en-US Thu, 01 May 2025 11:24:56 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 62558732 Lisa Jewell returns with a scintillating new psychological thriller about a woman who finds herself the subject of her own popular true crime podcast.

Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summers crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins.

A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix’s children’s school. Josie has been listening to Alix’s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.

Josie’s life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can’t quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realise that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix’s life—and into her home.

But, as quickly as she arrived, Josie disappears. Only then does Alix discover that Josie has left a terrible and terrifying legacy in her wake, and that Alix has become the subject of her own true crime podcast, with her life and her family’s lives under mortal threat.

Who is Josie Fair? And what has she done?]]> 384 Lisa Jewell Jenn 0 4.15 2023
author: Lisa Jewell
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/01
date added: 2025/05/01
shelves:
review:

]]> 201103486 An epic novel of star-crossed lovers set in a doomsday cult on the Texas prairie that What would you sacrifice for the person you love?

“Symphonic and suspenseful . . . In an epic act of empathy, Bret Anthony Johnston inhabits every point of view, from doomed devotees to perplexed law enforcement.”—Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of March

Waco, Texas, 1993. People from all walks of life have arrived to follow the Lamb’s gospel—signing over savings and pensions, selling their homes and shedding marriages. They’ve come here to worship at the feet of a former landscaper turned prophet who is preparing for the End Times with a staggering cache of weapons. Jaye’s mother is one of his newest and most devout followers, though Jaye herself has suspicions about the Lamb’s methods—and his motives.

Roy is the youngest son of the local sheriff, a fourteen-year-old boy with a heart of gold and a nose for trouble who falls for Jaye without knowing of her mother’s attachment to the man who is currently making his father’s life hell. The two teenagers are drawn to each other immediately and completely, but their love may have dire consequences for their families. The Lamb has plans for them all—especially Jaye—and as his preaching and scheming move them closer and closer to unthinkable violence, Roy risks everything to save Jaye.

Based on the true events that unfolded thirty years ago during the siege of the Branch Davidian compound, Bret Anthony Johnston’s We Burn Daylight is an unforgettable love story, a heart-pounding literary page turner, and a profound exploration of faith, family, and what it means to truly be saved.]]> 326 Bret Anthony Johnston 0399590137 Jenn 5 4.11 2024
author: Bret Anthony Johnston
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/23
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves:
review:

]]> 126919201 A roofing family’s bonds of loyalty are tested when they uncover a long-hidden secret at the heart of their blue-collar town—from Amy Jo Burns, author of the critically acclaimed novel Shiner

It’s 1990 and seventeen-year-old Marley West is blazing into the river valley town of Mercury, Pennsylvania. A perpetual loner, she seeks a place at someone’s table and a family of her own. The first thing she sees when she arrives in town is three men standing on a rooftop. Their silhouettes blot out the sun.

The Joseph brothers become Marley’s whole world before she can blink. Soon, she is young wife to one, The One Who Got Away to another, and adopted mother to them all. As their own mother fades away and their roofing business crumbles under the weight of their unwieldy father’s inflated ego, Marley steps in to shepherd these unruly men. Years later, an eerie discovery in the church attic causes old wounds to resurface and suddenly the family’s survival hangs in the balance. With Marley as their light, the Joseph brothers must decide whether they can save the family they’ve always known—or whether together they can build something stronger in its place.]]> 319 Amy Jo Burns 1250908574 Jenn 5 3.91 2024
author: Amy Jo Burns
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves:
review:

]]> 53285047 We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other Bunny, and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled Smut Salon, and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus Workshop where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.

Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, Electric Literature, and The New York Public Library]]> 305 Mona Awad 0525559752 Jenn 0 to-read 3.43 2019
author: Mona Awad
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 33358751 The New York Times, was unusual in many respects. There was the an impoverished, nuclear waste-riddled area of the American Midwest. There was her mother, a woman who speaks almost entirely in strange koans and warnings of impending danger. Above all, there was her gun-toting, guitar-riffing, frequently semi-naked father, who underwent a religious conversion on a submarine and discovered a loophole which saw him approved for the Catholic priesthood by the future Pope Benedict XVI - despite already having a wife and children.

When the expense of a medical procedure forces the 30-year-old Patricia to move back in with her parents, husband in tow, she must learn to live again with her family's simmering madness, and to reckon with the dark side of a childhood spent in the bosom of the Catholic Church. Told with the comic sensibility of a brasher, bluer Waugh or Wodehouse, this is at the same time a lyrical and affecting story of how, having ventured into the underworld, we can emerge with our levity and our sense of justice intact.]]> 360 Patricia Lockwood 069818839X Jenn 0 currently-reading 3.85 2017
author: Patricia Lockwood
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 220531016
They were just friends. Best friends. Allies. They spent entire summers sitting on Shiloh’s porch steps, dreaming about the future. They were both going to get out of north Omaha—Shiloh would go to college and become an actress, and Cary would join the Navy. They promised each other that their friendship would never change.

Well, Shiloh did go to college, and Cary did join the Navy. And yet, somehow, everything changed.

Now Shiloh’s thirty-three, and it’s been fourteen years since she talked to Cary. She’s been married and divorced. She has two kids. And she’s back living in the same house she grew up in. Her life is nothing like she planned.

When she’s invited to an old friend’s wedding, all Shiloh can think about is whether Cary will be there—and whether she hopes he will be. Would Cary even want to talk to her? After everything?

The answer is yes. And yes. And yes.

Slow Dance is the story of two kids who fell in love before they knew enough about love to recognize it. Two friends who lost everything. Two adults who just feel lost.

It’s the story of Shiloh and Cary, who everyone thought would end up together, trying to find their way back to the start.]]> 400 Rainbow Rowell 006338020X Jenn 0 to-read 4.00 2024
author: Rainbow Rowell
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 218671843 An unexpected��road trip across America brings a family together, in this raucous and moving new novel from the bestselling author of Nothing to See Here.

Ever since��her dad left them twenty years ago,��it’s just been Madeline Hill and her mom on their farm in Coalfield, Tennessee. While she sometimes admits it’s a bit lonely and a less exciting life than she imagined for herself, it’s mostly OK. Mostly.

Then one day Reuben Hill pulls up in a PT Cruiser and informs Madeline that he believes she’s his half sister. Reuben—left behind by their dad thirty years ago—has hired a detective to track down their father and a string of other half siblings.��And he wants Mad to leave her home and join him for the craziest kind of road trip imaginable to find them all.

As Mad and Rube—and eventually the others—share stories of their father, who behaved so differently in each life he created, they begin to question what he was looking for with each new incarnation. Who are they to one another? What kind of man will they find? And how will these new relationships change Mad’s previously solitary life on the farm?

Infused with deadpan wit, zany hijinks, and enormous heart, Run for the Hills is a sibling story like no other—a novel about a family forged under the most unlikely circumstances and united by hope in an unknown future.]]> 256 Kevin Wilson 0063317516 Jenn 0 to-read 4.03 2025
author: Kevin Wilson
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 20565519 An irresistible, deftly observed novel about the secrets, joys, and jealousies that rise to the surface over the course of an American family’s two-week stay in Mallorca.

For the Posts, a two-week trip to the Balearic island of Mallorca with their extended family and friends is a celebration: Franny and Jim are observing their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and their daughter, Sylvia, has graduated from high school. The sunlit island, its mountains and beaches, its tapas and tennis courts, also promise an escape from the tensions simmering at home in Manhattan. But all does not go according to plan: over the course of the vacation, secrets come to light, old and new humiliations are experienced, childhood rivalries resurface, and ancient wounds are exacerbated.

This is a story of the sides of ourselves that we choose to show and those we try to conceal, of the ways we tear each other down and build each other up again, and the bonds that ultimately hold us together. With wry humor and tremendous heart, Emma Straub delivers a richly satisfying story of a family in the midst of a maelstrom of change, emerging irrevocably altered yet whole.]]> 304 Emma Straub 1101618043 Jenn 0 currently-reading 3.43 2014
author: Emma Straub
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 202329914 A fast-paced, completely delightful new mystery about what happens when parents get a little too involved in their kids' schools, from NAACP Image Award nominee Elise Bryant.

Mavis Miller is not a PTA mom. She has enough on her plate with her feisty seven-year-old daughter, Pearl, an exhausting job at a nonprofit, and the complexities of a multigenerational household. So no one is more surprised than Mavis when she caves to Trisha Holbrook, the long-reigning, slightly terrifying PTA president, and finds herself in charge of the school’s brand-new DEI committee.

As one of the few Black parents at this California elementary school, Mavis tries to convince herself this is an opportunity for real change. But things go off the rails at the very first meeting, when the new principal's plans leave Trisha absolutely furious. Later that night, when Mavis spies Trisha in yellow rubber gloves and booties, lugging cleaning supplies and giant black trash bags to her waiting minivan, it’s only natural that her mind jumps to somewhere it surely wouldn’t in the light of day.

Except Principal Smith fails to show up for work the next morning, and has been MIA since the meeting. Determined to get to the bottom of things, Mavis, along with the school psychologist with the great forearms (look, it’s worth noting), launches an investigation that will challenge her views on parenting, friendship, and elementary school politics.

Brilliantly written, It's Elementary is a��quick-witted, escapist romp that perfectly captures just how far parents will go to give their kids the very best, all wrapped in a mystery that will leave you guessing to the very end.]]> 336 Elise Bryant 0593640799 Jenn 0 currently-reading 3.90 2024
author: Elise Bryant
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 74891920 Harrison Scott Key, winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, tells the shocking, “shot through with sharp humor�� (The Washington Post), spiritually profound story of his journey through hell and back when infidelity threatens his marriage.

One gorgeous autumn day, Harrison discovers that his wife—the sweet, funny, loving mother of their three daughters, a woman “who’s spent just about every Sunday of her life in a church”—is having an affair with a family friend. This revelation propels the hysterical, heartbreaking events in How to Stay Married, casting our narrator onto “the factory floor of hell,�� where his wife was now in love with a man who “wears cargo shorts, on purpose.�� What will he do? Kick her out? Set fire to all her panties in the yard? Beat this man to death with a gardening implement? Ask God for help in winning her back?

Armed only with a sense of humor and a hunger for the truth, Harrison embarks on a hellish journey into his past, seeking answers to the riddles of faith and forgiveness. Through an absurd series of escalating confessions and betrayals, Harrison reckons with his failure to love his wife in the ways she needed most, resolves to fight for his family, and in a climax almost too ridiculous to be believed, finally learns that love is no joke. “A fiercely memorable account of marital devotion against all odds�� (Publishers Weekly, starred review), How to Stay Married is a comic romp unlike any in contemporary literature, a wild ride through the hellscape of marriage and the mysteries of mercy.]]> 317 Harrison Scott Key 1668015668 Jenn 0 currently-reading 4.13 2023
author: Harrison Scott Key
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 216724329 In her first book, the popular From the Front Porch podcast host and independent bookstore owner challenges the idea that loud lives are the ones that matter most, reminding us that we don't have to leave the lives we have in order to have the lives of which we've always dreamed.

Can life be an adventure, even when it’s just . . . ordinary?

Annie Jones always assumed adulthood would mean a high-powered career; life in a big, bustling city; and travels to far-flung places she’d longed to see. But her reality turned out differently. As the years passed, Annie was still in the same small town running an independent bookstore —the kind of life Nora Ephron dreamed.

During that time, she hosted friends�� goodbye parties and mailed parting gifts; wrote recommendation letters and wished former shop staffers well. She stayed in her small town, despite her love of big cities; stayed in her marriage to the guy she met when she was 18; and she stayed at her bookstore while the world outside shifted steadily toward digital retailers. And she stayed loyal to a faith she sometimes didn’t recognize.

After ten years, Annie realized she might never leave. But instead of regret, she had an epiphany. She awakened to the gifts of a quiet life spent staying put.

In Ordinary Time, Annie challenges the idea that loud lives matter most. Rummaging through her small-town existence, she finds hidden gifts of humor and hope from a life lived quietly. Staying, can itself be a radical act. It takes courage to stay in the places we’ve always called home, Jones argues, as she paints a portrait of possibility far away from thriving metropolises and Monica Gellar-inspired apartments.

We’ve long been encouraged to follow our dreams, to pack up and move to new places and leave old lives—and past selves—behind. While there is beauty in these kinds of adventures, Ordinary Time helps us see ourselves right where we in the middle of messy, mundane lives, maybe not too far from where we grew up. We don’t have to leave to find what we yearn—we can choose to stay, celebrating and honoring our ordinary lives, which might turn out to be bigger and better than we ever imagined.��


]]> 240 Annie B. Jones 006341127X Jenn 0 currently-reading 4.43
author: Annie B. Jones
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.43
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 204905217
A month later, Lisa Marie was dead, and the world would never know her story in her own words, never know the passionate, joyful, caring, and complicated woman that Riley loved and grieved.

Riley got the tapes that her mother had recorded for the book, laid in her bed, and listened as Lisa Marie told story after story about smashing golf carts together in the yards of Graceland, about the unconditional love she felt from her father, about being upstairs, just the two of them. About getting dragged screaming out of the bathroom as she ran towards his body on the floor. About living in Los Angeles with her mother, getting sent to school after school, always kicked out, always in trouble. About her singular, lifelong relationship with Danny Keough, about being married to Michael Jackson, what they shared in common. About motherhood. About deep addiction. About ever-present grief. Riley knew she had to fulfill her mother’s wish to reveal these memories, incandescent and painful, to the world.

To make her mother known.

This extraordinary book is written in both Lisa Marie’s and Riley’s voices, a mother and daughter communicating—from this world to the one beyond—as they try to heal each other. Profoundly moving and deeply revealing, From Here to the Great Unknown is a book like no other—the last words of the only child of an American icon.]]> 304 Lisa Marie Presley 0593733878 Jenn 0 4.26 2024
author: Lisa Marie Presley
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/23
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves:
review:

]]> 35120600 A heartbreaking debut about family, love, grief and food. Perfect for fans of Joanne Harris' Chocolat anbd Julia Powell's Julie & Julia.


Two women adrift in New York - an Iraqi immigrant widow and the latchkey daughter of a famous chef - find each other and a new kind of family through their shared love of cooking.


Lorca, a sensitive and troubled thirteen-year-old, spends hours poring over cookbooks, seeking out ingredients for her distracted chef of a mother, who is about to send her off to boarding school. In one last effort to secure her mother's love and prove herself indispensable, Lorca resolves to replicate her mother's ideal meal.


Victoria, an octogenarian Iraqi immigrant, teaches cooking lessons. Grappling with grief over her husband's death, Victoria has been dreaming of the daughter they gave up forty years ago.


Together these two women - a widow and an almost-orphan - begin to suspect they are connected through more than a love of food.]]> 354 Jessica Soffer Jenn 0 abandoned 3.76 2013
author: Jessica Soffer
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 203956653 A fiery, heartbreaking, riveting memoir that follows one New Hampshire family over three years, unspooling a story of gender identity, class, trans youth, and a child caught in the riptide of America’s culture wars

Abi Maxwell grew up in rural New Hampshire, one of eight kids in a poor town abutting a wealthier lakeside village. As a young couple, Maxwell and her husband planned not to have kids, but when Maxwell became pregnant, she knew she wanted to raise her child near the mountains and lake of her youth. When her six-year-old, who was known to the world as a boy, asks to wear pink sneakers, asks to be a witch for Halloween, and asks to wear a girl’s dance costume, Abi worries about how their small community will react. But when that child changes her name, grows her hair long, and announces that she is a girl, a firestorm engulfs the family.

Weaving together the story of her youth, marked by long afternoons skiing the mountains, a cottage on the lake, and a proud gay brother, but also by neglect and bullying that pushed her brother to the brink, Abi Maxwell contends with the rural America where she was raised and, years later, where she is now raising her daughter, as lawmakers nationwide push to erase the very existence of trans youth. Intimate and stirring, this book is essential reading for this moment in our history.]]> 320 Abi Maxwell 0593535847 Jenn 5 4.43 2024
author: Abi Maxwell
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/23
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves:
review:
A must read for anyone who doesn't "get" affirming trans kids.
]]> 215768414
On the brink of adulthood in the early 2000s, destiny intervened, catapulting the sisters into the spotlight as the pop sensation the Griffin Sisters, hitting all the touchstones of early aughts fame—SNL, MTV, Rolling Stone magazine—along the way.

But after a whirlwind year in the public eye, the band abruptly broke up.

Two decades later, Zoe’s a housewife; Cassie’s off the grid. The sisters aren’t speaking, and the real reason for the Griffin Sisters�� breakup is still a mystery. Zoe’s teenage daughter, Cherry, who’s determined to be a star in spite of Zoe’s warnings, is on a quest to learn the truth about what happened to the band all those years ago.

As secrets emerge, all three women must face the consequences of their choices: the ones they made and the ones the music industry made for them. Can they forgive each other—and themselves? And will the Griffin Sisters ever make music again?]]> 384 Jennifer Weiner 0063342448 Jenn 0 abandoned 3.91 2025
author: Jennifer Weiner
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 213243915 The #1 New York Times bestselling author, whose books so many love, brings us a fresh, contemporary story of a woman and her unruly blended family

Lila Kennedy has a lot on her plate. A broken marriage, two wayward daughters, a house that is falling apart, and an elderly stepfather who seems to have quietly moved in. Her career is in freefall and her love life is... complicated. So when her real dad—a man she has barely seen since he ran off to Hollywood thirty-five years ago—suddenly appears on her doorstep, it feels like the final straw. But it turns out even the family you thought you could never forgive might have something to teach about love, and what it actually means to be family.]]> 450 Jojo Moyes 1984879324 Jenn 0 3.86 2025
author: Jojo Moyes
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/21
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves:
review:

]]> 9949524
Crippled by lupus at twenty-five, celebrated author Flannery O'Connor was forced to leave New York City and return home to Andalusia, her family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. Years later, as Flannery is finishing a novel and tending to her menagerie of peacocks, her mother drags her to the wedding of a family friend.

Cookie Himmel embodies every facet of Southern womanhood that Flannery lacks: she is revered for her beauty and grace; she is at the helm of every ladies' organization in town; and she has returned from her time in Manhattan with a rich fiancé, Melvin Whiteson. Melvin has come to Milledgeville to begin a new chapter in his life, but it is not until he meets Flannery that he starts to take a good hard look at the choices he has made. Despite the limitations of her disease, Flannery seems to be more alive than other people, and Melvin is drawn to her like a moth to a candle flame.

Melvin is not the only person in Milledgeville who starts to feel that life is passing him by. Lona Waters, the dutiful wife of a local policeman, is hired by Cookie to help create a perfect home. As Lona spends her days sewing curtains, she is given an opportunity to remember what it feels like to be truly alive, and she seizes it with both hands.

Heartbreakingly beautiful and inescapably human, these ordinary and extraordinary people chart their own courses through life. In the aftermath of one tragic afternoon, they are all forced to look at themselves and face up to Flannery's observation that "the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."]]> 326 Ann Napolitano 1594202923 Jenn 0 to-read 3.87 2011
author: Ann Napolitano
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 34541786 Calling My Name, by debut author Liara Tamani, is a striking, luminous, and literary exploration of family, spirituality, and self—ideal for readers of Jacqueline Woodson, Jandy Nelson, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Sandra Cisneros. This unforgettable novel tells a universal coming-of-age story about Taja Brown, a young African American girl growing up in Houston, Texas.

Liara Tamani’s debut novel deftly and beautifully explores the universal struggles of growing up, battling family expectations, discovering a sense of self, and finding a unique voice and purpose. Taja Brown lives with her parents and older brother and younger sister, in Houston, Texas. Taja has always known what the expectations of her conservative and tightly-knit African American family are—do well in school, go to church every Sunday, no intimacy before marriage. But Taja is trying to keep up with friends as they get their first kisses, first boyfriends, first everythings. And she’s tired of cheering for her athletic younger sister and an older brother who has more freedom just because he’s a boy. Taja dreams of going to college and forging her own relationship with the world and with God, but when she falls in love for the first time, those dreams are suddenly in danger of evaporating.

Told in fifty-four short, episodic, moving, and iridescent chapters, Calling My Name follows Taja on her journey from middle school to high school. Literary and noteworthy, this is a beauty of a novel, a divine and tender enchantment. Calling My Name deftly captures the multifaceted struggle of finding where you belong and why you matter.]]> 320 Liara Tamani 0062656880 Jenn 0 currently-reading 3.67 2017
author: Liara Tamani
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/19
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 210585802
The prestigious Urban Promise Prep school might look pristine on the outside, but deadly secrets lurk within. When the principal ends up murdered on school premises and the cops come sniffing around, a trio of students―J.B., Ramón, and Trey―emerge as the prime suspects. They had the means, they had the motive . . . and they may have had the murder weapon. But with all three maintaining their innocence, they must band together to track down the real killer before they are arrested. Or is the true culprit hiding among them?

Find out who killed Principal Moore in Nick Brooks's murder mystery, Promise Boys �� The Hate U Give meets One of Us Is Lying.]]> 320 Nick Brooks 1250362679 Jenn 0 3.62 2023
author: Nick Brooks
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/18
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves:
review:

]]> 203927997 From the acclaimed author of��Wahala,��a “vibrant�� (Charmaine Wilkerson) retelling of Mansfield Park, exploring identity, culture, race, and love.

Quiet Funke is happy in Nigeria. She loves her art teacher mother, her professor father, and even her annoying little brother (most of the time). But when tragedy strikes, she’s sent to England, a place she knows only from her mother’s stories. To her dismay, she finds the much-lauded estate dilapidated, the food tasteless, the weather grey. Worse still, her mother’s family are cold and distant. With one exception: her cousin Liv.

Free-spirited Liv has always wanted to break free of her joyless family. She becomes fiercely protective of her little cousin, and her warmth and kindness give Funke a place to heal. The two girls grow into adulthood the closest of friends.

But the choices their mothers made haunt Funke and Liv, and when a second tragedy occurs their friendship is torn apart. Against the long shadow of their shared family history, each woman will struggle to chart a path forward, separated by country, misunderstanding, and ambition.

Moving between Somerset and Lagos over the course of two decades,��This Motherless Land��is a sweeping examination of identity, culture, race, and love that asks how we find belonging and whether a family’s generational wrongs can be righted.]]> 352 Nikki May 0063084317 Jenn 0 4.41 2024
author: Nikki May
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/18
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves:
review:

]]> 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 Jenn 0 to-read 4.36 2022
author: Dolen Perkins-Valdez
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 43623441
Meet Rachel Grossman.
She’ll stop at nothing to protect her daughter, Aviva, even if it ends up costing her everything.

Meet Jane Young.
She’s disrupting a quiet life with her daughter, Ruby, to seek political office for the first time.

Meet Ruby Young.
She thinks her mom has a secret. She’s right.

Meet Embeth Levin.
She’s made a career of cleaning up her congressman husband’s messes.

Meet Aviva Grossman.
The Internet won’t let her or anyone else forget her past transgressions.

This is the story of five women . . .
. . . and the sex sexist scandal that binds them together.

From Gabrielle Zevin, the bestselling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, comes another story with unforgettable characters that is particularly suited to the times we live in now . . .]]> Gabrielle Zevin Jenn 0 4.04 2017
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/11
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves:
review:

]]> 203237161
If your twenties are supposed to be the best years of your life, Bennet Taylor is failing miserably . . . with a big emphasis on the miserable. Where’s that zest she keeps hearing about? She’s a temp worker in New York City with no direction, no future, and no social life. And at the painful center of this listlessness is grief over the death of her first love.

When Bennet runs into Henry Adams just hours after standing him up for a first date, she makes an alcohol-fueled confession: She’s not ready to date. In fact, it’s been years since she felt passion for something. Not even pottery, or organized sports—not anything. Rather than leaving her to ruminate, Henry jumps at the opportunity for adventure: Bennet needs to find a passion for life, and Henry will help her find it. Every Saturday, they’ll try something new in New York City. As friends, of course.

As their “passion project�� continues, the pair tackle everything from carpentry to tattooing to rappelling off skyscrapers, and Bennet feels her guarded exterior ebbing away. But as secrets surface, Bennet has to decide what she wants, and if she’s truly ready to move on. With emotional resonance and sparkling banter, Passion Project is a fun, flirty, thoughtful story of finding a spark—and igniting happiness.]]> 368 London Sperry 0143138561 Jenn 0 to-read 3.95 2025
author: London Sperry
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199373354
In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck's ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries and murders are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven through characters and families.

The haunting title story recalls the journey of two men who meet around a piano in a smoky, dim bar, only to spend a summer walking the Maine woods collecting folk songs in the shadow of the First World War, forever marked by the odyssey. Decades later, in another story, a woman discovers the wax cylinders recorded that fateful summer while cleaning out her new house in Maine. Shattuck’s inventive, exquisite stories transport readers from 1700s Nantucket to the contemporary woods of New Hampshire and beyond—into landscapes both enduring and unmistakably modern. Memories, artifacts, paintings, and journals resurface in surprising and poignant ways among evocative beaches, forests, and orchards, revealing the secrets, misunderstandings, and love that linger across centuries.

Written with breathtaking humanity and humor, The History of Sound is a love letter to New England, a radiant conversation between past and present, and a moving meditation on the abiding search for home.]]> 320 Ben Shattuck 059349038X Jenn 0 to-read 4.36 2024
author: Ben Shattuck
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 43427045 Explores the terror, grace, and beauty of coming of age as a Black person in contemporary America and what it means to parent our children in a persistently unjust world.

Emotionally raw and deeply reflective, Imani Perry issues an unflinching challenge to society to see Black children as deserving of humanity. She admits fear and frustration for her African American sons in a society that is increasingly racist and at times seems irredeemable. However, as a mother, feminist, writer, and intellectual, Perry offers an unfettered expression of love--finding beauty and possibility in life--and she exhorts her children and their peers to find the courage to chart their own paths and find steady footing and inspiration in Black tradition.

Perry draws upon the ideas of figures such as James Baldwin, W. E. B. DuBois, Emily Dickinson, Toni Morrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Ida B. Wells. She shares vulnerabilities and insight from her own life and from encounters in places as varied as the West Side of Chicago; Birmingham, Alabama; and New England prep schools.

With original art for the cover by Ekua Holmes, Breathe offers a broader meditation on race, gender, and the meaning of a life well lived and is also an unforgettable lesson in Black resistance and resilience.]]> 184 Imani Perry 0807076554 Jenn 0 to-read 4.19 2019
author: Imani Perry
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 53138238 Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin Luther, and Louise Little's son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary women who raised them. In her groundbreaking and essential debut The Three Mothers, scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs celebrates Black motherhood by telling the story of the three women who raised and shaped some of America's most pivotal heroes.

Berdis Baldwin, Alberta King, and Louise Little were all born at the beginning of the 20th century and forced to contend with the prejudices of Jim Crow as Black women. These three extraordinary women passed their knowledge to their children with the hope of helping them to survive in a society that would deny their humanity from the very beginning―from Louise teaching her children about their activist roots, to Berdis encouraging James to express himself through writing, to Alberta basing all of her lessons in faith and social justice. These women used their strength and motherhood to push their children toward greatness, all with a conviction that every human being deserves dignity and respect despite the rampant discrimination they faced.

These three mothers taught resistance and a fundamental belief in the worth of Black people to their sons, even when these beliefs flew in the face of America’s racist practices and led to ramifications for all three families�� safety. The fight for equal justice and dignity came above all else for the three mothers.

These women, their similarities and differences, as individuals and as mothers, represent a piece of history left untold and a celebration of Black motherhood long overdue.]]> 261 Anna Malaika Tubbs 125075612X Jenn 0 4.08 2021
author: Anna Malaika Tubbs
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 214331246 When you’ve been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for?

As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes.

Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves.

When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.]]> 387 Suzanne Collins 1546171460 Jenn 0 to-read 4.62 2025
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 22462257
As their world comes undone, the Courtlands are drawn into a vortex of dread and recrimination. Why weren’t they more careful? What has happened to their daughter? Is she alive? Will they ever know? Caitlin’s disappearance, all the more devastating for its mystery, is the beginning of the family’s harrowing journey down increasingly divergent and solitary paths until all that continues to bind them together are the questions they can never bring themselves to ask: At what point does a family stop searching? At what point will a girl stop fighting for her life?]]> 384 Tim Johnston Jenn 0 3.85 2015
author: Tim Johnston
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves:
review:

]]> 62929342 Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than answers.

In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.

Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made, and if so, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?

From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family, and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures? ]]> 399 Rachel Khong 0593537254 Jenn 5 3.94 2024
author: Rachel Khong
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/02
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves:
review:

]]> 203164564
Detroit, 1960. Lila Pereira is two years old when her angry, abusive father has her mother committed to an asylum. Lila never sees her mother again. Three decades later, having mustered everything she has—brains, charm, talent, blond hair—Lila rises to the pinnacle of American media as the powerful, brilliant executive editor of The Washington Globe. Lila unapologetically prioritizes her career, leaving the rearing of her daughters to her generous husband, Joe. He doesn’t mind—until he does.

But Grace, their youngest daughter, feels abandoned. She wishes her mother would attend PTA meetings, not White House correspondents�� dinners. As she grows up, she cannot shake her resentment. She wants out from under Lila’s shadow, yet the more she resists, the more Lila seems to shape her life. Grace becomes a successful reporter, even publishing a bestselling book about her mother. In the process of writing it, she realizes how little she knows about her own family. Did Lila’s mother, Grace’s grandmother, die in that asylum? Is refusal to look back the only way to create a future? How can you ever be yourself, Grace wonders, if you don’t know where you came from?

Spanning generations, and populated by complex, unforgettable characters, Like Mother, Like Mother is an exhilarating, portrait of family, marriage, ambition, power, the stories we inherit, and the lies we tell to become the people we believe we’re meant to be.]]> 336 Susan Rieger 0525512497 Jenn 0 3.75 2024
author: Susan Rieger
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/02
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves:
review:

]]> 74845213 Promise Boys is a blockbuster, dark academia mystery about three teens of color who must investigate their principal’s murder to clear their own names. This page-turning thriller is perfect for fans of Karen McManus, Jason Reynolds, Angie Thomas, and Holly Jackson.

"Thrilling, captivating, and blade-sharp." —Karen M. McManus, #1 New York Times bestselling author of One of Us Is Lying

The prestigious Urban Promise Prep school might look pristine on the outside, but deadly secrets lurk within. When the principal ends up murdered on school premises and the cops come sniffing around, a trio of students—J.B., Ramón, and Trey—emerge as the prime suspects. They had the means, they had the motive . . . and they may have had the murder weapon. But with all three maintaining their innocence, they must band together to track down the real killer before they are arrested. Or is the true culprit hiding among them?

Find out who killed Principal Moore in Nick Brooks's murder mystery, Promise Boys��The Hate U Give meets One of Us Is Lying.

"A brilliant pulls-no-punches mystery." —Adam Silvera, #1 New York Times bestselling author of They Both Die at the End

A Boston Globe-Horn Book Award 2023 Honoree. A New York Public Library and Kirkus Best Book of the Year!]]> 279 Nick Brooks Jenn 0 4.11 2023
author: Nick Brooks
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/01
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves:
review:

]]> 216426697 An intimate and lyrical celebration of great love, great art, and the sacrifices we make for both

For fifty years Abe and Jane have been coming to Central Park, as starry-eyed young lovers, as frustrated and exhausted parents, as artists watching their careers take flight. They came alone when they needed to get away from each other, and together when they had something important to discuss. The Park has been their witness for half a century of love. Until now.

Jane is dying, and Abe is recounting their life together as a way of keeping them going: the parts they knew—their courtship and early marriage, their blossoming creative lives—and the parts they didn’t always want to know—the determined young student of Abe’s looking for a love story of her own, and their son, Max, who believes his mother chose art over parenthood and who has avoided love and intimacy at all costs. Told in various points of view, even in conversation with Central Park itself, these voices weave in and out to paint a portrait as complicated and essential as love itself.]]> 304 Jessica Soffer 0593851269 Jenn 5 3.20
author: Jessica Soffer
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.20
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves:
review:
I love when an author is doing creative things with form, structure.
]]> 54232794
Based on a groundbreaking in-depth survey of 22,000 Christian women, The Great Sex Rescue unlocks the secrets to what makes some marriages red hot while others fizzle out. Generations of women have grown up with messages about sex that make them feel dirty, used, or invisible, while men have been sold such a cheapened version of sex, they don't know what they're missing. The Great Sex Rescue hopes to turn all of that around, developing a truly biblical view of sex where mutuality, intimacy, and passion reign.

The Great Sex Rescue pulls back the curtain on what is happening in Christian bedrooms and exposes the problematic teachings that wreck sex for so many couples--and the good teachings that leave others breathless. In the #metoo and #churchtoo era, not only is this book a long overdue corrective to church culture, it is poised to free thousands of couples from repressive and dissatisfying sex lives so that they can experience the kind of intimacy and wholeness God intended.]]> 272 Sheila Wray Gregoire 1540900827 Jenn 0 to-read 4.55 2021
author: Sheila Wray Gregoire
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 59900688 Trip. My parents started using that word about a year ago—“one day, you’ll
take a trip to be with us. Like an adventure.��

Javier Zamora’s adventure is a 3,000-mile journey from his small town in
El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, and across the U.S. border.
He will leave behind his beloved aunt and grandparents to reunite with a
mother who left four years ago and a father he barely remembers. Traveling
alone amid a group of strangers and a “coyote�� hired to lead them to safety,
Javier expects his trip to last two short weeks.

At nine years old, all Javier can imagine is rushing into his parents�� arms,
snuggling in bed between them, and living under the same roof again. He
cannot foresee the perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, pointed guns,
arrests and deceptions that await him; nor can he know that those two
weeks will expand into two life-altering months alongside fellow migrants
who will come to encircle him like an unexpected family.

A memoir as gripping as it is moving, Solito provides an immediate and
intimate account not only of a treacherous and near-impossible journey,
but also of the miraculous kindness and love delivered at the most
unexpected moments. Solito is Javier Zamora’s story, but it’s also the story
of millions of others who had no choice but to leave home.]]> 384 Javier Zamora 0593498062 Jenn 0 to-read 4.46 2022
author: Javier Zamora
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214490432 A whirlwind romance inspired by Ferris Bueller’s Day Off about four friends whose hearts are broken and mended over the course of an epic senior skip day—from the bestselling author of The Summer of Broken Rules!

Grace, Isa, and Everett used to be an inseparable trio before their love lives became a tangled mess. For starters, Grace is secretly in love with Everett, who used to go out with Isa before breaking her heart in the infamous Freshman Year Fracture. And, oh yeah, no one knows that Isa has been hanging out with James, Grace’s brother—and if Grace finds out, it could ruin their friendship.

With graduation fast approaching, Grace decides an unsanctioned senior skip day in Philadelphia might be just what they need to fix things. All she has to do is convince Isa to help her kidnap Everett and outmaneuver James, who’s certain his sister is up to something.

In an epic day that includes racing up the famous Rocky steps, taste-testing Philly's finest cheesesteaks, and even crashing a wedding, their secrets are bound to collide. But can their hearts withstand the wreckage?]]> 384 K.L. Walther 0593813952 Jenn 0 to-read 3.66 2025
author: K.L. Walther
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 218153839 USA Today bestselling author of Nora Goes Off Script, a novel about a former adolescent TV punchline who has left her awkwardness in the rearview mirror thanks to a fake-it-till-you-make-it mantra that has her on the cusp of success, until she tells a lie that sets her on a crash-course with her past, spending a week in Long Island with the last man she thinks might make her believe in love.

Rules for a love story: There are none. It’s all a lie.

Jane Jackson knows that true love is a lie. Laughter is the only truth—you can’t fake a belly laugh. Jane should know, she spent her adolescence as "Poor Janey Jakes," the barbecue-sauce-in-her-braces punchline on America's fifth-favorite sitcom. Now she’s a Creative Executive at Clearwater Studios and she’s living by a new mantra: Fake it till you make it.

Except, she might have faked it too far. Desperate to get her first project greenlit and riled up by pompous cinematographer and one-time crush Dan Finnegan, she opened her mouth and a big fat fib fell out. She claimed that Jack Quinlan, hottest popstar of the moment, has promised to write an original song for the soundtrack. Jack may have been her first kiss—and greatest source of shame—but she hasn’t spoken to him in twenty years.

Now, Jane must turn to the last man she’d ever want to owe: Dan Finnegan. Because Jack is playing a festival in Dan’s hometown on Long Island, and Dan has an in. A week in close quarters with Dan while facing down her past is Jane's idea of hell, but Dan just might surprise her. While covering up her lie, can they find something true?]]> 368 Annabel Monaghan 0593714105 Jenn 0 to-read 4.29 2025
author: Annabel Monaghan
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 23848338 From the internationally bestselling author of Mornings in Jenin, a novel about four generations of powerful Palestinian women in Gaza.

Violently pushed from their ancient farming village of Beit Daras, a Palestinian family tries to reconstitute itself in a refugee camp in Gaza. The men here, those who have escaped prison or the battlefields, worry over making ends meet, tend their tattered pride, join the resistance. The women are left to be breadwinners and protectors, too. Nazmiyeh is the matriarch, the center of a household of sisters, daughters, granddaughters, whose lives threaten to spin out of control with every personal crisis, military attack, or political landmine. Her brother’s granddaughter Nur is stuck in America; her own daughter’s son, traumatized in an Israeli assault, slips into another kind of exile; her daughter has cancer and no access to medicine. Their neighbor, the Beekeeper’s wife, will extract the marijuana resin to shrink her tumor, but it is also Nazmiyeh’s large heart and zest for life that heals, that will even call Nur back from the broken promise of America and set her on a new path. All Nazmiyeh’s loved ones will return to her, and ultimately journey further, to that place between the sky and water where all is as it once was, and where all will meet again.

Born of a troubling history that continues to rage forth and claim its dead, The Blue Between Sky and Water is a novel of survival and of the vivid, powerful women who manage to enlarge and enliven the everyday. It is a novel for our time—and one that is also timeless.]]> 293 Susan Abulhawa 1632862212 Jenn 0 to-read 4.22 2015
author: Susan Abulhawa
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 6692041 In the refugee camp of Jenin, Amal is born into a world of loss—of home, country, and heritage. Her Palestinian family was driven from their ancestral village by the newly formed state of Israel in 1948. As the villagers fled that day, Amal's older brother, just a baby, was stolen away by an Israeli soldier. In Jenin, the adults subsist on memories, waiting to return to the homes they love. Amal's mother has walled away her heart with grief, and her father labors all day. But in the fleeting peacefulness of dawn, he reads to his young daughter daily, and she can feel his love for her, "as big as the ocean and all its fishes." On those quiet mornings, they dream together of a brighter future.

This is Amal's story, the story of one family's struggle and survival through over sixty years of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, carrying us from Jenin to Jerusalem, to Lebanon and the anonymity of America. It is a story shaped by scars and fear, but also by the transformative intimacy of marriage and the fierce protectiveness of motherhood. It is a story of faith, forgiveness, and life-sustaining love.

Mornings in Jenin is haunting and heart-wrenching, a novel of vital contemporary importance. Lending human voices to the headlines, it forces us to take a fresh look at one of the defining political conflicts of our lifetimes.]]> 331 Susan Abulhawa 1608190463 Jenn 5 4.49 2006
author: Susan Abulhawa
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/17
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 2939754
In an attempt to save him, Julia marshals help from her looseknit clan: elderly parents; remarried ex-husband; removed sister; and combative eldest son. Ultimately, heroin courses through the characters' lives with an impersonal and devastating energy, sweeping the family into a world in which deceit, crime, and fear are part of daily life.]]> 416 Roxana Robinson 0374271879 Jenn 0 to-read 3.58 2008
author: Roxana Robinson
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57812401
Told in the intimate voices of unique and endearing characters of all ages, these tales explore desire and heartache, loss and discovery, moments of jolting violence and the inexorable tug toward love at all costs. A bookseller's unspoken love for his employee rises to the surface, a neglected teenage boy finds much-needed nurturing from an unlikely pair of college students hired to housesit, a girl's loss of innocence at the hands of her employer's son becomes a catalyst for strength and confidence, and a proud nonagenarian rages helplessly in his granddaughter's hospital room. Romantic, hopeful, brutally raw, and unsparingly honest, some even slipping into the surreal, these stories are, above all, about King's enduring subject of love.]]> 240 Lily King 0802158765 Jenn 0 3.69 2021
author: Lily King
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves:
review:

]]> 122815019
Many Christians today are seeking to disentangle biblical teaching from power structures that marginalize women and people of color. There's a hunger for a new kind of devotional that offers refreshing and relevant ways to connect with God and the Bible--ways that challenge readers to seek out a more liberated and embodied faith.

Drawing from personal narrative and Scripture, Armas highlights biblical passages that point toward decolonized themes centered on creation, wisdom, spirit, the body, and the feminine. Sacred Belonging helps us see how Scripture directs us to live a liberated faith, where we belong to God, the earth, and one another.]]> 208 Kat Armas 1587435098 Jenn 0 currently-reading 4.52
author: Kat Armas
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.52
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 232450

The book's central figures are Fannie Lou Hamer, who worked for Jesus in civil rights activism; Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi; William Douglas Hudgins, an influential white Baptist pastor and unofficial theologian of the closed society; Ed King, a white Methodist minister and Mississippi native who campaigned to integrate Protestant congregations; and Cleveland Sellers, a SNCC staff member turned black militant.


Marsh focuses on the events and religious convictions that led each person into the political upheaval of 1964. He presents an unforgettable American social landscape, one that is by turns shameful and inspiring. In conclusion, Marsh suggests that it may be possible to sift among these narratives and lay the groundwork for a new thinking about racial reconciliation and the beloved community. He maintains that the person who embraces faith's life-affirming energies will leave behind a most powerful legacy of social activism and compassion.

-- "Publishers Weekly"]]> 288 Charles Marsh 0691029407 Jenn 0 to-read 4.04 1997
author: Charles Marsh
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 37655066 322 Jennifer Close Jenn 0 3.40 2016
author: Jennifer Close
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/07
date added: 2025/03/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 213243908 A hopeless romantic meets a jaded radio host in this cozy, Sleepless in Seattle-inspired love story from beloved author B.K. Borison.

Aiden Valentine has a secret: he's fallen out of love with love. And as the host of Baltimore's romance hotline, that's a bit of a problem. But when a young girl calls in to the station asking for dating advice for her mom, the interview goes viral, thrusting Aiden and Heartstrings into the limelight.

Lucie Stone thought she was doing just fine. She has a good job; an incredible family; and a smart, slightly devious kid. But when all of Baltimore is suddenly scrutinizing her love life-or lack thereof—she begins to question if she's as happy as she thought. Maybe a little more romance wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Everyone wants Lucie to find her happy ending... even the handsome, temperamental man calling the shots. But when sparks start to fly behind the scenes, Lucie must make the final call between the radio-sponsored happily ever after or the man in the headphones next to her.]]> 448 B.K. Borison 0593641191 Jenn 0 to-read 4.05 2025
author: B.K. Borison
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 50998143 Throw together fast, flavorful meals in no time with just a handful of ingredients with 200 highly cookable, delicious, and incredibly simple recipes from the James Beard Award-winning team at Milk Street.

In Cookish, Christopher Kimball and his team of cooks and editors harness the most powerful cooking principles from around the world to create 200 of the simplest, most delicious recipes ever created. These recipes, most with six or fewer ingredients (other than oil, salt, and pepper), make it easy to be a great cook -- the kind who can walk into a kitchen and throw together dinner in no time.

In each of these recipes, big flavors and simple techniques transform pantry staples, common proteins, or centerpiece vegetables into a delicious meal. And each intuitive recipe is a road map for other mix-and-match meals, which can come together in minutes from whatever's in the fridge.

With most recipes taking less than an hour to prepare, and just a handful of ingredients, you'll enjoy:
Pasta with Shrimp and Browned Butter
West African Peanut Chicken
Red Lentil Soup
Scallion Noodles
Open-Faced Omelet with Fried Dill and Feta
Greek Bean and Avocado Salad
And for dessert: Spiced Strawberry Compote with Greek Yogurt or Ice Cream



When it's a race to put dinner on the table, these recipes let you start at the finish line.]]> 352 Christopher Kimball 0316540307 Jenn 0 to-read 4.07
author: Christopher Kimball
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.07
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 56749658 A stirring meditation of being Black and learning to love in a loveless, anti-Black world

In Shoutin' in the Fire, Danté Stewart gives breathtaking language to his reckoning with the legacy of white supremacy--both the kind that hangs over our country and the kind that is internalized on a molecular level. Stewart uses his personal experiences as a vehicle to reclaim and reimagine spiritual virtues like rage, resilience, and remembrance--and explores how these virtues might function as a work of love against an unjust, unloving world.

In 2016, Stewart was a rising leader at the predominantly white evangelical church he and his family were attending in Augusta, Georgia. Like many young church leaders, Stewart was thrilled at the prospect of growing his voice and influence within the community, and he was excited to break barriers as the church's first Black preacher. But when Donald Trump began his campaign, so began the unearthing. Stewart started overhearing talk in the pews--comments ranging from microaggressions to outright hostility toward Black Americans. As this violence began to reveal itself en masse, Stewart quickly found himself isolated amid a people unraveled; this community of faith became the place where he and his family now found themselves most alone. This set Stewart on a journey--first out of the white church and then into a liberating pursuit of faith--by looking to the wisdom of the saints that have come before, including James H. Cone, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, and by heeding the paradoxical humility of Jesus himself.

This sharply observed journey is an intimate meditation on coming of age in a time of terror. Stewart reveals the profound faith he discovered even after experiencing the violence of the American church: a faith that loves Blackness; speaks truth to pain and trauma; and pursues a truer, realer kind of love than the kind we're taught, a love that sets us free.]]> 272 Danté Stewart 0593239628 Jenn 5
If the white folk I worshipped and went to school with and had dinner with had the imagination to see C.S. Lewis�� Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as Jesus, then I knew there should have been no problem when Black folk said Jesus was Black and Jesus loved Black people and Jesus wanted to see Black people free. Just as they found meaning in the symbol of Aslan’s representation of love, I found meaning in the symbol of Jesus�� solidarity with Blackness. But, sadly, I found out that many could see the symbol of divine goodness and love in an animal before they could ever see the symbol of divine goodness and love in Blackness.]]> 4.37 2021
author: Danté Stewart
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves:
review:
Every single word. Just a few of the truths-

If the white folk I worshipped and went to school with and had dinner with had the imagination to see C.S. Lewis�� Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as Jesus, then I knew there should have been no problem when Black folk said Jesus was Black and Jesus loved Black people and Jesus wanted to see Black people free. Just as they found meaning in the symbol of Aslan’s representation of love, I found meaning in the symbol of Jesus�� solidarity with Blackness. But, sadly, I found out that many could see the symbol of divine goodness and love in an animal before they could ever see the symbol of divine goodness and love in Blackness.
]]> 52397
Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.

When fire destroys their compound, Lauren’s family is killed and she is forced out into a world that is fraught with danger. With a handful of other refugees, Lauren must make her way north to safety, along the way conceiving a revolutionary idea that may mean salvation for all mankind.]]> 345 Octavia E. Butler 0446675504 Jenn 4 4.21 1993
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves:
review:

]]> 199798217 A heartfelt novel of friendship, betrayal, and redemption set against three transformative decades in Tehran, Iran.

In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams of a friend to alleviate her isolation.

Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind, passionate girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the stone kitchen of Homa’s warm home, wander through the colorful stalls of the Grand Bazaar, and share their ambitions for becoming “lion women.��

But their happiness is disrupted when Ellie and her mother are afforded the opportunity to return to their previous bourgeois life. Now a popular student at the best girls�� high school in Iran, Ellie’s memories of Homa begin to fade. Years later, however, her sudden reappearance in Ellie’s privileged world alters the course of both of their lives.

Together, the two young women come of age and pursue their own goals for meaningful futures. But as the political turmoil in Iran builds to a breaking point, one earth-shattering betrayal will have enormous consequences.]]> 327 Marjan Kamali 1668036584 Jenn 0 to-read 4.47 2024
author: Marjan Kamali
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 180494684
“I never thought I’d see you here,�� Sarah says. Then she adds, “But I never thought I’d see you anywhere.��

Sarah and Warren’s college love story ended in a single moment. Decades later, when a chance meeting brings them together, a passion ignites?threatening the foundations of their lives. Since they parted in college, each has married, raised a family, and made a career. When they meet again, Sarah is divorced and living outside New York, while Warren is still married and living in Boston.

Seeing Warren sparks an awakening in Sarah, who feels emotionally alive for the first time in decades. Still, she hesitates to reclaim a chance at love after her painful divorce and years of framing her life around her children and her work. Warren has no such he wants to leave his marriage but fears how his wife and daughter will react. As their affair intensifies, Sarah and Warren must confront the moral responsibilities of their love for their families and each other.

An engrossing exploration of the vows we make to one another, the tensile relationships between parents and their children, and what we owe to others and ourselves, “Leaving is a tour de force—unfailingly clear-eyed, and its final impact shatters." (Washington Post)]]> 328 Roxana Robinson Jenn 4 3.99 2024
author: Roxana Robinson
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves:
review:

]]> 211888 209 Martin Luther King Jr. 0807005711 Jenn 0 to-read 4.63 1966
author: Martin Luther King Jr.
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.63
book published: 1966
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58684300 The bestselling, beloved writer of romantic comedies like You've Got Mail tells her own late-in-life love story, complete with a tragic second act and joyous resolution.

Delia Ephron had struggled through several years of heartbreak. She’d lost her sister, Nora, and then her husband, Jerry, both to cancer. Several months after Jerry’s death, she decided to make one small change in her life—she shut down his landline, which crashed her internet. She ended up in Verizon hell.
��
She channeled her grief the best way she knew: by writing a New York Times op-ed. The piece caught the attention of Peter, a Bay Area psychiatrist, who emailed her to commiserate. Recently widowed himself, he reminded her that they had shared a few dates fifty-four years before, set up by Nora. Delia did not remember him, but after several weeks of exchanging emails and sixties folk songs, he flew east to see her. They were crazy, utterly, in love.
��
But this was not a rom-com: four months later she was diagnosed with AML, a fierce leukemia.
��
In Left on Tenth, Delia Ephron enchants as she seesaws us between tears and laughter, navigating the suicidal lows of enduring cutting-edge treatment and the giddy highs of a second chance at love. With Peter and her close girlfriends by her side, with startling clarity, warmth, and honesty about facing death, Ephron invites us to join her team of warriors and become believers ourselves.]]> 304 Delia Ephron 0316267651 Jenn 0 to-read 3.99 2022
author: Delia Ephron
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60889090 DISCLAIMERThis is not a publication of the original author but an independent work of Terry K. Smith.It is only a summary of the book and is not intended to replace the main book.This summary format saves you lots of time, money and improves your understanding of the original bookClick on the Buy Button to grab your copy]]> 10 Terry K. Smith Jenn 0 to-read 4.33
author: Terry K. Smith
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 9396843 452 Ned Vizzini 1423141083 Jenn 0 4.03 2006
author: Ned Vizzini
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves:
review:

]]> 60143350 214 Kelley Nikondeha 1506474799 Jenn 5 4.29
author: Kelley Nikondeha
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.29
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 219301727 In this vibrant, gratifying novel, a pious, small-town teenager travels to Atlanta to get an abortion and finds herself smack in the middle of the civil rights movement and the secret lives of queer Black people.

Where do you get an abortion in 1960 Georgia, especially if the town midwife goes to the same church as your parents? For seventeen-year-old Doris Steele, the answer is Atlanta, where her favorite teacher, Mrs. Lucas, calls upon her brash, wealthy childhood best friend, Sylvia, for help. While waiting to hear from the doctor who has agreed to do the procedure, Doris spends the weekend scandalized by, but drawn to, the people who move in and out of Sylvia's celebrities whom Doris has seen in the pages of Jet and Ebony, political leaders like Coretta Scott King and Diane Nash, women who dance close together, atheists!��And even more shocking? Mrs. Lucas seems right at home.

The young people Doris encounters are no less surprising. When he's not flirting too hard or talking too much, Sylvia’s nephew, Dexter, brings Doris into the heart of Atlanta’s civil rights movement, where some activists practice nonviolence to prepare for sit-ins, while others carry guns to protect Black families from the Klan.

From the guests at a queer kickback to the student activists at a SNCC conference, Doris suddenly finds herself surrounded by so many people who seem to know exactly who or what they want. Doris knows she doesn’t want a baby, but what does she want? Will this trip help her find out?

These Heathens! is a funny, poignant story about Black women’s obligations and ambitions, what we owe to ourselves, and the transformative power of leaving your bubble, even for just one chaotic weekend.]]> 272 Mia McKenzie 0593596943 Jenn 0 to-read 4.69 2025
author: Mia McKenzie
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.69
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 212924025
“An extraordinary debut that made me laugh, tear up, and feel hopeful.�� —Angie Kim, author of Happiness Falls

“Climb up here, Little Alien. Sit next to me. I will tell you about life on this planet. I will tell you how it goes.��

Before she thinks of herself as Little Alien, our protagonist is a lonely girl who doesn’t understand the world the way other children seem to. So when a late-night TV special introduces her to the mysterious Voynich Manuscript—an ancient tome written in an indecipherable language—Little Alien experiences something she hasn’t before: hope. Could there be others like her, who also feel like they’re from another planet?

Convinced the Voynich Manuscript holds the answers she needs, Little Alien and her best (and only) friend Bobby decide they must find this strange book. Where that decision leads them will change everything.

Narrated by an unexpected guide who has arrived to give Little Alien the advice she’ll need to find her way, Life Hacks for a Little Alien is both a coming-of-age adventure and a love letter to language. Alice Franklin will have you swinging from stitches to tears on the uneven path to finding a life that fits, even when you yourself do not.]]> 304 Alice Franklin 0316576050 Jenn 0 to-read 3.78
author: Alice Franklin
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.78
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 219520678 The announcement of a major literary debut: What begins as a celebration takes a sudden turn when a shocking betrayal shatters the trust between families.

It’s an autumn weekend at a comfortable New York country house where two deeply intertwined families have gathered to mark the host’s fifty-second birthday.

Together, the group forms an enviable portrait of middle age. The wives and husbands have been friends for over thirty years, their teenage daughters have grown up together, and the drinks, dinners, rituals, and games that form their days all reflect the rich bonds between them.

This weekend, however, something is different. An unforeseen curdling of envy and resentment will erupt into an unspeakable act, the ramifications of which are enormous. Accusations, denials, and shattered illusions follow, driving wedges between friends, spouses, children and parents, and exposing the treacherous fault lines on which these families have dwelt.

Written with hypnotic elegance and molten precision, and announcing the arrival of a major literary talent, Hal Ebbott’s Among Friends examines the aftermath of betrayal within the sanctuary of a defining relationship. It explores themes of class, marriage, friendship, and power, as well as the things we tell ourselves to preserve our finely made worlds.]]> 320 Hal Ebbott 0593854195 Jenn 0 to-read 4.03 2025
author: Hal Ebbott
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217388145 From a New Yorker staff writer and PEN Award winner, a blend of memoir, history, and reportage on one of the most complex and least understood states in America.

“In Alabama, we exist at the border of blessing and disaster��.��

Alexis Okeowo grew up in Montgomery, Alabama—the former seat of the Confederacy—as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. Here, she weaves her family’s story with her state’s, from Alabama’s forced removal of the Creek Nation, making room for enslaved West Africans, to present-day legislative battles for “evolution disclaimers�� in biology textbooks. She immerses us in a landscape today dominated not by cotton fields but by auto plants and Amazon warehouses. Defying stereotypes at every turn, Okeowo shows how people can love their home while still acknowledging its sins.

In this perspective-shifting work that is both an intimate memoir and a journalistic triumph, Okeowo investigates her life, other Alabamians�� lives, and the state’s lesser-known histories, to examine why Alabama has been the stage for the most extreme results of the American experiment.]]> 272 Alexis Okeowo 1250206227 Jenn 0 to-read 4.40
author: Alexis Okeowo
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.40
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 215361966 In this beautifully written memoir, an accomplished journalist leaves New York City to work as an amateur farmhand at Princeton Seminary, while harvesting spiritual lessons that change his life

Jeff��Chu had a seemingly successful life. As a writer at a fast-paced magazine company, he penned glossy profiles of business leaders while living with his husband in a New York City brownstone. Yet��he struggled, as many of us do, with feelings of loneliness and disillusionment, all while trying to reconcile his identity as a first-generation Chinese American. Seeking a remedy,��he��left his job and enrolled at Princeton Seminary’s “Farminary,�� a 21-acre farm where students learn to work the soil while asking the big questions of life.

As the seasons turn, Chu introduces us to a cast of characters, human and not, each with their own lesson to teach. From the cranes that visit the pond, to the worms that turn waste into fertile soil, to the Chinese long beans that get passed over in the farm’s CSA, Chu gently interrogates his relationship with the food on his plate and his own heritage, discovering what the earth is trying to teach us--if we’ll stop and listen.

In gorgeous, moving prose, Good Soil helps readers connect to the land and to each other at a time when we are drawn most to the phones in our hands. For nature lovers, foodies, and anyone who has daydreamed about a more meaningful life, this book is a tribute to friendship, acceptance, spirituality, and how love can grow from the unlikeliest of places.]]> 336 Jeff Chu 0593727363 Jenn 0 to-read 4.28 2025
author: Jeff Chu
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214974562
Writer and podcaster Erin Moon has questions, and this book is her open letter for anyone who feels iffy, conflicted, or just downright devastated by this disconnect. With empathy, insight, and the therapy of memes and a good laugh, Erin maps out not a rigid prescription but an open-hearted pathway for you to reclaim what you once loved about your faith home and light a match to the rest.

As it turns out, God is not afraid of your questions. To the contrary, the fullness of the Christian story is found not in a certainty checklist but a vision of a people who wrestle with God. This is the story to which Erin turns and guides you through, as you

- understand the good, bad, ugly, and just plain bizarre of your faith origins
- find permission to lament, ask questions, and name pressure points
- make peace as you set your own new boundaries and rebuild

Consider this your open invitation to get gut-level honest about where it started, and heart-level hopeful about where it can go from here.]]> 256 Erin Hicks Moon 1540904083 Jenn 5
“Grappling with the God of the universe, if you’re ready to do that, takes balls (you have to be tender), and it takes a uterus (you have to be tough).��

“God is ready, willing, and able to scrap in the dark desert over all the things that piss us off, the stuff that wounds us, the injustices in the world, and why God made all this so damn hard sometimes.��

My copy of this book is more underlined than not. Erin has managed to marry deep theological thoughts with hilarious personal stories and irreverent pop culture references.

Did I drive 700 miles to go to a release event with the author. Yes, yes I did. Erin H. Moon through podcast Faith Adjacent, her studies and her newsletter have spiritually mothered and pastored me over the last 5 years. It was a honor to be there. ]]> 4.57 2025
author: Erin Hicks Moon
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/08
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves:
review:
“…God is more welcoming, more loving, more inclusive, and more generous than we ever imagined. And that love gives you room: room for your questions, room for your story, room for your hopes, room for your grief and your anger, room for your transformation, and room for your whole self.��

“Grappling with the God of the universe, if you’re ready to do that, takes balls (you have to be tender), and it takes a uterus (you have to be tough).��

“God is ready, willing, and able to scrap in the dark desert over all the things that piss us off, the stuff that wounds us, the injustices in the world, and why God made all this so damn hard sometimes.��

My copy of this book is more underlined than not. Erin has managed to marry deep theological thoughts with hilarious personal stories and irreverent pop culture references.

Did I drive 700 miles to go to a release event with the author. Yes, yes I did. Erin H. Moon through podcast Faith Adjacent, her studies and her newsletter have spiritually mothered and pastored me over the last 5 years. It was a honor to be there.
]]> 13586707 331 Elena Ferrante Jenn 0 abandoned 3.91 2011
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 219301746 A hitmaking songwriter and a bitter musician share a startling and inexplicable connection that they’ll do anything to shake, in the next sparkling, magical book from Ashley Poston.

Joni Lark is living the dream. She’s one of the most coveted songwriters in LA…and she can’t seem to write. There’s an emptiness inside her, and nothing seems to fill it.

When she returns to her hometown of Vienna Shores, North Carolina, she hopes that the sand, the surf, and the concerts at The Revelry, her family’s music venue, will spark her inspiration. But when she gets there, nothing is how she left it. Her best friend is avoiding her, her mother’s memories are fading fast, and The Revelry is closing.

How can she think about writing her next song when everything is changing without her?

Until she hears it. A melody in her head, lyric-less and half-formed, and an alluring and addictive voice to go with it—belonging, apparently, to a wry musician with hangups of his own.

Surely, he’s a figment of her overworked imagination.

But then the very real man attached to the voice shows up in Vienna Shores. He’s aggravating and gruff on the outside—nothing like the sweet, funny voice in Joni’s head—and he has a plan:

They’ll finish the song haunting them both, break their connection, and hope they don’t risk their hearts in the process.

Because that song stuck in their heads? Maybe it’s there for a reason.]]> 384 Ashley Poston 0593641000 Jenn 0 to-read 4.23 2025
author: Ashley Poston
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 43604047
Welcome to Renaissance France, a place of poison and plots, of beauties and beasts, of mice and . . . queens?

Mary is the queen of Scotland and the jewel of the French court. Except when she’s a mouse. Yes, reader, Mary is an Eðian (shapeshifter) in a kingdom where Verities rule. It’s a secret that could cost her a head—or a tail.��

Luckily, Mary has a confidant in her betrothed, Francis. But things at the gilded court take a treacherous turn after the king meets a suspicious end. Thrust onto the throne, Mary and Francis face a viper’s nest of conspiracies, traps, and treason. And if Mary’s secret is revealed, heads are bound to roll.

With a royally clever sense of humor, Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows continue their campaign to turn history on its head in this YA fantasy that’s perfect for fans of A Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue.]]> 512 Cynthia Hand 0062930060 Jenn 0 to-read 3.88 2021
author: Cynthia Hand
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 49630951
JANE (a genuine hero-eene)

Calamity’s her name, and garou hunting’s her game—when she’s not starring in Wild Bill’s Traveling Show, that is. She reckons that if a girl wants to be a legend, she should just go ahead and be one.

FRANK (*wolf whistle*)
Frank “the Pistol Prince�� Butler is the Wild West’s #1 bachelor. He’s also the best sharpshooter on both sides of the Mississippi, but he’s about to meet his match. . . .

ANNIE (get your gun!)
Annie Oakley (yep, that Annie) is lookin�� for a job, not a romance, but she can’t deny there’s something about Frank she likes. Really likes. Still, she’s pretty sure that anything he can do, she can do better.

A HAIRY SITUATION
After a garou hunt goes south and Jane finds a suspicious-like bite on her arm, she turns tail for Deadwood, where there’s been talk of a garou cure. But things ain’t always what they seem—meaning the gang better hightail it after her before they’re a day late and a Jane short.]]> 544 Cynthia Hand 0062652818 Jenn 0 to-read 3.56 2020
author: Cynthia Hand
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 36301023
Or does she?

Prepare for an adventure of Gothic proportions, in which all is not as it seems, a certain gentleman is hiding more than skeletons in his closets, and one orphan Jane Eyre, aspiring author Charlotte Brontë, and supernatural investigator Alexander Blackwood are about to be drawn together on the most epic ghost hunt this side of Wuthering Heights.]]> 447 Cynthia Hand 006265277X Jenn 0 to-read 3.76 2018
author: Cynthia Hand
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217223460 From the author of the “delightful�� (New York Times Book Review)��Mary Jane, a new novel of found family, growing up, and the best and worst of the 1980s, revolving around San Francisco’s most exclusive department store, I. Magnin.

Nineteen-year-old Zippy can hardly believe she’s the newest and youngest salesgirl at I. Magnin, “San Francisco’s Finest Department Store.�� Every week, she rotates her three spruced-up Salvation Army outfits and Vaseline-shined pumps; still, she’s thrilled to walk those pumps through the employee entrance five days a week as she saves to buy something new. For a girl who grew up in a one-bedroom apartment above a liquor store with her mother and her mother’s madcap boyfriend, Howard; a girl who wanted to go to college but had no help in figuring out how; I. Magnin represents a real chance for a better and more elegant life. Or, at the very least, a more interesting one.

Zippy may not be in school, but she’s about to get an education that will stick with her for decades. Her fellow salesgirls (lifetime professionals) run the gamut from mean and indifferent to caring and helpful. The cosmetics ladies on the first floor share both samples and advice (“only date a man with a Rolex��); and her new roommate, Raquel, an ambitious lawyer, tells Zippy she can lose ten pounds easy if she joins Raquel in eating only every other day. Just when Zippy thinks she’s getting a handle on how to be an adult woman in 1985, two surprises threaten both her sense of self and her coveted position at I. Magnin.

Set in the Day-Glo colors of 1980s San Francisco,��Shopgirls��is an intoxicating novel of self-discovery, outrageous fashion, and family both biological and found.


]]> 272 Jessica Anya Blau 0063052350 Jenn 0 to-read 3.70 2025
author: Jessica Anya Blau
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220543381
But what does belonging--to God, ourselves, and each other--look like in the context of living within an empire and its ideologies?

In Liturgies for Resisting Empire, Cuban American writer Kat Armas explores this question both for the New Testament church and for us today.

Armas starts by introducing the idea of empire and how deeply it affects everyone, every day. She then explores what it means to belong to God, not empire, by looking at the ways the early church wrestled with this. Through de- and post-colonial interpretations of Scripture, she examines empires throughout history, offering readers a path toward liberation from systems of exploitation and guidance for building communities that value people over power.

Armas gives readers a sense of hope and belonging in their daily lives--belonging to ourselves, God, each other, and the earth--in ways that resist the lies of empire. Each chapter begins with a brief liturgy.]]> 224 Kat Armas 1587436493 Jenn 0 to-read 0.0
author: Kat Armas
name: Jenn
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220543430
Well, it helps to write it all out.

A companion to her gritty, gut-level-honest book I've Got Questions, this guided journal from author Erin Hicks Moon is filled with prompts to get you thinking (and writing) through your own thoughts and questions about faith, God, the church, and much more. As you sift through the wreckage of your spiritual upbringing, you'll come ever closer to claiming a faith that is all yours--one that you can wholeheartedly embrace and joyfully express.

Because, as it turns out, God's not afraid of your questions. And you shouldn't be either.]]> 192 Erin Hicks Moon 1540904091 Jenn 0 to-read 4.50
author: Erin Hicks Moon
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214974527
In Becoming the Pastor's Wife, Barr draws on her 25 years of experience as a pastor's wife and her scholarship as a historian to trace the role of the pastor's wife, showing how it both helped and hurt women in conservative Protestant traditions. While they gained an important leadership role, it came at a deep cost: losing independent church leadership opportunities and strengthening a gender hierarchy that prioritized male careers.

Barr examines the connection between the decline of female ordination and the rise of the role of pastor's wife in the evangelical church, tracing its patterns in the larger history of Christian women's leadership. By expertly blending historical and personal narrative, she equips pastors' wives to better advocate for themselves while helping the church understand the origins of the role as well as the historical reality of ordained women.]]> 256 Beth Allison Barr 1587435896 Jenn 0 to-read 4.52 2025
author: Beth Allison Barr
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 216555807 God, Sex, and Rich People follows Mattie Jo as she takes off her purity ring, navigates public transportation, and tries to have good sex without hating herself. From dating her doorman, to sex with a pop star, to living with millionaires, watch Mattie Jo hilariously fumble and find her footing, as she redefines her sexuality and spirituality in the city that never sleeps (and never stops sleeping around).]]> 343 Mattie Jo Cowsert 1964252067 Jenn 0 to-read 4.46
author: Mattie Jo Cowsert
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.46
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 201465867
Michael is coming undone. Adrift after his wife's departure, he has begun taking himself on long, solitary walks across the English countryside. Becoming ever more reclusive, he’ll do anything to avoid his empty house.

Marnie, on the other hand, is stuck. Hiding alone in her London flat, she avoids old friends and any reminders of her rotten, selfish ex-husband. Curled up with a good book, she’s battling the long afternoons of a life that feels like it’s passing her by.

When a persistent mutual friend and some very unpredictable weather conspire to toss Michael and Marnie together on the most epic of ten-day hikes, neither of them can think of anything worse. Until, of course, they discover exactly what they’ve been looking for.

Michael and Marnie are on the precipice of a bright future . . . if they can survive the journey.]]> 368 David Nicholls 0063394057 Jenn 0 abandoned 3.97 2024
author: David Nicholls
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 66087062 A woman risks everything to end her family’s centuries-old curse, solve her mother’s disappearance, and find love in this mesmerizing novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Spells for Forgetting.

In the small mountain town of Jasper, North Carolina, June Farrow is waiting for fate to find her. The Farrow women are known for their thriving flower farm—and the mysterious curse that has plagued their family line. The whole town remembers the madness that led to Susanna Farrow’s disappearance, leaving June to be raised by her grandmother and haunted by rumors.

It’s been a year since June started seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. Faint wind chimes, a voice calling her name, and a mysterious door appearing out of nowhere—the signs of what June always knew was coming. But June is determined to end the curse once and for all, even if she must sacrifice finding love and having a family of her own.

After her grandmother’s death, June discovers a series of cryptic clues regarding her mother’s decades-old disappearance, except they only lead to more questions. But could the door she once assumed was a hallucination be the answer she’s been searching for? The next time it appears, June realizes she can touch it and walk past the threshold. And when she does, she embarks on a journey that will not only change both the past and the future, but also uncover the lingering mysteries of her small town and entangle her heart in an epic star-crossed love.

With The Unmaking of June Farrow, Adrienne Young delivers a brilliant novel of romance, mystery, and a touch of the impossible—a story you will never forget.]]> 320 Adrienne Young 0593598679 Jenn 0 abandoned 4.13 2023
author: Adrienne Young
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: abandoned
review:

]]> 49738792 Defiant��explores how the Exodus women summoned their courage, harnessed their intelligence, and gathered their resources to enact justice in many small ways and overturned an empire. Women find themselves in similar circumstances today. The Women’s March stirred the conscience of a nation and prompted women to organize with and for their neighbors, it is worth reflecting on the resistance literature of Exodus and what it has to offer women.��

Defiant��is about the deep work women do to create conditions for liberation in their church, community, and country. The women of Exodus defied Pharaoh, raised Moses, and plundered Egypt. We are invited to consider what the midwives, mothers of Moses, Miriam, Zipporah and her sisters demonstrate under the oppressive regime of Pharaoh and what it might unlock for us as we imagine our mandate under modern systems of injustice.��

Kelley Nikondeha presents a fresh paradigm for women, highlighting a biblical mandate to join the liberation work in our world. Women’s work involves more than tending to our own family and home. According to Exodus, it moves us beyond the domestic territory and into relationship with women across the river, confronting injustice and working to liberate our neighborhoods so all mothers and children are free. Nikondeha calls women to continue to be active agents in heralding liberation as we organize and march together for one another’s freedom.]]> 208 Kelley Nikondeha 0802864295 Jenn 0 to-read 4.36
author: Kelley Nikondeha
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.36
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211004135
One In a Millennial is an exploration of pop culture, nostalgia, the millennial zeitgeist, and the life lessons learned (for better and for worse) from coming of age as a member of a much-maligned generation.

Kate is a pop culture commentator and host of the popular millennial-focused podcast Be There in Five . Part-funny, part-serious, Kate navigates the complicated nature of celebrating and criticizing the culture that shaped her as a woman, while arguing that great depths can come from surface-level interests.

With her trademark style and vulnerability, One In a Millennial is sharp, hilarious, and heartwarming all at once. She tackles AOL Instant Messenger, purity culture, American Girl Dolls, going out tops, Spice Girl feminism, her feelings about millennial motherhood, and more. Kate’s laugh-out-loud asides and keen observations will have you nodding your head and maybe even tearing up.]]> 336 Kate Kennedy 1250874165 Jenn 0 to-read 3.45 2024
author: Kate Kennedy
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 177192267
At a lavish party in the hills outside of San Francisco, Jin Han meets Lidija Jung and nothing will ever be the same for either woman. A brilliant young photographer, Jin is at a crossroads in her work, in her marriage to her college love Philip, and in who she is and who she wants to be. Lidija is an alluring, injured world-class ballerina on hiatus from her ballet company under mysterious circumstances. Drawn to each other by their intense artistic drives, the two women talk all night.

Cracked open, Jin finds herself telling Lidija about an old familial curse, breaking a lifelong promise. She’s been told that if she doesn’t keep the curse a secret, she risks losing everything; death and ruin could lie ahead. As Jin and Lidija become more entangled, they realize they share more than the ferocity of their ambition, and begin to explore hidden desires. Something is ignited in Jin: her art, her body, and her sense of self irrevocably changed. But can she avoid the specter of the curse? Vital, bold, powerful, and deeply moving, Exhibit asks: how brightly can you burn before you light your life on fire?]]> 224 R.O. Kwon 0593190025 Jenn 0 to-read 3.13 2024
author: R.O. Kwon
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.13
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 75339201
“A page-turner with heart.�� —Alison Wisdom, author of We Can Only Save Ourselves

“Dazzling! Readers will love these flawed, tender characters.�� —Deb Rogers, author of Florida Woman

When thirty-three-year-old Athena Matthias is asked, yet again, to be a bridesmaid, she’s not exactly enthusiastic about the idea. Still reeling from a messy divorce from her wife, she’s never felt less inclined to celebrate love. But Athena can't say no, especially to one of her oldest friends, and at least it's a destination wedding, which means three days of sun and sand.

As the wedding weekend commences on the gorgeous beaches of Watercolor, Florida, for the first time in ages, Athena finds herself surrounded by people who know and love her. There’s the bride, nervous about an old relationship; a groomsman grappling with a big mistake; Athena’s mother, ready to date again; and even a potential new romantic interest.

But just as Athena begins to feel herself opening up again, an unexpected guest from the past throws the entire wedding party into chaos. By the time the cake is cut and the ultimate betrayal is revealed, Athena must find the courage to forgive—both others and herself—and embrace the beauty of a chance to move forward.

�� Today Tonight Forever beautifully encapsulates all the ways people come together and break apart. This book is moving, sweet, funny, and I fell in love with its characters over and over again.�� —Ilana Masad, author of All My Mother’s Lovers]]> 304 Madeline Kay Sneed 1525819593 Jenn 3
Could anything have lived up to my great love for Snead’s debut The Golden Season for me? Highly unlikely. I’ve talked about the book, I’ve underlined my own and copies I eventually gifted, I considered a quote from it for my second tattoo.

Will I read everything Sneed publishes or posts? Absolutely. Will I recommend Today Tonight Forever? Probably not. But I’m reserving my right to not give the book a rating in ŷ������. Apparently someone out there in the book world uses the app’s ratings to the benefit or detriment of authors, and I do not want to risk doing anything to hurt MKS. ]]> 3.45 2023
author: Madeline Kay Sneed
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/31
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:
I have waited til the last day of the year to log that I read Sneed’s second book. Never have I anticipated a release more! Today�� was fine, but to be honest I was disappointed. It seemed scattered, and I didn’t love any of the characters other than Deacon.

Could anything have lived up to my great love for Snead’s debut The Golden Season for me? Highly unlikely. I’ve talked about the book, I’ve underlined my own and copies I eventually gifted, I considered a quote from it for my second tattoo.

Will I read everything Sneed publishes or posts? Absolutely. Will I recommend Today Tonight Forever? Probably not. But I’m reserving my right to not give the book a rating in ŷ������. Apparently someone out there in the book world uses the app’s ratings to the benefit or detriment of authors, and I do not want to risk doing anything to hurt MKS.
]]> 40203647 From a psychotherapist, and national advice columnist comes a thought-provoking new book that takes us behind the scenes of a therapist's world -- where her patients are looking for answers (and so is she).

One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.

As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients' lives -- a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can't stop hooking up with the wrong guys -- she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.

With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is revolutionary in its candor, offering a deeply personal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly revealing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly funny and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them.]]> 413 Lori Gottlieb Jenn 3 4.41 2019
author: Lori Gottlieb
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/29
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 48678512 Both a primer for teens eager to be allies as well as a reassuring testimony for young queer men of color, All Boys Aren't Blue covers topics such as gender identity, toxic masculinity, brotherhood, family, structural marginalization, consent, and Black joy.

In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.

Johnson's emotionally frank style of writing will appeal directly to young adults.]]> 304 George M. Johnson 0374312729 Jenn 4 4.23 2020
author: George M. Johnson
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/24
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 11664494
By refreshing their pages, they learn that making different decisions now will affect the outcome of their lives later. And as they grapple with the ups and downs of what their futures hold, they're forced to confront what they're doing right - and wrong - in the present.]]> 364 Jay Asher 1101548126 Jenn 3 3.72 2011
author: Jay Asher
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/18
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 126431368 From #1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Weiner comes a heartfelt short story about a complicated friendship and a youthful betrayal that still has the power to shape two women’s lives.

Senatorial favorite Ida Berkowitz is headed for a win. Raised by a hardworking widowed mother, she’s authentic, relatable, and down-to-earth. Voters love her. Polls promise victory. Then her campaign manager utters four awful words: Who is Marissa Schuyler? She had almost managed to forget. Ida’s bunkmate at Camp Golden Hills when they were girls, Marissa was confident, sophisticated, and wealthy. Everything Ida wasn’t. Now the polished wife of a major conservative donor, Marissa’s announced a press conference. About Ida.

Just like that, Ida’s old insecurities come rushing in. So do new feelings of dread. After all these years, she knows what’s on Marissa’s mind. It could undermine everything Ida’s worked for. Because it isn’t very pretty.]]> 53 Jennifer Weiner 1662514050 Jenn 3 3.5 3.90 2023
author: Jennifer Weiner
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/19
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:
3.5
]]> 62060532
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 329 R.F. Kuang Jenn 3 3.77 2023
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/03
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:
So weird? Honestly disappointed.
]]> 50743767
In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter "the real world". She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.

It started with an itch - first on her feet, then up her legs, like 1,000 invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her 23rd birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.

When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward - after three and a half years of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant - she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal - to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.

How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked - with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt - on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.]]> 352 Suleika Jaouad 0399588582 Jenn 4 Timely. Read this over the winter my bro was in the hospital getting stem cells from my other bro. Bad news- transplants don’t always work. Had to pace myself cause it hit so close to my heart. My copy will mark that season of weekly drives to Cville. Now following her journey. And want to watch film American Symphony. Wasn’t ready when it came out. Think
I’m ready. ]]> 4.40 2021
author: Suleika Jaouad
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/19
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:
4.5
Timely. Read this over the winter my bro was in the hospital getting stem cells from my other bro. Bad news- transplants don’t always work. Had to pace myself cause it hit so close to my heart. My copy will mark that season of weekly drives to Cville. Now following her journey. And want to watch film American Symphony. Wasn’t ready when it came out. Think
I’m ready.
]]> 39851109 Four starred reviews!

* "Many readers will recognize themselves or their neighbors in these pages." -- Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Mia Tang has a lot of secrets.

Number 1: She lives in a motel, not a big house. Every day, while her immigrant parents clean the rooms, ten-year-old Mia manages the front desk of the Calivista Motel and tends to its guests.

Number 2: Her parents hide immigrants. And if the mean motel owner, Mr. Yao, finds out they've been letting them stay in the empty rooms for free, the Tangs will be doomed.

Number 3: She wants to be a writer. But how can she when her mom thinks she should stick to math because English is not her first language?

It will take all of Mia's courage, kindness, and hard work to get through this year. Will she be able to hold on to her job, help the immigrants and guests, escape Mr. Yao, and go for her dreams?]]> 228 Kelly Yang 1338157809 Jenn 4 4.59 2018
author: Kelly Yang
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/26
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:
Read alongside a young friend. My favorite way to read!
]]> 57576425 In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman's relentless errors.

Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.

The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.]]> 382 Louise Erdrich 0062671146 Jenn 4 Took a while to get into so not 5 stars for me but just beautiful. On my To Own List.]]> 4.09 2021
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/03
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:
4.5
Took a while to get into so not 5 stars for me but just beautiful. On my To Own List.
]]> 139400713 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Jenn 3 4.22 2024
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/20
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:
I’m not sure I understand it but creative. A Booker Prize nominee this year and it’s rare for me to read those. Read at least 2 this year! James forever.
]]> 123246338
“‘Let us descend,�� the poet now began, ‘and enter this blind world.’�� �� Inferno, Dante Alighieri

Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.

Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.

From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward’s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages.]]> 316 Jesmyn Ward 1982104511 Jenn 3 3.76 2023
author: Jesmyn Ward
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/09
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:
So creative but man, me and magical realism usually don’t jive. Def going to read more Ward though.
]]> 201636040 From��New York Times��bestseller Maureen Callahan, a fierce, character-driven exposé of the real Kennedy Curse—the family’s generations-long legacy of misogyny, murder, and mayhem—and the women who have paid the price for our obsession with Camelot

The Kennedy name has long been synonymous with wealth, power, glamor, and—above all else—integrity. But this carefully constructed veneer hides a dark truth: the pattern of Kennedy men physically and psychologically abusing women and girls, leaving a trail of ruin and death in each generation’s wake. Through decades of scandal after scandal—from sexual assaults to reputational slander, suicides to manslaughter—the family and their defenders have kept the Kennedy brand intact.

Now, in Ask Not, bestselling author and journalist Maureen Callahan reveals the Kennedys�� hidden history of violence and exploitation, laying bare their unrepentant sexism and rampant depravity while also restoring these women and girls to their rightful place at the center of the dynasty’s story: from Jacqueline Onassis and Marilyn Monroe to Carolyn Bessette, Martha Moxley, Mary Jo Kopechne, Rosemary Kennedy, and many others whose names aren’t nearly as well known but should be.

Drawing on years of explosive reportage and written in electric prose, Ask Not is a long-overdue reckoning with this fabled family and a consequential part of American history that is still very much with us. At long last Callahan redirects the spotlight to the women in the Kennedys�� orbit, paying homage to those who freed themselves and giving voice to those who, through no fault of their own, could not.]]> 380 Maureen Callahan 0316276421 Jenn 3 4.33 2024
author: Maureen Callahan
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/25
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:
Not well written in my opinion but damn…if I was ever a Kennedy fan that’s over. And RFK is the worst one!
]]> 133286908 “Not all stories of adoption are stories of pain and regret. Not even most of them. Why don’t we ever get that movie?��

India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actor. Armed with a stack of index cards (for research/line memorization/make-shift confetti), she goes from awkward sixteen-year-old to Broadway ingenue to TV superhero.

Her new movie is a prestige picture about adoption, but its spin is the same old tired story of tragedy. India is an adoptive mom in real life though. She wants everyone to know there’s more to her family than pain and regret. So she does something you should never do—she tells a journalist the truth: it’s a bad movie.

Soon she’s at the center of a media storm, battling accusations from the press and the paparazzi, from protesters on the right and advocates on the left. Her twin ten-year-olds know they need help–and who better to call than family? But that’s where it gets really messy because India’s not just an adoptive mother��

The one thing she knows for sure is what makes a family isn’t blood. And it isn’t love. No matter how they’re formed, the truth about family is this: it's complicated.]]> 400 Laurie Frankel 1250236819 Jenn 3 3.5 4.08 2024
author: Laurie Frankel
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:
3.5
]]> 54746196
True biz (adj./exclamation; American Sign Language): really, seriously, definitely, real-talk

True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history finals, and have politicians, doctors, and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. This revelatory novel plunges readers into the halls of a residential school for the deaf, where they’ll meet Charlie, a rebellious transfer student who’s never met another deaf person before; Austin, the school’s golden boy, whose world is rocked when his baby sister is born hearing; and February, the hearing headmistress, a CODA (child of deaf adult(s)) who is fighting to keep her school open and her marriage intact, but might not be able to do both. As a series of crises both personal and political threaten to unravel each of them, Charlie, Austin, and February find their lives inextricable from one another—and changed forever.

This is a story of sign language and lip-reading, disability and civil rights, isolation and injustice, first love and loss, and, above all, great persistence, daring, and joy. Absorbing and assured, idiosyncratic and relatable, this is an unforgettable journey into the Deaf community and a universal celebration of human connection.]]> 404 Sara Nović Jenn 4 4.11 2022
author: Sara Nović
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/29
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 74892080
As the novel opens, Adam is approaching his seventieth birthday, staring down his mortality and fading relevance. He has always managed his bipolar disorder with medication, but he’s determined to make one last scientific breakthrough and so he has secretly stopped taking his pills, which he knows will infuriate his children. Meanwhile, Abby and Ken are both harboring secrets of their own, and there is a new person on the periphery of the family—Steph, who doesn’t make her connection known. As Adam grows more attuned to the frequencies of the deep sea and less so to the people around him, Ken and Abby each plan the elaborate gifts they will present to their father on his birthday, jostling for primacy in this small family unit.

Set in the fraught summer of 2016, and drawing on the biblical tale of Cain and Abel, Little Monsters is an absorbing, sharply observed family story by a writer who knows Cape Cod inside and out—its Edenic lushness and its snakes.]]> 317 Adrienne Brodeur 1982198125 Jenn 4 3.92 2023
author: Adrienne Brodeur
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/10
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 204316960 A witty, warmhearted novel about coming to terms with grief, taking a chance on unexpected connections, and finding family in time for the holidays.

For wedding singer Mel Hart, the holidays have always retained a certain magic. Her mother, Connie, always managed to pull off spectacular Santa hijinx that convinced Mel to keep believing in Santa way longer than other kids. Those moments meant everything to Mel because the rest of the year, life was unpredictable because of her mother’s alcohol use.

But two weeks before Christmas, Mel gets a call from the hospital: her mother has died.

Then a woman shows up on Mel's doorstep, claiming to be Connie's estranged best friend, promising to tell Mel a different narrative—one in which Connie was almost a famous country music star, if only a man hadn't gotten in the way. Instead of spending Christmas alone in her dead mother's house, Mel agrees to stay with Barb for the holidays, finding herself in the middle of Barb's complicated family and uncovering secrets while fighting an attraction to Barb’s in-the-middle-of-a-divorce son. As Christmas approaches, Mel reckons with how little she knew about her mother's past while reexamining her own future.

A Home for the Holidays is a moving exploration of complicated grief, mother-daughter relationships, loving someone with addiction, and the redemptive power of opening one's heart to love in all its forms.]]> 256 Taylor Hahn 0593470702 Jenn 4 3.80 2024
author: Taylor Hahn
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/25
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 90588969
But when the elderly owner of the shop comes to Carmen with a Christmas wish that threatens to never come true, Carmen knows she must buckle down to get the funds to save not only his trip, but the shop itself. While fending off a shady tatt-selling businessman, Carmen discovers wonders to the shop she could have never imagined, and opens a labyrinth of bookish backrooms for the customers to get lost in.

With her deadline looming, it might take more than a fresh coat of paint to solve Carmen's problems. But with the help of their neighbours, her nieces and nephew, and a very distractingly cute male nanny, Carmen might just pull her greatest magic trick yet...]]> 302 Jenny Colgan 006326045X Jenn 4 3.45 2023
author: Jenny Colgan
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/26
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 199531989 Knives Out gets a rom-com twist in this rivals-to-lovers Christmas romance-mystery from New York Times bestselling author Ally Carter

The bridge is out. The phones are down. And the most famous mystery writer in the world just disappeared out of a locked room three days before Christmas.

Meet Maggie Chase and Ethan Wyatt:
She’s the new Queen of the Cozy Mystery.
He’s Mr. Big-Time Thriller Guy.

She hates his guts.

He thinks her name is Marcie (no matter how many times she’s told him otherwise.)

But when they both accept a cryptic invitation to attend a Christmas house party at the English estate of a reclusive fan, neither is expecting their host to be the most powerful author in the world: Eleanor Ashley, the Duchess of Death herself.

That night, the weather turns, and the next morning Eleanor is gone.

She vanished from a locked room, and Maggie has to wonder: Is Eleanor in danger? Or is it all some kind of test? Is Ethan the competition? Or is he the only person in that snowbound mansion she can trust?

As the snow gets deeper and the stakes get higher, every clue will bring Maggie and Ethan closer to the truth—and each other. Because, this Christmas, these two rivals are going to have to become allies (and maybe more) if they have any hope of saving Eleanor.

Assuming they don’t kill each other first.]]> 293 Ally Carter 0063276682 Jenn 3 3.92 2024
author: Ally Carter
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 151740 Fresh Air in 1998, Sandy Tolan brings the Israeli-Palestinian conflict down to its most human level, suggesting that even amid the bleakest political realities there exist stories of hope and reconciliation.]]> 400 Sandy Tolan Jenn 0 to-read 4.10 2006
author: Sandy Tolan
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 209221486 0 Alan Morrison 1739473450 Jenn 0 to-read 4.78
author: Alan Morrison
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.78
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 18502257 130 Mitri Raheb 1626980659 Jenn 0 to-read 4.31 2014
author: Mitri Raheb
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 986137 170 Mitri Raheb 0800636538 Jenn 0 to-read 4.22 2004
author: Mitri Raheb
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 986133 229 Naim Stifan Ateek 088344545X Jenn 0 to-read 4.18 1989
author: Naim Stifan Ateek
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 204263936 From America’s favorite government teacher, a heartfelt, inspiring portrait of twelve ordinary Americans whose courage formed the character of our country.

In The Small and the Mighty, Sharon McMahon proves that the most remarkable Americans are often ordinary people who didn’t make it into the textbooks.��Not the presidents, but the telephone operators. Not the aristocrats, but the schoolteachers.��Through meticulous research, she discovers history’s unsung characters and brings their rich, riveting stories to light for the first time.����

You’ll meet a woman astride a white horse riding down Pennsylvania Ave, a young boy detained at a Japanese incarceration camp, a formerly enslaved woman on a mission to reunite with her daughter, a poet on a train, and a teacher who learns to work with her enemies. More than one thing is bombed, and multiple people surprisingly become rich. Some rich with money, and some wealthy with things that matter more.

This is a book about��what really made America �� and Americans �� great.��McMahon’s cast of improbable champions��will become familiar friends, lighting the path we journey in our quest to make the world more just, peaceful, good, and free.]]> 317 Sharon McMahon 0593541685 Jenn 0 to-read 4.46 2024
author: Sharon McMahon
name: Jenn
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 50496866 Another heartfelt and delightful Christmas tale from the beloved New York Times bestselling author of The Bookshop on the Corner and Christmas on the Island.

New York Times bestselling author Jenny Colgan returns to the setting of Christmas on the Island and Endless Beach for a heartwarming new novel celebrating the season, and Scotland.

On the tiny, beautiful, and remote island of Mure, halfway between Scotland and Norway, a new hotel opening is a big event. New mother Flora MacKenzie and her brother Fintan are working themselves half to death to get it ready in time for Christmas.��

The new hotel’s impressive kitchens throw together two unlikely new friends: Isla Gregor is the hardworking young girl who has been a��waitress in the island's cafe, dreaming of a bigger, better life now that she’s at a proper fancy hotel. Konstantin Pederson is working his way up in the hotel's kitchens too…but he is also, secretly, the only son of the Duke of Utsire. Konstantin has been sent to learn what it is to work hard for a living, before receiving his inheritance. Although he’s initially resentful, the place grows on him; he has never met anyone quite like Isla and her fellow Murians before.��

As the island’s residents and special VIP guests gather for the hotel’s grand opening gala, Christmas is in the air. But so are more than a few small-town secrets…]]> 352 Jenny Colgan 0062911287 Jenn 0 to-read 3.64 2020
author: Jenny Colgan
name: Jenn
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>