Hilary's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 22 Apr 2025 12:30:10 -0700 60 Hilary's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg We Do Not Part 205673168 Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter of Korean history.

One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama.

A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend's house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering,it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.]]> 272 Han Kang 0593595475 Hilary 0 currently-reading 3.95 2021 We Do Not Part
author: Han Kang
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/22
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]]> Blue Sisters 195431722
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 that the greatest secrets they've been keeping might not have been from each other, but from themselves.Ěý

Imbued with Coco Mellors’s signature combination of humor and heart, Blue Sisters is a story of what it takes to keep living after loss—and, ultimately, to fall in love with life again.]]> 272 Coco Mellors 0593723775 Hilary 0 4.02 2024 Blue Sisters
author: Coco Mellors
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/22
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]]> The Eyes Are the Best Part 179780170 “Violent, smart, gruesome and wildly original, this novel pulls readers into a horrific world of murder and cannibalism while also critiquing misogyny, exploring Asian fetishization and stereotypes, sharing what it’s like to navigate two cultures and telling a touching story of a family in turmoil.� �New York Times Book Review

Crying in H-Mart meets My Sister, the Serial Killer in this feminist psychological horror about the making of a female serial killer from a Korean-American perspective.

Ji-won’s life tumbles into disarray in the wake of her Appa’s extramarital affair and subsequent departure. Her mother, distraught. Her younger sister, hurt and confused. Her college freshman grades, failing. Her dreams, horrifying� yet enticing.

In them, Ji-won walks through bloody rooms full of eyes. Succulent blue eyes. Salivatingly blue eyes. Eyes the same shape and shade as George’s, who is Umma’s obnoxious new boyfriend. George has already overstayed his welcome in her family’s claustrophobic apartment. He brags about his puffed-up consulting job, ogles Asian waitresses while dining out, and acts condescending toward Ji-won and her sister as if he deserves all of Umma’s fawning adoration. No, George doesn’t deserve anything from her family. Ji-won will make sure of that.

For no matter how many victims accumulate around her campus or how many people she must deceive and manipulate, Ji-won’s hunger and her rage deserve to be sated.

A brilliantly inventive, subversive novel about a young woman unraveling, Monika Kim’s The Eyes Are the Best Part is a story of a family falling apart and trying to find their way back to each other, marking a bold new voice in horror that will leave readers mesmerized and craving more.]]> 284 Monika Kim 1645661253 Hilary 0 3.91 2024 The Eyes Are the Best Part
author: Monika Kim
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/19
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]]> <![CDATA[The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind]]> 10365342
In this pioneering, practical book, Daniel J. Siegel, neuropsychiatrist and author of the bestselling Mindsight, and parenting expert Tina Payne Bryson demystify the meltdowns and aggravation, explaining the new science of how a child’s brain is wired and how it matures. The “upstairs brain,� which makes decisions and balances emotions, is under construction until the mid-twenties. And especially in young children, the right brain and its emotions tend to rule over the logic of the left brain. No wonder kids can seem—and feel—so out of control. By applying these discoveries to everyday parenting, you can turn any outburst, argument, or fear into a chance to integrate your child’s brain and foster vital growth. Raise calmer, happier children using twelve key strategies, including
Ěý
� Name It to Tame It: Corral raging right-brain behavior through left-brain storytelling, appealing to the left brain’s affinity for words and reasoning to calm emotional storms and bodily tension.
� Engage, Don’t Enrage: Keep your child thinking and listening, instead of purely reacting.
� Move It or Lose It: Use physical activities to shift your child’s emotional state.
� Let the Clouds of Emotion Roll By: Guide your children when they are stuck on a negative emotion, and help them understand that feelings come and go.
� SIFT: Help children pay attention to the Sensations, Images, Feelings, and Thoughts within them so that they can make better decisions and be more flexible.
� Connect Through Conflict: Use discord to encourage empathy and greater social success.
Ěý
Complete with clear explanations, age-appropriate strategies for dealing with day-to-day struggles, and illustrations that will help you explain these concepts to your child, The Whole-Brain Child shows you how to cultivate healthy emotional and intellectual development so that your children can lead balanced, meaningful, and connected lives.]]> 192 Daniel J. Siegel Hilary 0 4.30 2011 The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind
author: Daniel J. Siegel
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/18
date added: 2025/04/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism]]> 223436601 An explosive memoir charting one woman’s career at the heart of one of the most influential companies on the planet, Careless People gives you a front-row seat to Facebook, the decisions that have shaped world events in recent decades, and the people who made them.

From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite.

Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.�

Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.]]> 400 Sarah Wynn-Williams 1250391237 Hilary 0 4.31 2025 Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
author: Sarah Wynn-Williams
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/15
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]]> None of This Is True 62558732 Lisa Jewell returns with a scintillating new psychological thriller about a woman who finds herself the subject of her own popular true crime podcast.

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

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

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

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

Who is Josie Fair? And what has she done?]]> 384 Lisa Jewell Hilary 0 4.15 2023 None of This Is True
author: Lisa Jewell
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/12
date added: 2025/04/12
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]]> <![CDATA[The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood]]> 214151357
She felt like an imposter in her own body. She grew distant from her friends and husband. She suffered from anxiety, fear, guilt, and shame. She also experienced trauma at the hands of one of her doctors—a stark trigger. And eventually, when her son was born, there was no� joy. Instead, she felt “disoriented, lonely, and like none of my clothes fit.� Why was she seeing and hearing things that weren’t there? Why was she so angry and miserable when she had everything she thought she wanted? Why was the life she’d built falling apart?

It took her months to discover that she was suffering from severe postpartum depression. And it took even longer to trace all the threads that came to inform her experience.

At its core, The Motherload> is about learning to forgive yourself for not being what you’ve been told you must be and for not loving the way you’ve been told you should. It’s about the uniquely female experience of constantly grappling with expectation versus reality, no matter your circumstance, and a rejection of the cultural idea of the mother as a perfect being. It is a moving, exciting, roller coaster ride, and a propulsive addition to the canon of women’s literature.]]> 352 Sarah Hoover 1668010135 Hilary 0 to-read 3.84 The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood
author: Sarah Hoover
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.84
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shelves: to-read
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]]> Middle of the Night 199124279 In the latest jaw-dropping thriller from New York Times bestselling author Riley Sager, a man must contend with the long-ago disappearance of his childhood best friend—and the dark secrets lurking just beyond the safe confines of his picture-perfect neighborhood.

The worst thing to ever happen on Hemlock Circle occurred in Ethan Marsh’s backyard. One July night, ten-year-old Ethan and his best friend and neighbor, Billy, fell asleep in a tent set up on a manicured lawn in a quiet, quaint New Jersey cul de sac. In the morning, Ethan woke up alone. During the night, someone had sliced the tent open with a knife and taken Billy. He was never seen again.

Thirty years later, Ethan has reluctantly returned to his childhood home. Plagued by bad dreams and insomnia, he begins to notice strange things happening in the middle of the night. Someone seems to be roaming the cul de sac at odd hours, and signs of Billy’s presence keep appearing in Ethan’s backyard. Is someone playing a cruel prank? Or has Billy, long thought to be dead, somehow returned to Hemlock Circle?

The mysterious occurrences prompt Ethan to investigate what really happened that night, a quest that reunites him with former friends and neighbors and leads him into the woods that surround Hemlock Circle. Woods where Billy claimed monsters roamed and where a mysterious institute does clandestine research on a crumbling estate.

The closer Ethan gets to the truth, the more he realizes that no place—be it quiet forest or suburban street—is completely safe. And that the past has a way of haunting the present.]]> 379 Riley Sager 0593472381 Hilary 0 3.87 2024 Middle of the Night
author: Riley Sager
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/10
date added: 2025/04/10
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]]> <![CDATA[How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen: A Survival Guide to Life with Children Ages 2-7 (The How To Talk Series)]]> 33129127 OVER HALF A MILLION COPIES SOLD A must-have resource for anyone who lives or works with young kids, with an introduction by Adele Faber, coauthor of How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk, the international mega-bestseller The Boston Globe dubbed “The Parenting Bible.�For nearly forty years, parents have turned to How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk for its respectful and effective solutions to the unending challenges of raising children. Now, in response to growing demand, Adele’s daughter, Joanna Faber, along with Julie King, tailor How to Talk’s powerful communication skills to parents of children ages two to seven. Faber and King, each a parenting expert in her own right, share their wisdom accumulated over years of conducting How To Talk workshops with parents, teachers, and pediatricians. With a lively combination of storytelling, cartoons, and observations from their workshops, they provide concrete tools and tips that will transform your relationship with the children in your life. What do you do with a little kid who…won’t brush her teeth…screams in his car seat…pinches the baby...refuses to eat vegetables…throws books in the library...runs rampant in the supermarket? Organized by common challenges and conflicts, this book is an essential manual of communication strategies, including a chapter that addresses the special needs of children with sensory processing and autism spectrum disorders. This user-friendly guide will empower parents and caregivers of young children to forge rewarding, joyful relationships with terrible two-year-olds, truculent three-year-olds, ferocious four-year-olds, foolhardy five-year-olds, self-centered six-year-olds, and the occasional semi-civilized seven-year-old. And, it will help little kids grow into self-reliant big kids who are cooperative and connected to their parents, teachers, siblings, and peers.]]> 449 Joanna Faber 1501131664 Hilary 0 4.41 2017 How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen: A Survival Guide to Life with Children Ages 2-7 (The How To Talk Series)
author: Joanna Faber
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/08
date added: 2025/04/08
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]]> All the Colors of the Dark 203019740
Amerika, 1975. In het dorpje Monta Clare, Missouri, wordt tiener Joseph 'Patch' Macauley ontvoerd. Saint Brown, zet alles op het spel om haar beste vriend te vinden.

Patch ligt alleen in een pikdonkere kamer totdat hij een hand in de zijne voelt. Ze heet Grace en in het donker is haar stem zijn redding. Als Patch ontsnapt, is er echter geen bewijs dat ze ooit heeft bestaan, dus begint hij een grootse zoektocht om haar te vinden.

Terwijl jaren decennia worden en hoop een obsessie, jaagt Patch's jeugdvriendin Saint op de man die de twee ontvoerde en daarmee de enige jongen van wie ze ooit heeft gehouden een doel in het leven gaf.]]> 608 Chris Whitaker 0593798872 Hilary 0 4.23 2024 All the Colors of the Dark
author: Chris Whitaker
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/01
date added: 2025/04/02
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]]> Daughters of Olympus 199260477
Gods and men wage their petty wars, but it is the women of spring who will have the last word...

Demeter did not always live in fear. Once, the goddess of spring loved the world and the humans who inhabited it. After a devastating assault, though, she becomes a shell of herself. Her only solace is her daughter, Persephone.

A balm to her mother's pain, Persephone grows among wildflowers, never leaving the sanctuary Demeter built for them. But she aches to explore the mortal world--to gain her own experiences. NaĂŻve but determined, she secretly builds a life of her own under her mother's watchful gaze. But as she does so, she catches the eye of Hades, and is kidnapped...

Forced into a role she never wanted, Persephone learns that power suits her. In the land of the living, though, Demeter is willing to destroy the humans she once held dear--anything to protect her family. A mother who has lost everything and a daughter with more to gain than she ever realized, their story will irrevocably shape the world.]]> 448 Hannah Lynn 1728284309 Hilary 0 4.16 2024 Daughters of Olympus
author: Hannah Lynn
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> <![CDATA[The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way]]> 13259960
America has long compared its students to top-performing kids of other nations, but how do the world’s education superpowers look through the eyes of an American high school student? Author Amanda Ripley follows three teenagers who chose to spend one school year living and learning in Finland, South Korea, and Poland. Through their adventures, Ripley discovers startling truths about how attitudes, parenting, and rigorous teaching have revolutionized these countries� education results.

In The Smartest Kids in the World, Ripley’s astonishing new insights reveal that top-performing countries have achieved greatness only in the past several decades; that the kids who live there are learning to think for themselves, partly through failing early and often; and that persistence, hard work, and resilience matter more to our children’s life chances than self-esteem or sports.

Ripley’s investigative work seamlessly weaves narrative and research, providing in-depth analysis and gripping details that will keep you turning the pages. Written in a clear and engaging style, The Smartest Kids in the World will enliven public as well as dinner table debates over what makes for brighter and better students.]]> 306 Amanda Ripley 1451654421 Hilary 0 4.05 2013 The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way
author: Amanda Ripley
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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]]> Big Swiss 50361265 A brilliantly original and funny novel about a sex therapist’s transcriptionist who falls in love with a client while listening to her sessions. When they accidentally meet in real life, an explosive affair ensues.

Greta lives with her friend Sabine in an ancient Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York. The house, built in 1737, is unrenovated, uninsulated, and full of bees. Greta spends her days transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach who calls himself Om. She becomes infatuated with his newest client, a repressed married woman she affectionately refers to as Big Swiss, since she’s tall, stoic, and originally from Switzerland. Greta is fascinated by Big Swiss’s refreshing attitude toward trauma. They both have dark histories, but Big Swiss chooses to remain unattached to her suffering while Greta continues to be tortured by her past.

One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice at the dog park. In a panic, she introduces herself with a fake name and they quickly become enmeshed. Although Big Swiss is unaware of Greta’s true identity, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship�

Bold, outlandish, and filled with irresistible characters, Big Swiss is both a love story and also a deft examination of infidelity, mental health, sexual stereotypes, and more—from an amazingly talented, one-of-a-kind voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 333 Jen Beagin 1982153105 Hilary 0 3.62 2023 Big Swiss
author: Jen Beagin
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
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]]> The Wedding People 177328214 A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A Today Show #ReadwithJenna Book Club Pick

A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew.

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.]]> 384 Alison Espach 1250899567 Hilary 0 4.23 2024 The Wedding People
author: Alison Espach
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
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]]> The Warm Hands of Ghosts 154527508 During the Great War, a combat nurse searches for her brother, believed dead in the trenches despite eerie signs that suggest otherwise, in this hauntingly beautiful historical novel with a speculative twist from the New York Times bestselling author of The Bear and the Nightingale

January 1918. Laura Iven was a revered field nurse until she was wounded and discharged from the medical corps, leaving behind a brother still fighting in Flanders. Now home in Halifax, Canada, she receives word of Freddie’s death in combat, along with his personal effects—but something doesn’t make sense. Determined to uncover the truth, Laura returns to Belgium as a volunteer at a private hospital. Soon after arriving, she hears whispers about haunted trenches, and a strange hotelier whose wine gives soldiers the gift of oblivion. Could Freddie have escaped the battlefield, only to fall prey to something—or someone—else?

November 1917. Freddie Iven awakens after an explosion to find himself trapped in an overturned pillbox with a wounded enemy soldier, a German by the name of Hans Winter. Against all odds, the two men form an alliance and succeed in clawing their way out. Unable to bear the thought of returning to the killing fields, especially on opposite sides, they take refuge with a mysterious man who seems to have the power to make the hellscape of the trenches disappear.

As shells rain down on Flanders, and ghosts move among those yet living, Laura’s and Freddie’s deepest traumas are reawakened. Now they must decide whether their world is worth salvaging—or better left behind entirely.]]> 327 Katherine Arden 0593128265 Hilary 0 4.10 2024 The Warm Hands of Ghosts
author: Katherine Arden
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> Portrait of a Thief 58611246 Ocean’s Eleven meets The Farewell in Portrait of a Thief, a lush, lyrical heist novel inspired by the true story of Chinese art vanishing from Western museums; about diaspora, the colonization of art, and the complexity of the Chinese American identity.

History is told by the conquerors. Across the Western world, museums display the spoils of war, of conquest, of colonialism: priceless pieces of art looted from other countries, kept even now.

Will Chen plans to steal them back.

A senior at Harvard, Will fits comfortably in his carefully curated roles: a perfect student, an art history major and sometimes artist, the eldest son who has always been his parents� American Dream. But when a mysterious Chinese benefactor reaches out with an impossible—and illegal—job offer, Will finds himself something else as well: the leader of a heist to steal back five priceless Chinese sculptures, looted from Beijing centuries ago.

His crew is every heist archetype one can imag­ine—or at least, the closest he can get. A con artist: Irene Chen, a public policy major at Duke who can talk her way out of anything. A thief: Daniel Liang, a premed student with steady hands just as capable of lockpicking as suturing. A getaway driver: Lily Wu, an engineering major who races cars in her free time. A hacker: Alex Huang, an MIT dropout turned Silicon Valley software engineer. Each member of his crew has their own complicated relationship with China and the identity they’ve cultivated as Chinese Americans, but when Will asks, none of them can turn him down.

Because if they succeed? They earn fifty million dollars—and a chance to make history. But if they fail, it will mean not just the loss of everything they’ve dreamed for themselves but yet another thwarted at­tempt to take back what colonialism has stolen.

Equal parts beautiful, thoughtful, and thrilling, Portrait of a Thief is a cultural heist and an examination of Chinese American identity, as well as a necessary cri­tique of the lingering effects of colonialism.]]> 384 Grace D. Li 0593186079 Hilary 0 3.54 2022 Portrait of a Thief
author: Grace D. Li
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/05
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]]> <![CDATA[Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood]]> 62217096 A radical new examination of the transition into motherhood and how it affects the mind, brain and body

During pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood, women undergo a far-reaching physiological, psychological and social metamorphosis. Other than during adolescence, there is no other time in a human's life with such dramatic change, yet science, medicine, and philosophy have neglected this life-altering transition. Its seismic effects go largely unrepresented across literature and the arts. Speaking about motherhood as anything other than a pastel-hued dream remains, for the most part, taboo.

In this ground-breaking, deeply personal investigation, acclaimed journalist and author Lucy Jones brings to light the emerging concept of 'matrescence'. Drawing on new research across various fields—neuroscience and evolutionary biology; psychoanalysis and existential therapy; sociology, economics and ecology—Jones shows how the changes in the maternal mind, brain, and body are far more profound, wild, and enduring than we have been led to believe. She reveals the dangerous consequences of our neglect of the maternal experience, and interrogates the patriarchal and capitalist systems that have created the untenable situation mothers face today.

Here is an urgent examination of the modern institution of motherhood that seeks to unshackle all parents from oppressive social norms. As it deepens our understanding of matrescence, it raises vital questions about motherhood and femininity; interdependence and individual identity; and our relationships with each other and the world.]]> 310 Lucy Jones 0241513480 Hilary 0 4.45 2023 Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood
author: Lucy Jones
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/25
date added: 2025/02/25
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]]> Intermezzo 208932385 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 464 Sally Rooney 0374602646 Hilary 0 3.90 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
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]]> Greek Lessons 61438927 A powerful novel of the saving grace of language and human connection, from the celebrated author of The Vegetarian

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight.

Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages.

Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish - the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to one another. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity - their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression.

Greek Lessons is a tender love letter to human intimacy and connection, a novel to awaken the senses, vividly conjuring the essence of what it means to be alive.]]> 176 Han Kang 0593595289 Hilary 0 3.65 2011 Greek Lessons
author: Han Kang
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/02/09
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]]> <![CDATA[Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass, #7)]]> 123004998 Together they will rise. Or together they will fall.

Aelin Galathynius has vowed to save her people-but at a tremendous cost. Locked in an iron coffin by the Queen of the Fae, Aelin must draw upon her fiery will as she endures months of torture. The knowledge that yielding to Maeve will doom those she loves keeps her from breaking, but her resolve unravels with each passing day.

With Aelin captured, her friends and allies have scattered. Some bonds will grow even deeper, while others will be severed forever. But as destinies weave together at last, all must stand together if Erilea is to have any hope of salvation.

Sarah J. Maas's #1 New York Times bestselling Throne of Glass series draws to an explosive conclusion as Aelin fights for her life, her people, and the promise of a better world.]]> 988 Sarah J. Maas Hilary 0 4.79 2018 Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass, #7)
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.79
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> We All Want Impossible Things 60647499 Gilligan's Island reruns and REM concerts; hickeys and heartbreak; surprise Scottish wakes; marriages, infertility, and children. As Ash says, "Edi's memory is like the back-up hard drive for mine." But now the unthinkable has happened. Edi is dying of ovarian cancer and spending her last days at a hospice near Ash, who stumbles into heartbreak surrounded by her daughters, ex(ish) husband, dear friends, a poorly chosen lover (or two), and a rotating cast of beautifully, fleetingly human hospice characters.

As The Fiddler on the Roof soundtrack blasts all day long from the room next door, Edi and Ash reminisce, hold on, and try to let go. Meanwhile, Ash struggles with being an imperfect friend, wife, and parent--with life, in other words, distilled to its heartbreaking, joyful, and comedic essence.

For anyone who's ever lost a friend or had one. Get ready to laugh through your tears.]]> 228 Catherine Newman 0063230917 Hilary 0 4.18 2022 We All Want Impossible Things
author: Catherine Newman
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/27
date added: 2025/01/27
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]]> <![CDATA[How to Raise an Intuitive Eater: Raising the Next Generation with Food and Body Confidence]]> 60028278 With the wisdom of Intuitive Eating, a manifesto for parents to help them reject diet culture and raise the next generation to have a healthy relationship with food and their bodies.Kids are born intuitive eaters. Well-meaning parents, influenced by the diet culture that surrounds us all, are often concerned about how to best feed their children. Nearly everyone is talking about what to do about the childhood obesity epidemic. Meanwhile, every proposed solution for how to feed kids to promote health and prevent weight-related health concerns don’t mention the importance of one a healthy relationship with food. The consequences can be disastrous and are indistinguishable from the predictable and well-researched impact that dieting has on adults. Weight cycling, low self-esteem, deviations from normal growth, and eating disorders are just some of the negative health effects children can experience from the fear-based approach to food and eating that has become the norm in our culture.Sumner Brooks and Amee Severson believe that parents want the best for their kids and know a parent’s job is to make them feel safe in the world and their bodies. They want them to grow up to be competent, healthy eaters, living their best lives in the bodies they were born to have. Intuitive Eating is more talked about than ever, and the time is now to make sure parents truly understand what it means to raise an intuitive eater. With a compassionate and relatable voice, How to Raise an Intuitive Eater is the only book of its kind to teach parents what they need to know to improve health, happiness, and wellbeing for the littlest among us.]]> 375 Sumner Brooks 1250786614 Hilary 0 currently-reading 4.00 2022 How to Raise an Intuitive Eater: Raising the Next Generation with Food and Body Confidence
author: Sumner Brooks
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> Very Cold People 53283816
For Ruthie, the frozen, snow-padded town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. But this is no picturesque New England. Once "home of the bean and the cod, where Lowells speak only to Cabots, and Cabots speak only to God," by the tail-end of the twentieth century it is an unforgiving place, awash with secrets.

Very Cold People tells Ruthie's story, through her eyes: from the shame handed down through her immigrant forebears and indomitable mother, to the violences endured by her high school friends, each suffering a fate worse than the last. For Ruthie, Waitsfield is a place to be survived--and a girl like her would be lucky to get out alive.

Part social commentary and part Gothic horror, Very Cold People is an ungilded portrait of girlhood at the crossroads of history and social class. In her eagerly anticipated debut novel, Sarah Manguso has produced a masterwork on how very cold places make for very cold people, and a pitiless look at an all-American whiteness.]]> 208 Sarah Manguso Hilary 0 3.46 2022 Very Cold People
author: Sarah Manguso
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/24
date added: 2025/01/24
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]]> <![CDATA[Tower of Dawn (Throne of Glass, #6)]]> 123004979 A glorious empire. A desperate quest. An ancient secret.

Chaol Westfall and Nesryn Faliq have arrived in the shining city of Antica to forge an alliance with the Khagan of the Southern Continent, whose vast armies are Erilea's last hope. But they have also come to Antica for another purpose: to seek healing at the famed Torre Cesme for the wounds Chaol received in Rifthold.

After enduring unspeakable horrors as a child at the hands of Adarlanian soldiers, Yrene Towers has no desire to help the young lord from Adarlan, let alone heal him. Yet she has sworn an oath to assist those in need, and she will honor it. But Lord Westfall carries his own dark past, and Yrene soon realizes that those shadows could engulf them both.

Chaol, Nesryn, and Yrene will have to draw on every scrap of their resilience to overcome the danger that surrounds them. But while they become entangled in the political webs of the khaganate, long-awaited answers slumber deep in the mountains, where warriors soar on legendary ruks. Answers that might offer their world a chance at survival . . . or doom them all.

The final battle looms in this sixth book in the #1 New York Times bestselling Throne of Glass series.]]> 675 Sarah J. Maas Hilary 0 4.44 2017 Tower of Dawn (Throne of Glass, #6)
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef’s Journey to Discover America’s New Melting-Pot Cuisine]]> 35592077 Off the Menu, he shows how we each have a unique food memoir that is worthy of exploration. To Lee, recipes are narratives and a conduit to learn about a person, a place, or a point in time. He says that the best way to get to know someone is to eat the food they eat. Each chapter shares a personal tale of growth and self-discovery through the foods Lee eats and the foods of the people he interacts with—whether it’s the Korean budae jjigae of his father or the mustard beer cheese he learns to make from his wife’s German-American family. Each chapter is written in narrative form and punctuated with two recipes to highlight the story, including Green Tea Beignets, Cornbread Pancakes with Rhubarb Jam, and Butternut Squash Schnitzel. Each recipe tells a story, but when taken together, they form the arc of the narrative and contribute to the story we call the new American food.]]> 304 Edward Lee 1579657389 Hilary 4 3.97 2018 Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef’s Journey to Discover America’s New Melting-Pot Cuisine
author: Edward Lee
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/08
date added: 2025/01/17
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]]> James 179550498
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin�), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon� (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.]]> 304 Percival Everett 0385550375 Hilary 0 4.60 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> <![CDATA[I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris]]> 198562146 When you’re a woman of a certain age, you are only promisedĚýthat everything will get worse.ĚýBut what if everything you’ve been told is a lie?

Come to Paris, August 2021, when the City of Lights was still empty of tourists and a thirst for long-overdue pleasure gripped those who wandered its streets.

After New York City emptied out in March 2020, Glynnis MacNicol, aged forty-six, unmarried with no children, spent sixteen months alone in her tiny Manhattan apartment. The isolation was punishing. A year without touch. Women are warned of invisibility as they age, but this was an extreme loneliness no one can prepare you for. When the opportunity to sublet a friend’s apartment in Paris arose, MacNicol jumped on it. Leaving felt less like a risk than a necessity.

What follows is a decadent, joyful, unexpected journey into one woman’s pursuit of radical enjoyment.

The weeks in Paris are filled with friendship and food and sex. There is dancing on the Seine; a plethora of gooey cheese; midnight bike rides through empty Paris; handsome men; afternoons wandering through the empty Louvre; nighttime swimming in the ocean off a French island. And yes, plenty of nudity.

In the spirit of Nora Ephron and Deborah Levy (think Colette . . . if she’d had access to dating apps), I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself is an intimate, insightful, powerful, and endlessly pleasurable memoir of an intensely lived experience whose meaning and insight expand far beyond the personal narrative. MacNicol is determined to document the beauty, excess, and triumph of a life that does not require permission.

The pursuit of enjoyment is a political act, both a right and a responsibility. Enjoying yourself—as you are—is not something the world tells you is possible, but it is.

Here’s the proof.]]> 286 Glynnis MacNicol 0593655761 Hilary 0 3.71 2024 I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris
author: Glynnis MacNicol
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/01/13
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]]> All Fours 197828937
"A giddy, bold, mind-blowing tour de force by one of our most important literary writers." � George Saunders, Booker-Prize winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo

"Profound and bawdy and deeply human, a brilliant work of art from a completely blown open and fearless mind."—Emma Cline, New York Times bestselling author of The Guest

A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 333 Miranda July 0593190289 Hilary 0 3.47 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
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]]> <![CDATA[Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones]]> 40121378 Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving—every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results.

If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights.

Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field.

Learn how to:
-ĚýMake time for new habits (even when life gets crazy);
-ĚýOvercome a lack of motivation and willpower;
- Design your environment to make success easier;
- Get back on track when you fall off course;
...and much more.

Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits--whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.]]> 319 James Clear Hilary 0 4.34 2018 Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
author: James Clear
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/14
date added: 2024/12/19
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]]> Mexican Gothic 52873094
Noemí is also an unlikely rescuer: She’s a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she’s also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: Not of her cousin’s new husband, who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems to be fascinated by Noemí; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemi’s dreams with visions of blood and doom.

Her only ally in this inhospitable abode is the family’s youngest son. Shy and gentle, he seems to want to help Noemí, but might also be hiding dark knowledge of his family’s past. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place. The family’s once colossal wealth and faded mining empire kept them from prying eyes, but as Noemí digs deeper she unearths stories of violence and madness.

And NoemĂ­, mesmerized by the terrifying yet seductive world of High Place, may soon find it impossible to ever leave this enigmatic house behind.]]> 304 Silvia Moreno-Garcia Hilary 4 3.76 2020 Mexican Gothic
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/04
date added: 2024/12/18
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]]> <![CDATA[Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance, 2nd Edition (The Racing Weight Series)]]> 20448494 Racing Weight is a proven weight-management program designed specifically for endurance athletes.

Revealing new research and drawing from the best practices of elite athletes, coach and nutritionist Matt Fitzgerald lays out six easy steps to help cyclists, triathletes, and runners lose weight without harming their training.

This comprehensive and science-based program shows athletes the best ways to lose weight and avoid the common lifestyle and training hang-ups that keep new PRs out of reach.

The updated Racing Weight program helps athletes:

Improve diet quality Manage appetite Balance energy sources Easily monitor weight and performance Time nutrition throughout the day Train to get—and stay—lean

Racing Weight offers practical tools to make weight management easy. Fitzgerald’s no-nonsense Diet Quality Score improves diet without counting calories. Racing Weight superfoods are diet foods high in the nutrients athletes need for training. Supplemental strength training workouts can accelerate changes in body composition. Daily food diaries from 18 pro athletes reveal how the elites maintain an athletic diet while managing appetite.

Athletes know that every extra pound wastes energy and hurts performance. With Racing Weight, cyclists, triathletes, and runners have a simple program and practical tools to hit their target numbers on both the race course and the scale.

]]> 385 Matt Fitzgerald 1937716260 Hilary 0 3.97 2009 Racing Weight: How to Get Lean for Peak Performance, 2nd Edition (The Racing Weight Series)
author: Matt Fitzgerald
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/13
date added: 2024/12/16
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]]> <![CDATA[Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism]]> 55095887
The reality of runaway climate change is inextricably linked with the mass consumerist, capitalist society in which we live. And the cult of endless growth, and endless consumption of cheap disposable commodities, isn’t only destroying the world, it is damaging us and our way of being. How do we stop the impending catastrophe, and how can we create a movement capable of confronting it head-on?

Philosopher Kate Soper offers an urgent plea for a new vision of the good life, one that is capable of delinking prosperity from endless growth. Instead, Soper calls for renewed emphasis on the joys of being that are currently being denied, and shows the way to creating a future that allows not only for more free time, and less conventional and more creative ways of using it, but also for fairer and more fulfilling ways of working and existing. This is an urgent and necessary intervention into debates on climate change.

Reviews]]> 225 Kate Soper 178873887X Hilary 0 currently-reading 3.61 2020 Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism
author: Kate Soper
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (The Hunger Games, #0)]]> 210868783
The odds are against him. He's been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined -- every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute... and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.]]> 541 Suzanne Collins Hilary 0 4.13 2020 The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (The Hunger Games, #0)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/10
date added: 2024/12/10
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]]> Icebreaker 63490073 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A TikTok sensation! Sparks fly when a competitive figure skater and hockey team captain are forced to share a rink.

Anastasia Allen has worked her entire life for a shot at Team USA. It looks like everything is going according to plan when she gets a full scholarship to the University of California, Maple Hills and lands a place on their competitive figure skating team.

Nothing will stand in her way, not even the captain of the hockey team, Nate Hawkins.

Nate’s focus as team captain is on keeping his team on the ice. Which is tricky when a facilities mishap means they are forced to share a rink with the figure skating team—including Anastasia, who clearly can’t stand him.

But when Anastasia’s skating partner faces an uncertain future, she may have to look to Nate to take her shot.

Sparks fly, but Anastasia isn’t worried…because she could never like a hockey player, right?]]> 447 Hannah Grace Hilary 0 3.96 2022 Icebreaker
author: Hannah Grace
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/05
date added: 2024/12/05
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]]> <![CDATA[The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work]]> 63210216 A challenge to the tyranny of work and a call to reclaim our lives from its clutches.

From the moment we ask children what they want to "be" when they grow up, we exalt the dream job as if it were life's ultimate objective. Many entangle their identities with their jobs, with predictable damage to happiness, wellbeing, and even professional success.

In The Good Enough Job, journalist Simone Stolzoff traces how work has come to dominate Americans' lives--and why we find it so difficult to let go. Based on groundbreaking reporting and interviews with Michelin star chefs, Wall Street bankers, overwhelmed teachers and other workers across the American economy, Stolzoff exposes what we lose when we expect work to be more than a job. Rather than treat work as a calling or a dream, he asks what it would take to reframe work as a part of life rather than the entirety of our lives. What does it mean for a job to be good enough?

Through provocative critique and deep reporting, Stolzoff punctures the myths that keep us chained to our jobs. By exposing the lies we--and our employers--tell about the value of our labor, The Good Enough Job makes the urgent case for reclaiming our lives in a world centered around work.]]> 267 Simone Stolzoff 0593538978 Hilary 0 4.29 2023 The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work
author: Simone Stolzoff
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/29
date added: 2024/11/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Your Driver Is Waiting: A Novel]]> 74569870 A BEST BOOK OF THE Autostraddle, Shondaland, Booklist â€� InĚýthis electrifyingly fierce and funny social satire—inspired by the iconic 1970s film TaxiĚýDriver—aĚýride share driver is barely holding it together on the hunt for love, dignity, and financial security...until she decides she's done waiting.

“What you are about to read is a call to arms. Best to prepare for a confrontation." �New York Times Book Review

"A perfect gut punch of a novel…Full of love and real friendship and frustrations boiled over and the urge to burn everything down…This is a hard-hitting masterpiece.—Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth and Mostly Dead Things

Damani is tired. Her father just died on the job at a fast-food joint, and now she lives paycheck to paycheck in a basement, caring for her mom and driving for an app that is constantly cutting her take. The city is roiling in protests--everybody's in solidarity with somebody--but while she keeps hearing that they’re fighting for change on behalf of people like her, she literally can’t afford to pay attention.ĚýĚýĚýĚý

Then she gives a ride to Jolene (five stars, obviously). Jolene seems like she could be the perfect girlfriend--attentive, attractive, an ally--and their chemistry is off the charts. Jolene’s done the reading, she goes to every protest, and she says all the right things. So maybe Damani can look past the one thing that's holding her she’s never dated anyone with money before,Ěýnot to mention a white girl with money.ĚýBut just as their romance intensifies and Damani finally lets her guard down, Jolene does something unforgivable, setting off an explosive chain of events.

A wild, one-sitting readĚýbrimming with dark comedy, and piercing social commentary and announcing Priya Guns's feverishly original voice, Your Driver Is Waiting is a crackling send-up of our culture of modern alienation.]]> 313 Priya Guns 0385549318 Hilary 0 3.36 2023 Your Driver Is Waiting: A Novel
author: Priya Guns
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/11/26
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]]> Orbital 123314421 A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey,ĚýOrbitalĚýis an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours


"Ravishingly beautiful."Ěý—ĚýJoshua Ferris,ĚýNew York Times

A slender novel of epic power,ĚýOrbitalĚýdeftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space.ĚýSelected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.Ěý

Profound and contemplative,ĚýOrbitalĚýis a moving elegy to our environment and planet.]]> 212 Samantha Harvey 0802161553 Hilary 0 3.89 2023 Orbital
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/23
date added: 2024/11/23
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]]> Human Acts 30238842
An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of a historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.]]> 213 Han Kang Hilary 0 4.25 2014 Human Acts
author: Han Kang
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/13
date added: 2024/11/13
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]]> Choosing to Run: A Memoir 61420096
When Des woke up on April 16, 2018, the morning of the Boston Marathon, it was 39 degrees and raining, with high, gusty winds. The weather didn’t bother her. In fact, she thought it might be a blessing. She was far from peak form—recovering from illness and questioning her running future—and didn’t expect much of herself that day.

But as she ticked off mile after mile in the brutal conditions, passing familiar landmarks on the course she knew by heart, something shifted. Opportunity unexpectedly presented itself. Des tapped into her inner strength and remembered all of the reasons she loved to race.

Coming off Heartbreak Hill at Mile 22, Des took the lead and never relinquished it, becoming the 2018 Boston Marathon champion and the first American woman to win the race in thirty-three years.Ěý

Her career has always been defined by tenacity and an independent spirit, stretching back to her first competitive race in San Diego, when she beat better-outfitted, more experienced kids. Des was a two-time All-American at Arizona State University, and as her collegiate years wound down, she decided she wasn’t done with the sport. Des gambled on herself and moved to Michigan to give professional running a try. As she rose through the elite ranks, she became increasingly determined to do things her way in an industry often bound by the status quo.

In her first book, readers will learn the story behind that the way Des trains, the way she thinks, her relationships with other great runners of her generation, and how much she values her family and friends. They’ll read about her deep connection to the most famous marathon in the world, her two very different Olympic experiences, and how she defined new goals and set a world record at the 50-kilometer distance.
Ěý
Most of all, they’ll learn what makes her get up and run every day.]]> 272 Des Linden 0593186648 Hilary 0 4.24 2023 Choosing to Run: A Memoir
author: Des Linden
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/04
date added: 2024/11/10
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]]> Long Island Compromise 55675439 “Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?�

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.

But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives� successes and failures.

Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives� tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.]]> 480 Taffy Brodesser-Akner 0593133501 Hilary 0 3.88 2024 Long Island Compromise
author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/08
date added: 2024/11/08
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]]> <![CDATA[Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net]]> 198562179 Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women. Holding It Together chronicles the causes and dire consequences.America runs on women—womenĚýwho are tasked with holding society together at the seams andĚýfixing it when things fall apart.ĚýIn this tourĚýde force, acclaimed Sociologist JessicaĚýCalarcoĚýlays bare the devastating consequences of our status quo. ĚýHolding It Together draws on five years of researchĚýin whichĚýCalarcoĚýsurveyed over 4000 parents and conducted more than 400 hours of interviewsĚýwith women who bear the brunt of our broken system. A widowed single mother struggles to patch together meager public benefits while working three jobs; an aunt is pushed into caring for her niece and nephew at age fifteen once their family is shattered by the opioid epidemic;Ěýa daughter becomes the backstop caregiver for her mother, her husband, and her child because of the perceived flexibility of her job; aĚýwell-to-do couple grapples with the moral dilemma of leaning on overworked, underpaid childcare providers to achieve their egalitarian ideals.ĚýStories of grief and guilt abound. Yet, they are more than individual tragedies.ĚýĚýTracing present-dayĚýpoliciesĚýback toĚýtheir roots,ĚýCalarcoĚýreveals a systematic agreement to dismantle our country’s social safety net and persuade citizens to accept precarity while women bear the brunt.ĚýShe leads us to see women's labor as the reason we've gone so long withoutĚýtheĚýsupport systems that our peer nations take for granted, and howĚýwomen’s workĚýmaintains the illusion that we don't need a net.ĚýĚýWeaving eye-opening original research with revelatory sociological narrative, Holding It Together is a bold call to demand the institutional change that each of us deserves, and a warning about the perils of living without it.]]> 334 Jessica Calarco 0593538137 Hilary 0 4.12 2024 Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net
author: Jessica Calarco
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/01
date added: 2024/11/01
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]]> The List 60155834
It began as a crowdsourced collection of names and somehow morphed into an anonymous account posting allegations on social media. Ola would usually be the first to support such a list—she’d retweet it, call for the men to be fired, write article after article. Except this time Michael’s name is on it.]]> 336 Yomi Adegoke 0063274892 Hilary 0 3.17 2023 The List
author: Yomi Adegoke
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.17
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/21
date added: 2024/10/21
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]]> Night Sky with Exit Wounds 30245389 Night Sky with Exit Wounds is a book of poetry unlike any other. Steeped in war and cultural upheaval and wielding a fresh new language, Vuong writes about the most profound subjects â€� love and loss, conflict, grief, memory and desire â€� and attends to them all with lines that feel newly-minted, graceful in their cadences, passionate and hungry in their tender, close attention: â€â€¦the chief of police/facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola./A palm-sized photo of his father soaking/beside his left ear.â€� This is an unusual, important book: both gentle and visceral, vulnerable and assured, and its blend of humanity and power make it one of the best first collections of poetry to come out of America in years.

â€These are poems of exquisite beauty, unashamed of romance, and undaunted by looking directly into the horrors of war, the silences of history. One of the most important debut collections for a generation.â€� Andrew McMillan]]> 93 Ocean Vuong Hilary 0 4.05 2016 Night Sky with Exit Wounds
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2019/10/05
date added: 2024/10/16
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]]> The Safekeep 199897944 A “razor-sharp, perfectly plotted� (The Sunday Times) tale of desire, suspicion, and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961—a powerful exploration of the legacy of WWII and the darker parts of our collective past.

A house is a precious thing...

It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl—Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to infatuation, leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva—nor the house in which they live—are what they seem.

Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is “a brave and thrilling debut about facing up to the truth of history, and to one’s own desires� (The Guardian).]]> 272 Yael van der Wouden 1668034360 Hilary 0 4.25 2024 The Safekeep
author: Yael van der Wouden
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/14
date added: 2024/10/14
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]]> Five Decembers 57650856

"Read this book for its palpitating story, its perfect emotional and physical detailing and, most of all, for its unforgettable conjuring of a steamy quicksilver world that will be new to almost every reader."
Pico Iyer

December 1941. America teeters on the brink of war, and in Honolulu, Hawaii, police detective Joe McGrady is assigned to investigate a homicide that will change his life forever. Because the trail of murder he uncovers will lead him across the Pacific, far from home and the woman he loves; and though the U.S. doesn't know it yet, a Japanese fleet is already steaming toward Pearl Harbor.

This extraordinary novel is so much more than just a gripping crime story—it's a story of survival against all odds, of love and loss and the human cost of war. Spanning the entirety of World War II, FIVE DECEMBERS is a beautiful, masterful, powerful novel that will live in your memory forever.]]> 432 James Kestrel 178909612X Hilary 0 4.55 2021 Five Decembers
author: James Kestrel
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/06
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]]> Margo's Got Money Troubles 199796715
Margo braucht Geld. Seit sie ungewollt von ihrem Collegeprofessor, der sie jetzt mit dem Kind alleinlässt, schwanger wurde, mehr denn je. Wie Margo es auch dreht und wendet, kein Job scheint passend zu sein, oder könnte auch nur ansatzweise ihr Leben mit einem Baby finanzieren. Durch einen Zufall wird sie auf die Plattform OnlyFans aufmerksam, und Margo ist fasziniert von dieser Welt, in der Frauen mit sich und ihrem Körper experimentieren, und offenbar gut dabei verdienen. Also beginnt auch sie, Inhalte zu produzieren. Dabei erhält sie Unterstützung von ihrer Mitbewohnerin Suzie, einem großen Cosplay-Fan, und auch von ihrem Vater Jinx, einem Ex-Wrestlingprofi. Ehe sie sich versieht, ist Margo ein Online-Phänomen. Könnte dies die Antwort auf all ihre Probleme sein, oder hat der Internet-Ruhm einen zu hohen Preis?]]> 368 Rufi Thorpe 0063356600 Hilary 0 3.93 2024 Margo's Got Money Troubles
author: Rufi Thorpe
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/01
date added: 2024/10/01
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]]> The Midnight Feast 199791337 Secrets. Lies. Murder. Let the festivities begin...

It’s the opening night of The Manor, and no expense, small or large, has been spared. The infinity pool sparkles; crystal pouches for guests� healing have been placed in the Seaside Cottages and Woodland Hutches; the “Manor Mule� cocktail (grapefruit, ginger, vodka, and a dash of CBD oil) is being poured with a heavy hand. Everyone is wearing linen.

But under the burning midsummer sun, darkness stirs. Old friends and enemies circulate among the guests. Just outside the Manor’s immaculately kept grounds, an ancient forest bristles with secrets. And the Sunday morning of opening weekend, the local police are called. Something’s not right with the guests. There’s been a fire. A body’s been discovered.

THE FOUNDER * THE HUSBAND * THE MYSTERY GUEST * THE KITCHEN HELP

It all began with a secret, fifteen years ago. Now the past has crashed the party. And it’ll end in murder at� The Midnight Feast.]]> 320 Lucy Foley 0063003120 Hilary 0 3.79 2024 The Midnight Feast
author: Lucy Foley
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/26
date added: 2024/09/26
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]]> Liars 200556722 A searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars out of us all, from the author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments.

A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that. But I’d never suspected how easily I’d fall into one anyway.

When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joy and labor of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife.

As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her.

Combining the intensity of Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment and the pithy wisdom of Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation, Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.]]> 260 Sarah Manguso 0593241266 Hilary 0 3.82 2024 Liars
author: Sarah Manguso
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/25
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]]> The God of the Woods 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 490 Liz Moore Hilary 0 4.15 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/22
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]]> The Husbands 195372149 An exuberant debut, The Husbands delights in how do we navigate life, love, and choice in a world of never-ending options?

When Lauren returns home to her flat in London late one night, she is greeted at the door by her husband, Michael. There’s only one problem—she’s not married. She’s never seen this man before in her life. But according to her friends, her much-improved decor, and the photos on her phone, they’ve been together for years.

As Lauren tries to puzzle out how she could be married to someone she can’t remember meeting, Michael goes to the attic to change a lightbulb and abruptly disappears. In his place, a new man emerges, and a new, slightly altered life re-forms around her. Realizing that her attic is creating an infinite supply of husbands, Lauren confronts the question: If swapping lives is as easy as changing a lightbulb, how do you know you’ve taken the right path? When do you stop trying to do better and start actuallyĚýliving?]]> 352 Holly Gramazio 0385550626 Hilary 4 3.59 2024 The Husbands
author: Holly Gramazio
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/17
date added: 2024/09/17
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]]> <![CDATA[Empire of Storms (Throne of Glass, #5)]]> 126060933
As the kingdoms of Erilea fracture around her, enemies must become allies if Aelin is to keep those she loves from falling to the dark forces poised to claim her world. With war looming on all horizons, the only chance for salvation lies in a desperate quest that may mark the end of everything Aelin holds dear.

Aelin's journey from assassin to queen has entranced millions across the globe, and this fifth installment will leave fans breathless. Will Aelin succeed in keeping her world from splintering, or will it all come crashing down?]]> 704 Sarah J. Maas 1619636085 Hilary 0 4.72 2016 Empire of Storms (Throne of Glass, #5)
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.72
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/14
date added: 2024/09/14
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]]> Strange Sally Diamond 62606369 The internationally bestselling author of Lying in Wait returns with a wickedly dark, twisted, and brilliantly observed new novel about an enigmatic woman confronting her unknown past.

Reclusive Sally Diamond causes outrage by trying to incinerate her dead father. Now she’s the center of attention, not only from the hungry media and police detectives, but also a sinister voice from a past she does not remember. As she begins to discover the horrors of her early childhood, Sally steps into the world for the first time, making new friends, big decisions, and learning that people don’t always mean what they say.

But who is the man observing Sally from the other side of the world, and why does he call her Mary? And why does her new neighbor seem to be obsessed with her? Sally’s trust issues are about to be severely challenged…]]> 317 Liz Nugent 1501189735 Hilary 0 4.13 2023 Strange Sally Diamond
author: Liz Nugent
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/06
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]]> <![CDATA[Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See]]> 157980063
An award-winning journalist obsessed with obsession, Bianca Bosker’s existence was upended when she wandered into the art world—and couldn’t look away. Intrigued by artists who hyperventilate around their favorite colors and art fiends who max out credit cards to show hunks of metal they think can change the world, Bosker grew fixated on understanding why art matters and how she—or any of us—could engage with it more deeply.

In Get the Picture , Bosker throws herself into the nerve center of art and the people who live for gallerists, collectors, curators, and, of course, artists themselves—the kind who work multiple jobs to afford their studios while scrabbling to get eyes on their art. As she stretches canvases until her fingers blister, talks her way into A-list parties full of billionaire collectors, has her face sat on by a nearly-naked performance artist, and forces herself to stare at a single sculpture for hours on end while working as a museum security guard, she discovers not only the inner workings of the art-canonization machine but also a more expansive way of living.

Probing everything from cave paintings to Instagram, and from the science of sight to the importance of beauty as it examines art’s role in our culture, our economy, and our hearts, Get the Picture is a rollicking adventure that will change the way you see forever.]]> 380 Bianca Bosker 0525562214 Hilary 0 4.31 2024 Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See
author: Bianca Bosker
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/03
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]]> Funny Story 194802722 A shimmering, joyful new novel about a pair of opposites with the wrong thing in common, from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.

Daphne always loved the way her fiancé, Peter, told their story. How they met (on a blustery day), fell in love (over an errant hat), and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it... right up until the moment he realized he was actually in love with his childhood best friend Petra.

Which is how Daphne begins her new story: stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only person who could possibly understand her predicament: Petra’s ex, Miles Nowak.

Scruffy and chaotic—with a penchant for taking solace in the sounds of heart break love ballads—Miles is exactly the opposite of practical, buttoned-up Daphne, whose coworkers know so little about her they have a running bet that she’s either FBI or in witness protection. The roommates mainly avoid one another, until one day, while drowning their sorrows, they form a tenuous friendship and a plan. If said plan also involves posting deliberately misleading photos of their summer adventures together, well, who could blame them?

But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex... right?]]> 400 Emily Henry Hilary 0 4.21 2024 Funny Story
author: Emily Henry
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/24
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]]> Lies and Weddings 197146587 From the iconic internationally bestselling author of the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy: A forbidden affair erupts volcanically amid a decadent tropical wedding in this outrageous comedy of manners from the iconic author of Crazy Rich Asians.

Rufus Leung Gresham, future Earl of Greshambury and son of a former Hong Kong supermodel has a problem: the legendary Gresham Trust has been depleted by decades of profligate spending, and behind all the magazine covers and Instagram stories manors and yachts lies nothing more than a gargantuan mountain of debt. The only solution, put forth by Rufus’s scheming mother, is for Rufus to attend his sister’s wedding at a luxury eco-resort, a veritable who’s-who of sultans, barons, and oligarchs, and seduce a woman with money.

Should he marry Solène de Courcy, a French hotel heiress with honey blond tresses and a royal bloodline? Should he pursue Martha Dung, the tattooed venture capital genius who passes out billions like lollipops? Or should he follow his heart, betray his family, squander his legacy, and finally confess his love to the literal girl next door, the humble daughter of a doctor, Eden Tong? When a volcanic eruption burns through the nuptials and a hot mic exposes a secret tryst, the Gresham family plans—and their reputation—go up in flames.

Can the once-great dukedom rise from the ashes? Or will a secret tragedy, hidden for two decades, reveal a shocking twist?

In a globetrotting tale that takes us from the black sand beaches of Hawaii to the skies of Marrakech, from the glitzy bachelor pads of Los Angeles to the inner sanctums of England’s oldest family estates, Kevin Kwan unfurls a juicy, hilarious, sophisticated and thrillingly plotted story of love, money, murder, sex, and the lies we tell about them all.]]> 448 Kevin Kwan 0385546300 Hilary 0 3.96 2024 Lies and Weddings
author: Kevin Kwan
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/19
date added: 2024/08/19
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]]> The End of Drum-Time 60741781 FINALIST FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

An epic love story in the vein of Cold Mountain and The Great Circle, about a young reindeer herder and a minister’s daughter in the nineteenth century Arctic Circle

In 1851, at a remote village in the Scandinavian tundra, a Lutheran minister known as Mad Lasse tries in vain to convert the native Sámi reindeer herders to his faith. But when one of the most respected herders has a dramatic awakening and dedicates his life to the church, his impetuous son, Ivvár, is left to guard their diminishing herd alone. By chance, he meets Mad Lasse’s daughter Willa, and their blossoming infatuation grows into something that ultimately crosses borders—of cultures, of beliefs, and of political divides—as Willa follows the herders on their arduous annual migration north to the sea.

Gorgeously written and sweeping in scope, Hanna Pylväinen's The End of Drum-Time immerses readers in a world lit by the northern lights, steeped in age-old rituals, and guided by passions that transcend place and time.]]> 368 Hanna Pylväinen 1250822904 Hilary 0 to-read 3.88 2023 The End of Drum-Time
author: Hanna Pylväinen
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/15
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]]> <![CDATA[Queen of Shadows (Throne of Glass, #4)]]> 76707900 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

Everyone Celaena Sardothien loves has been taken from her. But she’s at last returned to the empire—for vengeance, to rescue her once-glorious kingdom, and to confront the shadows of her past�

She has embraced her identity as Aelin Galathynius, Queen of Terrasen. But before she can reclaim her throne, she must fight.

She will fight for her cousin, a warrior prepared to die for her. She will fight for her friend, a young man trapped in an unspeakable prison. And she will fight for her people, enslaved to a brutal king and awaiting their lost queen’s triumphant return.

The fourth volume in the New York Times bestselling series continues Celaena’s epic journey and builds to a passionate, agonizing crescendo that might just shatter her world.]]> 648 Sarah J. Maas 1639731008 Hilary 0 4.64 2015 Queen of Shadows (Throne of Glass, #4)
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.64
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/15
date added: 2024/08/15
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]]> The Ministry of Time 199798179 A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all:

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats� from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge�: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as �1847� or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,� “Spotify,� and “the collapse of the British Empire.� But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.]]> 339 Kaliane Bradley 1668045141 Hilary 0 to-read 3.54 2024 The Ministry of Time
author: Kaliane Bradley
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/13
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]]> The Lost Daughter 1058564
But she soon finds herself intrigued by Nina, a young mother on the beach, eventually striking up a conversation with her. After Nina confides a dark secret, one seemingly trivial occurrence leads to events that could destroy Nina’s family.]]> 140 Elena Ferrante 1933372427 Hilary 0 to-read, kindle 3.70 2006 The Lost Daughter
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read, kindle
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]]> <![CDATA[This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life]]> 157995996 A manifesto on the gender politics of marriage (bad) and divorce (actually pretty good!) in America today, and an argument that the former needs a reboot

Studies show that nearly 70 percent of divorces are initiated by women—women who are tired, fed up, exhausted, and unhappy. Journalist Lyz Lenz is one such woman whose life fell apart after she reached a breaking point in her twelve-year marriage. In this exuberant and unapologetic book, Lenz flips the script on that narrative and preaches the good gospel of the power of divorce.

The end of a marriage is often seen as the failure of the individual—most often the woman. We've all seen how media portray divorced women: sad, lonely, drowning their sorrows in a bottle of wine, desperate for a new man. It’s as though they did something wrong, so they’ve been cast out from society. Lenz sees divorce as a practical and powerful solution for women to take back the power they are owed, while examining why we call divorce a failure when it's heterosexual marriage that has been flawed all along. How can women succeed in marriage when most relationships are based on inequality?

This book weaves reportage with sociological research, literature with popular culture, and personal stories of coming together and breaking up to create a kaleidoscopic and poignant portrait of American marriage today. Lenz argues that the mechanisms of American power, justice, love, and gender equality remain deeply flawed, and that marriage, like any other cultural institution, is due for a reckoning. Unlike any other book about divorce, this raucous manifesto for acceptance, solidarity, and collective female refusal takes readers on a riveting ride—all while pointing us toward something a little freer.]]> 272 Lyz Lenz 0593442687 Hilary 0 4.21 2024 This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life
author: Lyz Lenz
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/04
date added: 2024/08/04
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]]> Hot Air 214986266 A joyfully unhinged story of money, marriage, sex, and revenge unspools when a billionaire crashes his hot air balloon into the middle of a post-pandemic first date.

Joannie hasn’t been on a date in seven years when Johnny invites Joannie and her daughter to dinner. His house is beautiful, his son is sweet, and their first kiss is, well, it’s not the best, but Joannie could convince herself it was nice enough. But when Joannie’s childhood crush, a summer camp fling turned famous billionaire, crash lands his hot air balloon in Johnny’s swimming pool, Joannie dives in.Ěý

Soon she finds herself alighting on a lost weekend with Johnny the bad kisser, Jonathan the billionaire, and Julia his smart, stunning wife. Does Joannie want Jonathan? Does Julia want her husband? Or Joannie? Or Joannie’s beautiful little girl? Does Johnny want Julia? Does Jonathan want Joannie, or Julia, or maybe, his much younger personal assistant, Vivian, who is tasked to fix it all? A tale of lust and money and lust for money, Hot Air is as astonishing as it is blisteringly funny, a delirious, delicious story for our billionaire era.]]> 208 Marcy Dermansky 0593320905 Hilary 0 to-read 3.43 2025 Hot Air
author: Marcy Dermansky
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[This Is How You Lose the Time War]]> 55710260 From award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone comes an enthralling, romantic novel spanning time and space about two time-traveling rivals who fall in love and must change the past to ensure their future.

Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandment finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading.

Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, becomes something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

Except the discovery of their bond would mean the death of each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win. That’s how war works, right?

Cowritten by two beloved and award-winning sci-fi writers, This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epic love story spanning time and space.]]> 223 Amal El-Mohtar Hilary 0 3.93 2019 This Is How You Lose the Time War
author: Amal El-Mohtar
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/27
date added: 2024/07/29
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]]> Clear 176443690
Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies's intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us. Perfectly structured and surprising at every turn, Clear is a marvel of storytelling, an exquisite short novel by a master of the form.]]> 196 Carys Davies 1668030667 Hilary 4 3.85 Clear
author: Carys Davies
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.85
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/15
date added: 2024/07/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass, #3)]]> 125810184
The bestselling series that has captured readers all over the world reaches new heights in this sequel to the New York Times best-selling Crown of Midnight. Packed with heart-pounding action, fierce new characters, and swoon-worthy romance, this third book will enthrall readers from start to finish.]]> 583 Sarah J. Maas 1619630664 Hilary 0 4.51 2014 Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass, #3)
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/23
date added: 2024/07/23
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]]> West 35297141
West is the story of Bellman's journey and of Bess, waiting at home for her father to return.]]> 160 Carys Davies 1501179349 Hilary 0 to-read 3.67 2018 West
author: Carys Davies
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> Very Bad Company 195790649
When another high-level executive vanishes after the first night, the disappearance has the potential to derail the future of the company’s sale and cost everyone on the team millions. Now more than ever Caitlin and her colleagues must continue the charade—partaking in team-building exercises, group brainstorms, and dinners—to keep the future of Aurora afloat amid the fatal speculations.]]> 272 Emma Rosenblum 1250906555 Hilary 0 3.22 2024 Very Bad Company
author: Emma Rosenblum
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.22
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/11
date added: 2024/07/11
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]]> North Woods 75569082
This magisterial and highly inventive novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason brims with love and madness, humor and hope. Following the cycles of history, nature, and even language, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment, to history, and to one another. It is not just an unforgettable novel about secrets and destinies, but a way of looking at the world that asks the timeless question: How do we live on, even after we’re gone?]]> 320 Daniel Mason Hilary 0 4.12 2023 North Woods
author: Daniel Mason
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/09
date added: 2024/07/09
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]]> The Sicilian Inheritance 182777488 From bestselling author and award-winning journalist Jo Piazza, comes aĚýtransportingĚýnovel rooted inĚýthe author's ownĚýfamily history about a long-awaited trip to Sicily, a disputed inheritance, and a family secret that some will kill to protect . . .

Sara Marsala barely knows who she is anymore after the failure of her business and marriage.ĚýOn top of that, her beloved great-aunt Rosie passes away, leaving Sara bereft withĚýgrief. But Aunt Rosie's death also opens an escape from her life and a window into the past by way of a plane ticket to Sicily, a deed to a possibly valuable plot of land, and a bombshell family secret.ĚýRosie believes Sara's great-grandmother Serafina, the family matriarch who was left behind while her husband worked in America, didn’t die of illness as family lore has it . . . she was murdered.

Thus begins a twist-filled adventure that takes Sara all over the picturesque Italian countryside as she races to solve a mystery and prove her birthright. Flashing back to the past, we meet Serafina, a feisty and headstrong young woman in the early 1900s thrust into motherhood in her teens, who fought for a better life not just for herself but for all the women of her small village. Unsurprisingly it isn’t long before a woman challenging the status quo finds herself in danger.

As Sara discovers more about Serafina she also realizes she is coming head-to-head with the same menacing forces that took down her great-grandmother. At once an immersive multigenerational mystery and an ode to the undaunted heroism of everyday women, The Sicilian Inheritance is an atmospheric, page-turning delight.]]> 384 Jo Piazza 0593474171 Hilary 4 4.19 2024 The Sicilian Inheritance
author: Jo Piazza
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/30
date added: 2024/06/30
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]]> <![CDATA[Just for the Summer (Part of Your World, #3)]]> 195820807
Emma hadn't planned that her next assignment as a traveling nurse would be in Minnesota, but she and her best friend agree that dating Justin is too good of an opportunity to pass up, especially when they get to rent an adorable cottage on a private island on Lake Minnetonka.

It's supposed to be a quick fling, just for the summer. But when Emma's toxic mother shows up and Justin has to assume guardianship of his three siblings, they're suddenly navigating a lot more than they expected--including catching real feelings for each other. What if this time Fate has actually brought the perfect pair together?]]> 432 Abby Jimenez 1538704439 Hilary 0 to-read 4.35 2024 Just for the Summer (Part of Your World, #3)
author: Abby Jimenez
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Women 127305853 From the celebrated author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds comes Kristin Hannah's The Women—at once an intimate portrait of coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of a nation divided.

Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie� McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.

As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is over-whelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. Each day is a gamble of life and death, hope and betrayal; friendships run deep and can be shattered in an instant. In war, she meets—and becomes one of—the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost.

But war is just the beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends. The real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam.

The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm’s way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has too often been forgotten. A novel about deep friendships and bold patriotism, The Women is a richly drawn story with a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage under fire will come to define an era.]]> 471 Kristin Hannah 1250178630 Hilary 0 to-read 4.59 2024 The Women
author: Kristin Hannah
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/26
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]]> The Covenant of Water 180357146 From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret

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

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. Imbued with humor, deep emotion, and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.]]> 715 Abraham Verghese 0802162177 Hilary 0 4.34 2023 The Covenant of Water
author: Abraham Verghese
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/26
date added: 2024/06/26
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]]> The Paris Novel 195431572
Stella reached for an oyster, tipped her head and tossed it back. It was cool and slippery, the flavor so briny it was like diving into the ocean... Oysters, she thought, where have they been all my life?

When her estranged mother dies, Stella is left with an unusual gift: a one-way plane ticket, and a note reading â€Go to Parisâ€�. But Stella is hardly cut out for adventure; a childhood trauma has kept her confined to the strict routines of her comfort zone. When her boss encourages her to take time off, Stella resigns herself to honoring her mother’s last wishes.

Alone in a foreign city, StellaĚýfalls into old habits, living cautiously and frugally. Then she stumbles across a vintage store where she tries on a fabulous Dior dress. The shopkeeper insists that this dress was meant for Stella and, for the first time in her life, Stella does something impulsive. She buys the dress and together they embark on an adventure.Ěý

Her first iconic brasserie Les Deux Magots, where Stella tastes her first oysters, and then meets an octogenarian art collector who decides to take her under his wing. As Jules introduces her to a veritable who’s who of the 1980s Paris literary, art, and culinary worlds, Stella begins to understand what it might mean to live a larger life.

As weeks—and many decadent meals—go by, Stella ends up livingĚýas a “tumbleweedâ€� at famed bookstore Shakespeare & Company, uncovers a hundred-year-old mystery in a Manet painting, and discovers a passion for food that may be connected to her past.ĚýA feast for the senses, this novel is a testament toĚýliving deliciously, taking chances, and finding your true home.]]> 386 Ruth Reichl 0812996313 Hilary 0 4.28 2024 The Paris Novel
author: Ruth Reichl
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/22
date added: 2024/06/22
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]]> Bear 196056205 A mesmerising novel of two sisters on a Pacific Northwest island whose lives are upended by an unexpected visitor � a tale of family, obsession, and a mysterious creature in the woods, by the celebrated, bestselling author of Disappearing Earth.

They were sisters and they would last past the end of time.

Sam and her sister, Elena, dream of another life. On the island off the coast of Washington where they were born and raised, they and their mother struggle to survive. Sam works long days on the ferry that delivers wealthy mainlanders to their vacation homes while Elena bartends at the local golf club, but even together they can’t earn enough to get by, stirring their frustration about the limits that shape their existence.

Then one night on the boat, Sam spots a bear swimming the dark waters of the channel. Where is it going? What does it want? When the bear turns up by their home, Sam, terrified, is more convinced than ever that it’s time to leave the island. But Elena responds differently to the massive beast. Enchanted by its presence, she throws into doubt the plan to escape and puts their long-held dream in danger.

A story about the bonds of sisterhood and the mysteries of the animals that live among us � and within us � Bear is a propulsive, mythical, rich novel from one of the most acclaimed young writers in America.]]> 304 Julia Phillips 0525520430 Hilary 0 to-read 3.21 2024 Bear
author: Julia Phillips
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/21
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]]> Such a Bad Influence 198509143
Hazel Davis is drifting: she’s stalled in her career, living in a city she hates, and less successful than her younger sister @evelyn, a lifestyle influencer. Evie came of age on the family YouTube channel after a viral video when she was five. Ten years older and spotlight-averse, Hazel managed to dodge the family business—so although she can barely afford her apartment, at least she made her own way.

Evie is eighteen now, with a multimillion-dollar career, but Hazel is still protective of her little sister and skeptical of the way everyone seems to want a piece of her: Evie’s followers, her YouTuber boyfriend and influencer frenemies, and their opportunistic mother. So when Evie disappears one day during an unsettling live stream that cuts out midsentence, Hazel is horrified to have her worst instincts proven right.

As theories about Evie’s disappearance tear through the internet, inspiring hashtags, Reddit threads, and podcast episodes, Hazel throws herself into the darkest parts of her sister’s world to untangle the truth. After all, Hazel knows Evie better than anyone else . . . doesn’t she?]]> 336 Olivia Muenter 1683694015 Hilary 0 to-read 3.38 2024 Such a Bad Influence
author: Olivia Muenter
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/21
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In]]> 123921296
One In a Millennial is an exploration of pop culture, nostalgia, the millennial zeitgeist, and the life lessons learned (for better and for worse) from coming of age as a member of a much-maligned generation.

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

With her trademark style and vulnerability, One In a Millennial is sharp, hilarious, and heartwarming all at once. She tackles AOL Instant Messenger, purity culture, American Girl Dolls, going out tops, Spice Girl feminism, her feelings about millennial motherhood, and more. Kate’s laugh-out-loud asides and keen observations will have you nodding your head and maybe even tearing up.]]> 328 Kate Kennedy 1250285127 Hilary 0 to-read 3.73 2024 One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In
author: Kate Kennedy
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> Real Americans 62929342 Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

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

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

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

From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family, and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures? ]]> 399 Rachel Khong 0593537254 Hilary 4 3.94 2024 Real Americans
author: Rachel Khong
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/20
date added: 2024/06/20
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]]> <![CDATA[The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store]]> 85148114
ĚýĚýĚýĚýAs these charactersâ€� stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.]]> 400 James McBride 0593422961 Hilary 0 4.25 2023 The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
author: James McBride
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/17
date added: 2024/06/17
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]]> <![CDATA[The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook]]> 191746386
On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution . Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach on the island of Hawaii, Cook was killed in a conflict with native Hawaiians. How did Cook, who was unique among captains for his respect for Indigenous peoples and cultures, come to that fatal moment?

Hampton Sides� bravura account of Cook’s last journey both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s. Cook was renowned for his peerless seamanship, his humane leadership, and his dedication to science-–the famed naturalist Joseph Banks accompanied him on his first voyage, and Cook has been called one of the most important figures of the Age of Enlightenment. He was also deeply interested in the native people he encountered. In fact, his stated mission was to return a Tahitian man, Mai, who had become the toast of London, to his home islands. On previous expeditions, Cook mapped huge swaths of the Pacific, including the east coast of Australia, and initiated first European contact with numerous peoples. He treated his crew well, and endeavored to learn about the societies he encountered with curiosity and without judgment.

Yet something was different on this last voyage. Cook became mercurial, resorting to the lash to enforce discipline, and led his two vessels into danger time and again. Uncharacteristically, he ordered violent retaliation for perceived theft on the part of native peoples. This may have had something to do with his secret orders, which were to chart and claim lands before Britain’s imperial rivals could, and to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. Whatever Cook’s intentions, his scientific efforts were the sharp edge of the colonial sword, and the ultimate effects of first contact were catastrophic for Indigenous people around the world. The tensions between Cook’s overt and covert missions came to a head on the shores of Hawaii. His first landing there was harmonious, but when Cook returned after mapping the coast of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, his exploitative treatment of the Hawaiians led to the fatal encounter.

At once a ferociously-paced story of adventure on the high seas and a searching examination of the complexities and consequences of the Age of Exploration, THE WIDE WIDE SEA is a major work from one of our finest narrative nonfiction writers.]]> 408 Hampton Sides 0385544766 Hilary 0 4.47 2024 The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook
author: Hampton Sides
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/09
date added: 2024/06/09
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]]> The Bee Sting 62039166 From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under―but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 Hilary 0 3.92 2023 The Bee Sting
author: Paul Murray
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/03
date added: 2024/06/03
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]]> Tom Lake 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X Hilary 4 3.92 2023 Tom Lake
author: Ann Patchett
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/07
date added: 2024/06/03
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]]> Splinters 155685405 Ěý
Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. She has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books� Splinters enters a new realm.
Ěý
In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents� complicated bond. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once—a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover—Jamison places the magical and the mundane side by side in surprising ways: pumping breastmilk in a shared university office, driving the open highway in the throes of new love, growing a tender second skin of consciousness as she watches her daughter come alive to the world. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, an almost impossibly deep reckoning with the muchness of life and art, and a book that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.
Ěý
How do we move forward into joy when we are haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we’ve caused? A memoir for which the very term tour de force seems to have been coined, Splinters plumbs these and other pressing questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page. Jamison has delivered a book with the linguistic daring and emotional acuity that made The Empathy Exams and The Recovering instant classics, even as she reaches new depths of understanding, piercing the reader to the core. A master of nonfiction, she evinces once again her ability to “stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon� (NPR).]]> 272 Leslie Jamison 0316374881 Hilary 4 3.79 2024 Splinters
author: Leslie Jamison
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/14
date added: 2024/06/03
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]]> Seven Days in June 57378707 Seven days to fall in love, fifteen years to forget and seven days to get it all back again... From the author of The Perfect Find, this is a witty, romantic, and sexy-as-hell new novel of two writers and their second chance at love.

Brooklynite Eva Mercy is a single mom and bestselling erotica writer, who is feeling pressed from all sides. Shane Hall is a reclusive, enigmatic, award-winning literary author who, to everyone's surprise, shows up in New York.

When Shane and Eva meet unexpectedly at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their past buried traumas, but the eyebrows of New York's Black literati. What no one knows is that twenty years earlier, teenage Eva and Shane spent one crazy, torrid week madly in love. They may be pretending that everything is fine now, but they can't deny their chemistry-or the fact that they've been secretly writing to each other in their books ever since.

Over the next seven days in the middle of a steamy Brooklyn summer, Eva and Shane reconnect, but Eva's not sure how she can trust the man who broke her heart, and she needs to get him out of New York so that her life can return to normal. But before Shane disappears again, there are a few questions she needs answered. . .

With its keen observations of Black life and the condition of modern motherhood, as well as the consequences of motherless-ness, Seven Days in June is by turns humorous, warm and deeply sensual.]]> 336 Tia Williams 1538719118 Hilary 0 4.16 2021 Seven Days in June
author: Tia Williams
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/03
date added: 2024/06/03
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]]> Hurricane Girl 58065398
Allison Brody is thirty and newly arrived on the east coast after just managing to flee her movie producer boyfriend. She has some money, saved up from years of writing and waitressing, and so she spends it, buying a house on the beach. But then a Category Three hurricane makes landfall and scatters her home up and down the shore, leaving Allison adrift. Should she follow the strange camera man home from the bar and stay in his guest room? Is that a glass vase he smashed on her skull? Can she wipe the blood from her eyes, get in her car and drive to her mother’s? Does she really love the brain surgeon who saved her, or is she just using him for his swimming pool? And is it possible to ever truly heal emotionally without seeking some measure of revenge? A gripping, provocative novel that walks a knife’s edge of comedy and horror, Hurricane Girl is the work of singular talent, a novelist unafraid to explore the intersection of love, sex, violence, and freedom--while celebrating the true joy that can be found in a great swim and a good turkey sandwich.]]> 240 Marcy Dermansky 0593320883 Hilary 0 3.63 2022 Hurricane Girl
author: Marcy Dermansky
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/26
date added: 2024/06/03
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]]> Good Material 96177629
Now he is. . .

Without a home

Waiting for his stand-up career to take off

Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn't looking

Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of his ruined relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. But Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend's side of the story�

In this sharply funny and exquisitely relatable story of romantic disaster and friendship, Dolly Alderton offers up a love story with two endings, demonstrating once again why she is one of the most exciting writers today, and the true voice of a generation.]]> 345 Dolly Alderton 0241523672 Hilary 0 3.85 2023 Good Material
author: Dolly Alderton
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/17
date added: 2024/06/03
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[The Assassin's Blade (Throne of Glass, #0.1-0.5)]]> 126062562
When Celaena's scheming master, Arobynn Hamel, dispatches her on missions that take her from remote islands to hostile deserts, she finds herself acting independently of his wishes—and questioning her own allegiance. Along the way, she makes friends and enemies alike, and discovers that she feels far more for Sam than just friendship. But by defying Arobynn’s orders, Celaena risks unimaginable punishment, and with Sam by her side, he is in danger, too. They will have to risk it all if they hope to escape Arobynn’s clutches—and if they fail, they’ll lose not just a chance at freedom, but their lives . . .

A prequel to Throne of Glass, this collection of five novellas offers readers a deeper look into the history of this cunning assassin and her enthralling—and deadly—world.

Included in this volume:
The Assassin and the Pirate Lord
The Assassin and the Healer
The Assassin and the Desert
The Assassin and the Underworld
The Assassin and the Empire]]> 451 Sarah J. Maas 1619632217 Hilary 0 4.16 2014 The Assassin's Blade (Throne of Glass, #0.1-0.5)
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/26
date added: 2024/06/03
shelves:
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]]> The Berry Pickers 123036004 A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that haunts the survivors, unravels a community, and remains unsolved for nearly fifty years.

July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.

For readers of The Vanishing Half and Woman of Light, this showstopping debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.]]> 307 Amanda Peters 1646221958 Hilary 0 4.04 2023 The Berry Pickers
author: Amanda Peters
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/27
date added: 2024/06/03
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]]> The Great Divide 181110028
It is said that the canal will be the greatest feat of engineering in history. But first, it must be built. For Francisco, a local fisherman who resents the foreign powers clamoring for a slice of his country, nothing is more upsetting than the decision of his son, Omar, to work as a digger in the excavation zone. But for Omar, whose upbringing was quiet and lonely, this job offers a chance to finally find connection.

Ada Bunting is a bold sixteen-year-old from Barbados who arrives in Panama as a stowaway alongside thousands of other West Indians seeking work. Alone and with no resources, she is determined to find a job that will earn enough money for her ailing sister’s surgery. When she sees a young man—Omar—who has collapsed after a grueling shift, she is the only one who rushes to his aid.

John Oswald has dedicated his life to scientific research and has journeyed to Panama in single-minded pursuit of one goal: eliminating malaria. But now, his wife, Marian, has fallen ill herself, and when he witnesses Ada’s bravery and compassion, he hires her on the spot as a caregiver. This fateful decision sets in motion a sweeping tale of ambition, loyalty, and sacrifice.

Searing and empathetic, The Great Divide explores the intersecting lives of activists, fishmongers, laborers, journalists, neighbors, doctors, and soothsayers—those rarely acknowledged by history even as they carved out its course.]]> 321 Cristina Henríquez 0063291320 Hilary 4 3.62 2024 The Great Divide
author: Cristina HenrĂ­quez
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/25
date added: 2024/05/25
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]]> How to Say Babylon 62919742 Educated and Born a Crime, How to Say Babylon is the stunning story of the author’s struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as a woman and poet.

Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.

In an effort to keep Babylon outside the gate, he forbade almost everything. In place of pants, the women in her family were made to wear long skirts and dresses to cover their arms and legs, head wraps to cover their hair, no make-up, no jewelry, no opinions, no friends. Safiya’s mother, while loyal to her father, nonetheless gave Safiya and her siblings the gift of books, including poetry, to which Safiya latched on for dear life. And as Safiya watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under housework and the rigidity of her father’s beliefs, she increasingly used her education as a sharp tool with which to find her voice and break free. Inevitably, with her rebellion comes clashes with her father, whose rage and paranoia explodes in increasing violence. As Safiya’s voice grows, lyrically and poetically, a collision course is set between them.

How to Say Babylon is Sinclair’s reckoning with the culture that initially nourished but ultimately sought to silence her; it is her reckoning with patriarchy and tradition, and the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica. Rich in lyricism and language only a poet could evoke, How to Say Babylon is both a universal story of a woman finding her own power and a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we may know how to name, Rastafari, but one we know little about.']]> 352 Safiya Sinclair 1982132337 Hilary 0 4.44 2023 How to Say Babylon
author: Safiya Sinclair
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/22
date added: 2024/05/22
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]]> <![CDATA[Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans]]> 54304028
In Hunt, Gather, Parent, Doucleff sets out with her three-year-old daughter in tow to learn and practice parenting strategies from families in three of the world’s most venerable communities: Maya families in Mexico, Inuit families above the Arctic Circle, and Hadzabe families in Tanzania. She sees that these cultures don’t have the same problems with children that Western parents do. Most strikingly, parents build a relationship with young children that is vastly different from the one many Western parents develop—it’s built on cooperation instead of control, trust instead of fear, and personalized needs instead of standardized development milestones.

Maya parents are masters at raising cooperative children. Without resorting to bribes, threats, or chore charts, Maya parents rear loyal helpers by including kids in household tasks from the time they can walk. Inuit parents have developed a remarkably effective approach for teaching children emotional intelligence. When kids cry, hit, or act out, Inuit parents respond with a calm, gentle demeanor that teaches children how to settle themselves down and think before acting. Hadzabe parents are world experts on raising confident, self-driven kids with a simple tool that protects children from stress and anxiety, so common now among American kids.

Not only does Doucleff live with families and observe their techniques firsthand, she also applies them with her own daughter, with striking results. She learns to discipline without yelling. She talks to psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, and sociologists and explains how these strategies can impact children’s mental health and development. Filled with practical takeaways that parents can implement immediately, Hunt, Gather, Parent helps us rethink the ways we relate to our children, and reveals a universal parenting paradigm adapted for American families.]]> 352 Michaeleen Doucleff 1982149671 Hilary 0 to-read 4.11 2021 Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans
author: Michaeleen Doucleff
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Between Two Fires 13543121
Is it delirium or is it faith? She believes she has seen the angels of God. She believes the righteous dead speak to her in dreams. And now she has convinced the faithless Thomas to shepherd her across a depraved landscape to Avignon. There, she tells Thomas, she will fulfill her mission to confront the evil that has devastated the earth, and to restore to this betrayed, murderous knight the nobility and hope of salvation he long abandoned.

As hell unleashes its wrath, and as the true nature of the girl is revealed, Thomas will find himself on a macabre battleground of angels and demons, saints, and the risen dead, and in the midst of a desperate struggle for nothing less than the soul of man.]]> 432 Christopher Buehlman 1937007863 Hilary 0 to-read 4.20 2012 Between Two Fires
author: Christopher Buehlman
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Only One Left 62703226 At seventeen, Lenora Hope
Hung her sister with a rope

Now reduced to a schoolyard chant, the Hope family murders shocked the Maine coast one bloody night in 1929. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. Other than her denial after the killings, she has never spoken publicly about that night, nor has she set foot outside Hope’s End, the cliffside mansion where the massacre occurred.

Stabbed her father with a knife
Took her mother’s happy life

It’s now 1983, and home-health aide Kit McDeere arrives at a decaying Hope’s End to care for Lenora after her previous nurse fled in the middle of the night. In her seventies and confined to a wheelchair, Lenora was rendered mute by a series of strokes and can only communicate with Kit by tapping out sentences on an old typewriter. One night, Lenora uses it to make a tantalizing offer�I want to tell you everything.

“It wasn’t me,� Lenora said
But she’s the only one not dead

As Kit helps Lenora write about the events leading to the Hope family massacre, it becomes clear there’s more to the tale than people know. But when new details about her predecessor’s departure come to light, Kit starts to suspect Lenora might not be telling the complete truth—and that the seemingly harmless woman in her care could be far more dangerous than she first thought.]]> 383 Riley Sager 0593183223 Hilary 0 4.12 2023 The Only One Left
author: Riley Sager
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/04
date added: 2024/05/04
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]]> Come and Get It 127482608
It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardised by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks and illicit intrigue.

A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption and reckless abandon, Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion, and bad behavior.]]> 400 Kiley Reid 0593328205 Hilary 0 3.32 2024 Come and Get It
author: Kiley Reid
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/03
date added: 2024/05/02
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]]> The Leftover Woman 78296909 An evocative family drama and a riveting mystery about the ferocious pull of motherhood for two very different women--from the New York Times bestselling author of Searching for Sylvie Lee and Girl in Translation.

Jasmine Yang arrives in New York City from her rural Chinese village without money or family support, fleeing a controlling husband, on a desperate search for the daughter who was taken from her at birth--another female casualty of China's controversial One Child Policy. But with her husband on her trail, the clock is ticking, and she's forced to make increasingly desperate decisions if she ever hopes to be reunited with her daughter.

Meanwhile, publishing executive Rebecca Whitney seems to have it all: a prestigious family name and the wealth that comes with it, a high-powered career, a beautiful home, a handsome husband, and an adopted Chinese daughter she adores. She's even hired a Chinese nanny to help her balance the demands of being a working wife and mother. But when an industry scandal threatens to jeopardize not only Rebecca's job but her marriage, this perfect world begins to crumble and her role in her own family is called into question.

The Leftover Woman finds these two unforgettable women on a shocking collision course. Twisting and suspenseful and surprisingly poignant, it's a profound exploration of identity and belonging, motherhood and family. It is a story of two women in a divided city--separated by severe economic and cultural differences yet bound by a deep emotional connection to a child.]]> 288 Jean Kwok 0063031469 Hilary 0 3.72 2023 The Leftover Woman
author: Jean Kwok
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/16
date added: 2024/04/16
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]]> I Hope This Finds You Well 200987323 In this wildly funny and heartwarming office comedy, an admin worker accidentally gains access to her colleagues� private emails and DMs and decides to use this intel to save her job—a laugh-till-you-cry debut novel you’ll be eager to share with your entire list of contacts, perfect for fans of Anxious People and Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.

As far as Jolene is concerned, her interactions with her colleagues should start and end with her official duties as an admin for Supershops, Inc. Unfortunately, her irritating, incompetent coworkers don’t seem to understand the importance of boundaries. Her secret to survival? She vents her grievances in petty email postscripts, then changes the text colour to white so no one can see. That is, until one of her secret messages is exposed. Her punishment: sensitivity training (led by the suspiciously friendly HR guy, Cliff) and rigorous email restrictions.

When an IT mix-up grants her access to her entire department’s private emails and DMs, Jolene knows she should report it, but who could resist reading what their coworkers are really saying? And when she discovers layoffs are coming, she realizes this might just be the key to saving her job. The plan is simple: gain her boss’s favour, convince HR she’s Supershops material and beat out the competition.

But as Jolene is drawn further into her coworker’s private worlds and secrets, her carefully constructed walls begin to crumble—especially around Cliff, who she definitely cannot have feelings for. Soon she will need to decide if she’s ready to leave the comfort of her cubicle, even if it means coming clean to her colleagues.

Crackling with laugh-out-loud dialogue and relatable observations, I Hope This Finds You Well is a fresh and surprisingly tender comedy about loneliness and love beyond our computer screens. This sparkling debut novel will open your heart to the everyday eccentricities of work culture and the undeniable human connection that comes with it.]]> 338 Natalie Sue 0063320363 Hilary 0 to-read 3.74 2024 I Hope This Finds You Well
author: Natalie Sue
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Crown of Midnight (Throne of Glass, #2)]]> 76705490 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

"A line that should never be crossed is about to be breached.

It puts this entire castle in jeopardy—and the life of your friend."

From the throne of glass rules a king with a fist of iron and a soul as black as pitch. Assassin Celaena Sardothien won a brutal contest to become his Champion. Yet Celaena is far from loyal to the crown. She hides her secret vigilantly; she knows that the man she serves is bent on evil.

Keeping up the deadly charade becomes increasingly difficult when Celaena realizes she is not the only one seeking justice. As she tries to untangle the mysteries buried deep within the glass castle, her closest relationships suffer. It seems no one is above questioning her allegiances—not the Crown Prince Dorian; not Chaol, the Captain of the Guard; not even her best friend, Nehemia, a foreign princess with a rebel heart.

Then one terrible night, the secrets they have all been keeping lead to an unspeakable tragedy. As Celaena's world shatters, she will be forced to give up the very thing most precious to her and decide once and for all where her true loyalties lie... and whom she is ultimately willing to fight for.]]> 420 Sarah J. Maas 1639730966 Hilary 0 4.34 2013 Crown of Midnight (Throne of Glass, #2)
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/09
date added: 2024/04/09
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]]> The Fraud 66086834 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780525558965.

From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story—and who gets to be believed.

It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years.

Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.

Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.

The “Tichborne Trial”—wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title—captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task. . . .

Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of “other people.”]]> 464 Zadie Smith Hilary 0 3.25 2023 The Fraud
author: Zadie Smith
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/01
date added: 2024/04/01
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]]> The Island of Sea Women 40538657 9781501154850

Set on the Korean island of Jeju, The Island of Sea Women follows Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls from very different backgrounds, as they begin working in the sea with their village’s all-female diving collective. Over many decades—through the Japanese colonialism of the 1930s and 1940s, World War II, the Korean War, and the era of cellphones and wet suits for the women divers—Mi-ja and Young-sook develop the closest of bonds. Nevertheless, their differences are impossible to ignore: Mi-ja is the daughter of a Japanese collaborator, forever marking her, and Young-sook was born into a long line of haenyeo and will inherit her mother’s position leading the divers. After hundreds of dives and years of friendship, forces outside their control will push their relationship to the breaking point.

This beautiful, thoughtful novel illuminates a unique and unforgettable culture, one where the women are in charge, engaging in dangerous physical work, and the men take care of the children. A classic Lisa See story—one of women’s friendships and the larger forces that shape them�The Island of Sea Women introduces readers to the fierce female divers of Jeju Island and the dramatic history that shaped their lives.]]> 374 Lisa See Hilary 4 4.29 2019 The Island of Sea Women
author: Lisa See
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/28
date added: 2024/03/30
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder]]> 61714633 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on the Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then . . . six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.]]> 331 David Grann 0385534264 Hilary 4 4.14 2023 The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
author: David Grann
name: Hilary
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/23
date added: 2024/03/25
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Mystery Guest (Molly the Maid, #2)]]> 157062582
When Detective Stark, Molly’s old foe, investigates the author’s unexpected demise, it becomes clear that this death was murder most foul. Suspects abound, and everyone wants to know: Who killed J. D. Grimthorpe? Was it Lily, the new Maid-in-Training? Or was it Serena, the author’s secretary? Could Mr. Preston, the hotel’s beloved doorman, be hiding something? And is Molly really as innocent as she seems?

As the high-profile death threatens the hotel’s pristine reputation, Molly knows she alone holds the key to unlocking the killer’s identity. But that key is buried deep in her past, as long ago, she knew J. D. Grimthorpe. Molly begins to comb her memory for clues, revisiting her childhood and the mysterious Grimthorpe mansion where she and her dearly departed Gran once worked side by side. With the entire hotel under investigation, Molly must solve the mystery posthaste. Because if there’s one thing she knows for sure, it’s that secrets don’t stay buried forever.]]> 293 Nita Prose 0593356187 Hilary 0 3.75 2023 The Mystery Guest (Molly the Maid, #2)
author: Nita Prose
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/20
date added: 2024/03/20
shelves:
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]]> First Lie Wins 164444179 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593492918.

Evie Porter has everything a nice Southern girl could want: a doting boyfriend, a house with a white picket fence, a tight group of friends. The only catch: Evie Porter doesn’t exist.

The identity comes first: Evie Porter. Once she’s given a name and location by her mysterious boss, Mr. Smith, she learns everything there is to know about the town and the people in it. Then the mark: Ryan Sumner. The last piece of the puzzle is the job.

Evie isn’t privy to Mr. Smith’s real identity, but she knows this job isn’t like the others. Ryan has gotten under her skin, and she’s starting to envision a different sort of life for herself. But Evie can’t make any mistakes—especially after what happened last time.

Evie Porter must stay one step ahead of her past while making sure there’s still a future in front of her. The stakes couldn’t be higher—but then, Evie has always liked a challenge. . . .]]> 340 Ashley Elston Hilary 0 3.97 2024 First Lie Wins
author: Ashley Elston
name: Hilary
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/15
date added: 2024/03/16
shelves:
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