While wedding planning (!!!) has started to creep into my free time a bit, I did find some time this month to do a bit of reading.
Actually, quite a bit. I sped through three books this month — although one was a children’s book and one was the newest Emily Henry novel, which feels a bit like cheating.
(As a reminder: I always track my reading on Goodreads.)
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VALIANT WOMEN: THE EXTRAORDINARY AMERICAN SERVICEWOMEN WHO HELPED WIN WORLD WAR II by Lena Andrews
Recommend
This was a book club pick, and while it wasn’t the type of book I’d normally gravitate toward, I absolutely loved it. The last quarter of the book is all citations and references, which should give you an idea as to how much research and work went into this book. It read well and flowed wonderfully, and I learned so much about so many incredible, brilliant and strong women, like Ann Baumgartner, Charity Adams, Mary Sears and Jaqueline Cochran. I was fascinated by a lot of this history, especially the bits about women in aviation.
A LONG WALK TO WATER by Linda Sue Park
Recommend
While this is a children’s book written for middle schoolers (and it definitely reads like it), it’s still really touching! My mom mailed it to me and it’s really short (about 120 pages) so it was easy to read in the span of an hour. This book tells the story of Salva, a Sundanese refugee in the 1980s, and Nya, a girl living in South Sudan in 2008. It covers a lot of the Second Sudanese Civil War and tells the story of the “Lost Boys.” It’s based on a true story about a real person, and it’s a good entryway into the long history of Sudanese conflicts
GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL LIFE by Emily Henry
Recommend
I don’t think I will ever not recommend Emily Henry’s books. If you’re not familiar, she writes romance books… but not like, smut romance. She writes long, banter-filled, introspective narratives about two people falling in love. She writes in pure tropes, but somehow, they always feel fresh and new and exciting. “Great Big Beautiful Life” was a bit different than her normal books. It leaned a bit lighter on the romance, but also somehow fused in elements of historical fiction and mystery. It felt like a Taylor-Swift-Writes-Evelyn-Hugo piece, and while it wasn’t my favorite Emily Henry book, I did still devour it and I do still recommend it.
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