My cousin recommended Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon, to me. It wasn’t an enthusiastic recommendation. It had been recommended to her, and she hadn’t really been into it, but she thought I might enjoy it.
I’m often hesitant to take on a book that is a solid two inches thick, especially on a recommendation that starts with, “I didn’t really like it, but…”
As it turns out, I did enjoy it.
I love big, coffee table-sized books that are full of luscious illustrations. If a book has interesting and well-written text to go along with those illustrations, so much the better.
Enter Trees: A Rooted History, by Piotr Socha and Wojceich Grajkowski.
I recently read The Queen of Nothing, by Holly Black, and Imposters, by Scott Westerfeld. I wanted to throw them together into one post because while they are fairly different from each other, they are from the same genre, and both books feature twin sisters as the main characters.
Last Train To London, by Meg Waite Clayton, was recommended by my mom and took me back to one of my first loves, historical fiction around the time of World War II.
This book is huge, and it took me a while to get into it. I had to get used to jumping in between the different plot lines that are braided together in the story, and honestly, I’m short on time and get intimidated by huge books. But soon, I couldn’t stop reading.
The Remarkables, by Margaret Peterson Haddix, was sitting in the middle grade section of our library on an open shelf. The teaser phrase on the cover reads, “There’s a mystery next door.”
There was something compelling and a little spooky about the cover art. With a little hesitation, because I don’t like to be spooked, I grabbed it.
It took several weeks to get to – the reading list is so long these days. But it was SO. GOOD.
