Somehow the 3rd quarter of the year because the fastest one yet – how did the summer blow by so quickly!? Our library reopened and I stocked up on all the books I’d been waiting for, & along the way found some of my favorites for the year!! It’s so interesting to me to watch the fluctuation through the year of physical books vs. Kindle (last quarter it was heavily Kindle but I always seem to go back to real books in the end!).
63. A Cold Trail: Robert Dugoni
64. The Alice Network: Kate Quinn
65. Matchmaking for Beginners: Maddie Dawson
66. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Katherine Boo
67. Once More Unto the Breach: Meghan Holloway
68. Dreams of Falling: Karen White
69: My Stagedoor Family : Lori Mann
70. Miss You: Kate Eberlen
71: The Starless Sea: Erin Morgenstern
72: The Home for Unwanted Girls: Joanna Goodman
73: Long Bright River: Liz Moore
74: The Huntress: Kate Quinn
75: Free Food for Millionaires: Min Jin Lee
76: The Hatching: Ezekiel Boone
77. In Farleigh Field: Rhys Bowen
78. All We Ever Wanted: Emily Giffin
79: The Indigo Girl: Natasha Boyd
80: Pachinko: Min Jin Lee
81: The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle: Stuart Turton
Some of my favorites this time were The Alice Network, Matchmaking for Beginners, The Starless Sea, The Huntress, The Indigo Girl, and Pachinko.
The Alice Network: Truly anything that Alice Quinn writes is gold. Her mastery of historical WW2 fiction is unparalleled and she finds the most fascinating nuggets of history to draw off of. The Alice Network is based on a true story of men and women who infiltrated German lines in rural France and passed information to the Resistance. It is twisty, fascinating, heart wrenching and triumphant, and a must read for those who love WW2 fiction.
Matchmaking for Beginners: Honesty this is a pretty fluffy book but it was really sweet and well written. It moved along well and didn’t falter like many lighter contemporary romances do.
The Starless Sea: Oh this was a good one!! I would recommend reading the actual book as you’ll probably want to flip back and forth between chapters but Erin Morgenstern is such a phenomenal author of magical fiction that you’ll completely lose yourself in her fantasy land on the banks of the Starless Sea.
The Huntress: Another Kate Quinn book, need I say more? It follows three characters through the past and present and includes some of the most BA women you don’t learn about in school called the Night Witches, who were Russian WW2 pilots who ran night bombing raids. I absolutely loved the strong female characters in this book and the twists that it took through post war Europe and America following Nazi hunters. Honestly one of the most gripping books I read all year, and I read it in one sitting because I couldn’t put it down.
The Indigo Girl: My aunt recommended this one to me and I absolutely LOVED it. It follows a 16 year old English girl living in 1700’s South Carolina who attempts to cultivate indigo to save her family’s 3 plantations. It’s also based on the true story of Eliza Pickney, who taught slaves to read in return for helping her create the dye. She proved that indigo could be a cash crop exported to England and became the first woman inducted into South Carolina’s Business Hall of Fame.
Pachinko: If you can get past the fact that this book is almost 500 pages long, you’ll find a majestic story of love, ambition and sacrifice across generations of an exiled Korean family in 20th century Japan. It was SO GOOD and I couldn’t put it down even though I put off reading it for awhile. It was beautifully written and when I finished it, it was one of the few books that has EVER made me sit there and say “wow.”
As always, let me know if you have any recommendations because my list is getting low!!
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