Favorite book of the month: Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli and Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater (I am declaring co-winners, here. I'm okay with this.)

Longest in pages: City of Glass by Cassandra Clare at 561 pages

Total books ingested: 30

Re-reads: 6

Audiobooks ingested: 1

Minutes spent listening: 603

Average minutes per day: 20

Total books read: 29

Total pages read: 6243

Average pages per book: 215

Average pages per day: 208

Scores:

1: 2

2: 4

3: 17

4: 7

5: 0

Did not finish: 0 (This number probably ought to have been higher, but I was feeling stubborn.)

Average: 2.96

This was a moderately strange month in a few ways. The number of short stories I read (and many of them were very short) did some curious things to the numbers and obviously made my page count much lower than it would have been. They were fun, though, so no regrets. Sometimes you just need something five pages long.

I completely fell off the boat of my monthly reading challenge (June was supposed to be "Adaptations," for reference. Which is a shame, since I have quite a few I am interested in reading. Not that that's going to stop me, clearly.), and I'm still behind on my yearly book number challenge, too.

I did finally finish an audiobook again (go me!) and have made hefty inroads on a few more. 

Plans for July: actually write reviews, listen to more audiobooks, finish up The Raven Cycle (I'm just holding off because I'm not ready for it to be over), finally finish annotating A Feast for Crows so I can hand it off to my most-patient friend, who may have been waiting for it for at least a year now.

How was everyone else's June? Reading go well? How does it feel to be halfway through the year? Anyone else having trouble keeping up with their challenges?

On the evening of her betrothal party, the duke Miss Sarah Forrester is set to marry, confesses that he is in love with another. Sarah is instantly named "the girl who lost a Duke" in society and prepares to become a complete social outcast. However, one of the leading ladies in society advises her to reinvent herself, and soon Sarah is known as "The Golden Lady", the glittering, carefree toast of the town. Not everyone is as happy about her drastic changes, though.

Sarah's childhood friend Lieutenant Jackson Fletcher is back in London as the ship he was serving on is too old to sail any longer. While he cools his heels, living with the Forresters, waiting to find out the final fate of his ship, he also determines to breach Sarah's glittering facade and see if there are any traces left of the trusting and adventurous girl he once knew. A truly outrageous scheme involving costumes, lurking in a cupboard and assumed identities leads to a passionate kiss, as well as Jackson being recruited to help solve a high-profile murder. The last thing he wants to do is keep secrets from Sarah, as secrets were what broke up her engagement with the Duke.

This was my first romance by Kate Noble, and I must admit, it was a bit of a hot mess. There were so many different story beats, and it seemed difficult to pin down what the story really wanted to be. There was Sarah's transformation to society "Mean Girl" in order to mask her heartbreak. There was Jackson's struggle to acknowledge that life as he'd known it might be over, and he'd have to get used to a civilian life. There was the preposterous scheme Jack hatched to re-awaken Sarah's sense of fun, which amounted to him disguising himself as "The Blue Raven", a masked spy having worked against the French during the Napoleonic wars, basically Sarah's childhood hero. Then there was the plot to uncover a murderer, which both Sarah and Jack eventually got involved in. Too many things happening, none of which felt like they were really properly committed to.

It didn't help that I couldn't really connect with Sarah. I felt bad that she was jilted, but she clearly didn't love her Duke all that much anyway. The social disgrace and fact that she was no longer going to be comfortably settled seemed to be more hurtful than the fact that her fiancee loved another. "The Golden Lady" is a self-centred bitch and I can't fault Jackson for wanting to make her stop being so dismissive of her sisters and behave better. What I couldn't really see was why he was so determined to "break her cover" or why he fell in love with her. Even when she admits that she behaved badly, she's still not very interesting.

From this book, I learned that after the Napoleonic wars, a huge number of naval officers in England were left without positions, as there simply weren't enough ships for them to serve on. I just didn't particularly care. Then there was the dumb scheme of Jack's, that turned into an elaborate murder investigation and the romance seemed to almost be forgotten.

I've bought a whole bunch of Kate Noble books in e-book sales in the past few years, so at some point I'm obviously going to read them. This is not the first book in the Blue Raven series. I started with this one because it fit in my Monthly Key Word Challenge. One of the books in the series is about Sarah's younger sister, whose hurt that her older sister is completely ruining her first season, and as I liked and sympathised with her a lot more than with the protagonists, I'm hoping that other Noble books engage me more than this one. 

For reasons I cannot fathom (actually, I can fathom them: my library doesn't have it in their system, though that is admittedly something I cannot fathom), I had no clue this was released.

I also had no clue that this was a quartet and not a trilogy.

So when people spoke in passing about waiting for the last book in the series, I thought they were talking about this one and now I'm not sure if I should be completely psyched about the existance of this book (even though apparently I need to buy it if I'm going to read it--my book budget only stretches so far, oh library!) or horrified that I waited to read this and yet my wait is not over yet, there is another one in the works that has legitimately not been released yet.

I'll probably settle for the first one, but not without a little angsting over the second option there (and further angsting after finishing the novel once I get my greedy little hands on it.)

You know when you turn  21   you take  a shot  of books  LOL