UNWRAPPING BOOKS PICKS WHAT I READ! 🎁wrapped up revamped - episode 4! january reading vlog

[Music] hey friends and welcome to another episode of wrapped up as and you know we had this series ongoing in december and i really enjoyed doing it it helps me read more because it's only it's only one book for a vlog so it doesn't feel very intimidating and i basically made a decision that at least for the first couple months a year at least for the first half of the year we're gonna continue the series i know i hear you're cheering right now so we're gonna keep doing it once a month and this was actually supposed to be happening later in january like towards the end of january but like i am struggling struggling to read this is exactly what i was afraid of like it's just not happening for me at the start of the year i'm like four books behind schedule like it's not good like it needs to change so i thought i would bump this up because you love it i love it we all love it and let's read a book let's pick a book and wrap it and read it okay so these are still all 2021 new releases that i haven't read i feel like when we first did it we were unwrapping a lot of hardback so i'm feeling like a paperback today and i'm also feeling like what color green what is she green well tamar have you ever watched the show [Music] this one or this one i hate it i i hate choosing these i feel so nervous okay i'm gonna go with this one because this one's quite short and so i feel like we may not have like much to talk about in a vlog so this one's a bit longer oh my god i'm gonna cry so let's go with this one okay can you see what it is yeah oh my god i am so happy okay so we've got the appeal by janice hallett which is one of the books i was most excited to read in general this year like to get to this year i am so so excited for this so if you don't know this is a murder mystery in this queen english town but it's told entirely through emails and texts and letters and stuff like that so the whole book is told through emails etc so i feel like this is actually the perfect thing for me right now because i feel like it will probably get me out of my kind of slump that i've had at the start of the year quite quickly and oh my god i feel blessed wrapped up is really kind to me i feel like wrapped up just like gets me like also janice had its next one is coming out like i think in the next couple months so i'm glad i'm gonna get to read this figure out if i like her stuff and then i can keep reading her stuff if i do oh my god okay i'm gonna go to the gym now and then i will come back and hopefully start reading this this evening [Music] okay so before we get into it i just i just need to clear clear the room you know i need to get something off my chest so obviously you saw me unwrap this okay but i i since when and i i bought this so i never do this okay i just want to say like i never buy another additional book even before i read it right but my mom had read this and she just like gotten [ __ ] on it and it just made me sad reading it so i went and i brought the hardcover this didn't exist when i bought this otherwise i would have never bought this i love hardbacks more this is like kind of clothy i just love it i just absolutely love it it brings me so much more joy i didn't spend any money on it because i had waterstones credit so i didn't even spend any money and i got this for half price anyway so really i've spent less buying these two books than this cost normally so i don't want to hear any critiques i don't want to hear any critiques i don't want to hear anything to haters i'm not your enemy i'm your hero you know cheer up you should be happy i'm here but now i'm going to arrive this morning so now i'm going to be reading from this one let's chat about this so the appeal we are in this quaint english town very agatha christie and we're actually following this group of people which is like an adult amateur drama society where they put on shows and i actually the bar this is so fun for me to to read is when i was a kid i was in the kids version of an adult's theater society like this that's what i went to to go act and so i remember the kinds of people you would get in these groups is often more elderly people and you often have a lot of families in it like parents and and children and that's what this is like so like i'm like does janice hallett live near me like is this based off of what i know it's a conspiracy theory that i'm actually interested in or is this just a very like common occurrence so it's making it really fun for me to read because i'm like i know these people when there's like a meddling like [ __ ] up type person i know who that is when there's a family situation and how that makes it a bit awkward for everyone else like i know this i've lived this so that's really fun for me to read and it is told entirely through mostly emails there's a few text messages i feel like some of the characters i'm like you wouldn't be emailing each other like the younger characters i'm like why are we doing emails here like that doesn't really make sense to me but like i'll take it we'll go along with it whatever i'm 100 pages in so i feel like it's taken me up until now recently to like get a hold of what's happening and to kind of understand everything it definitely took me a while to like understand all the different characters we've got going on it reads very fast so it's not like a hundred pages of a normal book do you know what a normal book like a traditionally written book do you know what i mean it's very different it's like a much faster pace reading experience having to read between the lines a lot but i'm really enjoying it i'm loving the setting like i said the characters we've got a very big cast of characters but it's super interesting and we are kind of reading from the perspective of these two detectives who are going through this with us and trying to figure it out now i already have some theories as to what's going on but i feel like those theories are gonna get solved pretty quickly and we're gonna constantly kind of have new mysteries going on throughout it we don't even know what the case or what the death i assume is a death involved in this like who that is or what's happened we don't know any of that we've really started from the beginning and so we're kind of going through the before do you know what i mean it's not like a normal mystery where like the murders happened and the rest of the book is trying to solve it this is like leading up to the murder which i actually really enjoy i've read a few books i've done that and i've always really enjoyed them so i'm really enjoying it so far i can't tell yet if it's gonna be like a four or a five it's kind of feeling like a four at the moment but like i said we're very much at the beginning so it could really go anywhere and i'm really enjoying the kind of unique sense of storytelling so yeah all i've got to do today is really read this book so i'm just gonna go ahead and chill out and read some of this [Music] and wrote something for me [Music] okay so it's much later i've been for a run so excuse the hair that's just like i don't even know what it's looking like on camera i should have kept my mouth closed so i realized when i last checked in with you i didn't tell you to plot this i just neglected to tell you the plot so basically the granddaughter of the kind of heads of the drama group i think she's got a rare form of cancer she's only two years old and so they basically launched an appeal to raise 250 000 pounds for her to get this drug treatment that is not approved on the nhs yet but like is being sold as the cure for her basically from the beginning i was like i don't trust these [ __ ] like her family you know like the adults because it's obvious they're the head honchos they are the head horn chose like they control the the beating heart of the socializing in this titanic community do you know what i mean like they're the rich [ __ ] so first of all i'm like there's a weird power dynamic here and second of all i'm like you have money that hasn't really been covered yet that much but i'm like you have money like i don't trust you but i feel like that in this book something it's doing really well is making us not trust everyone like there's a big character list and i could go down almost everyone and be like here's why i don't trust this person but i kind of want to get into all of them i was here like 10 years and one of the main characters of following is this strange character called izzy who is like obsessed like obsessed with this other character called sam i'll just go away oh obsessed with me here's the thing reading from izzy's perspective a lot she write this girl writes a lot of emails and she's annoying like it's annoying to read like i it's not i'm like after page 100 i was like i get the point you know what i mean i was like i understand like she's annoying but like i don't need to read it over and over again it's not like a five star for me right now it's probably about a four it's it's strange right i almost think i need to read janice hallett's next book to kind of get used to this style where other books i've read have been mixed media but haven't been solely like one form of media pretty much other books say the good girls guide to murder has mixed media elements interspersed well the illuminae series has mixed media but it's a lot of different forms of mixed media right whereas this is all emails it's just email after email email with occasional text messages signed in but they're not that different to the emails and like constantly read all i'm reading is people's email tone do you know what i mean like you write emails in a different tone so that you speak or to you text or you whatever you know and it's a bit like it's a lot you know like i wish this could have been not just emails which i'm intrigued as to whether janice had its next one is only emails or if maybe it has other mixed media because that's what i feel like this is crying out for i mean actually i lied to you there's been like one one or two police reports maybe um but that has literally been it one or two newspaper articles but like when i'm talking i want a variety i think like every other you know everything should be different you're constantly going in different forms of mixed media if your whole book is going to be mixed media and so it's getting a little bit like a lot like it's getting a little bit like okay like constantly reading in people's email tone of voice they use is strange this is not for me no i don't know and i don't know if i love that element of it but i will say i love how this book is really keeping you on your toes because you don't have like a detective or a narrator to kind of affirm things you find out you kind of have to find like clues out you have to read your lines and you have to make you have to assure yourself that the conclusion you reach from that piece of information is right rather than in a mystery having a detective get a piece of information and then a detective coming to the conclusion you're kind of like having to do that for yourself which is a very interesting reading experience as well so i am enjoying it but it's just like the emails are a lot like i wish there was some stuff that weren't emails and i'm kind of ready for the murder to happen you know right from the beginning it's in the kind of um synopsis that a murder is gonna happen and i'm like girlies the tension is rising let's get a killing because it feels like it we just need something to move the story on a bit it's not a five star which i i feel like i'm a bit disappointed that it's not i feel like maybe you can tell in my demeanor because i wanted this to be an all-time favorite and it it could be like it could turn it around in this last bit and just go absolutely ape [ __ ] but i'm still really enjoying it so i feel like me sounding disappointed doesn't do it justice because i still are having a great time reading it i just wanted it to be like an all-time favorite if that makes sense if i speak i am in in big trouble in big trouble so [ __ ] i am disappointed i'm just gonna throw it out there i'm just gonna say it i'm just gonna say it 3.5 stars it's not the vibe stop i'm giving it 3.5 stars okay 3.5 for me i think in the end the repetitiveness of the emails it got a bit old for me the structure of the story actually didn't work for me you know the murder happens at probably the 75 mark and then we suddenly stop having emails and we get into this really long document that the two like detectives or are they lawyers i don't even know yes these two to your law students are writing to try and like propose what they think happened and so then that is repetitive and then like i feel like at no stage in the book was there enough variation there was like clear blocks in like what was being written you know what i mean but like i feel like everything should have been mixed together a bit more like something i feel like the guest list for example did so well in one perspective or in the past following up to the day of the wedding when there is a death and in the other perspective you're at the night of the wedding trying to figure out what's going on and that worked so well because you are you are leading up to the death the murder like we are in this one but you're also in the present sometimes i just feel like this book was a bit too it's a little bit stagnant it felt a bit stuck in itself at points for me and that's the truth but i will say i really love the experience of reading it like i read this so fast you could not pry it off my hands i was flying through it and i still had a great time reading it but i'm i i don't come out of it going oh i really loved that or i really really enjoyed it and i can't see many flaws with it like there are some floors for me so that's why it's a 3.5 but funnily enough like i am really excited like really really excited to read the author's next book which has just come out which i think is mostly with codes and stuff like that i think before i buy it i may go have a look at it in person and see kind of what the layout on the inside is like because it just felt like it needed a bit more variation throughout for me i will say i also think i thought the the resolution to the murder was a good one it was one that felt satisfying yeah i don't know i feel like this had a lot of possibility but it just didn't quite hit the mark and i don't think this is a good place to start with murder mysteries if you haven't read a lot of them because the structure is a little bit confusing like the kind of getting all of these emails and leading up to the death but the death taking like 75 to happen it's i don't think it's conducive to it like starting with murder mysteries but a lot of people have loved this this has been super successful but for me it just it just missed the mark i feel like i am becoming a little more picky with murder mysteries though perhaps if i had read this when i was a bit more of a newbie to the genre to the you know the idea of that of those books i would have enjoyed it more but i feel like i've just seen this done better and i also felt like some of the tropes and some of the reveals were a little bit like stereotypical we're a little bit like i've seen this story before which whereas with my meta mysteries i know it's really hard but i want the reveals to be something a little bit new so yeah i really enjoyed reading it i'm really excited to read the author's next book but i was still disappointed and i i did still feel a little bit let down by the book so listen we're a little bit sad because i this was like a beyond a five star prediction for me i'm still glad i got this edition because i love it so much more and i i really like i'm gonna it's gonna bring me joy seeing us on my shelves regardless but but yeah i don't know i'm really sad because this was like beyond a five-star prediction for me it was like a 10-star prediction and it wasn't that but it's okay listen like i said i'm gonna continue reading anything that's author writes because it's still it's really hard to find modern murder mysteries you know what i mean so yeah that's where we're ending it i'm sorry guys if you wanted better from me but that's what we're getting um if you've gone to the end leave a red heart emoji because i love this edition so leave a red heart image if you've gone to the end let me know if you thought of this if you read it i know a lot of you have read it like from not my recommendation but from me talking about it and a lot of you been commenting recently like some of you saying you loved it some of you saying you found a bit disappointing so i'd love to know what you thought if you read it especially in response to what i've said and thank you so much for watching and i'll see you very soon in another video bye [Music] you