On Bee's Bookshelf

Hey Bookworms!  Summer is here and I cannot wait for summer reading! Last year I found some absolutely amazing summer reads and I have high hopes for this summer too. Over spring, I found some real gems and even went back to revisit some old favourites. I read a LOT this spring, and I've actually hit my years reading challenge already, which included 6 FIVE STAR books - probably the most I've ever given out so it's been a good reading season! Some of the books on this list are advance copies so they won't be out yet but you should definitely check them out when they are! So, here's everything that I read in Spring- let me know if you read any of these and if there's anything I should check out! Happy Reading!  The Wardstone Chronicles #1 - Joseph Delaney   (Re-Read) Genre: Fantasy |  Released: 2004 The Wardstone Chronicles #2 - Joseph Delaney  (Re-Read) Genre: Fantasy | Released: 2005 The Wardstone Chronicles #3 - Joseph Delaney  (Re-Read)  Genre: Fant...

  Genre: Romance | Fiction Release Date: Expected 19th August 2021 Eleanor Mason is fine. Better than fine actually. She's got the perfect job as a lawyer, supportive parents and  a wonderful flat in London. And then there's Gus, her very sweet, very long term boyfriend who she has sex with at least once a week.  She's completely fine - until she heads back to her parents town for a few days and sees Arthur. Lord Arthur Drummond, to be precise. Rich, successful, gorgeous and married to a stunning Heiress. But underneath all that, he's just Art - the one who got away, her former childhood friend and the one person who's ever broken her heart.  And the longer she's in her old town, the more her life slowly feels less and less perfect. Is this just a case of the grass always looking greener on the other side? Or is Nell just settling for fine because she's scared to reach out for something amazing?  Did You Miss Me? managed to completely capture that nostalgic ...

  Genre: Young Adult | Magic | Romance Release Date: Expected 3rd June 2021 Evie had always thought books held their own type of magic - but recently they're just words on a page. She had bookshelves full of meticulously organised romance novels but now she's giving them all away along with her own belief in love. Since her Father announced he was leaving their family for another woman, love has lost its appeal. But now, when she's given a beaten old book called 'Instructions for Dancing', it takes her on a completely dfferent journey to small struggling dance studio just minutes from her home where she starts to look for answers about the unwelcome gift she's starting to develop - she can see the whole stoy of someone's love right before her eyes; fro but m their first kiss to their last goodbyes and it just further proves Evies theory that love isn't made to last. But then there's X - a tall mysterious stranger who gets roped into a dancing contest...

Genre: Mystery | Thriller | Fiction Release Date: Expected 6th June 2021 (#6 in The Essex Witch Museum Series ) Rosie Strange has always lived up to her name - since taking over her families legacy at the Essex Witch Museum, her life has become a never ending series of oddities and mystery. And the Museum isn't the only legacy Rosie has come into - the strange apparitions and things that go bump in the night seem to be her normal as she struggles to understand a strange new gift that seems to growing.  And now, her Curator Sam Stone is  slowly trying to peice together the mystery of what really happened to his missing brother and the other young boys who dissappeared seemingly without a trace. Never one to shy away from the dark, Rosie follows him on a journey into the unknown to try and find the truth.  Syd Moore has a magical, unique charm in everything she writes and the sixth installment of this series is no exception. You can definitely read this if you're not famili...

 Genre: Adult Fiction | Romance | Romantic Comedy  Release Date: Expected 27th May 2021 Alexa Humphries wakes up every morning wrapped in a warm cuddle with her one true love - her duvet. It's the one place she is just simply Alexa before she gets up and becomes Alexa the sensible, grown up lawyer. Unfortunately between the endless demands of her job, her neurotic boss and unhealthily competitive colleague/flatmate, she doesn't get to spend much time sleeping, and definitely doesn't have anyone to share her duvet with. But today she can't. She simply can't deal with getting up and putting on a face she hardly recognises in the mirror. She just wants to stay in bed, turn off her phone and have a duvet day. Because everyone deserves a break, right? When I picked up this book, I didn't think a story about someone taking a day off work could really be that interesting - but oh was I wrong.  This book is not at all what it seems - an hilariously chaotic adventure ful...

  Genre: Romance | Romantic Comedy | Fiction Release Date: Expected 23rd June 2021 Publisher: Bookouture When Archie finally got down on one knee and proposed (or tripped and dropped the engagement in the mud, actually) Natalie almost didn't believe it. She'd been dreaming of him finally doing something romantic since they got together and they can finally start planning the first day of the rest of their lives. But planning the wedding isn't she'd hoped - Archie keeps going AWOL, the best man is a total creep, her future mother-in-law is scrutinizing every single detail and her sister-in-law seems to think it's her wedding instead. Not to mention the utter insanity of her wedding planner who doesn't seem to understand that live flamingos have no place at a wedding.  For quite a while now, she's been part of Natalie and Archie, but this chaos is making her wonder who she is without him and maybe if she'd better off at home with her very spoiled cat inste...

Genre: Adult Fiction | Mystery  Release Date: Expected 24th June 2021 Etta wants nothing more to marry her boyfriend, Ola. And while he says he does too, he's always focused on the next step and insists they need to save enough for a house before they even think of walking down the aisle. Etta is a sensible woman, working a steady office job, volunteering for a charity helping people facing deportation and injustice - but they still don't quite have enough.  So she tries something new - online gambling. And she likes it. Pretty soon she's playing all the time and lying to Ola about it - but she's sure the win is coming soon, even if there's a few losses along the way. And her new friend on the site, StChristopher75 seems to be supportive. He's won big recently ... and he thinks she's hot. Etta knows she's going to get lucky soon. She has to.  Lucky took me totally by surprise - this was so much more than it appeared to be. It was a an enthralling, tense ...

  Genre: Mystery | Womens Fiction | Adult Fiction Release Date: Expected 27th May 2021 A lot has changed in Sashas life as the years passed but one thing has always remained - Caitlin. They've been best friends since the moment they met as children and Sasha knew she would always do whatever it takes to make sure Caitlin is happy - from sneaking in magazines she wasn't allowed to read to keeping her darkest secrets.  Caitlin is the type of woman everybody is drawn to -  she's successful and wealthy, but there's also just something about her that draws people in. She's the life and soul of every room she walks into, but she still chooses to be with Sasha even though she's the complete opposite of everything Caitlin is.  And now, Caitlin is getting married and it goes without saying that Sasha is going to be by her side and make sure the wedding is as perfect as Caitlin is. But as the day draws nearer, cracks start to appear in the foundation of their relationship...

  Genre: Fantasy | LGBT+ | Horror Release Date: Expected 24th May 2021 Publisher: Ninestar Press  Content Warnings: Gore / Death / Child Endangerment / Murder / Violence / Sexual Content / Alcholism / Guns / Demons. Grace doesn't remember anything since Halloween night six weeks ago. Since she stumbled into the hospital clinging onto life and begging for help. Now, the only life she knows is the one among the mysterious Order of Saint Raphael the Healer, a clandestine convent who took her in and treated her wounds. On the surface they look like every other Convent - but there's much more under the surface. Assured by the Sisters her memories will return in time, Grace tries to learn the ways of the Order and their demon hunting ways with her new confidant Monica - until Grace is accused of being a Demon herself. It seems like she's hiding something from herself, and she's not the only one with secrets that are waiting to break free.  Immediately thrown into a new and st...

  Genre: Thriller | Mystery  Release Date: Expected 4th June 2021 TW: Abuse, Alcoholism, Death, Divorce, Cheating.  On top of the cornish cliffsides, Carly finally found her home. Her husband Mark designed and renovated every part of it with her - a project that made him famous. Together, they've raised their children in this house, spent nights watching the stormy sea and starry skies, and they'd promised to love each other and always keep each others secrets. But it's also where Mark told her that he was in love - just not with her. After losing her husband and her reputation, Carly isn't going to lose her home too. Peacefully alone, surrounded by the secrets her house had always hidden, Carly feels safe. Until she finds the cracks in the walls and anonymous threats start to appear. Someone wants to tear down the walls around her entire life - and she's already cracking under the pressure.  The Forever Home was a slow-burning, domestic thriller about a family who ...

  Genre: Fiction | Womens Fiction | Romance Release Date: 16th June 2021 Natalie is a wife, a newlywed. She's finally found someone she can actually stand to spend all her time with and she is very much in love with Carl. He's full of surprises, but not always good ones. Like buying their new house at an auction without even showing her a photograph first ... that just so happens to be in walking distance from his beautiful ex-wife Antonia and their perfect children.  But it's the dream house she was promised - it's falling apart, and she's living in second hand clothes, painting her second hand furniture, and now feeling like she's got a second-hand husband. Antonia is perfect in every way, the Queen of the village, and has a rage-inducing habit of calling Carl 'Our Husband'. While Natalie tries to relocate her career, adjust to a new way of life and stop the rain from flooding her bedroom, she also has to figure out if she's really Carls Partner or...

  Release Date: Expected 22nd July 2021 Genre: Fiction | Adult Fiction Jax Levy. Almost thirty years old. Journalist (with no hope of progressing) Single (no hope there either) But the best friends in the world.  Clara, Omni and Alice are the real loves of Jax's life, they're soulmates. The four of them are a perfectly wrapped package deal - but now Clara is getting married to Ed and there's one more soulmate to make room for. Trying to get past the growing jealousy, Jax tries to throw herself in the role of Maid of Honour and make sure Clara gets the day of her dreams. But during her mission, she discovers some secerts about Ed that will ruin everything - and she isn't going to let that happen.  This was a story about beautifully real and honest women. Confident, Sexual and Vulgar. Nervous, scared and insecure. And it made me feel seen. (And a book with the main focus being a wedding that actually passes the bechdel test? Yes please!)  This might seem like a love st...

  Release Date: Expected 8th July 2021 Genre: Fiction | Novella  Trigger Warning: This novel contains in depth depictions of abusive relationships, self-harm, graphic language, sex and mentions of rape. Lilja has fallen in love with him. He's beautiful and so much smarter than her, he cooks perfectly balanced vegetarian meals and reads in latin. He is perfect in every way, and she is obsessed with him. Soon she finds herself living in his flat, eating his food, sharing his bed and his shower as she tries to become the perfect person for him so he will stop f*cking other women and fall in love with her too. Fully blinded to his manipulations, she doesn't realise how much she is losing herself to get him until it's too late. Magma was haunting and addictive from the first page, I felt the obsession and despair deep in my stomach as Lilja was gripped tighter by her manipulating lover and started to act more and more like the "Crazy Girlfriend" that men create and the...

  Genre: General Fiction  Release Date: Expected 22nd July 2021 Alison spends all day fixing broken relationships - marriages that have carelessly fallen apart and seem like they'll never be put back together. So when her husbands ex, Lydia, walks back into their life after disappearing without a trace and demands to see their son, Alison knows she has the tools to handle anything that comes her way. Her marriage is solid, she isn't worried at all. But soon enough, cracks start to form and it seems that Lydia could hold secrets that might break their family apart entirely. Can Alison really mend her own marriage, or are some things just beyond repair? Starting off in relative domestic bliss and slowly burning into a real-life drama and the breakdown of Alisons whole life. Her husband, her daughter Tilda, and Stepson Josh are all caught in the crossfire and struggling in their own ways,  showing just how quickly fire can spread between a family from the roots to the leaves...

  Genre: Womens Fiction | Humour | Adult Fiction Release Date: Expected 28th May 2021 TW: Divorce, Cheating, Anxiety, Panic Attacks, Abuse.  Claire had plans. She was married to university sweetheart, she co-owned a successful design business with her best friend, she had a beautiful home and she was going to be something special. But her plans definitely didn't include living with a grumpy cat in a damp-ridden flat and getting abandoned by her husband for her very own friend.  Now, without a plan to follow she's flailing - she's eaten a small fortunes worth of ice cream, she's plagued by self-doubt and her life is well and truly falling apart. Every time she think she's found a spark and tries to move forward, the past just comes crashing around her and puts her in reverse. Now, she's got to try something to put the spark back in her life before it goes out for good.  This story called out to the catasrophising, doubtful parts of my brain that say awful things ...

  Genre: Mystery| Thriller Release Date: 13th May 2021 Publisher: Harper Collins UK When Kate was twenty-five, she moved to London and wasn't exactly where she was expecting to be. Living in a run down flatshare, working a zero-hour contract in a coffee shop and feeling very alone, especially since her sister vanished without a trace years ago. But then she meets Della and by chance ends up taking part in her life coaching class, and very quickly their lives become tangled together, Della was charming, enchanting even and despite Kate not wanting Dellas help she couldn't say no to her. Without even realising it, their relationship becomes all-consuming. She's looking after Dellas' kids, meeting her friends, wearing her clothes and getting very close to her husband ... Both of them have secrets, but how long can Kate stay in Della's orbit before it spirals out of control? The House Guest was a slow-burning fire of a story full of tension, passion and lies that was gr...

  Genre: Literary Fiction Release Date: Expected 8th July 2021 Eight months ago, a young woman began her life - moving into her renting university living space and ready to start her new job as a research assistant at Oxford. All around her, she can feel the energy from the previous residents who became leaders and pioneers - and it almost doesn't feel like real life at all. But now everything is different - she's sleeping on a strangers sofa in London, temping at a magazine and things don't appear to be getting better. She's no closer to a stable job or home, she's overworked and underpaid, and the world around her is falling apart - Brexit is dividing the nation, Grenfell tower burned, the city is rife with homelessness and despair and the climate is changing beyond repair. And as every day passes by, she begins to question what this is all really for.  Our nameless, faceless narrator was cold and detatched - an almost clinic approach to storytelling that made me ...

  Genre: Literary Fiction | General Fiction Release Date: Expected 15th June 2021 Translated from Catalan On the worst day of Paulas life, she lost Mauro twice. First when he announced he was leaving her for another woman, and then all over again just a few hours later when a tragic car accident takes his life. Not knowing how to even begin to deal with this all, she continues as though their life is normal - going to her job as a paediatrician, seeing her family, continuing their life without him in it. But most of all, obsessing over the life was torn from her and the woman who he fell in love with. But slowly, in the home they'd built together, Mauros food is rotting in the fridge and all of his plants are slowly dying but as they do, Paula tries to learn how to live.  "Dying isn't mystical, Dying is physical, it's logical, it's real."   This story was devastating and moving, but with glimmers of laughter-inducing happiness when we can find the humour in th...

Genre: Literary Fiction  Release Date: Expected 13th May 2021 Debbie has a pretty normal life - or so she thinks. She lives at home on a small Dairy farm with her someone ecentric and tarot-loving mum Maeve and her uncle Billy living in the bottom of the garden with just the stars and a bottle of whiskey for company.  But as she gets ready to start her life as a student at Trinity College in Dublin, her normal changes very quickly. Trying to navigate the sophisticated and complicated lives of Trinity Students, she's struggling to maintain balancing the two halves of her lives. Maeve is getting more eccentric, convinced her dreams are prophecies. Billy is drinking more and more and Debbie doesn't know how to cope. But despite it all, Debbie knows no matter how hard life gets - her family is cheering her on in their own way. Snowflake is a normal story about normal life - and that's what gives it such a unique charm. It didn't feel like there was much a story in places bu...

  Genre: Literary Fiction | Fiction | Romance  Release Date: Expected 13th May 2021  Emily has everything. A husband, two beautiful children, a great job and a new home in a trendy neighbourhood with wonderfully friendly neighbours. But her and her husband don't talk anymore, she hasn't slept properly since the boys were born, she doesn't want to keep working so much, her estate is full of aging hipsters, and the neighbours might be an issue. Alathea is beautiful, confident and totally intimidating and her husband Elliot is ... a problem. He's charming, and funny, and understanding and she's finding herself undeniably drawn to the couple. But too soon her friendship with Elliot is all-consuming and out of control. They should be happy with their lives, but underneath they still want something more. I'm just going to say it - everyone in this book was extremely unlikeable. They were dysfunctional, selfish, and destructive but somehow I was still desperately searc...

  Genre: Literary Fiction  Release Date: Expected 10th June 2021 TW:  Murder, Death, Illness, Prison, Graphic Sex.  Grace is currently sitting in jail for a murder she didn't even commit.  Not that she hasn't killed before, she definitely has, but she didn't do this one. For the last fourteen long months she's been amongst the criminals who were stupid enough to get caught and it has dragged.  At 28, her body count is six - six members of her family killed in clever and untraceable ways - and nobody knows but her and her secret journal. How wonderful it is that she'd gotten away with it all, but how sad it is that nobody will ever know just why and how she got the perfect revenge.  How To Kill Your Family is Grace's private confession, as we travel back in time to find out the reasons that she killed off her entire family and the plans that slowly fit together into the perfect revenge. Through diary entries and thoughts, we jump between the prison cell...

  Genre: Romance | RomCom | Womens Fiction | Comedy Release Date: Expected 27th May 2021 Publisher: Bookouture Previously published as The Mix-Up  Marley is unlucky in love, unlucky in her acting career, but very lucky when it comes to friends. Her best friend Anna is amazing, although somewhat absent recently and she's getting married! So when Anna calls desperate for wedding help - how can she say no? There is a very exclusive venue tour that Anna can't get to and there is no change to reschedule.  But when Hotel Manager Cameron automatically assumes she is actually Anna, she's far too awkward to correct him and tries to enjoy being confident, successful Anna for the day - until the spark happens. There's a connection there that she hasn't felt in a long time and she's certain he feels it too. But she's spent the day pretending to be a blushing bride - witha  fictional wedding and husband in the way. Marley needs to find a way out of this, but being Anna i...

Genre: Young Adult | Science Fiction  Released: 6th May 2021 "What do you do at the end of the world? 1.  Live your best life 2. Uncover family secrets 3. Trust no-one." Olivia was avoiding the Christmas party when she got the news - the end of the world was really coming. She thought the only things she had to worry about were not having the guts to talk to the girl she liked and being too scared to audition for Juliet in the play, but none of that mattered now. Humans have done so much irreversible damage to the planet that breathable air is running out - scientists estimate a year at most before Earth is altogether unliveable. She thought she had all the time in the world to figure out who she wants to be and what she wants to do but now she's struggling to do anything. Until she meets Natasha - a long lost cousin who wants to reconnect with her family while she still can. She's amazing - beautiful, confident and so sure about who she is that it's giving Olivia...

  Genre: Historical Fiction | Womens Fiction Release Date: Expected 21st May 2021 TW: Mentions of police brutality, racism, death and Illness.  Ruthie had a happy life in St Lucia with her auntie until she was five and a half years old. Then out of nowhere, she was made to return to England where her birth parents had been waiting and she became Yvette Angelina Francis.  Now everything is changing for Yvette again; her now estranged Papa is in the hospital and his secrets are finally ready to come to the surface - forty years ago, he believes he killed a man while defending his wife on the boat to England and it's haunted him ever since. He wants to know the truth in case the worst should happen - but one secret often hides a hundred more.  The Other Island is a beautiful debut novel - masterfully written and enchanting; a true-to-life story about race, family, home, and the true meaning of identity. Yvettes was one of those narrators you connect with right away, and...

  Genre: Young Adult | Fiction Release Date: Expected 3rd June 2021 Wilbur is a lot of things;  A Loser. Triangle player in the school band. The unexpected best friend of his eighty-year old neightbour. The son to two amazing mothers. A secret poet. A Loser.  He doesn't think he's anything more - until he meets Charlie. As part of his schools French exchange programme, he finds himself showing someone around who has no idea of who was before - and it's the perfect time for a makeover to show that there is more to Wilbur, that he really is capable of tremendous things.  Wilbur was the loveable dork that you've seen a thousand times but written perfectly. Full of exceedingly awkward misunderstandings and typical teenager drama that turns into something amazing. The relationships in this story were beautiful - Sal was a reluctant grumpy old man that didn't want a friend, let alone a teenage boy, but their friendship was my highlight of this story.  I loved the lite...