en-US Tue, 29 Apr 2025 18:10:41 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 49247242 In America, demons wear white hoods.

In 1915, The Birth of a Nation cast a spell across America, swelling the Klan's ranks and drinking deep from the darkest thoughts of white folk. All across the nation they ride, spreading fear and violence among the vulnerable. They plan to bring Hell to Earth. But even Ku Kluxes can die.

Standing in their way is Maryse Boudreaux and her fellow resistance fighters, a foul-mouthed sharpshooter and a Harlem Hellfighter. Armed with blade, bullet, and bomb, they hunt their hunters and send the Klan's demons straight to Hell. But something awful's brewing in Macon, and the war on Hell is about to heat up.

Can Maryse stop the Klan before it ends the world?]]> 185 P. Djèlí Clark 1250767024 Tori 0 to-read 3.96 2020
author: P. Djèlí Clark
name: Tori
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 218460347 A darkly comic and warm-hearted novel about an old man on a cross-country mission to reunite with his high school crush—bringing together his adult daughter, two orphaned kids, and a cat who can predict death—from the beloved author of Rabbit Cake and Unlikely Animals

At sixty-three years old, million-dollar lottery winner PJ Halliday would be the luckiest man in Pondville, Massachusetts, if it weren’t for the tragedies of his life: the sudden death of his eldest daughter and the way his marriage fell apart after that. Since then, PJ spends both his money and his time at the bar, and he probably doesn’t have much time left—he’s had three heart attacks already.

But when PJ reads an obituary of his old romantic rival, he realizes his high school sweetheart, Michelle Cobb, is finally single again. Filled with a new enthusiasm for life, PJ decides he’s going to drive across the country to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona to win Michelle back.

Before PJ can hit the road, tragedy strikes Pondville, leaving PJ the sudden guardian of his estranged brother’s grandchildren. Anyone else would be deterred from the planned trip, but PJ figures the orphaned kids might benefit from getting out of town. PJ also figures he can ask Sophie, his adult daughter, adrift in her 20s, to come along to babysit. And there’s one more surprise addition to the roster: Pancakes, a former nursing home therapy cat with a knack of predicting death, who recently turned up outside PJ’s home.

This could be the second chance PJ has long hoped for—a second shot at love and parenting—but does he have the strength to do both those things again? It’s very possible his heart can’t take it.]]> 384 Annie Hartnett 0593873440 Tori 0 to-read 4.43 2025
author: Annie Hartnett
name: Tori
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 218559595 Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a couple of plot twists up her sleeve in this dazzling and sweeping new novel from Emily Henry.

Alice Scott is an eternal optimist still dreaming of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer-prize winning human thundercloud. And they’re both on balmy Little Crescent Island for the same reason: To write the biography of a woman no one has seen in years--or at least to meet with the octogenarian who claims to be the Margaret Ives. Tragic heiress, former tabloid princess, and daughter of one of the most storied (and scandalous) families of the 20th Century.

When Margaret invites them both for a one-month trial period, after which she’ll choose the person who’ll tell her story, there are three things keeping Alice’s head in the game.

One: Alice genuinely likes people, which means people usually like Alice—and she has a whole month to win the legendary woman over.

Two: She’s ready for this job and the chance to impress her perennially unimpressed family with a Serious Publication

Three: Hayden Anderson, who should have no reason to be concerned about losing this book, is glowering at her in a shaken-to-the core way that suggests he sees her as competition.

But the problem is, Margaret is only giving each of them pieces of her story. Pieces they can’t swap to put together because of an ironclad NDA and an inconvenient yearning pulsing between them every time they’re in the same room.

And it’s becoming abundantly clear that their story—just like the tale Margaret’s spinning—could be a mystery, tragedy, or love ballad…depending on who’s telling it.]]> 432 Emily Henry Tori 0 4.20 2025
author: Emily Henry
name: Tori
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/29
date added: 2025/04/29
shelves:
review:

]]> 214151693 A rollicking historical novel set in turn-of-the-century Alberta about a young woman on the run from her abusive husband who uses a legal loophole to claim a homestead in the Wild West—perfect for fans of Outlawed and Giver of Stars.

In 1905, Scottish newcomer Flora Craigie jumps from a moving train to escape her abusive husband. Desperate to disappear, she claims a homestead near Alix, Alberta, determined to start a new life for herself. She finds that her nearest neighbours are also a Welsh widow with three children; two American women raising chickens; and a MĂ©tis woman who makes a living by breaking in wild horses.

While battling the harsh environment (and draconian local attitudes toward female farmers), the five women grapple with the differences of their backgrounds and the secrets each struggles to keep. When their homes are threatened with expropriation by the hostile federal Minister of the Interior, the women join forces to “fire the heather,� a Scottish term meaning raising a ruckus. And as the competition for land along the new Canadian Pacific railway line heats up, Flora’s violent husband closes in, and an unscrupulous land agent threatens the lives and livelihoods of the women just as they’re coming into their own.]]> 384 Elinor Florence 166805891X Tori 0 to-read 4.49 2025
author: Elinor Florence
name: Tori
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57773248
Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he’s done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn’t want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood. He hoped it wouldn’t end like this, not for him.

Through a kaleidoscope of women—a mother, a sister, a homicide detective—we learn the story of Ansel’s life. We meet his mother, Lavender, a seventeen-year-old girl pushed to desperation; Hazel, twin sister to Ansel’s wife, inseparable since birth, forced to watch helplessly as her sister’s relationship threatens to devour them all; and finally, Saffy, the homicide detective hot on his trail, who has devoted herself to bringing bad men to justice but struggles to see her own life clearly. As the clock ticks down, these three women sift through the choices that culminate in tragedy, exploring the rippling fissures that such destruction inevitably leaves in its wake.

Blending breathtaking suspense with astonishing empathy, Notes on an Execution presents a chilling portrait of womanhood as it simultaneously unravels the familiar narrative of the American serial killer, interrogating our system of justice and our cultural obsession with crime stories, asking readers to consider the false promise of looking for meaning in the psyches of violent men.]]> 306 Danya Kukafka 0063052733 Tori 4 4.04 2022
author: Danya Kukafka
name: Tori
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves:
review:

]]> 127282939 From the acclaimed author of Parakeet, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth.

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.

For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.]]> 327 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374109281 Tori 0 to-read 4.08 2024
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Tori
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 215362444 336 Katy Hays 0593875559 Tori 2 3.62 2025
author: Katy Hays
name: Tori
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/23
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves:
review:

]]> 213570812 "I'm in your blood, and you are in mine�"

The Netherlands, 1887. Lucy's twin sister Sarah is unwell. She refuses to eat, mumbles nonsensically, and is increasingly obsessed with a centuries-old corpse recently discovered on her husband's grand estate. The doctor has diagnosed her with temporary insanity caused by a fever of the brain. To protect her twin from a terrible fate in a lunatic asylum, Lucy must unravel the mystery surrounding her sister's condition, but it's clear her twin is hiding something. Then again, Lucy is harboring secrets of her own, too.

Then, the worst happens. Sarah's behavior takes a turn for the strange. She becomes angryâ€� and hungry.Ěý

Lucy soon comes to suspect that something is trying to possess her beloved sister. Or is it madness? As Sarah changes before her very eyes, Lucy must reckon with the dark, monstrous truth, or risk losing her forever.]]> 368 Johanna van Veen 1728281571 Tori 4 4.01 2025
author: Johanna van Veen
name: Tori
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/19
date added: 2025/04/19
shelves:
review:

]]> 59721793 A magnetic tale of betrayal, art, and ambition, set in the world of professional ballet, New York City during the AIDS crisis, and present-day Los Angeles

Carlisle Martin dreams of becoming a professional ballet dancer just like her mother, Isabel, a former Balanchine ballerina. Since they live in Ohio, she only gets to see her father Robert for a few precious weeks a year when she visits Greenwich Village, where he lives in an enchanting apartment on Bank Street with his partner, James.

Brilliant but troubled, James gives Carlisle an education in all that he holds dear in life--literature, music, and most of all, dance. Seduced by the heady pull of mentorship and the sophistication of their lives, Carlisle's aspiration to become a dancer herself blooms, born of her desire to be asked to stay at Bank Street, to be included in Robert and James' world even as AIDS brings devastation to their community. Instead, a passionate love affair creates a rift between them, with devastating consequences that reverberate for decades to come.

Nineteen years later, Carlisle receives a phone call which unravels the fateful events of her life, causing her to see with new eyes how her younger self has informed the woman she's become. They're Going to Love You is a gripping and gorgeously written novel of heartbreaking intensity. With psychological precision and a masterfully revealed secret at its heart, it asks what it takes to be an artist in America, and the price of forgiveness, of ambition, and of love.]]> 288 Meg Howrey 038554877X Tori 0 to-read 4.06 2022
author: Meg Howrey
name: Tori
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213650748 She’s the one that got away. He’s the one that never let her go.

From the bestselling author of Done and Dusted and Swift and Saddled, the next book in the Rebel Blue Ranch series, a small town romance in which past lovers get a second chance to rediscover what they lost.

Camille Ashwood had always loved a plan. Her latest was her best yet. She was going to get married so she could secure her daughter’s future, get her overbearing parents off her back, and finally start building her own life in small town Meadowlark, Wyoming. Easy, right?

But when her groom doesn’t show up to the wedding, Cam’s life is turned upside down—she doesn’t even have a place to live. That is, until she finds out the house she’s loved since high school is available to rent. There’s only one problem: the neighbor.

Dusty Tucker has spent nearly all of his adult life running. Running from what, though? More like who: Cam Ashwood. But ever since he returned home last year, the girl who was his first, well, everything has become a woman seemingly determined to keep him at arm’s length. And he was okay with that—at least, that’s what he kept telling himself. She was getting married, after all. But now she’s single and living next door. Dusty wants to show her that they can be friends, and that he can stay put.

Despite her best attempts to stay far away from Dusty Tucker, Cam realizes that being close to him is like slipping on her favorite jeans. Easy. Comfortable. That is until past wounds start to open and feelings—both old and new—wreak havoc. Nearly ten years after they first met, Dusty and Cam begin to wonder if their first love can also be their last. And this time, will it be forever?]]> Lyla Sage Tori 0 4.04 2025
author: Lyla Sage
name: Tori
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/16
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves:
review:

]]> 217388096 An emotional, spicy, second-chance romance from USA Today bestselling author Tarah DeWitt.

This time, they'll get it right.

Wren and Ellis Byrd fell in love as kids, had their son Sam when they were only teenagers, and built a life together in the coastal town of Spunes, Oregon. They were made for one another…until they fell apart.

Now divorced and in their 30s, Wren runs the bakery in town, while Ellis works as a firefighter. They live separate lives, though they are hardly off each other’s minds.

When Sam gets accepted into college and the pair help him move in together, Ellis convinces Wren to take an extended road trip back to Spunes with him to see if they can give their relationship one last chance. Amid the gorgeous scenery of the California coastline, dreamy destinations, and a great deal of long-yearned-for proximity, Wren starts to think it just might be possible. But the two still have to contend with their tumultuous past in order to move forward. And when spoken words fail, sometimes the written word must bridge the gap.
Will they make the most of what’s left of forever? Or will they let each other go for good?

Brimming with big feelings and packed with steam, Left of Forever is bestseller Tarah DeWitt at the top of her game.]]> 336 Tarah DeWitt 1250329442 Tori 0 to-read 4.58 2025
author: Tarah DeWitt
name: Tori
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 216522634 A breathtaking, joy-filled novel about the people we love, the secrets we keep, and the enduring power of family, from the bestselling author of The Unsinkable Greta James.

The four Endicott siblings—Gemma, Connor, Roddy, and Jude—were once inseparable, a bond created by the absence of their dazzling, mercurial mother, who would return for a few weeks each summer to whisk them off on sprawling road trips around the country.

Decades later, the unthinkable has happened: the Endicotts haven’t spoken in years . . . until an out-of-the-blue text arrives from Jude, now a famous actress, summoning them to a small town in North Dakota. They’re each at a crossroads: Gemma, who put her own ambitions aside to raise the others, now isn’t sure if she wants to be a mother herself; Connor, a celebrated novelist, is floundering after his recent divorce and suffering from an epic case of writer’s block; and Roddy, at the tail end of a professional soccer career, is dangerously close to losing his future husband for the chance at one last season.

Jude is the only Endicott who seems to have it all together—but appearances can be deceiving. As the weekend unfolds, and the siblings wrestle with their shared past and uncertain futures, they’ll discover that Jude has been keeping three secrets . . . each of which could change everything.

A captivating journey and an ode to forgiveness that takes readers across all fifty states, Fun for the Whole Family brims with heart and resonates long after the final page.]]> 368 Jennifer E. Smith 0593358309 Tori 3 4.20 2025
author: Jennifer E. Smith
name: Tori
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/13
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 230422842 New York Times bestselling author Lyla Sage, featuring a rugged craftsman in need of a fresh start and a photographer whose life has come to a screeching halt . . . and the supernatural forces that bring them together.]]> 368 Lyla Sage 0593977777 Tori 0 to-read 4.83 2025
author: Lyla Sage
name: Tori
average rating: 4.83
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220502647
Mallory Devlin keeps a careful count. Twelve days for a black cat crossing your path, a week for putting your shoes on the table, and a whopping year for falling down a well. He’s a Reynard, a trickster from a darkly enchanted realm—and Bad Luck incarnate. Caught in a wager with his awful brother Felix, Mallory has until the month’s end to tally one-hundred unlucky years. He’s certain to fail—until the unluckiest woman he’s ever met tumbles into his lap.

The two strike a bargain. Mallory will help Orla discover which high-society member pushed her down the well, and she in turn will accrue as much bad luck as possible to win Mallory his wager. But as they draw closer to her assailant’s identity—and Orla’s new wedding date—one question remains. Would it count as lucky or unlucky to fall in love with Bad Luck himself?]]> Rachel Gillig Tori 0 to-read 4.50
author: Rachel Gillig
name: Tori
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 26856502 A super-powered collision of extraordinary minds and vengeful intentions�#1 New York Times bestselling author V. E. Schwab returns with the thrilling follow-up to Vicious.

Magneto and Professor X. Superman and Lex Luthor. Victor Vale and Eli Ever. Sydney and Serena Clarke. Great partnerships, now soured on the vine.

But Marcella Riggins needs no one. Flush from her brush with death, she’s finally gained the control she’s always sought—and will use her new-found power to bring the city of Merit to its knees. She’ll do whatever it takes, collecting her own sidekicks, and leveraging the two most infamous EOs, Victor Vale and Eli Ever, against each other.

With Marcella's rise, new enmities create opportunity--and the stage of Merit City will once again be set for a final, terrible reckoning.]]> 462 Victoria E. Schwab Tori 0 to-read 4.13 2018
author: Victoria E. Schwab
name: Tori
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 40874032 A masterful tale of ambition, jealousy, desire, and superpowers.

Victor and Eli started out as college roommates—brilliant, arrogant, lonely boys who recognized the same sharpness and ambition in each other. In their senior year, a shared research interest in adrenaline, near-death experiences, and seemingly supernatural events reveals an intriguing possibility: that under the right conditions, someone could develop extraordinary abilities. But when their thesis moves from the academic to the experimental, things go horribly wrong.

Ten years later, Victor breaks out of prison, determined to catch up to his old friend (now foe), aided by a young girl whose reserved nature obscures a stunning ability. Meanwhile, Eli is on a mission to eradicate every other super-powered person that he can find—aside from his sidekick, an enigmatic woman with an unbreakable will. Armed with terrible power on both sides, driven by the memory of betrayal and loss, the archnemeses have set a course for revenge—but who will be left alive at the end?

In Vicious, V. E. Schwab brings to life a gritty comic-book-style world in vivid prose: a world where gaining superpowers doesn't automatically lead to heroism, and a time when allegiances are called into question.]]> 402 Victoria E. Schwab Tori 4 4.17 2013
author: Victoria E. Schwab
name: Tori
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/10
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 23587120
A Scottish sweetheart. One who was handsome and honorable and devoted to her, but conveniently never around. Maddie poured her heart into writing the imaginary Captain MacKenzie letter after letter . . . and by pretending to be devastated when he was (not really) killed in battle, she managed to avoid the pressures of London society entirely.

Until years later, when this kilted Highland lover of her imaginings shows up in the flesh. The real Captain Logan MacKenzie arrives on her doorstep—handsome as anything, but not entirely honorable. He's wounded, jaded, in possession of her letters . . . and ready to make good on every promise Maddie never expected to keep.]]> 390 Tessa Dare 0062349031 Tori 3 3.88 2015
author: Tessa Dare
name: Tori
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 216052751 Four dissatisfied sixties-era housewives form a book club turned sisterhood that will hold fast amid the turmoil of a rapidly changing world and alter the course of each of their lives.

By early 1960s standards, Margaret Ryan, Viv Buschetti, and Bitsy Cobb, suburban housewives in a brand-new "planned community" in Northern Virginia, appear to have it all. The fact that "all" doesn't feel like enough leaves them feeling confused and guilty, certain the fault must lie with them. Things begin to change when they form a book club with Charlotte Gustafson--the eccentric and artsy "new neighbor" from Manhattan--and read Betty Friedan's just-released book, The Feminine Mystique.

Controversial and groundbreaking, the book struck a chord with an entire generation of women, helping them realize that they weren't alone in their dissatisfactions, or their longings, lifting their eyes to new horizons of possibility and achievement. Margaret, Charlotte, Bitsy, and Viv are among them. But is it really the book that alters the lives of these four very different women? Or is it the bond of sisterhood that helps them find courage to confront the past, navigate turmoil in a rapidly changing world, and see themselves in a new and limitless light?]]> 384 Marie Bostwick 1400344743 Tori 0 to-read 4.14 2025
author: Marie Bostwick
name: Tori
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213816143 A stunning reimagining of Bluebeard—one of the most mythologized serial killers—twisted into a modern tale of toxic masculinity, a feminist sermon, and a folktale for the twenty-first century.

The tale begins with Agnes. After losing her baby, Agnes is called to the great manor house to nurse the local lord’s baby boy. But something is wrong with the child: his nails grow too fast, his skin smells of soil, and his eyes remind her of the dark forest. As he grows into a boy, then into man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere. Trees wither at the roots, fruits rot on their branches, and the town turns against him. The man takes a wife, who bears him a son. But tragedy strikes in cycles and his family is forced to consider their own malignancy—until wife after wife, death after death, plague after plague, every woman he touches becomes a ghost. The ghosts become a chorus, and they call urgently to our narrator as she tries to explain, in our very real world, exactly what has happened to her. The ghosts can all agree on one thing, an inescapable truth about this man, this powerful lord who has loved them and led them each to ruin: If you leave, you die. But if you die, you stay.

Natalia Theodoridou’s haunting and unforgettable debut novel, Sour Cherry, confronts age-old systems of gender and power, long-held excuses made for bad men, and the complicated reasons we stay captive to the monsters we love.]]> 312 Natalia Theodoridou 1963108191 Tori 0 to-read 3.75 2025
author: Natalia Theodoridou
name: Tori
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214151311 A cozy mystery series about a former nun who searches for answers in a small seaside town after her pen pal mysteriously disappears

1954: When her former novice’s dependable letters stop, Nora Breen asks to be released from her vows. Haunted by a line in Frieda’s letter, Nora arrives at Gulls Nest, a charming hotel in Gore-on-Sea in Kent. A seaside town, a place of fresh air and relaxed constraints, is the perfect place for a new start. Nora hides her identity and pries into the lives of her fellow guests—but when a series of bizarre murders rattles the occupants of Gulls Nest it’s time to ask if a dark past can ever really be left behind.]]> 325 Jess Kidd 1668034034 Tori 0 to-read 3.88 2025
author: Jess Kidd
name: Tori
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217204419 “Razor-sharp, darkly comedic, and emotionally piercing. With the satirical bite of Richard Russo’s Straight Man, the introspection of Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove, and the reinvention of Andrew Sean Greer's Less, Kenney’s vivid prose transforms the mundane into unexpected hilarity.�
�Booklist (starred review)

An Indie Next & LibraryReads Pick for April

The Office meets Six Feet Under meets About a Boy in this coming-of-middle-age tale about having a second chance to write your life’s story.

Bud Stanley is an obituary writer who is afraid to live. Yes, his wife recently left him for a “far more interesting� man. Yes, he goes on a particularly awful blind date with a woman who brings her ex. And yes, he has too many glasses of Scotch one night and proceeds to pen and publish his own obituary. The newspaper wants to fire him. But now the company’s system has him listed as dead. And the company can’t fire a dead person. The ensuing fallout forces him to realize that life may be actually worth living.

As Bud awaits his fate at work, his life hangs in the balance. Given another shot by his boss and encouraged by his best friend, Tim, a worldly and wise former art dealer, Bud starts to attend the wakes and funerals of strangers to learn how to live.

Thurber Prize-winner and New York Times bestselling author John Kenney tells a funny, touching story about life and death, about the search for meaning, about finding and never letting go of the preciousness of life.]]> 304 John Kenney Tori 0 to-read 4.19 2025
author: John Kenney
name: Tori
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 212342605 Hungerstone is a thrillingly seductive sapphic romance for fans of S.T. Gibson’s A Dowry of Blood and Emilia Hart’s Weyward.

For what do you hunger, Lenore?

Lenore is the wife of steel magnate Henry, but ten years into their marriage, the relationship has soured and no child has arrived to fill the distance growing between them. Henry's ambitions take them out of London and to the imposing Nethershaw manor in the countryside, where Henry aims to host a hunt with society’s finest. Lenore keeps a terrible secret from the last time her husband hunted, and though they never speak of it, it haunts their marriage to this day.

The preparations for the event take a turn when a carriage accident near their remote home brings the mysterious Carmilla into Lenore's life. Carmilla who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night; Carmilla who stirs up a hunger deep within Lenore. Soon girls from local villages begin to fall sick before being consumed by a bloody hunger.

Torn between regaining her husband's affection and Carmilla's ever-growing presence, Lenore begins to unravel her past and in doing so, uncovers a darkness in her household that will place her at terrible risk . . .

Set against the violent wilderness of the moors and the uncontrolled appetite of the industrial revolution, Hungerstone is a compulsive feminist reworking of Carmilla, the book that inspired Dracula: a captivating story of appetite and desire.]]> 336 Kat Dunn 1638932166 Tori 3 4.02 2025
author: Kat Dunn
name: Tori
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves:
review:

]]> 13627235
The story of Christabel concerns a central female character of the same name and her encounter with a stranger called Geraldine, who claims to have been abducted from her home by a band of rough men. Christabel pities her and takes her home with her; supernatural signs seem to indicate that not all is well.]]> 20 Samuel Taylor Coleridge Tori 0 to-read 3.83 1816
author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
name: Tori
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1816
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 52346471
After Daunis witnesses a shocking murder that thrusts her into a criminal investigation, she agrees to go undercover. But the deceptions—and deaths—keep piling up and soon the threat strikes too close to home. How far will she go to protect her community if it means tearing apart the only world she’s ever known?]]> 496 Angeline Boulley Tori 0 to-read 4.32 2021
author: Angeline Boulley
name: Tori
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217223452 Return to the Jersey Shore with a new romance by Summertime Punchline author Betty Corrello in which a young woman recently diagnosed with lupus attempts a no-strings fling with a former television star, perfect for readers of Elissa Sussman or Tia Williams.Ěý

Nadia Fabiola wants to lose herself in Evergreen—the Jersey Shore town where she grew up vacationing with her family—and never look back at her glamorous, gainfully employed former self. After a shocking lupus diagnosis turned her life upside down, she’s desperate for a sense of control over her body, her life, and her mental health.ĚýNadia plans on keeping her life small and boring, while continuing to ignore her sister’s relentless questioning.

Nadia’s sister isn’t the only person worried about her. When her rheumatologist not-so-subtly sets her up with his infamous former-actor cousin, Marco Antoniou, Nadia is skeptical. But Marco is gorgeous—despite carrying his own baggage from a very public burnout. After a messy (but fun) first date, they decide that a May-long fling could be just what the doctor no commitment, no strings, just one month of escape.

Their undeniable chemistry starts to feel a lot like something more and while Marco pulls Nadia deeper into his life, she is dead set on keeping her diagnosis from him. But there are only so many days in May, and only so much pretending she can do. As the stress of their whirlwind romance takes its toll on Nadia’s health, she’s forced to decide if a chance at love is worth the risk of trusting someone new.

Travel from the Jersey Shore to Rome and back in this delightfully funny, beautifully honest exploration of love, intimacy, and vulnerability while living with a chronic illness.Ěý ]]> 320 Betty Corrello 0063426471 Tori 0 to-read 4.33
author: Betty Corrello
name: Tori
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58065804 While investigating a man claiming to be the long-lost heir to a noble family, Veronica Speedwell gets the surprise of her life in this new adventure from the New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award-nominated author Deanna Raybourn.

London, 1889. Veronica Speedwell and her natural historian beau Stoker are summoned by Sir Hugo Montgomerie, head of Special Branch. He has a personal request on behalf of his goddaughter, Euphemia Hathaway. After years of traveling the world, her eldest brother, Jonathan, heir to Hathaway Hall, was believed to have been killed in the catastrophic eruption of Krakatoa a few years before.

But now a man matching Jonathan's description and carrying his possessions has arrived at Hathaway Hall with no memory of his identity or where he has been. Could this man truly be Jonathan, back from the dead? Or is he a devious impostor, determined to gain ownership over the family's most valuable possessions--a legendary parure of priceless Rajasthani jewels? It's a delicate situation, and Veronica is Sir Hugo's only hope.

Veronica and Stoker agree to go to Hathaway Hall to covertly investigate the mysterious amnesiac. Veronica is soon shocked to find herself face-to-face with a ghost from her past. To help Sir Hugo discover the truth, she must open doors to her own history that she long believed to be shut for good.]]> 325 Deanna Raybourn 0593197291 Tori 4 4.02 2022
author: Deanna Raybourn
name: Tori
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/02
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves:
review:

]]> 214151426 A bestselling romance author flees to Alaska to reinvent herself and write her first murder mystery, but the rugged resort proprietor soon has her fearing she’s living in a rom-com plot instead in this earnestly spectacular debut by a stunning new voice.

Beloved romance author Margot Bradley has a dark secret: she doesn’t believe in Happily Ever Afters. Not for herself, not for her readers, and not even for her characters, for whom she secretly writes alternate endings that swap weddings and babies for divorce papers and the occasional slashed tire. When her Happily Never After document is hacked and released to the public, she finds herself canceled by her readers and dropped by her publisher.

Desperate to find a way to continue supporting her chronically ill sister, Savannah, Margot decides to trade meet-cutes for murder. The fictional kind. Probably. But when Savannah books Margot a six-week stay in a remote Alaskan resort to pen her first murder mystery, Margot finds herself running from a moose and leaping into the arms of the handsome proprietor, making her fear she’s just landed in a romance novel instead.

The last thing Dr. Forrest Wakefield ever expected was to leave his dream job as a cancer researcher to become a glorified bellhop. What he’s really doing at his family’s resort is caring for his stubborn, ailing father, and his puzzle-loving mind is slowly freezing over—until Margot shows up. But Forrest doesn’t have any room in his life for another person he could lose, especially one with a checkout date.

As long snowy nights and one unlikely trope after another draw Margot and Forrest together, they’ll each have to learn to overcome their fears and set their aside assumptions before Margot leaves—or risk becoming a Happily Never After story themselves.]]> 336 Victoria Lavine 1668079275 Tori 0 to-read 4.04 2025
author: Victoria Lavine
name: Tori
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 31945128 272 Catherine Hernandez 1551526778 Tori 0 to-read 4.28 2017
author: Catherine Hernandez
name: Tori
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211399774 Two former serial killers trying to keep their past buried realize that old habits die hard in this “wildly original, razor-sharp thriller� (Chris Whitaker, New York Times bestsellingauthor of All the Colors of the Dark).

I wasn't smashing the patriarchy; I was killing it. Literally.

Hazel and Fox are an ordinary married couple with a baby. Except for one small thing: they're murderers. Well, they used to be. They had it all. An enviable London lifestyle, five-star travels, and plenty of bad men to rid from the world. Then Hazel got pregnant.

Now, they’re just another mom-and-dad-and-baby. They gave up vigilante justice for life in the suburbs: arranged play dates instead of body disposals, diapers over daggers, mommy conversations instead of the sweet seduction right before a kill. Hazel finds her new life terribly dull. And the more she forces herself to play her monotonous, predictable role, the more she begins to feel that murderous itch again.

Meanwhile, Fox has really taken to being a father. Always the planner, he loves being five steps ahead of everyone and knowing exactly what’s coming around the bend. Plus, if anyone can understand Hazel needing one more kill, it’s Fox. But then Hazel kills someone without telling Fox. And when police show up at their door, Hazel realizes it will take everything she has to keep her family together.]]> 352 Asia Mackay 0593875583 Tori 0 3.60 2025
author: Asia Mackay
name: Tori
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves:
review:

]]> 58932964 336 Georgia Toews 038569671X Tori 0 to-read 3.50 2022
author: Georgia Toews
name: Tori
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 221493579 A razor-sharp dramedy following a twenty-something female comic as she navigates family grief, a dysfunctional friendship, and a date gone very wrong, from Georgia Toews, author of Hey, Good Luck Out There.

Virginia is twenty-three and a stand-up comedian. In between working the rounds of Toronto’s small comedy club circuit and auditioning for paper towel commercials, she is tiptoeing around her depressed roommate and childhood friend, Haley, and having biweekly dinners with her bereaved stepdad, Dale, while trying to manage her own grief at the loss of her mother. She is also secretly working to get the green card that will be her ticket to L.A. and, she hopes, a glittering comedy career.

But when Dale tells her that he wants to sell their family home, and when a date with a fellow comic turns into a shattering encounter, she is forced to confront the limits of comedy—and friendship. Not every experience can be neatly packaged into a “bit,� and not every friendship is meant to last.

By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Nobody Asked for This reaches into the messy depths of love, friendship, grief and trauma and, like all the best jokes, is utterly unpredictable.]]> 336 Georgia Toews 0385700075 Tori 3 3.49 2025
author: Georgia Toews
name: Tori
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves:
review:

]]> 224103430 The new novel from the bestselling author of If We Were Villains and Graveyard Shift—a vivid and immersive tale of one woman’s reckless mission to make sense of the events that shattered her childhood, and made her who she is

Summer, 1989: ten-year-old Suzanne is drawn like a magnet to her father’s forbidden world of electric guitars and tricked-out cars. When her mother remarries, she jumps at the chance to tag along on the concert tour that just might be Gil and the Kills� wild ride to glory. But fame has sharper fangs than anybody realized, and as the band blazes up the charts, internal power struggles set Gil and his group on a collision course destined for a bloody reckoning—one shrouded in mystery and lore for decades to come.

The only witness to a desperate act of violence, Suzanne spends the next twenty-nine years trying to disappear. She trades the music and mayhem of her youth for the quiet of the suburbs and the company of her mild-mannered husband Rob. But when her father’s sudden death resurrects the troubled past she tried so hard to bury, she leaves it all behind and hits the road in search of answers. Hitching her fate and Gil’s beloved car to two vagabonds who call an old Airstream trailer home, she finds everything she thought she’d lost desire, adventure, and the woman she once wanted to be. But Rob refuses to let her go. Determined to bring her back where she belongs, he chases her across the country—and drives her to a desperation all her own.

Drenched in knock-down drag-out rock and roll, Hot Wax is a raucous, breakneck ride to hell and back—where getting lost might be the only way to find yourself and save your soul.]]> 400 M.L. Rio 1668070022 Tori 0 to-read 4.13 2025
author: M.L. Rio
name: Tori
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214152505 A moving story about two very different sisters, and a love letter to childhood, growing up, and the power of imagination—from the bestselling author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead and Interesting Facts About Space.

Sigrid hates working at the Dollar Pal but having always resisted the idea of growing up into the trappings of adulthood, she did not graduate high school, preferring to roam the streets of her small town with her best friend Greta, the only person in the world who ever understood her. Her older sister Margit is baffled and frustrated by Sigrid’s inability to conform to the expectations of polite society.

But Sigrid’s detachment veils a deeper turmoil and sensitivity. She’s haunted by the pains of her past—from pretending her parents were swamp monsters when they shook the floorboards with their violent arguments to grappling with losing Greta’s friendship to the opioid epidemic ravaging their town. As Margit sets out to understand Sigrid and the secrets she has hidden, both sisters, in their own time and way, discover that reigniting their shared childhood imagination is the only way forward.

What unfolds is an unforgettable story of two sisters finding their way back to each other, and a celebration of that transcendent, unshakable bond.]]> 256 Emily R. Austin 1668085518 Tori 4 4.15 2025
author: Emily R. Austin
name: Tori
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/24
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves:
review:

]]> 177188708 Veronica and Stoker discover that not all fairy tales have happy endings, and some end in murder, in this latest historical mystery from New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award–nominated author Deanna Raybourn.

Lord Rosemorran has purchased a wax figure of a beautiful reclining woman and asks Stoker to incorporate a clockwork mechanism to give the Rosemorran Collection its own Sleeping Beauty in the style of Madame Tussaud’s. But when Stoker goes to cut the mannequin open to insert the mechanism, he makes a gruesome discovery: this is no wax figure. The mannequin is the beautifully preserved body of a young woman who was once very much alive. But who would do such a dreadful thing, and why?

Sleuthing out the answer to this question sets Veronica and Stoker on their wildest adventure yet. From the underground laboratories of scientists experimenting with electricity to resurrect the dead in the vein of Frankenstein to the traveling show where Stoker once toured as an attraction, the gaslit atmosphere of London in October is the perfect setting for this investigation into the unknown. Through it all, the intrepid pair is always one step behind the latest villain—a man who has killed once and will stop at nothing to recover the body of the woman he loved. Will they unmask him in time to save his next victim? Or will they become the latest figures to be immortalized in his collection of horrors?]]> 326 Deanna Raybourn 0593545958 Tori 0 to-read 4.12 2024
author: Deanna Raybourn
name: Tori
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61260992 Veronica must find and stop a devious killer when a group of old friends is targeted for death in this new adventure from the New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award-nominated author Deanna Raybourn.

Veronica's natural-historian beau, Stoker, has been away in Bavaria for months and their relationship is at an impasse. But when Veronica shows up before him with his brother, Tiberius, Lord Templeton-Vane, he is lured back home by an intriguing job offer: preparing an iguanodon for a very special dinner party.

Tiberius has received a cryptic message-along with the obituaries of two recently deceased members of his old group of friends, the Seven Sinners-that he too should get his affairs in order. Realizing he is in grave danger but not knowing why, he plans a reunion party for the remaining Sinners at his family estate to lure the killer out while Veronica and Stoker investigate.

As the guests arrive and settle in, the evening's events turn deadly. More clues come to light, leading Veronica, Stoker, and Tiberius to uncover a shared past among the Sinners that has led to the fatal present. But the truth might be far more sinister than what they were prepared for.]]> 310 Deanna Raybourn 0593545923 Tori 0 to-read 4.13 2023
author: Deanna Raybourn
name: Tori
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 53965865 A princess is missing, and a peace treaty is on the verge of collapse in this new Veronica Speedwell adventure from the New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award-nominated author Deanna Raybourn.

January 1889. As the newest member of the Curiosity Club—an elite society of brilliant, intrepid women—Veronica Speedwell is excited to put her many skills to good use. As she assembles a memorial exhibition for pioneering mountain climber Alice Baker-Greene, Veronica discovers evidence that the recent death was not a tragic climbing accident but murder. Veronica and her natural historian beau, Stoker, tell the patron of the exhibit, Princess Gisela of Alpenwald, of their findings. With Europe on the verge of war, Gisela's chancellor, Count von Rechstein, does not want to make waves—and before Veronica and Stoker can figure out their next move, the princess disappears.

Having noted Veronica's resemblance to the princess, von Rechstein begs her to pose as Gisela for the sake of the peace treaty that brought the princess to England. Veronica reluctantly agrees to the scheme. She and Stoker must work together to keep the treaty intact while navigating unwelcome advances, assassination attempts, and Veronica's own family—the royalty who has never claimed her.]]> 340 Deanna Raybourn 0593197267 Tori 3 3.98 2021
author: Deanna Raybourn
name: Tori
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/21
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves:
review:

]]> 221896822 Cher 0063422778 Tori 0 to-read 5.00
author: Cher
name: Tori
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 222159043
“Lending my voice to help deliver Cher’s memoir has been an honor and a thrill. Her life is fascinating, glamorous, surprising, exciting� and at times, completely heartbreaking. Her story is a beautiful balance of ULTIMATE stardom and accessibility. She is CHER for a reason and this book helps the reader get behind �the reason,’� says Block.

“When it came to completing the audiobook, I knew I wouldn't be able to do it all myself due to my dyslexia. But then I thought of Stephanie, who won the Tony for playing me on Broadway in The Cher Show. I knew she would be the perfect choice to get across to the reader the essence of me. I called her and within hours she re-arranged her schedule to start the recording. I felt so safe having her help share my story, and she did a beautiful job,� says Cher.]]> Cher Tori 0 4.29 2024
author: Cher
name: Tori
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 213878922 An illuminating look at the adaptive nature of our memories—and how their flexibility and fallibility help us survive and thrive

We tend to think of our memories as impressions of the past that remain fully intact, preserved somewhere inside our brains. In fact, we construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them. Memory Lane introduces readers to the cutting-edge science of human memory, revealing how our recollections of the past are constantly adapting and changing, and why a faulty memory isn’t always a bad thing.

Shedding light on what memory is and what it evolved to do, Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy discuss the many benefits of our flexible yet fallible memory system, including helping us to maintain a coherent identity, sustain social bonds, and vividly imagine possible futures. But these flexible and easily distorted memories can also result in significant harm, leading us to provide erroneous eyewitness testimony or fall victim to fake news. Greene and Murphy explain why our flawed memories are not a failure of evolution but rather a byproduct of the perfectly imperfect way our minds have evolved to solve problems. They also grapple with important ethical questions surrounding the study and manipulation of memory.

Blending engaging storytelling with the latest science, the authors demonstrate how our continuous reconstruction of the past makes us who we are, helps us to interpret our experiences, and explains why no two trips down memory lane are ever quite the same.]]> 248 Ciara Greene 0691257094 Tori 0 to-read 4.14
author: Ciara Greene
name: Tori
average rating: 4.14
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 219520677 From the author of Oprah's Book Club pick and New York Times best seller Nightcrawling, here is an astonishing new novel about the joys and entanglements of a fierce group of teenage mothers in a small town on the Florida panhandle.

Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck.

The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for love, making and breaking friendships, and navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood.

Full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends� secrets and betrayals, The Girls Who Grew Big confirms Leila Mottley’s promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.]]> 352 Leila Mottley 0593801121 Tori 0 to-read 4.20 2025
author: Leila Mottley
name: Tori
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 209594872 The Last of Us meets The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in this standalone dystopian romance about survival, sacrifice, and love that risks everything.

By encouraging massive accumulations of debt from its underclass, a single corporation, Caerus, controls all aspects of society.

Inesa lives with her brother in a half-sunken town where they scrape by running a taxidermy shop. Unbeknownst to Inesa, their cruel and indolent mother has accrued an enormous debt—enough to qualify one of her children for Caerus’s livestreamed assassination spectacle: the Lamb’s Gauntlet.

Melinoë is a Caerus assassin, trained to track and kill the sacrificial Lambs. The product of neural reconditioning and physiological alteration, she is a living weapon, known for her cold brutality and deadly beauty. She has never failed to assassinate one of her marks.

When Inesa learns that her mother has offered her as a sacrifice, at first she despairs—the Gauntlet is always a bloodbath for the impoverished debtors. But she’s had years of practice surviving in the apocalyptic wastes, and with the help of her hunter brother, she might stand a chance of staying alive.

For Melinoë, this is a game she can’t afford to lose. Despite her reputation for mercilessness, she is haunted by painful flashbacks. After her last Gauntlet, where she broke down on livestream, she desperately needs redemption.

As Mel pursues Inesa across the wasteland, both girls begin to question everything: Inesa wonders if there’s more to life than survival, while Mel wonders if she’s capable of more than killing.

And both wonder if, against all odds, they might be falling in love.]]> 384 Ava Reid 0063211556 Tori 0 3.83 2025
author: Ava Reid
name: Tori
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/17
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 216247552 An incendiary, deeply reported exposé of Johnson & Johnson, one of America’s oldest and most trusted pharmaceutical companies—from award-winning investigative journalist Gardiner Harris

One day in 2004, Gardiner Harris, early for a flight, sat down at an airport bar and started talking to the woman on the bar stool beside him. She was a drug sales rep for Johnson & Johnson, and her horrific story about unethical sales practices and the devastating impact they’d had on her family fundamentally changed the nature of how Harris covered the company—and the entire pharmaceutical industry—for The New York Times. His subsequent investigations and ongoing research since that conversation led to new federal laws and ultimately to No More Tears, a blistering exposé of a trusted American institution and the largest healthcare conglomerate in the world.

Harris takes us light years away from the company’s image as the child-friendly “baby company� as he uncovers reams of evidence showing decades of deceitful and dangerous corporate practices that have threatened the lives of millions. He covers multiple disasters: lies and cover-ups regarding baby powder’s link to cancer; the surprising dangers of Tylenol; a criminal campaign to sell dangerous anti-psychotics to children; a popular drug for cancer patients that increases the risk of tumor growth. Deceptive marketing efforts that accelerated opioid addictions rival even those of the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma. All told, Johnson & Johnson's products have helped cause drug crises that have contributed to the deaths of as many as two million people and counting.

Filled with shocking, infuriating, but utterly necessary revelations, No More Tears is a landmark work of investigative journalism that lays bare the deeply rooted corruption behind the image of babies bathing with a smile.]]> 464 Gardiner Harris 059322986X Tori 0 to-read 4.37 2025
author: Gardiner Harris
name: Tori
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 219848315 Ocean Vuong returns with a big-hearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Vuong’s writing � formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness � are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.]]> 416 Ocean Vuong 059383187X Tori 0 to-read 4.34 2025
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Tori
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 216522711 They didn't know they would change each other.

Following the unlikely friendship of four of the first ever women to matriculate at Oxford University in the aftermath of the First World War, a captivating debut novel about sisterhood, self-determination and the many forms courage can take.

Oxford, 1920. For the first time in its 1000-year history, the world's most famous university has admitted female students. Giddy with dreams of equality, education and emancipation, four young women move into neighbouring rooms. Beatrice, Dora, Marianne and Otto (collectively known as The Eights) have come here from all walks of life, and they are thrown into an unlikely, life-affirming friendship.

Dora was never meant to go to university, but, after losing both her brother and her fiancé on the battlefield, has arrived in their place. Politically-minded Beatrice, daughter of a famous suffragette, sees Oxford as a chance to make her own way - and some friends her own age. Otto was a nurse during the war but is excited to return to her socialite lifestyle in Oxford - where she hopes to find distraction from the memories that haunt her. And finally Marianne, the quiet, clever daughter of a village pastor, who has a shocking secret she must hide from everyone, even her new friends, if she is to succeed.

But Oxford's dreaming spires cast a dark shadow: in 1920, misogyny is still rife, influenza is still a threat, and the ghosts of the Great War are still very real indeed. And as the group navigate this tumultuous moment in time, their friendship will become more important than ever.]]> 384 Joanna Miller 0593851412 Tori 0 to-read 3.82 2025
author: Joanna Miller
name: Tori
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211004089
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place.

Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.]]> 303 Charlotte McConaghy 1250827957 Tori 0 to-read 4.27 2025
author: Charlotte McConaghy
name: Tori
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211003787 From New York Times bestseller and Edgar-Award nominee Elle Cosimano, comes Finlay Donovan Digs Her Own Grave—the hugely anticipated next installment in the fan-favorite Finlay Donovan series.

Finlay Donovan may have skeletons in her closet . . . but at least there's not a body in her backyard.

Finlay Donovan and her nanny/partner-in-crime, Vero, have not always gotten along with Finlay’s elderly neighbor, Mrs. Haggerty, the community busybody and president of the neighborhood watch. But when a dead body is discovered in her backyard, Mrs. Haggerty needs their help. At first a suspect, Mrs. Haggerty is cleared by the police, but her house remains an active crime scene. She has nowhere to go . . . except Finlay’s house, right across the street.

Finlay and Vero have no interest in getting involved in another murder case—or sacrificing either of their bedrooms. After all, they’ve dealt with enough murders over the last four months to last a lifetime and they both would much rather share their beds with someone else.]]> 320 Elle Cosimano 1250337348 Tori 4 4.13 2025
author: Elle Cosimano
name: Tori
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves:
review:

]]> 214537784 From the author of Gold Diggers, a biting examination of millennial adulthood, the often fraught conversations around fertility and reproduction, and the painful quest to forge an identity

Sanjana Satyananda is trying to recover her life. It’s been a year since she walked out on her husband, a struggling actor named Killian, at a commune in India, after a disagreement about whether to have children. Now, Sanjana is struggling to resurrect her busted anthropology dissertation and crashing at her annoyingly perfect sister’s while her similarly well-adjusted peers obsess over marriages, mortgages, and motherhood. Sanjana needs to move forward—and finalize her divorce, ASAP.

There’s just one problem: Killian is missing. As Sanjana tries to track him down, she’s bombarded with unnerving calls from women seeking her advice on pregnancy and fertility. Soon, Sanjana comes face to face—literally—with what her life might have been if she’d chosen parenthood. And the road not taken turns out to be wilder, stranger, and more tempting than she imagined.

A darkly funny, vertiginous novel about the dilemmas of procreation, pregnancy, and parenting, Goddess Complex is both a twist-filled psychological thriller and a feminist satire of our age of GirlBosses turned self-care influencers, optimization cults, internet mommy gurus, egg freezing, and so much more.]]> 304 Sanjena Sathian 0593489772 Tori 0 to-read 3.61 2025
author: Sanjena Sathian
name: Tori
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214537759 “Where are you, Mom?� So began Amy’s quest to solve a mystery trapped in the deep recesses of her own memory—a journey that would take her into the burgeoning field of psychedelic therapy, to the limits of the judicial system, and ultimately, home to the Texas panhandle, where her story began.

In her search for the truth, to understand and begin to recover from buried childhood trauma, Griffin interrogates the pursuit of perfectionism, control, and maintaining appearances that drives so many women, asking, when, in our path from girlhood to womanhood, did we learn to look outside ourselves for validation? What kind of freedom is possible if we accept the whole story and embrace who we really are? With hope, heart, and relentless honesty, she points a way forward for all of us, revealing the power of radical truth-telling to deepen our connections—with others and ourselves.]]> 288 Amy Griffin 0593731204 Tori 0 to-read 4.20 2025
author: Amy Griffin
name: Tori
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211164792 Two feuding second-grade teachers (and neighbors) find themselves teaming up in this rivals-to-lovers romance.

Emily Walker hates having her carefully crafted world disrupted by anyone, most of all her legendary nemesis, Jack Bennett. He's the opposite of the wonderful heroes she dreams up in her double life as a romance writer, which is why Emily was perfectly happy when Jack left Rome, Kentucky, mid-school year, with his fiancée. The last thing Emily saw coming was Jack’s return at the start of the summer after calling off the wedding and ending his relationship, but he’s here to stay—as her colleague and her neighbor.

Jackson Bennett is glad to be back, eager to renovate his house and work on the next mystery novel under his bestselling pen name. But when he realizes he’s now neighbors with the one woman who has always pushed his buttons, he discovers something he’s even more excited for—thwarting Emily and her petty plans to sabotage his return.

With their chemistry-fueled animosity at an all-time high, Emily accidentally sends an email to their school’s principal that could reveal her secret literary side hustle. She needs to steal back her manuscript, and Jack—she hates to admit—is just the man to help her. Surprisingly, Jack agrees. Will their unlikely alliance put an end to their rivalry? Or could it lead to a steamy plot twist they never saw coming?]]> 384 Sarah Adams 0593723694 Tori 0 4.06 2025
author: Sarah Adams
name: Tori
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves:
review:

]]> 53260224 This explosive book of history and cultural criticism argues that white feminism has been a weapon of white supremacy and patriarchy deployed against Black and Indigenous women and all colonized women. It offers a long-overdue validation of the experiences of women of color. Taking us from the slave era—when white women fought in court to keep "ownership" of their slaves—through the centuries of colonialism—when they offered a soft face for brutal tactics—to the modern workplace, White Tears/Brown Scars

Examining subjects as varied as The Hunger Games, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the viral BBQ Becky video, and nineteenth-century lynchings of Mexicans in the American Southwest, Ruby Hamad builds a powerful argument about the entrenched systems of white supremacy that we are socialized within, a reality that we must apprehend in order to fight.]]> 284 Ruby Hamad 194822674X Tori 0 to-read 4.56 2020
author: Ruby Hamad
name: Tori
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211004124 From the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six comes the story of three siblings who, upon the death of their father, are forced to reckon with their long-festering rivalries, dangerous abilities, and the crushing weight of all their unrealized adolescent potential.

Where there’s a will, there’s a war.

Thayer Wren, the brilliant CEO of Wrenfare Magitech and so-called father of modern technology, is dead. Any one of his three telepathically and electrokinetically gifted children would be a plausible inheritor to the Wrenfare throne.

Or at least, so they like to think.

Meredith, textbook accomplished eldest daughter and the head of her own groundbreaking biotech company, has recently cured mental illness. You're welcome! If only her father's fortune wasn't her last hope for keeping her journalist ex-boyfriend from exposing what she really is: a total fraud.

Arthur, second-youngest congressman in history, fights the good fight every day of his life. And yet, his wife might be leaving him, and he's losing his re-election campaign. But his dead father’s approval in the form of a seat on the Wrenfare throne might just turn his sinking ship around.

Eilidh, once the world's most famous ballerina, has spent the last five years as a run-of-the-mill marketing executive at her father’s company after a life-altering injury put an end to her prodigious career. She might be lacking in accolades compared to her siblings, but if her father left her everything, it would finally validate her worth—by confirming she'd been his favorite all along.

On the pipeline of gifted kid to clinically depressed adult, nobody wins—but which Wren will come out on top?]]> 512 Olivie Blake 1250883407 Tori 0 to-read 3.83 2025
author: Olivie Blake
name: Tori
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58416952 At the elite Catenan Academy, a young fugitive uncovers layered mysteries and world-changing secrets in this new fantasy series by internationally bestselling author of The Licanius Trilogy, James Islington.

AUDI. VIDE. TACE.

The Catenan Republic � the Hierarchy � may rule the world now, but they do not know everything.

I tell them my name is Vis Telimus. I tell them I was orphaned after a tragic accident three years ago, and that good fortune alone has led to my acceptance into their most prestigious school. I tell them that once I graduate, I will gladly join the rest of civilised society in allowing my strength, my drive and my focus � what they call Will � to be leeched away and added to the power of those above me, as millions already do. As all must eventually do.

I tell them that I belong, and they believe me.

But the truth is that I have been sent to the Academy to find answers. To solve a murder. To search for an ancient weapon. To uncover secrets that may tear the Republic apart.

And that I will never, ever cede my Will to the empire that executed my family.

To survive, though, I will still have to rise through the Academy’s ranks. I will have to smile, and make friends, and pretend to be one of them and win. Because if I cannot, then those who want to control me, who know my real name, will no longer have any use for me.

And if the Hierarchy finds out who I truly am, they will kill me.]]> 639 James Islington 1982141190 Tori 4 4.60 2023
author: James Islington
name: Tori
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/09
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves:
review:

]]> 169485073 This highly anticipated follow-up to The Will of the Many—one of 2023’s most lauded and bestselling fantasy novels—follows Vis as he grapples with a dangerous secret that could change the course of history across alternate dimensions.


OMNE TRIUM PERFECTUM.

The Hierarchy still call me Vis Telimus. Still hail me as Catenicus. They still, as one, believe they know who I am.

But with all that has happened—with what I fear is coming—I am not sure it matters anymore.

I am no longer one. I won the Iudicium, and lost everything—and now, impossibly, the ancient device beyond the Labyrinth has replicated me across three separate worlds. A different version of myself in each of Obiteum, Luceum, and Res. Three different bodies, three different lives. I have to hide; fight; play politics. I have to train; trust; lie. I have to kill; heal; prove myself again, and again, and again.

I am loved, and hated, and entirely alone.

Above all, though, I need to find answers before it’s too late. To understand the nature of what has happened to me, and why.

I need to find a way to stop the coming Cataclysm, because if all I have learned is true, I may be the only one who can.]]> James Islington Tori 0 to-read 4.69 2025
author: James Islington
name: Tori
average rating: 4.69
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 32758901 "As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure."

In a corporate-dominated space-faring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. For their own safety, exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.

On a distant planet, a team of scientists is conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied �droid--a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.� Scornful of humans, Murderbot wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is, but when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and Murderbot to get to the truth.]]> 144 Martha Wells Tori 0 to-read 4.11 2017
author: Martha Wells
name: Tori
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 28274420 A desperate man attempts to win a reality TV game where the only objective is to stay alive in this #1 national bestseller from Stephen King, writing as Richard Bachman.It was the ultimate death game in a nightmare future America. The year is 2025 and reality TV has grown to the point where people are willing to wager their lives for a chance at a billion-dollar jackpot. Ben Richards is desperate—he needs money to treat his daughter’s illness. His last chance is entering a game show called The Running Man where the goal is to avoid capture by Hunters who are employed to kill him. Surviving this month-long chase is another issue when everyone else on the planet is watching—and willing to turn him in for the reward. Each night all Americans tune in to watch. So far, the record for survival is only eight days. Can Ben Richards beat the brutal odds, beat the rigged game, beat the entire savage system? He’s betting his life that he can� With an introduction by Stephen King on “The Importance of Being Bachman,� The Running Man is a terrifying novel about the eternal fight of good versus evil.]]> 417 Richard Bachman Tori 0 to-read 4.02 1982
author: Richard Bachman
name: Tori
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 625094 The Sicilian prince Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa (1896-1957) died just after writing The Leopard, his only novel. Visconti's film adaptation, starring Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1963.

In Sicily, in 1860, a family from the high aristocracy suffered the consequences of the change of regime in favor of the Republicans. While Prince Salina lets himself be overcome by nostalgia, his nephew Tancred embodies the new force that is shaking his country. He asks for the hand of Angélique, daughter of an upstart, while this union marks the defeat of the family coat of arms.]]> 319 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 0679731210 Tori 0 to-read 4.01 1958
author: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
name: Tori
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1958
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 51046755 Two sisters travel the same streets,though their lives couldn't be more different.
Then one of them goes missing.

In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don't speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling.

Then Kacey disappears, suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey's district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit—and her sister—before it's too late.

Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters' childhood and adolescence, Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate.]]> 492 Liz Moore 0525540695 Tori 0 to-read 4.18 2020
author: Liz Moore
name: Tori
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 42270835 Author of The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in 1960s Florida.

Elwood Curtis has taken the words of Dr Martin Luther King to heart: he is as good as anyone. Abandoned by his parents, brought up by his loving, strict and clear-sighted grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But given the time and the place, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy his future, and so Elwood arrives at The Nickel Academy, which claims to provide 'physical, intellectual and moral training' which will equip its inmates to become 'honorable and honest men'.

In reality, the Nickel Academy is a chamber of horrors, where physical, emotional and sexual abuse is rife, where corrupt officials and tradesmen do a brisk trade in supplies intended for the school, and where any boy who resists is likely to disappear 'out back'. Stunned to find himself in this vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold on to Dr King's ringing assertion, 'Throw us in jail, and we will still love you.' But Elwood's fellow inmate and new friend Turner thinks Elwood is naive and worse; the world is crooked, and the only way to survive is to emulate the cruelty and cynicism of their oppressors.

The tension between Elwood's idealism and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision which will have decades-long repercussions.

Based on the history of a real reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped and destroyed the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative by a great American novelist whose work is essential to understanding the current reality of the United States.]]> 213 Colson Whitehead Tori 0 to-read 4.25 2019
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Tori
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 228356903 An unforgettable dark fairy tale that asks, Can love save us from ourselves?

Birdie’s keeping it together; of course she is. So she’s a little hungover sometimes, and she has to bring her daughter, Emaleen, to her job waiting tables at an Alaskan roadside lodge, but she’s getting by as a single mother in a tough town. Still, Birdie can remember happier times from her youth, when she was free in the wilds of nature.

Arthur Neilsen, a soft-spoken and scarred recluse who appears in town only at the change of seasons, brings Emaleen back to safety when she gets lost in the woods. Most people avoid him, but to Birdie he represents everything she’s ever longed for. She finds herself falling for Arthur and the land he knows so well. Against the warnings of those who care about them, Birdie and Emaleen move to his isolated cabin in the mountains on the far side of the Wolverine River.

It’s just the three of them in the vast black woods, far from roads, telephones, electricity, and outside contact, but Birdie believes she has come prepared. At first, it’s idyllic, but soon Birdie discovers that Arthur is something much more mysterious and dangerous than she could have imagined, and that like the Alaska wilderness, a fairy tale can be as dark as it is beautiful.]]> 306 Eowyn Ivey Tori 2 3.58 2025
author: Eowyn Ivey
name: Tori
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/02
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves:
review:

]]> 20696006 In Being Mortal, author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.

Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.]]> 282 Atul Gawande 0805095152 Tori 0 to-read 4.47 2014
author: Atul Gawande
name: Tori
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 219966756 “Good Spirits is an absolute knockout. A new Borison book feels like coming home in the best way. She's truly in a league of her own.� � Hannah Grace, New York Times bestselling author of Icebreaker

The USA Today bestselling author of Business Casual, B.K. Borison is back with a whimsical new holiday romance—this time with a magical twist—that will have everyone falling in love with the Ghost of Christmas Past.

He’s the Ghost of Christmas Past. She’s not exactly Scrooge.

Ghost of Christmas Past Nolan Callahan intends to spend this holiday haunting like every other—get in, get out, return to his otherwise aimless existence as a ghost awaiting the afterlife. But when he’s faced with Harriet York, the sweetest assignment he’s ever had, he suddenly finds himself wishing for a future.

Harriet York has no idea why she’s being haunted. She’s a good person—or, at least, she tries to be. A people pleaser to her core, she always does what’s expected of her. But as she and Nolan begin to examine her past, they discover there are threads that bind them together� and realize there might be more to moving on than expected.

With the deadline of Christmas Eve fast approaching, will they find the key to their futures in each other’s pasts? Or will they stay firmly in the present, indulging in their unexpected, spirited connection?

Filled with magic, mayhem, and cozy holiday charm, this swoony romance is B.K. Borison’s best yet!]]> B.K. Borison Tori 0 to-read 4.55 2025
author: B.K. Borison
name: Tori
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 218048420 B.K. Borison Tori 0 to-read 0.0 2027
author: B.K. Borison
name: Tori
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2027
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 56787127 The Nebula Award–winning author of Kindred presents a “gripping� dystopian novel about a woman fleeing Los Angeles as America spirals into chaos (The New York Times Book Review).

“A stunner.� —Flea, musician and actor, The Wall Street Journal

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.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler including rare images from the author’s estate.]]> 356 Octavia E. Butler Tori 4 library-reads 4.28 1993
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Tori
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: library-reads
review:

]]> 210395729 They've loved each other in a thousand lifetimes. They've killed each other in every one.

Evelyn remembers all her past lives. She also remembers that in every single one, she’s been murdered before her eighteenth birthday by Arden, a supernatural being whose soul―and survival―is tethered to hers.

The problem is that she’s quite fond of the life she’s in now, and her little sister needs her for bone marrow transplants in order to stay alive. If Evelyn wants to save her sister, she’ll have to:

1. Find the centuries-old devil who hunts her through each life―before they find her first.
2. Figure out why she’s being hunted and finally break their curse.
3. Try not to fall in love.

The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue meets This is How You Lose The Time War in this fantastical love story that defies death as two souls reincarnate through the centuries.]]> 352 Laura Steven 1250333881 Tori 0 to-read 3.76 2025
author: Laura Steven
name: Tori
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214151301 Set over the course of one day, a heart-racing story about a woman facing the unimaginable, determined to find safety

Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, she realizes there’s nothing to do but walk.

Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and kindness: strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. She’s determined to change her life if she can just make it home.]]> 229 Emma Pattee 1668055473 Tori 0 to-read 3.72 2025
author: Emma Pattee
name: Tori
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214565614 A chilling historical horror novel set in the American west in 1912 following a Lutheran priest who transcribes the life of a vampire who haunts the fields of the Blackfeet reservation looking for justice.

A diary, written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. Told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones.]]> 448 Stephen Graham Jones 1668075083 Tori 0 to-read 4.23 2025
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Tori
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211143113
But Mama’s want is stronger than her hunger sometimes, and when a beautiful, white-toothed stray named Eden turns up in the heart of a snowstorm, Margot must confront the shifting dynamics of her family, untangle her own desires, and make her own bid for freedom.

With this gothic coming-of-age tale, novelist Lucy Rose explores how women swallow their anger, desire, and animal instincts—and wrings the relationship between mother and daughter until blood drips from it.]]> 336 Lucy Rose 0063374609 Tori 0 to-read 3.89 2025
author: Lucy Rose
name: Tori
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 56787154 Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel: The powerful and compelling sequel to the dystopian classic Parable of the Sower

Lauren Olamina was only eighteen when her family was killed, and anarchy encroached on her Southern California home. She fled the war zone for the hope of quiet and safety in the north. There she founded Acorn, a peaceful community based on a religion of her creation, called Earthseed, whose central tenet is that God is change. Five years later, Lauren has married a doctor and given birth to a daughter. Acorn is beginning to thrive. But outside the tranquil group’s walls, America is changing for the worse.

Presidential candidate Andrew Steele Jarret wins national fame by preaching a return to the values of the American golden age. To his marauding followers, who are identified by their crosses and black robes, this is a call to arms to end religious tolerance and racial equality—a brutal doctrine they enforce by machine gun. And as this band of violent extremists sets its deadly sights on Earthseed, Acorn is plunged into a harrowing fight for its very survival.

Taking its place alongside Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Butler’s eerily prophetic novel offers a terrifying vision of our potential future, but also one of hope.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler including rare images from the author’s estate.]]> 434 Octavia E. Butler Tori 0 to-read 4.37 1998
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Tori
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211721806
You know what’s worse than breaking up with your girlfriend? Being stuck with her prize-winning show cat. And you know what’s worse than that? An alien invasion, the destruction of all man-made structures on Earth, and the systematic exploitation of all the survivors for a sadistic intergalactic game show. That’s what.

Join Coast Guard vet Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, as they try to survive the end of the world—or just get to the next level—in a video game–like, trap-filled fantasy dungeon. A dungeon that’s actually the set of a reality television show with countless viewers across the galaxy. Exploding goblins. Magical potions. Deadly, drug-dealing llamas. This ain’t your ordinary game show.

Welcome, Crawler. Welcome to the Dungeon. Survival is optional. Keeping the viewers entertained is not.

Includes part one of the exclusive bonus story “Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret.�]]> 450 Matt Dinniman 059382024X Tori 0 to-read 4.49 2020
author: Matt Dinniman
name: Tori
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 49552 The Stranger has long been considered a classic of twentieth-century literature. Le Monde ranks it as number one on its "100 Books of the Century" list. Through this story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on a sundrenched Algerian beach, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd."]]> 123 Albert Camus Tori 0 to-read 4.04 1942
author: Albert Camus
name: Tori
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1942
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 53138199 A gripping set of stories about the forces that shape girls and the adults they become. A wise and brilliant guide to transforming the self and our society.

In her powerful new book, critically acclaimed author Melissa Febos examines the narratives women are told about what it means to be female and what it takes to free oneself from them.

When her body began to change at eleven years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she’d been told about herself and the habits and defenses she’d developed over years of trying to meet others� expectations. The values she and so many other women had learned in girlhood did not prioritize their personal safety, happiness, or freedom, and she set out to reframe those values and beliefs.

Blending investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny.

Written with Febos� characteristic precision, lyricism, and insight, Girlhood is a philosophical treatise, an anthem for women, and a searing study of the transitions into and away from girlhood, toward a chosen self.]]> 320 Melissa Febos 1635572525 Tori 4 4.23 2021
author: Melissa Febos
name: Tori
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves:
review:

]]> 217513554 B.K. Borison Tori 0 to-read 4.71 2026
author: B.K. Borison
name: Tori
average rating: 4.71
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 200555182
Beth Pickering is on the verge of finally capturing the rare deathwhistler bird when Professor Devon Lockley swoops in, capturing both her bird and her imagination like a villain. Albeit a handsome and charming villain, but that's beside the point. As someone highly educated in the ruthless discipline of ornithology, Beth knows trouble when she sees it, and she is determined to keep her distance from Devon.Ěý

For his part, Devon has never been more smitten than when he first set eyes on Professor Beth Pickering. She's so pretty, so polite, so capable of bringing down a fiery, deadly bird using only her wits. In other words, an angel. Devon understands he must not get close to her, however, since they're professional rivals.Ěý

When a competition to become Birder of the Year by capturing an endangered caladrius bird is announced, Beth and Devon are forced to team up to have any chance of winning.ĚýNow keeping their distance becomes a question of one bed or two. But they must take the risk, because fowl play is afoot, and they can't trust anyone else—for all may be fair in love and war, but this is ornithology.]]> 384 India Holton Tori 3 3.90 2024
author: India Holton
name: Tori
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 34454589 320 Margaret Atwood 1328879941 Tori 0 to-read 4.30 1985
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Tori
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211809571 The third installment in the heartwarming and enchanting Emily Wilde series, about a curmudgeonly scholar of folklore and the fae prince she loves

Emily Wilde has spent her life studying faeries. A renowned dryadologist, she has documented hundreds of species of Folk in her Encyclopaedia of Faeries. Now she is about to embark on her most dangerous academic project studying the inner workings of a faerie realm—as its queen.

Along with her former academic rival—now fiancé—the dashing and mercurial Wendell Bambleby, Emily is immediately thrust into the deadly intrigues of Faerie as the two of them seize the throne of Wendell’s long-lost kingdom, which Emily finds a beautiful nightmare filled with scholarly treasures.

Emily has been obsessed with faerie stories her entire life, but at first she feels as ill-suited to Faerie as she did to the mortal How can an unassuming scholar such as herself pass for a queen? Yet there is little time to settle in, for Wendell’s murderous stepmother has placed a deadly curse upon the land before vanishing without a trace. It will take all of Wendell’s magic—and Emily’s knowledge of stories—to unravel the mystery before they lose everything they hold dear.

Book Three of the Emily Wilde Series]]> 368 Heather Fawcett 0593500237 Tori 3 library-reads 4.25 2025
author: Heather Fawcett
name: Tori
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/14
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: library-reads
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 Tori 4 library-reads 4.06 2025
author: B.K. Borison
name: Tori
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/15
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: library-reads
review:

]]> 214269394
Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost? Or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice?

Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.]]> 277 Holly Brickley 0593799089 Tori 0 to-read 3.76 2025
author: Holly Brickley
name: Tori
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210246742 A clear and concise guide to the politics of post-Roe America, for readers eager to understand the attacks on our bodies and freedom—and to do something about it

In this, her most urgent book yet, New York Times–bestselling author Jessica Valenti dispels misinformation and cuts through the headline overwhelm to illuminate the full-scale assault conservative lawmakers have launched on women’s freedom—and fundamental human rights. Valenti provides the language to talk about abortion with confidence and the facts to convince.

American voters overwhelmingly support abortion rights and have for decades. In the years since Roe v. Wade was overturned, that support has been growing, as nearly seventy-percent of Americans want abortion to be legal in the first three months of pregnancy, and sixty-three percent want abortion medication to be legal. Abortion is among the key tools conservatives use to roll back decades of advances for women, but here Valenti arms readers with the truth needed to fight back and win, not only at the dinner table but at the polling station and all the way to the Supreme Court.]]> 256 Jessica Valenti 0593800230 Tori 0 4.70 2024
author: Jessica Valenti
name: Tori
average rating: 4.70
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves:
review:

]]> 210223811 Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own.

Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality—her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world—that is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.

Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion.]]> 400 R.F. Kuang Tori 0 to-read 4.03 2025
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Tori
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214282631 Grieving the loss of her best friend, a young woman’s life is turned upside down when she meets a grumpy stranger who swears he can help her live again, in this heartwarming, slow-burn romance by the author of Ready or Not

Lenny’s a bit of a mess at the moment. Her best friend, Lou, recently passed away after a battle with cancer, and her death has left Lenny feeling completely lost. She’s avoiding her concerned parents, the apartment she shared with Lou, and the list of things she’s supposed to do to help her live again. The only thing she can do is temporary babysitting gigs, and luckily, she just landed a great one, helping overworked, single mom Reese and her precocious daughter, Ainsley. It’s not perfect: Ainsley’s uncle, Miles, always seems to be around, and is kind of... a huge jerk. But if Lenny acts like she has it all together, maybe no one will notice she’s falling apart.

Miles sees right through her though. Turns out, he knows a lot about grief and, surprisingly, he offers her a proposition. He’ll help her complete everything on her “live again� list if she’ll help him connect with Ainsley and overcome his complicated relationship with Reese. Lenny doubts anything can fill the Lou has left behind, but she begins to spend more time with Miles, Lenny is surprised to discover that, sometimes, losing everything is only the first step to finding yourself, and love, again.]]> Cara Bastone 0593595742 Tori 3
Promise Me Sunshine follows Lenny as she navigates life after the tragic loss of her best friend. Soon enters Miles, the uncle to the child Lenny, who is currently nannying for. While their first meeting is a bit of a mess, they soon enter into a heartwarming friendship where they try to find joy together in dealing with grief.Ěý

The themes of loss and grief were wonderfully done, and I also really loved the side characters, and the little cameo from someone in Bastone's previous novel, “Ready or Not,â€� was a nice surprise. However, I did find some dialogue to come across as more YA, which came across as a bit cringey at times. The last bit of the book did feel a bit rushed, and I would’ve loved to see a more fleshed-out ending.Ěý

Overall, a book I would recommend if you are looking for a story about the power of friendship, loss, and love.

3.75â­�️±Ő±Ő> 4.30 2025
author: Cara Bastone
name: Tori
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/08
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves:
review:
Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for the advanced E-ARC.Ěý

Promise Me Sunshine follows Lenny as she navigates life after the tragic loss of her best friend. Soon enters Miles, the uncle to the child Lenny, who is currently nannying for. While their first meeting is a bit of a mess, they soon enter into a heartwarming friendship where they try to find joy together in dealing with grief.Ěý

The themes of loss and grief were wonderfully done, and I also really loved the side characters, and the little cameo from someone in Bastone's previous novel, “Ready or Not,â€� was a nice surprise. However, I did find some dialogue to come across as more YA, which came across as a bit cringey at times. The last bit of the book did feel a bit rushed, and I would’ve loved to see a more fleshed-out ending.Ěý

Overall, a book I would recommend if you are looking for a story about the power of friendship, loss, and love.

3.75�️
]]> 61219635 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250886088.

A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes.

After a lifetime of bounties and bloodshed, Viv is hanging up her sword for the last time.

The battle-weary orc aims to start fresh, opening the first ever coffee shop in the city of Thune. But old and new rivals stand in the way of success—not to mention the fact that no one has the faintest idea what coffee actually is.

If Viv wants to put the blade behind her and make her plans a reality, she won't be able to go it alone.

But the true rewards of the uncharted path are the travelers you meet along the way. And whether drawn together by ancient magic, flaky pastry, or a freshly brewed cup, they may become partners, family, and something deeper than she ever could have dreamed.]]> 304 Travis Baldree Tori 0 to-read 4.17 2022
author: Travis Baldree
name: Tori
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 195790788
Recruited into the fundamentalist Quiverfull movement as a young wife, Tia Levings learned that being a good Christian meant following a list of additional life principles—a series of secret, special rules to obey. Being a godly and submissive wife in Christian Patriarchy included strict discipline, isolation, and an alternative lifestyle that appeared wholesome to outsiders. Women were to be silent, “keepers of the home.�

Tia knew that to their neighbors her family was strange, but she also couldn't risk exposing their secret lifestyle to police, doctors, teachers, or anyone outside of their church. Christians were called in scripture to be “in the world, not of it.� So, she hid in plain sight as years of abuse and pain followed. When Tia realized she was the only one who could protect her children from becoming the next generation of patriarchal men and submissive women, she began to resist and question how they lived. But in the patriarchy, a woman with opinions is in danger, and eventually, Tia faced an urgent and extreme stay and face dire consequences, or flee with her children.

Told in a beautiful, honest, and sometimes harrowing voice, A Well-Trained Wife is an unforgettable and timely memoir about a woman's race to save herself and her family and details the ways that extreme views can manifest in a marriage.]]> 304 Tia Levings 1250288282 Tori 0 to-read 4.31 2024
author: Tia Levings
name: Tori
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 209220944
But Sarah has begun to wonder... Who is she without her other half?

When she decides to take on a project of her own, a fundraising gala in memoriam of her late mother, Sarah wants nothing more than to prove to herself—and to everyone else—that she doesn’t need Caleb’s help to succeed. She’s still her mother’s daughter, after all. Independent and capable.

That is until the event fails and Caleb uninvitedly steps in to save the day.

The rift that follows unearths a decade of grievances between them and doubts begin to grow. Are they truly the same people they were when they got married at nineteen? Are they supposed to be?

In a desperate attempt to fix what they fear is near breaking, Sarah and Caleb make the spontaneous decision to join a grueling hiking trip intended to guide couples through rough patches.

What follows is a life-affirming comedy of errors as two nature-averse people fight their way out of the woods in order to find their way back to their roots.]]> 336 Hannah Bonam-Young 0593871863 Tori 3 library-reads 3.98 2025
author: Hannah Bonam-Young
name: Tori
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/04
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: library-reads
review:

]]> 35530507
Worse yet, London is gripped by hysteria in the autumn of 1888, terrorized by what would become the most notorious and elusive serial killer in history, Jack the Ripper--and Lady Wellie suspects the prince may be responsible.

Veronica and Stoker reluctantly agree to go undercover at Madame Aurore's high class brothel, where another body soon turns up. Many secrets are swirling around Veronica and the royal family--and it's up to Veronica and Stoker to find the truth, before it's too late for all of them.]]> 320 Deanna Raybourn 0451490762 Tori 4 kindle-reads 4.10 2020
author: Deanna Raybourn
name: Tori
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/02
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: kindle-reads
review:

]]> 195430687 Three estranged siblings return to their family home in New York after their beloved sister's death in this unforgettable story of grief, identity, and the complexities of family.

The three Blue sisters are exceptional—and exceptionally different. Avery, the eldest and a recovering heroin addict turned strait-laced lawyer, lives with her wife in London; Bonnie, a former boxer, works as a bouncer in Los Angeles following a devastating defeat; and Lucky, the youngest, models in Paris while trying to outrun her hard-partying ways. They also had a fourth sister, Nicky, whose unexpected death left Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky reeling. A year later, as they each navigate grief, addiction, and ambition, they find they must return to New York to stop the sale of the apartment they were raised in.

But coming home is never as easy as it seems. As the sisters reckon with the disappointments of their childhood and the loss of the only person who held them together, they realize the greatest secrets they've been keeping might not have been from each other, but from themselves.]]> 342 Coco Mellors 0593723767 Tori 4 library-reads 3.93 2024
author: Coco Mellors
name: Tori
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/19
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: library-reads
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 Tori 3 library-reads 3.92 2024
author: Ally Carter
name: Tori
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/03
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: library-reads
review:

]]> 43822024
In this pulse-pounding conclusion to New York Times bestselling author Neal Shusterman’s Arc of a Scythe trilogy, constitutions are tested and old friends are brought back from the dead.]]> 625 Neal Shusterman 1481497065 Tori 3 library-reads 4.15 2019
author: Neal Shusterman
name: Tori
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/08
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: library-reads
review:

]]> 464260 The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,� written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose,� The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.]]> 106 James Baldwin 067974472X Tori 5 library-reads 4.55 1963
author: James Baldwin
name: Tori
average rating: 4.55
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/29
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: library-reads
review:

]]> 30008834 London, 1887. At the Curiosity Club, a ladies-only establishment for daring and intrepid women, Victorian adventuress Veronica Speedwell meets the mysterious Lady Sundridge, who begs her to take on an impossible task--saving society art patron Miles Ramsforth from execution. Ramsforth, accused of the brutal murder of his mistress, Artemisia, will face the hangman's noose in a week's time if the real killer is not found.

But Lady Sundridge is not all that she seems, and unmasking her true identity is only the first of many secrets Veronica must uncover. Together with her natural-historian colleague, Stoker, Veronica races against time to find the true murderer. From a Bohemian artists' colony to a royal palace to a subterranean grotto with a decadent history, the investigation proves to be a very perilous undertaking indeed....]]> 338 Deanna Raybourn 0451476158 Tori 4 kindle-reads 4.05 2017
author: Deanna Raybourn
name: Tori
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/13
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: kindle-reads
review:

]]> 26244626 London, 1888. As colorful and unfettered as the butterflies she collects, Victorian adventuress Veronica Speedwell can’t resist the allure of an exotic mystery—particularly one involving her enigmatic colleague, Stoker.

His former expedition partner has vanished from an archaeological dig with a priceless diadem unearthed from the newly discovered tomb of an Egyptian princess. This disappearance is just the latest in a string of unfortunate events that have plagued the controversial expedition, and rumors abound that the curse of the vengeful princess has been unleashed as the shadowy figure of Anubis himself stalks the streets of London.

But the perils of an ancient curse are not the only challenges Veronica must face as sordid details and malevolent enemies emerge from Stoker’s past.

Caught in a tangle of conspiracies and threats—and thrust into the public eye by an enterprising new foe—Veronica must separate facts from fantasy to unravel a web of duplicity that threatens to cost Stoker everything. . . .]]> 308 Deanna Raybourn 0451476174 Tori 4 kindle-reads 4.12 2018
author: Deanna Raybourn
name: Tori
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: kindle-reads
review:

]]> 219876684 In a hilarious short story from New York Times bestselling author Fredrik Backman, the absurdities of modern life cause one man’s solitary world to spin suddenly, and comically, out of control.

Lucas knows the perfect night entails just three things: video games, wine, and pad thai. Peanuts are a must! Other people? Not so much. Why complicate things when he’s happy alone?

Then one day the apartment board, a vexing trio of authority, rings his doorbell. And Lucas’s solitude takes a startling hike. They demand to see his frying pan. Someone left one next to the recycling room overnight, and instead of removing the errant object, as Lucas suggests, they insist on finding the guilty party. But their plan backfires. Colossally.

Told in Fredrik Backman’s singular witty style with sharply drawn characters and relatable antics, The Answer Is No is a laugh-out-loud portrait of a man struggling to keep to himself in a world that won’t leave him alone.]]> 68 Fredrik Backman 1662526520 Tori 4 kindle-reads 3.94 2024
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Tori
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/09
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: kindle-reads
review:

]]> 73936042
From one of the finest writers working today, Keegan's new story asks if a lack of generosity might ruin what could be between men and women.]]> 47 Claire Keegan 0571382010 Tori 3 kindle-reads 3.97 2023
author: Claire Keegan
name: Tori
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: kindle-reads
review:

]]> 30518319
As spectral figures, ghostly music, and mysterious threats begin to plague the partygoers, Veronica enlists Stoker's help to discover the host's true motivations. And as they investigate, it becomes clear that there are numerous mysteries surrounding the Romilly estate, and every person present has a motive to kill Rosamund...]]> 336 Deanna Raybourn Tori 4 kindle-reads 4.26 2019
author: Deanna Raybourn
name: Tori
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: kindle-reads
review:

]]> 36578942 The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared has charmed readers across the world.]]> 396 Jonas Jonasson Tori 2 3.84 2009
author: Jonas Jonasson
name: Tori
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2009
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/05
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: book-club-reads, library-reads
review:

]]> 90872
In these tales of loss and pleasure, lovers and family, a woman learns to conduct an affair, a child of divorce dances with her mother, and a woman with a terminal illness contemplates her exit. Filled with the sharp humor, emotional acuity, and joyful language Moore has become famous for, these nine glittering tales marked the introduction of an extravagantly gifted writer.]]> 163 Lorrie Moore 0307277291 Tori 3 library-reads 4.13 1985
author: Lorrie Moore
name: Tori
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1985
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/08
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: library-reads
review:

]]> 40164365
When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.

While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.

Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.]]> 212 Sigrid Nunez 0735219451 Tori 4 library-reads 3.72 2018
author: Sigrid Nunez
name: Tori
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/11
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: library-reads
review:

]]> 60675380 The bestselling author-illustrator of Garlic and the Vampire, Bree Paulsen, brings her fantastical storytelling and warm, sparkling artwork to this story that celebrates the bond between sisters.

In a city powered by magic and still recovering from a bloody war, Ada is concerned about her younger sister Safi’s developing powers. She understands that Safi could learn how to control her magic under the apprenticeship of a king's magician. But with the memories of war still fresh, Ada is conflicted by this prospect—despite her knowing that she can’t keep Safi safely at home with the threat of deadly, power-thieving liches prowling the kingdom.

When a traveling group of magicians comes to the city to perform, they immediately recognize Safi’s talents and offer to take her on as an apprentice. Safi is thrilled about her new adventure—even if that means leaving behind Ada and their sickly father. And Ada is right to worry about her sister, for there may be monsters hiding behind friendly faces…]]> Bree Paulsen Tori 4 library-reads 4.13 2024
author: Bree Paulsen
name: Tori
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: library-reads
review:

]]> 33597976 423 Eowyn Ivey Tori 4 library-reads 4.10 2012
author: Eowyn Ivey
name: Tori
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: library-reads
review:

]]> 211479192 A woman inherits a pawnshop where you can sell your regrets, and then embarks on a magical journey when a charming young physicist wanders into the shop, in this dreamlike and enchanting fantasy novel.

On a backstreet in Tokyo lies a pawnshop, but not everyone can find it. Most will see a cozy ramen restaurant. And only the chosen ones—those who are lost—will find a place to pawn their life choices and deepest regrets.

Hana Ishikawa wakes on her first morning as the pawnshop’s new owner to find it ransacked, the shop’s most precious acquisition stolen, and her father missing. And then into the shop stumbles a charming stranger, quite unlike its other customers, for he offers help instead of seeking it.

Together, they must journey through a mystical world to find Hana’s father and the stolen choice—by way of rain puddles, rides on paper cranes, the bridge between midnight and morning, and a night market in the clouds.

But as they get closer to the truth, Hana must reveal a secret of her own—and risk making a choice that she will never be able to take back.]]> 384 Samantha Sotto Yambao 0593724992 Tori 3 library-reads 3.79 2025
author: Samantha Sotto Yambao
name: Tori
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/20
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: library-reads
review:

]]> 220064761 To the world, they were a scandal. To each other, an obsession.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER � An epic love story set in the sparkling, savage sphere of elite figure skating, starring a woman determined to carve her own path on and off the ice

“P˛ą°ůłŮ Wuthering Heights and part Daisy Jones & The Six, this novel is as brilliantly choreographed as a gold medal performance and will keep you guessing until its last page.”—Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of By Any Other Name

She might not have a famous name, funding, or her family’s support, but Katarina Shaw has always known that she was destined to become an Olympic skater. When she meets Heath Rocha, a lonely kid stuck in the foster care system, their instant connection makes them a formidable duo on the ice. Clinging to skating—and each other—to escape their turbulent lives, Kat and Heath go from childhood sweethearts to champion ice dancers, captivating the world with their scorching chemistry, rebellious style, and roller-coaster relationship.

Until a shocking incident at the Olympic Games brings their partnership to a sudden end.

As the ten-year anniversary of their final skate approaches, an unauthorized documentary reignites the public obsession with Shaw and Rocha, claiming to uncover the “real story� through interviews with their closest friends and fiercest rivals. Kat wants nothing to do with the documentary, but she can’t stand the thought of someone else defining her legacy. So, after a decade of silence, she’s telling her story: from the childhood tragedies that created her all-consuming bond with Heath to the clash of desires that tore them apart. Sensational rumors have haunted their every step for years, but the truth may be even more shocking than the headlines.]]> 448 Layne Fargo 0593736826 Tori 0 library-reads 4.17 2025
author: Layne Fargo
name: Tori
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: library-reads
review:

]]>