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Hey guys it's Trina and this is my August reading wrap-up. There are time
stamps in the description of this video in case you want to jump straight to one
of those book reviews or if you want to jump over one because you're not that
interested in my thoughts on it. But we're gonna start out with my TBR
check-in. So, I had six books on my TBR for August and I read all six of them.
This is the first month in a long time, if not the first month in this entire
year, where I read all the books on my TBR all within that month. Out of the
nine books total that I read this month, four of those I actually listened to the
audio books of and the other five I read in the print format. Any of the
audiobooks I listened to this month I'll put a little note on the screen to
let you guys know which ones those were, and don't forget that I do an audiobook
review series where I talk about just the narration but I haven't yet reviewed
any of these audiobooks that I listened to this month. That will be in an
upcoming video so stay tuned for that if you are very interested in thoughts on
audiobooks. So into the book reviews for August now. As always, I'm starting at the
lower end of the books that I liked the least
working my way up to my favorite books of the month. First up I'm talking about
Perfect Days by Raphael Montes. I rated this book one-star unfortunately. It is
an adult thriller novel. This is set in Brazil and written by a Brazilian crime
thriller author and it is about a main character who is a stalker. He falls for
this girl and he like wiggles his way into her life in some creepy ways and
then he ends up kidnapping her and taking her on a road trip. A lot of
people compared it to the book You by Caroline Kepnes. That is a very apt
comparison. They do have similarities. My main overall issue with this book was
there was absolutely zero tension or suspense, which is something that I need
a lot more than this book gave me when it comes to the mystery and thriller
genre. It's just so straight forward like a killers manual of what he's gonna do
and then him getting away with it and just, you know, it wasn't interesting
because you knew what was gonna happen. He's telling you what's gonna happen and
then it happens. There's no hurdle no obstacle! What this book really has going
for is its readability. It was gripping. I always wanted to keep reading it because
I just kept holding out hope that the other shoe would drop and something
would drastically change the course that events were taking. It never happened in
a way that fulfilled me unfortunately. And going back to that comparison with
You, if you hated You and the reason you hated that book was because you thought
the main character was just too awful, you will definitely hate this book as
well because this character is just as awful, if not more so. In the end I just
wasn't fan. The next book I read this month was The Lying Game by Ruth
Ware. This is another adult mystery thriller and it is about these four
friends who were best friends in like their high school or boarding school and
they used to play all these pranks. They had this game called The Lying game
where they just tried to lie to people and see who would believe it. One of
these lies and things that they got involved in ended up getting them
expelled from the school and now it's like 15 years after they got kicked out
of school, these girls have not seen each other in the past many years, they've all
moved on with their lives, and then one of them calls the other three and says
she needs them and they all end up back in that town going to like the reunion
dinner of their old boarding school and the reader starts to see how all these
different events from the past and from the present fit together and we're
basically just trying to learn about what that event was that got them kicked
out and what really happened. This book had all of these suspense and all of the
tension that I want. You really don't know where things are going, you suspect
everyone and everything, there are a lot of obstacles and hurdles and stuff.
However, this book only got three stars because I just don't think that this
improved upon Ruth Ware's previous two books. I am a fan of her writing, her
mysteries are lacking and this one was the most lacking of her three books so
far. It just didn't set itself apart from the genre or from this author's previous
books for me so it was a little bit lackluster. I had four four star reads
this month and the first one I'm going to talk about was Map of Fates by
Maggie Hall. This is the second book in The Conspiracy of Us trilogy. This is a YA
contemporary adventure series about a girl who finds out that she's actually
part of this like ancient secret society. I really
definitely thought that this was a big improvement on the first book. For being
such a clue based actiony series, the first book didn't give me enough clues
and action but this book brought it. There was a lot of world travel, a lot of hunting
clues, and the romance kind of picked up for me because I just wasn't feeling it
before but I could start to feel it in this book. And yeah I just thought that
this one was really an improvement over the first book and so that is why I enjoyed
it so much. People call it the National Treasure or The Da Vinci Code of YA.
Those are definitely great comparisons and I would recommend it if you like
either one of those things. Then I read Wild Swans by Jessica Spotswood, which is
a YA contemporary novel about a girl who has this strong family legacy that
she is struggling with living up to because all of the women in her family
have been these greatly talented ladies, like poets or singers or artists and
then they all have met tragic ends with the exception of her and her mother. Her
mother fled her life and abandoned her as a child and then in this book her mom
comes back into town, back into her life, so she is dealing a lot with family
issues as well as the pressure and expectation for her to also come up with
this great talent which so far she doesn't have. I really enjoyed the family
emphasis in this book and how the main character struggles with her mom and the
whole family legacy. I really enjoyed the romance in this book. Jessica Spotswood
writes absolutely fantastic bookish nice guys. This book is very
atmospheric, you're gonna get a strong dose of the setting. If you're looking
for something with a very strong plot I don't think this is it but if you love
very atmospheric reads that are character driven and have an emphasis on
family with lots of diverse side characters I definitely think that this
is one that you would enjoy. Next is Girl Out of Water by Laura Silverman,
which is a 2017 debut novel. This is also a YA contemporary. This one follows
our main character who has grown up in Santa Cruz, California. She's a surfer
girl, she loves her surf town and she never ever wants to leave but then all
of a sudden her aunt gets into a car accident and breaks both of her legs
so the main character and her father have to pack up and move away from all
the things and all of the friends that our main character loves so that she can
help to take care of her three cousins over the summer and this book just
explores the new friendships and relationships that she makes and again
it has a very strong family connection in it and there is a really great love
interest that I really loved. He was just a really great, sweet nice guy and
this one also has a ton of diverse side characters in it. Laura Silverman has
been pretty open on her Twitter account that she has a disability and although
the main character does not, the love interest does have a form of disability
and then of course the aunt does too although they aren't the same thing
about Laura Silverman has, I believe. But there are some really great
conversations in this book about the main character who is able-bodied kind
of adjusting her way of thought about these other characters and their
disabilities and I felt that that was pretty great. I'm sure that that comes
from a place of experience from the author. I really connected to the parts
of this book where Anise is dealing with her friendships, like I felt like this
book was calling me out. I could so completely relate to why Anise was
really reluctant to open up to and connect with her friends because she
just got into her head about it and as someone with anxiety, I don't know if
this main character has anxiety, but it was something that I was like oh I know
those feelings so well. I totally hold myself back all the time and yeah it was
just really relatable to me. I really really enjoyed spending time in this
story and I would recommend it for sure. Next up is The Gentleman's Guide to Vice
and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee. This is a YA historical romance adventure novel and
in it we are following our young main character Monty who is bisexual. The
author of this book is also bisexual. And Monty is about to go off on a grand tour
of Europe with his sister Felicity and his best friend Percy who he has a crush
on. There is a very prominent male/male romance and flirtation all throughout
this book that is very evident by the book summary and by chapter 1. Monty as a
character was amazing. He's very smarmy, he's very flirtatious, he's very sassy
and his narrative voice really made the book for me. There is a pretty
action packed and very intriguing, interesting plot in this book that I was interested
in but I found that it kind of dragged at times. It was really the characters
that made this book such an enjoyable experience. The love interest Percy is
also black and he has epilepsy so there are some good conversations again about
these things but because this is a historical setting there's a lot of
racism, and ableism, and homophobia presented in this story because of the
time period but our main characters never embody those ideas, they never
support those ideas, they try to fight back against them. I just really
enjoyed this because it's those characters, like they're an amazing trio.
I really love them. The last three books I read this month were all rated 5
stars. They are all all-time favorites and one of them was a reread. I'll start
with that. It's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling, book 2
in the Harry Potter series. I listened to this on audiobook. I don't really have
any new thoughts to tell you guys so I won't keep you here listening about
Harry Potter, I will say the same thing I did last month about the audiobook: it is
absolutely fantastic to get to relive this world and this story in a new to me
format so I'm really enjoying my audio reread of these. The last two books on
this list were both my absolute favorites of the month. They were both
new reads for me and they both made it into my all-time favorites list as of
now because they both just showed me such strong pieces of myself. And I'm
going to talk about Upside of Unrequited by Becky Albertalli first. This one
is a YA contemporary romance about Molly who is a Jewish, overweight, anxious girl -
she takes medication for her anxiety - and all three of those things are own voices
representation. And she's a girl who's had a lot of crushes. She's had 26
crushes in her life but she's never had a boyfriend, she's never been kissed, and
her twin sister gets into a new relationship with a new girlfriend and
the two of them team up to kind of push Molly out of her comfort zone and say
we're gonna set you up with someone, we want you to get a boyfriend, because
Molly is now like feeling a little bit left out because her sister's in a new
relationship. She feels like everyone's pairing off and she doesn't know why
she's holding herself back from romance. I related to Molly hard, hardcore because I
also am overweight and I also have anxiety. It was such a positive portrayal
of both of these things but very very real because, you know, not everybody has
positive thoughts about those things. And I also hardcore related to the love
interest in this book because he embodied a lot of things that I connect with and so
I just saw myself so much in this book. I really enjoyed it. It was so cute.
I loved all the side characters. Not only does Molly have some own voices
representation, there's a ton of diversity in the side characters. I think
it's an important read and also a very fun read and I loved it. That's all I can
really say. [laughing] And then we are to Bad Romance by Heather Demetrios and this is
a YA contemporary novel that is about an abusive romance between a girl and a
guy. This is a very difficult book to read. There are going to be
extraordinarily huge triggers for an abusive relationship, for rape, for
thoughts of suicide, but this book is so real, it is so powerful, it is so
important and it means so much to me because I've said before, I'm sorry to
repeat myself but because I get a lot of new viewers on wrap-ups, I have been in
an abusive toxic relationship before and this book hit home so hard and I think
part of the reason is because the author says in her author's note that she wrote
this based partially on some of her own real-life experiences. And I loved the
format of this book so much because the main character, she's writing to him in
the past now that she knows all these things were abusive. She'll say, "this is
how many days it took me to fall out of love with you," so there is the use of "you"
quite frequently throughout this book as she is talking to him so we get to see
just such a very genuine journey of her meeting this guy and falling for him -
which that's the thing I think I wish more people would understand, why people
fall for abusers - but at the time that these bad things are happening in this
relationship the narrator is able to stop and take that step back and she's
able to call it out right there on page as it has happened.
So you can see that genuine fall but then also have those things called
out at the exact same time and I loved the format, I loved how that was set up.
It absolutely is not going to cover everybody's experience with an abusive
relationship. This should not be your guidebook to what abuse looks like but I
definitely think that if you've been through an abusive relationship this
book will probably be pretty cathartic, and if you've never been through one I
think this book would also kind of shed some light on what behaviors are abusive.
I really appreciated the jealousy and the manipulation and the assault aspects
in this relationship and just how much of a struggle it was for the main
character to recognize this relationship for what it was. This book nailed it, it
really nailed it and it means a lot to me. It's one of those books that I'm
never gonna forget. I would definitely recommend it if you're interested in
those things but I'm not going to give you guys like a blanket recommendation
because I think it could be very upsetting and harmful to people who are
not yet past some of these things that are in this book. Luckily, I'm in a
place where I can read about this stuff now and I enjoy reading about it, so you
know, I'm not trying to push anyone that you need to read this if you've experienced
abuse and manipulation. You don't. Take care of yourself because this book is
very intense. Just be prepared before you go into it but it was my favorite book I
read this month and it is absolutely one of my favorites of the year. That's
everything that I read in August and I would love to hear if you guys have read
any of these books and you want to talk about them further we can definitely
chat down below and I would love to hear what your favorite book of the month was.
I'm gonna have my TBR video up for you guys soon. Thank you so much for watching,
I hope any of these reviews have been helpful to you, and I will see you in the
comments. Bye!
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