My Six Favorite Reads of the First Half of 2025

The Bossy Bookworm
Jul 25
7 min read

Bossy Favorites of 2025 So Far

I love looking back on my reads of the year to date and taking stock of my favorites. These are six of my most-loved titles from the first half of this year.

What are some of your favorite reads of 2025?

01 Isola by Allegra Goodman

Isola, based upon the story of a real-life sixteenth-century woman, shifts between details of a life of moneyed ease and an abandonment on an unforgiving, uninhabited island after our main protagonist falls in love with the wrong person.

Marguerite is heir to a fortune, but after she is orphaned, she grows into a young lady while her guardian Roberval squanders her inheritance.

As Marguerite enters into her early teens, she begins to fear that her cousin views her as a creepy match for himself. At the very least it becomes clear that he will pay no dowry in order to make another match for her. Instead, in a somewhat shocking turn of events, he forces her to sail with him to New France. But on the way, Marguerite falls for her guardian's servant.

When their relationship is discovered, Roberval cruelly punishes them by abandoning them on an uninhabited island to perish. Marguerite, once a privileged, protected child of wealth and opportunity, must learn to survive in the wild.

I was fascinated by each aspect of this tale, and Goodman transported me into the details and (often infuriating) dynamics of life at the time.

Isola is inspired by the story of the real-life sixteenth-century heroine, Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval.

For my full review of this book please see Isola.

02 Time of the Child by Niall Williams

Time of the Child feels like poetry in prose form, and Williams richly shapes a small-town Irish community's everyday and extraordinary events in this poignant, gorgeous literary fiction novel.

In 1962 in the small Irish town of Faha, it's Christmastime, and Dr. Jack Troy and his oldest daughter Ronnie are coping with complicated family dynamics in their drafty, rural Irish home when an unexpected discovery turns everything upside down.

During the annual, chaotic community fair preceding this holidays, which this year is a rainy business full of haggling, disappointments, and triumphs, an infant is left by the church gates. Young Jude and Faha's grown twins, Tim and Tom, bring the baby girl to Dr. Troy and Ronnie, believing her dead but not sure what else to do. And she does seem to have passed on to another realm, until Dr. Troy is able to revive her. In an impulsive pact, the four men agree not to share the news of the baby with anyone.

What really shines in Time of the Child is the power of the small-town Faha community--gossipy and desperate for dirt as its citizens may largely be. The miracle of unity brought about by a baby's presence is poignant without feeling too easy. This story is beautiful and powerful.

Williams's writing feels like a poem in prose structure; no word is wasted, and I read this novel slowly in order to savor the world the author so gorgeously created.

For my full review of this book please see Time of the Child.

03 Atmosphere: A Love Story by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I love an astronaut story, and while Reid spent far more page time on relationships than on the astronaut or space aspects, there was plenty of each to go around in this novel that was the perfect book at the perfect time for me. I loved it.

Joan has always been fascinated by the stars, and as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University, she teaches her passion to college students. On the side, she shows her beloved young niece the sky and serves as a second parent alongside her sometimes-trying single-mother sister.

When she sees an ad seeking for the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program, Joan becomes obsessed with being part of the 1980s training and with becoming one of the first women in space.

The complicated interpersonal situations added wonderful depth to the complexities of astronauts' training, stresses, competition, and life-and-death goals of entering space. The women's fights to fully be part of a traditionally male-dominated field and the various ways in which they navigated this were particularly captivating to me.

The carelessness that partially leads to the crisis in space felt unrealistic to me, and the high drama and gasping reveal regarding the pivotal space scene toward the end could have felt over the top, but as usual, I was putty in Taylor Jenkins Reid's hands, ready to embrace every bit of it.

This was exactly the right story for me at the right time, and I hugged it to my chest when I finished, then immediately began telling everyone how much I loved it.

Taylor Jenkins Reid is also the author of Carrie Soto Is Back, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Malibu Rising, and Daisy Jones & the Six. You might also want to check out these other Bossy reviews of books about astronauts and space.

04 The Names by Florence Knapp

Knapp's novel explores three life paths for a set of characters, all set into motion by the naming of the youngest child--whimsical, Mom's choice, or named for his cruel father. The trauma was difficult to read, but the various timelines were fascinating, as were the intersections of events and characters among them.

Florence Knapp's novel The Names explores three paths in a life--determined by three different names given to a baby upon his birth.

In one timeline, an abused wife makes a stand for a whimsical name suggested by her daughter Maia, Bear; in a second, she makes a less aggressive but unsanctioned name choice that's her favorite, Julian; in a third, she registers her baby's name as "junior" to her brutal husband Gordon.

In this sliding-doors story, the three paths diverge dramatically, and the whole family's destiny is shaped in different ways for each option.

Each timeline produces a vastly different boy, a significantly shaped sister Maia, drastically different paths for mother Cora, and altered futures for father Gordon. Supporting characters make Easter-egg appearances in other timelines.

None of the paths are too easy or perfect, but each offers varied satisfaction and challenge in the form of justice, tragedy, self-realization, fulfillment, confidence, and hope.

The epilogue surprised me; I wasn't sure it was necessary or that I bought into the point of view and the version of a reckoning that it offered, but it was an interesting way to set up slight closure to the story.

I found this novel fascinating.

Please click here for my full review of The Names.

05 The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr

Carr's newest novel is a captivating series of character studies within a tightly knit Irish seaside community in the late 1900s. While characters struggle to make ends meet, support each other, and avoid giving in to the least generous parts of themselves, tragedies and wonders shape their community in this lovely, heartbreaking and heart-wrenching tale.

In a seaside Irish town in the 1970s, a baby is washed up on the shore. As the community wonders at his mysterious, whimsical appearance, they embrace Brendan, as he is ultimately named, as one of their own, yet hold him separate--and, for a time, credit him with the power of bestowing blessings upon them.

But the world of the story is grounded in day-to-day stressors and challenges. The country is reeling from economic troubles; Brendan's older adoptive brother deeply resents his presence; and conflicts and complicated dynamics underscore friendships, family relationships, and the community as a whole.

The story is a fascinating study of relationships, with heartwarming moments and heartbreaking developments alike. Brendan is not the main protagonist, despite the novel's title, yet he is central to the story in that his presence pushes others to determine what they're about. He remains steady in the face of external upheaval (and Declan's exceptionally poor treatment of him), until even Brendan begins to waver and to seem for a time unsure of who he is and what he is made of and made for.

When Carr offers various measures of character growth and resolutions toward the end of the book, they are reassuring and lovely, sometimes heart-wrenching, and fittingly complicated.

I listened to The Boy from the Sea as an audiobook.

Click here for my full review of The Boy from the Sea.

06 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.

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.