What I Read On My Summer Vacation
I’d read that vacations shift into another gear - less “parenting somewhere else” and more of an actual holiday - once your youngest turns four, and this summer, when Claire was three and a half, was a glorious preview of that.
She still needed supervision, especially when we were by the pool, but she is able to play independently for decent stretches of time these days and, equally thrillingly, has become a good playmate for Robbie. Because of that, I was able to read six whole books in the two weeks we were on Martha’s Vineyard!
The first, Thread Needle, was a bit of a slog - which made more sense once I realized it was the first in a trilogy, but isn’t ideal regardless. Unlike a lot of fantasy, it takes place here (well, London) and now (it was published in 2021) so doesn’t require tons of world-building. The protagonist is an English teenager, and it does a great job capturing the hell that high school can be: mean girls and outcasts, gossip and rumors, friendships and crushes. Throw secret covens of witches and hidden magic-making into the mix, and you’ve got a recipe for toil and trouble! I’d give this book three stars because there was no reason for the first 3/4 to be so slow and I was frustrated that two of the four girls in the protagonist’s group of friends were such clichés.
Without meaning to, I hopped from that to another book set partially in an English high school: When We Were Friends. It’s about two girls, Fern and Jessica, who were inseparable as teenagers in the early 2000s. They had a massive falling out in their first year of university, and the chapters bounce back and forth between the years in which they were best friends and their reconnection more than a decade later. Those flashback chapters were almost hard to read because they so mirrored some of my own experiences in high school; the particular sexist and sexually-charged gender dynamics and peer pressure of that era were traumatic to so many elder millennials. But Fern’s character development was great and the setting was truly immersive. Four stars, with one knocked off because the episode that caused the girls’ rift didn’t turn out as cataclysmic as it had been built up to be and because I wish we’d gotten a little more from Jessica and the impacts of her experiences.
This Summer Will Be Different was a fun, easy read. It was exactly what it purported to be - breezy and light with just enough tension to keep the story humming along. Not every book needs to be great literature, you know? Four and a half stars for this one, as long as you’re reading it on the beach or by the pool!
And then I blitzed through the first three books of the Countess of Harleigh Mysteries, a new-to-me series. “A witty romp through the high society of Victorian England with a touch of romance, an appealing and independent female lead, and rich historical detail,” these books are what you’d get if Bridgerton and Poirot had a baby (though with less spice than the former and a more amiable protagonist than the latter). They’re a quick and enjoyable read; I figured out the murderer in each of the books just before it was spelled out, but that didn’t detract from the fun of solving the mystery alongside the characters. I loved the scene-setting, from the explanations of what outfits were worn when and why to the explorations of social mores and niceties amongst the aristocracy. There are seven books so far, and I look forward to reading them all!
