It’s Monday! What are you reading?

Hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson

Petra and Sharon were 13 in 1974 in Wales. They were madly in love with David Cassidy. They had all the posters and every single issue of the Essential David Cassidy Magazine which they referred to as their Bible. They didn’t know that most of the articles in the magazine, including the Personal Letter from David, where made up by a recent college graduate named Bill.

Petra and Sharon and some of their friends conspire to go to David’s farewell concert in England. When Petra’s mother finds out she punishes her severely. But Petra doesn’t know how severely until after her mother’s death in 1998 when she finds the letter. She and Sharon had won a free trip to Hollywood to the set of the Partridge Family to meet David but her mother never told them. Now, 24 years later Petra decides to claim her prize.

I listened to this on audio and it went a little slow for me. I really enjoyed it when the plot was moving but there was a lot of musing on the nature of love, etc that drug a bit. Grown up Petra was a bit of a bore until she let her hair down on the trip. Maybe that was the point. I loved Sharon.

The Awakeners: Northshore & Southshore by Sherri S. Tepper

“Meet Pamra Don–a young woman scarred by her mother’s death, lured to a priest-hood where the truth must be hidden from the faithful. And meet Thrasne, a young boatman who trades from town to town, free from the iron control of the towers of the Awakeners, and the priests of the world of the River–free, that is, as long as he never speaks his mind. These two, by design and accident both, are about to discover many truths. And on the Northshore of the River, the truth can kill you.” from Amazon

I love a lot of this author’s work. I was surprised to have found one of her books that I hadn’t heard of before. Most of the time her books are ones I enjoy in retrospect. You spend most of the novel with no idea what is going on and then it all comes together magically and you need to reread it to savor how it all fit. I pushed through this book waiting for the magic point and it didn’t ever really come. Very sad.

Trust Me on This (Loveswept) by Jennifer Crusie

“Dennie Banks is an investigative reporter chasing down the biggest story of her career. Alec Prentice is a government agent working undercover to catch an elusive grifter. When they meet by accident, it’s a case of mistaken identities at first sight. What they don’t mistake is the instant attraction they have for each other, an attraction they’ll do everything in their power to resist—because Dennie thinks that Alec is running interference for her interview subject, and Alec suspects that Dennie is linked to his swindler. As the confusion grows, so do their feelings for each other, and what begins as a romantic comedy of errors may just end in the love affair of a lifetime.”

This was cute. Light and fluffy was just what I needed this week in between studying.

The Goddess Rules: A Novel (See all Contemporary Literature) by Claire Naylor

Kate is an English woman who paints animal portraits. She has a loser boyfriend and lives in a friend’s garden shed. When a reclusive movie star turns up to have her paint her lion cub, Kate’s life gets turns around when the actress decides to fix Kate’s life.

I’m still on the light and fluffy here. This was also a good study distraction.

The Gathering (Darkness Rising, Book 1) (See all Children's Spine-Chilling Horror Literature) by Kelley Armstrong

This is the first book in her second YA trilogy. It is happening just after the events in the first one expect this is in Canada. A secluded company town has been developed around a lab that does pharmaceutical research. Several of the towns teenagers are starting to develop weird powers and they find out that the company that they’ve been raised around may not be as harmless as they’ve been taught.

I really liked this book. If you know the author’s work you will understand a lot of things that aren’t overtly revealed in the book. In fact, if this is the first book of hers a person has read they would be sort of confused because it ends with no revelation of what is going on.