My to be read for August is purposefully short. I have an extremely busy month coming up and I already know I’m not going to get a lot of time to read. Not to spoil my upcoming July wrap up but I didn’t read half as much as I wanted to and my current read, Ride the Wave, has taken me over two weeks to get 70% of the way through – I’m starting to doubt I’ll finish it before the end of the month.
Something else I need to remember is having festive reads to get through before December. I’ve taken a different approach this year so I don’t have as many (four) but I do also want to get a head start on 2027’s reads too – very organised or a little too organised?
Anyway, here are my top two books I want to read during August:
Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood
This wouldn’t be my next choice for an Ali Hazelwood read if it didn’t have summer in the title. I’ve actually been wanting to read Bride for quite a while now but that feels more suited for an October read.
I’m not a fan of age gap romance if I’m being totally honest, but I know, despite the title, this one won’t be problematic – a 15 year gap between two consenting adults is completely fine. It’s when they’re teenagers with people twice their age that makes me feel sick.
Anyway, Ali Hazelwood has yet to let me down with a full length novel (we don’t talk about her festive novella) so I’m hoping this will be a fun, lighthearted read I can pick up in the rare down time I’m going to have in August.
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Synopsis: Maya Killgore is twenty-three and still in the process of figuring out her life.
Conor Harkness is thirty-eight, and Maya cannot stop thinking about him.
It’s such a cliché, it almost makes her heart implode: older man and younger woman; successful biotech guy and struggling grad student; brother’s best friend and the girl he never even knew existed. As Conor loves to remind her, the power dynamic is too imbalanced. Any relationship between them would be problematic in too many ways to count, and Maya should just get over him. After all, he has made it clear that he wants her gone from his life.
But not everything is as it seems—and clichés sometimes become plot twists.
When Maya’s brother decides to get married in Taormina, she and Conor end up stuck together in a romantic Sicilian villa for over a week. There, on the beautiful Ionian coast, between ancient ruins, delicious foods, and natural caves, Maya realizes that Conor might be hiding something from her. And as the destination wedding begins to erupt out of control, she decides that a summer fling might be just what she needs—even if it’s a problematic one.
If This Gets Out by Sophie Gonzales & Cale Dietrich
I had planned to read this during June (Pride month) but life very much got in the way, which I imagine will happen again in August, but better late than never. By late I mean that I’ve owned this book for multiple years now but haven’t thought about pickling it up until now.
I’ve read one other Sophie Gonzales book and I really enjoyed it. I’m intrigued to see how the collaboration plays into this – I’m assuming one POV is written by each author, which is fun. I do love books that do that.
This one is about two members of a boyband who develop a secret romance, so I can only imagine how off the charts the angst is.
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Synopsis: Eighteen-year-olds Ruben Montez and Zach Knight are two members of the boy-band Saturday, one of the biggest acts in America. Along with their bandmates, Angel Phan and Jon Braxton, the four are teen heartbreakers in front of the cameras and best friends backstage. But privately, cracks are starting to form: their once-easy rapport is straining under the pressures of fame, and Ruben confides in Zach that he’s feeling smothered by management’s pressure to stay in the closet.
On a whirlwind tour through Europe, with both an unrelenting schedule and minimal supervision, Ruben and Zach come to rely on each other more and more, and their already close friendship evolves into a romance. But when they decide they’re ready to tell their fans and live freely, Zach and Ruben start to truly realize that they will never have the support of their management. How can they hold tight to each other when the whole world seems to want to come between them?
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