Category: books

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Twisted

Twisted by Jonathan Kellerman is the second Petra Connor book and, as far as I can tell, the last. I read the first one, Billy Straight, at the beginning of April and finished this one near the end of the month.

I did like the book, but not as much as the first one. It seemed a bit more glum, for lack of a better word. It seemed like Petra was just going through the motions, both with her job and her relationships, and not really very happy or excited about either of them, which I guess is reality for a fair number of people but isn’t that much fun to read about.

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The Day Shelley Woodhouse Woke Up

The Day Shelley Woodhouse Woke Up by Laura Pearson is a wonderful book which I devoured in one sitting. I loved the process of watching Shelley recover her memories gradually after waking up in the hospital from a coma. By alternating the timeline between then and now, Pearson allows the reader to slowly get more and more of Shelley’s story.

The book does have a focus on generational domestic violence, so it could be hard to read for some people. I do think it was handled very well, but you may want to avoid this book if that is triggering for you. The characters were well developed and the pace was steady.

The only reason I didn’t give it 5 stars is one small plot point at the very end which was totally unrealistic.  I won’t give more details so as to avoid spoilers.  Despite that, I still think this is a great book and plan to read more from this author.

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The Great Sex Rescue

The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended by Sheila Wray Gregoire, Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach, and Joanna Sawatsky

Sheila Wray Gregoire’s ministry, Bare Marriage, has been very helpful to me in recovering from some of the messages I learned growing up in conservative evangelical circles.  I was a teenager in the 1980s, so I was a bit early for the full-fledged purity culture movement of the 1990s, but I still heard many harmful teachings about sex and marriage during my dating years and my first marriage.

Note: This book is aimed at straight married people who have received messages from the church or from Christian resources that have caused harm to their marriage. It does not get into sex outside of marriage or LGBT relationships. Despite that, I believe it is a very helpful resource for the intended audience.

There is a lot of research that went into the writing of this book, and it shows. The authors provide a lot of statistics from the large survey that they did as well as discuss their reviews of academic research on evangelicalism and sexuality as well as bestselling Christian sex and marriage books. They also provide anecdotes from their own lives and from (primarily) women who wrote in with their stories.

I only wish this book had been around twenty years earlier. It could have made a big difference for me.

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Lethal Prey

Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers join forces to track down a ruthless killer who will do whatever it takes to keep the past buried, in this latest thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford.

Things I loved about this book:

  • How the opening scene with the murder drew me right in
  • The alternating the POV between the investigators and the killer
  • How the killer’s backstory unfolds as the book progresses
  • The introduction of the true-crime bloggers, which makes for a fun addition given the pervasiveness of social media these days
  • That the deductions the investigators make seem plausible given the clues that have been uncovered and aren’t crazy leaps of intuition that don’t ring true
  • The collaboration between two great Sandford characters, Davenport and Flowers
  • The ending, which was a bit different and I really liked

I found Lethal Prey thoroughly entertaining and gave it 5 stars.

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Sunrise on the Reaping

I greatly enjoyed all of the earlier Hunger Games books by Suzanne Collins and was eager to read the newest entry, Sunrise on the Reaping. This book provides the backstory for Haymitch Abernathy and the fiftieth annual Hunger Games.

This was a quick read for me, mainly because I kept wanting to find out what the big twist or information unveiling would be.  I never really felt like I got what I was waiting for, however. Collins did a nice job of showing us what Haymitch was like as a teenager, but I didn’t really feel the plot had much to say for itself.  Also, I am not a big poetry fan, so I felt like the amount of poetry at the end was a bit of an overkill.

I’m not upset that I read it, but I thought Ballad was better as prequels go than Sunrise.

Have you read it?  Do you agree or disagree with my opinion?

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What I’m Reading – May 2025

What I’m Reading Now

Fiction – Plymouth Undercover by Pamela M. Kelley – Court Street Investigations #1

Nonfiction – The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis by Karen Swallow Prior

What I Recently Finished

Fiction

  • How to Get a (Love) Life by Rosie Blake
  • Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins – The Hunger Games #0.5
  • The Day Shelley Woodhouse Woke Up by Laura Pearson
  • Young Jane Young by Gabrielle Zevin
  • Lethal Prey by John Sandford – Lucas Davenport #35; Virgil Flowers #16
  • Billy Straight by Jonathan Kellerman – Petra Connor #1
  • Twisted by Jonathan Kellerman – Petra Connor #2

Nonfiction

  • The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended by Sheila Wray Gregoire, Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach, and Joanna Sawatsky

Short Stories

  • The Bookstore Sisters by Alice Hoffman – The Once Upon a Time Bookshop #1
  • The Bookstore Wedding by Alice Hoffman – The Once Upon a Time Bookshop #2
  • The Bookstore Keepers by Alice Hoffman – The Once Upon a Time Bookshop #3
  • The One That Got Away by Mike Gayle
  • The Sublet by Greer Hendricks
  • The Fall Risk by Abby Jimenez
  • The Tomorrow Box by Curtis Sittenfeld
  • Giraffe & Flamingo by Curtis Sittenfeld
  • Sebastian and the Troll by Fredrik Backman
  • The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin

What I Added to my TBR

Fiction

  • How to Find Your (First) Husband by Rosie Blake
  • The Gin O’Clock Club by Rosie Blake
  • Lessons at the School by the Sea by Jenny Colgan – School by the Sea #3
  • Studies at the School by the Sea by Jenny Colgan – School by the Sea #4
  • Meet Me at the Seaside Cottages by Jenny Colgan
  • The Secret Christmas Library by Jenny Colgan
  • Betting on Good by Wendy Francis
  • Same Time Next Week by Milly Johnson
  • The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennet by Lindz McLeod
  • The Many Futures of Maddy Hart by Laura Pearson
  • I Wanted You to Know by Laura Pearson
  • Missing Pieces by Laura Pearson
  • Nobody’s Wife by Laura Pearson
  • The Beforelife of Eliza Valentine by Laura Pearson
  • The Woman Who Met Herself by Laura Pearson
  • In the Woods by Tana French – Dublin Murder Squad #1
  • Storm Peak by John A. Flanagan – Jesse Parker Mystery #1
  • Avalanche Pass by John A. Flanagan – Jesse Parker Mystery #2

Nonfiction

  • How I Changed My Mind About Evolution: Evangelicals Reflect on Faith and Science by Kathryn Applegate (Editor) and J.B. Stump (Editor)
  • The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins by Peter Enns
  • Autism Out Loud: Life with a Child on the Spectrum, from Diagnosis to Young Adulthood by Kate Swenson, Adrian Wood, and Carrie Cariello

Short Stories

  • The Bookstore Family by Alice Hoffman – The Once Upon a Bookshop #4

TBR Stats/Goal Updates

  • I currently have 160 books on my TBR. Of those, 17 are nonfiction and 143 are fiction.
  • I finished 5 more of my 25 in 2025 list, bringing that total to 18.
  • I have read 46 books so far this year (my goal is 75).
  • One of my goals was to read 2 nonfiction books each month. So far this year I have read 1 per month.

If you’re on Goodreads, feel free to add me as a friend. I’m always looking for new recommendations!

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How to Get a (Love) Life

In How to Get a (Love) Life, Rosie Blake introduces us to Nicola Brown, a somewhat obsessive woman who lives a routine life without much excitement, or love. Her co-worker Caroline dares her to start putting herself out there and try to find love by Valentine’s Day.  Taking the dare, Nicola spends the next three months finding dates by a variety of methods, hoping to find the perfect guy for her.

This was a fun read with a lot of humor and wit. I liked the characters and enjoyed reading about all the disastrous dates Nicola went on in her quest to find love. This is the second book I have read from Blake, and I plan to read more.

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Billy Straight

I have been a fan of Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware series for a long time, and I recently looked through his body of work and found that he has written two books labeled as the Petra Connor series.  They are Billy Straight (1998) and Twisted (2004), and they are a spinoff of the Alex Delaware series.

In Billy Straight, the title character is a twelve year old runaway who witnesses a traumatic murder, a brutal stabbing.  He is not seen and runs away into the night. LAPD homicide detective Petra Connor is tasked with solving this murder.  The story switches between Billy’s reaction to what he has seen and Petra’s unfolding investigation, and as the plot unfolds, we learn more about Billy’s backstory as well.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  I was able to follow everything that was happening even though the perspective is changing in each chapter and could visualize the scenes easily.  I empathized with both Billy and Petra, and I appreciated the range of minor characters as well.

Do you enjoy detective novels?  Are there any that you recommend?

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Shoe Addicts Anonymous

In Shoe Addicts Anonymous by Beth Harbison, we meet four women who come together to swap designer shoes and become friends in the process.  Each of them has their own problems and their Tuesday night group turns out to be a safe place to share their issues and help each other overcome them.

This is a light, humorous read, a textbook example of chick lit. The characters hover on the edge of caricatures and the problems are all tidied up at the end in a way that is entertaining although not totally realistic.

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The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Although I must have heard of The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, I hadn’t read it before now. The coming of age novel came out in 1999, a dozen years after I graduated from high school, which explains why it wasn’t on my radar at the time. It was brought to my attention by a book I read in December of 2024 called The Book Swap.  The two main characters in that book shared a history of loving Perks during their high school years, which intrigued me enough to put it on my TBR.

I really enjoyed this book, although I’m not sure if enjoyed is the right word when it deals with so many heavy issues.  The story is told through a series of letters that Charlie, the main character, is writing to a friend.  We don’t know the identity or location of this friend, but the use of the epistolary style is very effective in allowing us to learn from Charlie’s point of view what is happening and how he feels about it.

I was leaning towards giving this four stars, but then it made me cry.  That is very rare for me and made me realize how invested I had become in Charlie’s story, which bumped it up to five stars. Now that I have read the book, I want to watch the movie, which came out in 2012 and was written and directed by Chbosky.