Hi everyone! I’ve been reading a bit so here are the books for the month! 

Right now I’m at 36 books out of 50, which is my goal for the year. That is 72% of my goal! I’m getting close! Kinda? But I suppose there is a little under half a year left! Anyway, I read 3 books this month, so a little short of my usual 4 per month goal (one book a week) but it’s okay. I did mostly enjoy the books I did read, so here we go!

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Hunted by Meagan Spooner

2 out of 5 stars

Yeva is living a life of aristocracy and fortune in the city, but longs for the forest she grew up in. She lives with a feeling of constantly wanting “more” although she isn’t sure what that is. When her father makes a risky business venture and loses big, he moves Yeva and her sisters back to his old hunting lodge. At first Yeva is thrilled, but she isn’t allowed to hunt as she used to and her father goes missing in the woods. Yeva takes it upon herself to go after him, knowing that he was obsessed with tracking a creature that no one’s seen. Yeva finds the Beast and the cursed valley where he lives, and must find a way to survive in this world that the fairy tales of Yeva’s youth has prepared her for.

I was excited for this book but ultimately it feel flat for me. Hunted is a Beauty and the Beast retelling, so you know I had to read it, but it wasn’t that great. I felt that the characters were predictable and boring, and the story did have its own unique twist but wasn’t that compelling. I did enjoy the fairy tales that are woven into it. I hadn’t realized it before reading but it is inspired by Russian fairy tales. I haven’t read any Russian fairy tales myself but they seem to all have this kind of mystical story telling, and I do enjoy reading that type of writing so that aspect was nice for me. Unfortunately the plot itself didn’t really hold up to it until closer to the end and felt slow for the first two thirds of the book for me.

City of Bones by Cassandra Clare

3 out of 5 stars

Clary witnesses a murder during a night out with a friend, but by the time the police arrive there is no evidence as it’s simply vanished. This is Clary’s introduction to the Shadowhunters, a group of magical people who dedicate their lives to keeping order among the supernatural beings that inhabit the world and fight to defeat the demons that plague it. When her mother disappears and she’s attacked by a demon herself, Clary immerses herself with the Shadowhunters to try to find her mother and find how she’s connected with this world she never knew existed.

I did an entire separate review on this one already so you can read it if you want (you’ll find both a spoiler-free and a full review in the post). Basically I thought it was an interesting concept but it was not very well written and dragged a lot, which made this already long book feel even longer. I hear the series gets much better though so I do plan to keep reading and reviewing it as I go along.

When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon

4 out of 5 stars

Dimple Shaw is a smart and ambitious young lady, ready to head to college and escape her Mamma’s obsession to turn Dimple into perfect wife material and marry her off. In the meantime she’s off to a summer program to get a head start in web development. Rishi Patel is a smart and amenable young man who is excited to meet Dimple, the woman he’s been arranged to marry at the same summer program. The pair really could not be more different, but the Shahs and Patels figure this is a great time and place for them to meet. Dimple and Rishi then must spend the program figuring out their differences and struggle to reconcile who they are with who they’re expected to be by their parents, peers, and even themselves.

I loved this one! I kept hearing a lot of buzz about this book in the bookish community and so I thought I’d try it. I knew it was about an Indian American girl named Dimple, who is into coding. Sounds cool already! And then here was the bit about Rishi who is such a romantic. I was interested in the culture and how it would influence the story. I liked reading it and learning more about the culture as well as seeing how Dimple and Rishi both accepted, rejected, or adapted their heritage to their current lives. I don’t normally enjoy contemporary, much less YA contemporary as it’s so… romantic. But this book was quite a lot of fun. My favorite character was Dimple, of course, and she’s such a character! Towards the end the book fell victim to the usual YA style, where everything just happens oh-so-conveniently but overall did a great job staying true to the characters established at the start of the story.

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And those are my July books! Like I said, I’d rather hoped to read at least 4 but 3 isn’t bad! I just find that I like to take my time with the books lately. I am likely going to have to decrease my reading goal but I’ll think about that after August or September. I just don’t know much much time I’ll have for reading for fun!

So what have you been reading? Let me know!

Thanks for reading!

Pamela

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