i really can't hold these in frame! how do
people do this! that is precarious if
anything...
I do not have the strength to hold this.
hey everyone, my name's Maddie and
today I'm going to be going over all of
the books that I read
over the summer. I say summer quite
loosely. This is everything i've read
between
april and august, so quite a lot of
months to cover and quite a lot of books.
I managed to read
16 in that time. The first book I have to
talk about is On Chesil Beach by Ian
McEwan.
This is all about a young couple, Edward
and Florence, in the 1960s on the night
of their wedding.
fForence is really anxious about the
consummation and it leads to a breakdown
in their relationship. The book has a
kind of now and then narrative
of telling you about their wedding night
but also their relationship from its
very beginning, when they met, how they
fell in love,
what their families thought of each
other and it's like a beautiful series
of vignettes of their life. I had quite a
specific reason for wanting to read this
and that's because Florence can be read
as an asexual character
and so much of her speech to Edward
about how she felt
really resonated with me. I liked that it
gave both characters perspectives on
Florence's asexuality
and while it was a bittersweet read, I
really appreciated the representation of
a sex-repulsed character.
I also watched the movie that has Saoirse Ronan
and it was
stunning really beautiful, like, the
actual cinematography of it was gorgeous
and I thought that it really did the
book justice as well. I think the best
part of this book is the ending.
It gives you a 'what if?' scenario of both
whether Edward and fForence stayed
together
or if they decided to separate and I
really liked what both of those endings
had to say about their love and what
Florence meant to Edward even if society
would have thought there would have been
something missing from their
relationship.
Very sweet, a standout read for the year
for me. Then I got to read Loveless by
Alice Oseman
with another asexual character as the
protagonist. What world am I living in
where I read two back to back??  and I did
a whole video review of what I thought
the representation was like for me
personally.
Since I posted that video, it's come to
my attention that there have been other
reviews that criticized the
representation and I said in my video
that, of course, my review is going to be
biased towards my own experiences
so if you would like to see other
asexual readings of this book,
then I definitely recommend going onto
the goodreads page and seeing whether it's
right for you because
others have found it quite harmful. 
I'll leave a link to the goodreads page
for the reviews of this book, if you
wanted to do your own research.
Although I would keep in mind that this
book...it's about a character that
is despising her own identity. There is a
lot of internalized acephobia in this
that is unfortunately a reflection of
some experiences. But, something to be
very nervous about book like this
is the fact that because it's so
obviously about an aro-ace character,
that it will be taken as a monolith of
that experience - 
as the only way to identify - and
that's a lot of pressure on Alice
Oseman's shoulders, so it would be
impossible to try and represent
every experience of what it's like to be
asexual and I hope that other books in
the future can try
and do it differently and do it better
but we just need more books with ace
characters
so that one doesn't have to be seen as
"the" experience. Next
we have a book that I think is going to
stay with me for the rest of my life
and that's Where the Crawdads Sing by
Delia Owens.
This is all about Kya, who grew up in
the marshes.
She was abandoned by her family slowly
over the course of her early childhood
and so she's living alone, fending for
herself, surviving,
trying to learn. Throughout the course of
the book, you experience her first
romances, heartbreaks, betrayals and how
her town has made her a complete outcast.
Then, the other narrative of the book is a
murder mystery as Chase Andrews, the town
football star of years gone,
is found at the bottom of a water tower
dead and Kya is presumed to be the main
suspect.
Then you follow her court trial as the
town try and convict her. I thought this
was absolutely fascinating. I cannot begin to
fathom how much this book was doing in
terms of plot,
of showing you a character's full life.
This was just such a journey to read and
I really savored it.
The writing was gorgeous with these just
stunning descriptions of the landscape.
It felt like I was truly there.
I have a real struggle
imagining things in my head when it
comes to books and I felt this one
was just playing out like a film. It's
crying out for an adaptation, honestly. My
favorite part of the book was Kya's
relationship with Tate,
a boy a few years older than her that
really took an interest in
educating her and helping foster her
passions. Any time he came up in the book I was
really rooting for them to be together,
and i thought that their relationship
was so sweet, especially in comparison to
Kya's other love interest later in the
book. There's something about it that
managed to be both innocent
and mature and whilst it might be the
kind of book that takes you a while to
settle into, I think
it's so worth putting the effort into
because you get just completely sucked
in. Shall we just have it be in the video
the whole time? just as a prop?
yeah! let's have that there! Next, I read
two thrillers back to back.
First was The Silent Patient by
Alex Michaelides. This was the winner of the goodreads mystery book of the year last
year, so again another super hyped read.
I didn't know that before I picked it up
but I completely understand why
everybody loved this book because I did
not see the twist coming and I know
that's such an easy thing to say about a
thriller,
but I think after seeing so much crime
drama, so much stuff on tv, and reading
these books
my mind is kind of geared to try and
think about what the twist will be, so
I'm always actively doing that.
But, in this book, I was thrown for a loop.
I couldn't put it down. I had to read it
just
in one sitting. What's the guy's name? He
isn't important...
okay so, this book is all about a
therapist
who is trying to unlock the mind of a
woman that killed her husband
and hasn't spoken since. She's pretty
much been written off as crazy but it
turns out that she's been keeping this
journal of the events and you get to
slowly see him try and unpick her
and what happened it was just very, very
clever so
I would recommend this one if you want
to be surprised and, you know, if you're
not then you get to be the person that
says that you guessed it which is
satisfying in itself.
Then I read Fallen angel by Chris
Brookmeyer. It's about a large family who
went to Portugal in the early 2000s
and their daughter went missing. Years
later, they returned to that same holiday
spot
and start to figure out what happened. I
thought it would really grip me
but it turns out that things just seemed
a little bit too
linked. Like, every character was
connected to another one
and at the beginning of the book, there's
this family tree and I didn't realize
how much I would need it but I found
myself just having to keep flicking back
and seeing like
who was married to who, who was the
sibling and daughter and whatever of
whichever person, and I found that quite
distracting to not be able to keep that
information in my head as I was reading.
I really didn't like the twist of this,
it made me feel super uncomfortable
so a low rating. These were like two very
opposite ends of the spectrum.
Then I read City of Girls by Elizabeth
Gilbert. This is all about a young girl
called Vivian who goes to New York City
in
the 1930s and lives with her aunt in a
theatre,
and falls into all the glitz and glamour
of the people acting there and comes to
her sexual maturity.
Reclaiming how we think of women in the
past as being
very prudish and not sexually liberated -
this is the correction to that!
I thought that the character voice was
really vibrant and fun as the structure
of the book is
Vivian writing to someone in her 90s and
telling her about her youth.
Very enjoyable, a four-star read. Next I
read another of my favorite books of the
year and that's Daisy Jones and the Six. This
probably needs no introduction as it's
one of the most hyped books on the
internet. It's told in a
documentary, biography format of someone
who is writing about Daisy
Jones and the Six and how they came to
be a band, the biggest one in the world.
This is probably the book that I raved
the most about in person,
like, anyone I came up to if I had the
opportunity to talk about this book and
how great it was,
I would use it and then have to be like
'sorry, you had to listen to me talk about
that for 20 minutes' but 
I cannot help but talk about how great
it was. Really deserving of all the hype
and how many things can you say that
about? All of the characters
were so well imagined. They were all
well-rounded, fully fleshed out human
beings and
I'm just astounded that they all managed
to have such unique voices. There's like
eight main characters in this
and for them all to interact so well
with each other have distinct
personalities,
it's truly a feat. I loved the format.
There were so many elements of it that
made me laugh seeing how the characters
would
retell different versions of the same
event and quirky little mentions of
people that, say, didn't believe in the band. It would
have, like, one statement from that person
being like
'I wish them all the best' and then
you'd never hear from them again in the
book. It just gave it so much texture to
have moments like that
and at the beginning of each part,
there's a little description of
essentially like a wikipedia article of
what the band had done in that time
period. So, it just made for a really great
reading experience and
now that I've heard good things about
the audiobook, it makes me want to reread
it again because
after seeing how white the cast is for
this in the tv show,
can't say I'm as excited as I
hypothetically would have been
if there'd been more diversity there. My
favourite characters were definitely all
of the women in this book, Daisy probably least. I loved Camilla
the most.
She's the main love interest of Billy,
the ringleader of the Six,
and I thought it was amazing how she and
Daisy were polar opposites.
Any scenes where they interacted or
spoke about each other, I was super
invested in because
they both played such a significant role
in Billy's life. And then my other MVP of
the book was Karen,
the only female member of the Six. While
Camilla and Daisy were 
romantically very different people, Karen
and Daisy were different in terms of
their feminism.
There wasn't any girl bashing going on
in this book, I think they both
appreciated each other's stance
but Karen was very much like 'I have to
be a certain way to be taken seriously
in this industry'
and Daisy could just get away with doing
anything and
still be adored and respected. So, the
contrast is what really made this book
work. Karen and another member of the Six, Graham who's Billy's brother, have a
relationship and that was one of my
favourite side plots of the book. There's
so much going on besides Daisy Jones and
the Six, it's almost sad that that is
what the book is called. I loved how it
gave space for the other characters to
have their lives and tell their stories
as well. One thing about this book is
that it can be quite repetitive in the
fact that it's like
'Daisy Jones was so wonderful', 'every time
Daisy and Billy were on the stage, it was
just magic, unlike anything else' and so many
of the characters had the exact
same interpretations of what they were
like on stage. I really appreciated
the member of the Six that was less
enamored by them.
So, you do have to put up with quite a
lot of that but I
kind of enjoyed the romanticised, rose
tinted glasses
vision that they all had and that didn't
really affect my five-star rating.
Also the ending of this book when you
find out who is writing this book about
them...
wow, the best little twist possible that
I was not expecting.
And the ending, they do this amazing like
'where are they now?' section
telling you about what's happening with
all of the members. That's always my
favourite part of a based on a true story
film
so, I loved all the resolutions that we
got for their lives and how it panned
out after the band broke up. This was
fantastic, fantastic. If you haven't read
it,
what are you doing? Get on board this sex
drugs and rock and roll story. I'm
really pleased that I picked this up and
now I just need to go back and read
every single Taylor Jenkins Reid thing
possible. Then I read Sofia Khan is Not
Obliged and
The Other Side of Happiness by Aiysha Malik,
Sofia Khan is a muslim Bridget Jones character,
going through the
throes of muslim dating and explaining
that as her publisher wants her to write
a book on it.
In the first book, you get to see her
dating and her interactions with her
love interests. At the beginning, she's just called off a
wedding so there's the drama of that,
then she meets two guys that are quite
significant but it's actually not about
who she'll choose. She goes through those
relationships in very clear-cut,
she's done with him and moves on to the
next one, and it wasn't necessarily as
romantic as I thought it was going to be.
It's very much more a slice of life
story
than a love triangle romance. I had
fun with the first one but I was
definitely more intrigued by the second
book, The Other Half of Happiness
is about her marriage with one of the
men that she meets in the first book and
it's an interracial relationship
and the struggles of that for her. And, I
was really interested in
what that would be like. It pretty much
just followed to the pattern of the
first book
so I'd say that I liked this one more
just because the characters felt more
developed. We'd spent more time with them. The thing I
valued most about these books
was the faith aspect of them, I think
it's not something that we really see in
books very often, characters just
practicing their faith
and that being not a background element
of their lives. Reading about other
cultures is just
so fun and I think it's one of the
reasons why I read
so I'm going to put way more effort into
reading books that are
outside of my own experience because I
love being taken out of that and falling
into another person's world entirely for
a while. So i'm very happy that these
ended up being my first
'chick-lit' books, they set the standard
pretty high, I think. Continuing on that
historical train, I read The Muse by
Jessie Burton. This is another two timeline story one
is in the 1960s
following a young caribbean girl called
Odelle, who starts working for a woman
called Marjorie Quick
and discovers this painting that she
wants to know the origins of and the
second storyline is in the 1930s
following the painter and so unfolding
the history and lineage that Odelle is
looking for. I think this book
struggled to grip me because it was so
obviously split into two, with two
different characters as the perspective,
so
I was more invested in Odelle
than I was Olive,
but things really picked up in the last
hundred pages, like,
I was going to put it down and then
something got really dramatic
in Olive's storyline and there was a
little f/f element going on as well
so that really hooked me at the end. I
think it falls into my niche of being
about something
specific in-universe. They're just always
talking about this painting and it
reminded me a lot about Inkheart in that
way, of that whole book being the focus of a
book written by
characters that the book is about,
I don't know, that kind of stuff really
intrigues me
and seeing it across the multiple
timelines throughout history was fun too.
So, while the pacing was a little bit off
for me, I'm still invested enough to read
something else written by Jessie Burton.
Then, I read the last two books in the
Murder Most Unladylike series, Top Marks for Murder and Death Sets Sail. Top Marks For
Murder was really cute. They went back to
Deepdean, so it was another school
setting mystery,
and it was about an open parents
evening so
parents were involved. I don't think that
this one's super focused on
Hazel and Daisy as the people solving
the murder, it was centred on the other
girls that have only really been
secondary characters throughout the
series, so I loved seeing them get to
play a bigger role and it to feel
more like a society because we're so
used to Daisy and Hazel just working as
a pair
that, anytime the group expands to more
than just the two of them,
it's just super fun and I also think
that the murders where things are quite
close to home for the girls,
like when people that they love are
suspects, it just raises the stakes a little
so I thought that was great for the
penultimate book. And then, Death Sets Sail was really just
a fantastic finale. Just like my favourite
book in the series, First Class Murder,
this book is a direct homage to a Poirot
mystery,
Death on the Nile, and it takes place on
a boat. And, I love First Class Murder
because it takes place on a train,
and if there's anything better than a
train setting, it's a boat.
This book took the series to places that
it's never been before, it felt quite
mature. The girls both have their first
kisses which is adorable.
So in Top Marks, one of the
highlights of the book was a character
called Amina,
who is Daisy's love interest, and in this
book she invites them to stay with her
family in Egypt, hence why they end up
going. Another muslim character making an
appearance, love that!
I really couldn't be happier with how
this series finished. I met Robin Stevens a couple of years ago,
and she said to me then that the future
she imagined for
Hazel and Daisy were that Hazel was
going to work at Bletchley Park and
Daisy was going to be an
international spy, and I can definitely
still see that being the ending
after this book. Continuing on with
murder mysteries, I read Good Girl, Bad
Blood by Holly Jackson. This is the
sequel to A Good Girl's Guide to Murder
which I read in our read all day and
absolutely loved, so I'm really pleased
to have picked this one up so soon, but
it now means I have to wait for the
third book. I'm so intrigued with where
this book took the series. It follows Pip
as she creates a podcast for the mystery
of the first book,
and she thinks she's going to give it up
until one of her friends comes to her
saying that his brother is missing and
so she gets drawn into another mystery.
Seeing how well executed the first book
was, I was a little bit apprehensive that
Holly Jackson would be able to achieve
the same thing with the second book
but she definitely did. The mystery was
at the same standard. I thought that the
character development was great, you
could actually see how
the events of the first book affected
Pip and her character definitely
took a turn kind of in the vein of Tris
from Divergent
so I'm nervous for her for the third
book, but I thought it was great and such
a worthy sequel.
Next, we have Girl, Woman, Other by
Bernadine Evaristo.
This is the story of 12 women,
predominantly black women,
and their stories living in a modern day
Britain. It's split up into
four parts each with three characters
and they all link so the story begins
telling you about
Amma, who is a playwright, and then the
second perspective
is Yazz, her daughter, and the section
after that is Dominique, Amma's best
friend. The thing that links all the characters
is that they're going to see this play
that Amma puts on, and what I loved the
most is as I read it, getting to see these
connections between the women because
they weren't all just linked to one
person. There were little connections
between all of them
and the ending genuinely made me cry. I
didn't really know how a book like this
could finish because it all seemed so segmented but
there is a conclusion/epilogue chapter where you
get to see more of them all
existing in the same story. It tied up
these loose ends in the most beautiful
way possible, confirming the themes of
motherhood and female experiences.
There's so much diversity in this
in terms of gender identity, sexuality
and each woman's experience with race
being different, so I thought it was a
really valuable read and a true feat
again, just like Daisy Jones to have so
many characters that all felt
so unique like each one of these women
could have carried the whole book
if that had just been the story. I think
the writing style was
hilariously literary in just the way
that, like, if you
miss out some punctuation and don't use
capital letters as
often then things can come across as
"more difficult to read"
and therefore is given more value. That's
a hot take from studying english lit,
but don't let that put you off. I think
it's really easy once you actually
just like fall into it, just read a
couple of pages and then you'll adjust.
So, really great, five stars. We're getting
to the end now, so I read
The Stranger in My Home by Adele Parks.
This was recommended to me by my nan.
I thought it was going to be really cute
if I read a book that she'd read
recently, and we could talk about it
together because
apparently there was a huge twist at the
end and, as I was reading it,
I did speak to my nan and update her of
where I was in the book and I kept being
like 'where's the twist? like, what is this
going to be?' because it felt like the
twist was at the beginning!
Because, the whole plot is that a woman
realises that her daughter
isn't actually biologically hers. Two
babies were switched to the hospital
and so the girl that she has actually
belonged to this other family, and it
turns out that that family
might have a genetic mutation in their
genes which means that the daughter
she's lived with
is at risk of dying early. That's
traumatising and
a huge twist in itself, and I was losing
interest because
this is like a 400 page book, and by
300 pages,
it wasn't doing anything but, like The
Muse, the last hundred pages
really did go 'whoa, here is the story!' and
tried to
bring you as much drama should have been over the whole book in just that short
amount of time. So,
I will feed back to my nan, but yeah, not
the right pacing for me! And
finally, I read The Hunting Party by Lucy
Foley. This was another hyped book on my
instagram, so I couldn't resist picking
it up for 99p in a charity shop.
This tells the story of 10 friends who
go to a hunting lodge in Scotland
over new year's. They're in their mid-30s
and they were all friends when they were
freshers, so it's been a while since
they've interacted
and you just get to see the drama unfold
between them as secrets get unveiled.
This book, I think the marketing or the
framing of it
externally, hindered me from enjoying it
as much as I could because,
on the blurb, it's just got like a list
of the archetypes that the characters
fall into
and so I thought that they were all
going to be relevant but actually only
three of them have perspectives and the
other two perspectives
are of the people that work at the lodge.
They are in charge of the 'now' narrative,
telling you about the fact that they
found a body, and then the 'then' narrative
is of these three women that are all
part of the bigger group but it just
felt that like there was a lot of
chaff that could have been cut. A lot
of people that weren't significant to
the story so I didn't understand why it had to be
such a big group. I was really looking
for a big,
ensemble cast thing, and that's not what
this ended up delivering. I did like that
it was female-centric but it did
end up being quite catty
and I think that the reasons, the
motives behind
the murder and the pain that was caused
felt a little
cliche. Those were the books that I read
and I really do not have the strength to
hold this!
So, that's all the reading that I managed
to do between April and August, and I
found some real gems.
I'm really excited by that and how
everything I've read has helped further
define what my taste is going to be for
the rest of the year. I'll have to try
and set out my September tbr, that's
something I'm really excited to pick.
Let me know what you thought of these
books if you've read them, thank you
everyone
so much for watching, I do not know how
long this video is going to be, but thank
you if you made it this far,
and I'll see you next time!
