What I've Been Reading | April Wrap-Up

hey everyone if you're new here welcome my name is keisha and today i'm going to be talking about all the books that i read in the month of april [Music] [Applause] [Music] so for those of you who have been around a while you might have noticed that i haven't posted in a couple of weeks and that is because i've been very busy as a children's librarian getting ready for summer reading program in june has taken quite a bit of my time if you don't know what a summer reading program is check out your local public library and see if they have anything going on a lot of times there's things for all ages though it's primarily focused on children there's also stuff for like teens and adults too so go ahead and check out um your summer reading program or your local library i'm going to put a shameless plug in there moving forward i only read 13 books in the month of april which may sound like a lot to some of you but seven of those were graphic novels three of them were middle grade and three of them were adults so the graphic novels did not take me that long to read nor did the middle grade and it's just been hard for me to kind of get through books this month because i've been so busy and i have not been prioritizing my time the best that i can so first off i just want to go ahead and tell you that i'm still reading the invited by jennifer mcmahon if you remember back in january i read the winter people by her and i really enjoyed it i like the historical mystery aspect of it and like the dual timelines where it goes back from past to present the invited is not so much doing that it started out in the past and then we've been in the present sense with where i'm at in the book so far which i'm about a third of the way through i'm reading it really slowly and i had to kind of put it down and read some other things for a little bit but i am really enjoying it and i plan to finish it in may but if you don't know the invited is essentially a story about these people who are building a haunted house you start off in the past and you learn about a woman named hattie who is accused of being a witch and she was hung then you jump into the future in connecticut these people this couple has decided to move out in the country in this bog that is supposed to be haunted by hattie and they end up building a house from wood that is part of the tree where hattie was hung so essentially like i said they're building a haunted house i don't typically read stuff like this i'm not a huge like i like middle grade spooky ghost stories but in real life just to let you guys know i don't believe in ghosts in in my personal experience and my personal um opinion of this and beliefs is that um there are no ghosts in that if you mess with anything similar to that you're messing with demonic forces um i am a christian and that is part of my beliefs as a christian and so that's just a kind of a side tangent but so i don't usually read stuff like this because i don't really believe like in the story that hattie would be a ghost um but it is intriguing i do like jennifer mcmahon so i'm giving it a go but moving on from that i'm going to go ahead and talk about the graphic novels that i read and then i'm going to save the rest of the adult books for life because i feel like those are some of my favorites so first up i read space boy by stephen mcraney i read book number nine in this series and i'm really enjoying it this is a middle grade graphic novel series that i found at my library and it really caught my eye because there were like faces on the spines and they line up to make a picture and i thought that was really cool so i picked up the first book and the first book and how the series starts is you follow this main character who sees that everybody has a flavor and i can't remember exactly what everybody's flavor is that she sees in the first book but her dad is similar to like he's hot cocoa and her mom is like peppermint or something like that and so she sees different people as their flavors and then she meets this boy who does not have a flavor and so she gets curious about him and wonders where he came from and why he doesn't really talk to anybody and then the story goes on from there i won't say anything else because it would be very easy to spoil this but i would highly recommend checking out the series if you like middle grade graphic novels i've really enjoyed it so far there's another one or two books coming out later this year so i'm really excited to get my hands on those as well but as for number nine i gave it four stars next up i read book number four in the five worlds middle grade graphic novel series which was the amber anthem um i gave it five stars i can't say much about this one either except that if you like amulet and avatar the last airbender you might like this series it's kind of like a mashup of both of those and i've really liked the amulet series i have not read any of the manga for avatar i've watched a few of the episodes that used to come on nickelodeon but i'm not like super into avatar not that i don't think it's good i just have not sat down to watch it so but if you like either one of those things that's kind of along the lines of what this series will follow but anyways like i said i gave book number four in the series five stars and the final book i believe comes out this summer or fall i can't remember but once we get that at my library i'll be reading that too and finishing up the series along the same lines of series brenna thumler wrote a book named sheets and she just released the second book in that series which is delicates and i remember really liking sheets i apologize if you hear a train in the background i'm not going to stop talking because i finally feel like i have words because i've been struggling to film this video you guys don't know that because i edit but my words have not been formulated very well today so if you hear a train in the background i apologize in advance just deal with it so anyways brenna thumler wrote a book called sheets that i read and i remember really enjoying it it was about this girl who wow that's a really loud train okay maybe i will hold on just a second so like i was saying the main character in sheets um her and her dad had recently lost her mom her dad is in a really deep depression and they own a laundromat which she has kind of had to take over because her dad has been so depressed and she ends up meeting this ghost named wendell and he's a sheep ghost and it kind of tells the story of their friendship and how they bond over different things in their life now the heater or the air whatever that is is going to turn on so i apologize for all the random noise in this video hopefully it won't just destroy it so anyways i decided to read delicates and delicates brings in a new main character and um different aspects to make new main character like well i guess she's like not a main character but it's another main character the main character's still in the book but you have kind of two and the new one likes to do photography and she wants to photograph ghosts so um that's kind of the storyline that this one follows i didn't enjoy it quite as much as the first one i'm not sure if it was like the mood that i was in when i read both of the books um that made me feel different about both of them or what but i gave this one three stars i do think it was good and i think most people will still enjoy it i dealt with a lot of really good topics that i think that age group needs to be more familiar with and needs to kind of see how different things play out for different people so i do think it was really insightful in that aspect but i did only give it three stars because for personal and women i just didn't like it as much as i liked the first one next up you might remember that i read the first in the graphic novel series of babysitter's little sister well this month i read the second book which is karen's roller skates and i also started the babysitter's club graphic novel series like just the first because it was babysitter's club then babysitter's little sister and i know those were like real not real books but you know what i mean like written novels before they were graphic novels and that was all taking place during my childhood and somehow it just bypassed me and i never read the babysitter's club so as an adult i'm now reading through the babysitter's club just in graphic novel form because i like i like picture books so i read christy's great idea which is book one and then the truth about stacy which is book number two so in the actual babysitter's club series christy's great idea the truth about stacy i gave both of those five stars and then karen's roller skates which is number two in the babysitter's little sister series i gave that one four stars um so babysitters club i'm sure most of you already know but if you don't it's just a story about these friends who get together and form a babysitter's club and they take turns going and babysitting different kids in the neighborhood so i did not babysit a lot growing up which may be why i might have not been so familiar with the series or might not have read it but i did not babysit and so i guess i didn't feel like i could relate but now i don't know i just really enjoy the series so i'm really looking forward to continuing it the last graphic novel that i read was allergic and allergic is about this girl who is allergic to dogs or well not just dogs but any animals with fur or feathers or anything like that and it's kind of crazy because she is it's her and her two brothers and her two brothers have each other her parents have each other and they're about to have a baby and she feels kind of alone or left out and so she wants a companion and so they go to the pet store to get a dog and come to find out she's allergic and she can't have anything and she tries all these different pets out and nothing seems to work and things progress on in different ways in the story how different friendships are affected by her allergies and all that stuff so i thought this story was really good it really tugged at my heartstrings and i just loved it i just think it was great i don't think there was any fault in it i highly recommend it i gave it five stars so yeah um if you like graphic novels this is a definitely this is definitely a good one to pick up next i'm going to move on to middle grade so first up i read i cosmo by carly cerosiak and i read this for the middle grade book club that i host at my library and so this is the book that my kids voted on that they wanted to read this month and it's about a dog if you can't already tell by the cover so our dog's name is cosmo and cosmo is best friends with max and then you have max's mom and dad his sister emmeline and max's mom and dad have started arguing and max knows that this could lead somewhere bad and he does not want that to happen um divorce has been thrown around and so he decides that he is going to enter cosmo and himself into a dance competition and see if they can win the competition and land a movie role then maybe that will help his family see that it's important that they stay together and that they belong together maybe it'll help them stop fighting so that is the story and this book was just it was so wholesome it was so good it's told from the perspective of cosmo and so anything from the perspective of an animal i think just makes the story even better because you get aspects where cosmo doesn't understand certain things about humans for example when they're going out trick-or-treating for halloween max's dad says ready freddy and cosmo's like i don't know why he says ready freddy because his name is max and so it's just stuff like that where you know you don't understand as a dog what different things are like as a human and he's like well why do why do i get in trouble for getting on the furniture my bed's made out of the same material and stuff like that so i think that makes it um light-hearted in the midst of some heavier things going on and then you also have times where max and cosmo communicate non-verbally and you learn how cosmo does different things to let max know you know how he's feeling or to comfort max and so it's just a really good story i think most people would like this i highly recommend it my kiddos really enjoyed it most of them um their parents are together i believe or they have not i don't want to say i would say the majority i only have nine kids but um the majority of them their parents are together and a couple of them have have experienced separation and so this is a good story for those who have experience separation to see kind of how it can play out in a more positive way um at some point or um the ones who have not experienced this can see what it might be like for other kids who have and so i think it's really good story it definitely deals with some heavier subject matter at times but it is a really good story i have kids ranging from seven years old to 12 years old in my book club and they all really enjoyed it and liked it and handled it really well so i would recommend this for anybody that's looking for a good middle grade with an animal companion and i gave this one five stars i can't remember if i mentioned that but yeah i highly recommend then i read there's no ham and hamburgers which is essentially facts and folklore about america's favorite food or fast food so this book talks about there's another train going by sorry guys apparently it's train day um but this book talks about the origins of like where certain foods came from so like hamburgers hot dogs ice cream um chicken fingers all this different stuff so i'll go ahead and tell you that there's a legend behind hamburgers this is just to kind of pick your interest in picking this up it is middle grade but i do think adults would enjoy this as well i just like the formatting of a middle grade non-fiction book versus an adult it just looks more interesting to me but hamburgers the legend of how they started is that genghis khan um him and his soldiers were traveling from mongolia to china and they needed some food but they didn't have time to stop so they would take raw scraps like animal scraps and put them together in a patty and put them between the saddle and the horse while they were traveling and while they were traveling the friction from the side on the horse moving would create a tenderization in the meat and then they would eat it raw and so you have your first saddle patty which ended up becoming a hamburg steak you'll learn about that if you read the book so we had the hamburger shake before the hamburger in case you guys didn't know it wasn't on a bun and then they added a bun so that's one fun gross fact from the book but i thought that it was really interesting and insightful so i gave it five stars it's just a good side read amidst everything else you might be reading where you get to learn a few fun facts about food and some gross facts apparently too the last middle grade book that i read was the line of mars by jennifer l holm and i gave this book four stars i really enjoyed it i don't read a lot of sci-fi and so i knew that if i wanted to read some middle grade was probably my best bet because i do tend to enjoy most middle grades that i read and this book was about a boy who is in a um what do you call it like a settlement on mars and there's like a u.s settlement and then other countries have settlements on mars as well and some things are going on that confuse our main character he doesn't understand why the teenagers or his best friend who's now like a little bit older than him is acting weird he doesn't understand why they can't communicate with these other settlements why the u.s is kind of separated and then the sickness breaks out and affects all the adults but doesn't affect the kids and so they have to kind of figure out what to do to save the adults and save their settlement and so this story was really good i really enjoyed it the only thing is i feel like it was kind of slow at the beginning which i didn't mind it being slow but it was like slow and then everything happened in the last like third of the book or fourth of the book so i wish that it would have been paced a little bit better i guess and not just have everything kind of hit and happen at the end i would have liked it more spread out or for the story to have been longer so it wouldn't have just felt like a weird jumble at the end but regardless i still really enjoy the story and i recommend it for a lot of people even if you don't like science fiction i think that this might be a good one for you to try out so i would highly recommend picking that one up okay let's go ahead and get into the last three books that i read which were all adult books the first one is why you should read children's books even though you are so old and wise um this is by katherine rundell i have not read anything by catherine rondell before but i know she reads or writes a lot of middle grade books and i had high expectations for this one and then it came in and it was like this big and it's an essay which i mean but it was this big and i read it in one sitting and i'm gonna say something kind of harsh but just understand this is my personal opinion i had high expectations i was let down and i felt like i like if i would have read this as someone who doesn't already enjoy reading children's books i would not have been convinced there were some good points but like the overall essay i just it didn't sell me and i feel like the way that i speak about children's books at my library during our weekly staff picks when we talk about books that we've been reading or just when i'm talking to different patrons in the library that i kind of sell the books a little bit better which is a very bold statement to make and i understand this and i understand that somebody's probably going to be mad at me but i want you to also understand this is my opinion and that i just didn't think it was very well done i know a lot of people that really enjoy this and thought it was really well done so i think it's just up to um each person somebody may be really convinced by this and somebody may really not be like me so check it out if it sounds interesting to you but i gave it two stars because i was just really let down by it unfortunately next i read finley donovan is killing it by el casimano and y'all this book was so good i gave it four out of five stars and that's only because in the grand scheme of like other things i've read i think it was more of a four star than a five star but i'm so excited about this book and it's going to be the first book in a series so there's more to come but it follows this girl named finley donovan and she is a crime novelist and she's in the middle of a panera talking to her agent about this new book she's pitching her new book and this lady that's sitting at the table next to her here overhears their conversation thinks finley is a hit woman and so she slips her a piece of paper and basically asks her if she can kind of dispose of her husband so that is kind of the springing point of the story where we start out and then it has kind of a if you like dead to me on netflix if you've seen that show you would probably like this book also if you're a big fan of like thelma and louise type stories this is a good one because our main character gets together with another character in the book and has that kind of dynamic with them and it's really funny it's one of those things where it just kind of plays out like you're looking at the characters like what are you doing why did you say this why did you do this what are you thinking like it's one of those kind of books and it was just so good it was i guess more of a cozy mystery even though it's not necessarily classified as a cozy mystery it's not a like it's got the harder elements of a mystery and there's some things in there but the humor really provides a lighter aspect to the story and i thought it was really good there was a twist that i did not see coming i did not know who the murderer was and it wasn't one of those twists that made me like gasp that i was just so surprised at who it was i was surprised at who it was and i did not guess who it was but it was more of one of those just like oh okay like that yeah i could see that so it was still a good twist it just wasn't like that so that's the only like it wasn't really a bad thing i just want to explain how i felt about the twist and then at the end where it left off to set up for the next book just blew my mind i was like what like how and i can't explain that unless you've read it then you'll know what i'm talking about but yeah i highly recommend this book if you like mysteries or if you want to just try to get into mysteries and you haven't read them before this would be a good one because it's also a little light-hearted and again like i said dead to me thelma louise if that's your area um definitely try finley donovan out and finally i read somewhere in the dark by rj jacobs and actually i had the pleasure of meeting rj jacobs he came to our library just a couple of days ago and we got to talk to him about some of his books and i really enjoyed meeting him and just kind of getting to know the person behind the story and picking his brain and figuring out more about why he did certain things in his books and so that was really interesting also if you haven't already heard the train that's the third train to go by today so apparently i picked the worst time to film but we're just gonna truck through it because we're almost done so somewhere in the dark follows jessie who's our main character and jessie has faced a childhood of neglect in the foster care system she was paired with a family or actually a couple of families who did not treat her very well and so she has a lot of trauma from that and cognitive and other developmental delays within herself as a result and one thing from that time period where she was being neglected that she kind of held with her was a love for some country music stars and she was obsessive about it and went to some shows and some things happened and yeah so we are now meeting her with her psychologist and kind of finding out the back story of all of this and going forward from there and it turns out that there ends up being a murder and it is one of the country music stars and now jessie is a prime suspect because of her past with these country music stars so that's kind of the storyline and i don't want to say too much about it because i could very easily spoil this but i will say that i'm not typically a person who likes to read suspense novels i'm more of on a thriller novel suspense is usually slower build and thriller is more like there's always action going on and this book is very much a psychological suspense and i think the psychological aspect is really what drew me into it and the very beginning it starts out with her and her psychologist and them speaking and i think that's really what gripped me because i'm very interested in psychology and in mental illnesses and different things that affect different people's lives in different ways for different reasons and so i really enjoyed that and that's kind of what gripped me but then going on through the story it also takes place in nashville which hits a little bit close to home for me because i am a tennessee girl if you could not already tell by my accent now you know and so i liked so many aspects of the story there's part of it where jessie's character she will say what she's thinking like as she's processing she'll say the word for blah blah blah like whatever the definition of the word is and then she'll say the word after it which might sound weird me explaining that but if you read the book you'll know what i'm talking about i thought that was a really neat aspect of her character um it might be annoying to some but i thought it was really neat to kind of try to guess what word she was about to say as she was like going through her process and yeah she ends up teaming up with um some other character in the book and they make quite an unlikely pair but their relationship just i love it so much and yeah i don't really have anything else to say i guess except for if you have not heard of rj jacobs definitely pick up somewhere in the dark he also has another book out the first book that he came out with was and then and then you were gone i think it's what it's called i always get some of them mixed up because there's title sets and then she was gone and then he was gone i think it's and then you were gone but i'll throw up a picture of it just to make sure and he also has a new book coming out hopefully in 2022 that sounds really interesting but i'll go ahead and hold off explaining that one because i'm hoping in the future to be talking with you guys about it then and anyways so yeah those are the books that i read in the month of april it was a really weird reading month and i'm hoping that may will be a little bit better but as i said in the beginning i'm still preparing for summer reading and that program is a month long like something's going on every day of the week just about um that takes place in june and i'm still preparing and so i'll probably be busy until july but we'll see hopefully i can get some reading done but i just wanted to say thank you so much for stopping by my channel if you like this video please go ahead and hit the like button and if you would like to see more videos from me you can hit subscribe and the bell to get notifications anytime i post a new video thank you guys again so so much for watching and i will see you in my next video bye [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: A Book Like You

Views: 215

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: recent reads, booktube newbie, april wrap up, monthly wrap up, books, bookstagram, book blogger, booktuber, reading, reads, book reviews, book recommendations

Id: I2FRFEEu7i4

Length: 23min 55sec (1435 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021