Friday Reads 7/11/2025

This is going to be a very boring post. I'm reading two things, but I have not decided what to take on vacation next week. I'm abandoning all my "assigned" books for the month for that adventure. I will pack at Whim. Hopefully what I pack at Whim will still be what I want to read at Whim when I'm 1500 miles away from my shelves.

Such Charming Liars by Karen M. McManus - I am 2/3 through this one. It's pretty harrowing. Our girl already had to rescue her mom from being murdered by a bad man with a pillow. It is currently before lunch so hopefully I will get more read then.

The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman - I put together a spinner wheel with numbers 1-54 for the 54 books on my contemporary shelf. I spun the wheel and got 2. This was the second book on that shelf. The story is told by Ice Cream Fifteen Star. She and her Sengles community (from what I can tell they are black) live in a post-apocalyptic Massachusetts. Nearby is a town of hispanic people. The Sengles people tend to die by the age of 20 from what they call Posy. The description makes it sound like plague. All the white people either left of died of WAKS, whatever that was. Probably the same thing. Anyway, they're all out there just trying to survive. The language makes this slow reading. It's definitely a dialect of English, but you really have to work at it to figure out what they're saying. Also, it's 600 pages. At 50 pages, I'm all of 8% through the book.

So that's it. I will be reading something else next week, but I don't know what. I'll try to keep you posted.