🎄 Sunday Sharies: December 2024

Festive recipes, the last books of the year, and A Complete Babyratu Inside

Happy New Year! Many thanks to our readers for spending another year with us. We have loved sharing our recommendations with you, and can’t wait for another year of new TV shows, movies, and books to experience together.

There’s a lot of stuff we’d like to share that won’t fit in our usual Thursday TV newsletter. Some of that stuff is here. Read on for a special monthly peek into what your trusty Double Take duo has been watching, reading, listening to, and more.

— Jess Spoll and Jenni Cullen

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Jenni:

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride was my first read of the month. As a Philadelphia native, this felt long overdue—McBride writes a lot of historical fiction about Philly-adjacent communities in the not-so-distant past. This one follows marginalized families across a few generations in Pottstown, PA. Beautiful writing, but the pacing and subject matter had me putting it down for long stretches at a time. (3.75/5 stars)

Then I picked up Bear by Julia Phillips, a novel about two sisters trapped by circumstance in the Pacific Northwest, who form a strange attachment to a grizzly passing through the area. I personally found this book to be a huge bummer and wanted to shake a few of the characters into seeing sense. The narrator was whiny and unlikeable and seemed to make life hard for everyone around her. (2/5 stars)

As far as romance goes, Ali Hazelwood is a always a safe bet for cute (and decently written) easy reads, so I picked up Not in Love as a mid-December palate cleanser. This was a departure from her usual fare—less of a rom-com and more of an erotic romance—and I unfortunately entirely missed the disclaimer warning of this shift at the novel’s start. It was still cute at parts but definitely not what I was expecting or what I usually go for in my romance. (2.5/5 stars)

Finally, my family does a book-themed Pollyanna around the holidays, so I was gifted quite a few fun things that have been sitting on my TBR list. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney is first up from that pile. I have historically felt very lukewarm about Rooney, but the first chapters of her newest novel have already drawn me in.

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Jess: I’d set a goal to read 52 books this year, and I ended the year at a total of 82 books (woohoo!!). It would have been 83, except that I can’t find the motivation to pick up Fourth Wing again after getting to page ~400.

Big Fan by Alexandra Romanoff is like The Idea of You without the age gap: a political staffer in DC consults for a former boy bander whom she obsessed over in her youth, and they start a relationship. While it was thankfully less cringey than The The Idea of You, the short format of the novella felt too rushed for me to develop an interest in the relationship. It’s very fanfic-y though, if you’re into that. (2.5/5 stars)

Part rom-com, part ensemble comedy, part workplace satire, I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue is delightfully charming and heartwarming, and it was one of my favorite reads of the year. It follows an anxious administrative office worker who accidentally gains access to her colleague’s private messages and emails and uses the intel to her advantage. (4/5 stars)

In How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin, a mystery novelist gets roped into solving the murder of her Great Aunt after being summoned to her estate. It’s a classic Agatha Christie-style cozy murder mystery with a cast of suspicious townies, threatening notes, and a provincial village setting. I saw someone describe it as Clue meets Knives Out, which feels apt. (3.5/5 stars)

As a fan of Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, I was excited for her new YA thriller, The Reappearance of Rachel Price. This one revolves around a young girl whose mother vanished without a trace 16 years ago, and while filming a documentary on the unsolved case, her mother suspiciously reappears. Reading this reminded me of my experience with the third book in the A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series, which I abhorred. Repetitive passages bog down an already sluggishly paced plot, and the twists make little sense. (1.5/5 stars)

Jess: I didn’t watch any of them on Christmas Day itself, but I did participate in ‘A Complete Babyratu Inside’. For the uninitiated, that’s a portmanteau of the movies Babygirl, Nosferatu, A Complete Unknown, and The Fire Inside, all of which premiered on December 25.