June was a lean month. Will July be any better? Lots of June books have been rolled over, and yet I still find myself with a few books to add to this month’s pile. Can I catch up? Here is my July 2024 Book Preview.
The June Carry Over.
I won’t dwell on these too much as I already previewed them in June. From Usborne books, I have two children’s novels to read. The Boy to Beat the Gods by Ashley Thorpe—A tale set against the backdrop of the Yoruba pantheon of Gods. (I’m most of the way through this, and can already recommend it.) Shipwrecked by Jenny Pearson is a “children get marooned on an island and encounter pirates” story that looks great for summer vacations.
From my own pile, I still have Movies Showing Nowhere by Yorick Goldewijk to read. This has since appeared as the Children’s Book of the Summer in the (London) Times newspaper, so I am even more eager to read it.
Paul Lynch’s Booker-winning The Prophet won’t be a cheery beach read, but I’m very keen to get to it this month!
Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi, I also started, but I put it down. It’s quite a dense Machiavellian fantasy. I had a lot going on during the back end of June and couldn’t give the book the attention it deserved. Hopefully, in July, I can get back to it as, while quite slow, it has an intriguing opening 100 pages.
A Better World?
A Better World by Sarah Langan was sent to me by Titan Books. I suspect, I’ll discover that the world portrayed is not, in fact, better. It has echoes of last month’s The Ferryman by Justin Cronin. It’s a family drama set in a near-future wealthy enclave. It’s described as “gleefully ruthless in its dissection of wealth, power, and privilege, timely in its depiction of a self-destructing world—and… a prescient warning to us all.”
I love the premise, let’s hope it delivers.
The Book Club Choice
My book group is meeting early this month, so I’d better get cracking on Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake. Patchett is very popular in our group and this is the fourth of hers that we have read. When I worked as a bookseller, Bel Canto was a book I would always recommend for book groups. It’s a riveting story with loads of things to discuss.
I’m not sure Tom Lake will hit those heady heights. It sounds rather more prosaic in tone. Set during the pandemic, a family in lockdown discusses their mother’s old flame. A man who subsequently became a Hollywood actor and Oscar winner. We love novels that explore the family dynamic in our book group, so I’m hoping we all enjoy this one.
Fourth Wing with Vampires?
The Waterstones SFF Book of the Month choice for June was another behemoth and another book I don’t know much about. To be honest, The Serpent and the Wings of Night by Carrisa Broadbent looks like it’s the same novel as Fourth Wing but with vampires instead of dragons. I guess I’ll have to wait and see.
Deadly legendary tournaments have been the staple of the genre for a very long time, and for good reason. They’re usually exciting and provide opportunities for lots of double-crossing. Not for the first time with the book I’m apprehensive about this one and find myself wishing it wasn’t quite such a big book. Weighty tomes play havoc with the reading schedule. I enjoyed Fourth Wing a lot more than I thought I might, so I’ll keep an open mind about this one.
So that’s it. A few repeats but still a large number of books to get through in July. Hopefully, I can focus a little better than I did in June, but I suspect, my August pile might still have one or two of these books on it too.
