Vacation Vibes: BRTD's Booked Summer
“Here’s to books, the cheapest vacation you can buy.”
With summer already kicked off, we are well aware of the looming parade of vacations that scatter across every feed on your phone. Damn them and their cruises, foreign beaches and spicey summer nights. After an exceptional amount of jealousy, we are here to tell you that the next step is acceptance along with filling the void. With all that said, we have something for the stay-cationers! We are booked (pun intended) this summer with plenty of spellbinding reads to satisfy everyone’s taste. Five captivating books will be introduced to hopefully fill your vacation void.
Additionally we have decided to switch things up a bit. Instead of doing preview posts before every book we review, we are going to do one big preview of all the books we have coming up. Our summer is officially packed with books! Starting in August, each reviewer will be reading separate books to bring some diversity and frequency to the posts while we keep up with collegiate life. If you have any recommendations, whether you’re an author or a reader yourself, send them our way!
Now, without further ado: Better Read Than Dead’s Summer Agenda!
Marlena by Julie Buntin
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Summary: Everything about fifteen-year-old Cat’s new town in rural Michigan is lonely and off-kilter until she meets her neighbor, the manic, beautiful, pill-popping Marlena. Cat is quickly drawn into Marlena’s orbit, and as she catalogues a litany of firsts– first drink, first cigarette, first kiss, first pill– Marlena’s habits harden and calcify. Within a year, Marlena is dead, drowned in six inches of icy water in the woods nearby. Now, decades later, when a ghost from that pivotal year surfaces unexpectedly, Cat must try again to move on, even as the memory of Marlena calls her back.
Told in a haunting dialogue between past and present, Marlena is an unforgettable story of the friendships that shape us beyond reason and the ways it might be possible to pull oneself back from the brink.
Fun Fact: Henry Holt and Company provided us with two copies of this novel in return for a fair and honest review. Thus, we dig Henry Holt and Company.
Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur
Genre: Poetry
Summary: “Milk and Honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. It is about the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity. It is split into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose, deals with a different pain, heals a different heartache. Milk and Honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.” Goodreads
Fun Fact: Rupi Kaur has a self-titled YouTube channel where she had posted her original spoken word poems.
Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
Genre: Mystery Thriller
Summary: “A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged. Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother's sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she'd never return.” Goodreads
Fun Fact: Paula Hawkins was born in Zimbabwe and moved to London when she was 17.
Carla by Michael Gryboski
Genre: Thriller
Summary: Carla al-Hassan lives in two worlds. In one, she is known as a mild-mannered young woman who dropped out of college to work full time to pay for her grandfather’s medical bills. In the other, she is a professional killer who does the will of a mysterious domestic terrorist group called the Cicero Organization. For years, Carla maintained this delicate balance. But an act of jealous betrayal and an investigation by a determined lawyer threaten this balance… and her life.
Fun Fact: This author messaged us from our Instagram account recommending it to us, and we were provided with copies in return for a review.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Genre: Classic Feminism
Summary: The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, by slowly going under– maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther’s breakdown with such intensity that Esther’s insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.
Fun Fact: This novel was originally rejected by American publishers and printed by a British publisher.