I had a bit of a mish mash month reading wise in July. Some books blew me away and others left me with a bit of a meh feeling. There were however three that stood out to me. One a modern day fantasy with dark haunting magic and ghosts, one a rip roaring space adventure filled with some amazing and diverse characters and the last a dark and twisty read filled with Witches and dark magic. Were there any books that really stood out for you in July? Let me know in the comments.

Ghost Wood Song

Shady Grove inherited her father’s ability to call ghosts from the grave with his fiddle, but she also knows the fiddle’s tunes bring nothing but trouble and darkness.

But when her brother is accused of murder, she can’t let the dead keep their secrets.

In order to clear his name, she’s going to have to make those ghosts sing.

Favourite Quotes

This is what evil is–not some unnatural force, not demons or devils. It’s this right here–a man clinging so hard to hate it’s worth dying for.Worth risking the lives of his wife and his child.Worth seeing a bullet fly into his brother’s brain.Worth everything.

Daddy’s fiddle drew ghosts like hummingbirds to nectar. Mine only reminds me of everything I’m not, everything I’ll never be.

All this family ever does is bury its secrets, and yet they keep climbing out of the dirt and sneaking up on us. Maybe if we just dig them up and face them, they can’t hurt us all so much. Maybe if we speak them out loud, they won’t have so much power over us.

As you can see the premise for this book doesn’t really give much away plot wise, so I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Whats inside is a beautiful and haunting story about grief and how it can destroy you, filled with lyrical writing that transports you into the pages. Review.

Seven Devils

When Eris faked her death, she thought she had left her old life as the heir to the galaxy’s most ruthless empire behind. But her recruitment by the Novantaen Resistance, an organization opposed to the empire’s voracious expansion, throws her right back into the fray. Eris has been assigned a new mission: to infiltrate a spaceship ferrying deadly cargo and return the intelligence gathered to the Resistance. But her partner for the mission, mechanic and hotshot pilot Cloelia, bears an old grudge against Eris, making an already difficult infiltration even more complicated. When they find the ship, they discover more than they bargained for: three fugitives with firsthand knowledge of the

corrupt empire’s inner workings. Together, these women possess the knowledge and capabilities to bring the empire to its knees. But the clock is ticking: the new heir to the empire plans to disrupt a peace summit with the only remaining alien empire, ensuring the empire’s continued expansion. If they can find a way to stop him, they will save the galaxy. If they can’t, millions may die.

Favourite Quotes

“Seven of us,” Eris murmured … A disgraced Princess, a mechanic, a soldier, an engineer, a courtesan, a pilot, a leader of the resistance. Yet they were all so much more than that. “Seven devils.”

The God of Death did not have favourites; he simply took.

“Hands off the Mors, Alesca,” Sher said. “You’re not shooting anyone.” “Oh, but if we all aim at the same time…”

This book took me on one hell of a ride. On one side its a fun space romp filled with a diverse cast of female MC’s. and on the other it has a group of people all struggling through their own trauma, trying to become better and fix the errors they made in the past. It was a denser read than I expected but I fell in love with everything. Review.

A Wicked Magic

Dan and Liss are witches. The Black Book granted them that power. Harnessing that power feels good, especially when everything in their lives makes them feel powerless. During a spell gone wrong, Liss’s boyfriend is snatched away by an evil entity and presumed dead. Dan and Liss’s friendship dies that night, too. How can they practice magic after the darkness that they conjured? Months later, Liss discovers that her boyfriend is alive, trapped underground in the grips of an ancient force. She must save him, and she needs Dan and the power of The Black Book to do so. Dan is quickly sucked back into Liss’s orbit and pushes away her best friend, Alexa. But Alexa has some big secrets she’s hiding and her own unique

magical disaster to deal with. When another teenager disappears, the girls know it’s no coincidence. What greedy magic have they awakened? And what does it want with these teens it has stolen?

Favourite Quotes

Alexa thought of laughing with Dan on their drives into Gratton, of Liss protecting her secrets when they were still strangers, of watching sunsets in LA with Lorelai and Domino nuzzling her feet, of how the people you love can somehow become the only place of stillness in the wild and beautiful world that all of them shared and none of them understood.

Magic gave you gifts, but it took from you too, and although it had seemed fantastic and fun when she and Liss first tasted that world, they had learned better.

This book was not at all what I expected it to be. Dark and twisty with realistic and trauma filled teenage MC’s. Another book that I had to make my way through slowly, but there are so many bits of information to pick up along the way, bits of information that lead to a terrific and somewhat destined ending.