Another year of books to read! This year marks my TENTH year of doing book reviews! I almost can’t believe it haha! I started this as a way to just keep track of what I was reading, and it has slowly become a hobby of mine! All of my reviews and lists of books are posted under my Book tab, but you can also search for “Book Reviews” and they should all come up!
First read of 2025, “Waiting for Tom Hanks.” Mixed feelings on this one…I remember really liking it most of the way through, but wasn’t crazy about the ending. Some of my favorite movies are “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail,” so I totally get the premise, and that’s also why I enjoyed the book overall, but there were just parts that I remember feeling annoyed by haha!
Rebecca Ross is a great author, and so far I’ve enjoyed every book I have read by her. “The Queen’s Resistance” was a great sequel to “The Queen’s Rising,” and I enjoyed seeing how the story played out with Brienna and Cartier.
“The Second Chance Year” was cute, and I love reading seasonal books. A redo of a very awful year that restarts on January 1? Sign me up! Of course, I could only read this book in January haha… a witty love story with confusion and resolution, overall a good read!
Leah Brunner has become one of my favorite little authors, I really have loved her rom com series. I listened to “Running Mate” and fell in love with this whole family and all of their issues. Of course getting in to a fake marriage to win a congressional election will go over well, right? 🙂
“House Mate” was another cute read! Dr. Reed offers his basement apartment to his boss’s daughter, because she needed a place to live with her own daughter, as she recently lost her husband. She also agrees to be his part time nanny for his daughter…basically throwing together the perfect little family haha…
“Call Your Daughter Home” reminded me a lot of “Where the Crawdads Sing”…set in the 1920s in South Carolina, three women living entirely different lives are all brought together through various trials they are enduring. It was a heartbreaking read at times, but at others inspiring to see their strength to stand up and do what needed to be done for their families at a time when women weren’t expected to fulfill those roles.
Just working on finishing out this cute Leah Brunner series! “Check Mate” was another fun read, this time picking up with the last brother in the family, who is nerdy and super straight laced, and his neighbor who is absolutely not any of that haha. Coincidentally, they get booked on the same trip to Machu Picchu, and end up having to share a tent for the whole trip. Enemies to lovers trope. 🙂
Oh yes, another cute little rom-com listen before the month is over! “The Spy and I” was also a fun book! Dove, a computer analyst, is mistaken for her twin sister and pulled into an intense spy mission that she is completely untrained for. In too deep, her partner convinces her to stay and ride it out, finishing the mission together.
You know I like seasonal reads, so a good New Year’s party thriller seemed to be a good fit for this month! “The Last Party” started out with some good fun at Rhys’ vacation home on the lake, but by the end of the night he was a goner and everyone else was a suspect. There’s a lot of history that comes into play with this one, it was hard to put down at times!
Yes, I read a lot of rom coms, but they just make me happy! “Why Trey Let Me Get Away” was really cute! Second chance romance, where Trey absolutely is not letting Whitney get away a second time, and even calls on his NFL team mates to help him strategize to get her back haha!
Oooo y’all. “The Return of Ellie Black.” I listened to this one and highly recommend listening versus reading…I love it when books have a cast and there is a voice for each part… A girl who was abducted years ago returns, found in the woods, with no explanation of how she got there or what happened to her. Other girls have gone missing too…this one was intense at times, dramatic and heart breaking, but one of my favorite reads this month.
“Better Than the Movies” was better than I initially thought it would be. I’m not crazy about high school romances, but this one ended up being cute. Typical teenage drama 😉 …Liz’s crush moves back into town and she is willing to do anything to get noticed by him, while her arch nemesis neighbor actually has “loved” her for years and years but she doesn’t notice. I liked the way it all ended up, but again, high school romance is a little odd to me haha…just so young!
I enjoyed ending my month with listening to “The Next Right Thing.” A book about choices, and making choices, which I love thinking about for a new year. As an indecisive person, this was a great book for me to listen to. My biggest take away was that in life, there are no wrong choices when trying to decide what to do next. Make a decision, if it turns out differently than you expected, or you don’t like where it takes you, then make a new decision and a different choice. When I think about things like that, it really helped take the pressure off of that mentality of always needing to make the “right” choice.
