End of Year wrap-up

Hello everyone, or maybe just the one or two of you that have found my new blog. This is all new to me, but I thought I’d give it a go as I had to write my Australian Women Writers Challenge Wrap-up for 2018.

 

 

So this year was pretty insane for reading, I set myself the goal to read and review 20 books for the AWW challenge and originally 60 books for the Goodreads Reading Challenge. I more than surpassed both of those challenges with 136 books read and reviewed for AWW alone! Pretty crazy really, but then we come to the Goodreads challenge where I read and reviewed over 230 books for 2018.  Anyone would think I did nothing but read, but with my current job as a crane operator for shutdowns up on the mines, there is a ton of downtime which allows for a lot of reading.

I have read some fabulous books this year and find it hard to narrow down some of my favourites, but I’ll give it a go.

I’ve picked 8  books by Australian Women authors and 2 books by Non-Australian Women authors , I’ll start my wrap-up with the Australian authors.

First up we have When Darkness Follows by Athena Daniels a West Australian author, which is part of a fabulous series called Beyond The Grave, I have loved every book in this series which I would put in the Romantic paranormal suspense category and is definitely one of my favourite series, next year book 5 will be released and I can’t wait.

Next we travel back to Victorian times with The Elusive Earl by Maddison Michaels ,  I actually read the first book in the Saints and Scoundrels series; The Devilish Duke this year also and it was a tough call as to which was my favourite. These are fun and sexy with strong heroines who challenge our leading men.

From Victorian times to country Australia we have a fabulously fun romantic comedy It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time by Kylie Scott. I found this to be unputdownable and was up literally all night reading, it was only supposed to be one chapter before bed.

The Lost Flowers Of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland was a debut novel and a surprise for me that I found it was was full of heart, love, pain, loss, betrayal and hope. Set in Australia’s Central Desert it was a beautiful story of growth and finding out who we are.

A YA book that I loved was P Is For Pearl by Eliza Henry-Jones and was so beautifully written that it was like pure poetry and I defintely want to go back and read it again. Set in a seaside town in Tasmania it was a beautiful and moving story that spoke straight to my heart.

Dustfall by Michelle Johnston was a dual timeline story, a story that needed to be told, a time in Australia’s history that has been forgotten an event which was covered up for years by money hungry companies, whose workers are still fighting battles in court.

I loved In At the Deep End by Penelope Janu, this one also kept me up well past my bedtime as I didn’t want to put it down, an enjoyable and emotional story.

The last Australian author is Natasha Lester whose book A Kiss From Mr Fitzgerald was one I’d had on my Extrodinarily long (try neverending) TBR list for ages and can’t understand why it took me so long to get to it. This is one of my favourite historical fiction novels for the year.

Now we have a New Zealand author Carole Brungar who has written 2 historical fiction novels set around the Vietnam war. I’ve read both of them this year, the first The Nam Legacy was such an amazing read, but with book 2 The Nam Shadow, Carole completely blew me away, what a read! An absolutely amazing story that I highly recommend.

Last but not least we have Lights Out Lucy by Elicia Hyder, I’ve read all her books, but this was something different to her paranormal romance, this was romantic comedy at it’s best and taught me a lot about roller derby; well to tell you the truth I had to google some YouTube clips as I had no idea.

So those are my 10 favourite reads for 2018, but as I said it was extremely hard to pick just 10 from so many. If you want to check out any of the other books I read and my thoughts on them head to goodreads and have a browse. I hope you’ll join me on my reading journey next year, I’m thinking a monthly post on what I’ve been reading each month and maybe an author highlight or two.

Until next year, Merry Christmas and happy reading

Claire Louisa xxxx