With the end of the year fast approaching, I’m on a mission to complete my reading challenges for the year. Book Voyage: Read Around the World has been complete for a couple of months, though not as robust as I would have liked. My most urgent goal is to complete Diversity Across Genres, and it looks like I’m on pace to do that. Luckily, my current Nordic Literature Reading Challenge is not time sensitive so I’ll pick that up again in the new year! (In the meantime, you can see my progress here.)

What have you been reading lately? 

Mad Honey: A Novel by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan (2022) 📖

This was an excellent book that made a very strong impression on me. I can’t really share too much without giving away important story points. The story is told from the perspectives of two women. Olivia is the mother of 18-year-old Asher. She took her son and left her husband years ago when the husband revealed a darker side. Lily is Asher’s girlfriend. She and her mom had just moved to town for a fresh start. One fall day during senior year, Olivia receives a call that Lily is dead and Asher is being questioned by the police. So begins a suspenseful story of young love, secrets, murder trial, and a mother’s love for a child, with a wonderful dash of beekeeping and honey mixed in. I highly recommend it, but the book does contain many potentially triggering topics so research that if it’s important to you, but otherwise I suggest just diving straight into the book.  ⭐️⭐️⭐⭐️⭐️

• Read My Own Shelf: Gifted

Whiskey Tender: A Memoir by Deborah Jackson Taffa (2024) 🎧
Narrated by Charley Flyte

This is a coming-of-age memoir by a mixed tribe Native woman. She was born to a Native American father and Catholic Latin American mother on the Arizona Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico. She shares stories of her childhood from the age of three to eighteen in the 1970s and 1980s on and off the reservation. It explores the difficulty of balancing mainstream American culture and Native inheritance as well as assimilation and respect for tradition. It provided interesting insight into the challenges of her childhood as well as Indigenous history. ⭐⭐️⭐

• #DiversityAcrossGenres: Indigenous / Nonfiction
• Book Voyage: Read Around the World: USA (The Southwest)

Hearts Unbroken by Cynthia Leitich Smith (2018) 🎧
Narrated by Kyla Garcia

This is a young adult novel categorized as a romance, but it really wasn’t one in my opinion. It’s a contemporary fiction story set in Kansas about a Native teen dealing with a variety of high school issues, including first love. Most important is her school community’s feelings and behavior towards Native people. It becomes an issue in her relationship with her first boyfriend and with the school’s upcoming musical The Wizard of Oz with its color blind casting, which she ends up covering for the school newspaper with the new boy in town. It was a quick and enjoyable read. However, I was a bit put off by how the chapters would end so suddenly. I was listening and actually thought there was a fault with the recording and but then it happened with every chapter. ⭐️⭐⭐️

• #DiversityAcrossGenres: Indigenous / Romance

A Different Dawn (Nina Guerrera #2) by Isabella Maldonado (2021) 📖

For last year’s #DiversityAcrossGenres, I read the first in this series and really enjoyed it (Reading Lately, July 2023) so I thought I’d read the next in the series now. I still liked the cast of characters. Nina is a FBI Special Agent, and she and her team take on trying to solve the mystery of a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight. Every 4 years for the last 30 years, the suspect has murdered a family in their sleep. I liked the premise, the pace, generally everything except for a coincidence that was too unrealistic and ruined it all for me. ⭐️⭐️

• #DiversityAcrossGenres: Latine / Mystery/Thriller

What have you been reading lately?

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