***UPDATE: I realized last night that A Time To Kill is over 500 pages! So I checked off yet another box on the list. I also made some other edits to this post in bold.***

This month was pretty epic in terms of how many books I finished. It does sort of feel like cheating, though, because 3 of them were those short YA novels that should not have been split into multiple books. But I completed 5 books this month, and checked off 7 more boxes.

First, I finished off the first set of 3 in the Kissed by An Angel series, The Power of Love and Soulmates. I was surprised by how little of the plot I remembered. I basically only remembered the poor kitty’s demise, and everything else I thought I had remembered was not in the book. I particularly thought that Eric was the character that plummeted to his death from the train bridge, not Gregory. I then started the next three books, with Evercrossed. So far, I’m in for the ride, but it is definitely jarring for the characters to have time-traveled to the age of Google.

Between Soulmates and Evercrossed, I finished Divergent. This is a very unpopular opinion, but I liked this book more than I liked The Hunger Games. Maybe it’s because it wasn’t as horrific, or maybe because I find Tris slightly more relatable. It is also a refreshing change that there wasn’t a love triangle. Why does YA dystopian fiction always have a love triangle? (I do need a love triangle for my challenge though…) I have now seen the movie for Insurgent, and I’m anxiously awaiting my turn for the ebook from the library.

The other book I completed this month was A Time To Kill. I really expected to enjoy this novel, at least as an easy light read (as light as a story about rape and murder can be, I guess). I hated it! The writing was clunky, the characters were one-dimensional and uninteresting, and it was so racist and sexist I could hardly get through it. It definitely is a “first novel” because it is somewhat “unpolished”, but I’m not sure some light editing could fix that. I have the movie now and I plan to get to it fairly soon and see what they did with the story.

I started Where We Belong by Emily Giffin as my “latest book by author I like” (as I mentioned in my February wrap up post). So far (2 chapters in), I really enjoy it, but as it is a dead tree book, I haven’t gotten much chance to read it. And since I picked up the 5th book in the Kissed By An Angel series from the library, Giffin will have to be on hold while I read that one. Physical books are just so difficult for me to get to with little ones!

I started Emma by Jane Austen and got a few chapters into that one before Sycamore Row by John Grisham came up on my ebook holds from the library. So I’ve switched over to that one as well, seeing if Grisham’s writing has improved any in the past 25 years. (Spoiler alert – sort of.)

I recently discovered that Britney Spears wrote a novel (wut?), and I’m seriously considering that as my negatively reviewed book. But the thing is, the reviews aren’t all bad. It’s hard to separate the fangirl reviews from the serious ones though. I don’t know if there are any books that are considered awful by everyone. Maybe I can get some advice here – should the critical/literary reviews be bad, or should the Goodreads and Amazon star ratings be bad?

I’ve made it through three months and I’ve checked off 21 out of 50 boxes on my list and completed 10 books total. I’m getting there!