Now that Memorial Day is over, I can feel my reading slipping into summer fantasy land. I’m like many people in that I prefer to put aside the heavy reading in the summer and just enjoy some lighthearted stories. My library encourages this with a summer reading program for adults, complete with prizes and parties. (The summer reading program was always one of my favorite parts of summer when I was a kid. I was probably a nerd, but there was nothing more fun than filling out that chart all summer long and seeing how many books I’d read by Labor Day.) I’m excited for the coming weeks and all the “beach reads” that will be rolling into my library.
- Dangerous Deception, by Kami Garcia. This is the sequel to Dangerous Creatures. These books are an extension of the world Garcia created in Beautiful Creatures. It’s a separate series so while there is some overlap, you don’t need to have read the first series to understand this one.
- The Wrath and the Dawn, by RenĂ©e Ahdieh. I’ve always loved the tale of Scheherazade. She married the king and to keep from being put to death after her first night with him as all the others before her, she spun a tale that ended on a cliffhanger. The king had to keep her alive to hear the end of the tale and so she kept spinning the tale each night and ending it in such a way that he had to keep her alive to hear the story. By the time she ended her story after 1,001 nights, he had fallen love with her and spared her life. This novel is a YA twist on the original tale and I hope it does it justice.
- Uprooted, by Naomi Novik. I love Novik’s Temeraire series about dragons in the British military, so I’m excited about this tale that seems like Beauty and the Beast with a magical twist.
- Off The Page, by Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer. The mother daughter duo turns out this companion novel to Between the Lines. This one isn’t a direct sequel to the first, so you don’t need to have read Between the Lines in order to make sense of this one. However, the two do work together to tell a full story so reading the first isn’t a bad idea.
- The Knockoff, by Lucy Sykes and Jo Piazza. The only “adult” book on the list, this one is a tale of an older (is 40 really that old?) editor-in-chief of a leading fashion magazine who has to deal with the entry of the millennial generation and all their tech toys into her world of traditional fashion publishing. As an “older” woman who can relate to the tech learning curve, I look forward to reading this one.