I don’t recall if I mentioned this last month or not but my primary reading goal for this year is to spend more time with books that I’m really enjoying and not absolutely plow through them. I don’t know if my reading habits have actually changed with this goal or not but I do know that my perspective about it has changed in a way that I like a lot.
I used to say: I’m a really slow reader.
Now I say: I’m enjoying this book, so I’m spending more time with it.
This is almost always true because if I am not enjoying a book right off the bat, I DNF that thing so fast. So any book I’m spending much time with is a book I’m enjoying!
In addition to spending February reading a whopping two books—this coming week also marks one month with Nala already! Getting to know one another has been more challenging than I expected. She’s only our second dog but we had Fiona for seven years so I felt like I was kind of an expert dog owner. That’s so funny because now I realize I was an expert at Fiona.
Fiona and Nala are so different. Fiona was so treat motivated and Nala only wants certain treats and only when she is in the mood. You could set your watch by Fiona. She wanted to wake up at the same time every day, go to the bathroom at the same times every day, eat at the same times every day and she’d make it happen. Nala… takes her time waking up. I get up before she does and she stays asleep for as long as she wants to. I make her breakfast and sometimes she eats it right away and sometimes it sits there for a little while. She’s very “I’ll get to it when I get to it”. There are so many differences and we’re still learning how to communicate with each other. I’m remaining curious and trying to let her just be who she is. We’ll figure one another out in due time.
On to the books!
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix
Ryan and I took a trip to Watermark books and I had a vague memory that Grady Hendrix had a new book coming out. So I asked about it and the bookseller’s eyes lit up. She grabbed this and pressed it into my hands and said, “Oh it is sooo good!” Then she immediately told me about how excellently this author described the horror of experiencing a pelvic exam for the first time. She said, “I can tell that he was instructed by people who have been through it and he really listened.” Most interesting book review I’ve ever received from a stranger. Especially because I actually didn’t know the first thing about this book. I just knew that I liked the last Grady Hendrix book I read and wanted to read this one.
So this book takes place in a home for unwed mothers in the 1970’s. And I’m struggling to want to tell you any other part of the part of the story. It’s not that there’s a lot of spoilers or anything but it’s more that I want you to experience it for yourself.
There wasn’t a single moment of this book where I wasn’t absolutely hooked. Nothing was boring. There were no lulls at all. It was a wild-ride. As I understand it, Grady Hendrix usually writes really campy horror books! How to Sell a Haunted House definitely felt that way and all the other books that people recommend to me by him sound that way. But I wouldn’t describe this as campy and silly at all. It was scary. It was real. It was horrifying. It was a love letter to all of the girls who spent time in these homes–abandoned by their families at such an unbearably vulnerable time of their lives.
I do recommend reading the content warnings on StoryGraph before you start reading. This book is about teenagers (one character is 12) who are pregnant. At least one character was a victim of abuse. There are a few different scenes of childbirth (and Grady Hendrix can be quite graphic at times). Also, the babies are removed from their mothers. There’s a lot of heartbreak in this book but I can’t help but notice the worst parts of this story are the things that actually happened to children all across our country before Roe v. Wade.
The Love Lyric by Kristina Forest
You know what I love about Instagram (there are plenty of things that I am struggling with at the moment) is the way that we are able to follow and interact with all kinds of people that we admire. For me it’s my favorite authors.
I started following Kristina Forest after I read The Neighbor Favor. I like her! She’s a lovely follow. So when she started talking about how her latest book about the Greene sisters. I’d only read the first one so I went down to my local bookstore and pre-ordered The Love Lyric!
One thing about me–I’m uninterested in reading a series “in order”. If a series needs to be read in a specific order, I’m not reading it anyway. I hate a series, honestly. I’ll read books that take place in the same universe that work as stand-alones. But when that story is over I want the story to be over. It’s bad enough when my favorite television show ends on a cliffhanger and I have to wait a week to see what happens. But if I have to wait years? Why would I do that to myself? Why do you all do that to yourself?
Annnyway–tangent over. After the last book I needed a pallet cleanser so I reached for my absolute go-to genre: romance written by Black women. These books just never let me down, man!
This book has all my favorite tropes: normal person falls for a celebrity, he falls first, she’s a powerful badass at work. I highly recommend! And now I have book two, The Partner Plot, to look forward to!
Finally, I started an Instagram just for my reading and where I can talk about books, owning a bookstore, the politics of reading, yadda yadda yadda. It’s @xoxo.books and you’re welcome to follow if you’d like.
What have you been reading?
XOXO, Lib 