June is usually a lovely month with Summer Reading Challenges being the perfect excuse for staying indoors and reading. While our temps were pretty mild in the upper Midwest, it can get muggy and staying indoors to read or write posts is a good alternative to working in the gardens. The veggie garden, oh so slow to take off this year, the flower garden not much better, and the fairy garden (my son refers to it as “the swamp”) just a wild mess as usual. Perhaps I’ve lost that fight and now the goal is to keep the weeds down.
June is also birthday month, our son being born on the CE’s birthday—double celebration. We took the opportunity to run to Indianapolis to catch the Indiana State Museum exhibit.
All to say, we enjoyed June, and still managed fourteen books between us. These are from NetGalley but more now from my local library both audiobooks and digital. (As always, links below are to my reviews that include purchase info.)
The Silent Sister by Diane Chamberlain (audiobook)
The Water Tower by Amy Young (CE review)
Iwo, 26 Charlie by P T Deutermann (CE review)
The Mountains Wild by Sarah Stewart Taylor (audiobook)
Mainely Wicked by Matt Cost (CE review)
Need You by Blake Pierce
Overkill by Sandra Brown (read by both of us)
Hard Country by Reavis Z Wortham (CE review)
Before It’s Too Late by Sara Driscoll
Should the Tent Be Burning Like That? By Bill Heavey
The Final Frame by Harmony Reed (CE review)
A Sagebrush Soul by John Isaac Jones (5 star CE review)
The Caretaker by Ron Rash (5 stars)
The Swiss Nurse by Mario Escobar (audiobook)
These included historical fiction, literary fiction, psychological fiction, biographical fiction, crime thrillers, and mysteries.
I loved The Caretaker (a new author to me and one I will follow) and gave it five stars, the CE gave five stars to the biographical fiction, A Sagebrush Soul. I’m sure it was great and he thoroughly enjoyed it, but I was totally captivated by The Caretaker. It haunted me and continued to resonate after I finished reading it.
Book of the Month for June—The Caretaker.
My Reading Challenges page… I have 73 books of a goal of 145 in Goodreads (one book ahead of schedule) and slipped a percent to 97% feedback ratio in NetGalley. As always, I’m struggling to keep up with the rest.
Summer is usually such a good time to finally get out and about! My heart goes out to the Canadians, however, with 259 uncontrolled wildfires (as of this writing) in a total of 503 active wildfires. I can’t even imagine all the personnel trying to fight that conflagration. The smoke has given us cloudy skies with dangerous levels of particulates in the air. As with all the yearly fires in California, however, I also worry about the coming winter and the devastation the lack of trees will produce. Let’s hope for a mild winter for our neighbors to the north.
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©2023 V Williams
Tucker Snow is as tough as they come, hardened by decades working as an undercover narcotics agent for the Texas Department of Public Safety. Through special dispensation from the governor, he and his brother Harley cut a wide swath through the criminal element of Northeast Texas. But tragedy comes calling after taking a dream job as a special ranger with the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, when Tucker’s wife and toddler are killed in a horrific traffic accident caused by a drug addled felon. Close to breaking, Tucker sets his badge aside to move his surviving teenage daughter outside of Ganther Bluff, a quiet town with enough room for them to mourn their unexpected loss.
Rosepoint Publishing 