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!