*Top Ten Tuesday* Books that Surprised Me (22 April 2025)

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. Joood - Hooligan of Platypire reviews bossed me into doing this, so I guess this is a thing I do now. 

This week’s theme is books that surprised me. But I typically go into books largely blind. I basically never read book blurbs before reading, and while serious book hype will absolutely get me to buy a book when I find it on sale for Kindle or at the thrift store, I usually forget the specificity of the hype by the time I start reading. And it's hard to be surprised by a book when you go into reading it with no expectations. So instead I'm going to focus on books that I enjoyed even though they made me mad while I was reading them. Let's go. 

Lessons In Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus - We can all agree that the patriarchy sucks, right? We get treated to a whole lot of the sucky patriarchy in Lessons in Chemistry, but Elizabeth Zott just kind of bulldozes her way through the bullshit. 

Somewhere Beyond the Sea by TJ Klune - The first book in this series felt light-hearted and fun. This book was heavy and deep, with a lot of potentially triggering political bullshit. It was still a great book, but I hated the events described in large portions of it. 

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood - Do I even need to explain why this one made the list?

From the Moon I Watched Her by Emily English Medley - This book read like the memoir of a female child raised in a cult. There were so many messed up things that happened to Stephanie that I couldn't help but be mad, but the book kept me pretty engaged too. 

The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner - This is a story about women who are mistreated by men, typically men who are close to them. I'm kind of starting to see a theme in my choices of books this week. 

Damsel by Elana K. Arnold - This is not the Damsel that Netflix turned into a movie, but both stories have a similar feeling to them, and in both cases they feature young women being lied to and tricked by a young prince and his family. There's that trend again. 

Cilka's Journey by Heather Morris - This is the story of a woman who survived Auschwitz only to end up in a Russian gulag because of how she survived Auschwitz. She was judged for what she did to survive, and her actions didn't even harm others. This was just such a powerful story. 

Thank You For Your Service by David Finkel - This is non-fiction about the lives of a few members of 2-16 Infantry Division out of Ft. Riley, Kansas after a deployment to Iraq during the surge. My husband served in this unit during this time, so this felt a bit personal to me, and it highlights the way we let our veterans down every single day, after they've sacrificed because they believed they were protecting us. 

Counting the Cost by Jill "Duggar" Dillard - She came to fame by being one of the 19 Kids and Counting on TLC, and while it had been obvious for a while that the family was run by a rather horrible person, seeing it through Jill's eyes was heartbreaking. I always felt sorry for the daughters growing up that way, but it seems that the older girls were lucky enough to get married to actually decent guys. 

Shanghai Girls by Lisa See - This historical fiction shows the lives of two young Chinese women who emigrate to America under somewhat false pretenses (although they don't realize that at the time, and had no say in the matter anyway). Then they get to America and are treated very poorly by the patriarch of the family they've been sold/married into. And there's that theme again. 

So there we have it. Ten books that I enjoyed even though they pissed me off while I was reading them. Have you read any of these books? If so, did they piss you off too?

If you're stopping by from the linkup, please be sure to drop a link to your post below. - Katie