13 books we've never talked about | q1 2021 wrap up

hello welcome back to my channel this is actually the second time that i'm filming or attempting to film this video last time i got like three quarters of the way done and my sd card filled up so we're trying this again and i'm gonna tell you about all of the books that i have never talked to you guys about or mostly haven't talked about i did this one other time for the last three months of 2020 and i'm back to do it for the beginning of 2021. these books that i'm going to tell you about are books that i didn't vlog and therefore would have no other reason to talk to you about them but i don't want them to just like completely disappear and me never you know kind of tell you my thoughts and feelings so that's what i'm gonna do that's what i use wrap ups for so i'm gonna talk to you guys about 13 books that we've never talked about let's get into it i broke it down last time into categories i thought that made everything a little neater and cleaner i'm gonna do that again this time the first category i guess you could say is young adult contemporary and i've actually i think only read one why a contemporary this year but not just that i haven't talked to you about i mean like total but the one at y contemporary that i've read so far this year is watch over me by nina lacour this is actually the first book that i read in total this year like it was the first book that i finished and i picked this up on the recommendation of kayla from books and lala i feel kind of neutral about this book i give it three stars it is about our main character mila as she kind of navigates the trauma that she had as a kid in this new setting so after she graduates high school she ends up getting her first job and she is going to be a tutor at this sort of group home almost she goes and lives i believe in northern california and she gets paid just a little bit but mostly gets paid in like free rent and she gets to stay on this like beautiful property and tutor this one little boy the story is about her connecting with him helping him work through his trauma her working through her trauma as a result of helping him and also her kind of developing friendships and relationships kind of for the first time outside of the ones that she has been traumatized by i found this story fine i think my issue with it was the way that it was told it was definitely very lyrical beautiful the setting was really nice but there was something about it that just kind of put up a wall for me i couldn't connect with mila our main character and a lot of the story felt a little bit i don't want to say too metaphorical for me i just couldn't really connect with what mila was going through and i don't feel like i ever really learned what she did go through so this was just okay for me i don't know if i'll pick up any nina liqueur in the future if you have read any of her books before let me know in the comments like which ones i should pick up this wasn't terrible i did appreciate the way it was written but i think there was just something there that made it to where i couldn't connect to the main character and since it's a y a contemporary if you can't connect with the characters like you probably can't connect with the story so moving on to a different category uh i also read a couple of nonfiction books which i think is interesting because i don't read a whole lot of nonfiction in total i need to go back and look at what i read last year i never really put together my statistics on you know what i read and how many of what genre but i don't think i read many nonfiction so it's interesting to me that i read two in the first three months of the year that was a long-winded way of saying let's talk about some non-fiction uh the first one that i read was disfigured by amanda leduc leduc not quite sure how to say her last name but i enjoyed this i think the only real thing that i can say about this is that i think i should have read some more kind of like introductory works for disability disability history and education i guess before i went into this this book particularly is about amanda's experience growing up disabled and also her experience with fairy tales and how they represent disabled people and i felt like it was really great i actually really really liked the memoir components of this i think what i didn't love was that it didn't it didn't feel introductory in a lot of ways and i do feel like there was a lot of repetition in terms of the fairy tale aspects i think a lot of our critiques of fairy tales were good but i think after the first critique a lot of the other critiques she had kind of all felt the same and that could just be me not understanding maybe exactly what she was trying to convey that's probably what it was i'm not super great with non-fiction to be honest in terms of like truly picking up every little little piece and this to me read a little bit like an article that you would read for school because she had kind of a thesis what she was trying to like set out to prove so i think there might have been some things that maybe i was missing but i definitely think this was interesting i hadn't really considered the fact that we treat disability so so shitty especially when it comes to you know it's representation in fairy tales and media especially media that we showed at children so i did appreciate that aspect but again i wish i had read maybe some more introductory or like historical texts about uh disability before i had gone into this one so good book i would recommend but i don't know if it would be the first book i'd recommend about disability so moving on the next nonfiction book that i read it's funny too because i think all three of these books were kind of influenced by kayla in some way watch over me it was like a direct recommendation disfigured as well this book i read because kayla was doing a video based on like enneagram types she's in enneagram 8 wing 7 just like me and she said that a lot of the recommendations for books to read were renee brown books and i never read renee brown kayla didn't actually read any brene brown in that video i believe but i decided to pick up some brene brown because she does this sort of like self-help thing and to be honest in february i needed to help myself so i decided to pick a brene brown book up how many times can i say brene brown it just sounds fun rolls off the tongue but i picked up rising strong which is an audiobook and i believe it is it's not even a true audiobook it is an audio recording of a lecture that she gave and i thought it was fine the whole point of rising strong is to kind of i guess tell you how to handle failure and like feelings of disappointment and how people who have experienced this and like grown from it like how they can teach us something i guess my issue i think with this was that there were a lot of stories about brene personally and like the experiences she'd been through and her kind of trying to grapple with failure herself which i found nice like it felt good to listen to her stories and it felt inspiring but i personally wanted something a little bit more prescriptive because when you say that this is going to be something about people who have failed gotten up and like been successful i want to see kind of some actionable steps i can take to be more like these people i never really felt like i got that from this even though there was like a q a session and someone specifically asked like what are the actionable steps i didn't feel like she really gave any so that was a little frustrating although i do feel like the overall tone and message of the story was great not even story it's like non-fiction but the overall toned message of what she was trying to say was great i just feel like there was something missing there for me and again it could just be because this was a lecture and not like a really well thought out um book but i don't know i felt kind of neutral about it i don't rate non-fiction i'd probably rate this three stars though if i did rate non-fiction um but i would be interested to pick up more brene brown in the future i think her narrative style is one that i really enjoy i think she has like a lot of sarcasm and cynicism that i can relate to i feel like a lot of self-help and non-fiction can be a little bit cheesy this didn't feel like that but again it didn't give me everything i was looking for so that's it with the nonfiction i only read two books in that category and i don't know i had a pretty good time definitely makes me want to pick up more nonfiction i think these are two of the nonfiction books that i've enjoyed more than a lot of my other ones so that's always good but next up let's talk about the one mystery thriller that i've read this year um i read some other mystery thrillers for a video but i actually think that the last one i finished in december anyway the one mystery thriller i have to talk to you guys about is the wife upstairs by rachel hawkins this was a really fun thriller i'm not gonna lie it was about our main character jane who goes to the deep south um she's had kind of a shitty life shitty past we don't know much about it except for she is trying to kind of change her life she's living with a guy who she knew from way back when he's kind of gross too and to kind of escape even the life she's living now she decides she's going to walk dogs in this like exclusive rich little neighborhood she meets a ton of people she dog walks and she runs into this guy named eddie one time when she dog walks and slowly but surely she's able to weasel her way into kind of the upper echelon of this little society this little neighborhood i think it's set in georgia and it's just fascinating to watch i really like jane and her motivations and trying to kind of discern if the things that she's doing are done with the best of intentions i liked that a lot and then also figuring out the kind of some mysteries and secrets of eddie because eddie's wife has recently gone missing and or could potentially be dead her name is b she was someone who made a really big impact on all the people around her so a lot of the interactions that jane is having with people are based on their reactions and their relationship with b so it's interesting hearing about b through everybody's different perspectives figuring out more about bee as the story goes on and also figuring out that eddie and jane might not necessarily be who we think they are so it's very twisty and very thrilling the entire time i loved the way that mental health was handled as well it was very subtle which i appreciated i think so often with like a more psychological style thriller we get kind of this like unhinged woman who i personally don't always connect with sometimes i think it can go into oh she's going crazy because you know this guy betrayed her and i think that can be frustrating in this it's not like that at all we have a few very calculating women who go after what they want and i think it was fun to read about so i really liked this i will say it's not as layered as some of the other thrillers that i enjoy which is why i didn't give it five stars and why i probably wouldn't reread this but it is one that i wouldn't hesitate to recommend so if you're looking for a good thriller to pick up this is a good one next up we can talk about some romance i read a lot of romance most of what i'm going to talk to you about next not most of all of what i'm going to talk to you about next is romance first up in the category of paranormal slash urban fantasy romance i only have one book to talk to you about but it was an interesting one and that is archangel's shadows by melanie singh i have a complicated history with the guildhunter series i can't remember what number this book is but i know it's not like the first or second book in the series i've read quite a few of them and this particular story is about ashwini and john vie who we've met in previous books i kind of feel mixed about this one i feel like i wanted to love the story more than i do i feel like it was trying to tell you that these two characters had a lot of like baked in history and i didn't really feel like that was conveyed very well and i also feel like the romance was just kind of like so so and i would be willing to overlook that like i have in pretty much all of the previous books except for the fact that the plot of this one was very weak it was kind of a whodunit ashwini and john va team up to figure out who has been killing people around uh new york i think it's new york i don't know they might have like traveled but they end up trying to find out who killed all of these people and the hudan aspect is pretty lame because almost immediately we kind of know who it is it's like the first suspect that we're introduced to i don't know that really made this book kind of flaw for me because here's the thing i appreciate realism and i appreciate happy for now i feel like that is pretty realistic for a lot of people right you don't necessarily start dating you know the first person you meet and then like fall madly in love and that's your person right but i think i prefer like a faded mate's intense over-the-top attraction whenever i'm reading paranormal in urban fantasy so whenever i pick up a nalini singh book i'm sort of disappointed when the characters grow to like each other they kind of like fall in love near the end of the book and that's it you know there's no marriage there's no engagement and i know that's very like heteronormative and over the top and that like doesn't need to happen in every story but when it comes to paranormal and urban fantasy that's something that i just come to expect so i don't know this book was just okay the plot was just okay the character relationship was just okay the romance was just okay it was just whatever it's kind of made me consider whether or not i want to continue on with the series because i felt this way about most of the books i think the plot was interesting in more of the other books but i've never really loved any of the couples that i've read so it kind of leaves me thinking like if the whole point of the series is romance are these books that i want to continue to pick up when there's other paranormal series out there that i could give a chance and maybe like really fall in love with the couples so i don't know i'm on the fence about this maybe the other books get better let me know if you've read these you know if i should carry on or if i should maybe try the cy changeling series i think i tried to read the first book in that series and didn't love it but i've heard a lot of good things so maybe i'll give those a try instead next we can move on to the bulk of what i read and that is contemporary romance which is very unsurprising i'm sure most of these books i am reading for a list video that's coming out in august but i didn't want to wait until august to tell you about them so i'm going to talk to you about some of them um some of them i just picked up on my own and i'll i'll let you know what's what but the first book i picked up was one that i just picked up on a whim and it was the princess trap by talia hibbert this one was another just kind of like middle of the road book for me i think it's because you can definitely see the progression of talia hibbert's writing as you read her stuff uh the brown sisters books are obviously in my opinion like the culmination of her writing like just top tier amazing stuff and this book while it wasn't bad by any means i think it lacked some of the development that i've seen talia hipper kind of display and by development i mean character development this book is about cherry and reuben and it is a kind of royalty romance cherry meets reuben at her place of work they kind of have a steamy interaction they end up making out outside of her office building and reuben is caught by the press so he has to propose to her and have some sort of like fake engagement because he can't be caught in a compromising situation the premise itself is fine but i think what was lacking for me was the fact that when they get together it's based purely on the fact that they've like had a steamy make out almost sex scene kind of situation i wish that we had seen them kind of interact a little bit more have a little bit more not even a slow burn romance but have a little bit more development in their relationship before they go into fake dating or fake engagement for me it felt like the only real thing they had going for them was they were so um just carnally attracted to each other and that just rarely works for me i need there to be some sort of like soul connection mental connection whatever intellectual connection i guess and that just wasn't super present here so it was just okay for me i gave this book three stars the steamy scenes were really good and i think that patented talia hibbert humor and like snark is definitely present but i think if you're looking for like the best of the best obviously the brown sisters books are the way to go this is obviously like not impacted my uh desire to read more talia hibbert in the future but this just wasn't my favorite so carrying on the next book i read is actually for a list video coming up and it is a new release called makeup breakup by lily manon lilly madonna is actually the pen name for saandimanon who writes mostly why a and this is her first foray into adult contemporary romance specifically i didn't like this like i i very much didn't enjoy this and it makes me really sad because i was interested to see how her writing would be different kind of in an adult setting and sadly i think my main complaint is that i felt like this was y a feeling kind of immature but with sex scenes so the story actually is kind of like when devil met rishi we have annika and hudson they both have their own apps and they met at a conference and were led to believe that they had some sort of like very i don't know whirlwind romance at this conference and then he basically ghosted her that's kind of like the vibe that we're getting annika's goal is to have this app called makeup which is an app to help couples communicate better and hudson has an app that is almost the antithesis of makeup it is an app that you could use to break up with your significant other so they kind of butt heads they end up like working in the same office building kind of on a whim randomly i don't know coincidentally that's the word i'm looking for coincidentally they work in the same building they're kind of butting heads even though you can tell that hudson's kind of into annika annika's just like he's the worst i just i don't know the interactions that annika and hudson had throughout the story i felt were so immature i felt like this built-in history that they were supposed to have was not at all convincing and it was very clear to me from the beginning why she had animosity towards him like we find out later on in the book like exactly what happened and you can tell from day one like why things unfolded the way they did and i felt like the uh pining that hudson was displaying was not something that i cared for so overall this was just really not it for me and it makes me sad because i wanted to you know give san diego another try since i didn't enjoy her her ya that i tried but um yeah i don't know if she's an author that i'm going to read more from in the future the next book is another one that i read for that list video that's coming in august and it is also one that i have discussed before but not like in any great detail so i thought i would talk about it again here and it is twice shy by sarah hoggle now i didn't have the best luck with her first novel i think it was you deserve each other but i was really curious to see what she was gonna put on next because there were hints of greatness in that first one and this one i think just took all of the good components of her writing from that first book and made this one perfect i don't know it was so so good gave this book five stars it's about our main character mabel maybelle mabel and wesley and mabel basically inherits a property from her aunt who's recently passed away and she ends up going to this property kind of trying to figure out what to do with it and when she's there she figures out that she's actually not the sole inheritor of this property she has to share it with a guy named wesley and wesley has very different ideas of what he wants to do with the property and he is not great at communicating those at the beginning we see wesley as a kind of two-dimensional and flat character and i was a little bit worried going in that this wasn't going to work for me for that reason that was the main complaint i had about her debut novel was that the male main character while he seemed interesting we never got enough time with him and we never got his point of view so we weren't able to really see how he was feeling about situations and while we don't get the point of view of wesley in this book we really get a better understanding of him as a character as the story kind of unfolds there is a really pivotal scene i would say at like the 40 mark and we instantly are given insight into wesley's character in a way that we weren't with the hero in that other book so love him as a character he was sweet he was soft really good anxiety rep i loved the way that the two characters supported each other and i felt like this was one of those examples of a really good puzzle piece romance where they just fit together perfectly and complemented each other in so many different ways even though their personalities were so so different so i love this book you have to pick it up when it comes out i think it comes out in like a week or two maybe it comes out this tuesday i don't really know but when it does come out you have to pick this one up so these next two books that i'm going to talk about much like twice shy are for that august list video that i'm doing and they're also books that i've recommended for other recommendation videos but i thought they like beard repeating here since i'm not going to talk about them again until august so the first book is the x talk by rachel lynn solomon i think that's her name the picture's right here so you can kind of determine that but this is one that i feel kind of bad about because i know noel noel gallagher picked this book up on my recommendation and she didn't love it she gave it i think three stars just like i did but i feel like in my recommendation video i kind of talked about all of the good points and none of the bad of this book and i'm here to do that now i think that's part of why i wanted to talk about these books because just because i recommend a book doesn't mean it was like my perfect read so i want to tell you how i really feel about this book so um this was about shay and dominic and they are working at a radio station shay has been there for kind of a while she's like 30 now and she's pretty successful she is the director of her own radio show she's not like a host she's just a director and she has her own home and she's just she's successful she's doing her thing but she feels lonely because she feels like she has a lot of love to give but she's not had a lot of success in kind of romantic relationships and dominic comes into this radio station as a sort of hot shot recent grad and he kind of rubs shay the wrong way but after some kind of uh poor not poor financial decisions after some like poor finance kind of stuff happens at the radio station shae's show gets cut and her and dominic have to come up with a show that is going to kind of save the radio station so she has this idea that if they pretend to be exes they can have this kind of like podcast slash radio show where they give relationship advice and that's sort of how the story is set up they have to really pretend to be access and make it convincing to people in order to kind of sell the story and it was a fun book it's one that i recommended based on beach read because i really feel like they have a similar kind of tone and relationship dynamic situation going on there but they were both three star reads for me and i think a lot of that comes down to the heroine i think shea and i can't remember january in b treat they just have this similar sort of like i don't want to say hateful or angry personality but they kind of have this woe as me situation going on that's kind of hard to sympathize with so i think that's why i recommended them based on each other i think i said it in like a nicer way in my recommendation video but they have kind of a similar vibe going on and even though i think the heroes are really nice and very respectful i just feel like the relationships are just kind of like whatever i wanted to like this so much more than i did and now that i'm trying to articulate exactly what didn't 100 work about this book for me i'm kind of drawing blanks like there wasn't anything just absolutely terrible but i really think that shea impacted my enjoyment of this book i understand where she was coming from she has a lot of love to give but i don't know i just feel like she could have done a little bit more introspection and maybe thought about the fact that like she's coming on a little too strong at first but this book was just three stars for me and i wanted to to get on here and tell you that because i feel like i kind of misled some of you in my recommendation video but with recommendations i try to give recommendations based on what i think other people will like and i know that i am like very picky with romance so anyway that's the next talk that's how i feel about it it was fine but i know a lot of people will probably enjoy it so take my kind of neutral opinion with a grain of salt okay now that i'm looking at this list the next three books are also part of that list video so i'm not going to say it anymore but these are ones that i've never talked to you about and they are interesting so first up we have much ado about you by samantha young and this is one that i read horrible initial reviews of from my friends no one seemed to like this book and i think i have like a differing opinion on this one i think i am gonna be the odd man out and say that i liked this i think you have to go in with certain expectations or lack thereof for this book because it definitely has you suspending your disbelief for a lot of it it's about our main character evie who goes to england to kind of run away from her real life i honestly can't remember exactly why she's running away i think maybe she got dumped by a long-term boyfriend or something and she's just looking to figure out what the next steps are in her life actually no it's a job related thing that's why she ends up leaving the us but she is able to go to northern england i believe and work in a bookstore and she gets to kind of run the bookstore itself she has free rent it seems like a very much too good to be true situation and if that is something that sounds like you wouldn't be able to kind of like suspend your disbelief for this is probably not a book for you because the rest of the book kind of carries on in the same way so evie kind of runs into this dog at one point and she meets his owner and they kind of start falling for each other and the story really is just about evie kind of figuring out what she wants out of life like what her goals and aspirations are what she wants as a next career step she kind of solves some of the townspeople's problems along the way which is so cheesy but like kind of cute at the same time and she falls for rhone i believe his name is and gets close to his niece and helps his niece out and i don't know it's just a good story i liked it i thought it was very atmospheric and this is definitely something i could see someone picking up in the summer at the pool at the beach whatever and just really sinking your teeth into it's not exactly um highbrow literature it's not the best romance i've ever read but i think the relationship was very well built i feel like there weren't any steamy scenes too early on in the book and i think if you are a book lover and you like something that's kind of like kitschy and quirky and silly i think you're gonna like this most of the reviews i read were from like my very cynical friends who were like this is a little hard to believe and i totally get that but i think you know there's a time and a place for everything and this one pleasantly surprised me i liked it for me if it's gonna be silly i'm gonna need to see some character growth and some you know relationship building and i saw both of those things in this book so i had a good time so if you're looking for something like that pick this up this next book i hated i really hated it this is up there with in five years and one day in december for me because i just really didn't like it it was the love proof and i liked the concept of this book our heroine is genius iq and she is trying to conceptualize time i think i don't i can't remember exactly what her you know thesis or whatever is but she is trying to do something with time that that is her whole thing and at the beginning of the story we see her meet a guy and it kind of changes the trajectory of her life and her career there's so much wrong with this book but i think my main issue is that the lesson here is that love is everything our heroine is so ambitious and not even single-minded she's just very ambitious and very into what she's studying until she meets the sky and when she meets him she completely loses all interest in what she's doing she makes kind of shitty grades in school she never turns her life around until he dumps her he fell in love with her for her smarts is what he says and he thinks he's holding her back so he dumps her he leaves her for many years and then comes back in his 50s and is like you know what i can't live without you and of course she's never found anyone else and she has gotten back on the horse when it comes to her like physics or whatever the learning that she's doing and i just don't know what the point of the story is like is it that love prevails is it that you should give up your career for love it just it didn't make any sense to me i hated the way that this was written too it was so strange because it was about our main character and yet and yet it was told from the points of view of her mother her professor her boyfriend it almost felt like a documentary like people talking about you and like the kind of person you are except for our main character doesn't die in the story it's just so bizarre i i don't know how to put into words how strange this book is i don't think i'm doing it justice but i hated it and the the lesson the moral was a very shitty one in my opinion also um not that it really matters that much but the hero in the story is kind of like a money grubbing goldman sachs type and i didn't like him at all so didn't like the hero didn't like heroin not a good story and there was no like true relationship development there it was insta-love it was just no don't pick this up i didn't rate this i don't think but i would give this book one star so then lastly we have a book that i would say is somewhere in between much ado about you and the love proof in that i think it was a little insta lovey and not the best but it also was a good book for summer and that's float plan by trish dollar i feel like i've seen a lot of hype around this book they see it on instagram quite a bit and i think maybe that's because they were pushing it really hard in terms of marketing but really this book is just about our main character anne that doesn't seem right anyway it's about our main character who is sailing her dead fiance's boat because she's grieving his loss and she wants to carry out this like grand sea adventure that he had before he died it's an interesting story it does focus a bit on grief but it's really just about our main character's relationship with keane keane is an irishman who lost his leg and is having issues trying to get back on a sailing crew because that's like his his life's dream was to sail and i think he actually lost his leg in a boating accident but he decides to free of charge hop on and boat i don't think her name is ann but for some reason i have it in my notes anyway he hops on her boat he helps her kind of navigate the waters of the caribbean and it's just their love story i guess love is kind of a loose word here because it's really just an insta love attraction that they share but i don't know it was fine i was doing yard work while i was listening to this and it had sort of a i don't know upbeat tone despite the grief that our heroine's dealing with and at the end of the book i just felt like a very generic sense of satisfaction i think this is a very middle-of-the-road story i think it's a three-star for me i think a lot of people will probably take issue with the insta-love and i usually do myself but i think there was enough time between their initial attraction in their first hookup that it didn't feel too bad for me i don't know i really do think this is like a beach read it's very descriptive of the caribbean so if you're into that this is something that you might enjoy but um overall just kind of a middle-of-the-road book in terms of a new release i wouldn't necessarily say run out and pick it up but if you can find a library go for it so that is it those are all the books that we've never talked about the 13 books that we've never talked about i hope you guys enjoyed this in some way i do really like filming wrap ups i wish the books that i had to talk to you guys about were a little more exciting this time but i found some other gems that i read in some vlogs these past three months so i'm not too upset about it but um thank you guys so much for watching let me know in the comments down below what your favorite books over the past three months were so i can maybe check them out but i love you guys so much and until next time

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Length: 27min 4sec (1624 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021