I’m quite impressed with the fact that I read three books in August when I only had one day off, and I spent the whole day travelling to Toronto for a wedding, so I was not reading that day. So I’m very pleased with myself.

Bad Cree by Jessica Johns. This was our work book club book and I liked it so much more than I expected. It is also much creepier than a book I was expecting from a work book club. Mackenzie is a young Cree woman from what’s now known as Alberta, living in Vancouver. She hasn’t been home since she moved, even when her sister died of a brain aneurysm. She feels pretty guilty about it, but also feels like she’s being less of a burden on her family by not being home. Then the dreams start. Dreams where she is bringing back into the waking world physical items. And crows are following her. The dreams take her home, reveal long-kept family secrets, and delve deep into Cree history and modern interactions between Indigenous communities and settler industries.

I really, really enjoyed this book. The only plot hole I could find is, where is her father? Like he’s physically there, but while the sisters, cousins, aunties, and Mom are running around investigating the dreams and talking about the dreams and we never hear from him. It keeps me wondering if maybe he is a very Christian Indigenous person (a lot of Indigenous people have really connected with Christianity) or if he’s a settler of some kind? I found that dynamic really interesting because he is so clearly happy Mackenzie is home, and then we never see him again.

The Five-Star Weekend by Elin Hilderbrand. This is my first Elin, which I know is wild. My mom was reading this while we were in Ireland and I came home with it. Elin Hilderbrand lives on the island of Nantucket, in the US state of Massachusetts and all of her books are set there/in that region (Boston is the nearest major city). This book follows a cooking blogger, Hollis, who exploded and became a full-time influencer during the pandemic (she has big Half-Baked Harvest energy) when she and her daughter’s worlds explode when her husband is killed in a car accident.

Hollis grew up on Nantucket and has become a summer person, keeping her family’s property and building a new fancy house on it. When she goes back to the island in the summer after his death she sees another blogger’s post about her 5-Star Weekend. The 5-Stars are friends, or stars of different parts of your life. She selects 5 friends from different parts of her life, childhood, college, a mom friend, a neighborhood friend, and an Internet friend who she met in the message boards section of her blog. She also hires her daughter, a film student, to film the entire weekend. This weekend ends up changing all of their lives, in ways they never would have imagined.

A Bakery in Paris by Aimie Runyan. This is such a classic dual-timeline historical fiction. One of our characters is an upper-class young woman destined to be married off to improve her family’s status in the time of Napoleon’s defeat and the other is her lower-class great-great(?) granddaughter in 1946 whose father was killed in WWII and whose mother disappeared shortly after the war/in the reclamation of Paris by the Allies. She is left raising her two younger sisters and when she takes some baked goods next door to an elderly neighbor after the tenants letting the bistro her family lives above disappear, taking her only source of income with them. Her neighbor enrolls her in baking school, beginning a journey forward from the war and reconnecting her with the history of her family.

I really enjoyed everything I read this month. It was all fun, and all so different.

Laura