Making it a cool summer with some good books

With the July Fourth holiday over with, the rest of the summer is a relatively quiet time where the main focus is to beat the ever increasing heat.

 That didn't stop me from making a visit to the library-books were due back,after all!-and I managed to pick up a few promising titles that should hold me over for awhile.

One book that I've heard quite a bit about is The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin, where a quartet of siblings are given the precise date of their deaths by a fortune teller on Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1969.

 This dubious yet rather exact information leads the Gold children to take all sorts of chances in life, since each of them has their own due date set by fate already. Brother and sister Simon and Klara team up to take off to San Francisco in the latter portion of the 1970s, where one of them decides to look into magic, particularly talking with the dead.

Meanwhile, decades later, their elder brother Daniel uses his connections as a military doctor to track down the fortune teller, who is on the FBI wanted list for fraud. Varya, the oldest of all her siblings, is a researcher seeking the key to increasing the human life span. While she has more of an emotional bond with the simian subjects of her experiments than actual human beings, an interview with a journalist sets off a change that could alter the whole course of her life.

This novel was on a good number of Best of the Year lists in 2018 and does offer a truly intriguing premise; how different would your life be if you knew just how long you had to live it? It's certainly worth a try and perhaps I'll get a few more reading suggestions out of this promising read as well:

 A pair of mysteries also found their way onto my library checkout; Cleo Coyle's A Shot in the Dark and The Dead Ringer by M.C. Beaton.  The latter is the latest Agatha Raisin entry, where our leading lady is asked to attend the arrival of a rather handsome bishop in a neighboring town.

This bishop attracts a lot of female attention, some of which leads to either a strange disappearance(of heiress Amber, who was said to be interested in marriage) or an untimely death such as one of the lady bell ringers at the church he was visiting.

Agatha is interested in both of these cases while trying to balance her love life and help out a few folks in need of her guidance, in her opinion. Can she manage it all out before things get more complicated than usual?

While I have read several of Coyle's Coffee House books before, this is the first Agatha Raisin novel that I'm reading(and yes, I do have the first two books in the series on hand). Well, at this point I have four library books at home and if you have that many taken out, you should start reading one of them at least!

Anyway, even though this title is further on in the series, I did finish watching Season One of the British TV series(which is great fun) and this ought to tide me over until Season Two is available:

Of course, the library wasn't the only place for me to get new books for the summer. Thanks to Library Thing, I won a copy of The Romanov Empress by C.W. Gortner, which chronicles the beginning of the end of the Russian monarchy.

Princess Maria Feodorovna of Denmark was destined to marry one son of the czar yet an unexpected turn for the worse leads her to wed his brother Sasha. As she joins the family, conditions under the rule of her father in law Alexander II lead the country into a realm of despair and uncertainty.

Maria does her best to keep her loved ones safe and secure, a mission that grows more difficult when Sasha's troubled reign is handed off to their son Nicholas, whose wife Alexandra is being strongly influenced by devious new advisor, Rasputin. Can she guide her family into calmer waters before it's too late?

I do like historical fiction but haven't read much about Russia in this genre, so this should be a good introduction to that. At the very least, I might watch the acclaimed Nicholas and Alexandra movie from the seventies, which sounds like a grand companion piece to this story:

However, I was unable to resist a book sale or two so, along with a Beatriz Williams novel that I've been meaning to get to, Dear Mrs. Bird by AJ Pearce is making it's way to me as we speak.

Set in WWII London, Emmeline, aka Emmy, Lake is hoping to do her bit for the war effort by becoming a Lady War Correspondent. However, her new job at Women's Friend magazine has Emmy being the assistant to Henrietta Bird, a popular advice columnist who demands that "unsuitable" letters from readers be tossed away.

Moved by the plight of those desperate letter writers, Emmy secretly answers them, using the Mrs. Bird byline. While she is helping to boost the moral of those waiting women at the home front, Emmy does run the risk of being found out and sent off in disgrace, not to mention her advice giving urges could lead to some personal disasters as well.

This charming novel should make for a great summer read, plus I do like the notion of someone with a plucky can-do spirit trying to spread joy in troubled times. That's something we all could use more of these days, that's for sure!:

Hopefully, these new finds will satisfy my bookish needs as the temperatures climb higher and higher. Best case scenario, my book buying budget will not be exceeded by all of the great deals being showcased out there.

Of course, there are some books that don't need a sale to be purchase worthy but it does make resisting temptation all the harder when that special book you've been waiting for is at such a good price! Perhaps I'm not alone in wanting my resolve in such matters to be as solid as a block of ice instead of being as prone to melting as ice cream, especially in summer: