April 2025 Wrap Up

What a journey April was. I finished 5 books, but I read from 10. Let's discuss.

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld - This is a modern day retelling of Pride and Prejudice. I had saved it for years because I was sure I was going to love it. I love Curtis Sittenfeld. I love Pride and Prejudice. It was a shoe-in. I picked this up in March and it carried over into April. On April 1st, I put it down and moved it to my get-rid-of pile. I used to think I didn't require likeable characters to like a book. Maybe that's still true for books not based on books I love with characters I love. In the first 50 pages of this book, the only truly likeable character was Mr. Darcy. Um, what? The story is told from Elizabeth's point of view, but she is kind of awful. I am so disappointed. DNF

The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science by G. Edwina Candlestank as told to Kate McKinnon - I talked about this in an earlier post, so I won't go deep here. I can see why this might appeal to a grade school kid, but it wasn't for me. It was good enough for me to finish, so there there's that.

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry - This might be the meatiest Henry book, yet. Yes, it's a rivals to lovers romance, but there is also a mystery to solve. Alice tracks down a former celebrity to try to write her biography. She was one of those "famous because she's rich" celebrities. But after her husband died, she went hermit. Then the disappeared altogether. When Alice goes to meet her, she finds out that there is another journalist there to do the same thing. Margaret Ives is pitting the two of them against each other. She will talk to each of them for a month, and then decide who will get to write the biography. Only she isn't telling the whole story. Alice finds holes in her story and goes digging. She finds way more than she bargained for. Also, she is falling for the other journalist, Hayden Anderson. I thought this was fantastic. Alice is hilarious, and I love her.

The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst - This was cute and fluffy and nice. My only quibble was that the villain didn't show up until halfway through the book. It was very cozy fantasy and felt a lot like Legends and Lattes and Emily Wilde. Also, the library copy I read had purple sprayed edges.

The JFK Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Kennedy - And Why It Failed by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch - I think I maybe read 20 pages. It was way to dramatic. In the first chapter they are describing Kennedy's time on a boat during WWII. A Japanese destroyer rammed their boat and all the men got dumped in the ocean. The way they used capitals to describe this event... just no. The boat SMASHED into them. Like, why? I couldn't handle it. DNF

Belgravia by Julian Fellowes - This was my second attempt at this book. Several years ago, I read like 150 pages and got sidetracked. I didn't remember any of it, so I started over. During the Napoleonic Wars, the daughter of a wealthy businessman fell in love with the son of a Duke at Waterloo. He then went off and died. She was devastated. Fast forward 25 years. She died a year or so later and left her parents childless. One day, her mother gets invited to a tea with the duchess (mother of the dead beau) and decides to tell her she has a grandson. The duchess is delighted and plans to use the information to destroy the lives of the parents of the girl she thinks seduced her son and trapped him with a pregnancy. This is just more drama than I was prepared for. I don't love an unplanned pregnancy plot, anyway, but at the halfway mark, I found that I didn't really want to pick up the book at reading time. That is a sure sign that it is time to give in.

Compassion In the Court: Life-Changing Stories From America's Nicest Judge by Frank Caprio - This is a feel-good book. Caprio was a judge for the Providence, Rhode Island Traffic Court. Not a prestigious judgeship, but he loved it because he got to help people. This is part memoir, and part a succession of stories about people he saw in his court and how they touched him. It was nice.

The Kennedy Girl by Julia Bryan Thomas - This was great. Mia is alone in the world after her father dies. She's working in a bakery in New York City, trying to decide what to do next. A man offers her plane tickets to Paris and a modeling job. Against her better judgment, she takes him up on it. It's 1960, but even then that seemed like a dumb idea. But it turned out to be a great job. Until she found herself mixed up in some cold-war espionage nonsense. She turns out to have more brains and grit than expected. It was a good time.

I did start two more books, but I'm still reading those, so that will have to wait.

I don't usually DNF books, but I did 2 in April. I wonder what that means? Bad month or am I getting more ruthless?

What did you read in April?