Earl Grey Books

Recently, I’ve started doing blog-style wrap-ups on my booktube channel, which I’ve really been enjoying. But it did mean that I had to rethink how I went about doing wrap-ups over here—I didn’t want to constantly rehash the same details. So here’s what I’m running with for now, every month I’ll talk about my favourites and disappointments and we’ll just see how it goes.

Favourites

The Singing Bones by Shaun Tan

I’ve loved every book I’ve read by Shaun Tan so far, and The Singing Bones was no different. Tan is an artist and author, so this one is a collection of little sculptures he created along with short excerpts of fairytales. I’m not a huge fairytale fan, but I love Shaun Tan so much that I ended up loving this one. I will admit that it isn’t my favourite of his, mostly because of that fairytale aspect, but it’s still incredibly good.

The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan

I feel like a little bit of a broken record talking about this one because I’ve been talking about it to so many of my offline friends. Basically, I don’t like crime books. Other than Christie, I rarely get through them but this one absolutely blew me away. The story kept me on my toes, and the characters were interesting and easy to read about so this gets a big thumbs up from me. I’m hoping to pick the other two books in the series up soon and I can’t wait.

Nine Rules To Break When Romancing A Rake by Sarah MacLean

Is it really a list from me if I don’t mention at least one historical romance? It’s the genre I go to whenever I just need something to make me happy or to help me destress. This one, and the other two Sarah MacLean’s I’ve read, was just great fun. Her books often lean towards the more dramatic side, but in a way that is just so much fun to read about. Honestly, I highly recommend this if you’re looking for something to distract you from the world right now.

Disappointments

King of Scars by Leigh Bardugo

Yep, I didn’t really like this book. There I said it! I’ve loved all of Bardugo’s other books but this one honestly just bored me to death. I really liked the start, and the very, very end but everything in between? I could’ve done without it. A lot of that had to do with the fact I couldn’t remember 99% of what happened in the original Grisha series. But hey, I finally got this book off my TBR after having bought it the week it came out. I think I’ll continue with this series anyway, but I’m not entirely sure yet.

The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary

So you might have already seen that Angel and I buddy read and posted a discussion about it last week. And if you haven’t, you can find that here. The basics of that post are…we were both pretty disappointed in this. I had super high hopes and while I didn’t hate this, I was also just expecting a lot more from it. I know that both Angel and I are kind of in the minority for this one but it just didn’t steal my heart away like I’d been hoping it would.

The Republic of Birds by Jessica Miller

I’m so sad that I have to put this book in this section. I had extremely high hopes for this. Seriously, I even bought Inge a copy because I was so excited about it. I ended up buddy reading it with Inge, and again, it was okay. It went in a completely different direction than what I had thought it would, and I kind of wish it’d gone that way instead. I think the premise and worldbuilding in here were very promising, but just didn’t quite follow through.

What are your favourites of June?