On the bookshelf in November
The first book I read in November was In a Holidaze by Christina Lauren. This book totally gave me “Hallmark Christmas movie” vibes in a book! The book follows the story of main character, a 26-year-old woman named Maelyn (love this name btw!!!), as she spends Christmas week at a cabin with her friends & family. This is a tradition for Maelyn & this is how her family has spent Christmas since before she was born. Maelyn has quite literally grown up with these people & knows them like the back of her hand. Since Maelyn was 13, she’s been crushing HARD on one of the guys close to her age — Andrew. Andrew gives total boy-next-door vibes & I was loving it! When the trip is over & Maelyn is headed to the airport with her family, she makes a wish & things spiral from there. She winds up time traveling to re-live this Christmas week at the cabin over & over & over again. There are definitely some things to work through, like the fact that Andrew’s younger brother, Theo, (who is the same age as Maelyn), has been crushing on her for just as long as Maelyn’s been crushing on Andrew. Oh the dynamics!
For me, the way that Christina Lauren writes is super easy to read so I flew through this one. I don’t mind reading fiction, unless it’s fantasy, so that was ultimately why I gave this book three out of five stars.
The second book I read was Comfort & Joy by Kristin Hannah. I typically love Kristin Hannah books, but this one just did not do it for me. The main character, Joy, has just been dealt a super difficult card in the game of life — her husband left her for her sister. OOF, am I right? Joy is a school librarian & at the beginning of her Christmas break, she decides she’s going to do something for herself, so she heads to the airport. This is where things start to get really interesting.
I was fairly into it in the beginning, but then there’s a super unexpected plot twist & I got really hung up there. I have a hard time thinking abstractly & I kind of feel like that’s required with this book in order to be super engaged all the way until the end. I gave it two stars.
The third book I read was Seven Day of Us by Francesca Hornak. I have to be totally honest here, I sometimes have a hard time getting into books that are based in Europe because I don’t always understand the things they’re talking about, like certain foods or transportation or cities, etc. so I struggled getting into this one. It’s about a family who has to quarantine together for seven days because one of the daughters comes back from treating a deadly illness in another country & a seven day quarantine is the protocol. & let me just tell ya, a WHOLE LOT of stuff goes down in those seven days! There were some INSANE plot twists that I totally did not see coming & I’m actually usually pretty good at predicting them, but these ones totally caught me by surprise. In the end, I gave the book three out of five stars just because of how slow it started & a little bit of a language barrier (if that’s even what you call it!).
The fourth book I read was The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah. Ya know how I said above that I usually love Kristin Hannah books, but didn’t love Comfort & Joy? Well I decided that she should have the chance to redeem herself so I tried another one that my mom, grandma, dad, & sister have all previously read. It felt much more like a Kristin Hannah book than Comfort & Joy did. It was full of grit & human struggle & perseverance & of course, some super sad stuff. The book follows a young woman named Elsa for part of her growing up years as well as when she enters adulthood. This paragraph is in the first couple pages of the book (& let me remind you, I am a twenty-five-year-old reading this):
“Hope began to dim for a woman when she turned twenty. By twenty-two, the whispers in town and at church would have begun, the long, sad looks. By twenty-five, the die was cast. An unmarried woman was a spinster. “On the shelf,” they called her, shaking heads and tsk-ing at her lost opportunities. Usually people wondered why, what had turned a perfectly ordinary woman from a good family into a spinster.”
So yeah. You could pretty much say I started out reading the book with a bad taste in my mouth. ;) Anyways, I quickly fell in love with the characters & I could feel the empathy coursing through me as struggle after struggle came their way. The book throws you into the Dust Bowl era as if you were right there experiencing all of it first-hand. I think that’s what made this book hit so deeply — it’s really not far from reality at all. The book depicts extreme poverty in such a realistic way. It shows the cycle that comes from it as well — poor healthcare, malnourishment, crime, etc. While this exact form of poverty doesn’t exist in the 21st century, the cycle absolutely does.
Of course there are some really intense scenes & plot twists I totally didn’t see coming & that’s what made me give it four out of five stars. In the end, I’m really grateful for my ancestors that endured the Dust Bowl / Great Depression Era & I’m feeling pretty dang thankful to be sitting on my cozy couch with a roof over my head & food in my belly that I supplied by working a job I truly love (& not in a cotton field). Highly recommend this one, friends!
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