Okay, I know, I know! It’s way too late to be posting my April Summary, it’s almost June for heaven’s sake! But please forgive me, I was on vacation for half of May and I never got around to posting it, but I read a lot of books in April that I want to talk about!
As a side note though, I decided not to do a monthly challenge for May. I was fully intending to, but then a whole bunch of new releases came out that I had to read and I only read 2 books the whole 3 weeks I was on vacation, so I ran out of time to do any kind of challenge. But I already have a challenge planned for June that I’m really excited about, so I’ll be back at it soon! Here’s my April Summary:
Books read: 9
Pages read: 3,081
Main genres: Young Adult
Favourite book: The Nowhere Girls
April was the month of YA and audiobooks. I discovered in March that I was digging a lot of the YA audiobooks, so I kept the trend going in April and listened to 3 books, but sadly only one was a winner. The Nowhere Girls was the first book I read in April and ended up being my favourite book of the month. I loved everything about this book. The content, the characters, the audiobook narrator, the book narrative, the writing – it was all fantastic!
The other two audiobooks I listened to were Love, Hate, & Other Filters and A Girl Like That. Both of these books tackled some fairly complex topics and had great diversity, but sadly I didn’t love either. I thought Love, Hate & Other Filters was juvenile and poorly written, though I thought the plot held so much promise. I blame my dislike of A Girl Like That on the audiobook though. I didn’t love the narrator and I found this extremely hard to follow in audiobook form, but I loved that it was set in Saudi Arabia, which is a setting I’ve never read about it a book before.
The Poet X was probably my next favourite read after The Nowhere Girls. It’s a brand new release that’s written in prose (reads like slam poetry), which I also thought was fantastic. The writing was definitely my favourite part of this book, but the main character had a lot of depth, which I really liked.
Last month I read Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief, so I followed that up with a read of The Queen of Attolia. I had mixed feelings about this one because I’d heard such good things about it and I think my expectations were a little too high and I didn’t like it quite as much as I thought I would, but still a good book and I will definitely be continuing on with the series.
My book club selection for the month was a letdown though. We read The Humans, which had mixed reviews between our members. Some people loved it, but I was really not a fan. It’s a science fiction novel that raises some interesting questions, but that I personally thought had too many plot holes to be engaging.
My last 3 reads were my monthly challenge reads for April. I challenged myself to read 3 award winning books and I loved 2 of 3 of them. I really liked both Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe and Brown Girl Dreaming. They were both really diverse books that had some great themes and I loved that Brown Girl Dreaming was written in prose. But I felt super bad about not liking The Underground Railroad. It won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, but I just could not get into either the writing or the story. I wanted to love it, but it wasn’t engaging for me. It’s obviously beloved by a lot of other people and I appreciate what the author tried to do with the story – it just wasn’t for me and I can’t pretend that I enjoyed it.
I don’t think May is going to be as successful a reading month, but I’m doing my best to squeeze in a few more books!
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
My first book, The Underground Railroad, was published in 2016 and won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book award for fiction. It was also one of Oprah’s book club reads and it won the Goodreads choice awards in historical fiction. The Underground Railroad looks at slavery in the early 1800’s, prior to the civil war, and re-imagines the underground railroad as an actual underground railroad, instead of just the network of secret routes and safe houses that it was in reality. It tells the story of Cora, a young girl who tries to escape the cotton plantation in the south where she’s spent her entire life.
The second book I selected was Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. I like including young adult books to capture a wide variety of experiences and this one has won a litany of awards. It won the Lambda Literary Award and the Stonewall Book Award for LGBT fiction, the Pura Belpré Narrative medal for Latino fiction, and the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award honour and the Michael L. Printz Award honour. I don’t know a whole lot about the plot of this book, except that it focuses on the friendship that develops between two boys, Aristotle and Dante, and has LGBTQIA+ themes. I’ve heard a lot of good things about it from vloggers I follow, so I’m excited to read it!
The last book on my list is Brown Girl Dreaming, which I bought a copy of a while ago and have been meaning to get to. I have no excuse as this is a middle grade novel written in prose, so I’m expecting it to a pretty quick read. Brown Girl Dreaming won the John Newberry Medal, the National Book Award for Young Adult Literature, and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature. It tells the story of a young girl growing up in the Jim Crow era in South Carolina.
The Paperback Princess 