Summer reads: Whether you want historical fiction or romance, mysteries or memoir, the good folks at Goodreads found books that should be on your summer reading list. Check out what its community of reviewers had to say about these ten tomes.
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Queenie: Author Candice "Carty-Williams explores dating, anxiety and racism through the eyes of a modern-day Jamaican Brit, and she does it all with a sense of humor and no aversion to cringe factor," writes one reviewer. "Oversharing at inappropriate moments, dating disasters and witty badass girlfriends are just some of the sources of hilarity."
Simon & Schuster
The Lost Man: "'The Lost Man' is less a novel and more of an experience: one that is pleasant, even beautiful, but more often than not, slippery and unaccountably wrong-feeling. It's exhilarating. It's exhausting. There is a twist on nearly every page, and there are more than 300 pages. Secrets meld and fuse and shrink until there is only truth."
Macmillan Publishers
The Bride Test: "This is a story about loss and love, yet also healing and becoming the person you want to be, no matter the circumstances. We get to see both Khai and Esme dealing with their own traumas, and healing separately, but we also get to see them building something really beautiful together: a future where they can be accepted and happy."
Penguin Random House
Normal People: "'Normal People' is not out to inspire, instruct, entertain or talk down to anyone, which makes it something of a refreshing anomaly in current fiction about young people. It is a novel (for anyone, young or old) that simply presents the truth of youthful experiences without the filters of nostalgia or sentimentality."
Penguin Random House
City of Girls: "This book is to be devoured and savored like a multi-course meal with wine pairings. It is a reflection of a life lived outside the box of the typical 1940s experience. Yes, there are the salacious details of a woman's sex life, but that's the amuse bouche, not the entree. This is about defining adulthood and the all the hard choices that stem from life experience."
Penguin Random House
Mrs. Everything: "Right now, I want to sit down with Jennifer Weiner, look her in the eye, and tell her 100 things. I want to take her hand, to make sure she hears what I say, and tell her how she captured my 'growing up' era. I'm a baby boomer; we all have stories we want to share, and we all think our stories are the most important. Maybe they are... [The book is] simply but extraordinarily well done."
Simon & Schuster
With the Fire on High: "Strongly written characters, an intersection of identities, cultures and histories, a taboo subject matter discussed with sensitivity, snippets of creative recipes, phenomenal storytelling, and an extremely satisfying ending -- 'With the Fire on High' has all the necessary ingredients (with just the right pinch of magical cinnamon dust) for a quick page-turner that readers will immediately eat up and fall in love with."
Harper Collins Publishers
Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations: "This is the real deal, raw, wrenching, funny, fearless, and honest. Mira Jacob is an American of Indian descent, married to a Jewish man, and their young son, referred to here as Z, is an inquisitive boy who inherited her dark skin and her poignant need to understand the "lifetime caught between beautiful dream of a diverse nation and the complicated reality of one."
Penguin Random House
Educated: "Difficult to read. Impossible to put down. A powerful, powerful book that you shouldn't miss ... It sounds odd to say how beautifully written this is because we are not spared of the ugly details of what this family was about, but yet it is beautifully written. I had to remind myself at times that I wasn't reading a gritty novel, that Tara and her family were real as I got more than just a glimpse of a life that was hard for me to even imagine."
Penguin Random House
Thick: And Other Essays: "Without a doubt the best book I have read in 2019 thus far, 'Thick: And Other Essays' is thick with wit, intelligence, and an assured self-awareness. Tressie McMillan Cottom addresses many topics within the realm of black womanhood, including beauty standards and whiteness, ethnic differences within the black community, socioeconomic class and assimilating into capitalism, and more."
![<a href="index.php?page=&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FMrs-Everything-Novel-Jennifer-Weiner%2Fdp%2F1501133489%2Fref%3Das_li_ss_tl%3Fkeywords%3DMrs.%2BEverything%26qid%3D1558706182%26s%3Dbooks%26sr%3D1-1%26linkCode%3Dsl1%26tag%3Dtravel0410-20%26linkId%3D17089fac147127b1377bc9b810c1033c%26language%3Den_US" target="_blank" target="_blank"><strong>Mrs. Everything</strong></a><strong>:</strong> "Right now, I want to sit down with Jennifer Weiner, look her in the eye, and tell her 100 things. I want to take her hand, to make sure she hears what I say, and tell her how she captured my 'growing up' era. I'm a baby boomer; we all have stories we want to share, and we all think our stories are the most important. Maybe they are... [The book is] simply but extraordinarily well done."](https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/190521185251-04-summer-books-2019-gallery.jpg?q=w_3756,h_2113,x_0,y_0,c_fill/h_447)
