Earl Grey Books

I’ve been on a bit of a reading roll lately, so I’m excited to bringing you another installment of these mini-reviews today. The second half of May and into June is a bit of a weird hodge-podge of me trying to finish off different reading projects and challenges while also still mood reading here and there. So buckle down for some weird mixes of books in these posts for the rest of the month!

Six Crimson Cranes (Six Crimson Cranes #1) by Elizabeth Lim

This was a birthday gift last year from my lovely friend, Mel, and I’ve just finally gotten around to reading it. I honestly wasn’t too sure about this at the start—the first 30 pages or so didn’t grab me but once I got into the story I ended up reading this in the space of a few hours. It’s a really interesting story—while it has some moments you see in basically every YA fantasy, the actual story was different and intriguing. I have to admit I didn’t love Shiori, I just didn’t really feel a connection to her but I didn’t dislike her either. However, I loved her love interest and Megari—they’re both fantastic and bring so much light to the story. I think this had a really interesting world as well, but I just don’t think it was that developed—sometimes these huge things would be mentioned casually about the world out of nowhere and it was like we were expected to know about it. So while I wasn’t blown away by this, I did really enjoy it and I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for the sequel.

The Duke Heist (Wild Wynchesters #1) by Erica Ridley

You might have heard me mention, in other mini-reviews, this post I’ve been procrastinating for months now. Well, I’m finally making some headway on that and hopefully, it’ll finally be ready by the end of June. Anyway, this was one of the ones on the list I needed to read for that and I’m so glad it was the one I decided to pick up. I’ve read/tried a few historical romances lately and I’ve been left feeling disappointed by most of them, but this was just really fun. For one, I love a good romance series that follows a family and I love that this one is a really sweet found family. I’m beyond excited to read the stories of all the other siblings—I have some suspicions as to who might be my favourite but I can’t wait to see where they’ll all go. I also loved the actual romance in this one—the relationship between Chloe and Faircliffe is really adorable. Faircliffe is 100% a cinnamon roll and I won’t be taking any further questions at this time, thank you. But seriously, what a great start to a series—I can’t wait for the rest of them!

Take A Hint, Dani Brown (The Brown Sisters #2) by Talia Hibbert

I figured it was finally time this week to get around to reading this having read Get A Life, Chloe Brown over a year ago now. This was honestly just a really fun read. Talia Hibbert is excellent at balancing adorable, sexy romance moments with more serious topics like mental health and I’ve really enjoyed the two books I’ve read from her. I do have a special place in my heart for Chloe Brown, but this one was fantastic as well. Dani is kind of chaotic but I love it, and Zaf is honestly just plain adorable. What can I say—I just have a thing for cinnamon roll love interests at the moment. I’m really excited for the final book in the series and I’m hoping we get to see more of the relationship between the sisters because that was the only thing this book was really lacking for me.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion

I was beyond excited to find this one secondhand, but completely untouched, for $3 last weekend and read it immediately that night. Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking helped me a lot at a time in my life when I was grieving for the first time and because of that, she’ll always have a special in my heart. But unfortunately, these essays didn’t really do much for me. My favourite thing about Didion is the way that she doesn’t sugarcoat things—she tells you exactly how she sees it, but I didn’t feel that came through in these. These are all old essays—I think the most recent was from 2000, but most were from the 70s and 80s so there’s really no connection in themes or anything else within this collection. For me, that made the whole thing harder to enjoy as they’ve just kind of been thrown in there without any real thought. I’m glad that I did read this, but it definitely didn’t impress me in the way Didion usually does. I’m sad this is the last publication of hers that we have, but I’m happy that I still have lots of her backlist to go through and this wasn’t my final (new) read of hers.

The Nursing Home Murder (Roderick Alleyn #3) by Ngaio Marsh

I’ve been absolutely loving Ngaio Marsh’s books so far—this is admittedly only my third, but the first two completely blew me away. This is, sadly, my least favourite of the three so far. The first two completely sucked me in and I had a lot of fun reading them, but this one felt a little flat to me. There were definitely parts of this that very much reflect the things society feared in 1935 when it was written that are kind of uncomfortable now. It’s hard to describe what I mean without spoiling anything, but there was just a particular section that kind of made me cringe and ended up kind of ruining the story for me. I think it was the worst conclusion of the three so far and even Inspector Alleyn felt like a background character even though it felt like there was no lead character either. All in all, it was just kind of a strange one but I’m excited to be moving onto the next in the series soon.

And that’s it for today! I’ll be back in a few days to talk about my recent Libro downloads.