November Reads 2024
November Reads 2024: 6 Books I Read this Month
By: Brittany Shields
Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you enjoyed a fun weekend filled with friends, family, food, and maybe even some extra reading time!
Apparently November was suspense/thriller month for me! Four of my six books fell into that category. The other two were a Bible study and a non-fiction parenting book.
But I needed to fill in some more of prompts (3) for the Shelf Reflection’s 2024 Reading Challenge so thrillers it was!
I also read two more from my list of Most Anticipated Books of 2024.
The year is coming to a close and I still have quite a few books to read and not enough time to do it. Per usual. I’ll have to roll over some of my books to the new year!
If you are into reading challenges, be sure to check out Shelf Reflection’s 2025 Reading Challenge that I just launched if you want to start planning your books. I have a lot of other reading challenges to choose from (linked below).
I hope you are all meeting your reading goals and enjoying the books you’ve picked!
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1. The Overnight Guest by Heather Gudenkauf
Genre: Suspense/Thriller
[Fulfilled ‘Two books with similar titles’ (with The Guest) for Shelf Reflection’s 2024 Reading Challenge]
[Nominee for ‘Best Mystery/Thriller’ category of the 2022 Goodreads Choice Awards Reading Challenge]
This was a really fast-paced book that was extra fun for me to read because the setting of the story is in rural Iowa.
It has three threads/storylines. The two main ones are the past (when there was a shooting on a farm and a little girl disappears) and the present day (when a true crime writer is finishing her book on the events while staying in the house where the original crime happened).
During a blizzard the writer finds a mother and a little boy on her property and sets her on a collision course with the other story threads.
Read my full review to see the Iowa nostalgia this book evoked for me, get more plot details, and see my one critique of the book.
2. A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham
Genre: Suspense/Thriller
[Fulfilled ‘Book with trees on the cover’ for Shelf Reflection’s 2024 Reading Challenge]
[Nominee for ‘Best Mystery/Thriller’ category of the 2022 Goodreads Choice Awards Reading Challenge]
“Monsters don’t hide in the woods; they aren’t shadows in the trees or invisible things lurking in darkened corners. No, the real monsters move in plain sight. They lived among us.”
“I had a taste of what it really felt like: control. Of not only having it, but taking it from someone else. And for one single moment, like a flicker in the dark, it felt good.”
I would recommend reading this book BEFORE you read reviews. I think my opinion of the book changed a bit once I read what other people thought and I might not have enjoyed it as much if I had their voice in my ear while reading.
My first Stacy Willingham book was Only If You’re Lucky and I was not impressed, but I’m happy to report that this book was better than that one!
Chloe was 12 when her father was arrested for being their small Louisiana town’s serial killer— 6 young girls in one summer. Chloe was the catalyst for his arrest when she found a box in his closet with the girls’ jewelry.
Chloe now, 20 years later, about to get married, has her own psychologist practice in Baton Rouge.
Her past comes back to haunt her when a local teenage girl goes missing. And then another. Everything is eerily similar to her father’s crimes.
Read my full review to see what other reviewers were saying and what I think about that, see what I liked, get spoilers, and get my ultimate recommendation.
3. When You Pray : A Study
Genre: Devotional/ Bible Study
“Life often hurts, and we need to know how to pray when it does.”
“Prayer isn’t about saying what we think the Lord wants to hear from us. Prayer is an honest, intimate, and intentional reaching for the Lord in truth, in reality, in the actuality of our lives as they are.”
This is a video-based, seven-session Bible Study about prayer.
I completed this study with other women from my church and I thought it was a great study.
I loved that there were 6 different teachers, each taking a different prayer in the Bible and showing us how/when to pray like it.
As we reflected on what stuck out to us the most with this study, one of my friends said that it was like taking a two-dimensional thing and making it 3D. I liked that analogy because they really did take something as simple as prayer and then showed us all the facets of it.
Prayer is simple yet complex. We don’t always know how to pray or what to pray for. These ladies do a great job of giving examples of how we can pray. It was also so good to just be reminded of the power of prayer.
Read my full review to get more details on the formatting of the study, see what prayers each woman focuses on, and get other recommendations on books about prayer.
4. Moonflower Murders (Susan Reyland #2) by Anthony Horowitz
Genre: Mystery
[Fulfilled ‘Book with a flower in the title’ for Shelf Reflection’s 2024 Reading Challenge]
Horowitz maintains his ‘book within a book’ theme from Magpie Murders in this murder mystery written like an Agatha Christie, Golden Age detective novel. It makes the book over 600 pages which feels a little bit insane to read, but in reality somehow doesn’t take that long.
I like the Golden Age of detective thrillers and if you aren’t sure what that means, you can get all the details in Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone because he lays it out on the first few pages. Another series written in the same way is Charles Finch’s Charles Lennox series.
I had a hard time solving the Moonflower Murders case. And I think the double book situation is partly why. That and just the sheer complexity of a dual mystery plot.
The main gist of the book is that a man was beaten to death in his hotel room; they thought they arrested and imprisoned the culprit but now, 8 years later, one of hotel’s managers read a book (written by the murdered man of Magpie Murders) that sheds new light on the crime. And then she disappears.
So what really happened and who knows about it? Susan is back from Greece to investigate it.
There’s a third book coming out in 2025 and the first two have been put to film if you’re interested in a book/movie combo.
Read my full review for more plot details and comments about what I liked and didn’t like about the book, as well as another rendition of British words I learned while reading this book.
5. The Fury by Alex Michaelides
Genre: Suspense/Thriller
[On my list of Most Anticipated Books of 2024]
“I feel duty bound to inform you that this is not a whodunit… If anything, it’s a whydunit— a character study, an examination of who we are; and why we do the things we do.”
“This is a tale of murder. Or maybe that’s not quite true. At its heart, it’s a love story, isn’t it? The saddest kind of love story— about the end of love; the death of love. So I guess I was right the first time.”
When I started this and read about Greece, Leo, a movie star, and a murder, I had to do a double take, but no, this was not me accidentally re-reading Moonflower Murders.
The Fury is pretty in line with Michaelides’ other two books- The Silent Patient and The Maidens. Both of those had some polarizing reviews and this one did as well. I think it must just be Michaelides’ way of writing and story concepts that has people frustrated for some reason.
This book is a little different than the other two in that we are being told this story by a narrator— Elliot— who is also one of the characters in the story. He addresses us, readers, directly as he gives us his account, divided into a five-act-play, about seven friends on an isolated Greek island when one of them turns up dead.
In short, I would describe this book as theatrical and layered.
Read my full review to get more plot details, a cast of characters, a good book club discussion question and my ultimate recommendation— which, btw, if you haven’t read his other books and plan to, you may want to as this has some cameos that may be spoilers for you otherwise.
6. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt
Genre: Non-fiction/ Parenting
[On my list of Most Anticipated Books of 2024]
“The Great Rewiring devastated the social lives of Gen Z by connecting them to everyone in the world and disconnecting them from the people around them.”
“It is very difficult to construct a meaningful life on one’s own, drifting through multiple disembodied networks.”
Jonathan Haidt’s thesis is that parents have become too protective in the real world with not enough adventure and unsupervised play and not protective enough in the virtual world of social media, porn, and video games; the result being an increase in anxiety and mental illness in our children.
I really loved Jonathan Haidt’s coauthored (Greg Lukianoff) book The Coddling of the American Mind. Definitely read that one if you haven’t yet.
I don’t think I loved The Anxious Generation as much as that one. I don’t know if it was because Lukianoff’s lawyer-side tempered Haidt’s psychological-side to balance the interpretation and explanataion of data or what, but this book felt a little too steeped in evolutionary descriptions of why we are where we are and why we need or want different things.
Nonetheless, Haidt’s presentation of the data is compelling and it’s truly hard to argue that a cell-phone based childhood rather than a play-based childhood doesn’t have negative effects on our kids.
Read my full review to see how he divides his book, get a bunch of other related book recommendations that I liked better than this one, and see all the things that stuck out to me, as well as get the action steps Haidt proposes as a way forward and links to where he plans to continue post new articles, research, and graphs as he studies this topic further.
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