March Wrap Up 2021

Time to wrap up my March reading. The first couple of weeks were great! In my first wrap up of the month I read 5 whole books! Then my reading got caught in a bog. I got stuck reading 2 books that both took concentrated effort and reading glasses to get through. TINY PRINT! Anyway, here we go.

The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams - This is a romance book with a twist. The book is told through the perspectives of a couple whose marriage is on the rocks. She's asked for a divorce. The guy is a professional baseball player and she never really felt like she belonged with the other wives and she resented that she gave up her whole life and dreams to be a mom to their twins and a baseball wife. His baseball friends induct him into their book club where they read romance books in order to rind out what their wives and girlfriends really want. It's a cute story with the happily ever after you expect from a romance.

Villette by Charlotte Bronte - I read this decades ago because I read everything I could find by Charlotte Bronte. I remembered a lot of the set up, but not much from the actual plot of the story. It was a good story, but she told it kind of backwards. Like there would be this big reveal, and the main character would go, "But I'd known that from the first time I saw him." Ugh. The gothic bits were fun. The ending was kind of vague. A friend of mine read it and thought it ended one way, and I thought it ended differently. It wasn't really spelled out.

Jane Austen's England by Karin Quint - This was a travel guide with a twist. Most travel guides tell you what you should see, how to get there, and how much it will cost, etc. This one did all that (including directions that included "cross the pasture" and "go down the walking lane") but it also quoted excerpts from Jane Austen's books and letters or Emma Thompson's filming diary from Sense and Sensibility and explained why each location is relevant to Jane Austen's life and stories or to the film adaptations of her work. I actually really enjoyed reading it, even if I skipped the bits about the locations hours etc.

Girl on the Line by Faith Gardner - Wow. This is seriously tough. Our main character, Journey, tried to commit suicide by swallowing a bottle of Tylenol. This is pretty graphically described in the book. When she is rescued by a family dog being walked in the park, she is strangely relieved, except now she has to deal with the life she wanted to leave. Her parents broke up recently. She was in a scary, fiery car wreck the summer before senior year. Since then, she hasn't felt right. She's diagnosed bipolar and given a prescription. Things go south at school and then her boyfriend breaks up with her. That's when she tried suicide. It's not told in order. It goes back and forth to "before" and "now" and you have to kind of put the pieces together. I had problems with the number of typos in the book. They were pretty pervasive. The growth of the character was pretty great, but it was a tough read.

And that's it. That's a total of 9 books for the month. It could have been really fantastic if I'd been able to read for those two weeks I was bogged down. Oh well.

What did you read in March?