Welcome to From the Front porch, a conversational podcast about books, small business, and life in the South.

Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands.

Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much.

I'm Annie Jones, owner of the Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in beautiful downtown Thomasville, Georgia.

And this week, I'm recapping the books I read in July.

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Okay, let's talk July reading and July books. My July was very full with lots of traveling.

And when it came time to prepare for this episode, I realized, and this is just full transparency, I realized I had read two books, two books in July.

And if you are also looking at your not dwindling TBR stack, or you are realizing summer is coming to a close and you did not read what you thought you were going to read.

This is your sign of solidarity because reading is part of my job.

And I knew I could not just talk about two books in a reading recap. I immediately got to work finishing up some books I had started reading books that I just happened to pick up because I thought I could probably fly through that.

And I wound up reading some really, really excellent books to close out the month. But if you are feeling a little bit like, wait, I didn't read anything this month, you're not alone.

My July was just so much travel and market and being with friends for the fourth, it just I did not read a lot.

And then I also started a lot of books that I did not finish. That's something that comes up on the podcast a lot is do you ever not finish a book and the answer is yes.

There are all kinds of books that I start and don't finish either because I didn't like them because the release date, you know, affects shelf subscription selections because somebody else on staff is reading it because I just don't like it because it's not for me.

And that happened a lot this month, even a couple of audiobooks Jordan and I started to listen to on road trips just not work even a couple that came recommended just did not work.

And so anyway, if you wanted some solidarity, this is me offering you solidarity. That being said, I did actually finish several books this month, thanks to looking at a looming deadline and realizing I needed to read more and many of them were really good.

So I want to start with the summer of broken rules. This is by K L. Water and it's a young adult novel that I believe released last year.

This was recommended to me by book seller Kindle and part of the reason she recommended it to me is because last year she and I both read the book that was kind of one of the

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