June 2025 Reads

Last month I got back into the swing of reading, after a bit of a lull in May, and of course I focused on escapist fiction, because reality is so awful now, who wants to face it? Here's what I read, from the top of the stack:

Fiction:
When I was in Colorado, I picked up three books by local authors at the Tattered Cover. One of these was Three Keys, by Laura Pritchett. I read Pritchett's first couple of books, way back in the early 2010s, after I briefly met her at a conference, but then kind of forgot to look for subsequent publications, so it was fun to find a book by her on the shelf. The protagonist of Three Keys heads west on a road trip from Chicago, after she loses her husband to early/sudden death, her job as a waitress to a restaurant fire, and her son to young-adult attitude. Her only plan is to visit three places to which she has keys: a vacation rental in Colorado, a trailer in the Arizona desert, and a beach hut in New Zealand. Along the way she has a bunch of different adventures and ultimately  finds a new direction for her rudderless mid-life. You have to suspend a lot of disbelief regarding the coincidences and circumstances she finds herself in (and about her repeatedly saying she's "new to middle age" when she's 55), but it's a fun book about the realities of being a woman in one's 50s, and about what possibilities life might hold if we took a chance and went out there and sought our future.

I picked up Mother Nature by Sarah Andrews, a mystery from the 90s, from the $2 shelf at the used bookstore. It features a geologist amateur sleuth, a senator involved in some unsavory dealings (which, frankly, appear rather quaint compared to our current era of sordid and downright criminal politicians), and leaking underground storage tanks (or LUST, which I got a kick out of, since, though I didn't work in that program when I was employed in environmental regulation, I knew people who did). I looked Andrews up online and found that she wrote about a dozen novels before dying in a plane crash (with her husband and son--awful!) in 2019. So write your novels now, kids, and stay out of private planes. I'll be keeping an eye on the used bookstore shelves for further volumes of these geological mysteries.

My son read The 7 1/2 deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton a while ago, and absolutely loved it, so he passed it on to me. It's a multi-point-of-view (sort of), and time-loop story, in which the main character wakes up in the body of a different guest at a house party in a moldering old estate on the same day, over and over, and has to figure out who killed the daughter of the house and why. I have to admit to having a hard time getting into it--it's very confusing at the start, and I was trying to read it on a camping trip with lots of distractions going on around me--but once I caught on to what was going on, I was swept along in the story and the clever writing, and the way the repeated events of the day, viewed from different perspectives wove together in the end to reveal the killer and motive. 

My sister passed You Are Fatally Invited by Ande Pliego on to me. It's a bit of a takeoff on And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie, only more gruesome. I think it might cross genres from mystery into horror, though I'm not really a horror reader, so I'm not sure about this. If you like a good puzzle and don't mind a bit of a blood and a jump scare, this book is a fun read.

Nonfiction
Finally, I read (or, more accurately, finished reading because it took a couple of months) Such News of the Land: U.S. Women Nature Writers, edited by Thomas Edwards and Elizabeth De Wolfe. I came across this book in my research into women nature writers for a long-term writing project I'm slogging through, and was surprised to find both writers are professors in Maine (and that one was provost of one my kids' colleges--unfortunately he retired and my son transferred before that knowledge could be of any use to me in terms of chatting to him about the subject matter; since the book came out nearly 25 years ago, he may not have been particularly interested in talking about it even if I had buttonholed him at some college event). The book's a collection of ecocritical essays about a wide range of women nature writers, and I read it mainly to discover writers I wasn't already familiar with, and while there weren't a ton of these, there were a few, and I found most of the essays extremely interesting, even if they didn't further my personal research.