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Ashley IN MEDIAS RES

• Forbidden Honor (Dragon Royals Book 1) by May Dawson
• Pillars of Wealth: How to Make, Save, and Invest Your Money to Achieve Financial Freedom by David Greene
• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk*
• Think and Grow Rich for Women: Using Your Power to Create Success and Significance by Sharon L. Lechter * 

*Ashley’s still waiting for these two titles to come back off hold at the library…struggle bus.

Nikki IN MEDIAS RES

• Love Every Day by Alexandra H. Solomon
• The Danish Way of Parenting by Jessica Joelle Alexander and Iben Dissing Sandahl narrated by Kim Mai Guest 

Ashley FIN

• The House on Biscayne Bay by Chanel Cleeton
• Body Language (The Bootknockers Ranch Book 2) by Em Petrova
• Pushin’ Buttons (The Bootknockers Ranch Book 1) by Em Petrova
• Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am by Julia Cooke
• King of Wrath (Kings of Sin #1) by Ana Huang
• Crossland: A Billionaire’s Game Novel by Samantha Whiskey
• Daughter of Snow and Secrets (Defying the Crown #3) by Kerry Chaput

Nikki FIN

• Under the Tulip Tree by Michelle Shocklee
• Walking in the Wilderness: Seeking God During Lent by Beth A. Richardson
• Coronation Year by Jennifer Robson
• Victory Garden Guide 21st Century Edition: Original 1940’s Edition Updated and Expanded for the 21st Century Victory Gardener by David Powers 
• Her Ruthless Duke (Rogue’s Guild #1) by Scarlett Scott
• The Self-Care Prescription by Robyn L. Gobin, PhD
• Hideaway Heart (Cherry Tree Harbor #2) by Melanie Harlow
• Plaid to the Bone (Bad in Plaid #1) by Caroline Lee
• The House on Biscayne Bay by Chanel Cleeton
• He’s Not My Type (The Vancouver Agitators #4) by Meghan Quinn
• Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am by Julia Cooke
• The Duke’s Wicked Widow (Surprise! Dukes #5) by Caroline Lee
• The Duke’s Daring Bride (Surprise! Dukes #4) by Caroline Lee
• Daughter of Snow and Secrets (Defying the Crown #3) by Kerry Chaput
• The Duke’s Counterfeit Wife (Surprise! Dukes #3) by Caroline Lee

Darling readers, I did a thing this month, and I’m not happy about it.  I read a book four before I’d read books one through three.  Does this need to be resolved ASAP?  Sort of.  I’m definitely interested in the rest of the series, but that’s not even the issue.  The issue is there seems to be a big hairy thing from somewhere in the first three books that came to a head in book four in a real way.  It didn’t seem to fit from my context of having only read the fourth book.  It’s a struggle when the algorithm presents a fun looking title and then Amazon neglects to share the order of the series, but I shall recover and persist, and maybe Ashley will join me in reading about The Vancouver Agitators if we start with Don’t Kiss and Tell.  

In case this is a surprise to you, we love chatting books.  Really, that’s how Heart.Wants.Books was born – the two of us buddy reading books and chatting about them during and after.  So when a bookish friend with overlapping taste said she’d read and loved Under the Tulip Tree by Michelle Shocklee, I naturally checked OverDrive (not Libby, ew) to see if it was available, and then promptly checked it out (seeing as how I did end my Kindle Unlimited subscription for a bit).  Set in Nashville, this novel follows Rena, an almost debutante whose future was dramatically changed when the stock market crashed on her 16th birthday.  The bulk of the novel takes place seven years later, when Rena takes a job with the Federal Writers’ Project interviewing people who were formerly enslaved.  While the Federal Writers’ Project and Slave Narratives are very real, the story in the book is a work of fiction.  Like Rena, I learned much that wasn’t taught to me in school as she interviewed Frankie, a 101 year-old woman who was born into slavery, but my education was more about the Battle of Nashville and the geography of the city in the 1860s and 1930s than slavery (as I had an impressive US history teacher in high school and am eternally grateful for him).  While I really enjoyed learning about Nashville in these time periods and the people who inhabited it, as well as the interviews that took place to create the Slave Narratives, I did find the book a bit preachy and I did not enjoy the way Rena relied on Frankie to help process her emotions about slavery and the ways her family interacted with it.  That is definitely my 21st century reflection looking back nearly 100 years after the events portrayed in the novel, and I don’t think the character was meant to mind, but I do wonder how Frankie would have felt, had she been written by a Black author.  The characters were real, dimensional, and the writing was very engaging, so I’m interested in Shocklee’s other works, particularly those focused on historical settings that are familiar to me.  If you’d recommend any fictional works surrounding the Slave Narratives written by Black authors, let me know in the comments!

Overall, I’m giving my March reading life five stars.  I think I broke out of the regency rut I fell into, and I’ve read some titles that aren’t romance or for the blog, so I think I’m ready to tackle the next month, at least I hope because it’s a busy one at home.  We’ll see next month if I stay ahead of my reading goal or fall back in line with it because of all the events coming my way!

What rating would you give your reading life recently?

~Nikki 

I read some books! I read some books that weren’t for the blog! I read some quick and delightful spicy romance books to get some quick wins for my book total and to cleanse my palette of all the other books I have been reading. Ok, ok, I really just needed the smuts. Needed in a desperate way. #IYKYK

I don’t have much else to add about my reading life this month. I read mostly on time for the blog (kinda) and got some fun and some other more serious romance novels onto my read list for March. 

What’s kinda been getting me in a tizzy has been that my little sister’s keeping pace with me this year! She’s read 16 books and I’ve read 17 so far. I’m so ding dang proud of her new reading habit. She reads dead tree titles from the library with no other goal than to enjoy the books she reads. That’s a very admirable goal and she’s rocking it. Even our mother said something to me about how I was behind my sister’s book count. (No longer after a couple of quick and dirty Boot Knocker romances!) I’m sad for me for being 8 books behind schedule to meet my 100 books for the year goal, according to Goodreads. I’m happy that my sister is crushing hers.

~Ashley

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