Midsummer’s Mayhem

Rajani LaRocca

This was an adorable middle grade novel. I bought it to read to my kids but I ended up reading it myself because I couldn’t seem to stop.

The premise is what if A Midsummer’s Night Dream was set in Great British Bakeoff and it understood the mandate.

The conflict and plot was very interior and even though she wasn’t even a teenager yet, the main character spends most of the book feeling overbooked and overwhelmed by her responsibilities.

The descriptions of food were sublime and I still want to eat most of the made up deserts in this book.

Soul Eater

Lily Mayne

This MM book gets recommended a lot for good reason. I got really sucked into it (as in, couldn’t stop reading, was reading while I was supposed to be cooking/sleeping/going to work).

It’s hard to explain this book in a way that doesn’t make it sound like the wrong genre. It’s monster romance, but also with strong Beauty and the Beast vibes. It’s post-apocalyptic, but also a road trip.

It’s definitely got high kink elements, but it’s also really sweet.

The Book Eaters

Sunyi Dean

This one is very, very good and very hard to put down. However, as a warning, it reminded me a lot of The Handmaid’s Tale and I know that (especially now) things in that genre can be triggering.

The premise of this book is what if vampires eat books instead of drinking blood. And what if their secret society was slowly dying and one woman decided to break free.

It’s also about what a mother’s love looks like and what a mother will do for her children. This book is FF but the romance is fairly light, and it reads more like a thriller.