What I Read This Month
I read a lot of books. Each month I choose a few of them to spotlight here on my blog. If you have any suggestions for books I should read, send me an email and I’ll take a look
Gathering Blue (The Giver Quartet #2) by Lois Lowry
Gathering Blue is the second in The Giver Quartet. It follows the story of young, crippled girl named Kira as she loses her mother and earns a new role in her village. As she finds her way using her amazing weaving skills, she learns secrets about her way of life that changes the way she sees everything.
Like The Giver, this book is beautifully and simply written. It’s a YA book, so it’s not difficult to read in any way. But it does a beautiful job of conveying strong emotions and themes. The story is unpredictable but it takes a beat longer for the characters to realize certain things than I did. Again, I think that’s because this is a YA book.
The word “quartet” is an interesting way to describe the way these four books are related. This is Lois Lowry’s next book after The Giver but it’s not exactly a sequel. The same themes are present but not the same characters. I plan on reading the next two books so I’ll get to see how it all fits in together.
The Girl in 6E by Alessandra Torre
Jessica is a woman in her early twenties who never leaves her apartment because the urge to kill is so strong that she’s afraid of what she might do to other people. As a webcam sex worker, she has the means and opportunity to remove herself from everyday interactions that rest of us can’t avoid. She has her meals delivered. She buys her toilet paper in bulk over the Internet. She is Amazon Prime’s best customer. But she is forced to leave this life when she finds that one of her regular customers has kidnapped a young girl and she may be the only person who can help.
I rarely give five stars to books. I think they are reserved for stories that are not only compelling and well written, but for stories that drag you into their world and won’t let you go. This is how much I liked The Girl 6E.
I’m not going to say I didn’t have some moments where I was baffled by some of the things the character did. Leaving your door unlocked at all times is one of the stupidest things someone who doesn’t want to kill people could do. But that was a flaw in Jessica’s thinking that she rationalized with believing it would be ok if she killed an intruder, not something the author did wrong.
Also, I think I was reading the extended version. I saw reviews where apparently there was less story in the first version. I think cutting it a little earlier might have benefited the story, though, and I wish it had stayed that way. For now, I’ll stop Monday Morning Quarterbacking and go pick up the rest of Alessandra Torre’s books.
Vanity, Vengeance And A Weekend In Vegas (A Sophie Katz Murder Mystery #6) by Kyra Davis
Vanity, Vengeance and a Weekend is the latest in a series about a mystery writer and her band of fabulously kooky friends who find themselves embroiled in real life mysteries. This time, Sophie’s long time boyfriend Anatoly reveals a secret marriage of convenience to her and they break up. Trying to forget about it, Sophie plans a girls weekend in Vegas with her friends only to find out there’s more to the story than she knew and it has followed her to Vegas.
I’ve read all of the other books and I’ve enjoyed them. (Which is the reason I picked this one up.) The humor was great. I love that all the secondary characters came back because I adore their banter. Sophie is a firecracker who gets off some really great lines. The plot was little predictable but I won’t hold that against the author. It was still a decent book.
But something seemed off about this one in the series. There were some clear formatting and grammatical errors. It didn’t affect the story but it did throw me off–like seeing the tag on a serial killer’s mask in a horror movie.
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