What I Read in June : Dinah

There are two things I want to do in the summer, drink and read! I was very lucky this month and really enjoyed every single book that I picked. They were for the most part based in the real world, or real places in the past, and all of them were relatively fast reads. They were also books that focused on female friendships and relationships, which was a nice change.

(*Photos link to books, we may collect a small commission from any Amazon purchases)

What I Read in June : Dinah

All Girls

This book focuses on an all girls boarding school in the Northwest corner of Connecticut, an area I an very familiar with and which has been getting a lot of play in books recently. The fictional Atwater School is an amalgam of several different schools, with so many of the traditions ringing true to my time at Miss Porters- and even a dorm named Lathrop! The plot centers around an allegation that the school has been protecting a teacher who sexually assualted a girl in 1995. As this allegation and the details reveal themselves, we see the school year through the perspective of various students, seeing how they process the scandal, but also how they are processing sexuality and consent.

I really enjoyed this book - despite the serious subject matter, it was not too heavy handed with the message, instead focusing on these individual students and their experience. It definitely brings you back to the feeling of being a teenager, trying to figure out your own feelings and choices around relationships while also processing what you are observing from older people and hearing in the media.

A Special Place for Women

What if The Wing was more secretive and also possibly maybe funding political candidates then taking them down when they change their agenda? Jillian is a journalist who just had her media outlet close, so she is on the hunt for freelance work. She pitches a story to an editor friend, and ends up trying to infiltrate Nevertheless, the exclusive invitation-only women’s organization run by two high powered women. She enlists her best friend who is a famous chef to pretend to be her boyfriend to give her cache and gets sucked into the group, their dynamics and sisterhood, while trying to crack the secrets of the upper echelon.

I devoured this book - it’s a super fast read, the action moves really quickly and I was dying to know what the big secret was! I was genuinely surprised by the two big twists and the ending, but loved that even in it’s criticism of this type of group, the author manages to make everyone a sympathetic character. I highly recommend it as a fun, zippy beach read this summer, as well as Laura Hankin’s Happy and You Know It.

Park Avenue Summer

This book has been on my list for a while - I love a coming of age story in the city! Ali has just moved to Manhattan in 1965 and through a family connection, lands a job as Helen Gurley Brown’s assistant, just as she is starting to overhaul Cosmopolitan Magazine. While the main character and some of the others are fictionalized or are amalgams of real people, the portrait that they paint of Brown is wildly compelling and you get a real sense of the resistance that she was up again from the big wigs at Hearst, from society and from other female leaders of the era. Contrasted with the main character trying to find herself in New York and pursue her passions, it tells a lot of story over a few months.

I find this time period in New York to be fascinating - fabulous martini lunches, the dynamic between the old guard and a more modern way of thinking, women managing workplace issues and new found independence. I would recommend this to anyone who loves that Mad Men energy and seeing how that modern media landscape evolved into the magazines we read today.

Good Company

Eloise and I both read this while we were on our vacations in June. The central drama is around Flora, a voice over actress, and her husband Julian who stars in a police procedural and owns a theater company, the Good Company. She discovers that he has been keeping a secret from her, and that her best friend Margot, the star of a long running Grey’s Anatomy-type series, knew the secret and has also been keeping it from her. The summer that their daughter graduates from high school, everything falls apart and through flashbacks to the beginning of their 20 plus years of friendship, we see how everything came to be.

This book was a very interesting look at fame, success, friendship and the long standing relationships that change over time, but still fall back on those initial years that bind people together. It was a more serious read, but not too heavy, and I really loved how they wove in the flashbacks and tied all of the different pieces together at the end.

Dial A for Aunties

Honestly, one of the funnier books that I have read recently! Meddy runs a wedding planning business with her mother and three aunties. The night before the biggest wedding they have ever booked, her blind date goes horribly wrong, and they eng up with a dead body they need to hide and a death they need to fake. Add in a nervous bride, a monster of a groom and a very handsome ex boyfriend popping up, and it gets wild!

There are some hilarious and surprising twists along the way and I was laughing through most of it. The family relationships were so well developed and the dynamics felt so real. I also love the way that Meddy explains her heritage and how it impacts her choices and creates such a complicated family history and family life. If you want Crazy, Rich Asians with a little bit of a murder, this is the book for you!

Follow me on Instagram for more updates.