 Hey guys it's Tilly and thank you for watching today. Today I'm going to be talking about my June wrap up. I absolutely smashed my June TV red pile. I actually read all the books I wanted to and some more which is really exciting because I haven't read very many books in quite a long time so it's really good to get back into reading and enjoying some good books and not enjoying some. So the first one that I've got which borderline was actually from last month but since I haven't actually done much reading I wanted to include it in this month's one otherwise I wouldn't really talk about it and that was House of Hollow by Crystal Sutherland. I read this for the Demix Jindala YA book club. The book itself I didn't really know what to expect were going into it. I decided to go into this book blind and there were concepts of it that I really liked. For instance the writing and the descriptions were very vivid and written really really well. I found myself getting dragged into the story however I wasn't a huge fan of the characters. They didn't feel very fleshed out and deep. I didn't really form a connection with them and the story itself was very very slow. The story itself follows three sisters when they were younger they all went missing and then they returned one month later and things started to change about them like their hair color and their eye color. This slowly drove the parents crazy with the father ending up committing suicide and the mother raising them on their own and these girls all grow up to be very individual and very different. The oldest sister is kicked out of the home and we don't know why. The middle sister eventually decides to leave home as well and it's just the younger sister and the mum and one day they find out that the oldest sister has gone missing so the other two sisters reunite to try to find out what happened to the missing sister. I would give this book a 2.5 stars out of five. I did enjoy parts of it but overall the story just wasn't enough for me to fully enjoy it. Next up is a book that I probably liked the least out of any books that I have read in quite a long time and that is Layla by Colin Hoover. I'm a big fan of reading romance especially because they helped me to get out of reading slumps and I picked up Colin Hoover at the start of the month to try to get through some books and I really really did not like this story at all so this book is a romance. It follows a guy called Leeds who falls in love with a girl called Layla and they have a whirlwind romance. Everything happens very fast. They develop a lot of feelings for each other and then one day there's an accident and he decides to stay with her during this accident and down the track he's trying to rekindle their love so he takes her back to the place where they met but in the place where they met there was a girl called Willow who he starts to fall for. I believe I did do a Goodreads view. I don't know if it was spoiler free or not but there's parts in this book that I really really dislike um and the characters just feel really flat and the storyline itself was really really ridiculous. I currently say too much without ruining the story for those who do plan on reading it but I would give this one a one out of five stars. The next one that I read has easily become one of my favorite series and that is the Fetch Phillips series. It's the first two books. I've got The Last Smile in Sunday City and Dead Man in a Ditch by Luke Arnold. So these follow a character called Fetch Phillips. He is a morally grey character which I really liked and you get to watch him grow over these books and you find out his past, what he's currently doing and it's really really fun. He's a man for hire so you get into all these different situations but there's a lot of side characters as well that are really really great in this book and I found that when I read this book that this entire world that Luke Arnold has created is very vivid and like you know that you can walk down any of the streets in this city and it would be fully fledged out and that these characters all have this backstory and it just puts you right to the middle of this world with this character and the feelings that they feel and it's really really good. It's a fast paced book as well so it's very action packed and it's both character and plot driven so I really enjoyed it. Plus it also has magical aspects in it as well. It's basically like a really cool fantasy crime novel but set in a world similar to ours. Another one of my favorite reads from this month was Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Taylor Jenkins Reid is an automatic buy for me. Any of her books I have absolutely loved. My favorite of course is always going to be The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, then Daisy Jones in The Six and then Malibu Rising. I really resonated with the story because I have a lot of siblings myself actually the same amount in the book including myself, there's two sisters and two brothers so I could really relate to how these siblings all interacted and I really enjoyed that aspect of it. I liked having the parallels of her parents story and the kids being born to what they currently are like now in their lives and watching everything come together was both dramatic and fun and interesting and emotional. So this book follows Nina Riva who is the oldest of her siblings and it follows her story as what's going on in her and her siblings lives whilst also paralleling with how her parents met and how her parents' relationship grew and what happens with them and it would explain what's currently happening in their lives and things like that. All of these characters were just really really really well written and I really enjoyed watching them all interact as well so I think this book for itself is very very character driven and you either love them or you hate them but either way you get a lot of emotions from this book. The next book that I read was The Light of the Minutet Stars by Reena Rossner. I didn't enjoy this one very much. I think I went into this book expecting too much as the plot of this book sounds really really good but it was actually very slowly written and I found that the plot didn't really peak very much in this book. I do have aspects that I really liked like the folklore telling of the story and the magical and whimsical way it is written. The characters I didn't really relate with too much. I found that there wasn't much death to them unfortunately but there are definitely parts in this book where my emotions did get involved with the story. I think I ended up giving it two and a half to three stars out of five because I did enjoy the story I can't doubt that but it also just fell short for me. So this book follows three sisters and their father who is Rabbi Isaac. They live in this beautiful countryside and all the daughters have these magical abilities that differ from each other but are along the same lines. They live in Europe and there's a darkness spreading over Europe which is affecting how Jews live and so they all have to make a decision on what they're going to do to try to survive this. This book also has a lot of Jewish folklore in it and I really appreciated the way the author wrote about this and the research that was put into the book. At the end of it she does have references to a lot of the terms and stuff that she used to make it really accurate in the story which I really enjoyed. I learned quite a lot through that but I did still find there were aspects of the book that just didn't give it a high rating for me. Next up I read the audio book of Stormblood by Jeremy Zhao and this one I really really enjoyed. It's a really fast paste sci-fi book and I really really liked that. I read this very very quickly and I really eagerly am awaiting for the next one as well. So I have my Goodreads open it's probably going to give you guys a better description than what I could do at Justice so it is a vibrant and talented new voice in sci-fi fantasy. Alien technology, addictive upgrades, a soldier determined to protect his family and a thief who is prepared to burn the world down. It's very very good, very fast paced and the fighting scenes are very well written and I really enjoyed it. The next book is Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Melinda Lowe. I enjoyed this book in parts and other parts I didn't enjoy so much. The characters felt really flat for me which really upset me because I wanted to love them so much and parts of the story were really really slow but the book overall had a lot of emotions for me. So this book follows Lily who is 17 and she has been questioning a few things about herself but it's until she meets Catherine Miller underneath the light up sign of a lesbian bar that she realizes who she really is and her and Kathleen become friends and start to learn things about each other and take their relationship to the next level. However this book is based in 1954 and it's also set in Chinatown and so these two girls risk everything to have their chance at love. This book 3 stars out of 5. The next book that I have is a very very big book it is called Plain Bad Heroines. This is by Emily M Danforth. I read the physical copy of this book but I did switch to audio because I was really really struggling to finish this. This book had the potential of being really really really good and there were concepts just that I absolutely really loved but unfortunately I just did not enjoy the writing style of this book and it made it very very hard for me to keep picking the book up and enjoying it as much as I probably could have. This book has some parallel timelines and one of the more important ones is in 1902 you had two girls who fell in love that's Flo and Clara and they were also obsessed with the book called The Story of Mary MacLean. However after they started reading this book they had both found dead in the woods a month later and because about the school of croquants ends up closing down and over a hundred years later they decided to do a big film shoot retelling the story of Flo and Clara. However it is believed that this school is haunted and it still is to this day so you have this parallel plot line some going back about why the school is haunted and to the present time frame where these girls are now filming at this place and what is happening to them whilst they're there. Don't know if I gave it as much justice as it probably deserves. The storyline from the blurb is really really cool it sounds like it's going to be amazing but there is a lot of writing in here that was kind of pointless. It does build up to making the characters very well written though. I did enjoy the character aspect quite a bit but it did fall flat for me so I think I gave this one a two and a half three start reading. Next up is The Midnight Library by Matt Hague. I read this book really really quickly it was not what I was expecting at all but I have seen quite a few people give it quite high reviews. I think I gave this one four out of five stars and it came with a lot of emotions which I really liked. This book follows the main character who's Nora and Nora basically realises that her life is not where she wants it to be. She doesn't really have any meaningful connections or any drive to succeed in her life and that she has no prospects for her future so she decides one night to end her life. And when she does fall asleep that night she wakes up in a library and in this library every book is filled with where her life could have gone. As you can imagine she's going to read quite a few books and you get to step into what her life could have been with small changes or big changes. Basically Nora has to choose what she believes is the best life to live whether it's one of these books or one she could write for herself. I also fell very deceived by this because there is a cat on the cover and I thought there was going to be a library cat but unfortunately it's just a cat. It's in the book for like five pages it was very sad. The next one that I read is called The Circus of Wonders by Elizabeth McNeill. I took a while to realise that my cover was misprinted. I've tried to take so many beautiful photos of this book because it is really stunning with the gold foil but it is slightly misprinted from the indents on the actual book so it makes it really hard to photograph without the words looking kind of weird. I was pretty sad but I actually read the book and it was average. I read a lot of books this month that were just very average and it kind of sucked because I was like am I just picking the wrong books? But anyway this book is set in 1866. You follow a girl whose name is Nell and Nell was born with these birthmarks all over her skin that makes her look like a leopard. She lives with her father who she dislikes and her brother who she really loves and when this circus comes to town her father ends up selling her to the circus without telling anyone so she is basically kidnapped and taken away from her home and forced to perform in the circus. However once Nell is in this circus she realises that she loves the people who perform in the circus who are all different just like her. However that also leads to other problems like the ringleader not enjoying that he is no longer the star of the show but Nell is and it follows different storylines. It's got three different point of views. You had the ringleader, Nell and the ringleader's brother. I would rate this one three out of five stars. There were aspects that I enjoyed like some of the characters but the actual storyline fell very slow in parts and there were some choices in the book that I wasn't a huge fan of. However I did find that the ending of this book was really redeeming. It did not end how I expected it to end and I really enjoyed that. My second last book is Piranesi by Susanna Clark and I'm probably pronouncing that wrong. This is an arc of the book so it's not the actual complete cover. This did come out last year but it has just taken me that long to get around to it. I had no idea what to expect when I went to this book and I was really blown away by it. I don't really know what I read. I literally tried to explain this book to my boyfriend after I finished reading it and his response was that he can't comprehend the books that I read all the time because they're just so weird. Which tells a lot about the story and I also think it means that I like this book quite a lot because I like weird books. Basically this book follows Piranesi and he lives in a house and this house has infinite rooms and hallways and he has his whole system for how he explores this house and learns things about it. He also knows that there are 13 dead bodies in this house and he knows that he is a 14th person and that there is a man called the other who is the 15th person. He meets with the other twice a week and the other is trying to learn the great knowledge. Correction, a great and secret knowledge. However, as Piranesi tries to help him discover this knowledge, he finds out that some things just aren't the way it seems and he also learns there's going to be a 16th person coming to his house. He does not know if the 16th person is good or bad but regardless, the 16th person brings out some secrets that Piranesi has to come face to face with. I think that got it. I really enjoyed it. I would rate it 4 out of 5 stars. And the last book that I read is for the Dimmicks Joondalup YA Book Club of this month which is July. Hopefully we actually get to have it because Perth is currently on its last day of lockdown and fingers crossed it stays on its last day of lockdown because I would love to discuss this book. It took me so so long to actually get into this book but then I couldn't put it down last night when I had to finish it and that is The Ones Were Meant to Find by Joan Hee. I still don't really know what I would rate this book because it took so long to get into and you kind of get thrown into this world and you have to try to pick up the pieces and figure out what the hell is going on and it was very difficult to enjoy it at the start. So this book follows two sisters. You've got See who was the oldest sister. She went missing and she has washed up on this like little island by herself where she's now been living for three years trying to find a way back to her sister. She has lost a lot of her memories. She sees the world in black and white and has a lot of unanswered questions but all she knows is that she wants to build a boat and get off that island. Then you have Kay who is her youngest sister. Her timeline follows I believe it's like three months after her sister has disappeared and she's obviously trying to get answers on where her sister's gone and in that process she also learns some dark secrets about the world that they currently live in. So they live in an eco city which is a world that floats on the earth's surface. It's off the actual land because earth has been completely reduced due to how humans have treated it. There's mega quakes, there's tsunamis, there's heaps of things happening and the world is suffering. So it created these eco cities where selected humans could live knowing that they would survive such destruction. It's currently happening to planet earth. That's like a loss taken and that's just basically what's on the blurb. The actual story itself is a lot crazier and there are a lot more plot twists than that I expected. I still don't actually know if I enjoyed this book or not. It's literally like halfway or over halfway into this book before I actually started to enjoy it and I did really feel like I had to force myself to read it. I think the book itself was just very unique idea but all of it together was just kind of average but the cover is beautiful. So that's the 13 books that I've read in June. I'm currently reading The Court of Miracles by Kester Grant. I'm really enjoying this one and I don't know what I'm going to be reading after it. So that is all that I have for today. Thank you guys for watching. If you've read any of these books and enjoyed them let me know down below and if you have written any recommendations for my July TBR please let me know. I will also be putting up reviews for a lot of these onto my Goodreads. Some of them will be spoilering and some of them will be spoiler free. If you wanted to see any particular reviews of these books please let me know in the comments as well. Thank you guys for watching and have a lovely bookish day but oh no wrong way around. So Betty, I'm not fucking doing it as well am I? The people were assholes but there was a lot of writing to get to this point. I don't fucking know what I'm saying. Come here.