June was one of those months where I didn’t plan a reading theme and somehow ended up with four books that couldn’t be more different from each other. A German literary novel, a sapphic YA romance, a generational epic spanning centuries, and a slow-burn historical fiction built around forbidden devotion. No through line, no mood board, just whatever was next on the TBR. It worked out better than it had any right to. Four books. Three hits. Here’s the breakdown.
The Great
She Drives Me Crazy by Kelly Quindlen is technically YA, and I mean that in the best possible way. Enemies-to-lovers, sapphic, set against the backdrop of high school basketball. On paper it sounds like every trope you’ve already read. In practice, Quindlen earns every single beat. The tension builds properly instead of just being asserted. The banter is actually funny. And the emotional core of it is more honest about what it feels like to be in your own way than a lot of adult fiction manages to be. It’s genuinely fun without being shallow, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. First 5/5 of the year for me, and I’d hand it to someone who hasn’t touched YA in a decade without a second thought. 5/5.
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi had been sitting on my TBR for an embarrassingly long time. It follows two branches of a Ghanaian family from the 18th century through to the present, each chapter a different character, a different generation, a different continent. The structure is ambitious to the point where it probably shouldn’t work as well as it does. Gyasi gives you a new protagonist every chapter and somehow makes you care about them within a few pages. The themes are both historical and deeply metaphorical, and what’s impressive is how seamlessly they’re woven together. Nothing feels like a history lesson and nothing feels heavy-handed. It just lands. The one caveat: as the story moves closer to the present, the chapters get shorter and the characters get less room to breathe. What starts as fiction starts to feel more like vignette, each one pegged to a specific historical moment — the Civil War, the Great Migration, modern civil rights. The history is still worth having. But you feel the difference. Everything else you’ve heard about it is true. 4.5/5.
The Good
Für Polina by Takis Würger is the kind of slim novel that earns its slimness. Under 200 pages, no wasted sentences, no hand-holding. You’re dropped into a relationship told in retrospect and Würger trusts you to keep up. What the book does exceptionally well is atmosphere. There’s a quiet dread running underneath the whole thing, a feeling that something is off before you can name what it is. By the time it becomes clear, it’s already too late to look away. It’s not a comfortable read and it’s not meant to be. But it’s a precise one, the kind that stays with you in a low-level, hard-to-shake way. For now it’s only available in German, which is either a reason to finally dust off your Deutsch or just a genuinely good argument for learning it. 4/5.
The One That Missed
A Private Man by Stephanie Sy-Quia opens in Rome, 1953. A newly ordained priest about to return to England, a woman in London entangled in an impossible love affair, and a Catholic college in a quiet village where their lives are thrown together. The premise is genuinely compelling. Forbidden love, institutional faith, the long shadow of choices made under impossible constraints. There’s real material here. But something in the execution didn’t land for me. The emotional weight the story is reaching for never quite arrives. It announces the gravity of what’s happening rather than making you feel it, and that distance never fully closes. There are moments that work, scenes that suggest what the book could have been. But as a whole it kept me at arm’s length in a way I don’t think was intentional. 2/5.
Three out of four is a good month by any measure. She Drives Me Crazy was the surprise, Homegoing was the long-overdue reckoning, and Für Polina was the one I’ll keep thinking about quietly for a while. A Private Man just wasn’t for me. That happens. Reading widely means occasionally finishing something and feeling mostly nothing, which is its own kind of data point.
