I promised to be back with a post today, and here I am!

Moving forward with the blog, I am still planning to do posts on Tuesdays and Fridays. However, I am going to be a little more forgiving when I don’t get a chance to do it. This blog is not my main job (or really a job at all), and I often have a lot going on. I don’t need to add more stress in other places that are supposed to be fun.

I’m also about to look crazy productive as I finally have time to sew for myself again, and my first order of business will be to finish up a bunch of things I started a while back and that currently have only one or two steps left until they are actually done. And then I have a lot of sewing plans for the next couple of week.

But let’s get to the matter at hand: reading!

Today I’m back with my January reads post. Even with the commotion of getting ready for a show, I read three books (thank you feeling slightly under the weather and wanting to rest as much as possible when NOT prepping for the show!).

The first was The Sun Down Motel, by Simone St. James. After a bit of a slow start, I LOVED this one. It takes place in a small town in upstate New York that has a strange appeal for those who enjoy the macabre. Carly Kirk, however, has a personal connection related to tragedies in the town: her aunt disappeared from it years earlier and is presumed dead, long before she was even born, and Carly wants to find out everything she can about the incident. She ends up working at the creepy Sun Down Motel in the same shift her aunt worked, and finds herself engrossed in the same strange mystery that her aunt was.

The book is, ultimately, a ghost story, and it was creepy. I had to stop reading it at night and continue it the next day in broad daylight. The story itself was also completely engaging, and I found myself not able to read fast enough to get to the bottom of the strange mystery.

Next up was The Wives, by Tarryn Fisher. This was another one that I had a little trouble getting into, but ended up becoming really engrossed in. I can’t say that it’s a perfect book, but I enjoyed getting wrapped up in the mystery once things really got started. It told the story of a young woman who shares her husband with two other wives. She is perfectly content to stick to her one night a week until curiosity gets the better of her and she decides to meet the other two women in her husband’s life. This story unfolds with an interesting twist that I want to say I saw coming, but I don’t think that I really did until shortly before it happened.

Finally, I read Summer of ’69 by Elin Hilderbrand. This was my least favorite of the bunch this month. About halfway through I lost interest in the various plights of the characters, and just felt like the book slowed way down. By that point I was invested in finishing it, and so I did, but I can’t say that I would recommend this one. However, I have read other Elin Hilderbrand books that I have really liked, so the author is worth checking out.

Three books is not a bad start to 2020. Technically I did say that my goal was to read 50 books on Goodreads, but I say that every year. We’ll see how close I get this time around!