July was a really good reading month for me. I finished 6 titles including 3 fiction and 3 nonfiction. Here are my thoughts on those:

Mortedant’s Peril by RJ Barker: Entertaining but not a favorite. The plot dragged quite a bit for me, although I did like the world-building and the characters. This is the first of a series but I likely won’t be picking up the other ones.

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher: One of my favorite authors but this one leaned too far into the horror genre for me. I’m glad I’m reading her back catalog, but I’m going to stick with more of her fantasy titles than ones like this for future reads.

One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson: I thoroughly enjoyed this one. I’m not always a fan of Bryson’s writing but when he nails it, he nails it and this one did. (How he manages to take some random occurrences that happened in the summer of 1927 and weave them together so I couldn’t put this one down I do not know!) Bryson looks at May through September 1927, which just happened to be the year Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, the year the Yankees won the pennant (and Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig each hit 50+ home runs in the season), as well as the Teapot Dome Scandal and the first talking pictures. Tossed in are the fads, the news headlines and the scandals that kept the public entranced during these 4 months. A very fun read!

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen: I have mixed feelings on this one. I don’t think you can argue that Greg Mortensen has done amazing and wonderful things for the children of Pakistan and Iran, building schools and helping rural villages build infrastructure that has vastly improved the lives of the people living there. But I also did some research around this book as I was reading it and it sounds like there was a healthy dose of “embellishments” to things that actually happened and maybe some outright made-up scenarios (like being kidnapped by the Taliban) that came to light in the years after this book was written. A mixed bag on this one for me.

Two Old Women by Velma Wallis: I picked this title up to fulfill a HRCYED 3.0 prompt but wound up LOVING it. It retells a oral tradition story of two old women left behind by their family and indigenous tribal social group to freeze to death in a hard winter when food is scarce, but they decide they will just figure out a way to live and in doing so wind up not just living but actually thriving. This is a short read and I’ll recommend it to all. The story was great.

Deep Water by James Bradley: I was really interested in this title because it sounded like a Robert MacFarlane (a favorite author) kind of book, but this time about the ocean. On the surface, I suppose it is, and there is a lot of good information to be had in this, but it was a very very hard read. It was so depressing, I had to keep putting it down and coming back to it; I couldn’t read a whole chapter at once. Bradley explores all the ways humans interact with the oceans and the creatures who live in them, and (spoiler alert) it’s not generally good interactions. Need to have a kick in the pants to start thinking about plastics and pollution and supertankers and global warming? This book is for you.