I’m linking up with Anne @ Modern Mrs. Darcy to share the books I’ve been reading over the past month. I feel like I’ve started dozens of books but according to my notes, I’ve only actually read three books since mid July. Here are the books that made it to the finish line.

Normally, This Would be Cause for Concern: Tales of Calamity and Unrelenting Awkwardness by Danielle Fishel

Finished July 23, 2015

I was a major Boy Meets World fan growing up and I loved getting to know the girl behind Topanga Lawrence. Danielle is very funny and had a lot of good stories to tell, but I also loved that she seems to have remained pretty down to earth all told. I like to imagine that we’d be total BFFs if we ever met. Sometimes the pace of this book and the jumps between past and present were not quite fluid, but I’m willing to look past this since she’s not a professional author and that after a quick moment of irritation, I’d be right back in the middle of a story I really enjoyed reading.

Looking for Alaska by John Green

Finished August 1, 2015 – This book was a roller coaster of emotion, which I guess I should have seen coming after TFIOS. I liked this but I didn’t quite love it – While I love how John Green creates his characters and navigates his stories, parts of this one were just hard to sink into. I’ve heard that people tend to just LOVE the first John Green book they read and that the other’s tend to be hard to enjoy as much and maybe this is true because TFIOS remains my favorite, but don’t get me wrong, this was still a good book. It just had a lot to live up to. I think I often found myself feeling “too old” for the book – the grown up in me wanting to tell these children what was what. A lot of great young adult books have the ability to silence the grown up in me and bring me right back to those years, so I guess that’s what separates like from love for me when it comes to YA books.

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown

Finished August 15, 2015

I really enjoyed this. The POV was interesting and well done – all three sisters basically become one voice, creating a multiple voiced first person narrative which was occasionally confusing but mostly worked really well. I found the characters easy to root for even when they were doing stupid things, their family dynamic was both fascinating and believable. Though I’ve never been raised by a father who spoke almost entirely in Shakespeare verses, I still get the dynamic of being raised in a highly intellectual household or environment. My children might someday write about how their parents seemed to mostly talk in Doctor Who quotes and obscure Craig Ferguson references. The best thing about books with multiple narrators, is deciding which one you really “get” – I think you’ll find yourself relating to all three of the sisters at some point but some more than others. I appreciated the moments that didn’t happen just as much as the moments that did. Sometimes it’s satisfying to have a plot development come along that you’ve been waiting for – but I also loved that Brown considered what her characters really needed and didn’t go along with every expected stereotype outcome. Refreshing, relevant, realistic.

Right now I’m reading The Wishing Spell, book 1 in the Land of Stories series by Chris Colfer. I’m also still making my way through The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo and I just picked up a copy of The Summer Before by Ann M. Martin which is kind of like a prequel to the Babysitter’s Club that I’m likely to pick up and devour in between.

What are you reading?