It’s Monday, What Are You Reading? 6/20/22

Good morning and happy Monday.

I’m really missing these three-day weekends. I’m going to need another day off after only having Saturday off last week. I hope everyone’s weekend went well and you stayed out of the heat.

This week I’m going to read a witchy teen read and a book that is being released as a movie soon.

What are you reading this week?

Extasia- Claire Legrand

Her name is unimportant.

All you must know is that today she will become one of the four saints of Haven. The elders will mark her and place the red hood on her head. With her sisters, she will stand against the evil power that lives beneath the black mountain–an evil which has already killed nine of her village’s men.

She will tell no one of the white-eyed beasts that follow her. Or the faceless gray women tall as houses. Or the girls she saw kissing in the elm grove.

Today she will be a saint of Haven. She will rid her family of her mother’s shame at last and save her people from destruction. She is not afraid. Are you?

My Policeman- Bethan Roberts

From the moment Marion first lays eyes on Tom – her best friend’s big brother, broad, blond, blue-eyed – she is smitten. And when he comes home from National Service to be a policeman, Marion, a newly qualified teacher, is determined to win him. Unable to acknowledge the signs that something is amiss, she plunges into marriage, sure that her love is enough for both of them…

But Tom has another life, another equally overpowering claim on his affections. Patrick, a curator at the Brighton Museum, is also besotted with his policeman and opens Tom’s eyes to a world previously unknown to him. But in an age when those of ‘minority status’ were condemned by society and the law, it is safer for this policeman to marry his teacher. The two lovers must share him until one of them breaks and three lives are destroyed.

Unfolding through the dual narratives of Marion and Patrick, both writing about the man at the center of their lives, this beautifully-told, painful, tragic story is revealed. It is a tale of wasted years, misguided love, and thwarted hope, of how at a time when the country was on the verge of change so much was still impossible.

Bethan Roberts has produced an intense and exquisitely raw yet tender novel, which proves her to be one of our most exciting young writers.