I have fallen behind on posting about what I and the members of my book club have read for Chantel’s Read Your Bookshelf Challenge, but I have kept up with reading books for the challenge. For October, we were supposed to read a book with the first letter of the title matching the first letter of the author’s last name of the book we read in September. Since I read All the Lost Places by Amanda Dykes and Allerednic by Chautona Havig for the previous month, I chose to read Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster and The Hearts of New Cheltenham by Chautona Havig (ignore the “The” at the beginning of the title, my friends did). I actually read all of the currently published New Cheltenham books within a month so I could get to this one for this challenge.
I have heard about Daddy-Long-Legs from a couple of people on BookTube who share similar reading tastes as myself. I decided to give it a try as it fit both this prompt and one for Chautona’s Anne-tober (I wrote about all of the books I read for that challenge here). I was definitely in the mood for an epistolary novel when I picked this book up. The first couple of years Jerusha/Judy spent at college appealed to me since she becomes a bookworm and learns how to navigate the real world. As she becomes more refined and ladylike in her last two years, I did not like her as much. I started this book with it already slightly spoiled for me, and Judy’s interactions with the man who ends up being “Daddy” felt questionable to me. They would definitely raise red flags for some modern readers. Overall, I gave the book 4 stars. I still haven’t decided if I will read the sequel.
Like I mentioned earlier, I ended up reading all of the currently available (a new one comes out next month) New Cheltenham Shopkeepers books in the span of a month so I could get to this one as a book with a title starting with “H”. I had Kindle Unlimited at the time, so I took advantage of having all of the books available to me for free. I really enjoyed the first and fourth books in the series. Chautona really sets up an interesting story with The Ghosts of New Cheltenham, and I loved the literary themed dates in The Stars of New Cheltenham. The Hearts of New Cheltenham follows Jarod as he is forced to take a month-long vacation while his work is shut down for maintenance and upgrades. His friend Crystal sends him to New Cheltenham in the hopes he will become interested in a woman there and no longer want to discuss their marriage pact from 10 years ago. It was fun watching Jarod go from clueless to fully invested in a relationship. I look forward to seeing more of him and Ellie when Crystal comes to visit in the next book. I ended up giving this book 4 stars and will probably put it in my rotation of books to read at Christmas.
Other books my friends read for this month included:
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
- The Enchanted Hill
- The Dark Lord’s Daughter by Patricia C. Wrede
- The Extraordinary Deaths of Mrs. Kip by Sara Brunsvold