en-US Sun, 31 Dec 2023 06:39:33 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 53137938
Noah is at the pinnacle of his career. With book and movie deals galore, there isn’t much the “golden boy� of modern fiction hasn’t accomplished. But he can’t walk away from what might be the best book of the century—the one his idol, Scarlett Stanton, left unfinished. Coming up with a fitting ending for the legendary author is one thing, but dealing with her beautiful, stubborn, cynical great-granddaughter, Georgia, is quite another.

But as they read Scarlett’s words in both the manuscript and her box of letters, they start to realize why Scarlett never finished the book—it’s based on her real-life romance with a World War II pilot, and the ending isn’t a happy one. Georgia knows all too well that love never works out, and while the chemistry and connection between her and Noah is undeniable, she’s as determined as ever to learn from her great-grandmother’s mistakes—even if it means destroying Noah’s career.]]> 400 Rebecca Yarros 1682815668 Emily 4 2023-read 4.26 2021
author: Rebecca Yarros
name: Emily
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/31
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: 2023-read
review:
A gentle romance-within-a-romance. It was perfectly cozy.
]]> 63133205 The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.

In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history.

Written with remarkable candor and humor, Spears’s groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love—and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.]]> 288 Britney Spears 1668009048 Emily 3 2023-read, crime-fiction
I really enjoyed it, but I didn’t think the writing was as good as it could have been. That can happen with celebrity memoirs. ]]> 3.83 2023
author: Britney Spears
name: Emily
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/31
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves: 2023-read, crime-fiction
review:
This story is heartbreaking.

I really enjoyed it, but I didn’t think the writing was as good as it could have been. That can happen with celebrity memoirs.
]]> 60784636
Except for the occasional catnap or small blackout where she loses track of time, she hasn’t slept in a year.

Isabelle's entire existence now revolves around finding him, but she knows she can’t go on this way forever. In hopes of jarring loose a new witness or buried clue, she agrees to be interviewed by a true-crime podcaster—but his interest in Isabelle's past makes her nervous. His incessant questioning paired with her severe insomnia has brought up uncomfortable memories from her own childhood, making Isabelle start to doubt her recollection of the night of Mason’s disappearance, as well as second-guess who she can trust... including herself. But she is determined to figure out the truth no matter where it leads.]]> 326 Stacy Willingham 1250803853 Emily 3 2023-read 4.04 2023
author: Stacy Willingham
name: Emily
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/23
date added: 2023/12/23
shelves: 2023-read
review:

]]> 58957873
Now, with only weeks left until a hungry swarm of demons devours everything on her island home, Alessa is running out of time to find a partner and stop the invasion. When a powerful priest convinces the faithful that killing Alessa is the island’s only hope, her own soldiers try to assassinate her.

Desperate to survive, Alessa hires Dante, a cynical outcast marked as a killer, to become her personal bodyguard. But as rebellion explodes outside the gates, Dante’s dark secrets may be the biggest betrayal. He holds the key to her survival and her heart, but is he the one person who can help her master her gift or destroy her once and for all?

Emily Thiede's exciting fantasy debut, This Vicious Grace, will keep readers turning the pages until the devastating conclusion and leave them primed for more!]]> 448 Emily Thiede 1250794056 Emily 3 2023-read 3.94 2022
author: Emily Thiede
name: Emily
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/23
date added: 2023/12/23
shelves: 2023-read
review:

]]> 55473310 She’s willing to risk her life for those she loves, but even that might not be enough to stop what’s coming.

Einar has finally let down his guard, but when the woman he trusts takes off in the middle of the night with his people's only hope for a cure, he realizes what a mistake that was.

They have been living under the shadow of the same monster for longer than either of them realize. But it’s up to them to decide whether that makes them enemies or allies.

You’ve heard it asked, who could ever learn to love a beast? But this time, the question is, could a beast ever learn to love?]]> 340 Elle Madison Emily 0 2023-read 4.20
author: Elle Madison
name: Emily
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/18
date added: 2023/12/18
shelves: 2023-read
review:

]]> 57899793 Lahore, Pakistan. Then.
Misbah is a dreamer and storyteller, newly married to Toufiq in an arranged match. After their young life is shaken by tragedy, they come to the United States and open the Cloud’s Rest Inn Motel, hoping for a new start.

Juniper, California. Now.
Salahudin and Noor are more than best friends; they are family. Growing up as outcasts in the small desert town of Juniper, California, they understand each other the way no one else does. Until The Fight, which destroys their bond with the swift fury of a star exploding.

Now, Sal scrambles to run the family motel as his mother Misbah’s health fails and his grieving father loses himself to alcoholism. Noor, meanwhile, walks a harrowing tightrope: working at her wrathful uncle’s liquor store while hiding the fact that she’s applying to college so she can escape him—and Juniper—forever.

When Sal’s attempts to save the motel spiral out of control, he and Noor must ask themselves what friendship is worth—and what it takes to defeat the monsters in their pasts and the ones in their midst.

From one of today’s most cherished and bestselling young adult authors comes a breathtaking novel of young love, old regrets, and forgiveness—one that’s both tragic and poignant in its tender ferocity.]]> 376 Sabaa Tahir 0593202341 Emily 5 2023-read 4.48 2022
author: Sabaa Tahir
name: Emily
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2023/12/10
shelves: 2023-read
review:

]]> 50454908 There never was a beauty and a beast, only a girl who was both.
And that girl was me."


Zaina will never be free.

She's forced into an arranged marriage to a Viking King in a castle full of secrets. But she carries secrets of her own, and the scars of her haunted past.

Handed off from one monster to another, she has no choice but to do her best to survive and protect her sisters.

Even if it costs her everything.

A Beauty and the Beast retelling you won’t want to miss, where nothing is what it seems and time is running out.]]> 346 Elle Madison Emily 3 2023-read 3.88 2020
author: Elle Madison
name: Emily
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2023/12/10
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I would have given it 3.5. Probably 4 if it had not ended so abruptly, without resolution. I love a good series, but I don’t like it when you can’t say a complete story is between the covers. Cliffhangers are fine, but they shouldn’t leave off in the middle � you should *have* to pick up the next one because you want to find out, even need to find out their conclusions, but not because it’s literally what you need to finish the book.
]]> 61771675
But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters� unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?]]> 416 Ann Napolitano Emily 5 2023-read 4.14 2023
author: Ann Napolitano
name: Emily
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2023/12/10
shelves: 2023-read
review:

]]> 61356231 The hit national bestseller - a New York Times Spring Nonfiction Pick, USA Today "Hottest New Book Release," Next Big Idea Club 2023 Must Read, and Kirkus “Most Buzzworthy Book Right Now"

A riveting, must-read, year-in-the-life account of three teachers, combined with reporting that reveals what's really going on behind school doors, by New York Times bestselling author and education expert Alexandra Robbins

Alexandra Robbins goes behind the scenes to tell the true, sometimes shocking, always inspirational stories of three teachers as they navigate a year in the classroom. She follows Penny, a southern middle school math teacher who grappled with a toxic staff clique at the big school in a small town; Miguel, a special ed teacher in the western United States who fought for his students both as an educator and as an activist; and Rebecca, an East Coast elementary school teacher who struggled to schedule and define a life outside of school.

Interspersed among the teachers' stories--a seeming scandal, a fourth-grade whodunit, and teacher confessions--are hard-hitting essays featuring cutting-edge reporting on the biggest issues facing teachers today, such as school violence; outrageous parent behavior; inadequate support, staffing, and resources coupled with unrealistic mounting demands; the "myth" of teacher burnout; the COVID-19 pandemic; and ways all of us can help the professionals who are central both to the lives of our children and the heart of our communities.]]> 372 Alexandra Robbins 1101986751 Emily 5 2023-read 4.17 2023
author: Alexandra Robbins
name: Emily
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/25
date added: 2023/11/25
shelves: 2023-read
review:
A look inside one of America’s hardest jobs, and one we don’t appreciate enough. Told as the story of 3 teachers over one school year, in 3 very different schools with a lot of other interviews sprinkled in.
]]> 90202302 “The first year is when some of us lose our lives. The second year is when the rest of us lose our humanity.� —Xaden Riorson

Everyone expected Violet Sorrengail to die during her first year at Basgiath War College—Violet included. But Threshing was only the first impossible test meant to weed out the weak-willed, the unworthy, and the unlucky.

Now the real training begins, and Violet’s already wondering how she’ll get through. It’s not just that it’s grueling and maliciously brutal, or even that it’s designed to stretch the riders� capacity for pain beyond endurance. It’s the new vice commandant, who’s made it his personal mission to teach Violet exactly how powerless she is–unless she betrays the man she loves.

Although Violet’s body might be weaker and frailer than everyone else’s, she still has her wits—and a will of iron. And leadership is forgetting the most important lesson Basgiath has taught her: Dragon riders make their own rules.

But a determination to survive won’t be enough this year.

Because Violet knows the real secret hidden for centuries at Basgiath War College—and nothing, not even dragon fire, may be enough to save them in the end.]]> 623 Rebecca Yarros 1649374178 Emily 5 2023-read 4.33 2023
author: Rebecca Yarros
name: Emily
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/25
date added: 2023/11/25
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Fun fantasy � dragons, magic, lies, warring kingdoms, a little romance. Loved it. Can’t wait for the next one.
]]> 61358638 Reimagining the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.

The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?

In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.

Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.]]> 304 Matthew Desmond 0593239911 Emily 5 2023-read 4.27 2023
author: Matthew Desmond
name: Emily
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/25
date added: 2023/11/25
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Must read. It’s short but so important.
]]> 43500334 Cal Ripken Jr. 1982656913 Emily 3 2023-read 3.59 2019
author: Cal Ripken Jr.
name: Emily
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/12
date added: 2023/11/12
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Good wisdom, a little repetitive, and I wish there would have been a little more vulnerability and a little less sanctimony. But I love Cal and he’s not wrong about his advice.
]]> 138505710
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us―and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.]]> 416 Naomi Klein 0374610320 Emily 5 2023-read 4.21 2023
author: Naomi Klein
name: Emily
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/12
date added: 2023/11/12
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Naomi Klein is a genius. She does a great job wrapping up all the wild happening in the far right right now and explaining the connection to the white women anti-vaxxers into a complex package. Fascinating read.
]]> 61896677 Set in Hilo, Hawai'i, a sweeping saga of tradition, culture, family, history, and connection that unfolds through the lives of three generations of women--a brilliant blend of There, There and Sharks in the Time of Saviors that is a tale of mothers and daughters, dance and destiny, told in part in the collective voice of a community fighting for its survival

"There's no running away on an island. Soon enough, you end up where you started."

Hi'i is the youngest of the legendary Naupaka dynasty, only daughter of Laka, once the pride of Hilo; granddaughter of Hulali, Hula matriarch on the Big Island. But the Naupka legacy is in jeopardy, buckling under the weight of loaded silences and unexplained absences, most notably the sudden disappearance of Laka when Hi'i was a child. Hi'i dreams of healing the rifts within her family by becoming the next Miss Aloha Hula--and prove herself worthy of carrying on the family dynasty. She demonstrates her devotion to her culture through hula--the beating heart of her people expressed through the movement of her hips and feet.

Yet she has always felt separate from her community, and the harder she tries to prove she belongs--dancing in the halau until her bones ache--the wider the distance seems to grow. Soon, fault lines begin to form, and secrets threaten to erupt. Everyone wants to know, Hi'i most of all: what really happened when her mother disappeared, and why haven't she and her grandmother spoken since? When a devastating revelation involving Hi'i surfaces, the entire community is faced with a momentous decision that will affect everyone--and determine the course of Hi'i's future.

Part incantation, part rallying cry, Hula is a love letter to a stolen paradise and its people. Told in part by the tribal We, it connects Hawaii's tortured history to its fractured present through the story of the Naupaka family. The evolution of the Hawaiian Sovereignty movement is reflected in the journeys of these defiant women and their community, in whose struggle we sense the long-term repercussions of blood quantum laws and colonization, the relationship between tribe and belonging, and the universal question: what makes a family?]]> 400 Jasmin Iolani Hakes 0063276984 Emily 4 2023-read 3.94 2023
author: Jasmin Iolani Hakes
name: Emily
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/12
date added: 2023/11/12
shelves: 2023-read
review:

]]> 59949720
Gwyn Jones is perfectly happy with her life in Graves Glen. She, her mom, and her cousin have formed a new and powerful coven; she’s running a successful witchcraft shop, Something Wicked; and she’s started mentoring some of the younger witches in town. As Halloween approaches, there’s only one problem—Llewellyn “Wells� Penhallow.

Wells has come to Graves Glen to re-establish his family’s connection to the town they founded as well as to make a new life for himself after years of being the dutiful son in Wales. When he opens up a shop of his own, Penhallow’s, just across the street from Something Wicked, he quickly learns he’s gotten more than he bargained for in going up against Gwyn.

When their professional competition leads to a very personal—and very hot—kiss, both Wells and Gwyn are determined to stay away from each other, convinced the kiss was just a magical fluke. But when a mysterious new coven of witches come to town and Gwyn’s powers begin fading, she and Wells must work together to figure out just what these new witches want and how to restore Gwyn’s magic before it’s too late.]]> 309 Erin Sterling 0063027518 Emily 3 2023-read 3.72 2022
author: Erin Sterling
name: Emily
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/01
date added: 2023/11/01
shelves: 2023-read
review:
A little ridiculous, a little steamy, a little spooky, a lot of fun.
]]> 61195313
In teenagers, powerful emotions come with the territory. And with so many of today’s teens contending with academic pressure, social media stress, worries about the future, and concerns about their own mental health, it’s easy for them—and their parents—to feel anxious and overwhelmed. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Parents who read this book will
� what to expect in the normal course of adolescent emotional development and when it’s time to worry
� why teens (and adults) need to understand that mental health isn’t about “feeling good� but about having feelings that fit the moment, even if those feelings are unwanted or painful
� strategies for supporting teens who feel at the mercy of their emotions so they can become psychologically aware and skilled at managing their feelings
� how to approach common challenges that come with adolescence, such as friction at home, spiking anxiety, risky behavior, navigating friendships and romances, the pull of social media, and many more
� the best ways to stay connected to their teens and how to provide the kind of relationship that adolescents need and want

With clear, research-informed explanations alongside illuminating, real-life examples, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers gives parents the concrete, practical information they need to steady their teens through the bumpy yet transformational journey into adulthood.]]> 229 Lisa Damour 0593500016 Emily 5 2023-read 4.47
author: Lisa Damour
name: Emily
average rating: 4.47
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/01
date added: 2023/11/01
shelves: 2023-read
review:
If you have teenagers, will have teenagers, teach teenagers, know a teenager, or just want to make the world an easier place for teenagers to exist this book is for you. Cannot recommend it more strongly.
]]> 58553639
Time is running out for crown princess Gemma Ripley. Despite being a cunning spy and a powerful mind magier, Gemma hasn’t been able to track down the most dangerous enemy her kingdom of Andvari has ever seen. Adding to her worries is the Sword and Shield tournament. With gladiators flocking to the capital city of Glanzen, Gemma can’t tell who is friend—or foe.

Determined to protect Andvari at any cost, Gemma hatches a bold plan, but things aren’t what they seem. Soon, everything she holds dear is being threatened, including her burgeoning relationship with Prince Leonidas Morricone.

With the kingdom she holds dear slipping through her fingers, Gemma will have to conquer her fear and unlock the true secret of her magic—or watch her friends and family die and her beloved Andvari fall . . .]]> 432 Jennifer Estep 0063023474 Emily 3 2023-read 4.12 2023
author: Jennifer Estep
name: Emily
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/01
date added: 2023/11/01
shelves: 2023-read
review:

]]> 57693171
Despite their alluring public lives, behind closed doors things are far less rosy. Sure, Olga can orchestrate the love stories of the 1%, but she can't seem to find her own...until she meets Matteo, who forces her to confront the effects of long-held family secrets...

Twenty-seven years ago, their mother, Blanca, a Young Lord-turned-radical, abandoned her children to advance a militant political cause, leaving them to be raised by their grandmother. Now, with the winds of hurricane season, Blanca has come barreling back into their lives.

Set against the backdrop of New York City in the months surrounding the most devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico's history, Olga Dies Dreaming is a story that examines political corruption, familial strife and the very notion of the American dream--all while asking what it really means to weather a storm.]]> 369 Xóchitl González 1250786177 Emily 5 2023-read 3.95 2022
author: Xóchitl González
name: Emily
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/27
date added: 2023/10/27
shelves: 2023-read
review:

]]> 54732645
Nani, Yuki, Ella, and Rory have discovered the truth about the curse that's left a trail of dead bodies at Grimrose. But the four still know nothing of its origins, or how to stop the cycle of doomed fates.

And each girl harbors her own secret. One is learning why she was brought to the school. One struggles to keep her new and deadly power under control. One knows exactly how much time she has left.

And one, trying to escape her dark destiny, will come even closer to fulfilling it.

Can the girls change their own stories and break the curse? Or must one of them die to end it forever?]]> 480 Laura Pohl Emily 3 2023-read 3.75 2022
author: Laura Pohl
name: Emily
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/27
date added: 2023/10/27
shelves: 2023-read
review:

]]> 65678550
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents—roused by Chona's kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.]]> 385 James McBride 0593422945 Emily 4 2023-read 3.83 2023
author: James McBride
name: Emily
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/21
date added: 2023/10/21
shelves: 2023-read
review:

]]> 101141871
Emory might be a student at the prestigious Aldryn College for Lunar Magics, but her healing abilities have always been mediocre at best—until a treacherous night in the Dovermere sea caves leaves a group of her classmates dead and her as the only survivor. Now Emory is plagued by strange, impossible powers that no healer should possess.

Powers that would ruin her life if the wrong person were to discover them.

To gain control of these new abilities, Emory enlists the help of the school’s most reclusive student, Baz—a boy already well-versed in the deadly nature of darker magic, whose sister happened to be one of the drowned students and Emory’s best friend. Determined to find the truth behind the drownings and the cult-like secret society she’s convinced her classmates were involved in, Emory is faced with even more questions when the supposedly drowned students start washing ashore� alive —only for them each immediately to die horrible, magical deaths.

And Emory is not the only one seeking answers. When her new magic captures the society’s attention, she finds herself drawn into their world of privilege and power, all while wondering if the truth she’s searching for might lead her right back to Dovermere…to face the fate she was never meant to escape.]]> 544 Pascale Lacelle 1665939273 Emily 3 2023-read 3.79 2023
author: Pascale Lacelle
name: Emily
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/21
date added: 2023/10/21
shelves: 2023-read
review:

]]> 62919402
Timothy McVeigh wanted to start a movement.

Speaking to his lawyers days after the Oklahoma City bombing, the Gulf War veteran expressed no regrets: killing 168 people was his patriotic duty. He cited the Declaration of Independence from “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.� He had obsessively followed the siege of Waco and seethed at the imposition of President Bill Clinton’s assault weapons ban. A self-proclaimed white separatist, he abhorred immigration and wanted women to return to traditional roles. As he watched the industrial decline of his native Buffalo, McVeigh longed for when America was great.

New York Times bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin traces the dramatic history and profound legacy of Timothy McVeigh, who once declared, “I believe there is an army out there, ready to rise up, even though I never found it.� But that doesn’t mean his army wasn’t there. With news-breaking reportage, Toobin details how McVeigh’s principles and tactics have flourished in the decades since his death in 2001, reaching an apotheosis on January 6 when hundreds of rioters stormed the Capitol. Based on nearly a million previously unreleased tapes, photographs, and documents, including detailed communications between McVeigh and his lawyers, as well as interviews with such key figures as Bill Clinton, Homegrown reveals how the story of Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing is not only a powerful retelling of one of the great outrages of our time, but a warning for our future.]]> 426 Jeffrey Toobin 1668013576 Emily 4 2023-read 4.12 2023
author: Jeffrey Toobin
name: Emily
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/15
date added: 2023/10/15
shelves: 2023-read
review:

]]> 75495002 When a father goes missing, his family's desperate search leads them to question everything they know about him and one another--both a riveting page-turner and a deeply moving portrait of a family in crisis from the award-winning author of Miracle Creek.

"We didn't call the police right away." Those are the first words of this extraordinary novel about a biracial Korean-American family in Virginia whose lives are upended when their beloved father and husband goes missing.

Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything--which is why she isn't initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don't return from a walk in a nearby park. They must have lost their phone. Or stopped for an errand somewhere. But by the time Mia's brother runs through the front door bloody and alone, it becomes clear that the father in this tight-knit family is missing and the only witness is Eugene, who has the rare genetic condition Angelman syndrome and cannot speak.

What follows is both a ticking-clock investigation into the whereabouts of a father and an emotionally rich portrait of a family whose most personal secrets just may be at the heart of his disappearance. Full of shocking twists and fascinating questions of love, language, race, and human connection, Happiness Falls is a mystery, a family drama, and a novel of profound philosophical inquiry. With all the powerful storytelling she brought to her award-winning debut Miracle Creek, Angie Kim turns the missing person story into something wholly original, creating an indelible tale of a family who must go to remarkable lengths to truly understand one another.]]> 387 Angie Kim 0593448200 Emily 3 2023-read 3.72 2023
author: Angie Kim
name: Emily
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/15
date added: 2023/10/15
shelves: 2023-read
review:

]]> 61273338 Drinking: A Love Story and Somebody’s Daughter—about the journey to sobriety and self-love amidst addiction, privilege, racism, and self-sabotage from the host of the popular podcast The Only One in the Room.

After years of hiding her addiction from everyone—from stockpiling pills in her Louboutins to elaborately scheduling withdrawals between PTA meetings, baby showers, and tennis matches—Laura Cathcart Robbins settles into a complicated purgatory.

She learns the hard way that privilege doesn’t protect you from pain. Facing divorce, the possibility of a grueling custody battle, and internalized racism, Robbins wonders just how much more she can take.

Now, with courage and candid openness, she reveals how she managed to begin the long journey towards sobriety and unexpectedly finding new love. Robbins harrowingly illustrates taking down the wall she built around herself brick by brick and what it means to be Black in a startingly white world. With its raw, finely crafted, and engaging prose, Stash is the story of just how badly the facade she created had to shatter before Laura could reconnect to her true self.]]> 288 Laura Cathcart Robbins 1668005336 Emily 3 2023-read 3.86 2023
author: Laura Cathcart Robbins
name: Emily
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/07
date added: 2023/10/07
shelves: 2023-read
review:

]]> 20518900
All These Things I've Done , the first novel in the Birthright series, introduced us to timeless heroine Anya Balanchine, a plucky sixteen-year-old with the heart of a girl and the responsibilities of a grown woman. Now eighteen, life has been more bitter than sweet for Anya. She has lost her parents and her grandmother, and has spent the better part of her high school years in trouble with the law. Perhaps hardest of all, her decision to open a nightclub with her old nemesis Charles Delacroix has cost Anya her relationship with Win.

Still, it is Anya's nature to soldier on. She puts the loss of Win behind her and focuses on her work. Against the odds, the nightclub becomes an enormous success, and Anya feels like she is on her way and that nothing will ever go wrong for her again. But after a terrible misjudgment leaves Anya fighting for her life, she is forced to reckon with her choices and to let people help her for the first time in her life.]]> 320 Gabrielle Zevin 1250050715 Emily 0 2023-read 3.67 2013
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Emily
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2023/10/07
date added: 2023/10/07
shelves: 2023-read
review:

]]> 61431922 Enter the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragon riders...

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.

But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile� humans. They incinerate them.

With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.

She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.

Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom's protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.

Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die]]> 528 Rebecca Yarros 1649374046 Emily 5 2023-read 4.56 2023
author: Rebecca Yarros
name: Emily
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/26
date added: 2023/09/26
shelves: 2023-read
review:
This one hits all the high notes. Magic, dragons, corruption, revolution, sexual tension. Can’t wait for the sequel.
]]> 55812605 For fans of Caraval and The Night Circus, this decadent and darkly enchanting YA fantasy, set against the backdrop of a Belle Époque-inspired hotel, follows seventeen-year-old Jani as she uncovers the deeply disturbing secrets of the legendary Hotel Magnifique.

All her life, Jani has dreamed of Elsewhere. Just barely scraping by with her job at a tannery, she’s resigned to a dreary life in the port town of Durc, caring for her younger sister Zosa. That is, until the Hotel Magnifique comes to town.

The hotel is legendary not only for its whimsical enchantments, but also for its ability to travel—appearing in a different destination every morning. While Jani and Zosa can’t afford the exorbitant costs of a guest’s stay, they can interview to join the staff, and are soon whisked away on the greatest adventure of their lives. But once inside, Jani quickly discovers their contracts are unbreakable and that beneath the marvelous glamour, the hotel is hiding dangerous secrets.

With the vexingly handsome doorman Bel as her only ally, Jani embarks on a mission to unravel the mystery of the magic at the heart of the hotel and free Zosa—and the other staff—from the cruelty of the ruthless maître d’hôtel. To succeed, she’ll have to risk everything she loves, but failure would mean a fate far worse than never returning home.]]> 400 Emily J. Taylor 0593404513 Emily 3 2023-read 3.76 2022
author: Emily J. Taylor
name: Emily
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/23
date added: 2023/09/23
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I like magic books and this one had an interesting premise where the magicians are prisoners in a traveling hotel.
]]> 13163011 The Godfather

Freed from jail, Anya hopes that things will get back to normal. But life on the outside is even more dangerous than life behind bars. Some of her gangland family want revenge for the crime for which she has done time: the shooting of her uncle. Forced to flee the country, Anya hides out in a cacao plantation in Mexico. There she learns the secrets of the chocolate trade, a trade that is illegal and deadly in her native New York. There too she discovers that seemingly random acts of violence carried out across the world have a single target: her family. As innocent bystanders get caught in the crossfire Anya must act fast and decisively to stop it, no matter what the danger to herself.]]> 350 Gabrielle Zevin 0374380740 Emily 3 2023-read 3.88 2012
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Emily
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/23
date added: 2023/09/23
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Second in the series. Will definitely finish and figure out what happens with the chocolate.
]]> 44767458
When House Atreides is betrayed, the destruction of Paul’s family will set the boy on a journey toward a destiny greater than he could ever have imagined. And as he evolves into the mysterious man known as Muad’Dib, he will bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream.]]> 658 Frank Herbert 059309932X Emily 4 2023-read 4.33 1965
author: Frank Herbert
name: Emily
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1965
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/17
date added: 2023/09/17
shelves: 2023-read
review:
A desolate dystopian world where water is everything. Palace intrigue, weird tech, and warring factions. I liked it.
]]> 63329951 An entertaining, enlightening, and utterly original investigation into one of the most quietly influential forces in modern American life—the humble parking spot

Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don’t resort to violence, we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. Indeed, in the century since the advent of the car, we have deformed—and in some cases demolished—our homes and our cities in a Sisyphean quest for cheap and convenient car storage. As a result, much of the nation’s most valuable real estate is now devoted exclusively to empty and idle vehicles, even as so many Americans struggle to find affordable housing. Parking determines the design of new buildings and the fate of old ones, patterns of traffic and the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and municipal finance, the quality of public space, and even the course of floodwaters. Can this really be the best use of our finite resources and space? Why have we done this to the places we love? Is parking really more important than anything else?

These are the questions Slate staff writer Henry Grabar sets out to answer, telling a mesmerizing story about the strange and wonderful superorganism that is the modern American city. In a beguiling and often absurdly hilarious mix of history, politics, and reportage, Grabar brilliantly surveys the pain points of the nation’s parking crisis, from Los Angeles to Disney World to New York, stopping at every major American city in between. He reveals how the pathological compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems—from housing affordability to the accelerating global climate disaster—ultimately, lighting the way for us to free our cities from parking’s cruel yoke.]]> 368 Henry Grabar 1984881140 Emily 4 2023-read 4.20 2023
author: Henry Grabar
name: Emily
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/10
date added: 2023/09/10
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Fascinating investigation of the history of parking � much more interesting than it sounds. Why do we have more housing for cars than humans? Why have we created a situation where we don’t have anywhere that is walkable? Why is car storage dominating our architecture? Recommend for all.
]]> 58733693 Remarkably Bright Creatures, an exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope, tracing a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors--until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.]]> 368 Shelby Van Pelt 0063204150 Emily 5 2023-read 4.35 2022
author: Shelby Van Pelt
name: Emily
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/10
date added: 2023/09/10
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Ahh! Loved this book. It made me really happy through all my tears to see people figuring their lives out and healing in grief. It’s basically Humphrey the Hamster for adults, if Humphrey was an octopus.
]]> 9858517 Engrossing and suspenseful, All These Things I've Done is an utterly unique, unputdownable read that blends both the familiar and the fantastic.

]]> 354 Gabrielle Zevin 0374302103 Emily 4 2023-read 3.69 2011
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Emily
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/10
date added: 2023/09/10
shelves: 2023-read
review:

]]> 62197595 On the night of London's grandest ball, a bold group of women launches a daring revenge heist against Mayfair society.

Mrs. King is no ordinary housekeeper. Born into a world of con artists and thieves, she’s made herself respectable, running the grandest home in Mayfair. The place is packed with treasures, a glittering symbol of wealth and power, but dark secrets lurk in the shadows. When Mrs. King is suddenly dismissed from her position, she recruits an eclectic group of women to join her in revenge: A black-market queen out to settle her scores; an actress desperate for a magnificent part; a seamstress dreaming of a better life; and Mrs. King’s predecessor, with her own desire for vengeance.]]> 365 Alex Hay 1525805002 Emily 3 2023-read 3.26 2023
author: Alex Hay
name: Emily
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/09/02
date added: 2023/09/02
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I wanted to love this so much. I love heists. I love girl power. But this just didn’t hit the mark completely. It was overly complex and some of the stories didn’t work. But if I ignored those, it was a fun heist.
]]> 51801337 United Kingdom Against Rabbit Population), complicating Peter's job as a Rabbit Spotter, and forcing him to take a stand, moving from unconscious leporiphobe to active supporter of the UK's amiable and peaceful population of anthropomorphised rabbits.]]> 307 Jasper Fforde 1444763628 Emily 4 2023-read
Rabbits have become humanlike and identity politics, “racism�, and government overreach collide. And the rabbits have an incredibly high sex drive. Witty. Very witty. ]]> 4.03 2020
author: Jasper Fforde
name: Emily
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/02
date added: 2023/09/02
shelves: 2023-read
review:
This level of intelligent satire took me awhile to ease into but it ended up being a really fun and well done commentary.

Rabbits have become humanlike and identity politics, “racism�, and government overreach collide. And the rabbits have an incredibly high sex drive. Witty. Very witty.
]]> 60194162 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780063251922.

"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver Emily 5 2023-read 4.46 2022
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Emily
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/19
date added: 2023/08/19
shelves: 2023-read
review:
One of Kingsolver’s best. Demon didn’t have a great life or even much of a chance at a great life by most standards. But the characters made lives with what they had and that was something. And it really does make you want to hunt down opioid companies.
]]> 61724281
“Immensely emotional and unforgettably haunting.� � Wall Street Journal

Acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen’s haunting investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, from the heights of brilliant promise to the forensic psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved. A story about friendship, love, and the price of self-delusion, The Best Minds explores the ways in which we understand—and fail to understand—mental illness.

When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of college professors, the boys were best friends and keen competitors, and, when they both got into Yale University, seemed set to join the American meritocratic elite.

Michael blazed through college in three years, graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. But all wasn’t as it seemed. One day, Jonathan received the Michael had suffered a serious psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital.

Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Michael was still in the hospital when he learned he'd been accepted to Yale Law School, and still battling delusions when he decided to trade his halfway house for the top law school in the country. He not only managed to graduate, but after his extraordinary story was featured in The New York Times , sold a memoir for a large sum. Ron Howard bought film rights, completing the dream for Michael and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend Carrie. But then Michael, in the grip of an unshakeable paranoid fantasy, stabbed Carrie to death with a kitchen knife and became a front-page story of an entirely different sort.

The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen's brilliant and heartbreaking account of an American tragedy. It is a story about the bonds of family, friendship, and community; the promise of intellectual achievement; and the lure of utopian solutions. Tender, funny, and harrowing by turns, at times almost unbearably sad, The Best Minds is an extreme version of a story that is tragically familiar to all too many. In the hands of a writer of Jonathan Rosen's gifts and dedication, its significance will echo widely.]]> 576 Jonathan Rosen 1594206570 Emily 5 2023-read 3.99 2023
author: Jonathan Rosen
name: Emily
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/07
date added: 2023/08/07
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Really well-done and well-told story. Somehow the author managed to tell both the tragedy of mental illness and the ultimate problem that we don’t know what we don’t know and boil it into one deep and enduring relationship.
]]> 61875390
São vizinhos, e vivem num complexo habitacional de baixo custo em Vacca Vale, cidade em decadência. É a partir deste lugar inóspito que Tess Gunty conduz o leitor numa invulgar viagem pelo desconcerto do espírito humano, pelas grandes doenças sociais e pelo alcance incomensurável da imaginação. Uma estreia literária arrebatadora, que inscreve Tess Gunty na linhagem do Grande Romance Americano.]]> 383 Tess Gunty Emily 4 2023-read 3.53 2022
author: Tess Gunty
name: Emily
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/04
date added: 2023/08/04
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I liked the way this all weaved together. The style was not a traditional novel -- more vignettes or short bits flowing together. The writing was lovely and the pain was made very real. I can see why this has made several lists.
]]> 22875447 From the visionary head of Google's innovative People Operations comes a groundbreaking inquiry into the philosophy of work-and a blueprint for attracting the most spectacular talent to your business and ensuring that they succeed.

"We spend more time working than doing anything else in life. It's not right that the experience of work should be so demotivating and dehumanizing." So says Laszlo Bock, head of People Operations at the company that transformed how the world interacts with knowledge.

This insight is the heart of WORK RULES!, a compelling and surprisingly playful manifesto that offers lessons including:


Take away managers' power over employees
Learn from your best employees-and your worst
Hire only people who are smarter than you are, no matter how long it takes to find them
Pay unfairly (it's more fair!)
Don't trust your gut: Use data to predict and shape the future
Default to open-be transparent and welcome feedback
If you're comfortable with the amount of freedom you've given your employees, you haven't gone far enough.



Drawing on the latest research in behavioral economics and a profound grasp of human psychology, WORK RULES! also provides teaching examples from a range of industries-including lauded companies that happen to be hideous places to work and little-known companies that achieve spectacular results by valuing and listening to their employees. Bock takes us inside one of history's most explosively successful businesses to reveal why Google is consistently rated one of the best places to work in the world, distilling 15 years of intensive worker R&D into principles that are easy to put into action, whether you're a team of one or a team of thousands.

WORK RULES! shows how to strike a balance between creativity and structure, leading to success you can measure in quality of life as well as market share. Read it to build a better company from within rather than from above; read it to reawaken your joy in what you do.

]]> 406 Laszlo Bock 1455554790 Emily 4 2023-read 4.11 2015
author: Laszlo Bock
name: Emily
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/04
date added: 2023/08/04
shelves: 2023-read
review:
It's no secret I geek out over a great employee experience. Hearing how this was applied at Google was interesting.
]]> 18775359 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781476712840.

When Lauren and Ryan’s marriage reaches the breaking point, they come up with an unconventional plan. They decide to take a year off in the hopes of finding a way to fall in love again. One year apart, and only one rule: they cannot contact each other. Aside from that, anything goes.

Lauren embarks on a journey of self-discovery, quickly finding that her friends and family have their own ideas about the meaning of marriage. These influences, as well as her own healing process and the challenges of living apart from Ryan, begin to change Lauren’s ideas about monogamy and marriage. She starts to question: When you can have romance without loyalty and commitment without marriage, when love and lust are no longer tied together, what do you value? What are you willing to fight for?

This is a love story about what happens when the love fades. It’s about staying in love, seizing love, forsaking love, and committing to love with everything you’ve got. And above all, After I Do is the story of a couple caught up in an old game—and searching for a new road to happily ever after.]]> 352 Taylor Jenkins Reid Emily 4 2023-read
What I love about this book is the plethora of views on what it takes to be married (or not!) in this society. Some people are defined by their partners, some aren’t, some have to find themselves before they can find their space in their relationships. ]]> 3.91 2014
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Emily
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/24
date added: 2023/07/24
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I would lean to just under 4 on this one. Taylor Jenkins Reid is one of my favorite authors right now but this was one of those examples where you find an author later in their career and when you go back, you can tell they are still coming into their craft.

What I love about this book is the plethora of views on what it takes to be married (or not!) in this society. Some people are defined by their partners, some aren’t, some have to find themselves before they can find their space in their relationships.
]]> 62687857 From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. Imbued with humor, deep emotion, and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.]]> 724 Abraham Verghese Emily 5 2023-read
A roaming and detailed story of a single family over about 70 years in Indian. Ranging from post-WWI through Indian independence and landing in the late 1970s, the characters were deep, complex, and perfect in their imperfection. It focused on medical issues again, and the mystery of discovering the origins of “the condition� and other diseases were fascinating and I kept wanting to Google and figure out the diseases but let it unfold and that was more fun. ]]> 4.42 2023
author: Abraham Verghese
name: Emily
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/22
date added: 2023/07/22
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I didn’t like this as well as Cutting for Stone, but it was beautiful. Really I’d give it 4.75 stars, but that’s not a choice.

A roaming and detailed story of a single family over about 70 years in Indian. Ranging from post-WWI through Indian independence and landing in the late 1970s, the characters were deep, complex, and perfect in their imperfection. It focused on medical issues again, and the mystery of discovering the origins of “the condition� and other diseases were fascinating and I kept wanting to Google and figure out the diseases but let it unfold and that was more fun.
]]> 1882261
With the spare time a suspension brings, Harry opens up the thirty-year-old file on the case and is irresistibly drawn into a past he has always avoided. It's clear that the case was fumbled and the smell of a cover-up is unmistakable. Someone powerful was able to divert justice and Harry vows to uncover the truth. As he relentlessly follows the broken pieces of the case, the stirred interest causes new murders and pushes Harry to the edge of his job... and his life.]]> 495 Michael Connelly 0446619078 Emily 3 2023-read 4.07 1995
author: Michael Connelly
name: Emily
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1995
rating: 3
read at: 2023/07/18
date added: 2023/07/18
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I really like Harry Bosch, but if I'm honest I'm no having as much fun reading corrupt cop stories these days.
]]> 55650158 Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a profoundly moving novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible wrong done to her patients, from the New York Times bestselling author of Wench.

Montgomery, Alabama 1973. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend has big plans to make a difference, especially in her African American community. At the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, she intends to help women make their own choices for their lives and bodies.

But when her first week on the job takes her down a dusty country road to a worn down one-room cabin, she’s shocked to learn that her new patients are children—just 11 and 13 years old. Neither of the Williams sisters has even kissed a boy, but they are poor and Black and for those handling the family’s welfare benefits that’s reason enough to have the girls on birth control. As Civil grapples with her role, she takes India, Erica and their family into her heart. Until one day, she arrives at the door to learn the unthinkable has happened and nothing will ever be the same for any of them.

Decades later, with her daughter grown and a long career in her wake, Dr. Civil Townsend is ready to retire, to find her peace and to leave the past behind. But there are people and stories that refuse to be forgotten.That must not be forgotten.

Because history repeats what we don’t remember.]]> 359 Dolen Perkins-Valdez 0593337697 Emily 5 2023-read 4.36 2022
author: Dolen Perkins-Valdez
name: Emily
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/02
date added: 2023/07/03
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Shocking, yet not at all shocking. Loosely based on real-life sterilization of poor women of color, often without consent.
]]> 60144955
When frantic, disheveled Edie Ledwell appears in the office begging to speak to her, private detective Robin Ellacott doesn’t know quite what to make of the situation. The co-creator of a popular cartoon, The Ink Black Heart, Edie is being persecuted by a mysterious online figure who goes by the pseudonym of Anomie. Edie is desperate to uncover Anomie’s true identity.

Robin decides that the agency can’t help with this—and thinks nothing more of it until a few days later, when she reads the shocking news that Edie has been tasered and then murdered in Highgate Cemetery, the location of The Ink Black Heart.

Robin and her business partner, Cormoran Strike, become drawn into the quest to uncover Anomie’s true identity. But with a complex web of online aliases, business interests and family conflicts to navigate, Strike and Robin find themselves embroiled in a case that stretches their powers of deduction to the limits � and which threatens them in new and horrifying ways . . .]]> 1391 Robert Galbraith 0316473537 Emily 4 2023-read 4.07 2022
author: Robert Galbraith
name: Emily
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/02
date added: 2023/07/02
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I love Corm and Robin and I’ll keep reading this series. But this was was super hard to choke through when I remember JK Rowling and how weirdly narcissistic and whiny about her own treatment online she is � made internet trolls and “SJWs� and the reaction of a fandom as the center of this plot eye-rolling at best.
]]> 60784360
In 1943, as the war against Nazi Germany raged abroad, President Franklin Roosevelt had a critical a face-to-face sit-down with his allies Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill. This first-ever meeting of the Big Three in Tehran, Iran, would decide some of the most crucial strategic details of the war. Yet when the Nazis found out about the meeting, their own secret plan took shape―an assassination plot that would’ve changed history.

A true story filled with daring rescues, body doubles, and political intrigue, The Nazi Conspiracy details FDR’s pivotal meeting in Tehran and the deadly Nazi plot against the heads of state of the three major Allied powers who attended it.

With all the hallmarks of a Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch page-turner, The Nazi Conspiracy explores the great political minds of the twentieth century, investigating the pivotal years of the war in gripping detail. This meeting of the Big Three changed the course of World War II. Here’s the inside story of how it almost led to a world-shattering disaster.]]> 400 Brad Meltzer 1250777267 Emily 4 2023-read 4.06 2023
author: Brad Meltzer
name: Emily
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/15
date added: 2023/06/15
shelves: 2023-read
review:
An interesting story I had never heard about WWII. I appreciated the narrative and the research about what we can and can’t know.
]]> 58532129 From Center for Fiction First Novel Prize winning author De'Shawn Charles Winslow, a sweeping and unforgettable novel of a Black community reeling from a triple homicide, and the secrets the killings reveal.

In the still-segregated town of West Mills, North Carolina in 1976, Marian, Marva, and Lazarus Harmon-three enigmatic siblings-are found shot to death in their home. The people of West Mills-on both sides of the canal that serves as the town's color line-are in a frenzy of finger-pointing, gossip, and wonder. The crime is the first reported murder in the area in decades, but the white authorities don't seem to care or have any interest in solving the case.

Fortunately, one person is determined to do more than talk. Ms. Jo Wright has just moved back to West Mills from New York City to retire and marry a childhood sweetheart, Olympus “Lymp� Seymore. When she discovers that the murder victims are Lymp's half-siblings, and that Lymp is one of West Mills' leading culprits, she sets out on a transformative manhunt to prove his innocence.

As Jo begins to investigate those who might know the most about the Harmons' deaths, she starts to discover darker secrets than she'd ever imagined, and a pattern of cover ups-of racial incidents, homophobia, and medical misuse-that could upend the reputations of many.

For readers of American Spy and Bluebird, Bluebird, Decent People is a powerful new novel about shame, race, money, and the reckoning required to heal a fractured community.]]> 272 De'Shawn Charles Winslow 163557532X Emily 4 2023-read 3.56 2023
author: De'Shawn Charles Winslow
name: Emily
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/15
date added: 2023/06/15
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Great characters, good story, fun read.
]]> 61155405
With the stroke of a pen, twenty-three-year-old Ivy Radcliffe becomes Lady Hayworth, owner of a sprawling estate on the Yorkshire moors. Ivy has never heard of Blackwood Abbey, or of the ancient bloodline from which she’s descended. With nothing to keep her in London since losing her brother in the Great War, she warily makes her way to her new home.

The abbey is foreboding, the servants reserved and suspicious. But there is a treasure waiting behind locked doors: a magnificent library. Despite cryptic warnings from the staff, Ivy feels irresistibly drawn to its dusty shelves, where familiar works mingle with strange, esoteric texts. And she senses something else in the library too, a presence that seems to have a will of its own.  

Rumors swirl in the village about the abbey’s previous owners, about ghosts and curses, and an enigmatic manuscript at the center of it all. And as events grow more sinister, it will be up to Ivy to uncover the library’s mysteries in order to reclaim her own story—before it vanishes forever.

Lush, atmospheric and transporting, The Last Heir to Blackwood Library is a skillful reflection on memory and female agency, and a love letter to books from a writer at the height of her power.]]> 336 Hester Fox 1525804782 Emily 3 2023-read
A little feminism, a little misogyny, a little British, a little brain-eating library. ]]> 3.30 2023
author: Hester Fox
name: Emily
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/05
date added: 2023/06/05
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Maybe 3.5 stars. It was fine, kept me reading. I really don’t know how all these supernatural books keep getting on my list � is that what’s coming out right now?

A little feminism, a little misogyny, a little British, a little brain-eating library.
]]> 60652997 Wealth. Power. Murder. Magic. Alex Stern is back and the Ivy League is going straight to hell.

Find a gateway to the underworld. Steal a soul out of hell. A simple plan, except people who make this particular journey rarely come back. But Galaxy “Alex� Stern is determined to break Darlington out of purgatory―even if it costs her a future at Lethe and at Yale.

Forbidden from attempting a rescue, Alex and Dawes can’t call on the Ninth House for help, so they assemble a team of dubious allies to save the gentleman of Lethe. Together, they will have to navigate a maze of arcane texts and bizarre artifacts to uncover the societies� most closely guarded secrets, and break every rule doing it. But when faculty members begin to die off, Alex knows these aren’t just accidents. Something deadly is at work in New Haven, and if she is going to survive, she’ll have to reckon with the monsters of her past and a darkness built into the university’s very walls.

Thick with history and packed with Bardugo’s signature twists, Hell Bent brings to life an intricate world full of magic, violence, and all too real monsters.]]> 481 Leigh Bardugo 1250313104 Emily 3 2023-read 4.09 2023
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: Emily
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/05
date added: 2023/06/05
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Second in the series. I still don’t love it, but it’s keeping me reading. This time they need to rescue their friend from hell. I was bought in but then…vampires?
]]> 60784568
Red Queen is the first book in a trilogy that has sold over 2 million copies in Spain, sold to seventeen countries, and is the basis of an Amazon streaming series to debut in 2023.

Antonia Scott—the daughter of a British diplomat and a Spanish mother—has a gifted forensic mind, whose ability to reconstruct crimes and solve baffling murders is legendary. But after a personal trauma, she's refused to continue her work or even leave her apartment.

Jon Gutierrez, a police officer in Bilbao—disgraced, suspended, and about to face criminal charges—is offered a chance to salvage his career by a secretive organization that works in the shadows to direct criminal investigations of a highly sensitive nature. All he has to do is succeed where many others have failed: Convince a recalcitrant Antonia to come out of her self-imposed retirement, protecting her and helping her investigate a new, terrifying case.

The case is a macabre, ritualistic murder—a teen-aged boy from a wealthy family whose body was found without a drop of blood left in it. But the murder is just the start. A high-ranking executive and daughter of one of the richest men in Spain is kidnapped, a crime which is tied to the previous murder. Behind them both is a hidden mastermind with even more sinister plans. And the only person with a chance to see the connections, solve the crimes and successfully match wits with the killer before tragedy strikes again...is Antonia Scott.]]> 384 Juan Gómez-Jurado 1250853672 Emily 4 2023-read 3.96 2018
author: Juan GĂłmez-Jurado
name: Emily
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/29
date added: 2023/05/29
shelves: 2023-read
review:
This book was really fun and Antonia Scott reminded me a lot of Lisbeth Salander. I enjoyed the partnership between the Red Queen and her handler, and hated those pulling the strings, so I think it did its job. I’m sorry to have to wait for the translations of the next ones in the series.
]]> 54304124
Extra-curricular activities. Honors classes. 60-hour work weeks. Side hustles.

Like many Americans, Dr. Devon Price believed that productivity was the best way to measure self-worth. Price was an overachiever from the start, graduating from both college and graduate school early, but that success came at a cost. After Price was diagnosed with a severe case of anemia and heart complications from overexertion, they were forced to examine the darker side of all this productivity.

Laziness Does Not Exist explores the psychological underpinnings of the “laziness lie,� including its origins from the Puritans and how it has continued to proliferate as digital work tools have blurred the boundaries between work and life. Using in-depth research, Price explains that people today do far more work than nearly any other humans in history yet most of us often still feel we are not doing enough.

Filled with practical and accessible advice for overcoming society’s pressure to do more, and featuring interviews with researchers, consultants, and experiences from real people drowning in too much work, Laziness Does Not Exist “is the book we all need right now� (Caroline Dooner, author of The F*ck It Diet ).]]> 256 Devon Price 1982140100 Emily 3 2023-read 3.91 2021
author: Devon Price
name: Emily
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/26
date added: 2023/05/26
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I loved the premise, but honestly it felt like 3 books. It needed a larger thread tying it all together. Basically capitalism has fed us a lie about being good enough or productive enough and it’s caused myriad problems. That I get. But then they meandered into anti-racism and anti-LGBTQIA+ and while I’m into all of that and it definitely intersects with how we view productivity through a capitalism lens, the overall book would have been better served with a more cogent thesis throughout. Or at least just acknowledging as a side chapter or call out that traditionally marginalized groups are hurt worse by the laziness myth but that the fix is really solidarity.
]]> 61053829
But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn't as much of an outsider at Granby as she'd thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.]]> 438 Rebecca Makkai 0593490142 Emily 4 2023-read 3.57 2023
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: Emily
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/26
date added: 2023/05/26
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I love her writing, but this was no Great Believers. It did address the complexities of predation and #metoo. But I didn’t love it as much as I wanted to.
]]> 61246258
Shot through with the indulgent pleasures of life among New York’s one-percenters, Pineapple Street is an addictive, escapist novel that sparkles with wit. Full of recognizable, lovable—if fallible—characters, it’s about the peculiar unknowability of someone else’s family, the miles between the haves and have-nots, and the insanity of first love—all wrapped in a deliciously funny, sharply observed debut of family, love, and class.]]> 304 Jenny Jackson 059349069X Emily 3 2023-read
(Edit) Marin Ireland did the audio book narration and she makes it all the better.

I enjoyed the book. I wanted to keep reading. But I’m conflicted.

What I can’t figure out is how seriously the novel is trying to take itself. Most of the family ended up attempting to break out of the bubble in their own ways, exploring racism, philanthropy, and grappling with immense privilege and the scarcity mentality it can create but moving from insulated, unaware 1%er to white savior 1%er or 1%er whose scariest moment would have been to ask a family member with hundreds of millions of dollars for a handout doesn’t really feel like redemption. And maybe that’s the point? That this obscene generational wealth and the mentality it creates can’t be undone in a single generation? Philanthropist shouldn’t be a job. But also, what is a decent person who inherits 100 million dollars supposed to do? Let’s put it this way, I did not leave the book more hopeful about wealth concentration.]]> 3.49 2023
author: Jenny Jackson
name: Emily
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/19
date added: 2023/05/19
shelves: 2023-read
review:
A fun piece of escapist fiction into the world of the uber rich world of tennis clubs and trust funds and private schools and scads of NYC property. The adult children, with more money than they could spend in 7 lifetimes begin to realize that perhaps they are part of the problem.

(Edit) Marin Ireland did the audio book narration and she makes it all the better.

I enjoyed the book. I wanted to keep reading. But I’m conflicted.

What I can’t figure out is how seriously the novel is trying to take itself. Most of the family ended up attempting to break out of the bubble in their own ways, exploring racism, philanthropy, and grappling with immense privilege and the scarcity mentality it can create but moving from insulated, unaware 1%er to white savior 1%er or 1%er whose scariest moment would have been to ask a family member with hundreds of millions of dollars for a handout doesn’t really feel like redemption. And maybe that’s the point? That this obscene generational wealth and the mentality it creates can’t be undone in a single generation? Philanthropist shouldn’t be a job. But also, what is a decent person who inherits 100 million dollars supposed to do? Let’s put it this way, I did not leave the book more hopeful about wealth concentration.
]]> 59049282 A Read with Jenna Book Club Pick as Seen on the Today Show

“If you like Practical Magic� you will love Black Candle Women.� —Jenna Bush Hager

Named a Best Book of the Month by: Shondaland, MS. Magazine, TODAY, Reader’s Digest, Katie Couric Media, AARP Sisters, Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ, BookRiot

A warm and wry family drama with a magical twist about four generations of Black women, a family love curse, and the secrets they keep for and from each other over one very complicated year

Generations of Montrose women—Augusta, Victoria, Willow—have always lived together in their quaint California bungalow. They keep to themselves, never venture far from home, and their collection of tinctures and spells is an unspoken bond between them. But when young Nickie Montrose brings home a boy for the first time, their quiet lives are thrown into disarray.

For the family has withheld a crucial secret from Nickie all these years: any person a Montrose woman falls in love with will die. Their surprise guest forces each woman to reckon with her own past choices and mistakes. And as new truths about the curse emerge, they're set on a collision course dating back to 1950s New Orleans’s French Quarter—where a hidden story in a mysterious book may just hold the answers they seek in life and in love�

“Richly imagined and elegantly told, with plenty of satisfying secrets, heartaches, and twists.�
—Sadeqa Johnson, New York Times bestselling author of The House of Eve, a Reese's Book Club Pick

“Propulsive and poignant, Black Candle Women concocts an intoxicating potion of warmth, wisdom, and wonder.� —Ava DuVernay]]> 336 Diane Marie Brown 1525899910 Emily 3 2023-read 3.38 2023
author: Diane Marie Brown
name: Emily
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/15
date added: 2023/05/15
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Bahni Turpin as the reader made this book for me. It was kind of fun and I like Creole legends. But for some reason I was really bothered by the lack of consent in this novel with all the magic the women used.
]]> 49189494 The discovery of a girl abandoned by the side of the road threatens to unearth the long-buried secrets of a Texas town's legendary cold case in this superb, atmospheric novel from the internationally bestselling author of Black-Eyed Susans.

It's been a decade since Trumanell Branson disappeared, leaving only a bloody handprint behind. Her pretty face still hangs like a watchful queen on the posters on the walls of the town's Baptist church, the police station, and in the high school. They all promise the same thing: We will find you. Meanwhile, her brother, Wyatt, lives as a pariah in the desolation of the old family house, cleared of wrongdoing by the police but tried and sentenced in the court of public opinion and in a new documentary about the crime.

When Wyatt finds a lost girl dumped in a field of dandelions, making silent wishes, he believes she is a sign. The town's youngest cop, Odette Tucker, believes she is a catalyst that will ignite a seething town still waiting for its own missing girl to come home. But Odette can't look away. She shares a wound that won't close with the mute, one-eyed mystery girl. And she is haunted by her own history with the missing Tru.

Desperate to solve both cases, Odette fights to save the lost girl in the present and to dig up the shocking truth about a fateful night in the past--the night her friend disappeared, the night that inspired her to become a cop, the night that wrote them all a role in the town's dark, violent mythology.

In this twisty psychological thriller, Julia Heaberlin paints unforgettable portraits of a woman and a girl who redefine perceptions of physical beauty and strength.]]> 352 Julia Heaberlin 0525621679 Emily 4 2023-read 3.75 2020
author: Julia Heaberlin
name: Emily
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/10
date added: 2023/05/10
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Finally a good thriller this year that didn’t dip into anything paranormal or fantastical. It was believable, interesting, and just twisty enough to maintain a plot.
]]> 60880794 From psychotherapist Katherine Morgan Schafler, an invitation to every “recovering perfectionist� to challenge the way they look at perfectionism, and the way they look at themselves.

We’ve been looking at perfectionism all wrong. As psychotherapist and former on-site therapist at Google Katherine Morgan Schafler argues in The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control, you don’t have to stop being a perfectionist to be healthy. For women who are sick of being given the generic advice to “find balance�, a new approach has arrived.

Which of the five types of perfectionist are you? Classic, intense, Parisian, messy, or procrastinator? As you identify your unique perfectionist profile, you'll learn how to manage each form of perfectionism to work for you, not against you. Beyond managing it, you'll learn how to embrace and even enjoy your perfectionism. Yes, enjoy!

Full of stories and brimming with humor, empathy, and depth, this book is a love letter to the ambitious, high achieving, full-of-life clients who filled the author’s private practice, and who changed her life. It’s a clarion call for all women to dare to want more without feeling greedy or ungrateful. Ultimately, this book will show you how to make the single greatest trade you’ll ever make in your life, which is to exchange superficial control for real power.]]> 325 Katherine Morgan Schafler 059332952X Emily 5 2023-read 4.16 2023
author: Katherine Morgan Schafler
name: Emily
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/09
date added: 2023/05/09
shelves: 2023-read
review:
This book was great � strengths based, trauma aware, and had solid information. The only thing keeping it from perfect were a few more practical exercises. I listened, but it’s worth buying to underline. I would also recommend to anyone who lives with a perfectionist � it would make for good understanding of motivations.
]]> 55922299
One year later, a writer moves into a cottage on the edge of the woods that border the same estate. Known locally as the Dark Place, the dense forest is the writer’s favorite area for long walks and it’s on one such walk that she stumbles upon a mysterious note that simply reads, “DIG HERE.�

Could this be a clue towards what has happened to the missing young couple? And what exactly is buried in this haunted ground?]]> 416 Lisa Jewell 1982137363 Emily 4 2023-read 4.05 2021
author: Lisa Jewell
name: Emily
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/01
date added: 2023/05/01
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Pretty good little thriller. I liked how it unfolded and the extra couple of twists I wasn’t expecting. The back and forth in time was well-done and there were enough extra, yet relevant, characters to keep you guessing.
]]> 61102619
But what Edward discovers about the vase has Dora questioning everything she has believed about her life, her family, and the world as she knows it. As Dora uncovers the truth, she comes to understand that some doors are locked and some mysteries are buried for a reason, while others are closer to the surface than they appear.

Steeped in mystery and rich in imagination, an exhilarating historical novel set in Georgian London where the discovery of a mysterious ancient Greek vase sets in motion conspiracies, revelations, and romance.]]> 408 Susan Stokes-Chapman 0063280027 Emily 3 2023-read 3.60 2022
author: Susan Stokes-Chapman
name: Emily
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/04/27
date added: 2023/04/27
shelves: 2023-read
review:
This book was fine. I don’t know why I am in some kind of recommend spiral where I keep getting speculative fiction, but I am. A mystical vase that predates time ends up in an antique shop, an evil cartoonish villain, and a tangential relationship to the myth of Pandora. It all buttoned up a little too nearly at the end, but it did keep me reading.
]]> 50607466 Vivid and compelling in its portrait of one woman’s struggle for fulfillment in a society pivoting between the traditional and the modern, The Henna Artist opens a door into a world that is at once lush and fascinating, stark and cruel.

Escaping from an abusive marriage, seventeen-year-old Lakshmi makes her way alone to the vibrant 1950s pink city of Jaipur. There she becomes the most highly requested henna artist—and confidante—to the wealthy women of the upper class. But trusted with the secrets of the wealthy, she can never reveal her own�

Known for her original designs and sage advice, Lakshmi must tread carefully to avoid the jealous gossips who could ruin her reputation and her livelihood. As she pursues her dream of an independent life, she is startled one day when she is confronted by her husband, who has tracked her down these many years later with a high-spirited young girl in tow—a sister Lakshmi never knew she had. Suddenly the caution that she has carefully cultivated as protection is threatened. Still she perseveres, applying her talents and lifting up those that surround her as she does.]]> 384 Alka Joshi 0778310205 Emily 4 2023-read 4.14 2020
author: Alka Joshi
name: Emily
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/24
date added: 2023/04/24
shelves: 2023-read
review:
India in the 1900s has become one of my favorite periods to read about. The kids were just the right balance to the realities of the life Lakshmi lived. The art was so beautiful I could almost see it. The character arcs were well-done and the story, while certainly not “fun� did make for a really enjoyable read.
]]> 58783802 A rollicking feminist tale set in 1950s America where thousands of women have spontaneously transformed into dragons, exploding notions of a woman’s place in the world and expanding minds about accepting others for who they really are.

The first adult novel by the Newbery award-winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon.

Alex Green is a young girl in a world much like ours, except for its most seminal event: the Mass Dragoning of 1955, when hundreds of thousands of ordinary wives and mothers sprouted wings, scales, and talons; left a trail of fiery destruction in their path; and took to the skies. Was it their choice? What will become of those left behind? Why did Alex’s beloved aunt Marla transform but her mother did not? Alex doesn’t know. It’s taboo to speak of.

Forced into silence, Alex nevertheless must face the consequences of this astonishing event: a mother more protective than ever; an absentee father; the upsetting insistence that her aunt never even existed; and watching her beloved cousin Bea become dangerously obsessed with the forbidden.

In this timely and timeless speculative novel, award-winning author Kelly Barnhill boldly explores rage, memory, and the tyranny of forced limitations. When Women Were Dragons exposes a world that wants to keep women small—their lives and their prospects—and examines what happens when they rise en masse and take up the space they deserve.]]> 367 Kelly Barnhill 0385548222 Emily 4 2023-read 3.79 2022
author: Kelly Barnhill
name: Emily
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2023/04/17
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Read on a recommendation and I really enjoyed it. I’m not usually one for magical realism but the context felt as relevant today as it would have in the 1950s. Mother, sister, daughter � women living into their power and being there for each other. It was as beautiful as the dragons.
]]> 59808190
From the glamorous to the entitled, from royalty to the financially ruined, everyone who wanted to be seen―or just to gawk―at the hottest restaurants in New York City came to places Michael Cecchi-Azzolina helped run. His phone number was passed around among those who wanted to curry favor, during the decades when restaurants replaced clubs and theater as, well, theater in the most visible, vibrant city in the world.

Besides dropping us back into a vanished time, Your Table Is Ready takes us places we’d never be able to get into on our own: Raoul's in Soho with its louche club vibe; Buzzy O’Keefe’s casually elegant River Café (the only outer-borough establishment desirable enough to be included in this roster), from Keith McNally’s Minetta Tavern to Nolita’s Le Coucou, possibly the most beautiful room in New York City in 2018, with its French Country Auberge-meets-winery look and the most exquisite and enormous stands of flowers, changed every three days.

From his early career serving theater stars like Tennessee Williams and Dustin Hoffman at La Rousse right through to the last pre-pandemic-shutdown full houses at Le Coucou, Cecchi-Azzolina has seen it all. In Your Table Is Ready , he breaks down how restaurants really run (and don’t), and how the economics work for owners and overworked staff alike. The professionals who gravitate to the business are a special, tougher breed, practiced in dealing with the demanding patrons and with each other, in a very distinctive ecosystem that’s somewhere between a George Orwell “down and out in�.� dungeon and a sleek showman’s smoke-and-mirrors palace.

Your Table Is Ready is a rollicking, raunchy, revelatory memoir.]]> 304 Michael Cecchi-Azzolina 1250281989 Emily 5 2023-read 3.60 2022
author: Michael Cecchi-Azzolina
name: Emily
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/17
date added: 2023/04/17
shelves: 2023-read
review:
What a fun escape into the world of fine dining in NYC from the 80s to today. The characters, the gossip, the shenanigans� I loved it all.
]]> 56472994 A popular sorority girl. An unsolved murder. A campus podcast with chilling repercussions.

Lucas Vega is obsessed with the death of Candace Swain, who left a sorority party one night and never came back. Her body was found after two weeks, but the case has grown cold. Three years later while interning at the medical examiner's, Lucas discovers new information, but the police are not interested.

Lucas knows he has several credible pieces of the puzzle. He just isn't sure how they fit together. So he creates a podcast to revisit Candace's last hours. Then he encourages listeners to crowdsource what they remember and invites guest lecturer Regan Merritt, a former US marshal, to come on and share her expertise.

New tips come in that convince Lucas and Regan they are onto something. Then shockingly one of the podcast callers turns up dead. Another hints at Candace's secret life, a much darker picture than Lucas imagined—and one that implicates other sorority sisters. Regan uses her own resources to bolster their theory and learns that Lucas is hiding his own secret. The pressure is on to solve the murder, but first Lucas must come clean about his real motives in pursuing this podcast—before the killer silences him forever.]]> 448 Allison Brennan 0778311686 Emily 3 2023-read 3.64 2021
author: Allison Brennan
name: Emily
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2023/04/10
date added: 2023/04/10
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I would lean towards 3.5 stars. It took a minute to get going but I found I liked the characters and know that Reagan’s story is going to improve.
]]> 57945316 From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a historical fantasy epic that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British Empire

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. The tower and its students are the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver-working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as the arcane craft serves the Empire's quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide . . .

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?]]> 544 R.F. Kuang 0063021420 Emily 5 2023-read 4.17 2022
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Emily
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/10
date added: 2023/04/10
shelves: 2023-read
review:
What can I say about this book? It’s dense and about words and language and solidarity and colonization. Really well done and flew by, even though it wasn’t light.
]]> 60318890
As the locals of Beartown struggle to overcome the past, great change is on the horizon. Someone is coming home after a long time away. Someone will be laid to rest. Someone will fall in love, someone will try to fix their marriage, and someone will do anything to save their children. Someone will submit to hate, someone will fight, and someone will grab a gun and walk towards the ice rink.

So what are the residents of Beartown willing to sacrifice for their home?]]> 671 Fredrik Backman Emily 5 2023-read
The conclusion to the Beartown trilogy is everything I have come to expect from the hockey heads and the cast of characters surrounding them. I found the very last couple of pages unsatisfying, but I think that’s really because this is a world I want to keep returning to. ]]> 4.45 2022
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Emily
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/10
date added: 2023/04/10
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I love Backman. He could write anything and I would devour it. I wish I could go back and discover him for the first time so that I could experience all his books again.

The conclusion to the Beartown trilogy is everything I have come to expect from the hockey heads and the cast of characters surrounding them. I found the very last couple of pages unsatisfying, but I think that’s really because this is a world I want to keep returning to.
]]> 13555073
For more than fifty years, the country has been affected by a horrifying epidemic of ghosts. A number of Psychic Investigations Agencies have sprung up to destroy the dangerous apparitions.

Lucy Carlyle, a talented young agent, arrives in London hoping for a notable career. Instead she finds herself joining the smallest, most ramshackle agency in the city, run by the charismatic Anthony Lockwood. When one of their cases goes horribly wrong, Lockwood & Co. have one last chance of redemption. Unfortunately this involves spending the night in one of the most haunted houses in England, and trying to escape alive.

Set in a city stalked by spectres, The Screaming Staircase is the first in a chilling new series full of suspense, humour and truly terrifying ghosts. Your nights will never be the same again . . .]]> 440 Jonathan Stroud 0857532014 Emily 4 2023-read 4.24 2013
author: Jonathan Stroud
name: Emily
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/26
date added: 2023/03/26
shelves: 2023-read
review:
A different mystery of the paranormal kind. I look forward to seeing the characters develop further as the series progresses.
]]> 95784
This book tells the story from three perspectives: of the Japanese soldiers who performed it, of the Chinese civilians who endured it, and of a group of Europeans and Americans who refused to abandon the city and were able to create a safety zone that saved many.]]> 290 Iris Chang 0140277447 Emily 4 2023-read 4.23 1997
author: Iris Chang
name: Emily
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/19
date added: 2023/03/19
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I really don’t know how this is a story I have missed in all this time, but I have. It’s disgusting and horrible and really, really hard to read. I think everyone should, and yet, I can’t actually recommend it to anyone who isn’t ready to process this story.
]]> 60149559 --Oliver Burkeman, New York Times bestselling author of Four Thousand Weeks

For anyone who’s sick of letting to-do lists dictate their time, Laura Vanderkam, the bestselling author of What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast , shares nine strategies for reclaiming your hours

Do you find yourself hoping that someday, life will be less hectic? One day, you say, you’ll finally have time for the activities that you love � writing that book, completing that triathlon, traveling with friends. But if the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that life is unpredictable. If we’re not careful, dull, unfulfilling tasks can quickly occupy our precious hours, derail our best-laid plans, and make life feel like a slog.

In Tranquility by Tuesday , Laura Vanderkam explains that if you want something to happen, you need to design your life to make it happen. Work crises, childcare emergencies, and home repairs are inevitable, and the mundane tasks of life � cooking, cleaning, laundry � aren’t going anywhere. To make time for what matters, you need a resilient schedule, not a perfect schedule. Based on a time diary study of over 150 people, Vanderkam shares nine strategies for building opportunities for joy, nourishment, and fulfillment into your week, such


This is more than a time management book about “how to do it all.� It’s a look at how real people changed their lives using Vanderkam’s nine rules, and how you can do the same. It’s about intentionally living the life that you want to live, and becoming an autonomous steward of life’s possibilities.]]> 288 Laura Vanderkam 0593419006 Emily 4 2023-read 4.21 2022
author: Laura Vanderkam
name: Emily
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/17
date added: 2023/03/17
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Some good suggestions in this one to calm the chaos not by ridding your life of things but by being more purposeful and taking control of your things instead of letting your list of things control you. I imagine I’ll pick it up again.
]]> 17349222 State of Wonder, Run,Ěý˛ą˛Ô»ĺĚýBel Canto, examines her deepest commitments â€� to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband â€� creating a resonant portrait of a life in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage.

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage takes us into the very real world of Ann Patchett’s life. Stretching from her childhood to the present day, from a disastrous early marriage to a later happy one, it covers a multitude of topics, including relationships with family and friends, and charts the hard work and joy of writing, and the unexpected thrill of opening a bookstore.

As she shares stories of the people, places, ideals, and art to which she has remained indelibly committed, Ann Patchett brings into focus the large experiences and small moments that have shaped her as a daughter, wife, and writer.]]> 308 Ann Patchett 0062236679 Emily 4 2023-read 4.00 2013
author: Ann Patchett
name: Emily
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/17
date added: 2023/03/17
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I don’t often read essays or short stories but I read this on a recommendation and I’m so glad I did. What a lovely set of words! On writing, on love, on life. It was great.
]]> 58446227 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

"One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet." --The New York Times

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.]]> 259 Emily St. John Mandel 0593321448 Emily 3 2023-read 4.04 2022
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Emily
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/12
date added: 2023/03/12
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I wish there was a half star. I would say 3.5. There were glimpses of brilliance and I liked the story and the premise. Time travel, pandemics, technology, and the general part of human beings that frankly, we should all worry about. What I wanted was to like the characters more. The way the threads weaved together was truly great, with a little more character development, it might have been 4.5.
]]> 60435878 Carrie Soto is fierce, and her determination to win at any cost has not made her popular.

By the time Carrie retires from tennis, she is the best player the world has ever seen. She has shattered every record and claimed twenty Slam titles. And if you ask her, she is entitled to every one. She sacrificed nearly everything to become the best, with her father as her coach.

But six years after her retirement, Carrie finds herself sitting in the stands of the 1994 US Open, watching her record be taken from her by a brutal, stunning, British player named Nicki Chan.

At thirty-seven years old, Carrie makes the monumental decision to come out of retirement and be coached by her father for one last year in an attempt to reclaim her record. Even if the sports media says that they never liked the 'Battle-Axe' anyway. Even if her body doesn't move as fast as it did. And even if it means swallowing her pride to train with a man she once almost opened her heart to: Bowe Huntley. Like her, he has something to prove before he gives up the game forever.

In spite of it all: Carrie Soto is back, for one epic final season. In this riveting and unforgettable novel, Taylor Jenkins Reid tells a story about the cost of greatness and a legendary athlete attempting a comeback.]]> 384 Taylor Jenkins Reid 0593158687 Emily 5 2023-read, pyx-book-club 4.19 2022
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Emily
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/05
date added: 2023/03/05
shelves: 2023-read, pyx-book-club
review:
Taylor Jenkins Reid just keeps getting better. The father-daughter relationship was lovely, the human growth and learning was powerful, and the gender-based double standards came through as great themes. I loved all the characters and could hardly put this one down.
]]> 59808036
Jenny Newberg, Queen of Bad Decisions, is about to make another one. In a small town where everyone knows everyone’s business, down-on-her-luck single mother Jenny is on a first-name basis with the debt collector at the bank, who is moving toward foreclosure. She is constantly apologizing to her precocious young daughter, Billie Starr, who is filling a book with her mother’s sorries, and it seems to Jenny that no apology will ever be enough.

Then a pair of strangers in black suits offers her a hefty check to seduce someone known as the Candidate. Finally, something will go her way.

But nothing ever goes as Jenny plans, and she is swept into the Candidate’s orbit. Surrounded by a wide universe of new ideas, she realizes how constrained her life has been by the expectations of everyone around her, and she starts to see how much more she might be capable of. And when her world is rocked to its core and Billie Starr may be in danger, Jenny is forced to do what she once thought impossible: trust in herself and her own power to make things right.

Shimmering with rage and sparkling with subtle humor, Billie Starr's Book of Sorries showcases Edgar Award-nominee Deborah E. Kennedy's singular voice and shines a light on the town of Benson, Indiana, where lakes, grudges, and family rifts run deep � but so does a mother’s love.]]> 320 Deborah Elaine Kennedy 1250138434 Emily 4 2023-read 3.44 2022
author: Deborah Elaine Kennedy
name: Emily
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/05
date added: 2023/03/05
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Not a deep story, but I enjoyed it. Single mom, doing her best, which was never actually all that good. A series of bad life choices, but also, the best she could. And the love for her girl never wavered.
]]> 56996757
In this literary novel, Robin and Eleanor meet in 1811 at the British estate of Eleanor’s rich aunt Clara. Robin is about to leave to fight in the Napoleonic Wars, and Aunt Clara rules out a marriage between her niece and the handsome young soldier.

Everyone Eleanor knows, including Robin, believe they’ve always lived in the early 19th century, in the Regency era that Jane Austen so vividly portrayed.

Yet in this time-jumping, genre-bending, challenging novel, Eleanor keeps finding herself in different times, living lives that are both similar and different to the life she lived in Regency England. Whether she finds herself in 1811, 1941 or 2010, she always lives with her aunt, she's invariably accompanied by her best friend Catherine, and her evolving romance with Robin leaves her both tense and joyful as he fights in yet another war.

Meanwhile, carriages change to trains, the telegraph arrives, bicycles come into vogue, then motorcars, and suddenly Robin is fighting in the First World War when he started out fighting Napoleon in 1811. Yet both Robin and Eleanor remain in their twenties a century after their love affair began.

No one but Eleanor notices the time jumps, and she struggles on her own to figure out what’s going on. Is she feverish? Hallucinating? Losing her mind? Only when she reaches the 21st century does Eleanor understand that she and Robin are being manipulated through time.

But who is doing this and why? Desperate, Eleanor sets off to confront the ones she finally discovers are behind this � chessmasters who are playing her like a pawn. Eleanor’s goal? To free herself from this quantum experiment to live out her life on her own terms, with Robin by her side.

Neither sci fi nor romance, but a critically-acclaimed literary mash-up, Time Squared reveals the roles women are forced to play in different centuries, the power they’re allowed, the stresses they face � and what this does to their relationships. Shakespeare famously wrote, "Love alters not when it alteration finds."

Or does it?]]> 315 Lesley Krueger 1770415920 Emily 2 2023-read 2.62 2021
author: Lesley Krueger
name: Emily
average rating: 2.62
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2023/02/28
date added: 2023/02/28
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Another disappointment this year. It started promising enough with a strange time travel/life repeating story. And then in the last 20% it just all tumbled together in some kind of vague moralistic wrap up.
]]> 43263680
Still searching for answers to this herself, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. These eight windowless “tombs� are well-known to be haunts of the future rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street and Hollywood’s biggest players. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive.]]> 461 Leigh Bardugo 1250313074 Emily 2 2023-read 4.00 2019
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: Emily
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2023/02/19
date added: 2023/02/19
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I wanted to love this but I didn’t. I have read others of Bardugo and enjoyed them. I guess maybe I’m not into ghost fantasy? I don’t know. I didn’t like the characters and found the story to be convoluted.
]]> 55711638 A stunning novel about love, work, and marriage that asks how far one family and one community will go to protect their future.

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened.

Colleen is an amateur midwife. Rich is a tree-topper. It’s a dangerous job that requires him to scale trees hundreds of feet tall—a job that both his father and grandfather died doing. Colleen and Rich want a better life for their son—and they take steps to assure their future. Rich secretly spends their savings on a swath of ancient Redwoods. Colleen, desperate to have a second baby, challenges the logging company’s use of herbicides that she believes are responsible for the many miscarriages in the community—including her own. Colleen and Rich find themselves on opposite sides of a budding conflict that threatens the very thing they are trying to protect: their family.

Told in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, Damnation Spring is an intimate, compassionate portrait of a family whose bonds are tested and a community clinging to a vanishing way of life. An extraordinary story of the transcendent, enduring power of love—between husband and wife, mother and child, and longtime neighbors. An essential novel for our times.]]> 464 Ash Davidson 1982144408 Emily 4 2023-read 3.85 2021
author: Ash Davidson
name: Emily
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/15
date added: 2023/02/15
shelves: 2023-read
review:
This book was a slow, slow burn. But in the end, I was glad I stuck with it. This is not a beach read, but a curl up under a blanket and read for hours. It's strange, but usually I'm a character person and I didn't love any of the characters, but I loved the trees and the town and environment and it's like they were the real star characters.
]]> 58065033 390 Bonnie Garmus Emily 5 2023-read, pyx-book-club 4.23 2022
author: Bonnie Garmus
name: Emily
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/02/12
date added: 2023/02/12
shelves: 2023-read, pyx-book-club
review:
Adorable, quirky, and impossible to put down. I can see why this book has appeared on so many lists. I loved all the characters so much. Woman scientist, precocious daughter, winning in a man’s world. The only ding I would give it is the ending, but it’s a small ding.
]]> 58909880 The New York Times best-selling author of Final Girls and Survive the Night is back with his most unexpected thriller yet.

Casey Fletcher, a recently widowed actress trying to escape a streak of bad press, has retreated to the peace and quiet of her family’s lake house in Vermont. Armed with a pair of binoculars and several bottles of liquor, she passes the time watching Tom and Katherine Royce, the glamorous couple who live in the house across the lake. They make for good viewing—a tech innovator, Tom is rich; and a former model, Katherine is gorgeous.

One day on the lake, Casey saves Katherine from drowning, and the two strike up a budding friendship. But the more they get to know each other—and the longer Casey watches—it becomes clear that Katherine and Tom’s marriage is not as perfect and placid as it appears. When Katherine suddenly vanishes, Casey becomes consumed with finding out what happened to her. In the process, she uncovers eerie, darker truths that turn a tale of voyeurism and suspicion into a story of guilt, obsession and how looks can be very deceiving.

With his trademark blend of sharp characters, psychological suspense, and gasp-worthy surprises, Riley Sager’s The House Across the Lake unveils more than one twist that will shock readers until the very last page.]]> 369 Riley Sager Emily 1 2023-read
I will also say that I got this on audio and the narrator was a terrible choice for this book. She's an older woman and the book's narrator is a younger woman (30s). Anyway, the whole combination was a mess.]]> 3.57 2022
author: Riley Sager
name: Emily
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2022
rating: 1
read at: 2023/02/05
date added: 2023/02/05
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I have had some bad books this year and it's only February. This book started out really good, typical 3.5-star thriller fare (which I love). An unreliable narrator with a drinking problem, creepy spying on lake neighbors, a missing wife, possible domestic violence, the whole 9. But then, suddenly there was a weird supernatural twist and it became almost comically stupid. I really wanted to put it down, but having already invested plenty of time, I figured I might as well see it through to the end. Having done that, it was definitely not worth it.

I will also say that I got this on audio and the narrator was a terrible choice for this book. She's an older woman and the book's narrator is a younger woman (30s). Anyway, the whole combination was a mess.
]]> 58200585
In the spring of 2020, COVID-19 arrived in New York City.

Before long, America’s largest metropolis was at war against a virus that mercilessly swept through its five boroughs. It became apparent that if Covid wasn’t somehow halted, the death count in New York alone would be in the hundreds of thousands. And if New York’s hospitals failed, what chance did the rest of the country have?

In The Desperate Hours, award-winning journalist Marie Brenner, having been granted unprecedented 18-month access to the entire New York-Presbyterian hospital system, tells the story of the doctors, nurses, residents, researchers, and suppliers who tried to save lives across Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn and the northern periphery of the city. Drawing on more than 200 interviews, Brenner takes us inside secure ICU units, sealed operating rooms, locked executive suites, unknown basement workshops, and makeshift clinics to provide extraordinary witness to the war as it was waged on the front line. But The Desperate Hours is more than a thrilling account of medicine under extreme pressure. It is an intimate portrait of courageous men and women coming together in their devotion to duty, their families, each other, and the city they loved more than any other.]]> 496 Marie Brenner 1250805732 Emily 4 2023-read 3.85
author: Marie Brenner
name: Emily
average rating: 3.85
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/04
date added: 2023/02/04
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I love an embedded reporter story. This one was heart warming, heartbreaking, infuriating, and inspiring. What struck me both in the book (and in life) is how many lifetimes seemed to pass in about 10 weeks at the beginning of the pandemic in the U.S.
]]> 58957615
Then a new foe pays Elizabeth a visit. Her mission? Kill or be killed. Suddenly the cold case has become red hot.

While Elizabeth wrestles with her conscience (and a gun), Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim chase down the clues with help from old friends and new. But can the gang solve the mystery and save Elizabeth before the murderer strikes again?

From an upmarket spa to a prison cell complete with espresso machine to a luxury penthouse high in the sky, this third adventure of the Thursday Murder Club is full of the cleverness, intrigue, and irresistible charm that readers have come to expect from Richard Osman's bestselling series.]]> 413 Richard Osman 0241512425 Emily 5 2023-read 4.32 2022
author: Richard Osman
name: Emily
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/29
date added: 2023/01/29
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I love all these people. I want them to be my friends. I want to be them when I grow up. Always a fun mystery adventure with the Thursday Murder Club is around.
]]> 59112754 Whose truth is the lie? Stay up all night reading the sensational psychological thriller that has readers obsessed, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of It Ends With Us.

Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling writer on the brink of financial ruin when she accepts the job offer of a lifetime. Jeremy Crawford, husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford, has hired Lowen to complete the remaining books in a successful series his injured wife is unable to finish.

Lowen arrives at the Crawford home, ready to sort through years of Verity’s notes and outlines, hoping to find enough material to get her started. What Lowen doesn’t expect to uncover in the chaotic office is an unfinished autobiography Verity never intended for anyone to read. Page after page of bone-chilling admissions, including Verity's recollection of the night her family was forever altered.

Lowen decides to keep the manuscript hidden from Jeremy, knowing its contents could devastate the already grieving father. But as Lowen’s feelings for Jeremy begin to intensify, she recognizes all the ways she could benefit if he were to read his wife’s words. After all, no matter how devoted Jeremy is to his injured wife, a truth this horrifying would make it impossible for him to continue loving her.]]> 314 Colleen Hoover 1538724731 Emily 3 2023-read, pyx-book-club
]]> 4.37 2018
author: Colleen Hoover
name: Emily
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2023/01/27
date added: 2023/01/27
shelves: 2023-read, pyx-book-club
review:
This book did not live up to the hype for me. It was twisty and hard to put down, but also effed up almost for the purpose of being effed up and not for the story. I have liked Hoover in the past, but I found this writing to be lacking.


]]> 55663163 India’s only female lawyer, Perveen Mistry, is compelled to bring justice to the family of a murdered female Parsi student just as Bombay’s streets erupt in riots to protest British colonial rule. Sujata Massey is back with this third installment to the Agatha and Mary Higgins Clark Award-winning series set in 1920s Bombay.

November, 1921. Edward VIII, Prince of Wales and future ruler of India, is arriving in Bombay to begin a four-month tour. The Indian subcontinent is chafing under British rule, and Bombay solicitor Perveen Mistry isn’t surprised when local unrest over the royal arrival spirals into riots. But she’s horrified by the death of Freny Cuttingmaster, an eighteen-year-old female Parsi student, who falls from a second-floor gallery just as the prince’s grand procession is passing by her college.

Freny had come for a legal consultation just days before her death, and what she confided makes Perveen suspicious that her death was not an accident. Perveen, who strongly identified with Freny—another young Parsi woman fighting hard against the confines of society’s rules and expectations—feels terribly guilty for failing to help her. Perveen steps forward to assist Freny’s family in the fraught dealings of the coroner’s inquest, and when Freny’s death is ruled a murder, Perveen knows she can’t rest until she sees justice done. But Bombay is erupting: as armed British secret service march the streets, rioters attack anyone with perceived British connections and desperate shopkeepers destroy their own wares so they will not be targets of racial violence. Can Perveen help a suffering family when her own is in danger?]]> 360 Sujata Massey 1641291052 Emily 4 2023-read 3.85 2021
author: Sujata Massey
name: Emily
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/23
date added: 2023/01/23
shelves: 2023-read
review:
This wasn’t my favorite of the series, but I like the characters and perhaps like the 1920s India setting even more. Will definitely look forward to the next one.
]]> 15839976 "I live for the dream that my children will be born free," she says. "That they will be what they like. That they will own the land their father gave them."

"I live for you," I say sadly.

Eo kisses my cheek. "Then you must live for more."

Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations.

Yet he spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children.

But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity already reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and sprawling parks spread across the planet. Darrow—and Reds like him—are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class.

Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the legendary Institute, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanity's overlords struggle for power. He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Society's ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies... even if it means he has to become one of them to do so.]]> 382 Pierce Brown 0345539788 Emily 3 2023-read 4.26 2014
author: Pierce Brown
name: Emily
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2023/01/21
date added: 2023/01/21
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I wanted to love this but there were moments where I didn’t totally follow the thread. I did like it enough to read the next though. I’m looking forward to the toppling of society.
]]> 57693566 From the New York Times bestselling author of The Plot, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Latecomer is a layered and immersive literary novel about three siblings, desperate to escape one another, and the upending of their family by the late arrival of a fourth.

The Latecomer follows the story of the wealthy, New York City-based Oppenheimer family, from the first meeting of parents Salo and Johanna, under tragic circumstances, to their triplets born during the early days of IVF. As children, the three siblings--Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally--feel no strong familial bond and cannot wait to go their separate ways, even as their father becomes more distanced and their mother more desperate. When the triplets leave for college, Johanna, faced with being truly alone, makes the decision to have a fourth child. What role will the “latecomer� play in this fractured family?

A complex novel that builds slowly and deliberately, The Latecomer touches on the topics of grief and guilt, generational trauma, privilege and race, traditions and religion, and family dynamics. It is a profound and witty family story from an accomplished author, known for the depth of her character studies, expertly woven storylines, and plot twists.]]> 439 Jean Hanff Korelitz 1250790794 Emily 5 2023-read 3.93 2022
author: Jean Hanff Korelitz
name: Emily
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/21
date added: 2023/01/21
shelves: 2023-read
review:
I loved this one. The ending wasn’t as strong as I would have hoped, but it couldn’t dull the tragic beauty in the rest of the story.
]]> 17667561 One war.
Too many deadly battles.
Can a king save his kingdom, when his own survival seems unlikely?

War has come to Carthya. It knocks at every door and window in the land. And when Jaron learns that King Vargan of Avenia has kidnapped Imogen in a plot to bring Carthya to its knees, Jaron knows it is up to him to embark on a daring rescue mission. But everything that can go wrong does.

His friends are flung far and wide across Carthya and its neighbouring lands. In a last-ditch effort to stave off what looks to be a devastating loss for the kingdom, Jaron undertakes what may be his last journey to save everything and everyone he loves. But even with his lightning-quick wit, Jaron cannot forestall the terrible danger that descends on him and his country. Along the way, will he lose what matters most? And in the end, who will sit on Carthya's throne?

Rousing and affecting, Jaron's adventures have thrilled and moved readers in The False Prince and The Runaway King. Journey once again with the Ascendant King of Carthya, as New York Times bestselling author Jennifer A. Nielsen brings his story to a stunning conclusion with The Shadow Throne.]]> 336 Jennifer A. Nielsen 0545633796 Emily 4 2023-read 4.26 2014
author: Jennifer A. Nielsen
name: Emily
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/07
date added: 2023/01/07
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Not the best in the series and a little too much battle detail but I love that smartmouthed Jaron, the redemption, and the comeuppance.
]]> 58756502 A young Black girl goes missing in the woods outside her white Rust Belt town. But she’s not the first—and she may not be the last. . . .

It’s watching.

Liz Rocher is coming home . . . reluctantly. As a Black woman, Liz doesn’t exactly have fond memories of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a predominantly white town. But her best friend is getting married, so she braces herself for a weekend of awkward and passive-aggressive reunions. Liz has grown, though; she can handle whatever awaits her. But on the day of the wedding, somewhere between dancing and dessert, the bride’s daughter, Caroline, goes missing—and the only thing left behind is a piece of white fabric covered in blood.

It’s taking.

As a frantic search begins, with the police combing the trees for Caroline, Liz is the only one who notices a pattern: a summer night. A missing girl. A party in the woods. She’s seen this before. Keisha Woodson, the only other Black girl in school, walked into the woods with a mysterious man and was later found with her chest cavity ripped open and her heart missing. Liz shudders at the thought that it could have been her, and now, with Caroline missing, it can’t be a coincidence. As Liz starts to dig through the town’s history, she uncovers a horrifying secret about the place she once called home. Children have been going missing in these woods for years. All of them Black. All of them girls.

It’s your turn.

With the evil in the forest creeping closer, Liz knows what she must do: find Caroline, or be entirely consumed by the darkness.]]> 336 Erin E. Adams 0593499301 Emily 2 2023-read 3.65 2022
author: Erin E. Adams
name: Emily
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2023/01/05
date added: 2023/01/05
shelves: 2023-read
review:
Well that book wasn’t a great way to start the year. There were moments that were good. Good enough to keep me reading, but in the end I found myself wishing I would have given up after the first 150 pages.
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