July Wrap-Up: My Favorite Reads of the Month
- The Bossy Bookworm
- Jul 31
- 6 min read
Bossy Favorites of the Month
Here are my six Bossy favorite reads of July.
I was already in love with five of these six authors' other books before I read these newest works, and I'm thrilled that the sixth is a new-to-me author with a backlist I can now explore.
Have you read any of these titles? What were some of your favorite reads this month?
01 Country People by Daniel Mason
Mason plays with the tone of his newest literary fiction, offering vast rural expanses, claustrophobic woods, childlike wonder, growing paranoia, sudden danger, haunting beasts, and the comfort of everyday familial patterns as a backdrop to characters' struggles to grow, adapt, and, in some cases, reimagine their paths.
Patriarch Mike is a dreamer and a romantic--over a decade late achieving his Russian folklore PhD, and increasingly worried that he is a disappointment to everyone. When his wife Kate is offered a visiting professorship at a university in Vermont, their family treks from California and traipses into a town with a colorful cast of characters, legends and stories, and woods that seem magical--making a life unlike anything they've experienced before.
Mason plays with the tone of the book, meandering between pastoral, peaceful settings, what seems to be magical realism with dark undertones, Mike's growing paranoia, and reassuring familial comforts.
Various levels of disaster and darkness exist alongside the widespread, convoluted, intriguing, outlandish hopes of many within the community. The novel leads to a heartwarming conclusion in which certain fates are accepted and other shifts in life are achieved. Characters' reimagined futures feel all the more powerful after the struggles within the book.
I'm in for all the Daniel Mason books, always.
I read a prepublication edition of this title courtesy of NetGalley and Random House.
Daniel Mason is also the author of other wonderful books like The Winter Soldier, North Woods, and The Piano Tuner.
For my full Bossy review, please check out Country People.
02 The Foursome by Christina Baker Kline
Kline takes what might be a voyeuristic-feeling story of two North Carolina sisters (distant relations of hers) who married the world-famous conjoined twins from Siam, Chang and Eng, and builds a suitably complicated set of dynamics; a layered story of hope, emotion, and tragedy; and enough details of the time to bring it all to life.
The Foursome paints a fascinating story of of the uncommon family structure and its logistics. The couples collectively had twenty-one children, and the novel delves into supposing the how-to of procreation and sex--including the participants' imagined mental tricks to creating distance in the mind to cope with complications around physical ability, emotional reactions, and lack of privacy.
As with all relationships, things get complicated; here, the stakes are higher and the ability to create space or have one-on-one conversations is impossible. The relationships between the sisters, the brothers, and the four adults evolve and show cracks, are repaired, then threatened again.
Kline puts forward plausible doubts, magnetism, conflict, seeming impossibilities, and outsiders' desire for salacious details in this sympathetic, layered story. She is skilled at building a story within a specific place and time, and the details made this story come alive.
I received a prepublication version of this novel courtesy of NetGalley and Mariner Books.
Christina Baker Kline is also the author of Exiles, which I liked, Orphan Train (which I really liked), and A Piece of the World (which I loved).
For my full review of this book please see The Foursome.
03 Eddie Winston Is Looking for Love by Marianne Cronin
Cronin's heartwarming, charming novel about nonagenarian Eddie and his new, younger best friend offers hope after grief and loss and the possibility of redemption in second chances.
Eddie Winston is a 90-year-old gentleman who has loved but somehow has never been kissed.
He spends his days working at a charity shop, a benevolent recipient of others' unwanted items, sometimes garbage-level junk, and, often, beloved items with associations so painful, they must be removed from sightlines and daily life.
Eddie and 24-year-old Bella become friends after she comes in to donate items from a loved one who has died. Bella is grieving, and as they spend time together, she puts her energy into renewing Eddie's potential for a love life.
I loved this sweet story of renewed hope, platonic love, and romantic promise. It's often funny and consistently charming, but never cloyingly sweet. Cronin strikes the perfect tone with these wonderful characters and their lives.
I read this book for my book club, and it was a perfect summer read.
Marianne Cronin is also the author of One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot, a book I loved and gave five Bossy stars.
You might also like these books I found heartwarming, or more titles that features friends who are like family.
For my full review, please check out this link.
04 The Unmagical Life of Briar Jones by Lex Croucher
Lex Croucher's foray into dark academia is fantastic, with angst, mature themes, magical adventure, sinister plots, far-reaching repercussions, and a childhood heartbreak that is revisited and revised in heartbreaking, satisfying form.
Briar and Sebastian are childhood best friends, but when Sebastian is accepted into the renowned nearby magic school at age 11 and Briar is not, the two have a heartbreaking, fraught split.
Then Briar works their way into a temporary maintenance job at the school and soon realizes that their old friend (now called Bastian) has become one of the most feared, powerful, cold students on campus. And Briar also discovers that the school is hiding dark secrets with unimaginable potential repercussions for the world.
The Unmagical Life of Briar Jones is dark, edgy, yet also warm, with mature magic-focused plot points, deep friendships, romance, adventure and strategizing, plus opportunities for redemption. (This is the type of tone and grown-up magical adventure and dark academia that I had hoped Lev Grossman's The Magicians might be; for me, the feel of that book was grim and lacked satisfying character development.)
I'm a huge Lex Croucher fan and I'm in for all Croucher books, always.
I listened to this novel as an audiobook courtesy of Libro.fm and Harper Voyager.
Lex Croucher is also the author of the wonderful Not for the Faint of Heart and Gwen & Art Are Not in Love, as well as the upcoming Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay. Croucher also wrote romcoms with a Regency-era twist, Reputation, which I'm about to dive into, and its sequels Infamous and Trouble.
Please click here for my full review of this title.
05 Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth
I loved the octogenarian main protagonist of Elsie and the darkly funny start to the book. Her heartbreaking history surprised me, as did the revelations at the end of the novel. This was my first Sally Hepworth read but won't be my last.
Elsie is an 81-year-old living in a Melbourne suburb, grumbling and mainly keeping to herself, aside from her best friend since childhood, a persistent 7-year-old girl who's determined to befriend her, and Peter, a kind young man across the street who she doesn't mind running into.
The playful tone of the early pages reminded me of Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club series, which I love. But there's darkness in Elsie's past, and ultimately, tragic, poignant aspects of her life become clear.
Delving into Elsie's childhood is heartbreaking. She experienced staggering loss, disappointment, glimmers of hope, and a few key loved ones who anchored her. Her coping mechanisms, which we come to understand, are wrapped in shocking truths. My heart ached for the child she was and all that she endured.
Some of the modern-day denouements were surprising, and those, along with the friends-like-family elements, made for an ending I didn't wholly expect.
Sally Hepworth is also the author of The Good Sister, Darling Girls, The Mother-in-Law, The Family Next Door, and other books.
For more Bossy reads featuring elderly protagonists, check out this link. And for more mysteries, please check out these Bossy titles.
For my full review, please see Mad Mabel.
06 The Land and Its People: Essays by David Sedaris
Sedaris's first collection of essays in four years offers his delightfully jarring observations and rejection of social niceties, including a hilarious emotional reliance on Duolingo, various entertaining and nerve-racking encounters, and powerfully poignant reflections on his decades-long friendship with his best friend.
In David Sedaris's latest book of essays, The Land and Its People, his first in four years, he brings his offbeat humor, acerbic observations, and surprising heart to recounting stories about travel, adventures, mishaps, shortcomings, true friendship, love, families, loss, aging, and the complicated, fascinating, sometimes disappointing nature of human beings.
As always, Sedaris delivers enough edge to keep me feeling slightly, delightedly nervous about what's to come, yet much of the time he manages to end essays on a thoughtful or surprisingly heartwarming note. Some of the poignancy in his essays shows up when you read between the lines, which feels only fitting for his sharp observations and his often-barbed voice. The final lines of the essays felt at times a little bit sentimental or cute, but he does have to wrap these up, after all.
David Sedaris is also the author of Happy-Go-Lucky, The Best of Me, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Santaland Diaries, and other books.
You might also like these Bossy reviews of other collections of essays.
For my full review, please check out The Land and Its People.
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