Hey! We’ve reached the midweek point, and I thought what a perfect time to unveil my new branding for this newsletter. Do you like it? I know the lighthouse is quite random, I originally started with a fish, equally random but I liked the idea of having something totally different as quite a lot of bookish-themed things have illustrations of books which look lush but it’s been done. So, I landed on a fish and was already to go ahead until my mum pointed out the fish is a Christian symbol and people will likely think it’s about religious books (it’s not!)
*Queue lots of panic* as I’d spent weeks creating the fish and I loved the Greek, Mediterranean, and sea theme. Nicholas suggested, very cleverly, a lighthouse as Ramsgate harbour has the most beautiful lighthouse and we love the windmills in Mykonos that look over the Harbour so…
I really like it and hope you do too.
It’s been a funny old week; decisions have been made regarding the bookshop (more to come on that soon), and my co-host on Novel Thought’s has taken a hiatus to focus on a new job. I’ve been left with a feeling of… what now?
I want to make this newsletter a focus of mine, I love to write albeit not very well but I find it so soothing to sit down and type up my thoughts on the books I’ve read and I know you guys like to receive book recommendations so that you can bulk up your TBR. So this is me making the intention and doing it publicly in the hopes this helps me stick to it.
It felt like the right time to revamp the branding including the name of this publication, as I explained in my last post, there will be two types of newsletters inside this publication. One, giving you a behind-the-scenes of what it’s like to run a bookshop. This one will be sporadic as many of the days in the bookshop can be the same as the days that came which isn’t very exciting for you to read. Two, the weekly newsletter where I share my book recommendations with you.
Time to get into the book recommendations…
Swanna in Love by Jennifer Belle
Dead Ink Books kindly sent me a copy of this, very grateful. It’s got a gorgeous pink cover that I am obsessed with. I flew through this book, it was a two-sitting kind of book. Swanna in Love is pitched as a sort of reverse Lolita. Lolita from the girl’s perspective. It follows fourteen-year-old Swanna, her eclectic, recently divorced and slightly erratic mother who’s dragged her to an artist’s residence in Vermont as her new boyfriend is making art there. The residency doesn’t allow kids so Swanna and her younger brother are left to sleep in the back of a pickup truck and entertain themselves a lot of the time. Swanna begins an affair with a married father of two and that’s the meat of the story. Their affair. I found it intriguing, it was interesting to have a main character as a teenage girl with a lot of agency, it didn’t feel like life was just happening to Swanna, it felt like she was in control. However, in any affair that involves an underage girl and a middle-aged married man, who is a father himself, there is a power dynamic. I found myself asking a lot throughout this book “Is Swanna as in control of this as she feels?”.
The Witching Hour by Ann Rice
Ann is the author of the famous book Interview with a Vampire which has been turned into various films and series over the years. This is a beast of a book at 1,207 pages with TINY writing. It took me a week to finish which when you consider I usually read three or four books a week gives you an idea of the size. The Witching Hour was my first experience of Ann Rice. I found that it reads quite like Stephen King so if you’re a fan of his work then you may well enjoy this. I got utterly lost in the page of this. A story spanning centuries and featuring a plethora of complex characters. The book follows a family of witches and a mysterious organisation which aims to observe and document paranormal experiences for public record.
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
This was a reread for me, I first read this when I stole it off of my mum’s bookshelf when I was perhaps 10ish. I’m not sure of my exact age but I was definitely too young to be reading about a 14-year-old girl who was murdered. This book gave me nightmares for months, although not for the reasons you might imagine - the dark side of the book wasn’t what kept me up at night when I was young - it was the fact that our main character Susie is dead for most of this book - she’s in heaven, and she’s able to look down on her family and watch them all. It was that which scared me so much, I had nightmares that I was up high somewhere watching my family behind a window but I couldn’t contact them, I’d wake up in tears!! I decided to reread this book because I was intrigued to see if at 30 I would feel differently about the book. The book’s beginning I think is brilliant. It starts “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.” Phwoar! What a start to a book, it really hooks you in. We are essentially following along with Susie and her family after she is murdered as her family grieves, tries to solve her murder and bring justice to Susie. They are all trying to figure out a life without Susie in it. I enjoyed this book, and I am pleased to report no nightmares this time around. I do want to note, that Alice Sebold has been in the news quite a lot due to her personal life, it’s something I’m aware of but don’t necessarily feel is my place to comment on.
This Love by Lottie Jeffs
This is pitched as a modern-day, queer One Day by David Nichols which I thought was an interesting comparison. This Love follows best friends Mae and Ari. We follow their lives over many decades, toxic partners and hidden secrets, the heavy weight of grief, and a complicated, unignorable desire to start a family. What I found most intriguing about it was that the two characters we are following are never in a relationship, nor do they want to be. There is so much love but it is a platonic love, a deep love between friends. It’s a type of love that doesn’t get talked about very much and isn’t given as much weight as romantic love and familial love. We’ve spoken about this on our memoir episode on the podcast but I was so excited to see a fiction book laid out like a typical love story but for friends and with both the main characters being gloriously queer. The only downside I had when reading this is Mae and Ari both need therapy, they are both quite self-absorbed and I find that annoying in characters. If they both went to therapy and worked on their self-awareness there wouldn’t be a plot here. That’s a personal gripe and not something I think should put anyone off of reading the book.
I’d love to know what you’ve been reading in the comments below. See you next week! xxx
Just 'discovered' this on Substack Reads and I'm glad I found it! :)
LOVE the new branding (from a brand manager) x