New Releases: August 2018

I don’t know why, but I’m really not in the mood for reading these days. I know – shocker. I mean, I still like to read, but I’m less inclined to find new authors and books. Just give me some rereads during summer and I’m happy, you know? We’ll just blame it on the heat :p I do feel like that’s kind of obvious when you look at this post though – only 4 books? For an entire month? What even is this? The new releases August 2018 I’m most looking forward to!

1. Good Luck With That (Kristan Higgins)

Emerson, Georgia, and Marley have been best friends ever since they met at a weight-loss camp as teens. When Emerson tragically passes away, she leaves one final wish for her best friends: to conquer the fears they still carry as adults.

For each of them, that means something different. For Marley, it’s coming to terms with the survivor’s guilt she’s carried around since her twin sister’s death, which has left her blind to the real chance for romance in her life. For Georgia, it’s about learning to stop trying to live up to her mother’s and brother’s ridiculous standards, and learning to accept the love her ex-husband has tried to give her.

But as Marley and Georgia grow stronger, the real meaning of Emerson’s dying wish becomes truly clear: more than anything, she wanted her friends to love themselves.

Tragedy, self love and friendship – what more does a summer read need?

Expected Publication Date: August 7th (Goodreads)

2. Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present (Peter Vronsky)

From the author of Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters comes an in-depth examination of sexual serial killers throughout human history, how they evolved, and why we are drawn to their horrifying crimes.

Before the term was coined in 1981, there were no “serial killers.” There were only “monsters”–killers society first understood as werewolves, vampires, ghouls and witches or, later, Hitchcockian psychos.

In Sons of Cain–a book that fills the gap between dry academic studies and sensationalized true crime–investigative historian Peter Vronsky examines our understanding of serial killing from its prehistoric anthropological evolutionary dimensions in the pre-civilization era (c. 15,000 BC) to today. Delving further back into human history and deeper into the human psyche than Serial Killers–Vronsky’s 2004 book, which has been called “the definitive history of the phenomenon of serial murder”–he focuses strictly on sexual serial killers: thrill killers who engage in murder, rape, torture, cannibalism and necrophilia, as opposed to for-profit serial killers, including hit men, or “political” serial killers, like terrorists or genocidal murderers.

These sexual serial killers differ from all other serial killers in their motives and their foundations. They are uniquely human and–as popular culture has demonstrated–uniquely fascinating.

Does this sound like the kind of thing I probably shouldn’t be wanting to read because I have an overactive imagination as is and this book just has “personalized nightmares written all over it”? Yes. Do I still really want to read it? Also yes. It’s history, you know? Even if it is the macabre kind 🙂

Expected publication date: August 14th (Goodreads)

3. Adequate Yearly Progress (Roxanna Elden)

A workplace novel that captures teaching with humor, insight, and heart. This perspective-hopping debut follows teachers at an urban high school as their professional lives impact their personal lives and vice versa.

Each year brings familiar educational challenges to Brae Hill Valley, a struggling high school in one of Texas’s bigger cities. But the school’s teachers face plenty of challenges of their own. English teacher Lena Wright, a spoken-word poet with a deep love for her roots, can never seem to satisfy her students that she’s for real. Hernan D. Hernandez is confident in front of his biology classes, yet tongue-tied around the woman he most wants to impress: namely, Lena. Down the hall, math teacher Maybelline Galang focuses on the numbers as she blocks out problems whose solutions aren’t so clear, while Coach Ray hustles his football team toward another winning season, at least on the field. Recording it all is idealistic history teacher Kaytee Mahoney, whose blog gains new readers by the day but drifts ever further from her in-class reality.

And this year, a new celebrity superintendent is determined to leave his own mark on the school—even if that means shutting the whole place down. The fallout will shake up the teachers’ lives both inside and outside the classroom.

Well… You can get the teacher out of the school, but you can’t get the school out of the teacher? Also, this sounds like it will have just the right balance of characters to really really like and to very strongly dislike… So again: right up my ally 🙂

Expected publication date: August 1st (Goodreads)

4. Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women & Witchcraft (Tess Sharpe a.o.)

A young adult fiction anthology of 15 stories featuring contemporary, historical, and futuristic stories featuring witchy heroines who are diverse in race, class, sexuality, religion, geography, and era.

Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

Glinda the Good Witch. Elphaba the Wicked Witch. Willow. Sabrina. Gemma Doyle. The Mayfair Witches. Ursula the Sea Witch. Morgan le Fey. The three weird sisters from Macbeth.

History tells us women accused of witchcraft were often outsiders: educated, independent, unmarried, unwilling to fall in line with traditional societal expectations.

Bold. Powerful. Rebellious.

A bruja’s traditional love spell has unexpected results. A witch’s healing hands begin to take life instead of giving it when she ignores her attraction to a fellow witch. In a terrifying future, women are captured by a cabal of men crying witchcraft and the one true witch among them must fight to free them all. In a desolate past, three orphaned sisters prophesize for a murderous king. Somewhere in the present, a teen girl just wants to kiss a boy without causing a hurricane.

From good witches to bad witches, to witches who are a bit of both, this is an anthology of diverse witchy tales from a collection of diverse, feminist authors. The collective strength of women working together—magically or mundanely–has long frightened society, to the point that women’s rights are challenged, legislated against, and denied all over the world. Toil & Trouble delves deep into the truly diverse mythology of witchcraft from many cultures and feminist points of view, to create modern and unique tales of witchery that have yet to be explored.

Are these new releases all over the place this month? Yes. But I’m also feeling kind of adventurous, in a way. And apparently, well… I’m in just the right mood to torture myself with books about serial killers and witches. Is it October yet? :p

Expected publication date: August 28th (Goodreads)

What books being published in August are you most looking forward to? Any that might get me back (more) into reading? Be sure to let me know below!

-Saar