Looking For Book Recommendations? These Summer Reads Will Warm Your Days

For most people, summer is the ultimate lazy season where you lie lazy with a book and let the day spiral away while you get lost in fiction. For most readers, summer reads are preferably light and fun or filled with mystery. Nothing too serious, but still challenging enough to keep you interested. If you are looking for books to keep you occupied this summer, then this list will offer some insight.

·       War Storm by Victoria Aveyard

Mare Barrow learns that victory comes at a price when she is betrayed by Carl, the last person she would have expected to do so. Bitten once, she is determined to protect herself by over throwing the kingdom of Norta once and for all. But she learns that battles aren’t won alone and so she has to collaborate with the enemy to defeat an even bigger enemy. Winter is coming. Who will survive?

·       Jane Seymour, The Haunted Queen - Alison Weir

Historian Alison Weir is at it again, this time bringing King Henry VIII’s cherished bride and mother to his heir, Jane Seymour to life. Since childhood, Jane has wanted to be a nun and she devotes her life to being kind, but her family has other plans. When she is sent to the King’s court and specifically as lady in waiting to Queen Katherine, she is drawn to the Queen’s kindness and fair treatment of all. It therefore comes as a shock that the king is hot for Anne Boleyn, also serving as lady-in-waiting to the Queen.

As the king disavows Queen Katherine and installs Anne as the new queen, he turns his eyes to Jane. Will she be the one to give him the heir he so desires or will she be cast aside like the women before her?

·       The Ensemble by Aja Gabel

Jana, Brit, Daniel, and Henry would not have been friends were it not for the art that they each love. Their friendship is one driven by their need for each other and love that glues them to each other and classical music. Henry, on the viola, has always had it easy in life while Brit, second violinist, is an orphan.  Daniel the cellist is always angry and he sleeps around while Jana, first violin, is the glue that binds the group. As the groups starts out, it is rocked with failure, then wild success, before marriage, breakups and pain almost wrecks them. Through it all, they will always be tied to each other.

·       Love and Ruin by Paula McLain

And now for a little romance. The year is 1937 and Martha Gellhorn, 28, is planning to head to Madrid to expose the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War. While there, she finds herself drawn to ordinary people caught up in a war that should never have been and this she sees as the best chance to dominate a field left to men. But love threatens to get in her way when she meets Hemingway. Will she stay on course?

So, do more than polish your aluminum siding this summer. Read a book or five and have lots to talk about with fellow readers.