The Reading Room

Welcome to The Reading Room

Welcome 👋

If you’ve found your way here — I’m so glad you did. I’m Toni. I’m a developmental editor, a part-time bookseller, a mom, and a person who has genuinely never met a TBR pile she didn’t immediately make too ambitious 😆

For years, most of my writing about books has lived on Instagram — in captions and comments and DM threads with an incredible community over at @readwithtoni. Those conversations are honestly some of the best parts of my week. But I’ve been wanting a bigger space. Somewhere I can think out loud a little longer about the things I care about most: how stories work, why certain books stay with us long after we’ve finished them, and what it’s actually like to spend your days inside other people’s manuscripts.

Little Free Library Treasures

The LFLs I visited on vacation 📚

Every year we visit the RI shore, we spend an hour visiting the same Little Free Libraries in the area — and I always check whether any new ones have popped up since last summer. We love this tradition. It’s always so fun to see what treasures are waiting.

Here’s what I found this year:

• All Boys Aren’t Blue
• Bad Vibes Only
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
• Miller’s Valley
• Deep Cuts
• The Four Winds
• The Future Saints

The only one I’ve actually read is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — but I grabbed it because I loved it and wanted my own copy on the shelf. The rest are the fun kind of gamble: books I might never have picked up, now sitting in my bag because a stranger’s little wooden box put them in my path.

It Isn't a Beach Vacation Without Carley

I love reading Carley Fortune on the beach. 🏖️

I know I’m safe in her hands. I’ve loved some of her books more than others, but I’ve never hated or been disappointed by a single one — and there’s something wonderful about that as a reader. When you’re packing for vacation and you want the sure thing, the author you can hand your limited reading hours to without a second thought, that trust is worth a lot.

Destiny or Chance?

A great read for the summer! 🌞 I picked up One & Only by Maurene Goo for the beach and it turned out to be so much more than I expected.

Summary — Cassia Park, 39, works for her family’s magical matchmaking business that divines soulmates through past-life face reading. She has spent a decade searching for her “fated” match, Daniel Nam. However, on the eve of her 40th birthday, she falls for an impulsive, handsome younger man named Ellis — only to discover his boss is none other than Daniel Nam. She is forced to choose between destiny and chance.

July Came in Hot

July came in hot — literally. 🥵

I made a smaller stack this month, because most of my reading time is going to be with my kids. We have a library stack we’re working our way through before we get to the ones we own and planned for the summer, and I’m really looking forward to those.

Here’s what I’m hoping to read:

• The Name Game
• Caramelo
• One Summer in Savannah
• Laws of Love and Logic
• A Far-Flung Life — #readwithtoni
• The Coming Wave — #readtolearn
• The One Day You Were My Husband
• The Keeper
• The Children
• Heather

Not pictured (but very much on the list):

Summer Is for Family Read-Alouds

Summer is for family read-alouds! ☀️📖

Today is my kids’ last day of school — bye, 7th and 3rd grade — and we are looking forward to lots of reading out loud together. Some of these we’ll read all as a family, some are for my son to tackle on his own, and some are just for my daughter and me.

Here’s the stack:

• Wishtree
• Ruby in the Sky
• Bridge to Terabithia
• Tuck Everlasting
• Hello, Universe
• Astrid the Unstoppable
• Alice with a Why
• Chronicles of Whetherwhy
• Superteacher
• Faker
• The Firefly Summer
• The Second Life of Snap
• Esperanza Rising
• We Dream of Space

There’s a particular joy to reading aloud that I don’t think ever really goes away, even as the kids get older. You slow down. You hear the sentences. You catch the small choices an author made that you’d have skimmed right past on your own — and honestly, as an editor, that’s some of the best craft-reading I do all year. Middle grade especially rewards it; the good ones are doing so much with so few words.

54 Miles

A new favorite by Pitts?

Together, a group of readers and I have read (some were a reread for a few of us) though Leonard Pitts Jr.’s backlist and let me tell you, it was amazing. Reading them in order of publication we really got a chance to see him hone his craft. From the beginning though, we could see his strength, his ability to write well-developed characters.

54 Miles was new to me (I had been saving it to read with the group), it followed some characters from his previous book The Last Thing You Surrender and I loved it even more than Surrender. It even rivals my absolute favorite by him, Freeman so I guess I’ll just say the two are tied for that spot.

The Last Thing You Surrender

“Make sure your decency, your humanity, is the last thing you give up.”

Summary - Set during World War II, that explores themes of race, war, and morality through the interconnected stories of three characters from Jim Crow Alabama: a white Marine, a Black woman working in a shipyard, and a Black man who joins the segregated 761st Tank Battalion. The novel follows their individual struggles with prejudice on the home front and the battlefield, examining how the war forces them to confront their beliefs about race and what it means to be an American.

Lightbreakers

No good life is free from unease, because unease is the start of exploration.

Summary - A speculative fiction novel about a quantum physicist, Noah, who joins a secret time-travel project in a desert lab to revisit his deceased daughter, while his artist wife, Maya, gets drawn into the lab’s mysteries and her own past. The book explores themes of love, grief, memory, and the nature of time, blending science fiction with a deeply human story about loss and connection. It’s praised for its emotional depth, complex characters, and genre-bending narrative.

Love Forms

It depends on the lens… Summary - Love Forms is about a Trinidadian woman, Dawn, who, at 58, embarks on a journey to find the daughter she gave up for adoption at 16 in Venezuela, exploring themes of maternal love, loss, and identity across Trinidad, Venezuela, and London. The book, longlisted for the Booker Prize, follows Dawn’s life after the adoptionmarriage, children, divorceas she grapples with her past and the possibility of reconnecting with her lost child.