Tag / Goodreads Choice Awards

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Book 41 (of 52) – Bunny

Bunny – Mona Awad

Samantha, a lonely MFA student at an elite New England university, finds her world turned upside down when she’s invited to join the Bunnies, a bizarre, hyper‑feminine clique in her cohort called the Bunnies.  As she becomes entangled in their surreal rituals, she finds herself unsure where imagination ends and reality begins.

Mona Awad’s Bunny, a Goodreads Choice award nominee for favorite horror in 2019, found its way onto my radar recently, though I can’t exactly remember how.  This was a little bit different, and I’m not sure if I want to dig in for more or avoid her work altogether going forward.  Time will tell, I guess.

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Book 39 (of 52) – People We Meet On Vacation

People We Meet On Vacation – Emily Henry

After two years of silence, Poppy reconnects with her best friend Alex, hoping they can get past the awkwardness of their last vacation together and rekindle their relationship.  Agreeing to a trip to Palm Springs, harkening back to the low-cost trips of their youth before attending the wedding of Alex’s brother, they try to pretend that nothing has changed, but the stifling heat turns up the tension until they can’t ignore the truth any longer.

Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation, the 2021 Goodreads Choice winner for Favorite Romance, is her annual appearance on my Kindle for this year.  It is a story that hits a little close to home, with friends that have drifted apart in spite of themselves, but it was an entertaining read.  It had recently been adapted to a movie by Netflix, which I’m sure I’ll watch at some point.  Despite romance not being my genre, Henry is now four for four with me.

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Book 37 (of 52) – Margo’s Got Money Troubles

Margo’s Got Money Troubles – Rufi Thorpe

When Margo, a young college student with no real plan for life, finds herself with child thanks to her English professor, she is unprepared for the realities of what keeping the child will mean.  After getting a small payoff from the father’s family in exchange for dropping out of school and leaving them alone, she finds that the only way for her to make ends meet is to start an OnlyFans page.  With the help of her roommate and her ex-wrestler junkie father, she starts to make things work, but a sudden custody battle and a separate CPS complaint by her estranged mother leaves her questioning her choices.

Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a 2024 Goodreads Choice nominee from Rufi Thorpe, first came to my attention earlier this year thanks to the Apple TV adaptation starring Elle Fanning.  It is an interesting tale, following the young protagonist and she struggles to find a place in the world and leaving her with a clear plan that should lead to future success.

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Book 19 (of 52) – The Widow

The Widow – John Grisham

A small-town lawyer in Virgina thinks he has hit the jackpot: a rich client with no family looking to prepare a will.  When she then dies suddenly, an autopsy shows she was poisoned and that will, which looked like a godsend to the financially struggling lawyer, now acts as a motive for murder.  When he is convicted of the crime despite a distinct lack of non-circumstantial evidence, he goes on the offensive, looking for the real killer before he reports to prison.

The Widow, the latest from John Grisham, was a 2025 nominee for Favorite Mystery & Thriller in the Goodreads Choice awards.  This was a small change of pace from Grisham, adding a who-done-it mystery to his usual legal thriller genre.  I’ve been reading Grisham’s work for well over 30 years now, albeit with a few fallow years along the way, so a little variety in approach is not a bad thing.

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Book 17 (of 52) – Gone Before Goodbye

Gone Before Goodbye – Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben

When a disgraced surgeon is offered the opportunity to operate again, while clearing all of her family’s debts and pending lawsuits at the same time, she jumps at the chance.  Flown to Russia, she completes the work on both of her patients but then feels like something isn’t right.  Barely escaping with her life, she is taken to Dubai, where she teams with a secret girlfriend of her missing colleague to try and find him and find out what really happened when her husband was murdered.

Actress Reese Witherspoon teams with prolific author Harlan Coben for Gone Before Goodbye, their first collaboration and nominee for the 2026 Goodreads Choice Award for Favorite Mystery & Thriller.  Having never read anything from either one before, it is hard to tell how much input Witherspoon had on the finished product.  It was a quick, if somewhat muddled, read, having the bones of a good story but dropping some of the execution.  While this could have been a good introduction to Coben and his many works, I don’t really feel the need to seek out more from him at the moment.

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Book 15 (of 52) – The Woman In Cabin 10

The Woman In Cabin 10 – Ruth Ware

Travel journalist Lo Blacklock has the chance to boost her career when she’s asked to cover the launch of a luxury cruise through Scandinavian waters in place of a pregnant co-worker.  On the first night, drunk and suffering from a lack of sleep due to a recent home invasion and burglary, she believes she witnesses a woman being thrown overboard from the next cabin next over, but, when she reports it, the crew insists all passengers and staff are accounted for.  Despite warnings to back off, she continues to dig, unsure of whom to trust or how to escape, until she becomes the next to disappear.

Nominated for a 2016 Goodreads Choice Award for Favorite Mystery & Thriller, Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10 was a rare miss from the author I’ve now read five times.  I might have enjoyed this better had I not seen the movie version this past December, but instead it felt like a rehash of a story I already knew, which is surprising since normally I enjoy going back and reading the source material after having seen the movie adaptation.  It has also been a decade since this was first released, so maybe Ware has grown as a writer in that time.  Either way, she recently released a sequel, so maybe I’ll have to give that a try before it gets adapted and see if that makes a difference.

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Book 13 (of 52) – Not Quite Dead Yet

Not Quite Dead Yet – Holly Jackson

When Jet Mason is violently attacked on Halloween night, she barely survives but has a ticking time bomb in her brain that will kill her within a week.  Rather than risking a surgery she likely wouldn’t survive anyway, she decides to spend her remaining time trying to find out who attacked her and why.  Staying with her childhood best friend, she starts investigating, uncovering family secrets involving her parents, her brother and sister-in-law, and her long-dead sister.  When she dies without learning the truth, her friend puts the final pieces together to find out the truth.

Winner of the 2025 Goodreads Choice Award for Favorite Mystery and Thriller, Holly Jackson’s Not Quite Dead Yet puts a unique spin on the genre in her first novel intended for adults.  While searching for her “killer” is the main motivation of the Jet character, she learns more about herself during the investigation than she bargained for, finding how the choices she’s made, in the wake of her sister’s death, led her to where she is in the present and the regrets she will have now that time is no longer an unlimited resource.  I enjoyed this enough to keep an eye on Jackson’s back catalog and for any future output.

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Book 12 (of 52) – The Book Of Lost Hours

The Book of Lost Hours – Hayley Gelfuso

As the Nazis rise to power in Germany leading up to World War II, a young girl is stranded in the time space, a vast library where the memories of the dead are bound into books.  As she grows older, she finds soldiers from different countries entering the time space to destroy certain memories, changing the collective reality along the way.  When she starts to interfere, she becomes a target, eventually getting pulled out and forced to work for the CIA in order to protect the man she loves and their secret child.

The Book of Lost Hours, the debut novel from Hayley Gelfuso, was a nominee for Favorite Science Fiction in the 2025 Goodreads Choice Awards and was a Good Morning America book club pick.  This was a fine debut from Gelfuso, who covers some of the same ground as Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library while tackling the role that government, both ours and others, plays in shaping what we eventually come to think of as history.  I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for whatever she comes up with next.

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Book 10 (of 52) – Rock Paper Scissors

Rock Paper Scissors – Alice Feeney

When Adam, a face-blind screenwriter, and Amelia, his long-suffering wife, win a weekend away at a remote Scottish home, it sounds like an opportunity for both of them to decide if they want to continue in the marriage or to finally move on.  Very quickly, however, they learn that things are not quite what they seem and their trip may not have been the prize they thought it was.  Will a third person staying on the property help bring the secrets of their marriage to the forefront?  And, if so, will they survive it?

Alice Feeney’s Rock Paper Scissors was 2021 nominee for Favorite Mystery & Thriller in the Goodreads Choice awards.  I wasn’t planning on dipping my toe back in to Feeney’s work so quickly, but good word of mouth and a quick delivery from the library pushed my hand.  The twist here was similar to her other book that I read, but I did end up liking this one a little better.  It was still kind of farfetched, but I’m glad I went for it.

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Book 8 (of 52) – Don’t Let Him In

Don’t Let Him In – Lisa Jewell

When a mysterious new man enters her mother’s life too quickly following her father’s death, Ash gets a bad feeling in her gut.  The more she digs, the more she realizes that this man, who claimed to be an old acquaintance of her father, is not quite what he seems, despite having ready answers for any of her probing questions or concerns.  A deeper dive leads her to the truth. and the scores of women he has scammed and families he has abandoned over the years.

Lisa Jewell’s latest, Don’t Let Him In, was a 2025 nominee for the Goodreads Choice award for Favorite Mystery & Thriller, which is somewhat surprising since there isn’t much of a mystery here and the thrills are rather light as well.  It is obvious fairly quickly that the men with the different names making time with the different women are all the same man and, once the jealousy was first introduced, it wasn’t much of a surprise to learn what role he played in the death of the protagonist’s father, which kicked the whole story into motion.  I was more in tune with the previous work of hers I had read, so hopefully this was more of a blip in the road.