I really enjoyed the excerpts from these 2018 releases! I was really caught by The Glitch, I definitely want to add this to my TBR. I liked the writing style and was instantly drawn in by the plot, and I’m not sure where it’s going to go. Thank you for these excerpts, I enjoyed reading them!

This is a GREAT way to get insight to future releases and a fabulous way to build your TBR! I hope to see one of these for 2024!

Refreshing Reads Summer Excerpt Sampler contains extracts from The High Season by Judy Blundell, The Glitch by Elizabeth Cohen, A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza, Ghosted by Rosie Walsh and Baby's First Felony by John Straley. This sampler was a great way to discover stories from authors I hadn't heard of before.

The High Season is a contemporary fiction which follows the lives of the people living in a beach town in Long Island. This book isn't the sort of thing I would usually gravitate towards and unfortunately I found the extract of this book to be quite slow and I didn't find that I connected to the characters. Therefore I wouldn't be interested in reading the rest of this book.

The Glitch is a contemporary, women's fiction novel which explores the pressures of motherhood, work and marriage. The premise of this sounded really interesting and unique so I was excited to read the extract. However I found I wasn't really able to get into the writing style so won't be reading on.

A Place for Us is a literary fiction novel about a wedding in an Indian-American family which explores themes of identity, love and belonging. The premise of this sounded really interesting and I ended up loving the writing style in the extract as it was beautifully written and very emotional. I definitely will be picking this up in the future.

Ghosted is a romance novel about Sarah and Eddie who are happily in love until Eddie gets on a plane and doesn't phone her when he lands like he promises to. I found the extract a bit slow and slightly cliched so I'm not convinced I would ever pick this book up to read the rest of it.

Baby's First Felony is a detective novel in Straley's Cecil Younger series. Having not read the rest of the series I was slightly hesitant going into the extract. I loved the setting but feel I would've got more out of it if I had read the rest of the series which I may get round to doing some day.

This excerpt featured five different books. The only author that I recognized was Rosie Walsh because I had read her book ‘The Love of My Life’ this summer, This books seemed most intriguing to me because I enjoy romance books. I would like to read more of this book.

For the other books in the excerpt, The High Season is one that I can relate to because my parents have a house at the beach and it is the source of wonderful memories for my family, I can’t imagine having to rent it out for the whole summer and missing all of that time at the beach house,

The Glitch excerpt that I read was about a couple vacationing in France and while the mother is distracted with a work phone call, her daughter goes missing, I have three children, and this is a nightmare scenario, if I read this entire book, I would be in the edge of my seat!

A Place For Us seems like a book about family, and it takes place at a family wedding where siblings and family members are estranged from one another, This book seems intriguing to me because I like books about families and weddings and secrets.

The last excerpt was for Baby’s First Felony. The book takes place in Alaska, and I have always wanted to visit Alaska. I think this makes for an interesting settling for a book and I would like to read more of this book.

Great sampler to get you introduced to multiple summer reads so you can pick the perfect book. Thank you so much for this!

Greatly intriguing samplers to help you decide which one of these books, or if multiple, would suit your reading tastes. I really appreciate this since thrillers are not my go-to genre and I often have difficulty deciding which I should look for.

The excerpts provided in this sampler intrigue me as a reader. I'll be checking out the full novels and adding them to my TBR.

Even though this sampler was put out in 2018, I had never read or even heard of most of these books. I love these samplers because I can read little bits of a lot of books and decide which ones I want to add to my TBR list.

This excerpt is so perfect. It left me at a satisfying thirst to buy the book and finish it as soon as possible.

Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Random House for the chance to read these excerpts!

I love the idea of a collection of lighter reads for the summer -- my experience in reading various sampler collections has been that many of them are either too self-serious and literary, or too dark and terrifying.

Our first sample, THE HIGH SEASON by Judy Blundell, seems very much like a classic beach read. The protagonist family literally owns a house on the beach, and rents it out to wealthy people over the summer in order to afford living in it the rest of the year. This arrangement makes sense to me but creates resentment in the heroine Ruthie's daughter Jem and ex-husband Mike. I'm not exactly sure how this book will play out but I'm sure there will be soul searching about what family means and how to live a meaningful life and whether it's better to live in a fancy house for 9 months each year or a moderate house all year round.

THE GLITCH by Elisabeth Cohen got on my nerves, as the opening scene is two Very Busy and Important People (a stockbroker and a Silicon Valley executive, I think) being very busy and important on phone calls, and losing their 4-year-old daughter. This sounds like it will be a satire of unpleasant people, and my preferred approach is just to not read about unpleasant people.

A PLACE FOR US by Fatima Farheen Mirza was the book I'm most excited about, though I was a little irritated at the tagline at the beginning which was basically like, "for fans of these other nonwhite authors who don't write about the US!" [Now that I've looked at the cover copy and seen that this is set in California I'm even more annoyed at the tagline "for fans of authors who bring the faraway close."] The sketches of the family dynamics at this big wedding are intriguing, and the little details sprinkled in--a navy sari, a table with glasses of mango juice--conjure up a lavish event.

I'm leery of GHOSTED by Rosie Walsh simply because it starts out with this perfect, sudden, overwhelming love which can only mean that separation will ensue (the title provides a hint, too). I much prefer a structure of the classic genre romance, where the relationship between two people IS the main conflict rather than the inciting incident.

BABY'S FIRST FELONY by John Straley is quirky but intriguing. The criminal defense side of the justice system is an interesting one, relevant to many social justice conversations today, and I will read this with a cautious eye toward whether the tone toward convicted people is sympathetic or judgmental.

Ultimately I can see where each of these are considered "lighter" reads than typical literary fare, even if not all of them worked for me. I look forward to checking out A PLACE FOR US and BABY'S FIRST FELONY, though!

Oh how I love these sampler collections! They always leave me impatiently awaiting the release dates for the multiple new additions to my TBR!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me a free digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

5 stars.

This sampler collection is the perfect mix of all things summer. Seeing as the warmer months are right around the corner, I will definitely be picking up the books featured in this collection.

I received a complimentary review copy of the Refreshing Reads Summer Excerpt Sampler (Summer 2018) from NetGalley.

This sampler includes extended previews of 5 novels. I really enjoyed being able to preview enough of the book to know whether I'd be interested enough to read the whole thing. Each excerpt starts with a page showing the book cover, publication date, plot description, titles of some similar-interest books to give readers some tips on whether they'd enjoy this book, and a quote from a professional review.

This was an unusual thing to read. As for reviewing it, it covers excerpts from 5 books. Some of the excerpts were not interesting at all and I really only found 1 book worth seeking out. So I am not reviewing the excerpts in themselves. I am reviewing the concept. This was a good idea as it gave me 5 books to consider without spending too much time on each.

"Quench your Literary Thirst": I love that title for a summer sampler. I already recognize three titles that were on my radar (Ghosted, A Place for Us, High Season) and I am looking forward to discovering the other two!

Thank you for this sampler! Many of these books look interesting and I've put several of these novels on my tbr/interest list.

I appreciate the opportunity to read excerpts from popular, cutting edge authors to allow me to familiarize myself with them and their work in a short period of time.

This sampler is a year old, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a few gems worth mining. What's great is the books I like here are already out so I don't have to wait to finish them.

Thanks so much for this sampler I didn't realize this was from 2018 but I found a very interesting book that I must have overlooked last summer. I own one and I have read Ghosted and liked it. A Place For Us and The High Season I will be looking for when I visit the bookstore


Thanks again for this sampler

I loved the short samples of these summer reads! They really whet my appetite to read all of them!! The cover was enticing and made the summer days seem not so far away.