Happy July!  Summer has arrived with a vengeance here; after a cooler June, July has had much hotter days.  Good for staying in and reading, I suppose!  I’ve been having a month of mostly fantasy books, which has always been a favorite, of course.  Lots of variety within that category, though!

I mentioned in my last update that I was reading a book about a character people forget – that book was The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab.  It sounds like the same premise as The Sudden Appearance of Hope, but it felt and played out very differently.  Hope felt like (fuzzy) science fiction, while this was straight fantasy.  Addie makes a deal with the devil – or at least, one of the “old gods” – in the early 1700s.  She gains “freedom” – immortality but also no one can remember her.  The book intercuts between stories of Addie’s past through the centuries and a modern story when she finally meets a man who can remember her.  This hits multiple story types I love, and there was a lot to enjoy here.  Her story felt deeply sad, though, in a way Hope didn’t, and I wasn’t entirely satisfied by the ending.  So I guess it was 98% of a very good book.

In the Lives of Puppets by T.J. Klune was one I was hotly anticipating.  Klune wrote the incandescently wonderful House in the Cerulean Sea and the hilariously funny How to Be a Normal Person, so that sets up a ton of expectation!  It’s a bit of Pinocchio with a little Wizard of Oz, about a human who was raised by an android and then goes on a kind of quest with three robot friends. This definitely had a lot of Klune markers to it, a found family story where everyone is a little bit against the norm.  The book also, unfortunately, had a tendency to use deep social awkwardness (mostly robots saying inappropriate remarks because they’re robots and have no filter) as humor, and I found that, well, awkward.  That toned down as the book went on, though, and overall I enjoyed it quite a bit.

I picked up Landline by Rainbow Rowell because I’ve enjoyed her other books, and the premise was intriguing.  Georgie and Neal have been married for years, still in love but things are rocky with two little girls and Georgie’s demanding career.  They have a possibly defining fight and Neal takes the girls to his family’s house for Christmas.  Trying to reach him, Georgie finds herself on the phone with Neal – fifteen years in the past.  Can or should she try to change things?  This was more slice of life than it was fantasy in some ways, but I loved it.  The story intercuts different memories of Georgie and Neal’s romance with the present, and I really enjoyed them as a couple.  There are cliche and trope things here that shouldn’t work but somehow do anyway, and I just found them to feel so real in a very satisfying way.

Indexing by Seanan McGuire (of Wayward Children fame) was another brilliant read – Henry, short for Henrietta, works in a government agency dedicated to dealing with the fallout when fairy tales force their way into the world, reshaping lives according to the rules of the narrative.  Henry is a prevented Snow White, one of her partners is an averted Wicked Stepsister, and it really screws up their day when they have to deal with a Sleeping Beauty or a Pied Piper.  This is a brilliant urban fantasy twist on fairy tales, and I love the emphasis on how dark and dangerous they are.  Henry is a brilliant, irascible heroine, and I’ve just picked up the sequel from the library.

To round things out, I did read two nonfiction books this month.  My book club chose We Need to Hang Out by Billy Baker, a kind of memoir of his efforts to connect more with friends in his forties.  Love the premise, but it became apparent early on that Billy and I would not be friends.  Every social event he tried sounded horrible (to me personally), usually centered around drinking, physical activity, or reminiscing with a hundred of his closest high school friends.  He makes some nods at the importance of men being comfortable expressing their feelings and connections, but also seemed screamingly uncomfortable with actually doing it.  He was not actually very successful with almost anything he tried, so it wasn’t a particularly helpful book either…

This book sent me to go look up Rachel Bertsche, who wrote MWF Seeking BFF, a similarly premised book that I enjoyed much more; I found out she most recently wrote The Kids Are in Bed.  It’s focused on parents of young children (her new life stage since the previous book), and the challenges and importance of carving time for yourself, your romantic partner and your friends.  Since this is my life stage too, I snatched this one up.  Nothing all that new (I may have explored this topic quite a bit in the last two years…) but a lot that was good and some nice suggestions and validations too.  Rachel and I, I think, could be friends, which makes this style of book much more enjoyable.

I’ve just started a new book I’m deeply intrigued by, After Anne by Logan Steiner, a novel based on L. M. Montgomery’s life.  This may be brilliant or terrible and I’m not far enough in to say yet (though I have already gone to check something in my copy of Montgomery’s journals…)  So stay tuned for next month!  I hope you’ve been having some good reading too.