This month has not been a productive one for reading. Well, I should probably rephrase that. This month has not been productive for reading anything outside of the Baby-Sitters Club canon. However, around Thanksgiving I managed to eke out some non-BSC reads in an effort to make sure I stayed at least a tiny bit on track for my “read fifty books that aren’t BSC books” goal.

My basic review of both books that I read was that they were slow to start (I started both at the beginning of November but neither really caught my attention) but at a certain point I became fully invested in the plot and needed to know the outcome, at which point I finished the books quickly.

The first was Goodnight, Beautiful by Aimee Molloy. I really ended up enjoying this one, as it threw me for a loop… TWICE! That never happens to me when I’m reading anymore so when it does it’s really exciting. And of course it’s done in a way that makes it nearly impossible for me to discuss the book in great detail without giving anything away. The gist of the plot is that Annie Potter is living in a small town with her new husband, a psychologist, when he suddenly goes missing. While I knew this was the main plot from the book description, the first couple of chapters are all about the setup, and so it wasn’t until Dr. Statler actually goes missing that I got into the story. To say much more would be to give a ton away, but this was definitely a worthwhile read even if it took some time for me to realize that.

The second was Pretty Little Wife, by Darby Kane, which didn’t exactly throw me for a loop but once I got into the story, I found myself unable to put it down to see how everything turned out. I suspected early on there was more to the action than the reader was currently seeing (the understatement of the year… you can say that about pretty much any book). This was, oddly, the second book I read that dealt with a missing husband. In this one, Lila’s husband goes missing, which concerns Lila mainly because she believes that she has killed him. Yes, this gives away a little bit of plot line, but the reader learns it very early on in the book, and then the story takes on a whole new track. It’s interesting, and it’s got a very unreliable narrator which adds to the fun. However, this one took me longer than Goodnight Beautiful to get into, but I got there eventually.

These two reads put me at 45 books for the year! Can I read five whole non-BSC books in a month AND still attempt to finish the BSC series before the year is out?! If I’m being completely honest, I really doubt it but it’ll be fun to try!