Reading Recap: May 2025
May was a freaking blur. But (mostly) a good one.
I wish we could collectively come up with a better word for the month of May than “Maycember” because it feels nothing like the holiday season to me. The end of the school year does not come with official holidays that offer PTO to those of us fortunate to have paid holidays at our place of work (hello Thanksgiving and The Day After Thanksgiving AND Christmas Day). Other than Memorial Day, there are no days off, just more stuff to do! Even when I feel like we are constantly saying no, to playdates, to dinners, to family events, our schedule was so packed that I’m exhausted and guess what? I still have to parent and do the things on our summer schedule!
I really don’t say all of this to complain, because we did make such good memories in May, including our preschooler’s first dance recital and her school’s Spring Program (which involved sunglasses, dance moves, and 4-year-olds yell-singing). Truly highlights of my year, if not my life. There was also: last week of school activities, a friend’s birthday party, a visit to the zoo, playdates at the park, my best friend’s graduate school graduation, on top of planning summer childcare, visiting sick family members, packing for vacation, and a garbage disposal that decided to spew water out of our kitchen sink.
Is this just life?
Usually I arrive at June with a sigh of relief, looking forward to slower pace and easy breezy days. Maybe it’s because my workplace has been in turmoil for the past month or because my grandma fell on Mother’s Day and has been in the hospital recovering for a few weeks, but I am so tired I’m not even feeling comforted by the impending summerness of summer. (I didn’t even touch on the absolute shit show that is the United States government.) Anyways, I did read some really good books, and my family is going to the beach next week for the first time in years so maybe that will heal me?
We Don’t Talk About Carol by Kristen L. Berry
I really enjoyed this! It’s about a woman who becomes interested in a long lost family member she never knew she had. It is not a mystery but there are elements of a cold case, including several missing women. I loved the family dynamics, the main character’s IVF journey, and the earnestness of the writing. It is a debut, and it felt like a debut but I still liked it!
Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry
I needed some easy, breezy, happy reading in my life and Emily Henry served it up. The beachy setting, the “older” protagonist (she’s in her early thirties, I think), and the love interests competing for the same job all just really worked for. It wasn’t heavy on tropes, it was just the right amount of cheesy, and I actually appreciated the toned-down witty banter between the two main characters. It felt like something Henry really wanted to write because it is slightly different than her other books. I don’t know if anything can compete with Funny Story, but I really liked this one!
The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff
Listen, I usually love a literary book with the death of a character we’ve grown to know and love in the middle of the novel (Chemistry Lessons, In Memoriam, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow) but the death in this story felt like it had no purpose at all other than the author needed a plot device. There were elements of the book that I loved, the grandmother/granddaughter relationship, the single mom storyline, but it felt like the author was trying to cram too much plot in.
Twist by Colum McCann
Despite the ocean on the cover, this is not a light beach read. It is a dense exploration of technology, power, and climate change. I did not know that most of the world’s information travels through tubes on the ocean floor rather than satellites in the sky, did you?? Colum McCann became obsessed with this fact, as does his narrator, and he travels to South Africa to write a story about a repair ship that goes out to sea to fix cables that are broken. It was really unexpected, the writing was killer, and it had a really good ending! I just wish I had read it in the fall because it was very dense and although short, took me weeks to get through.
Murder in the Dollhouse by Rich Cohen
Ohh boy do I have a juicy, intriguing, SAD, true crime book for you to take to the pool this summer. Although this story made national news in 2017, I’d never heard of Jennifer Dulos, an extremely wealthy mom of 5 who went missing after dropping her children off at school one morning. Honestly, I still can’t believe what happened to this woman, and I’ve thought about her children a lot since I finished reading it. The reporting is excellent, and it might be one of the few things I’ve ever read that made me glad to be poor!
Sleep by Honor Jones
I feel like every month I write a review that includes the sentence “this book won’t be for everybody”. Well, here’s that book for May! I absolutely loved it. Despite the words ‘childhood trauma’ in the New York Times review, this book is not about trauma. It is about being a mom, while also being a daughter, while also being a woman. It was so honest, the writing was exceptional, and I can’t stop thinking about it. What more could I want in a reading experience!!