July Wrap Up! Summerween, BOTM & more!

all right let's see if we can get this focused thing right this time my hair is still a little damp scrunch scrunch crunch hey y'all welcome back to my channel amy here uh hopefully i had this focus thing right in this video anyway uh today we're going to be wrapping up the month of july i had a very very good month i got so many book of the months read mostly i got all these done by listening to them because i can just keep my earbuds in my ear 24 7 and get things done get books read it's all good especially if the narration is really good too i read slash listen to mostly listened to 16 books in the month of july super excited about that um we started off the month with summerween so and i got a good bit read during during that time so it's been a really good reading month uh so we'll start off with the beginning of the month i started my month off with horrid by katrina leno this is a young adult horror i didn't really care for this i gave it two and a half stars i didn't really like the narration either as well i tried to read it um but i just i just got bored with it uh honestly and the the narration as far as that goes there was no distinction between characters so it was hard to figure out who was speaking at the time we mainly follow jane and she's telling us the story her and her mother moved back to her mother's hometown after her father's passing they moved back into the house that jane's mother grew up in uh there's apparently something happened in that house i was more interested in what happened to jane's mother back in the day because clearly there's something that happened to her she's kind of being weird throughout the story but the house is considered to be haunted and there is uh some paranormal ghostly activities happening here but when we find out what happened and everything about with jane's mother um i i really wasn't that impressed and then i really really didn't like the way it ended so that was kind of kind of a bum start to summer summerween but we moved on from there i picked up mallory uh by josh mallorman uh this is the second book in uh from like bird box bird box was really really good definitely my favorite between the two uh this one was okay i think i gave it a three star once again we're following mallory as she's making her way blindly through this book at the end of bird box i don't want to give anything away but bird box i guess could have could have ended we pick up right where bird box left off again don't want to say too much but we find ourselves once again on the run from these creatures but this time we have uh tom and olympia or mallory's two kids that were very young in bird box and then they're grown up into teenagers because we're going like it's like 10 years later uh we kind of pick up in the beginning we pick up where we left off and there's some stuff that's happening there and then we jump forward 10 years to current times and now we're getting the point of view from tom and olympia i really did enjoy that about the book getting a bit of a different perspective other than mallory because mallory's just kind of like she would i really liked her in the first book but she's been through enough she's been through it so in this book she's just kind of tired you know uh tom and olympia add a little life to the story tom is a little bit on the rebellious side he kind of wants to know more about these creatures olympia is more safe she just wants to keep her mother and her brother safe she wants to follow the rules um that kind of thing but she's still she's still young and she's still vibrant she's still curious um so yeah i really enjoyed that part of the story and i did like how it all ended uh in the end so so yeah a good wrap up to uh this little series unless there's gonna be more i don't i don't know i don't think so i wouldn't think so because it was it was kind of wrapped up in my opinion next was horror store by grady hendrix i think i gave this a three and a half star uh not my favorite grady hendrix but it was still a lot of fun uh we're following amy amy works at um orcs orcs how do you say it um it's it's definitely a play on ikea her and some of her co-workers end up staying the night due to some breaking and entering kind of situation going on at the store so they're hoping to catch whoever's you know doing the things that they're doing once they get into the store and that kind of ends up turning into what goes on when the lights go out things start appearing as night falls uh different writings on the walls and just we run into different kind of scary events i got a little bored towards the end when the action started to happen i was just like okay i get it let's let's move along um not as disgusting as i would say like my best friend's exorcism or uh the southern the southern book club's guide to slaying vampires which was my favorite out of all the greaty hendricks that i've read so far um but this this was fun it was a really good twist on you know like ikea and i really enjoyed how the chapter started with like an item and it had like the weird names just as like just as like a kia dust if you like grady hendrix and you like a little humor in your horror uh i would definitely uh give give it a shot it was it was just fun it wasn't my favorite like i said but it's a good time i threw a little male male romance into the mix just because you know it's me i gotta have a male male romance somewhere when i'm reading so i threw in p.s i spook you by essie horman uh this is this was very sexy with a little ghostly fun thrown in there we follow rain rain is an fbi agent he can see dead people basically he is sent back to his hometown to work on a cold case where his ex-boyfriend is they still have feelings for each other so we get some you know some good sexual tension between the two of them some good fun between the two of them they still both love each other so that was fun like it wasn't like a drama filled it was just a fun ghostly kind of book uh and we get you know we get him kind of solving case this case due to him being able to speak to the undead and figuring out what happened to this person it was a lot of fun i enjoyed it can't wait to continue on with the series next up i read hannah beast this is by jennifer mcmahon which i was really excited about because i've loved i've only read one book so far by jennifer mcmahon i've i really did like it but this was a short story that i chose to read in the dark it was available on kindle unlimited so i went ahead and gave it a go it has to do on halloween night um these these girls go trick-or-treating one of them is dressed up as a a beast and her name is hannah um so the girls are calling her hannah beast it does have to do with uh bullying not that i don't like reading about bullying i don't appreciate bullying at all i mean i've read plenty books with bullying in them but i just it like just made the it was such a star a short story um and it was you know based on this bullying effect but we're following one of those girls from current times and then she's taking us back to like 1985 or something like that um on halloween night and what happened to hannah her and hannah were kind of actually friends but you know she was in this group of girls that didn't really that you know are always messing with hannah so she knows she had to be with the in crowd which really pissed me off to begin with and then you know it's it just it goes about to tell the story of what happened to hannah on that on that night there was a little bit of a a good twist at the end and you got to pay really close attention to it because it's kind of fast um because because i had to go back and i was like wait what so that was really the only thing about this book that i really liked other than that i just i just didn't like the whole bullying of the the story like i said it was a short story so it was all based on on that um and i just i just didn't like it moving on to book of the months why do i keep doing jazz hands i need to control myself i started off i started at the beginning i just took my earliest this was february 2021 uh so this is girl a by abigail dean i was very intimidated by this book which is why i have not picked it up because i knew it had to do with like child neglect and abuse and things like that and that's really hard for me to read but we did it and it wasn't as intimidating as i thought it was going to be yes the things that happened to these children were horrible but the story was actually pretty good i gave it a what did i get this i gave it a three and a half star we're mainly following girl a which is uh lex um she's kind of taking us back we we are in current times but she's taking us back to what all happened how it all went down um with her and her brothers and sisters so we start getting each chapter is is like and there's not chapters i say each segment of the book we get a different story so like okay there is chapter like chapter two was boy a ethan so you know we start with the oldest children um lex is the oldest daughter so she's girl a and she's kind of taking us through um each of her brother and sisters and where they're at at current times in their life and what happened that to get them to these current times back when everything went down but what i didn't really understand was like what what really i mean i know what happened but like what made that happen i i'm still not grasping on to that like the parents were horrible but anyway like i said it wasn't as intimidating as i thought it would be and i actually sort of kind of enjoyed the ride i mean it wasn't the most impressive story and um in the end you know there there's like this slight little twist i don't really see this as being a thriller i more of like just a mystery of what happened to these kids and more like just family drama i don't know but there is a like slight little twist that i was just like oh okay you know it wasn't very impressive it ended pretty good uh i in my opinion i think i did listen to this one i really enjoy the narration so if you haven't dove into this one yet if you can get your hands on the audio i do recommend the audio it was very very good as well as like the horror store i highly recommend the audio for the horror store it was fantastic i don't have this next book with me but next up i picked up true story actually this was actually the first one i actually picked this one up at the beginning of the month and then i kind of put it down but i was very intrigued to get to this story this is by kate reed petty um i actually read this one i did not listen to the audio i heard the audio was not good which i can understand because the the format of this book is very different from anything i've ever read but i appreciated it i really like different formats that we get sometimes in a book and this was just fascinating to me so we follow alice and nick um and we get a bunch of timelines um we start off with alice's story in 2015. alice is wanting to be a horror writer she's always loved horror as far as like movies books anything goes kind of thing but her life sort of took a turn in high school i believe it might have been her senior year in high school i don't i don't remember um we get snippets of her story and then we get nick who was involved in an incident that involves alice back when they were both in school in like 1995. no 1999 sorry i'm thinking of me i i graduated in 95. uh this is 1995 1999 uh we get the story of nick how you know what just kind of kind of what character he was but the way nick nick nick telling his story is like it's so hard to explain this book y'all i thought it was fascinating i gave it four stars i think yeah yeah i gave it four stars it was just really fascinating just the way it was written out but something happened to alice in 1999 that um and it didn't necessarily involve nick but nick was sort of within that group of people that it that so-called this happened to alice throughout the book we're just we're just getting uh 15 years of information uh and how nick how this affected nick's life and how it affected alice's life there was such a twist at the end i was just like what uh it i know i don't want to give too much away but oh shoot it was it was awesome i i don't i don't it's hard to like say it's very hard to talk about this book uh i gave it to debbie to for her to read because i want her uh opinion and um just see how she feels reading this book i think she will like it because debbie likes you know different weird things um kind of like i do sometimes more than i do so i think she would appreciate this book but anyway four stars i i i loved it then i picked up the half sister this was a uh thrills and chills it was an add-on so it really wasn't a book of the month so it doesn't have the date on the back but um this was this was pretty good i gave this four stars as well so we're we're following two sisters and one day uh this young woman shows up and claiming to be their step sister their mother kind of goes ballistic about it um so we have one sister that's very skeptical about this young woman and then we're following the other sister that really wants to take this young woman in and figure out who she is and um go from there it has to do a little bit also with like one sister envying the other and they both kind of they don't it's almost like they don't really know each other like there's there's just no communication between the two sisters like they don't know the real person because one is ending the other and the other is in being that you know one is having trouble um having a baby and the other other one has you know like two two young boys and she's kind of like envying her and her perfect little family and then the other sister is in being the other sister because you know she doesn't have the weight of kids on her shoulders she's got a great job uh her hus she has a great husband uh so so there's stories there's kind of stories there with the two sisters and it was just intriguing i could not put it down or couldn't stop listening to it i did listen to this book the narration was very very good it definitely kept me guessing like i just couldn't figure out like what the heck was going on i really enjoyed it the lost apothecary i loved this book it was just different it was you know nothing like great or you know it was just fantastical kind of book it was different than what i've been reading it was like a step away from now my romance a step away from thrillers horror it was just just like we're kind of refreshing uh so this is by sarah pinner this was a march 2021 pick for book of the month we follow caroline who's having like sort of a little trouble in in her current life and so she decides to take this vacation um and she finds this apothecary bottle on this little like little adventure thing that she goes on on vacation and being like the historian that she is um she dives into the history of this bottle and then from there we get like backstory we get like we follow nail as well who was the owner of the lost apothecary back in like 1885 wait let me check i'm sorry 1791. we follow nella it's nella we we follow nella and her story uh about the apothecary and how it came about she mixes potions to basically give to other women um to kill their husbands or whoever you know whoever may be doing untowards toward them and then we also follow eliza eliza is 12 years old and she's uh going to the apothecary to fetch a bottle of something for her mistress and nella explains very well and very much in detail what she must do and how she must go about getting things done it was just it was just very interesting very good i loved all the characters i loved the little twist at the end the magical realism of it it was just it was just so much fun so so yeah we get caroline and her story and how she twines in with the apothecary um and then we get the whole apothecary story with nella and eliza and how it all panned out and like what happened to this apothecary loved it five stars next up too good to be true this was also a march 2021 uh pick this is by cat corolla corolla lovering i hope i'm saying that right um i gave this four stars this was actually pretty good i couldn't put it down i did listen to this um the narration was phenomenal we get three point of views we get um heather we follow her in like 1989 so we get like her story um heather is the wife of burke or maybe the ex-wife of burke it's a little it can be a little confusing um burke uh we actually get his journal entries starting back in 2018 when he met skye so we follow skye from like current times all very fascinating i didn't know what to believe who to believe who was telling the truth because there's so many stories going on in here we got heather's story we got burke and his journal entries and later on we get like his true story or so to speak and then we have skies guys she's kind of neutral and she's just trying to figure out what the hell is going on it was very it was very uh enticing i like i said i couldn't put it down and the narration was phenomenal next i picked up survive the night by riley sager this was uh this wasn't a book of the month pick but it was a add-on this is through part of the thrills and chills it says on the back um super excited to read this book but sadly i was a little let down it doesn't mean that i'm never going to read riley sager again i mean it was still i did appreciate the end i appreciated the end the part in italics at the very end sort of like the epilogue part i really appreciated that twist of the story i was just like wait what but the rest of the time i was really honestly just bored so we're we're following we're mainly following charlie um she gets into a stranger's car this dates back to 1991 so there's no like cell phones or anything like that um no like uber or you know other transportation so she like goes and puts a note up to have somebody drive her home which part of me was like why didn't you just get your boyfriend to drive me home but anyway her best friend was murdered by the campus killer and uh she can't just can't see herself staying on campus so she just leaves um and she hitches a ride with this josh guy and uh the whole time she's like going back and forth like is this could this be the campus killer so it's just a lot of back and forth with that we get a little bit point of view from josh like just a little bit we also get a little point of view from the the boyfriend um but it's it's mostly charlie we're following and just her inner monologue was just annoying to me but everything she did i was just like no no it was like it was almost like watching a slasher film and you're like talking to the main character and you're just like what are you doing no that that is not the right thing to do but we get to the end and it was i kind of understood why these events took place in that kind of way like i said i appreciated the ending i was a little bored with the rest of the story uh i could see this as being a movie we're gonna go with that it could be a really good slasher film next i read um painted lace by km newhold this was such a breath of fresh air after reading all these thrillers i picked up this mail mail romance cam new hold i have just adored all her books uh this this was just fun and lighthearted it didn't have like a lot of drama or angsty it was just it was just fun there was a little like i could see maybe miscommunication between our two characters but other than that i like i said it was a breath of fresh air so we have keaton keaton is an artist and he he likes to live life one day at a time he just takes odd jobs he doesn't have like a normal normal job he just takes odd jobs here and there just to put food on the table and pay his rent uh and then we have austin who is very organized he's an accountant he works uh kind of works for his best friend i think it's like it's his the family company or something but um he doesn't necessarily not like his job he's just he's like wanting a little bit more in his life he's wanting a little flare he gets an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding and he's like okay i i need to take control i need to do something i need to get laid so he gets on the m4ilm app and uh he finds keaton so they hook up for one night um but they can't seem to really get enough of each other and it was just so much fun to have like this like straightforward kind of guy and then like keaton who's like all over the place you never know what he's gonna do it was just a lot of fun uh like i said it was like no drama no angst a little miscommunication between the two guys but other than that it i thoroughly enjoyed it next is finding ian this is the second book in the findings series by riley hart i actually just finished this it took me a while to get through like it wasn't i gave it four stars because it really was a good story but i found myself not wanting to pick it up because i was just like oh how much more sex can we have i mean i get it i get it but uh it was between uh three men two younger men and one older man so this is it's sort of an age gap and it's a dumb and sub kind of story a little bit of bdsm not a lot some role playing going on it's different definitely a different lifestyle kind of thing we're following ian jordan and david uh ian is our character that he's just not sure that's the lifestyle for him but he's very curious about it plus he's he's really attracted to both jordan and david uh jordan is uh his friend and they they meet in the first book uh ian is actually finley's friend uh anyway jordan is a little bit more he he definitely wants to get into the lifestyle he's definitely more of a submissive and then we have david who is our dumb but he can also switch and be a sub which he sometimes craves but not all the time uh and ian kind of is more submissive but he sort of wants to die dig into being adam um so david just is infatuated with both these guys and he wants to explore what they can have together so it's a story between these three men it was it was fun uh i really enjoyed each individual story and like what was going to happen to to each of them or where what paths were they going in their lives um and you know how they met in the middle and how they made it work i was really interested in that i was just after so much i was just like okay are we having sex again uh it was a little much but all in all i still enjoyed it back to my book of the month picks this is how lucky this was a may 2021 pick uh in this book this was interesting i gave it three stars yeah i gave it three stars uh we followed daniel daniel's a little bit of a different character than i've ever read daniel has type 2 smas he is um in a wheelchair the entire time he can't really do a lot of things for himself but he does live on his own although he has like his best friend travis that comes over and feeds him lunch or takes him places and he has his pretty much daily caretaker um morgana or johnny uh she she takes you know she gets him up in the morning kind of gets him ready for the day and then she comes in the evening and she gets him ready to go to bed and then he has two sort of orderly guys that come in the middle of the night and have to flip him over it was very fascinating and i it was very educating to learn like what this character has to go through on a daily basis but he's just like it's like just this is you know this is my life i'm living it the best i can um so we have that and then thrown in there we have like a little bit of a mystery where he sees a young girl being taken or she gets into this car and she's never seen again so she goes missing and daniel daniel thinks that he knows who at least he you know he can kind of describe the car and a little bit of the guy that he saw her get in the car with but it's very hard for him to explain that to uh you know to someone to to the cops because he he has like a little um type pad that he can talk through um but i think it's sort of difficult for others to really understand what he's trying to say so he tries to get like travis to call the cops and it was it was just it was just fun fun and different like the the ending wasn't anything like spectacular you know like you know we find out what happened to the young young woman but um but i was just more interested in daniel himself and his his lifestyle and it was just very educational and interesting to read the last thing he told me was my last book of the month pick that i read in the month of july this was also may 2021's pick um this was okay once again i gave it three stars it was good like i didn't want to put it down i did listen to this oh i listened to this one as well very good narration on this one um this narration on this one was good too but we're following hannah hannah gets like this note from her husband owen saying protect her i think that's what it says yeah protect her so and she's you know obviously it's from owen but you know what does he mean um he ends up going missing um and we just sort of follow the story from there and it's mostly hannah's point of view um she she doesn't have a very good relationship with her stepdaughter bailey i really enjoyed how this story and the fact that her father went missing brought them together i mean i hate that him having to go missing brings them together but it was it was hard in the beginning but the two really started to get a hold of each other and just lean on each other so i really really enjoyed that part of the story but other than that like i was intrigued i wanted to know what happened what where did he go did did he just disappear did he have to make himself disappear is he dead what the hell happened and then we start getting into that part of the story and i'm just like huh so i don't know i don't know if like my brain just wasn't up to speed and i just couldn't really like go with it and i was like i don't know if i really understanding what is happening and like the reason he went missing or possibly dead i i don't know but um but i enjoyed the story up until up until and not i don't want to say up until then i just didn't really like get the whole thing of it but all in all it panned out pretty well in the end and lastly i read heartscape by garrett lee this is part of the vino and veritas sorry i was saying that wrong also in in my last video uh this is part of that series this is book two uh i did listen to this because michael dean was a narrator and he's like one of my favorite male male romance narrators but in this one we follow two guys that both have had a little bit of some past trauma they both have a little bit of ptsd going on and they just become friends and just help each other heal throughout their friendship that eventually turns into lovers so definitely a friend to love her story we follow jax and tanner in this story tanner actually manages the wine bar and uh jack's um jax is sort of in the area i think he might be fairly new to the area something happens to his place it catches on fire he needs a place to stay jax lets it i mean tanner lets him sleep on his couch and they just form like this this friendship and then you know eventually get to like really know each other and really fall for each other uh and like i said they help each other kind of heal they both had some fairly traumatic uh events that happened to them in the past but it was a very touching story i really liked it i think you gave it four stars yeah four stars for this one i'm going to continue diving into the vino and veritas vino and veritas uh series for the month of august see how many i can i can get through they're very easy to to get through and they're they're all on script i think i mentioned this in my last video um the narration so far has been really fun for me of course if i run across one that i don't like i'm just going to switch to the book because they're also available on kindle unlimited but i will definitely let y'all know how that goes at the end of august but yeah that was everything that i read in the month of july whoo that was a lot i thought about dividing this into two videos like doing like book of the month reads and then like but then i was like ah we'll just we'll just throw it all together but i'm down to only three book of the months on my book of month tbr shelf as well as i have like i have some more coming i have two more two more books coming i did when i picked my book of the month for august i definitely didn't add on i just can't do not do an add-on i might have done it one time and i regretted it i mean you you're getting another book for like 10 bucks a hardcover nice copy book i can't not get an add-on but anyway so yeah two more books to come in so that's gonna be five total book of the month tbrs but i'm gonna get through it we're gonna do it thank y'all so much for watching as always hope you are all doing well out there and staying safe it's getting scary again so please stay safe um hugs from me all around and i will see y'all very very soon in a new video bye y'all

Channel: Aimee Lou

Views: 310

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: wrap up, book reviews, booktube

Id: e99SpkeJoLc

Length: 35min 32sec (2132 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 10 2021