April was not my best month for reading – not that the books weren’t good (they were largely very good!), but I can just feel that I’m in a bit of a slump. I know it’ll pick up eventually, so I’m just making sure to keep reading a little bit every day. And I’m picking up a few romcoms next, because that always works for me! But here’s what I did read in April.

Ember in the Ashes series by Sabaa Tahir (An Ember in the Ashes, A Torch Against the Night, A Reaper at the Gates, and A Sky Beyond the Storm)

My friend Sophia recommended this series to me a while ago, and I finally picked it up last month. It’s a YA fantasy series with a little bit of romance, and I really liked it! It starts out with two main points-of-view – the scholar Laia, who have been subdued and repressed, and the martial Elias, who is the son of the Commandant of the academy herself. When Laia agrees to be a spy for the rebellion, she and Elias meet, finding themselves drawn to each other. The story expands to include more points-of-view, and was a rare time where I found all of them enjoyable! I always struggle to review series here, because I don’t want to spoil the plot of the books, but I loved how this one broke the characters apart and then brought them together again in a really beautiful way.

Perfume & Pain by Anna Dorn

This was such a fun, funny, and slightly strange book! Almost-cancelled author Astrid Dahl has just returned to the writing group she co-founded, Sapphic Scribes, and is trying to write again. But she keeps finding herself distracted – first by Ivy, another member in Sapphic Scribes, and then Penelope, her new neighbor, who is an older artists that Astrid finds herself annoyed by and yet can’t seem to make herself stay away. Astrid also finds out that a famous celebrity, Kat Gold, wants to adapt her work – but she can’t seem to get out of her own way, and relapses back into using a combination of drugs and alcohol that sent her life off the rails before. All of this results in a kind of steamy and very, very dramatic story.

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry

(Thanks to Libro.fm for my ALC of this book!) I really loved Emily Henry’s latest book, which is a romance but with more of a contemporary fiction blend than her previous books. Alice and Hayden are the epitome of the “grumpy-sunshine” trope, and forced to at least coexist as they both are in a small island in Georgia for a month while they compete to be chosen as the biographer for the heiress Margaret Ives. Alice wants to win more than anything, but is nervous because Hayden is just coming off of working on a very famous and very successful biography… and also because, the more she and Hayden become friends, the more it seems that Margaret isn’t giving either of them the full story. I really love how this all came together in the end – my only wish is that we got a little more of Margaret’s story, which I found so interesting!

Cellar Rat by Hannah Selinger

My friend who also worked in the fine dining scene in NYC recommended this to me, and wow, was it eye-opening. Hannah takes us through her time in the food service industry, starting from the first job she faked her way into in a little pub, all the way up to NYC’s fine dining scene with famous chefs whose names you have definitely heard of – and why she couldn’t stay in the industry any longer. It’s a love letter to food and service, and a peek into how toxic and demanding it can all be behind-the-scenes.

Five-Star Stranger by Kat Tang

This book didn’t quite work for me – it was okay, but I was left wanting more. An unnamed man is a “rental stranger” on an app where he’s for hire to fulfill any role people want from him for a day. He has a longstanding client where he’s hired to be her husband, and her daughter’s dad, seeing them weekly for years. Things start to get messy as she gets older, though, and the stranger finds himself bringing another client into the daughter’s life, essentially using the client as his own version of a rental stranger. I just found myself hoping for a little more depth (and resolution) from this one.