It’s a short reading recap for May! I really need to step my reading game up. While short and sweet, all three books were bangers in my opinion. As we head into the summer, I hope to have more time to dive into more stories – especially since there are some new releases sitting on my TBR waiting to be read! Here’s my reading recap for May:
The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young – The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young follows the story of the titular character, June, who is waiting for her fate to find her. The women in June’s family are cursed, where her small town of Jasper, North Carolina, knows what befalls the Farrow women and the madness that led to June’s mother, Susanna’s disappearance. As the curse begins to hit June, where she starts seeing and hearing things that aren’t there, she’s determined to figure out this curse and how to end it – even if it means sacrificing everything. After her beloved grandma dies, June discovers cryptic clues that could have the answer to her mother’s disappearance. Could the door she thought was a hallucination be real? Could it have the answers to her mother’s disappearance? As June goes through the threshold of this door, she has no idea that she’s about to embark on a journey that will change her life.
I went into this story not knowing what to expect. As a typical romance girlie, this technically isn’t a romance, but I do love magical realism in stories and this one checked that box tenfold. At first, I struggled a little bit to get into the story as I tried to understand June and what she was going through. As I kept reading and the plot developed, I got immersed in the story and couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next. My predictions as I read were wrong the whole time and I was shocked at some of the turn of events as the story progressed. There was some romance elements in the story but that’s not the focus of the story. June’s complicated life and her family’s past were interesting to read, though I did get confused with a few parts as I understood more. If you’re into magical realism and a little bit of mystery, check this book out.
Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry – read my full review here
Audre & Bash Are Just Friends by Tia Williams – I don’t usually read young adult books – nothing against YA it’s just that I struggle with relating to a younger characters – but when I saw Tia Williams was going to write a book centered on one of her other character’s daughters, I knew I had to read it. If you’ve read Seven Days In June, then you are no stranger to Audre Mercy-Moore, Eva Mercy’s daughter. You don’t need to have read Seven Days In June to read this book, but it does help you understand what’s going on in the story (you can also check out my review here).
Anyway, Audre & Bash Are Just Friends centers around Audre’s last summer as a high school student as she prepares to enter her senior year. She’s preparing her materials for her college admissions essays and is determined to write a self help book for teens to stand out amongst other applicants. Audre is an aspiring psychologist who regularly therapizes her private school classmates for a fee. When her summer plans are derailed, she’s stuck in Brooklyn with writers block and zero plans. When she realizes that she needs life experience to write her self help book, her friend Reshma helps her out with a sort of summer bucket list to help her get the experience she needs to write her book. The problem? Audre isn’t like a regular teenager and doesn’t know how to have “fun.” She ends up bumping into the new kid in town, Bash, whose reputation despite being new to Brooklyn already preceded him. Despite what she’s heard, she decides on asking him to be her “fun consultant” to help her complete the items on her list. While she was planning on having fun in some capacity, she didn’t anticipate that there would also be some trouble.
Knowing Audre from Seven Days In June, and through reading this book, she’s way ahead of her years and is very smart and wise. Like you forget she’s supposed to be a teenager and isn’t an adult. What I liked about this story is that it grounded her back to her age, and not in a bad way, because Audre needed to be a teenager for once; she finally gets to experience some of those normal, big teenager moments and suffers the consequences as well. It was fun to see Eva and Shane again and see how they navigated Audre’s story as a unit. That said, Audre & Bash was an enjoyable read, regardless if you usually read YA or not.
