Favorite Summer Read

Cherie Reich is hosting a favorite Summer Reads Blogfest.

I completed The Healing Spell by Kimberley Griffiths Little on 04/09.

(I know that’s not summer. Stick with me.)

Here’s how I started my review on Goodreads:

This is one of those books when I found myself thinking, WoW as I read though it.

I'd heard great things about this novel, but I was hesitant to read it because when I was 14 years old, my mother fell down the stairs and landed in a coma for weeks. I knew this book would drudge up memories. And it did. Near the end of the book, something happens that I'd forgotten about, and I burst into tears.

Soon after, I received an email from the author, thanking me for the review and asking me about my mother’s accident. We had a few email exchanges on the subject. It was cool that she reached out. We became Facebook friends.

She held a contest to win a copy of her ARC Circle of Secrets . I won!

I finished the book on 08/14 (See, summer!). This is similar to the review on Goodreads :

Kimberley can write layered, complicated feelings - especially when it comes to mothers and daughters. She can also bring the bayou alive. Even though I hate humidity, heat, and mosquitoes, this author makes me long to live on a bayou, boat near the alligators, and eat gumbo. She does an authentic dialect as well.

Shelby is uprooted from her grandmother and father to live with a mother she's barely had contact with for a year. (The mother's name is Mirage - how apt is that?) Everything about her new life, including the secrets of the bayou, makes her nervous. But soon the allure of the bayou calls to her. So does the mystery of the notes hidden in the blue bottle tree. Who wrote them?

When she starts school, some mean classmates entice her to play a dangerous game of ‘Truth or Dare’. When Shelby flees, she meets Gwen at a graveyard. The girls immediately click. But something doesn't seem right. Can Shelby connect the clues to figure out why?

Kimberley Griffiths Little writes beautifully. She can get into the head of girls around age 11. She understands what adults seem like from the children's POV.

Often, when I ask to be a published author’s “friend”, I comment on their Facebook posts, but they don’t comment on mine. She’s not like that. Recently she said she hoped my writing was going well. When I mentioned my 8 rejections out of 15 queries, she wrote:

Most importantly, just keep writing. I wrote for more than a decade without any hope or knowing any other writers - before blogging and Facebook began on the internet, etc. I have tons of practice novels sitting in file cabinets.

There are many authors I admire for their writing. It’s rare that I also get to admire them as people. And even rarer that they take the time to encourage me.

Please share your favorite book so far this summer in the comments section.