


(A note to our readers: click on the hashtags above to see our other blog posts with the same hashtag.)


Interested in what else we're reading? Check out our Featured Books page.


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