Summer Book Club Edition
Updated: Aug 8
We are deep in the heart of summer, and I want to do something a little different today.
No theme to unpack, no occasion to tie a bow around. Just me, you, and some books that have been living in my head and on my shelves — books I’ve reviewed right here on this channel that I keep thinking deserve another look. Another recommendation. Another reader.
Consider this your Blue Mojito Summer Book Club — a handful of reads for the rest of the season that I genuinely, wholeheartedly believe in.
And then — I’ll tell you what’s coming on Thursday. Because it is a very good one for these last days of July.
The Summer Book Club Shelf
Deacon King Kong — James McBride
If you haven’t read this one yet, this is your sign. Set in the Causeway Housing Projects of late-1960s Brooklyn, Deacon King Kong is the story of a community — messy, funny, heartbreaking, and more alive than almost any fictional world I’ve spent time in. When deacon Sportcoat drunkenly shoots the neighborhood drug dealer one September morning, the ripple effects touch every soul in the Cause: the church women, the gangsters, the cops, the gardeners, and everyone in between.
What McBride does that wrecked me is show how communities hold together not because everything is fine, but because the people inside them choose each other anyway. This is a book about love, loyalty, and the stubborn, improbable grace that shows up in the most unlikely places.
The Women — Kristin Hannah
Frankie McGrath volunteers for the Army Nurse Corps during Vietnam — young, sheltered, and completely unprepared for what she’s walking into. What she finds there is war. And what she finds inside the war is the most sustaining friendship of her life, with two other nurses who become her people in every sense of the word.
But the war doesn’t end when Frankie comes home. The country she returns to doesn’t acknowledge what she did or what she survived, and the second battle — the one fought in silence, in private, against her own mind — is in many ways the harder one.
This is a book I think about constantly. It’s about the women history forgets. The ones who served, and sacrificed, and came home to find themselves erased. Kristin Hannah gives them back their names.
The Wedding People — Alison Espach
Phoebe Stone checks into a luxury hotel in Newport, Rhode Island with a plan — and then accidentally stumbles into a stranger’s wedding week and everything changes. What sounds like a charming comedy of errors is also, quietly, one of the most honest and emotionally precise books I’ve read about grief, loneliness, and what it means to be pulled back toward life by people you never expected to love.
Espach writes with a wit that sneaks up on you — and then lands a gut punch when you least expect it. Phoebe is the kind of character you recognize immediately: a woman who did everything right and still found herself standing in the wreckage of a life she no longer understood. The wedding party, chaotic and ridiculous and human, becomes her unlikely path back.
Dancing with Bees — Anna Maynard
Sunny Moritz is thirty-three, aimless, and tired of her own life — until she decides, on a whim, to take up beekeeping. The man who shows up to teach her is decidedly not the sweet old gentleman she imagined. This debut novel from Australian author Anna Maynard is the kind of book that bubbles with warmth and humor and earns every bit of its emotional moments. It’s about self-discovery, unexpected connection, and — my favorite kind of story — a woman finding her way back to herself.
If you need something that will make you laugh out loud and then quietly tear up without quite knowing when it happened, this is your summer book.
Something these four books have in common
I was going to say something different here, but then I sat with it for a minute and realized it was obvious once I looked at them together:
Every single one of these books is about a person — or a group of people — who find their way back to something they nearly lost. Back to each other. Back to themselves. Back to a life worth living.
Sportcoat stumbling through grief with a bottle in one hand and a whole community behind him. Frankie building herself back up from the rubble of a war no one wanted to acknowledge. Phoebe letting strangers talk her back from the edge of something dark. Sunny following a bee straight into the life she was supposed to have.
That is the throughline of every summer I’ve spent reading. Not escape — return. The books I reach for in summer are the ones that bring me back to something.
And this Thursday — National Paperback Book Day, July 30.
Paperback Book Day is one of my favorite unofficial holidays, because it’s a celebration of the book you actually carry with you. The one with the dog-eared pages and the coffee ring on the back cover. The one you read at the beach and left in a beach bag and found again in October.
The book I’m bringing you for Thursday is Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry — and it is, without question, a paperback-in-your-beach-bag book if there ever was one.
Two journalists — Alice, an eternal optimist, and Hayden, a Pulitzer-prize winning thundercloud — land on a small Georgia island competing for the right to tell the life story of Margaret Ives: reclusive heiress, former tabloid princess, and a woman with more secrets than anyone bargained for.
What begins as a rivalry becomes something else entirely. And what Margaret Ives has to say about love, about loss, about the shape a life takes when you look back at it — I cannot wait to talk to you about it.
Thursday. Be there.
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