January Books

In the month of January, I read 4 books.  As I am keeping track of the numbers of books read this year, I'm also doing reviews of them.  

 

The first book of the new year that I finished was The Last Letter from Your Lover by JoJo Meyers.  I understand it is a movie on Netflix, but I have yet to see it.  The book started out slow and I almost gave up on it.  If a book does not grab a hold of my attention within the first 20-30 pages, I put it aside and reach for something else to read.  There are so many good books out there and never enough time to read them all that I personally refuse to continue every book started if I am not enjoying reading it.  However, I am glad I persevered on this one because once I got in to it, it was one of those that was hard to put down.  Very interesting story told in the past and the present about love and love lost with a twist I didn't see coming at the end of the book.  It did wrap up nicely with good closure at the end.  I'll say if you are going to read it, each chapter starts with a month and year.  Keep track of those in your head.  It will help it come together sooner than later as the story does bounce around a little bit.  Highly recommend it.

The second book I read was The Secret Next Door by Rebecca Taylor.  It is a story of a young mom who wants to give her son a great upbringing in a snobby type of neighborhood with a good school but has problems doing so with the challenges of her life and her marriage.  One of the other moms featured in the book loses a child in a mysterious way which has all the other families in the area up in arms on who the killer may be.  Again, the book wrapped up pretty well at the end and the story line was plausible with a surprise in the plot I was not expecting.  I think the author could have developed her characters a bit more and perhaps wrap up a few more loose ends, but all in all it was a well written book and held my attention.  Would recommend it.

The third book was Last Girl Ghosted by Lisa Unger.  I understand that this was her 19th book but this was the first one of hers I have read.  This book was a hardcover that I had gotten from my public library. The others I read this month were e-books I read on my tablet.  This took me about 6 weeks to complete as I only read a few pages a night before bed.  I'm not sure what my head was thinking when I checked this book out back in November-ish.  It was a really weird story line, a bit intriguing to see how it all played out.  It was dark and had an okay ending but kind of a sad tale all around.  I don't think I would recommend this.  If you did read this or any of her other books, would love your opinion about her as a writer and your thoughts about this book.  I guess I should say just a little about what the book was about.  Basically a lady meets a man through online dating and it kind of goes south after that.  Again, I just don't know what I was thinking when I got that book a few months back. 

The last book read in January was The Women in Black by Madeline St. John.  After I finished reading it, I read the "about author" section of the book and saw that she had been born in 1941 and had passed in 2006 (at the age of 64 from emphysema).  She wrote this book back in 1993; it was her first book written.  Aneta had recommended it on my last post I had written about book reviews.  It was an absolute delight of a book to read.  It isn't very long compared to the other books read this month but enjoyable story all around.  Very highly recommended.  The story involved four women who worked in a high end store in the clothing department during a 6 week holiday season.  Came to a very nice end.  Just an all around "feel good" book!

Now onto February.  I updated my Goodreads account so that would keep track of my reading and signed up for the reading challenge there, saying I would read 50 books in 2022 . I think I'll be able to achieve that goal!

Let me know if you read any of these and your thoughts and any good books you read in January!

Happy reading!