Summer-Themed Books to Read in July

At Windsong Place Apartments, we’re excited that we have so many amenities for members of our apartment community to enjoy. This month, we want to invite you to check out our DVD Lending Library for any movies based on books you may have read. We have a nice selection of DVDs for you to enjoy. In today’s post, we’re sharing some summer-themed books you may want to read this month (with reviews from Goodreads). We hope you are enjoying the summer here in Williamsville!

Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene

“Minutes before the train pulled into the station in Jenkinsville, Arkansas, Patty Bergen knew something exciting was going to happen. But she never could have imagined that her summer would be so memorable. German prisoners of war have arrived to make their new home in the prison camp in Jenkinsville. To the rest of her town, these prisoners are only Nazis. But to Patty, a young Jewish girl with a turbulent home life, one boy, in particular, becomes an unlikely friend.”

Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose

“A blistering character study and an examination of the American melting pot and the judicial system that keeps it in check, Twelve Angry Men holds at its core a deeply patriotic faith in the U.S. legal system. The play centers on Juror Eight, who is at first the sole holdout in an 11-1 guilty vote. Eight sets his sights not on proving the other jurors wrong but rather on getting them to look at the situation in a clear-eyed way not affected by their personal prejudices or biases. Reginald Rose deliberately and carefully peels away the layers of artifice from the men and allows a fuller picture to form of them—and of America, at its best and worst.”

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

“The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying.”

We couldn’t do a summer-themed reading list and not include A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, which is set in New York. It’s a poignant coming of age story focusing on a second-generation Irish-American girl and her family set in the early 1900s, but its message spans the century.