April Wrap-Up: My Favorite Reads of the Month

The Bossy Bookworm
May 2
8 min read

My very favorite Bossy April reads!

I've been reading like a maniac this past month, and I had so many favorite books, it was tough to narrow them down here. I'm giving a talk today about my favorite spring books, and many of these titles are on the list!

If you've read any of these titles, I'd love to hear what you think.

And I'd also love to hear: what are some of your recent favorite reads?

01 Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall

In Hall's Broken Country, characters do their duties, find wondrous love, feel heartbreak, suffer tragedies, sometimes act impulsively, and reel from the consequences of all of the above. A mystery surrounds a deadly moment, and the book ends with a hopeful, imperfect, heartbreaking way forward.

Beth and her kind husband Frank live and farm outside the small English village where they grew up. They love each other, but they are able to stay married only because they push down the memories of tragedies that could haunt them, and because secrets from the past stay buried.

But when Frank's brother shoots a dog going after the family's sheep, the gunshot sets into motion events that will change everything.

The dog belonged to Gabriel Wolfe, Beth's childhood love, and his return to town brings back long-suppressed complications around jealousies, love, choices, and the weighty consequences of the past.

Broken Country is a study of an extreme, life-and-death-stakes fallout after heartbreaking tragedy, but it's also a story of young love blossoming, then shriveling under the first pressures of the outside world; it's a mystery in which duty overpowers the difficult truth; and it's a hopeful view of how an imperfect set of characters can find their clumsy, sometimes beautiful, way forward.

I read this immersive story in a flash.

For my full review of this book please see Broken Country.

02 The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett

In this heartwarming story of wonderfully faulted characters who face tragedy and often make a mess of things, loyalty and steadfastness overcome all and allow a makeshift family to heal, find adventure, discover their individual strengths, and realize that they're meant to be together forever.

PJ Halliday is 63 and won the million-dollar lottery. Now he's about to set off on a cross-country road trip to track down his high-school sweetheart following the death of his former nemesis and rival.

But not everything in his life has been luck and adventure. PJ has weathered terrible tragedies in his life.

Before he can set out for Arizona to try to win back his young love, his estranged brother dies, and PJ becomes the guardian for his brother's grandchildren. So he packs them into the car, enlists his grumbling grown daughter to help him, and hits the road.

Tough situations are real but are surrounded by lighthearted, zany circumstances; characters are faulted and make missteps but learn to forgive themselves and those around them; loyalty and steadfastness serve as bridges to love and caring; and animals work with magical realism to shift and affect outcomes.

While the characters in The Road to Tender Hearts face sometimes devastating turns of events, the tone of the story is such that you won't wonder whether a happy ending is coming. Past hurts aren't erased, but love overcomes, and the ending is sweet sweet sweet.

Annie Hartnett is also the author of the wonderful novel Unlikely Animals, which was one of my Bossy Favorite Fiction Reads of the Year when I read it.

Click here for my full review of The Road to Tender Hearts.

03 This American Woman: A One-in-a-Billion Memoir by Zarna Garg

Comedian Zarna Garg lived several lives before falling into comedy in midlife and realizing it was where she'd belonged all along. Her memoir is candid, poignant, funny, and always entertaining. I loved this peek into her fascinating life.

Zarna Garg fled her comfortable lifestyle and her widower father to avoid an unwanted arranged marriage at age 14. She begged places to stay from friends and acquaintances in Mumbai, homeless. Desperate for food and shelter and tired of overstaying her welcome and never having security, she was returning home and on the verge of agreeing to be married off, until her long-hoped-for visa to the US came through. Instead of becoming a child bride, she ran from home and began a dramatically different new life in Akron, Ohio. In midlife, she reimagined her future again and became a hard-working comedian who opened for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and then warranted her own headliner spots.

Garg offers an honest, funny account of overcoming sobering challenges and determining her own destiny after years of struggles and constant worries about being a burden on those who might help her. Her intense push to achieve is accompanied by doubt, periods of low self-esteem, and feelings of unworthiness that stem from her childhood.

At the very beginning the pacing felt a little uneven to me, but then Garg hit her stride. I laughed out loud repeatedly while I was reading this charming memoir by this strong, funny woman.

Please click here for my full review of This American Woman.

04 Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Mysteries abound within McConaghy's Wild Dark Shore, but the story is largely an atmospheric story of isolation and loss set against the drama of climate change, tragedy, and finding the will to trust again.

The description of Charlotte McConaghy's Wild Dark Shore immediately ticked several of my reading-interest boxes--the setting is an isolated island (Antarctica is the closest land mass), the climate is cold (check out these other Bossy reviews of titles with cold settings), and climate change and shifting weather patterns are bringing matters to a head.

When a mysterious woman washes up half-dead on the remote island of Shearwater, home of the world's largest seed bank and formerly a research hub, she finds only Dominic Salt and his three children manning the lighthouse. The lonely, broken characters reach out to each other. Although hesitant because of past hurts, they begin to form intense bonds.

With violent storms on the horizon, no line of communication open with the outside world, and enormous secrets being harbored on all sides, the disjointed group seems doomed to fail each other. But regardless of their interpersonal complications, they may collectively be the only hope of saving the precious, preserved seeds for the future--if they can trust each other long enough to work together for the good of the world.

There are mysteries at the center of the story, but for me this was a captivating, atmospheric dive into the pressures, pain, and hope within extreme isolation, the power of external forces, and the push to protect each other at all costs. I was intrigued throughout.

For my full review of Wild Dark Shore, please check out this link.

Charlotte McConaghy is also the author of Migrations and Once There Were Wolves.

05 Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry

Henry's story-within-a-story adds a historical fiction element to her signature big-hearted, banter-driven, steamy, intriguingly complicated interpersonal dynamic exploration in Great Big Beautiful Life. This is an excellent rom-com with enough weighty themes to offer appealing depth.

Alice Scott is a celebrity feature writer for The Scratch in LA. She's got a sunny disposition, wears bright, cheery colors, and is hoping for her first big writing break. Hayden Anderson, from New York, has won a Pulitzer Prize and is humorless, highly scheduled, and work-obsessed.

They're both currently on Georgia's tiny Little Crescent Island, vying to become the memoir author for the reclusive former tabloid darling Margaret Ives, whose whereabouts have long been unknown to the general public.

Their strict NDAs mean Alice and Hayden can't talk about their work, and they're developing more questions than answers. Why is Margaret willing to share her personal tale now? What is she hiding? And what on earth is her purpose in stringing along Hayden and Alice for a month--if she even intends to follow through with this project, which they're each beginning to doubt?

But the writers can't deny that opposites are attracting in inconvenient fashion in their case. They're drawn to each other and discover unexpected joy, emotional intimacy, steaminess, and maybe even a promise of something real together.

Henry brings her signature warmth, great banter, and sultry romance to this story within a story. I loved the historical fiction aspect of Margaret's recounting of her history. This is an excellent rom-com with weighty themes that make it all feel anchored in something real. I got a little teary during some of the characters' vulnerability at the end, and I laughed out loud at times too.

For my full review please check out Great Big Beautiful Life.

Henry's Beach Read was one of my favorite books the year I read it, and it also made it onto the Greedy Reading List Six Lighter Fiction Stories for Great Escapism. People We Meet on Vacation was another great Henry story; you can check out my review here, and you might like to check it out on the Greedy Reading List Six More Great Light Fiction Stories. Emily Henry is also the author of Funny Story (one of my Favorite Reads of the Year), Happy Place, and Book Lovers.

06 Kills Well With Others (Killers of a Certain Age #2) by Deanna Raybourn

Killers of a Certain Age was darkly funny, action-packed, feminist, and friend-focused. I love the second installment's return to my favorite aging assassins and their quick-thinking, spry, deadly answers to those who have broken moral codes--and who have our protagonists in their sights.

The first installment of Deanna Raybourn's Killers of a Certain Age series was a fun, darkly funny, feminist story about a retiring female team of elite assassins. It was the right book at the right time for me: entertainment in the perfect combination of action and suspense, loyal friendship, clever plotting, and the promise of love.

Book two picks up when our main characters, having laid low and lived their own lives for a year, are contacted by the Museum, the elite assassin organization they used to work for. An Eastern European gangster has obtained the names of agents who have stood in his way over the years, and our aging assassins seem likely to be next on his hit list. They must figure out who's turned traitor on the Museum and shared this information--and stay alive long enough to bring them to justice.

Kills Well with Others sometimes feels a little bit as though Raybourn is gamely giving her readers what they want (more Billie, Helen, Mary Alice, Natalie--and Tanner!) rather than writing a book she felt compelled to put out into the world. But I'm one of those who are eager for more time with these clever, sometimes grumpy, often spontaneous, satisfyingly quick-thinking assassins who are loyal to each other above all.

The mind-bending examinations of what other characters might be up to and the combat and narrow escapes keep the pacing lively and engaging. In between, Raybourn allows friendships and love to grow and change. If Raybourn keeps writing this series, I'll read every last installment.

For my full review, please see Kills Well with Others.

Raybourn is also the author of the wonderful Killers of a Certain Age, which was the first in the Killers of a Certain Age series. And I loved A Curious Beginning, the first book in Deanna Raybourn's feisty Veronica Speedwell series of historical fiction mysteries, as well as the sequels A Perilous Undertaking, A Treacherous Curse, A Dangerous Collaboration, and A Murderous Relation. (There are currently nine books in the series.)