Milwaukee

OUT OF THE LOOP by Katie Siegel 4/5 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ For the last two years, Amie has woken up to the same date on the calendar. Stuck in a time loop, she spends her days making subtle changes to her routine trying unsuccessfully to alter the timeline around her. Then, for the first time in over seven hundred days, she wakes up to rain outside her window and knows she is free! Unfortunately, Amie is shocked to discover that on the day she thought she knew like the back of her hand, her upstairs neighbour was murdered and her best friend down the hall is now being framed! As Amie gets reacquainted with time moving on and tries to remember what she did differently on her final day in the time loop,  I thought the concept for this was really unique: time loop stories usually focus on escaping and returning to the character’s everyday life, but what happens AFTER the time loop when you’ve become so accustomed to the exact same day again and again and how might that affect you and your relationships. Add a fun little murder mystery to the mix and you’ve got a great read! I found the ending wrapped just a touch too quickly for me, but overall this was an excellent addition to the genre! #OutOfTheLoop #CurrentlyReading #Bookstagram #Book2Baker #MiksPicks

THIRTY LOVE by Tom Vellner 4.5/5 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Leo Chambers is in the top ten of professional tennis players in the world and is intent on winning the US Open before he turns 30 next year. Standing in Leo’s way is his longtime rival, Gabe Montoya, who plays a great game of tennis... and looks great doing it. Even more than the pressure to win the US Open, Leo knows he has to keep the fact that he is gay a secret. But then, just as the season is beginning, Gabe comes out publicly, making him the first out gay man in professional tennis! Leo admires Gabe’s strength and wonders if he could do the same after the competition. He also wonders if the tension and attraction he feels when playing Gabe on the court might have always been mutual? It was actually here on Bookstagram where I saw the author’s featured post about his new gay tennis romance coming out soon, and I’m so glad my library had it available! In our current HEATED RIVALRY obsessed world, this was a sweeter romance that focused on the sport and on the characters evolving and falling in love. I’ve never been a big sports fan, but I caught myself really rooting for Leo and Gabe when playing tennis and I truly celebrated their wins as if I were actually in the stands, proving to me just how well THIRTY LOVE was written.  #ThirtyLove #CurrentlyReading #Bookstagram #Book2Baker #MiksPicks

ATMOSPHERE by Taylor Jenkins Reid 5/5 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ For the first time, NASA has announced they are looking for female scientists to join training and become astronauts. Joan Goodwin, whose only two cares in the world are her niece Frances and the stars, is overjoyed when she is selected from the thousands of applicants. That’s where she meets Vanessa Ford and everything Joan thought she understood about herself and the world begins to shift. When Joan and Vanessa each have an opportunity to fly into space, it’s not gravity that pulls them back to earth, but each other. TJR has obviously had a ton of hype over the last few years, but this is the first book of hers that piqued my interest enough to place a hold at my library - historical fiction about lesbian astronauts, yes please! - and it took five months to become available, again showing just how popular ATMOSPHERE and its author are. I was immediately pulled in by the drama and tension of the opening chapters, and I dreaded returning to my real life because I never wanted to put this book down. Already half-way to my Reading Challenge goal, I can easily say ATMOSPHERE will be a favourite read of 2026. #Atmosphere #CurrentlyReading #Bookstagram #Book2Baker #MiksPicks

THE REBELLIOUS TIDE by Eddy Boudel Tan 3.5/5 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️ cw: assault, sexual harassment, human trafficking When twenty-nine-year-old Sebastian’s mother dies after years of illness and a lifetime of poverty, he leaves Quebec and joins the crew of a Mediterranean cruise ship as their photographer. He is searching for his father, who left his mother before Sebastian was born, and who he discovered is one of the ship’s captains. Already angry at this man for abandoning him and his mother, Sebastian leads a massive revolt in the cabin crew when he sees his father’s dictator-like way of running the ship. Tensions rise, a class war emerges, and Sebastian makes a discovery about the Glacier that could ruin the entire crew.  I flew through the audiobook for this on some longer commutes earlier this month and really enjoyed the pacing of the story, as once the action started it never seemed to stop. SPOILER: I was not expecting Sebastian to discover the ship was a human trafficking ring, but that especially made for a very tense second half! As a lover of Greek mythology, I felt some of the references and symbols in this book to be a bit too on the nose, and the ending was rushed with too little explanation of where all our side characters - so heavily featured throughout the story - ended up. However, I enjoyed this more than I can critique it, so it gets a spot on the ‘gram.  #TheRebelliousTide #CurrentlyReading #Bookstagram #Book2Baker #MiksPicks

EVERYONE IN THIS BANK IS A THIEF by Benjamin Stevenson 5/5 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ After the success of his third murder mystery - and yet another near-death experience of his own - Ernest Cunningham and his fiancee Juliette are hunting for funding to start a private investigation business, hoping for an easier life catching cheating spouses or finding missing persons. Their final hope is Huxley’s Bank, where the owner, Winston Huxley, is more than happy to help Ern... if only his vault weren’t locked and the only one with the code - Winston’s brother Edward - hadn’t gone missing just two days prior. Ernest is promised the loan he needs if he can find Edward, but just when he begins his search, the gun goes off and Ernest is officially a hostage in a small-town, big-bank heist. I have loved these books since Day One, and not having a new Ernest Cunningham book for all of 2025 made for a slog of a year. Today, though, I experienced a perfect birthday: reading this book in its entirety... and then meeting the author at a Cozy Mystery talk! I love these books and ones like it because our narrator is both a character in the story experiencing things for the first time and also removed enough to speak with readers about what they’re learning and what they should pay attention too. It makes me feel like I have a chance at solving the mystery, and yet I never seem to beat Ernest Cunningham to the solution!  #EveryoneInThisBankIsAThief #ErnestCunningham #CurrentlyReading #Book2Baker #MiksPicks

FOUR AUNTIES AND A WEDDING by Jesse Q Sutanto 4/5 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ As the photographer in her extremely successful wedding-planning family business, Meddelin Chan is going to ensure every detail of her own wedding is perfect. In sweeps the Weitings, another Chinese-Indonesian family promising to take care of everything, and Meddy, her Ma, and her three Aunties feel this is too good to be true. Unfortunately, this proves to be the case when, the night before the wedding, Meddy overhears a phone call and discovers that her ceremony is a cover for the Weitings to murder! When their only niece’s wedding is in jeopardy, it’s the Aunties to the rescue going face-to-face with the mafia!   I love these Aunties and all their quirks. And I love that inside of a heartwarming and hilarious story, the author is willing and successfully able to show us so much of her life with different - sometimes clashing - Asian cultures. There’s no one way to be Asian, there’s no one way to be an immigrant, and there’s no one way to be a family. I really enjoyed FOUR AUNTIES AND A WEDDING and read the whole thing in two days; I just wasn’t blown away like I was with DIAL A FOR AUNTIES, but I think that’s due to losing the shock factor and the possible expectations I had from the first book. #FourAuntiesAndAWedding #DialAForAunties #CurrentlyReading #Book2Baker #MiksPicks

TALES OF A SIXTH-GRADE MUPPET by Kirk Scroggs 4.5/5 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Danvers Blickensderfer LOVES the Muppets, especially his all-time hero, Gonzo the Great! After an especially hard day losing at his school talent show, a mysterious green flash fills his bedroom that night and Danvers wakes up the next morning with felt skin, canary-yellow hair, a flip-top mouth, and a round, red, detachable nose! Danvers isn’t the only thing affected by the green flash, though: the world of the Muppets seems to have merged with his, and he lands himself an internship at the Muppet Theatre, working for Gonzo! Though this seems like a dream come true at first, it’s not long before Danvers misses his regular life as a regular boy. It should come as no surprise to anyone that I’m as big a Muppet fan as Danvers Blickensderfer, and I loved imagining what it would be like for the Muppets to infiltrate MY city and experience them in my everyday life (some close to me would argue that I’m the Muppet in their life, to which I say “thank you”). It is so clear that the author is a huge Muppet fan as well, since these books are jam-packed with references to many Muppet projects and some of the more obscure Henson characters. Are these Literature-That-Is-Changing-The-World? Hard to say... But they’re an excellent addition to any Muppet-fan’s collection, and I look forward to using them to connect to the next generation of Muppet-heads. #TalesOfASixthGradeMuppet @themuppets #CurrentlyReading #Bookstagram #Book2Baker #MiksPicks

JAMES by Percival Everett 5/5 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The day Jim runs away to avoid being sold, Huck Finn fakes his own death to escape his abusive father. Knowing the whole town will assume Jim murdered Huck, the two float down the Mississippi River together to find a new life in a free state. Jim’s entire purpose is to free his wife and daughter whom he left behind, but every time he and Huck separate, they find their way back to one another.  I read THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN as a kid at some point, so it was really interesting to read JAMES now. During this read, I could never remember what adventure Jim and Huck would experience next, but as I read each chapter, certain details did come back to my memory. As this was told from Jim’s perspective, though, we had completely different insight into how some of the events may have occurred (“three sides to every story,” and all that), as well as how a slave in that time may have carried themselves differently when among varying company.  #James #CurrentlyReading #BookClub #Book2Baker #MiksPicks

STRANGE BUILDINGS by Uketsu Translated by Jim Rion 4.5/5 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ As our narrator continues to ponder the unusual floorplans submitted to them, patterns and similarities begin to show. It’s clear the building company responsible for many of these homes is hiding a dark secret, but everyone interviewed about their homes is just as shady, proving it difficult to move forward in the investigation. Speculation abounds, until the pieces of this puzzle fall perfectly into place.  Though the plot of STRANGE BUILDINGS is quite difficult to describe, the unease I enjoyed so much in STRANGE HOUSES continues. The structure of this book was a little different - readers are given all the clues to start, and then we read as the narrator solves the puzzle - but the repeated images and flowcharts in the second half of the book helped keep the files in order, especially as this one was significantly longer than Uketsu’s first two mysteries. I was able to deduce points and connections moments before reading them, which in my opinion makes an excellent mystery - letting the reader feel they are the ones doing the solving.  #StrangeBuildings #StrangeHouses #CurrentlyReading #Book2Baker #MiksPicks

ABIGAIL AND ALEXA SAVE THE WEDDING by Lian Dolan 5/5 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Penny and Chase are so very in love and supportive of each other’s plans and goals. So when Chase proposes and Penny accepts, everyone is thrilled... except Alexa, soon-to-be Mother of the Bride, and Abigail, future Mother of the Groom. Alexa was a single mother and can’t understand why anyone would choose a relationship over a career. Abigail is worried about the cost of hosting a destination wedding, barely keeping her family afloat as it is. And whenever the two women speak, they just cannot find common ground. All of that will have to be swept aside, however, because when the upcoming nuptials reach crisis mode, two mothers’ love may be the only thing that can fix it all.  As the weather began to warm up this week, I was transported to Montecito, California and Patmos, Greece through the excellent narration of the audiobook for ABIGAIL AND ALEXA SAVE THE WEDDING. I was pulled into the story by each and every character - no side character was too small to receive a bit of backstory or a development arc, and it made for an entirely real-life experience. There were so many scenes or montages where I could perfectly visualize how this would appear on screen in a movie, so I’m gonna need someone to get working on that ASAP please.  #AbigailAndAlexaSaveTheWedding #CurrentlyReading #Bookstagram #Book2Baker #MiksPicks

GAME CHANGER by Rachel Reid 3.5/5 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Kip Grady isn’t happy selling smoothies every morning and working as an event-waiter at night, instead of putting his history degree to good use. The only excitement lately has been Scott Hunter - captain of the New York Admirals hockey team - frequenting his smoothie shop, convinced that Kip’s blueberry smoothies are the good luck charm that broke the Admirals’ recent slump. Then Scott invites Kip to a game, and then to dinner, then to his apartment, and it’s not long before Kip is the official-but-secret boyfriend to New York’s (and the NHL’s) most eligible bachelor. Their romance could not be better and the men quickly fall in love, but Scott is under too much pressure with playoff season approaching and the secrecy is taking a toll on them both.  I think my favourite thing about being in a book club that includes new- and non-readers is that we don’t have to read “serious” books all the time. Instead, an EXTREMELY smutty, gay hockey romance followed by a pole dance class is exactly what friends need to celebrate Valentine’s month together. #GameChanger #CurrentlyReading #BookClub #Book2Baker #MiksPicks

LEGENDS & LATTES by Travis Baldree 4/5 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Viv is hopeful as she enters the city of Thune, her mind set on opening the first coffee shop here after recently falling in love with the beverage on one of her last bounty hunts. Fortunately, she has the Scalvert’s Stone, which legend says will bring the bearer great fortune - fortune Viv knows she’ll need since only gnomes seem to know what coffee is in the first place. The Stone seems to be working as Viv finds a location, and a carpenter, then a succubus willing to become her barista and a rat who loves baking pastries. However badly Viv wants to settle down, though, hunting and killing bad guys has been her whole life, and it’s hard to walk away, especially with ghosts from her past knocking at the door.  If some cozy books are warm hugs, wrapping us up and holding us tight, LEGENDS & LATTES is a warm cup of cocoa (sorry, but I don’t actually like coffee), fueling our hearts and souls from the inside out. I think I was expecting a little more romance from friends’ descriptions, but I actually loved how this was mostly a story of friendship instead. Viv is lucky to have so many people (creatures?) in her corner, proving that we all need a support system for our dreams to come true.  #LegendsAndLattes #CurrentlyReading #Bookstagram #Book2Baker #MiksPicks