February 2024 Reads

Five Stars

The Women (Hannah)

Absolutely loved Kristen Hannah's latest. Wow. Just wow. I was enthralled from word one.

Frankie McGrath, a newly graduated nurse signs up to be an Army nurse - following her brother to Vietnam. Her well-to-do family has a long history of military service and she is excited and eager to serve and join the Hero's Wall in her dad's study. Her excitement is short lived when she finds out her brother was killed in action and she now has to leave her parents to join the war that took their eldest child.

Frankie is green as green can be and her first day of nursing in Vietnam is a rude awakening to her as she finds out what the war is really like and that her nursing skills are sub-par. Hannah takes you along Frankie's journey of personal and professional growth throughout the book and you are there as she encounters love, loss, horror, pain, and every emotion in between. Frankie is in for yet another rude awakening when she returns stateside after her service and is greeted with an almost literal slap in the face. Her service is not appreciated, she finds she needs help coping with the aftermath of war and is turned away from Veterans' Services again and again as she is told 'there were no women in Vietnam'.

Frankie struggles with her family accepting her for who she is now, but she will always have the support of her fellow nurses who come to her and pull her through the worst of it. This book is a journey of a woman becoming her true self and the bonds that women make that are unbreakable, AND THAT THERE WERE WOMEN IN VIETNAM!!!

Just for the Summer (Jimenez)

Thank you to NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read an advanced copy! I absolutely LOVED Just for the Summer. The concept hooked me immediately and I quickly fell in love with the characters. Concept - a woman (Emma) comes across a Reddit story where a man (Justin) talks about his love curse - every woman he dates finds the love of her life in the next man she dates after she and Justin break up. Emma...has the exact same curse. On a whim she reaches out to him and they hit it off immediately. They make a master plan - if they date then they will cancel each other out and break their respective curses.

Abby Jimenez layers in fantastic back stories for each of these characters and brings in a supporting cast of characters that you'll love and love to hate. I don't want to give too much away in my review here, just trust me you'll love it, I laughed out loud at parts and also cried in quite a few - sad cries and good cries.

Emma's back story can be triggering for some readers, and I truly appreciated the content/trigger warning in the beginning of the book. I haven't seen that in any book before and it really is something we should see more to warn readers who may be triggered by some circumstances. I applaud Abby Jimenez and her publishers for realizing this!

Four Stars

Funny Story (Henry)

Thank you to Edelweiss for letting me read an advanced copy! Emily Henry is so good at bringing you right into the book and connecting with the characters and their situations. Daphne goes from goin' to the chapel to gettin ' the boot from her now ex-fiance Peter after he realizes his love for his lady BFF Petra who throws aside her boyfriend Miles for this longtime simmering love.

Librarian Daphne has nowhere to go having moved to this small town in Michigan for her fiance and ends up moving in with tossed aside Miles...miserable Miles...scruffy Miles.

As their friendship evolves, so do their feelings. And if you like steamy, Emily Henry is there for you! You'll love being there to see these two evolve from thrown together roommates to...wink wink.

Aside from the main love story Funny Story has a great supporting cast of characters who you will absolutely LOVE.

The Woman In Me (Spears)

I don't think it matters if you are a Britney Spears fan or not, this is a book to read. It really exposes what it is like for child stars and also the absolute horror that was the conservatorship that she was placed in and then kept in for THIRTEEN YEARS. It's just wild. I really feel awful for this woman. It seems like to me that she was taken advantage of by her family for years and when she was adult enough to get away her father kept her captive with a legal lockdown.