My Monday tradition, including a look back and a look ahead — what I read last week, what new books came my way, and what books are keeping me busy right now. Plus a smattering of other stuff too.
Life.
Happy August! I love August because it’s my son’s birth month… but I also don’t love it, because I can feel summer slipping away…
My daughter and her husband visited this past week, which was great, but over too soon! She and I managed to find time to go browse and have tea and cake at the new romance bookstore in town. I bought a few books for us both, plus stickers and other goodies — must support our local indie bookstores! So much fun.
The store itself is super cute — the shelves are organized by romance trope, which is pretty adorable (although I could see it be confusing if you walk in wanting the newest book by a favorite author, but don’t know whether to look under grumpy-sunshine or forced proximity!). A few pics from our bookish outing:
Bookish bits & bobs.
What did I read during the last week?
Romantic Hero by Kirsty Greenwood: Totally delightful rom-com about a fictional character showing up in his author’s real world. My review is here.
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton: I last read this book literally decades ago, and was surprised to see how much I remembered! I’m so glad I took the time for a reread. Such a powerful book.
Destination Funeral by Paige Harbison: Terrific contemporary fiction about chosen family and time loops! My review is here.
Bromantasy by Máire Roche: Such silly fun! I’ll share a review later this week.
Pop culture & TV:
I went to the movie theater to see the filmed version of Hadestown. It was glorious! I saw the show on Broadway several years ago, and loved getting to see it again this way. While it was originally only supposed to run for five nights, I know it got extended, and I highly recommend checking it out if you have the chance!
My daughter and I also watched The Sheep Detectives! It was just as adorable as expected… and this parody artwork (originally from Fandango, I believe) made me smile:
Fresh Catch:
Here’s what I came home with from our afternoon at the bookstore:
Plus, my daughter and my son-in-law each arrived for their visit bringing me a book! Such nice gifts:
From my daughter, an illustrated edition of Little Women, and from my son-in-law, an Easton Press edition of Pride and Prejudice. Both are gorgeous!
What will I be reading during the coming week?
Currently in my hands:
The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian: I just started last night… and I know I’m always in for a complicated, absorbing read when I start this author’s books.
Now playing via audiobook:
The Romance Revival by Christina Lauren: I really didn’t have much listening time this past week, but I finally made progress over the weekend, and hope to finish in the next few days.
Ongoing reads:
Two books I’m taking my time with:
The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe: My book group’s classic read. We’re reading and discussing two chapters per week. Progress: 63%. Coming up this week: Volume 3, chapters 8 and 9.
Everything On It by Shel Silverstein: I finally took this volume off my shelf and decided to read a few pages a day… because why not?
Spell the Month in Books is a monthly meme hosted by Jana at Reviews from the Stacks. To participate, find a book title that starts with each letter in the month’s name, make a list, share your link, and that’s it! You can share anytime by the end of the month. Some months have additional themes, but feel free to participate however you’d like!
There isn’t a theme set for August (or at least not as far as I’ve seen), so I’m making up my own! August is my son’s birth month… and while he’s a full-grown young adult now, I have so many happy memories of reading books together throughout his childhood. So, in honor of my birthday boy, my August theme is… books I read with my kiddo!
Note: It was hard to come up with two U titles that we’ve actually read! So, I fudged a bit with the 2nd U… but I feel like my pick still works!
Here are my AUGUST books:
A:
Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst
U:
The Unseen Guest (The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place, #1) by Maryrose Wood
G:
Go, Dog. Go! by P. D. Eastman
U:
Great Day for UP by Dr. Seuss
UP! UP! UP! Great day for UP!
Wake every person, pig and pup, till EVERYONE on earth is up!
S:
The Secret of Platform 13 by Eva Ibbotson
T:
Thirteenth Child (Frontier Magic, #1) by Patricia C. Wrede
Happy August! Enjoy the sunshine… and plenty of good books!
If you spelled the month in books, please leave me a link to your post — I’d love to see it!
Title: Destination Funeral Author: Paige Harbison Publisher: St. Martin’s Press Publication date: July 21, 2026 Length: 320 pages Genre: Contemporary fiction Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley Rating:
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
A fresh take on Groundhog Day with a dash of Practical Magic meets the magical escapism of One Italian Summer in this heartfelt and hilarious novel following a friend group so damaged that only a funeral could bring them back together.
When Babe—the complicated, magnetic matriarch of their teenage summers—dies, four estranged friends return to sleepy Mercy Island, a storm-swept stretch of coastal Georgia, summoned by the reading of her will.
Didion arrives at the timeworn pink house to find the friends she never thought she’d see again—along with the tensions, attractions, and unfinished business that once bound them together and broke them apart.
What should be a brief weekend of small talk quickly unravels when they wake up and discover…it’s Saturday. Again. And again. And again.
Trapped in a time loop with no end and no instructions, they’re forced to confront the betrayals, breakups, and buried truths that shattered them all those years ago. Because maybe, just maybe, an endless weekend is exactly what they all need to save their own lives.
Sometimes a book about chosen family hits just right… and Destination Funeral does just that. In this story about friends, estrangement, resentment, and reconciliation, a time loop forces four former friends to face the issues that drove them apart while gathered for a funeral at the place where they spent their teen-aged summers.
When Babe dies, she leaves instructions for her funeral to be held at her sprawling beachside house on Mercy Island, Georgia. Her daughters Didion and Sammie arrive, having not seen or spoken to one another in years. Didion, the older sister, resents having to be the responsible one, watching helplessly as free-spirit Sammie makes one bad choice after another. Their long-time best friend Matt arrives with his four-year-old daughter, and rounding out the foursome of adults is Austin, Didion’s teen love and source of her greatest heartbreaks.
As they arrive that Friday, they learn that Babe has left the house to all four of them, on the condition that they spend the weekend there, without phones or laptops, until the funeral on Sunday. Reluctantly, they agree, spend a tension-filled Saturday coping with being in one another’s presence again after so long, and grit their teeth until they can get over with it and return to their regular lives. But when they wake up the next morning, they soon realize that it’s Saturday… again. And so their Groundhog Day time loop begins, with a seemingly endless stream of Saturdays to relive.
But why? And how? Has Babe somehow made this happen? And if so, what will it take to break out of the loop?
As the four are forced to spend time together, old wounds and secrets resurface… and as the day repeats and repeats, the ice between them begins to thaw. Didion is our point-of-view character, and she’s a fascinating person to watch the world with. Her complicated feelings toward Babe and Sammie stem back to her teens, and her role as the responsible person, the one who has to make sure everyone else is okay, has carried forward through her adult year as a driven, successful chef — who can never relax and think about what she herself needs. Even more complicated is her reunion with Austin, someone whom she once loved whole-heartedly and never got over — but also never truly understood. Now, in the time loop, Didion finally has days on end where she can do nothing but be present, forcing her to reflect, understand where she herself added to the messier moments, and the ways in which she let other people down too.
The storytelling focuses on the now — and the endless Saturdays — with “then” chapters mixed in to show the early years on the island, and how the sisters and their friends experienced life with Babe, including moments of utter bliss (Halloween in July!) as well as the loneliness of having a fun mother who couldn’t or wouldn’t actually take care of them.
The relationships are all beautifully drawn. It takes the full length of the book to learn key facts about Babe and understand some of her actions. Likewise, Didion’s realizations and reconnections with the others come gradually — we’re by her side as she slowly starts to unravel her more harmful thought patterns and understand why and how she’s allowed herself to shut out the people who once formed the center of her life. I loved seeing the way the time loop serves as a catalyst for the emotional healing that these four people so desperately need.
It’s not all dramatic and serious — Destination Funeral has lovely moments of humor and fun, and it’s a wonderful homage to the glory of a summer spent in the sunshine, playing on a beach, eating good food, and enjoying a slower way of life.
The author’s previous book, The Other Side of Now, was one of my surprise favorites from 2025, and I’m delighted that her newest book hits so many high marks for me as well. Destination Funeral is a beautifully told story about the importance of holding onto the special people in our lives — whether family or friends — even when it’s hard or outside stress gets in the way. It’s also a wonderful immersive experience for summer, and definitely deserves a place in any bookish beach bag!
Purchase links: Amazon – Bookshop.org – Libro.fm Disclaimer: When you make a purchase through one of these affiliate links, I may earn a small commission, at no additional cost to you.
First Lines Friday is a weekly feature for book lovers created by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines? Here’s how to join in:
Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page.
Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first.
Finally… reveal the book!
I’m going with a short opening line that says a lot with just a few words. This is from a book that’s been on my shelf (unread) for far too long:
The real story isn’t half as pretty as the one you’ve heard.
So what’s the book?
Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik Published 2018 480 pages
Synopsis:
With the Nebula Award–winning Uprooted, Naomi Novik opened a brilliant new chapter in an already acclaimed career, delving into the magic of fairy tales to craft a love story that was both timeless and utterly of the now. Spinning Silver draws readers deeper into this glittering realm of fantasy, where the boundary between wonder and terror is thinner than a breath, and safety can be stolen as quickly as a kiss.
Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of moneylenders, but her father’s inability to collect his debts has left his family on the edge of poverty—until Miryem takes matters into her own hands. Hardening her heart, the young woman sets out to claim what is owed and soon gains a reputation for being able to turn silver into gold. When an ill-advised boast draws the attention of the king of the Staryk—grim fey creatures who seem more ice than flesh—Miryem’s fate, and that of two kingdoms, will be forever altered. She will face an impossible challenge and, along with two unlikely allies, uncover a secret that threatens to consume the lands of humans and Staryk alike.
I keep promising myself that this will be the year when I finally read this book! Have you read it? If not, does this sound like something you think you’d enjoy?
Title: Romantic Hero Author: Kirsty Greenwood Narrator: Amy James-Kelly & Jared Zeus Publisher: Berkley Publication date: June 16, 2026 Print length: 368 pages Audio length: 8 hours 24 minutes Genre: Contemporary romance Source: Review copy via NetGalley; audiobook via Audible Rating:
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
A heartbroken romance novelist is forced to address her writer’s block when the villainous cowboy character from her books showsup in the real world, desperately in need of his own Happily Ever After. . . from the bestselling author of GMA book club pick The Love of My Afterlife.
Gertie Bickerstaff writes happily-ever-afters for a living. . . . Or she did, until her own love life fell apart. Now her ex is thriving, her deadline is looming, and she can’t write a single word.
The last thing Gertie needs is more drama—like waking up to find a confused and rugged cowboy on her sofa. And not just any cowboy, but River Oakley, the villain from her unfinished novel. Somehow very real . . . and very shirtless.
River wants to go home. Gertie wants her life back. So they strike a deal: he’ll use his cunning ways to help her win back her ex, she’ll finish the novel, and, surely, he’ll return to whatever world he rode in from.
But as River Oakley proves to be so much more than just the bad guy, Gertie has to choose: the ending she thought she wanted . . . or the plot twist she never saw coming.
Another winning rom-com from the very talented Kirsty Greenwood! After loving The Love of My Afterlife (a GMA Book Club pick from 2024), I was more than ready to dive into her 2026 release, Romantic Hero.
The setup is delicious: Gertie is the bestselling author of the Bedlam Creek romance series, set in a small town in Texas (where London-based Gertie has never actually been). Gertie’s always felt so connected to her characters that it felt as if they were speaking to her… but as the deadline looms for the final book in the series (cue the long-awaited proposal scene!), they’ve gone silent. She suffers from horrendous writer’s block and can’t write a word.
Gertie’s long-term boyfriend, supposedly the love of her life, dumped her four weeks earlier (claiming that he’s been feeling “emotionally apathetic” and in need of a “break”, not a break-up), and she’s been an utter ball of misery ever since. When Gertie’s eccentric neighbor decides that what Gertie needs is help from the universe, she’s desperate enough to go along with a rooftop manifestation ceremony. To no avail, alas…
… or did it work after all? Because the next day, Gertie wakes to find a supremely gorgeous and very shirtless cowboy on her couch, who is utterly befuddled as to how he got there. The last thing he remembers is falling asleep under a tree out in the meadow of his ranch — and oh, his name is River Oakley. As in, the villain of Gertie’s series, the antagonist constantly thwarting her heroine’s quest to reclaim her family ranch and find true love. But how could he possibly be THAT River Oakley?
Still, there’s no denying that he exactly fits the description of the man Gertie has written about. Awkward! After much back and forth, they accept the unbelievable yet seemingly undeniable fact that he is the man from her books, and that he very much needs to get back to his own world. The two come up with a hypothesis: Gertie somehow summoned River during her manifestation ceremony, and he’s here to help her get her ex back, since reuniting with Henry was her secret plea to the universe.
And yet… as Gertie and River spend time together, they click in ways neither expected. Gertie is forced to admit that while the River in her books is a scoundrel, the flesh-and-blood (and very hot) version of him has hidden depths and sensitivity… and also comes to realize that Henry is not the ideal man she’d thought he was.
Romantic Hero is such a fun, entertaining read (and listen)! Gertie and River are both great characters, and their chemistry sparkles. The story is funny, with plenty of banter that’s both silly and sexy — and yet, there are emotional moments that hit as well, as Gertie is forced to come to terms with her sister’s death years earlier and to realize that she threw herself into the relationship with Henry rather than actually deal with her terrible grief.
The story moves in unexpected directions, as we learn just why and how River showed up and what this means for Gertie’s writing career. While it seems hopeless that Gertie and River — people from two totally separate worlds — could ever have a future together, the author manages to find a conclusion that both works from a story perspective and feels utterly satisfying.
Audiobook narrators Amy James-Kelly and Jared Zeus bring the characters to glorious life. His Texas drawl as River is delightful, and Amy James-Kelly handles the overall narration as well as Gertie’s voice with a lovely sense of animation.
Overall, the story itself as well as the audiobook listening experience are both highly recommended. What a great bit of happy summer reading!
Purchase links: Amazon – Bookshop.org – Libro.fm Disclaimer: When you make a purchase through one of these affiliate links, I may earn a small commission, at no additional cost to you.
Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, featuring a different top 10 theme each week. This week’s topic is Books I HAD to Have Immediately but Still Haven’t Read.
As the host explains, this is a throwback topic from 2022. My post from back then is here, in case you’re interested. And I’m a bit embarrassed to say that of the ten I highlighted, I’ve still only read three!
And yet, I keep buying books! (Don’t we all?)
Here’s a new batch of books I couldn’t wait to get my hands on… and still have not touched:
Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
Hemlock Island by Kelley Armstrong
Daughters of the Sun and Moon by Lisa See
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews
The Once and Future Queen by Paula Lafferty
Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor
Jane Austen’s Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney
The Fair Folk by Su Bristow
The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi
Have you read any of these? Any recommendations about which should be my top priorities?
Do you have any books that you couldn’t wait to buy… but still haven’t read? Please share your TTT links!
My Monday tradition, including a look back and a look ahead — what I read last week, what new books came my way, and what books are keeping me busy right now. Plus a smattering of other stuff too.
Life.
Back to the daily grind! After traveling quite a bit in early July, this week was a return to work and normal routines. All in all, busy but not bad, and we had some lovely weather over the weekend. Highlights of the week included dinner with friends we hadn’t seen in a while, another dinner out for just me and my husband, and my daughter’s arrival yesterday for a week here, which I’m very happy about!
Bookish bits & bobs.
The biggest recent book news (in my opinion!) is the cover and synopsis reveal for Taylor Jenkins Reid’s next book, The Last Days of Vic & Coco, to be released March 2027:
A snippet from the synopsis:
Sharp, seductive, and electric, The Last Days of Vic & Coco is set in the sun-and-shadows world of long desert highways, seedy motels, and dive bars. It’s the story of two women living by their wits, making their own rules, and traveling light. Even though they want different things from life, they swear they will stick together. But can you ever really trust the promises of a hustler?
Who else is excited?
What did I read during the last week?
We Solve Murders by Richard Osman: What a fun kick-off to a new series! My review is here.
Heartstopper, volume 6by Alice Oseman: A wonderful end to a terrific graphic novel series — even though I’m sad that it’s over. See my link (under pop culture) for thoughts on the end of the Heartstopper era.
Pronoun Troubleby John McWhorter: An entertaining little linguistics book — perfect for word nerds. My quick take is here.
Not With a Bang by Temi Oh: An end-of-the-world novel that’s more about the family at its center than it is about the catastrophic events. Interesting yet uneven; my review is here.
Romantic Hero by Kirsty Greenwood: I finished the audiobook yesterday! Such fun. Watch for my review later in the week.
Pop culture & TV:
The wonderful Netflix adaptation of the Heartstopper series ended this month with both a wrap-up movie and a behind-the-scenes short documentary. Check out my Heartstopper thoughts, here.
I didn’t have a whole lot of time to get involved in any other viewing, but I managed to squeeze in the first episode of AppleTV’s Star City, a spin-off of For All Mankind (series review) focusing on the early days of the space race from the Soviet perspective. As you might imagine, it’s fairly bleak, but I’m interested enough to want to keep going.
Fresh Catch:
No new books this week.
What will I be reading during the coming week?
Currently in my hands:
Destination Funeral by Paige Harbison: I really enjoyed this author’s previous book (The Other Side of Now), and I’m excited to be starting her new release.
Now playing via audiobook:
The Romance Revival by Christina Lauren: This feels like a great mid-summer audiobook choice! I’m always happy to have a new Christina Lauren book to listen to.
Ongoing reads:
Just one at the moment:
The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe: My book group’s classic read. We’re reading and discussing two chapters per week. Progress: 58%. Coming up this week: Volume 3, chapters 6 and 7.
Title: Not With a Bang Author: Temi Oh Publisher: Saga Press Publication date: July 14, 2026 Length: 352 pages Genre: Science fiction Source: Review copy courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley Rating:
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
Station Eleven meets Leave the World Behind in this family drama at the end of the world about a crumbling household’s attempts to find their way back to each other amidst a cataclysmic event.
“Our father had imagined the end of the world so often that, for a while, he believed that he summoned it.”
The Minton family is in crisis. After losing his job, Marcus begins stockpiling cans, running evacuation drills and digging a doomsday bunker in the back garden. At the same time, his daughters are unravelling in their own ways – Chantale is being haunted by dreams of disaster, and Briar’s obsession with a missing classmate draws her deeper into the seductive world of a UFO cult. Meanwhile, no one is aware of the diagnosis their mother has been trying to keep hidden.
When, on the morning of the eldest daughter’s wedding, an extinction-level event tears the world apart, the Mintons must fight their way through a devastated city—back to safety, survival, and each other.
What is expected to be a once-in-a-lifetime, awe-inducing astronomical event — a planet, or possibly moon or asteroid, expected to pass by Earth so closely as to be visible — turns cataclysmic in Not With a Bang. And yet, despite the catastrophe that turns life on Earth into “before” and “after”, the story here is very much about a family — what brings them together and what tears them apart.
Marcus and Kim Minton have four daughters. Their oldest, Aaliyah, is about to be married at age 22. Briar, 17, and Tanice, 15, are both in high school, and their little sister Chantal is only 7. After losing his job as a police officer years earlier, Marcus has become an obsessed prepper, building a bunker in the backyard, stocking it with food and supplies to sustain his family for at least a year, and drilling the girls on emergency evacuations through middle-of-the-night alarms.
And yet, when the real thing comes along, none of the planning seems to matter. On the day of Aaliyah’s wedding, the family is scattered across London in various stages of getting ready. In the aftermath of destruction and chaos, alone and in groups, they must find their way back home, avoiding threats from their changed surroundings as well as from other people.
The book has an interesting storytelling approach. Chapters focus on relaying events through different family members’ experiences, and yet, Briar’s voice narrates throughout. As she explains in the opening chapter:
Almost everything I didn’t live through, I would learn later from witness reports and testimonies. I have examined everything in its entirety, more than once. Some things I can only imagine. Like my father’s expression the morning it happened.
We never forget that it’s Briar telling us the story, even as we move through third-person accounts focused on other people — so chapters may open with lines such as:
Tanice could tell it was about to happen before I did. She’d seen it more times than she cared to count.
And while Briar will share her insights during this chapter and others, the focus is on the person whose chapter it is; in this case, what Tanice did and felt and observed during these moments. We’re led to understand that all of this represents the family members’ memories, as shared with Briar at some future point.
The actual event (or the Event, as many refer to it) is terrifying and leaves utter ruin in its wake. Some pieces of society collapse immediately, while a few emergency services and official organizations seem to have been prepared in advance. The explanations related to what exactly has happened and what it represents come slowly over the course of the book; I didn’t feel that it all made sense, but I was willing to accept it for the sake of the overall story.
Not With a Bang is oddly compelling. From chapter to chapter and from character to character, I was always eager to see what might be next. A sense of danger looms over every scene. From Briar’s narration, we can rest assured that the family will survive somehow, even in the moments when this seems most questionable. After all, how could she be telling us what they all went through if she hadn’t had the opportunity in the “after” to find out?
This guarantee of the family’s safety does diminish the stakes to an extent, although that’s not to say that they come through the Event unscathed. Clearly, life will never be the same. Seeing how they all reach one another, and what they have to do to survive and overcome deadly obstacles, is what propels the reading experience forward and keeps the reader hooked until the end.
With a potential extinction-level event as the catalyst, you might expect more of a science fiction focus — but at its heart, Not With a Bang is the story of a family. Their struggles before, during, and after the Event form the narrative arc, but their interwoven dynamics — the hurts, resentments, and anger built up over all the preceding years — provide the central elements of the story. The parents’ fracturing marriage, the girls’ sense of abandonment as related to their mother’s earlier career choices, the selfish, misguided, or desperate actions of the older daughters — these are the pivot points as the narrative unfolds. The Event is the catalyst for the family members to confront their complicated relationships, come to certain realizations, and redefine themselves as they move forward.
Briar’s storyline is often frustrating, as she becomes entangled with an alien-worshipping cult who believe that the Event is a harbinger of the aliens’ arrival and turn to near-death experiences to try to make contact. While her involvement with the group starts as a way to discover the truth about a classmate’s disappearance, it becomes more complicated as she finds a sense of acceptance and belonging, and begins to question whether their beliefs could be real. She makes some truly terrible decisions, allowing the cult to pull her away from the relative safety of her family and their bunker, and puts herself in mortal danger in a way that doesn’t feel necessary.
Overall, I found Not With a Bang interesting and absorbing, but perhaps not entirely successful. Using a cataclysmic event to tell the story of a family is an inventive approach, and yet, I wished for just a bit more focus on the events themselves — digressions into the oldest daughter’s teen tennis career, for example, take up more space that seemed needed and pull focus from the family’s struggles to survive.
I’m glad to have read Not With a Bang, despite the elements that dragged the story down for me. The narrative style and voice is fresh and certainly different from other apocalyptic books that I’ve read. The story may not satisfy fans of hard science fiction, but readers looking for a character-focused story with a world-changing disaster as a catalyst will find plenty to appreciate and savor.
Purchase links: Amazon – Bookshop.org – Libro.fm Disclaimer: When you make a purchase through one of these affiliate links, I may earn a small commission, at no additional cost to you.
Specifically, the Heartstopper era… during which Alice Oseman’s webtoon-turned-graphic-novels entranced readers with a swoony love story about two sweet boys who find one another, overcome bullying and deal with mental health crises, find a glorious friend group, and find a way to stay together, even while hearing (constantly) that teen relationships don’t last.
Nick and Charlie first meet early in their high school years. Nick, age 14, is one of the few out gay boys at school, and has been bullied for it. Nick, 16, is (presumably) straight and a star rugby player. The two connect instantly as friends, but there’s something else simmering beneath the surface right from the start. As the story progresses, Nick has an awakening about his own sexuality, Charlie deals with a severe eating disorder, and both learn to embrace their identities, stand proud, and allow their love to flourish.
In the 6th and final volume, as we readers deal with reaching the end, so too do Charlie and Nick have to deal with an ending of sorts — not of their relationship, but of their school years together. Nick is in his final year of high school, with plans to attend university out of town. He feels lost and conflicted — who is he without Charlie? Charlie has grown from a scared boy into a determined young man. He’s still himself, but has developed over the years into someone who sees that he can help others in a way that he himself wasn’t helped, launching a campaign to stop bullying and to establish a school club for gay kids to gather and feel safe.
As they navigate the ups and downs of their final school year together, Nick and Charlie confront serious issues, individually and together, but never lose their amazing connection. They also remain deeply committed to their friend group, who as individuals all add fresh elements to the story and as a group show the beauty of having a supportive, loving community.
Heartstopper volume 6 provides a lovely, cheery, moving conclusion to a wonderful graphic novel series. I’ll miss these characters!
From 2022 to 2024, Netflix aired three seasons of a wonderful adaptation of Heartstopper, with spot-on casting and a production vibe that perfectly captures the feeling (and feelings) of the books. This month, a final wrap-up movie was release, Heartstopper Forever:
I loved the three seasons of the seasons, and approached the movie this week with eagerness and nervousness.
Overall, I was happy with it! The movie takes a more depressing turn than the book does, which may be why I felt it started dragging a bit in the middle. Also, while the series episodes give breathing room to the friend group, so that we we really have time to get to know all the characters and their story arcs, the movie has so much ground to cover with Nick and Charlie that the friends mainly serve as background or support, without substantial storylines of their own.
That said, I did love seeing Nick and Charlie again, especially seeing how far they’ve come and how they’ve grown and matured together as their relationship has deepened. I will admit that seeing these characters being very sexually active can be a bit startling, considering that we’ve been watching them grow up since age 14 or thereabouts! Still, they are absolutely lovely together, and it’s beautiful to see them sorting out how to support one another, how to deal with their separate challenges and crises, and how to manage to be whole people as individuals, beyond their identity as “Nick and Charlie”.
Heartstopper Forever is essential viewing for anyone who’s watched the previous three seasons. For anyone who hasn’t, start at season 1 — I’ll bet you won’t want to stop!
This week, Netflix also dropped a short (35-minutes) behind the scenes special, Heartstopper: Ending on a Hi.
What a heartwarming way to end the Heartstopper experience! It’s lovely to hear the cast, crew, and fans talk about what the show has meant to them. If you’ve watched the show and the movie, definitely check this out too!
Now that I’ve reached the end, I’m tempted to start all over again from the beginning — with both the books and the Netflix series. I think it would be amazing to go back and see the characters once again at the very start of their journeys, knowing how much they grow and change as their stories move forward.
Heartstopper has been a wonderful experience. I encourage everyone to check it out!
First Lines Friday is a weekly feature for book lovers created by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines? Here’s how to join in:
Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page.
Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first.
Finally… reveal the book!
I’ve been away from home for various reasons for the past several Fridays… but now I’m back, and ready for a FLF post!
This week’s lines are from the July new release that I’ve just started:
Is it possible to want something so much that the force of your longing pulls taut the fabric of reality until it bursts? Our father had imagined the end of the world so often that, for a while, he believed that he summoned it.
So what’s the book?
Not With A Bang by Temi Oh Release date: July 14, 2026 352 pages
Synopsis:
Station Eleven meets Leave the World Behind in this family drama at the end of the world about a crumbling household’s attempts to find their way back to each other amidst a cataclysmic event.
“Our father had imagined the end of the world so often that, for a while, he believed that he summoned it.”
The Minton family is in crisis. After losing his job, Marcus begins stockpiling cans, running evacuation drills and digging a doomsday bunker in the back garden. At the same time, his daughters are unravelling in their own ways – Chantale is being haunted by dreams of disaster, and Briar’s obsession with a missing classmate draws her deeper into the seductive world of a UFO cult. Meanwhile, no one is aware of the diagnosis their mother has been trying to keep hidden.
When, on the morning of the eldest daughter’s wedding, an extinction-level event tears the world apart, the Mintons must fight their way through a devastated city—back to safety, survival, and each other.
I enjoyed this author’s 2019 novel, Do You Dream of Terra-Two?, and I’m excited to be starting this new release.
Bookshelf Fantasies 