It’s time for another post in my “Try a Chapter” Challenge—where I’ll choose ONE book for next month’s TBR!

If you’re not familiar with the Try a Chapter tag, it’s a tag common on booktube (and sometimes blogs) where the participant reads the first chapter of five books and chooses one of those books to read, based on the results!

For this series, I do something a little different:

The five books I choose will be inspired by the following month’s “theme”—for example, since June is Pride Month, the 5 books I sample for June’s TBR would be own-voice queer books, and so on. You get the idea!

Once again, I’m basing my 5 picks on the Devour Your TBR group theme. For April, it’s “ContemporApril“, so I’m going to be reading the first chapter of 5 contemporary titles today. I picked a mix of spring TBR titles, backlist, and some ARCs that my sweet friend Owl sent me!

1. The Foxhole Court — Nora Sakavic
2. Heroine — Mindy McGinnis
3. A Thousand Perfect Notes — C.G. Drews
4. A Heart in a Body in the World — Deb Caletti
5. If I’m Being Honest — Emily Wibberley & Austin Siegemund-Broka

My thoughts on the first chapter of…

The Foxhole Court:

This has been on my backlist for ages, so this seemed like as good a time as any to give it a try. My initial thought is that I don’t love the writing style, but I’m incredibly intrigued by Neil and this tragic, toxic back story he seems to be running away from. It doesn’t hurt that so many of my friends adore this series, and that I love a good sports story.

Heroine:

I read the prologue and chapter 1, and wow, wow, wow. I’ve never read anything by Mindy McGinnis yet, but I immediately really love her narrative voice, and I’m so intrigued by the prologue and the first chapter of this.

A Thousand Perfect Notes:

1) I honestly can’t believe I haven’t read this yet! I love Cait, and I was SO PUMPED when this was announced that I pre-ordered it the very day it went live on bookdepository. ? But then, everyone started talking about how much it broke their hearts, and I kept putting off the heartache… which I can now tell will be inevitable, because that first chapter was wonderful but SO painful.

A Heart in a Body in the World:

When I was a kid, I read Deb Caletti’s The Nature of Jade, and it became one of my favorite books of all time. It was the first book I ever read with anxiety rep, and I saw myself in it. I honestly never thought to look for more books by her, though, until this came out, and now I’ve been dying to read it, but sadly, the first chapter didn’t totally grip me like I hoped it would. Ah, well — I still expect great things from this book.

If I’m Being Honest:

Okay, as someone who admittedly can’t stand “mean girl” characters, I had a feeling this would either be flawless or terrible for me, because that’s what the main character is, but from the start, you can already tell she’s self-aware, she knows she’s a jerk, and that feels like it’s setting the stage for a TON of character development, plus the narrative voice was fun and reminded me of actual high schoolers. I’m pretty stoked to continue!

And the winner is…

The Foxhole Court!

It was a really hard decision this time because I honestly wanted to continue all 5 ASAP, but The Foxhole Court is one sooooo many people have begged me to read, and it felt like it would fly by, so I’m adding it to my ContemporApril TBR!

Is this something you might want to try out for your own TBR? If it is, please let me know so I can read or watch your post, too! ♥

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