Happy Friday, all!  And happy 4th!

I have to confess to feeling thoroughly discombobulated.  New York just zigzagged from an intense July-ish heat wave that made me want to re-read all my sweltering, summer-set Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels novels (Devil May Care, Houses of Stone, and Stitches in Time are THE summer heat wave books for me; I start to sweat just thinking about them) to late May drizzly gloom.  So I’m not quite sure what month I’m in and the beginning of the week feels roughly a year ago.

I’ve been trying to catch up on some of the books people told me I should read but I haven’t yet (don’t we all have those piles?).  So I started with Kate Weinburg’s The Truants, a thriller/coming of age story about a group of college students and a charismatic professor, whose lives are upended by a disruptive male in their midst after which Things Go Very Wrong.  (The university is in Norfolk.  A friend described the book to me as “basically about Ruth Galloway’s students, but not studying the same thing”.)  It reminded me a great deal of Kate Saunders’s Wild Young Bohemians, which is about a group of Oxford students whose lives are upended by a disruptive male in their midst after which Things Go Very Wrong, although that one’s a little darker.

After a brief pause to reread The Temptation of the Night Jasmine for this month’s Read Along (I’d forgotten how much I love Charlotte and Robert!), I moved on to the next book in the pile, a dark YA fantasy called House of Hollow, described by the same very perceptive friend as “think dark T. Kingfisher”, which was pretty spot on.  It had the some sort of prose you sink into, the same sort of very relatable heroine, the same blurring of fairy tale elements with reality– and it’s absolutely heart-breaking.  It’s an excellent book and I don’t wish it unread, but I do know I’ll be having nightmares about a certain element of it for a very long time.

I needed a comfort read after that.  And, just like that, a Trisha Ashley popped up in my daily BookBub.  So right now I’m reading The Garden of Forgotten Wishes, which is like visiting with an old friend in a small English town with Welsh rarebit and the prospect of family secrets (of the mild and not too distressing sort).  Also, at some point, a dishy male person is bound to show up.  It’s wonderfully soothing and makes me want to bake scones.

Once that’s done… I need to decide whether I’m reading Tia Williams’s Seven Days of June or the latest Riley Sager, Survive the Night, for my holiday weekend read.  Any thoughts?

What have you been reading this week?