So happy to I am back again with another reading roundup. This was a great month of reading once again, and I’m excited to share the last few books I read before we moved to California.
I am so excited to get into fall reading. Something about this season is just the best for curling up with a good book inside or outdoors! I wanted to share a fall reading guide one of my favorite Instagram follows, @readandwrightt, shared just a few weeks ago- definitely some fun reads to look forward to and put on our lists this fall!
Shop my September Reads:
The Flight Attendant, Chris Bohjalian: 4 Stars
Description: Cassandra Bowden is no stranger to hungover mornings. She’s a binge drinker, her job with the airline making it easy to find adventure, and the occasional blackouts seem to be inevitable. She lives with them, and the accompanying self-loathing. When she awakes in a Dubai hotel room, she tries to piece the previous night back together, already counting the minutes until she has to catch her crew shuttle to the airport. She quietly slides out of bed, careful not to aggravate her already pounding head, and looks at the man she spent the night with. She sees his dark hair. His utter stillness. And blood, a slick, still wet pool on the crisp white sheets. Afraid to call the police—she’s a single woman alone in a hotel room far from home—Cassie begins to lie. She lies as she joins the other flight attendants and pilots in the van. She lies on the way to Paris as she works the first class cabin. She lies to the FBI agents in New York who meet her at the gate. Soon it’s too late to come clean—or face the truth about what really happened back in Dubai. Could she have killed him? If not, who did?
My thoughts: As always, I want to clarify that I listened to this on audiobook, which I strongly believe affects the overall experience. I really liked this as an audiobook because it really felt like the main character, Cassandra, was speaking directly to me.
I was genuinely surprised by this book, and I didn’t expect to like it as much as I ended up. I thought it was thoughtful and witty, and I felt like I had a new insight to the entire flight industry/flight attendant profession. I highly recommend this one!
The Idea of You, Robinne Lee: 4 Stars
Description: Solène Marchand, the thirty-nine-year-old owner of an art gallery in Los Angeles, is reluctant to take her daughter, Isabelle, to meet her favorite boy band. But since her divorce, she’s more eager than ever to be close to Isabelle. The last thing Solène expects is to make a connection with one of the members of the world-famous August Moon. But Hayes Campbell is clever, winning, confident, and posh, and the attraction is immediate. That he is all of twenty years old further complicates things.
What begins as a series of clandestine trysts quickly evolves into a passionate and genuine relationship. It is a journey that spans continents as Solène and Hayes navigate each other’s worlds: from stadium tours to international art fairs to secluded hideaways in Paris and Miami. For Solène, it is a reclaiming of self, as well as a rediscovery of happiness and love. When Solène and Hayes’ romance becomes a viral sensation, and both she and her daughter become the target of rabid fans and an insatiable media, Solène must face how her romantic life has impacted the lives of those she cares about most.
My thoughts: This book is for mature readers only! Seriously, this is one of the steamier books I have read, so don’t jump into this one unless you are okay with that.
Let me set the scene, I finished this book on our first night at Disney World, and I was still thinking about it for hours and days afterward. I told Preston how good it was, but when I described the plot to Preston his immediate reaction was, “Seriously?? It was good?” The description just makes it sound totally idiotic, but, I promise you, something about this book is so good. The ending left a total whole in my heart for a few days, and I almost want to read this one again??
They are making this a movie with Anne Hathaway as the main character, and I already can’t wait to see it!
It Ends With Us, Colleen Hoover: 3 Stars
Description: Sometimes it is the one who loves you who hurts you the most.
Lily hasn’t always had it easy, but that’s never stopped her from working hard for the life she wants. She’s come a long way from the small town in Maine where she grew up
— she graduated from college, moved to Boston, and started her own business. So when she feels a spark with a gorgeous neurosurgeon named Ryle Kincaid, everything in Lily’s life suddenly seems almost too good to be true.
Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily. And the way he looks in scrubs certainly doesn’t hurt. Lily can’t get him out of her head. But Ryle’s complete aversion to relationships is disturbing. Even as Lily finds herself becoming the exception to his “no dating” rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place.
As questions about her new relationship overwhelm her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan — her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened.
My thoughts: This is the second Colleen Hoover book I’ve ever read, and whew it confirms that her books are just intense. This does contain heavy themes of domestic violence, so I really want to make that clear in case you are not good with reading about anything concerning that.
I liked this book and the characters a lot, but I just can’t help but wish domestic violence wasn’t part of the story. It was just so descriptive and frightening to read something that closely describing this horrible act. I think I just need to keep in mind that I’m not always comfortable with reading that! It’s also good to know that Colleen Hoover’s books are so, so intense. I’ve also read Verity by her, and it was also scary intense.
In Five Years, Rebecca Serle: 4 Stars
Description: Where do you see yourself in five years?
When Type-A Manhattan lawyer Dannie Kohan is asked this question at the most important interview of her career, she has a meticulously crafted answer at the ready. Later, after nailing her interview and accepting her boyfriend’s marriage proposal, Dannie goes to sleep knowing she is right on track to achieve her five-year plan.
But when she wakes up, she’s suddenly in a different apartment, with a different ring on her finger, and beside a very different man. The television news is on in the background, and she can just make out the scrolling date. It’s the same night—December 15—but 2025, five years in the future.
After a very intense, shocking hour, Dannie wakes again, at the brink of midnight, back in 2020. She can’t shake what has happened. It certainly felt much more than merely a dream, but she isn’t the kind of person who believes in visions. That nonsense is only charming coming from free-spirited types, like her lifelong best friend, Bella. Determined to ignore the odd experience, she files it away in the back of her mind.
That is, until four-and-a-half years later, when by chance Dannie meets the very same man from her long-ago vision.
Brimming with joy and heartbreak, In Five Years is an unforgettable love story that reminds us of the power of loyalty, friendship, and the unpredictable nature of destiny.
My thoughts: Hmmm, I really liked this book, but I have one big issue with it. This contains a spoiler about the ending, so don’t read these next few sentences if you haven’t read this yet- Ok, there is no way that anyone as close to a friend as Dannie was to Bella would sleep with her fiance the day of her best friends funeral? I am sorry, but that just didn’t make sense at all in real life.
I liked how the author tied everything together from the first dream to the reality- it totally made sense how Dannie would think they were in a serious relationship in the dream compared to what the actual situation was.
Besides that one hang up I have, this book was really good. It’s definitely heartbreaking, but I think it’s a good read.
The Last Thing He Told Me, Laura Dave: 4 Stars
Description: We all have stories we never tell. Before Owen Michaels disappears, he manages to smuggle a note to his beloved wife of one year: Protect her.
Despite her confusion and fear, Hannah Hall knows exactly to whom the note refers: Owen’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey. Bailey, who lost her mother tragically as a child. Bailey, who wants absolutely nothing to do with her new stepmother.
As Hannah’s increasingly desperate calls to Owen go unanswered; as the FBI arrests Owen’s boss; as a US Marshal and FBI agents arrive at her Sausalito home unannounced, Hannah quickly realizes her husband isn’t who he said he was. And that Bailey just may hold the key to figuring out Owen’s true identity—and why he really disappeared.
Hannah and Bailey set out to discover the truth, together. But as they start putting together the pieces of Owen’s past, they soon realize they are also building a new future. One neither Hannah nor Bailey could have anticipated.
My thoughts: There was a lot of hype surrounding this one, but I never really felt compelled to read it for some reason? I’m glad I did though! It was actually the book club pick for this virtual book club I just joined, and it was a good one to get together and discuss.
I loved, loved that Hannah wasn’t sabotaging like a lot of female characters are written to be. For example, with the Flight Attendant I kept shaking my head in frustration because it’s hard for me to relate to someone who just consistently horribly messes up their life in such drastic measures. Hannah took control of her situation, provided for her step daughter and worked to figure out what they needed to do in the best way. I thought the ending was a little cheesy, but overall I really liked this one and would recommend it.
It was also fun that it was partially set in Sausalito because we just moved to the South Bay Area, which is just about an hour from there! I had no idea it was set there when I picked it up, but it was a super nice surprise.
Apples Never Fall, Liane Moriarty: 5 Stars
Description: The Delaney family love one another dearly—it’s just that sometimes they want to murder each other…
If your mother was missing, would you tell the police? Even if the most obvious suspect was your father?
This is the dilemma facing the four grown Delaney siblings.
The Delaneys are fixtures in their community. The parents, Stan and Joy, are the envy of all of their friends. They’re killers on the tennis court, and off it their chemistry is palpable. But after fifty years of marriage, they’ve finally sold their famed tennis academy and are ready to start what should be the golden years of their lives. So why are Stan and Joy so miserable?
The four Delaney children—Amy, Logan, Troy, and Brooke—were tennis stars in their own right, yet as their father will tell you, none of them had what it took to go all the way. But that’s okay, now that they’re all successful grown-ups and there is the wonderful possibility of grandchildren on the horizon.
One night a stranger named Savannah knocks on Stan and Joy’s door, bleeding after a fight with her boyfriend. The Delaneys are more than happy to give her the small kindness she sorely needs. If only that was all she wanted.
Later, when Joy goes missing, and Savannah is nowhere to be found, the police question the one person who remains: Stan. But for someone who claims to be innocent, he, like many spouses, seems to have a lot to hide. Two of the Delaney children think their father is innocent, two are not so sure—but as the two sides square off against each other in perhaps their biggest match ever, all of the Delaneys will start to reexamine their shared family history in a very new light.
My thoughts: There was so much going on in this book, but I think it all worked really well. I love those twisty and turny books when you just can’t figure out what’s going to happen or who is going to be the villain of the story. I did not know how this one was going to end, and I loved how it all wrapped up.
The book does end with COVID-19, and I thought that was kind of weird and slightly unnecessary, but it was a nice way to mark this monumental time in history I suppose.
Shop My September Reads:
What I’m Reading Next:
I started listening to Paper Palace last month, but I didn’t love the audiobook version so I think I am going to wait for this to come out in Paperback (or maybe purchase on Kindle)
I picked up Devil in the Dark Water because it’s from the same author as a book I loved- the 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. I’m reading it right now, and it is a lot different than Evelyn Hardcastle, but it’s really good! It took me a minute to get into it, but now I look forward to reading it each night. It’s close to 500 pages, so be warned before you dive into this one!
The OMP bookclub pick this month is The Reading List!
Finally, my BOTM pick this month is The Ex Hex.
Thanks for reading this reading post, haha!
Love this! Love that you are passionate about reading 🥰