What I Read in June

Hey friends,

I wanted to share a little update on where things are headed around here. Travels with Missy isn’t going anywhere — the blog stays up, and I’ll still be writing about Spain, Italy, and all the corners of Europe I love exploring. But going forward, this Substack is going to be where I show up most.

It’s become the space where I feel most like myself when I write — less SEO checklist, more “here’s what’s actually going on in my Barcelona life.”

Thanks for being here. More soon.

— Missy

June, June, June. How disappointing you turned out to be (in reading, only). After a whopper month of reads in May, the month of June yielded many disappointments and book slumps. Perhaps it’s just a mid-year book slump - I have so many excellent books on my ever-growing book TBR pile that stretches the length of my corridor in my apartment that need to be read at some stage. Here’s hoping that July turns out to be exceptional and jam-packed with stellar reads from start to finish.

Onwards to the books that I managed to get through this month;

Oh, what a disappointment this read was. I had this saved on my bookshelf for months now, waiting for the perfect time to read it. And it turned out to be a load of nothing. The writing is gorgeous, but empty. The characters feel like caricatures and are never truly fleshed out. Set in 1920, after the onslaught of World War 1, Joseph travels to the South of France to interview the legendary painter, Edmond Tartuffe (Tata). There, he finds an unwilling and terribly awful Tata who has little desire to share any information about his processes or his past, and it is instead his quiet niece Ettie, who blends into the background and beckons to his every wish and command, who gradually fills in the details.

And that about sums up the entire 290+ pages. There are sumptuous details of the paintings, plates laden with half-rotting food and the magnificent sunshine that captivated many an artist in the south of France. Joseph is a weak character with little to endear yourself to him. It is Ettie, who quietly shines and rages in the background, that could have swung this novel in a completely different direction. By the time Ettie’s rage manifests, the pages whimper to a close, and the reader is left disappointed by all that could have been.

I’ll continue to check out Lucy Steeds work in the future; her writing is gorgeous and evocative, but this book wasn’t for me.

2.5 Stars

June didn’t turn out to be the whopper reading month I thought it was going to be, mostly because Life, Death & Giants by Ron Rindo put me into the almightiest book slump. I so wanted to love that book. So towards the end of June, my library hold for The Heir Apparent by Rebecca Armitage was up, and it thankfully pulled me out of the depths of my big fat reading slump.

A quick, easy and fast-paced read, it follows a hypothetical royal family that is very, very loosely based on the British Royal Family. If you know anything about the British Royal Family from watching The Crown or reading a tabloid newspaper/gossipy magazine, you’ll know several of the storylines that appear in The Heir Apparent. Lexi finds herself next in line to the throne after her father and brother are killed in a skiing accident.

Having run from her responsibilities a decade before, Lexi is thrust into the limelight again, and the decision of whether to wear the heavy crown she never wanted (or thought she would inherit), or choose the smaller life with the man she’s been making goo-goo eyes at for 7 years. You probably know what she ends up doing.

How I wish Rebecca Armitage had written Lexi to make the hard choice, the uncomfortable one that wasn’t all princesses and rainbows, but difficulty and disappointment.

3.5 Stars

I think I’m going to have to DNF this book. I’m 43% through and I just don’t care enough about baseball or American Football to persevere. The promise of the Amish wasn’t enough to quench my desire to continue.

I think I’m done (& I RARELY DNF a book).

And that was the month of June. A disappointment that I NEED to rectify in July. How was your month of reading? Did you finish anything notable? Worthwhile?

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