Cricket's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 11 Apr 2025 23:19:46 -0700 60 Cricket's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Book Censor's Library 175678711
The new book censor hasn’t slept soundly in weeks. By day he combs through manuscripts at a government office, looking for anything that would make a book unfit to publish―allusions to queerness, unapproved religions, any mention of life before the Revolution. By night the characters of literary classics crowd his dreams, and pilfered novels pile up in the house he shares with his wife and daughter. As the siren song of forbidden reading continues to beckon, he descends into a netherworld of resistance fighters, undercover booksellers, and outlaw librarians trying to save their history and culture.

Reckoning with the global threat to free speech and the bleak future it all but guarantees, Bothayna Al-Essa marries the steely dystopia of Orwell’s 1984 with the madcap absurdity of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, resulting in a dreadful twist worthy of Kafka. The Book Censor’s Library is a warning call and a love letter to stories and the delicious act of losing oneself in them.]]> 272 Bothayna Al-Essa 1632063344 Cricket 3 dystopia, satire 3.93 2019 The Book Censor's Library
author: Bothayna Al-Essa
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/17
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: dystopia, satire
review:

]]> Britt-Marie Was Here 27406704
When Britt-Marie walks out on her cheating husband and has to fend for herself in the miserable backwater town of Borg—of which the kindest thing one can say is that it has a road going through it—she finds work as the caretaker of a soon-to-be demolished recreation center. The fastidious Britt-Marie soon finds herself being drawn into the daily doings of her fellow citizens, an odd assortment of miscreants, drunkards, layabouts. Most alarming of all, she’s given the impossible task of leading the supremely untalented children’s soccer team to victory. In this small town of misfits, can Britt-Marie find a place where she truly belongs?]]> 324 Fredrik Backman 1501142534 Cricket 3 audiobook, realistic-fiction 4.05 2014 Britt-Marie Was Here
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: audiobook, realistic-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea]]> 216470365
Many believe that Shim Cheong, the most beautiful girl in the village—and the beloved of Mina’s older brother Joon—may be the legendary true bride. But on the night Cheong is to be sacrificed, Joon follows Cheong out to sea, even knowing that to interfere is a death sentence. To save her brother, Mina throws herself into the water in Cheong’s stead.

Swept away to the Spirit Realm, a magical city of lesser gods and mythical beasts, Mina seeks out the Sea God, only to find him caught in an enchanted sleep. With the help of a mysterious young man named Shin—as well as a motley crew of demons, gods and spirits—Mina sets out to wake the Sea God and bring an end to the killer storms once and for all.

But she doesn’t have much time: A human cannot live long in the land of the spirits. And there are those who would do anything to keep the Sea God from waking…]]> 352 Axie Oh 125086609X Cricket 0 to-read 4.00 2022 The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea
author: Axie Oh
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Beneath a Scarlet Sky 32487617 Based on the true story of a forgotten hero, Beneath a Scarlet Sky is the triumphant, epic tale of one young man’s incredible courage and resilience during one of history’s darkest hours.

Pino Lella wants nothing to do with the war or the Nazis. He’s a normal Italian teenager—obsessed with music, food, and girls—but his days of innocence are numbered. When his family home in Milan is destroyed by Allied bombs, Pino joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps, and falls for Anna, a beautiful widow six years his senior.

In an attempt to protect him, Pino’s parents force him to enlist as a German soldier—a move they think will keep him out of combat. But after Pino is injured, he is recruited at the tender age of eighteen to become the personal driver for Adolf Hitler’s left hand in Italy, General Hans Leyers, one of the Third Reich’s most mysterious and powerful commanders.

Now, with the opportunity to spy for the Allies inside the German High Command, Pino endures the horrors of the war and the Nazi occupation by fighting in secret, his courage bolstered by his love for Anna and for the life he dreams they will one day share.

Fans of All the Light We Cannot See, The Nightingale, and Unbroken will enjoy this riveting saga of history, suspense, and love.

]]> 509 Mark T. Sullivan 1503943372 Cricket 0 to-read 4.33 2017 Beneath a Scarlet Sky
author: Mark T. Sullivan
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History]]> 17910054
In prose that is at once frank, entertaining, and deeply informed, The New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species has before. Interweaving research in half a dozen disciplines, descriptions of the fascinating species that have already been lost, and the history of extinction as a concept, Kolbert provides a moving and comprehensive account of the disappearances occurring before our very eyes. She shows that the sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy, compelling us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.]]> 336 Elizabeth Kolbert 0805092994 Cricket 3 4.13 2014 The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
author: Elizabeth Kolbert
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/25
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: audiobook, nonfiction, philosophical, post-apocalyptic
review:

]]> 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 Cricket 2 4.16 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: audiobook, could-cut-the-sexism-with-a-knife, historical-fiction
review:

]]> A Love Song for Ricki Wilde 173404023
Leap years are a strange, enchanted time. And for some, even a single February can be life-changing.

Ricki Wilde has many talents, but being a Wilde isn’t one of them. As the impulsive, artistic daughter of a powerful Atlanta dynasty, she’s the opposite of her famous socialite sisters. Where they’re long-stemmed roses, she’s a dandelion: an adorable bloom that’s actually a weed, born to float wherever the wind blows. In her bones, Ricki knows that somewhere, a different, more exciting life awaits her.

When regal nonagenarian, Ms. Della, invites her to rent the bottom floor of her Harlem brownstone, Ricki jumps at the chance for a fresh beginning. She leaves behind her family, wealth, and chaotic romantic decisions to realize her dream of opening a flower shop. And just beneath the surface of her new neighborhood, the music, stories and dazzling drama of the Harlem Renaissance still simmers.

One evening in February as the heady, curiously off-season scent of night-blooming jasmine fills the air, Ricki encounters a handsome, deeply mysterious stranger who knocks her world off balance in the most unexpected way.

Set against the backdrop of modern Harlem and Renaissance glamour, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is a swoon-worthy love story of two passionate artists drawn to the magic, romance, and opportunity of New York, and whose lives are uniquely and irreversibly linked.]]> 352 Tia Williams 153872670X Cricket 0 to-read 3.98 2024 A Love Song for Ricki Wilde
author: Tia Williams
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Sharks in the Time of Saviors 45892255
Nainoa's family, struggling amidst the collapse of the sugarcane industry, hails his rescue as a sign of favor from ancient Hawaiian gods - a belief that appears validated after he exhibits puzzling new abilities. But as time passes, this supposed divine favor begins to drive the family apart: Nainoa, working now as a paramedic on the streets of Portland, struggles to fathom the full measure of his expanding abilities; further north in Washington, his older brother Dean hurtles into the world of elite college athletics, obsessed with wealth and fame; while in California, risk-obsessed younger sister Kaui navigates an unforgiving academic workload in an attempt to forge her independence from the family's legacy.

When supernatural events revisit the Flores family in Hawaii - with tragic consequences - they are all forced to reckon with the bonds of family, the meaning of heritage, and the cost of survival.

One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020. Named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the New York Times (#30), the Guardian, the Boston Globe, Oprah Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, BBC Culture, Good Housekeeping, LitHub, Spectrum Culture, Third Place Books, and Powell's Books.]]> 376 Kawai Strong Washburn 0374272085 Cricket 0 to-read 3.83 2020 Sharks in the Time of Saviors
author: Kawai Strong Washburn
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> North Woods 71872930
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants . An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire.A crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?]]> 372 Daniel Mason 0593597036 Cricket 0 to-read 4.12 2023 North Woods
author: Daniel Mason
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)]]> 9317452 392 Ben Aaronovitch 0575097566 Cricket 0 to-read 3.83 2011 Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1)
author: Ben Aaronovitch
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Stiletto (The Checquy Files, #2)]]> 25695756
When secret organizations are forced to merge after years of enmity and bloodshed, only one person has the fearsome powers—and the bureaucratic finesse—to get the job done. Facing her greatest challenge yet, Rook Myfanwy Thomas must broker a deal between two bitter adversaries:

The Checquy—the centuries-old covert British organization that protects society from supernatural
threats, and�
The Grafters—a centuries-old supernatural threat.

But as bizarre attacks sweep London, threatening to sabotage negotiations, old hatreds flare. Surrounded by spies, only the Rook and two women, who absolutely hate each other, can seek out the culprits before they trigger a devastating otherworldly war.

STILETTO is a novel of preternatural diplomacy, paranoia, and snide remarks.]]> 583 Daniel O'Malley 0316228044 Cricket 0 to-read 4.10 2016 Stiletto (The Checquy Files, #2)
author: Daniel O'Malley
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Ministry of Time 220160351 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.]]> 368 Kaliane Bradley 166804515X Cricket 0 to-read 3.65 2024 The Ministry of Time
author: Kaliane Bradley
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The City of God 900967
This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition is a complete and unabridged version of the Marcus Dods translation.]]> 892 Augustine of Hippo 0679600876 Cricket 0 to-read 4.08 426 The City of God
author: Augustine of Hippo
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.08
book published: 426
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road]]> 31920777 The unbelievable true story of the man who built a billion-dollar online drug empire from his bedroom—and almost got away with it.

In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything—drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons—free of the government’s watchful eye.

It wasn’t long before the media got wind of the new Web site where anyone—not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers—could buy and sell contraband detection-free. Spurred by a public outcry, the federal government launched an epic two-year manhunt for the site’s elusive proprietor, with no leads, no witnesses, and no clear jurisdiction. All the investigators knew was that whoever was running the site called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts.

The Silk Road quickly ballooned into $1.2 billion enterprise, and Ross embraced his new role as kingpin. He enlisted a loyal crew of allies in high and low places, all as addicted to the danger and thrill of running an illegal marketplace as their customers were to the heroin they sold. Through his network he got wind of the target on his back and took drastic steps to protect himself—including ordering a hit on a former employee. As Ross made plans to disappear forever, the Feds raced against the clock to catch a man they weren’t sure even existed, searching for a needle in the haystack of the global Internet.

Drawing on exclusive access to key players and two billion digital words and images Ross left behind, Vanity Fair correspondent and New York Times bestselling author Nick Bilton offers a tale filled with twists and turns, lucky breaks and unbelievable close calls. It’s a story of the boy next door’s ambition gone criminal, spurred on by the clash between the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralized Web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Filled with unforgettable characters and capped by an astonishing climax, American Kingpin might be dismissed as too outrageous for fiction. But it’s all too real.]]> 328 Nick Bilton 1591848148 Cricket 0 to-read 4.38 2017 American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road
author: Nick Bilton
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Purple Hibiscus 14569052 A previously published edition of ISBN 9781616202415 can be found here.

Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home—a home that is silent and suffocating.

As the country begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili and Jaja are sent to their aunt, a university professor outside the city, where they discover a life beyond the confines of their father’s authority. Books cram the shelves, curry and nutmeg permeate the air, and their cousins� laughter rings throughout the house. When they return home, tensions within the family escalate, and Kambili must find the strength to keep her loved ones together.

Purple Hibiscus is an exquisite novel about the emotional turmoil of adolescence, the powerful bonds of family, and the bright promise of freedom.]]> 336 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 1616202416 Cricket 4 4.18 2003 Purple Hibiscus
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: audiobook, could-cut-the-sexism-with-a-knife, get-out-the-tissue-box, realistic-fiction
review:

]]> The Dream Hotel 218695937 A novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.]]> 336 Laila Lalami 0593317602 Cricket 0 to-read 3.67 2025 The Dream Hotel
author: Laila Lalami
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The House of Eve 176443755
“A triumph of historical fiction� ( The Washington Post ), an instant New York Times bestseller, and a Reese’s Book Club pick, set in 1950s Philadelphia and Washington, DC, that explores what it means to be a woman and a mother, and how much one is willing to sacrifice to achieve her greatest goal.

1950s fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright.

Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride at Howard University, they fall madly in love. But William hails from one of DC’s elite wealthy Black families, and his parents don’t let just anyone into their fold. Eleanor hopes that a baby will make her finally feel at home in William’s family and grant her the life she’s been searching for. But having a baby—and fitting in—is easier said than done.

With their stories colliding in the most unexpected of ways, Ruby and Eleanor will both make decisions that shape the trajectory of their lives.]]> 384 Sadeqa Johnson 1982197374 Cricket 0 to-read 4.25 2023 The House of Eve
author: Sadeqa Johnson
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Worry 214152235
It’s March of 2019, and twenty-eight-year-old Jules Gold—anxious, artistically frustrated, and internet-obsessed—has been living alone in the apartment she once shared with the man she thought she’d marry when her younger sister Poppy comes to crash. Indefinitely. Poppy is a year out from a suicide attempt only Jules knows about, and as she searches for work and meaning in Brooklyn, Jules spends her days hate-scrolling the feeds of Mormon mommy bloggers and waiting for life to happen.

Then the hives that’ve plagued Poppy since childhood flare up. Jules’s uterus turns against her. Poppy brings home a maladjusted rescue dog named Amy Klobuchar. The girls� mother—a newly devout Messianic Jew—starts falling for the same deep-state conspiracy theories as Jules’s online mommies. A trip home to Florida ends in disaster. Amy Klobuchar may or may not have rabies. And Jules struggles halfheartedly to scrape her way to the source of her ennui, slowly and cruelly coming to blame Poppy for her own insufficiencies as a friend, a writer, and a sister. As the year shambles on and a new decade looms near, Jules and Poppy—comrades, competitors, permanent fixtures in each other’s lives—must ask themselves what they want their futures to look like, and whether they’ll spend them together or apart.

Deadpan, dark, and brutally funny, Worry is a sharp portrait of two sisters enduring a dread-filled American moment from a nervy new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 320 Alexandra Tanner 1668018624 Cricket 0 to-read 3.23 2024 Worry
author: Alexandra Tanner
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Third Rule of Time Travel 215748787 Rule One: Travel can only occur to a point within your lifetime.
Rule Two: You can only travel for ninety seconds.
Rule Three: You can only observe.
The rules cannot be broken.

In this riveting science fiction novel from acclaimed author Philip Fracassi, a scientist has unlocked the mysteries of time travel. This is not the story you think you know. And the rules are only the beginning.

Scientist Beth Darlow has discovered the unimaginable. She's built a machine that allows human consciousness to travel through time—to any point in the traveler's lifetime—and relive moments of their life. An impossible breakthrough, but it's not perfect: the traveler has no way to interact with the past. They can only observe.

After Beth's husband, Colson, the co-creator of the machine, dies in a tragic car accident, Beth is left to raise Isabella—their only daughter—and continue the work they started. Mired in grief and threatened by her ruthless CEO, Beth pushes herself to the limit to prove the value of her technology.

Then the impossible happens. Simply viewing personal history should not alter the present, but with each new observation she makes, her own timeline begins to warp.

As her reality constantly shifts, Beth must solve the puzzles of her past, even if it means forsaking her future.]]> 325 Philip Fracassi 0316572519 Cricket 0 to-read 3.65 2025 The Third Rule of Time Travel
author: Philip Fracassi
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Camera Flashes & Piercing Smiles: Celebrity Life Conceals a Bloodthirsty Secret]]> 210040716 5 Star Reader's Favorite Review

Two high-profile, male celebrities, Nick Meyers, a vampire that fronts as a pop star, and, Patrick Simon, a human with a vampire lineage, conceal their supernatural lives from the public eye. Fate brings them together during a night in the Lower East Side of NYC, igniting an undeniable attraction between them.

As their romance deepens, they face the constant threat of their secret being uncovered, jeopardizing both their careers and lives. As they navigate the complexities of their relationship, they must decide whether to risk everything for love.]]> 188 Parrish M. Salyers Cricket 0 to-read 4.00 Camera Flashes & Piercing Smiles: Celebrity Life Conceals a Bloodthirsty Secret
author: Parrish M. Salyers
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Extinction of Irena Rey 172979818 From the International Booker Prize–winning translator and Women's Prize finalist, a propulsive, beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing in a primeval Polish forest.

Eight translators arrive at a house in a forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.

The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens, and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets � and deceptions � of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.

This hilarious, thought-provoking second outing by award-winning translator and author Jennifer Croft is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe’s last great wildernesses.]]> 320 Jennifer Croft 1639731709 Cricket 2 realistic-fiction, satire 3.18 2024 The Extinction of Irena Rey
author: Jennifer Croft
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/24
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: realistic-fiction, satire
review:

]]> Headshot 174156218 An electrifying debut novel from an “unusually gifted writer� (Lorrie Moore) about the radical intimacy of physical competition

An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, prizewinning writer Rita Bullwinkel animates the competitors� pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.

Frenetic, surprising, and strikingly original, Headshot is a portrait of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness, and sheer physical pleasure that motivates young women to fight—even, and perhaps especially, when no one else is watching.]]> 224 Rita Bullwinkel 0593654102 Cricket 3 3.50 2024 Headshot
author: Rita Bullwinkel
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: audiobook, beautiful-style, realistic-fiction
review:
The first section was a perfect short story. After that it meandered until I felt totally uninvested by the end. I would definitely read short stories by this author though.
]]> <![CDATA[A Royal Experiment: The Private Life of King George III]]> 17286774
In the U.S., Britain's George III, the protagonist of A Royal Experiment, is known as the king from whom Americans won their independence and as "the mad king," but in Janice Hadlow’s groundbreaking and entertaining new biography, he is another character altogether—compelling and relatable.

He was the first of Britain’s three Hanoverian kings to be born in England, the first to identify as native of the nation he ruled. But this was far from the only difference between him and his predecessors. Neither of the previous Georges was faithful to his wife, nor to his mistresses. Both hated their own sons. And, overall, their children were angry, jealous, and disaffected schemers, whose palace shenanigans kick off Hadlow's juicy narrative and also made their lives unhappy ones.

Pained by his childhood amid this cruel and feuding family, George came to the throne aspiring to be a new kind of king—a force for moral good. And to be that new kind of king, he had to be a new kind of man. Against his irresistibly awful family background—of brutal royal intrigue, infidelity, and betrayal—George fervently pursued a radical domestic dream: he would have a faithful marriage and raise loving, educated, and resilient children.

The struggle of King George—along with his wife, Queen Charlotte, and their 15 children—to pursue a passion for family will surprise history buffs and delight a broad swath of biography readers and royal watchers.
]]> 682 Janice Hadlow 0805096566 Cricket 0 to-read 4.00 2014 A Royal Experiment: The Private Life of King George III
author: Janice Hadlow
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Other Bennet Sister 45186556 Pride and Prejudice’s five Bennet sisters, emerges from the shadows and transforms into a desired woman with choices of her own.

What if Mary Bennet’s life took a different path from that laid out for her in Pride and Prejudice? What if the frustrated intellectual of the Bennet family, the marginalized middle daughter, the plain girl who takes refuge in her books, eventually found the fulfillment enjoyed by her prettier, more confident sisters? This is the plot of The Other Bennet Sister, a debut novel with exactly the affection and authority to satisfy Austen fans.

Ultimately, Mary’s journey is like that taken by every Austen heroine. She learns that she can only expect joy when she has accepted who she really is. She must throw off the false expectations and wrong ideas that have combined to obscure her true nature and prevented her from what makes her happy. Only when she undergoes this evolution does she have a chance at finding fulfillment; only then does she have the clarity to recognize her partner when he presents himself—and only at that moment is she genuinely worthy of love.

Mary’s destiny diverges from that of her sisters. It does not involve broad acres or landed gentry. But it does include a man; and, as in all Austen novels, Mary must decide whether he is the truly the one for her. In The Other Bennet Sister, Mary is a fully rounded character—complex, conflicted, and often uncertain; but also vulnerable, supremely sympathetic, and ultimately the protagonist of an uncommonly satisfying debut novel.]]> 463 Janice Hadlow 1250129419 Cricket 0 to-read 4.11 2020 The Other Bennet Sister
author: Janice Hadlow
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Colored Television 201102398 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593544372

A dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the racial identity–industrial complex

Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she; her painter husband, Lenny; and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend’s luxurious home in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane’s sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her “mulatto War and Peace,� she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp.

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content� for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.� She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.]]> 277 Danzy Senna Cricket 4 3.53 2024 Colored Television
author: Danzy Senna
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/15
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: audiobook, califor-n-i-a, humor, satire
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection]]> 220341389 John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease.

Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year.

In Everything is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.]]> 208 John Green 0525556575 Cricket 0 to-read 4.54 2025 Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
author: John Green
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom]]> 144734702
Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawingon extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya Windshatters this myth and documents how Israeli universities are directly complicit in the violation ofPalestinian rights.

As this book shows, Israeli universities serve as pillars of Israel's system of oppression against
Palestinians. Academic disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories allservice Israeli occupation and apartheid, while universities violate the rights of Palestinians to education,stifle critical scholarship, and violently repress student dissent. Towers of Ivory and Steel is a powerfulexpose of Israeli academia’s ongoing and active complicity in Israel’s settler-colonial project.]]> 278 Maya Wind 1804291749 Cricket 0 to-read 4.56 Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom
author: Maya Wind
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.56
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Liars 200555235 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.

“Painful and brilliant—I loved it.”—Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and Either/Or

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.]]> 272 Sarah Manguso 0593241258 Cricket 1 3.67 2024 Liars
author: Sarah Manguso
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 1
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: audiobook, califor-n-i-a, could-cut-the-sexism-with-a-knife, realistic-fiction
review:

]]> Someone Like Us 201102290
With Helen and their two-year old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he'd been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel's life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Breath-taking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America's most prodigiously gifted novelists.]]> 272 Dinaw Mengestu 0385350007 Cricket 3 3.54 2024 Someone Like Us
author: Dinaw Mengestu
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves: a-familys-story-coming-to-america, audiobook, realistic-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dance of Thieves (Dance of Thieves, #1)]]> 37906104 A stunning new young adult adventure set in the kingdoms of the Remnant, by the author of the New York Times-bestselling Remnant Chronicles and the Jenna Fox Chronicles.

A formidable outlaw family that claims to be the first among nations.

A son destined to lead, thrust suddenly into power.

Three fierce young women of the Rahtan, the queen's premier guard.

A legendary street thief leading a mission, determined to prove herself.

A dark secret that is a threat to the entire continent.

When outlaw leader meets reformed thief, a cat-and-mouse game of false moves ensues, bringing them intimately together in a battle that may cost them their lives—and their hearts.]]> 507 Mary E. Pearson 1250159024 Cricket 0 to-read 4.21 2018 Dance of Thieves (Dance of Thieves, #1)
author: Mary E. Pearson
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Legends & Lattes (Legends & Lattes, #1)]]> 61219635 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250886088.

A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes.

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

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

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

But the true rewards of the uncharted path are the travelers you meet along the way. And whether drawn together by ancient magic, flaky pastry, or a freshly brewed cup, they may become partners, family, and something deeper than she ever could have dreamed.]]> 304 Travis Baldree Cricket 0 to-read 4.17 2022 Legends & Lattes (Legends & Lattes, #1)
author: Travis Baldree
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty 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.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Cricket 2 3.53 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/05
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: califor-n-i-a, humor, realistic-fiction, ze-queer-shelf
review:

]]> Sky Daddy 216247489 Subversive and unexpectedly heartwarming, Sky Daddy hijacks the classic love story, exploring desire, fate, and the longing to be accepted for who we truly are.

Linda is doing her best to lead a life that would appear normal to the casual observer. Weekdays, she earns $20 an hour moderating comments for a video-sharing platform, then rides the bus home to the windowless garage she rents on the outskirts of San Francisco. But on the last Friday of each month, she indulges in her true passion: taking BART to SFO for a round-trip flight to a regional hub. The destination is irrelevant because each trip means a new date with a handsome stranger—a stranger whose intelligent windscreens, sleek fuselages, and powerful engines make Linda feel a way that no human ever could.

Linda knows that she can’t tell anyone she’s sexually obsessed with planes—nor can she reveal her belief her destiny is to “marry� one of her suitors by dying in a plane crash, thereby uniting her with her soulmate plane for eternity. But when an opportunity arises to hasten her dream of eternal partnership, and the carefully balanced elements of her life begin to spin out of control, she must choose between maintaining the trappings of normalcy and launching herself headlong toward the love she’s always dreamed of.]]> 368 Kate Folk 059323149X Cricket 0 to-read 4.02 2025 Sky Daddy
author: Kate Folk
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation]]> 57693654 Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin Luther, and Louise Little's son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary women who raised them. In her groundbreaking and essential debut The Three Mothers, scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs celebrates Black motherhood by telling the story of the three women who raised and shaped some of America's most pivotal heroes.

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

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

These women, their similarities and differences, as individuals and as mothers, represent a piece of history left untold and a celebration of Black motherhood long overdue.]]> 288 Anna Malaika Tubbs 1250756138 Cricket 0 to-read 4.04 2021 Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation
author: Anna Malaika Tubbs
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Rejection 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

In “The Feminist,� a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics� spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,� a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Cricket 4 3.88 2024 Rejection
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/27
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: califor-n-i-a, could-cut-the-sexism-with-a-knife, humor, philosophical, satire, ze-queer-shelf
review:

]]> Worry 177058829 Frances Ha meets No One Is Talking About This in a debut that follows two siblings-turned-roommates navigating an absurd world on the verge of calamity—a Seinfeldian novel of existentialism and sisterhood. It’s March of 2019, and twenty-eight-year-old Jules Gold—anxious, artistically frustrated, and internet-obsessed—has been living alone in the apartment she once shared with the man she thought she’d marry when her younger sister Poppy comes to crash. Indefinitely. Poppy, a year and a half out from a suicide attempt only Jules knows about, searches for work and meaning in Brooklyn while Jules spends her days hate-scrolling the feeds of Mormon mommy bloggers and waiting for life to happen.Then the hives that’ve plagued Poppy since childhood flare up. Jules’s uterus turns against her. Poppy brings home a maladjusted rescue dog named Amy Klobuchar. The girls� mother, a newly devout Messianic Jew, starts falling for the same deep-state conspiracy theories as Jules’s online mommies. Jules, halfheartedly struggling to scrape her way to the source of her ennui, slowly and cruelly comes to blame Poppy for her own insufficiencies as a friend, a writer, and a sister. And Amy Klobuchar might have rabies. As the year shambles on and a new decade looms near, a disastrous trip home to Florida forces Jules and Poppy—comrades, competitors, constant fixtures in each other’s lives—to ask themselves what they want their futures to look like, and whether they’ll spend them together or apart.Deadpan, dark, and brutally funny, Worry is a sharp portrait of two sisters enduring a dread-filled American moment from a nervy new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 317 Alexandra Tanner Cricket 0 to-read 3.09 2024 Worry
author: Alexandra Tanner
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.09
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Margo's Got Money Troubles 199534613
“[An] enormously entertaining and lovable book.� —Nick Hornby, New York Times Book Review

A bold, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartwarming story about one young woman’s attempt to navigate adulthood, new motherhood, and her meager bank account in our increasingly online world—from the PEN/Faulkner finalist and critically acclaimed author of The Knockout Queen.

As the child of a Hooters waitress and an ex-pro wrestler, Margo Millet's always known she’d have to make it on her own. So she enrolls at her local junior college, even though she can’t imagine how she’ll ever make a living. She’s still figuring things out and never planned to have an affair with her English professor—and while the affair is brief, it isn’t brief enough to keep her from getting pregnant. Despite everyone’s advice, she decides to keep the baby, mostly out of naiveté and a yearning for something bigger.

Now, at twenty, Margo is alone with an infant, unemployed, and on the verge of eviction. She needs a cash infusion—fast. When her estranged father, Jinx, shows up on her doorstep and asks to move in with her, she agrees in exchange for help with childcare. Then Margo begins to form a plan: she’ll start an OnlyFans as an experiment, and soon finds herself adapting some of Jinx’s advice from the world of wrestling. Like how to craft a compelling character and make your audience fall in love with you. Before she knows it, she’s turned it into a runaway success. Could this be the answer to all of Margo’s problems, or does internet fame come with too high a price?

Blisteringly funny and filled with sharp insight, Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a tender tale starring an endearing young heroine who’s struggling to wrest money and power from a world that has little interest in giving it to her. It’s a playful and honest examination of the art of storytelling and controlling your own narrative, and an empowering portrait of coming into your own, both online and off.

“A wholly original novel. . . . Thorpe is both poetic and profound in the way she brings her remarkable story to an end.� —The Associated Press]]> 304 Rufi Thorpe 0063356589 Cricket 5 3.87 2024 Margo's Got Money Troubles
author: Rufi Thorpe
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: audiobook, califor-n-i-a, could-cut-the-sexism-with-a-knife, favorites, humor, philosophical, realistic-fiction, recs-for-moms-book-club
review:

]]> Orbital 123136728 207 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 Cricket 4 3.56 2023 Orbital
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/21
date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: beautiful-style, philosophical, realistic-fiction
review:

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

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

Written with breathtaking humanity and humor, The History of Sound is a love letter to New England, a radiant conversation between past and present, and a moving meditation on the abiding search for home.]]> 320 Ben Shattuck 059349038X Cricket 4 4.36 2024 The History of Sound
author: Ben Shattuck
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: audiobook, beautiful-style, realistic-fiction, short-stories-novellas
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dance of Thieves (Dance of Thieves, #1)]]> 35796008
At the same time, Kazi, a legendary former street thief, is sent by the queen to investigate transgressions against the new settlements. When Kazi arrives in the forbidding land of the Ballengers, she learns that there is more to Jase than she thought. As unexpected events spiral out of their control, bringing them intimately together, they continue to play a cat and mouse game of false moves and motives in order to fulfill their own secret missions.

Mary E. Pearson's Dance of Thieves is a new YA novel in the New York Times bestselling Remnant Chronicles universe, in which a reformed thief and the young leader of an outlaw dynasty lock wits in a battle that may cost them their lives—and their hearts. ]]> 512 Mary E. Pearson 1250159016 Cricket 0 to-read 4.11 2018 Dance of Thieves (Dance of Thieves, #1)
author: Mary E. Pearson
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Bunt! Striking Out on Financial Aid]]> 111673410
The author of the New York Times best-selling Check, Please series, Ngozi Ukazu returns with debut artist Madeline Rupert to bring an energetic young adult story about authenticity, old vs. new, and college failure. It also poses the question: “Is art school worth it?”]]> 288 Ngozi Ukazu 1250193516 Cricket 0 to-read 4.10 2024 Bunt! Striking Out on Financial Aid
author: Ngozi Ukazu
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Flip 220908950 SENIOR YEAR BUCKET LIST? SWITCH BODIES WITH YOUR CRUSH.

Chi-Chi Ekeh has one huge problem: She keeps having crushes on rich white boys who have no idea she exists. Enter Flip Henderson, the most popular boy at school, who receives Chi-Chi’s private video proposal to go to senior prom.

But when Flip rejects Chi-Chi in front of their entire class, what happens next is completely unexpected: Chi-Chi―shy nerd and scholarship student―switches bodies with Flip. Suddenly Chi-Chi is 6�1� and cool, while Flip gets a crash course on Chi-Chi’s life―that is, k-pop, hair-braiding, and being a poor kid of color at a rich white private school.

With graduation looming and their body swaps lasting longer and longer, Chi-Chi and Flip must form the most unlikely friendship their school has ever seen. But will they survive senior year? And, most importantly, can they find a way back to themselves?

From bestselling author of Check, Please! comes Flip, a thrilling and fantastical tale about self-acceptance, black girlhood, and how walking a mile in someone else’s shoes can teach you how to finally see yourself.]]> 320 Ngozi Ukazu 1250179513 Cricket 0 to-read 4.32 2025 Flip
author: Ngozi Ukazu
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> None of This Is True 199797783 This edition contains a bonus chapter.

Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summer 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 realize 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?]]> 400 Lisa Jewell 1982179015 Cricket 0 to-read 4.08 2023 None of This Is True
author: Lisa Jewell
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Night's Master (Tales from the Flat Earth #1)]]> 882258 208 Tanith Lee 0886771315 Cricket 0 to-read 4.09 1978 Night's Master (Tales from the Flat Earth #1)
author: Tanith Lee
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1978
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Infinity Gate (Pandominion #1)]]> 74756439
The Pandominion: a political and trading alliance of a million worlds - except that they're really just the one world, Earth, in many different realities. And when an AI threat arises that could destroy everything the Pandominion has built, they'll eradicate it by whatever means necessary, no matter the cost to human life.

Scientist Hadiz Tambuwal is looking for a solution to her own Earth's environmental collapse when she stumbles across the secret of inter-dimensional travel. It could save everyone on her dying planet, but now she's walked into the middle of a war on a scale she never dreamed of.

And she needs to choose a side before it kills her.]]> 527 M.R. Carey 0356518027 Cricket 0 to-read 4.42 2023 Infinity Gate (Pandominion #1)
author: M.R. Carey
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Great Expectations 139400711
I’d seen the Senator speak a few times before my life got caught up, however distantly, with his, but the first time I can remember paying real attention was when he delivered the speech announcing his run for the Presidency.

When David first hears the Senator from Illinois speak, he feels deep ambivalence. Intrigued by the Senator’s idealistic rhetoric, David also wonders how he’ll balance the fervent belief and inevitable compromises it will take to become the United States� first Black president.

Great Expectations is about David’s eighteen months working for the Senator's presidential campaign. Along the way David meets a myriad of people who raise a set of questions—questions of history, art, race, religion, and fatherhood—that force David to look at his own life anew and come to terms with his identity as a young Black man and father in America.

Meditating on politics and politicians, religion and preachers, fathers and family, Great Expectations is both an emotionally resonant coming-of-age story and a rich novel of ideas, marking the arrival of a major new writer.]]> 272 Vinson Cunningham 0593448235 Cricket 2 3.24 2024 Great Expectations
author: Vinson Cunningham
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves: historical-fiction, realistic-fiction
review:

]]> The Wedding People 198902277 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250899576.

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 Cricket 3 4.11 2024 The Wedding People
author: Alison Espach
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/09
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: audiobook, covid-lit, humor, recs-for-moms-book-club, romance
review:

]]> Wool - Holston (Wool, #1) 12287209
Or you'll get what you wish for.]]> 56 Hugh Howey Cricket 0 did-not-finish 4.14 2012 Wool - Holston (Wool, #1)
author: Hugh Howey
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: did-not-finish
review:

]]> The Book of George 203579186 From the author of the critically acclaimed Laura & Emma comes a The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. for our times: Kate Greathead's razor-sharp but big-hearted excavation of millennial masculinity, The Book of George.

If you haven’t had the misfortune of dating a George, you know someone who has. He’s a young man brimming with potential but incapable of following through; noncommittal to his long-suffering girlfriend, Jenny; distant from but still reliant on his mother; funny one minute, sullenly brooding the next. Here, Kate Greathead paints one particular, unforgettable George in a series of droll and surprisingly poignant snapshots of his life over two decades.

And yet, it’s hard not to root for George at least a little. Beneath his cynicism is a reservoir of fondness for Jenny’s valiant willingness to put up with him. Each demonstration of his flaws is paired with a self-eviscerating comment. No one is more disappointed in him than himself (except maybe Jenny and his mother). As hilarious as it is astute and singular as it is universal, The Book of George is a deft, unexpectedly moving portrait of one man � but also countless others.]]> 288 Kate Greathead 1250351022 Cricket 3 3.42 2024 The Book of George
author: Kate Greathead
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: beautiful-style, humor, realistic-fiction
review:
Can I hate a book for being a character study of a terrible person when it's obvious the book wants me to hate him?
]]> On the Bright Side 200359329
Ellie’s Deaf boarding school just shut down, forcing her to leave the place she considered home and return to her hearing family. Back in a mainstream school, Ellie quickly becomes the subject of hateful rumors. That’s when her guidance counselor pairs her with Jackson, a student who’s supposed to help her adjust. Can the boy who tries to say the right things, and gets it all wrong, be the lifeline Ellie needs?

Jackson has been avoiding his teammates ever since some numbness in his legs cost them an important soccer match. With his senior year off to a lonely start, he’s intrigued when he’s asked to help the new girl, initially thinking it will be a commendable move on his part. Little does he know Ellie will soon be the person he wants most by his side when the strange symptoms he’s experiencing amount to a life-changing diagnosis.

Exploring what it means to build community, Anna Sortino pens a story about the fear of the unknown and the beauty of the unexpected, all wrapped up in a poignant romance that will break your heart and put it back together again.]]> 320 Anna Sortino 0593697863 Cricket 0 to-read 4.01 2024 On the Bright Side
author: Anna Sortino
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: to-read
review:

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

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

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

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.]]> 327 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374109281 Cricket 4 4.08 2024 Beautyland
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: audiobook, beautiful-style, philosophical, sci-fi, ze-queer-shelf
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet]]> 55145261 A deeply moving and mind-expanding collection of personal essays in the first ever work of non-fiction from #1 internationally bestselling author John Green

The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his ground-breaking, critically acclaimed podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet - from the QWERTY keyboard and Halley's Comet to Penguins of Madagascar - on a five-star scale.

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.]]> 304 John Green 0525555218 Cricket 0 to-read 4.37 2021 The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
author: John Green
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Light from Uncommon Stars 56179360
Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the to escape damnation, she must entice seven other violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. She has already delivered six. When Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender runaway, catches Shizuka's ear with her wild talent, Shizuka can almost feel the curse lifting. She's found her final candidate. But in a donut shop off a bustling highway in the San Gabriel Valley, Shizuka meets Lan Tran, retired starship captain, interstellar refugee, and mother of four. Shizuka doesn't have time for crushes or coffee dates, what with her very soul on the line, but Lan's kind smile and eyes like stars might just redefine a soul's worth. And maybe something as small as a warm donut is powerful enough to break a curse as vast as the California coastline. As the lives of these three women become entangled by chance and fate, a story of magic, identity, curses, and hope begins, and a family worth crossing the universe for is found.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]> 372 Ryka Aoki 1250789060 Cricket 3 4.03 2021 Light from Uncommon Stars
author: Ryka Aoki
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/07
date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: audiobook, fantasy, sci-fi, ze-queer-shelf
review:

]]> Creation Lake 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Cricket 4 3.35 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: beautiful-style, philosophical, realistic-fiction
review:

]]> The Book of Love 157981682 The Book of Love showcases Kelly Link at the height of her powers, channeling potent magic and attuned to all varieties of love—from friendship to romance to abiding family ties—with her trademark compassion, wit, and literary derring-do. Readers will find joy (and a little terror) and an affirmation that love goes on, even when we cannot.

Late one night, Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves beneath the fluorescent lights of a high school classroom, almost a year after disappearing from their hometown, the small seaside community of Lovesend, Massachusetts, having long been presumed dead. Which, in fact, they are.

With them in the room is their previously unremarkable high school music teacher, who seems to know something about their disappearance—and what has brought them back again. Desperate to reclaim their lives, the three agree to the terms of the bargain their music teacher proposes. They will be given a series of magical tasks; while they undertake them, they may return to their families and friends, but they can tell no one where they’ve been. In the end, there will be winners and there will be losers.

But their resurrection has attracted the notice of other supernatural figures, all with their own agendas. As Laura, Daniel, and Mo grapple with the pieces of the lives they left behind, and Laura’s sister, Susannah, attempts to reconcile what she remembers with what she fears, these mysterious others begin to arrive, engulfing their community in danger and chaos, and it becomes imperative that the teens solve the mystery of their deaths to avert a looming disaster.]]> 628 Kelly Link 0812996585 Cricket 2 fantasy, ze-queer-shelf 3.44 2024 The Book of Love
author: Kelly Link
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/26
date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: fantasy, ze-queer-shelf
review:

]]> <![CDATA[They Both Die at the End (Death-Cast, #1)]]> 39320556 Adam Silvera reminds us that there’s no life without death and no love without loss in this devastating yet uplifting story about two people whose lives change over the course of one unforgettable day.

New York Times bestseller *4 starred reviews *A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year * A Kirkus Best Book of the Year * A Booklist Editors' Choice of 2017 * A Bustle Best YA Novel of 2017 * A Paste Magazine Best YA Book of 2017 * A Book Riot Best Queer Book of 2017 * A Buzzfeed Best YA Book of the Year * A BookPage Best YA Book of the Year

On September 5, a little after midnight, Death-Cast calls Mateo Torrez and Rufus Emeterio to give them some bad news: They’re going to die today.

Mateo and Rufus are total strangers, but, for different reasons, they’re both looking to make a new friend on their End Day. The good news: There’s an app for that. It’s called the Last Friend, and through it, Rufus and Mateo are about to meet up for one last great adventure—to live a lifetime in a single day.

In the tradition of Before I Fall and If I Stay, They Both Die at the End is a tour de force from acclaimed author Adam Silvera, whose debut, More Happy Than Not, the New York Times called “profound.”]]> 389 Adam Silvera 0062457802 Cricket 0 to-read 3.83 2017 They Both Die at the End (Death-Cast, #1)
author: Adam Silvera
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Way of Kings (The Stormlight Archive, #1)]]> 7235533 From #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings, book one of The Stormlight Archive begins an incredible new saga of epic proportion.

Roshar is a world of stone and storms. Uncanny tempests of incredible power sweep across the rocky terrain so frequently that they have shaped ecology and civilization alike. Animals hide in shells, trees pull in branches, and grass retracts into the soilless ground. Cities are built only where the topography offers shelter.

It has been centuries since the fall of the ten consecrated orders known as the Knights Radiant, but their Shardblades and Shardplate remain: mystical swords and suits of armor that transform ordinary men into near-invincible warriors. Men trade kingdoms for Shardblades. Wars were fought for them, and won by them.

One such war rages on a ruined landscape called the Shattered Plains. There, Kaladin, who traded his medical apprenticeship for a spear to protect his little brother, has been reduced to slavery. In a war that makes no sense, where ten armies fight separately against a single foe, he struggles to save his men and to fathom the leaders who consider them expendable.

Brightlord Dalinar Kholin commands one of those other armies. Like his brother, the late king, he is fascinated by an ancient text called The Way of Kings. Troubled by over-powering visions of ancient times and the Knights Radiant, he has begun to doubt his own sanity.

Across the ocean, an untried young woman named Shallan seeks to train under an eminent scholar and notorious heretic, Dalinar's niece, Jasnah. Though she genuinely loves learning, Shallan's motives are less than pure. As she plans a daring theft, her research for Jasnah hints at secrets of the Knights Radiant and the true cause of the war.

The result of over ten years of planning, writing, and world-building, The Way of Kings is but the opening movement of the Stormlight Archive, a bold masterpiece in the making.

Speak again the ancient oaths:

Life before death.
Strength before weakness.
Journey before Destination.

and return to men the Shards they once bore.

The Knights Radiant must stand again.]]> 1007 Brandon Sanderson 0765326353 Cricket 4 4.66 2010 The Way of Kings (The Stormlight Archive, #1)
author: Brandon Sanderson
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.66
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: fantasy, summer-reading-list, refuse-to-admit-any-level-of-woogis, woogish
review:

]]> <![CDATA[You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible]]> 208896806 A trained chef teaches you how to keep yourself fed in the face of stress, burnout, and exhaustion—and have fun doing it.Delivery is expensive. Eating a spoonful of peanut butter is depressing. You can’t imagine having the energy to chop an onion. But somehow, you gotta eat. How does anyone feed themselves under these conditions?Enter You Gotta Eat, a friendly, accessible resource for getting something on your plate when you have too much on your plate. Part cookbook, part pep talk, and part action plan, You Gotta Eat offers tips and tactics—plus ten "do exactly this" recipes—for making effortless food that’s nourishing, tasty, and even a little fun. Choose your current energy level and learn important kitchen If you can open a Turn instant ramen into a feastIf you can assemble a Make a cheese board fit for a kingIf you can press a Whip up perfect eggs in the microwaveIf you can wield a Turn any leftovers into a hearty casseroleAnd dozens more ideas for living deliciously without impossible effort!Whether you’re burnt out, depressed, overworked, a new parent, living away from home for the first time, or some combination of the above, let food editor, classically-trained chef, and nacho enthusiast Margaret Eby show you how to make your eating experience better—and easier—in every way.]]> 192 Margaret Eby 1683694422 Cricket 0 to-read 3.94 2024 You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible
author: Margaret Eby
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Outline 21400742
Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives. In the stifling heat and noise of the city the sequence of voice begins to weave a complex human tapestry. The more they talk the more elliptical their listener becomes, as she shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself.

Outline is a novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form.]]> 249 Rachel Cusk 0571233627 Cricket 3 3.68 2014 Outline
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/05
date added: 2024/12/05
shelves: about-writing, audiobook, beautiful-style, could-cut-the-sexism-with-a-knife, realistic-fiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance]]> 75665932
An award-winning author investigates the entangled history of her Jewish ancestors' land in South Dakota and the Lakota, who were forced off that land by the United States government

Growing up, Rebecca Clarren only knew the major plot points of her tenacious immigrant family’s origins. Her great-great-grandparents, the Sinykins, and their six children fled antisemitism in Russia and arrived in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, ultimately settling on a 160-acre homestead in South Dakota. Over the next few decades, despite tough years on a merciless prairie and multiple setbacks, the Sinykins became an American immigrant success story.

What none of Clarren’s ancestors ever mentioned was that their land, the foundation for much of their wealth, had been cruelly taken from the Lakota by the United States government. By the time the Sinykins moved to South Dakota, America had broken hundreds of treaties with hundreds of Indigenous nations across the continent, and the land that had once been reserved for the seven bands of the Lakota had been diminished, splintered, and handed for free, or practically free, to white settlers. In The Cost of Free Land , Clarren melds investigative reporting with personal family history to reveal the intertwined stories of her family and the Lakota, and the devastating cycle of loss of Indigenous land, culture, and resources that continues today.

With deep empathy and clarity of purpose, Clarren grapples with the personal and national consequences of this legacy of violence and dispossession. What does it mean to survive oppression only to perpetuate and benefit from the oppression of others? By shining a light on the people and families tangled up in this country’s difficult history, The Cost of Free Land invites readers to consider their own culpability and what, now, can be done.]]> 352 Rebecca Clarren 0593655079 Cricket 0 to-read 4.45 2023 The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance
author: Rebecca Clarren
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Mary: An Awakening of Terror 60301558 Nat Cassidy’s highly commercial, debut horror novel An Awakening of Terror, blends Midsommar with elements of American Psycho and a pinch of I'll Be Gone in the Dark.Mary is a quiet, middle-aged woman doing her best to blend into the background. Unremarkable. Invisible. Unknown even to herself.But lately, things have been changing inside Mary. Along with the hot flashes and body aches, she can’t look in a mirror without passing out, and the voices in her head have been urging her to do unspeakable things.Fired from her job in New York, she moves back to her hometown, hoping to reconnect with her past and inner self. Instead, visions of terrifying, mutilated specters overwhelm her with increasing regularity and she begins auto-writing strange thoughts and phrases. Mary discovers that these experiences are echoes of an infamous serial killer. Then the killings begin again.Mary’s definitely going to find herself.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]> 400 Nat Cassidy 1250265223 Cricket 0 to-read 3.76 2022 Mary: An Awakening of Terror
author: Nat Cassidy
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Martyr! 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

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

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Cricket 4 4.22 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves: a-familys-story-coming-to-america, audiobook, beautiful-style, realistic-fiction, ze-queer-shelf
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Book of Tongues (Hexslinger, #1)]]> 7775973
Magicians, cursed by their gift to a solitary and painful existence, have never been more than a footnote in history. But Rook, driven by desperation, has a plan to shatter the natural law that prevents hexes from cooperation, and change the face of the world-a plan sealed by an unholy marriage-oath with the goddess Ixchel, mother of all hanged men. To accomplish this, he must raise her bloodthirsty pantheon from its collective grave through sacrifice, destruction, and apotheosis.

Caught between a passel of dead gods and monsters, hexes galore, Rook's witchery, and the ruthless calculations of his own masters, Morrow's only real hope of survival lies with the man without whom Rook cannot succeed: Chess Pargeter himself. But Morrow and Chess will have to literally ride through Hell before the truth of Chess's fate comes clear-the doom written for him, and the entire world.]]> 274 Gemma Files 0981297862 Cricket 0 to-read 3.48 2010 A Book of Tongues (Hexslinger, #1)
author: Gemma Files
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Talk to My Back 58772767 An unearthed masterwork from one of the "three daughters of Garo," shimmering with realism and vulnerability

"Now that we've woken from the dream, what are we going to do?" Chiharu thinks to herself, rubbing her husband's head affectionately.

Set in an apartment complex on the outskirts of Tokyo, Talk to My Back explores the fraying suburban middle-class dream of the 1980s through Chiharu's relationship with her two young daughters as they mature and begin to assert their independence; and with her husband, who regularly works late and is unable to see his wife as anything more than a mother.

Despite Yamada Murasaki's honest engagement with marriage and motherhood, she is surprisingly generous with the characters that drag her protagonist down. When the husband has a brief affair, Chiharu brushes it off, feeling that she, too, has broken the marital contract by straying from the template of the happy housewife. Instead Yamada saves her harshest criticisms for society at large, particularly its false promises of eternal satisfaction within a family unit--as fears of having been thrown away inside that empty vessel called the household gnaw at Chiharu's soul.

Yamada was the first cartoonist to use the expressive freedoms of alt-manga to address domesticity and womanhood in a realistic, critical, and sustained way. A watershed work of literary manga, Talk to My Back was serialized in the influential Garo magazine during the early 1980s, and is translated by Eisner award winning Ryan Holmberg.]]> 384 Murasaki Yamada 1770465634 Cricket 0 to-read 4.06 1982 Talk to My Back
author: Murasaki Yamada
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Good Luck Girls (The Good Luck Girls, #1)]]> 36381842 Westworld meets The Handmaid's Tale in this stunning fantasy adventure from debut author Charlotte Nicole Davis.

Aster, the protector
Violet, the favorite
Tansy, the medic
Mallow, the fighter
Clementine, the catalyst

THE GOOD LUCK GIRLS

The country of Arketta calls them Good Luck Girls--they know their luck is anything but. Sold to a "welcome house" as children and branded with cursed markings. Trapped in a life they would never have chosen.

When Clementine accidentally murders a man, the girls risk a dangerous escape and harrowing journey to find freedom, justice, and revenge in a country that wants them to have none of those things. Pursued by Arketta's most vicious and powerful forces, both human and inhuman, their only hope lies in a bedtime story passed from one Good Luck Girl to another, a story that only the youngest or most desperate would ever believe.

It's going to take more than luck for them all to survive.]]> 352 Charlotte Nicole Davis 1250299713 Cricket 0 to-read 3.91 2019 The Good Luck Girls (The Good Luck Girls, #1)
author: Charlotte Nicole Davis
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Rani Choudhury Must Die 200982327 In this sapphic dual POV Young Adult romance by Adiba Jaigirdar, Meghna and Rani (ex-best-friends-turned-rivals) realize they're dating the same guy, so they team up to beat and expose him at a big science competition!

Meghna Rahman is tired of constantly being compared to her infuriatingly perfect ex best friend now rival. Everyone, except, at least, her boyfriend Zak, seems to think that Rani Choudhury can do no wrong—even her own parents! It doesn’t help that Rani is always accepted into the Young Scientist Exhibition, while Meghna’s projects never make it. But this year, she finally has a chance at defeating Rani in something.

Rani Choudhury is tired of feeling like she doesn’t have much say in her life—not when it comes to how her mom wants her to look and act or how her parents encourage her to date incredibly charming close family friend Zak. She would much rather focus on her coding, especially once she places high enough at the Young Scientist Exhibition to go on to the European Young Scientist Exhibition

When Meghna and Rani figure out that Zak has been playing them both, they decide to do something no one would see coming: they team up. They’ll compete in the EYSE as partners, creating an app that exposes cheaters and a project that exposes Zak. But with years of silence and pressure between them, working together will prove difficult. Especially once each girl starts to realize that the feelings they had for the other may have been more than platonic...

Hey, no one ever said science was easy!]]> 320 Adiba Jaigirdar 1250842085 Cricket 0 to-read 3.60 2024 Rani Choudhury Must Die
author: Adiba Jaigirdar
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Annie Bot 156023123
She’s learning, too.

Doug says he loves that Annie’s artificial intelligence makes her seem more like a real woman, but the more human Annie becomes, the less perfectly she behaves. As Annie's relationship with Doug grows more intricate and difficult, she starts to wonder whether Doug truly desires what he says he does. In such an impossible paradox, what does Annie owe herself?]]> 231 Sierra Greer 0063312697 Cricket 0 to-read 3.81 2024 Annie Bot
author: Sierra Greer
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Storm We Made 60211228 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781668015148.

A novel about a Malayan mother who becomes an unlikely spy for the invading Japanese forces during WWII—and the shocking consequences that rain upon her community and family.

Malaya, 1945. Cecily Alcantara’s family is in terrible danger: her fifteen-year-old son, Abel, has disappeared, and her youngest daughter, Jasmin, is confined in a basement to prevent being pressed into service at the comfort stations. Her eldest daughter Jujube, who works at a tea house frequented by drunk Japanese soldiers, becomes angrier by the day.

Cecily knows two things: that this is all her fault; and that her family must never learn the truth.

A decade prior, Cecily had been desperate to be more than a housewife to a low-level bureaucrat in British-colonized Malaya. A chance meeting with the charismatic General Fuijwara lured her into a life of espionage, pursuing dreams of an “Asia for Asians.� Instead, Cecily helped usher in an even more brutal occupation by the Japanese. Ten years later as the war reaches its apex, her actions have caught up with her. Now her family is on the brink of destruction—and she will do anything to save them.]]> 339 Vanessa Chan Cricket 2 3.80 2024 The Storm We Made
author: Vanessa Chan
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/07/16
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: audiobook, historical-fiction, wwii
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Kingdom of Sweets: A Novel of the Nutcracker]]> 218460310 368 Erika Johansen 1524742775 Cricket 0 to-read 3.34 2023 The Kingdom of Sweets: A Novel of the Nutcracker
author: Erika Johansen
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Heart of Winter 211025516 The extraordinary new novel by Jonathan Evison, about a married couple in their golden years, from when they met across big ups, deep downs, and survive-it-all, opposites-attract love

Abe Winter and Ruth Warneke were never meant to be together—at least if you ask Ruth. Yet their catastrophic blind date in college evolved into a seventy-year marriage and a life on a farm on Bainbridge Island with their hens and beloved Labrador, Megs. Through the years, the Winters have fallen in and out of lockstep, and from their haunting losses and guarded secrets, a dependable partnership has been forged.

But when Ruth’s loose tooth turns out to be something much more malicious, the beautiful, reliable life they’ve created together comes to a crisis. As Ruth struggles with her crumbling independence, Abe must learn how to take care of her while their three living children question his ability to look after his wife. And once again, the couple has to reconfigure how to be there for each other.

In this bighearted and profound portrait of a marriage, Jonathan Evison explores seventy years of big moments in subtle ways, elegantly braiding the Winters� turbulent history with their present-day battles, showing us how the oddly paired college kids became parents, fell apart and back together, and grew into the Abe and Ruth of today. Endlessly heartwarming and moving, The Heart of Winter is a reminder that true love lives in small, everyday moments.]]> 367 Jonathan Evison 0593473566 Cricket 0 to-read 4.35 2025 The Heart of Winter
author: Jonathan Evison
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World's Greatest Museum]]> 213395444 A former New York Times Paris bureau chief explores the Louvre, offering an intimate journey of discovery and revelation.


The Louvre is the most famous museum in the world, attracting millions of visitors every year with its masterpieces. In Adventures in the Louvre, Elaine Sciolino immerses herself in this magical space and helps us fall in love with what was once a forbidding fortress.


Exploring galleries, basements, rooftops, and gardens, Sciolino demystifies the Louvre, introducing us to her favorite artworks, both legendary and overlooked, and to the people who are the museum’s the curators, the artisans producing frames and engravings, the builders overseeing restorations, the firefighters protecting the aging structure.


Blending investigative journalism, travelogue, history, and memoir, Sciolino walks her readers through the museum’s front gates and immerses them in its irresistible, engrossing world of beauty and culture. Adventures in the Louvre reveals the secrets of this grand monument of Paris and basks in its timeless, seductive power.]]> 384 Elaine Sciolino 1324021403 Cricket 0 to-read 4.39 Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World's Greatest Museum
author: Elaine Sciolino
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.39
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> Summer in the City 216405550 From #1New York Timesbestselling author Alex Aster comes her adult debut novelSummer in the City—a swoony, fast-paced rom-com set in New York City in which a screenwriter and a sexy tech CEO go from lovers to enemies and back to lovers again�

Twenty-seven-year-old screenwriter Elle has the chance of a lifetime to write a big-budget movie set in New York City. The only problem? She’s had writer’s block for months, and her screenplay is due at the end of the summer.

In a desperate attempt at inspiration, Elle ends up back in the city she swore she would never return to, in an apartment she could never afford (floor-to-ceiling windows, skyline views, and a new coffee shop to haunt included). It’s the perfect place to write her screenplay…until she realizes her new neighbor is tech “Billionaire Bachelor� Parker Warren, her stairwell hookup from two years ago. It’s been a lovers-to-enemies situation ever since.

When seeing him again turns into a full night of hate-fueled writing, Elle realizes her enemy/twisted muse might just be the key to finishing her screenplay... if she can stand being around her polar opposite. She writes anonymously, and he’s on the cover of every business magazine. He frequents fancy red carpeted events, and she doesn’t like leaving her emotional support five block radius.

One summer. One wall apart. He needs to fake a buzzy relationship during his company’s precarious acquisition. She needs to write a movie around a list of NYC locations. Both need a break from their unrelenting schedules, and a chance to rediscover the skyscraper glimmering, pizza crusted, sunlit charms of the city.

Summers always end, and so will this agreement. It’s all pretend. Promise.

Until it isn’t.]]> 304 Alex Aster 0063411660 Cricket 0 to-read 3.86 2025 Summer in the City
author: Alex Aster
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> A World Worth Saving 212806632 A groundbreaking, action-packed, and ultimately uplifting adventure that intertwines elements of Jewish mythology with an unflinching examination of the impacts of transphobia, from Newbery Honor-winner Kyle Lukoff

“Kyle Lukoff has given us something rare and beautiful � a novel that combines wondrous fantasy, searing real-world relevance, and a frank empathetic understanding of the adolescent experience that hits so viscerally I can only compare it to the way my generation experienced Judy Blume. The way Lukoff combines these elements in a page-turning adventure is nothing short of magic!� –Rick Riordan, author of Percy Jackson and the Olympians


Covid lockdown is over, but A’s world feels smaller than ever. Coming out as trans didn’t exactly go well, and most days, he barely leaves his bedroom, let alone the house. But the low point of A’s life isn’t online school, missing his bar mitzvah, or the fact that his parents monitor his phone like hawks—it’s the weekly Save Our Sons and Daughters meetings his parents all but drag him to.

At SOSAD, A and his friends Sal and Yarrow sit by while their parents deadname them and wring their hands over a nonexistent “transgender craze.� After all, sitting in suffocating silence has to be better than getting sent away for “advanced treatment,� never to be heard from again.

When Yarrow vanishes after a particularly confrontational meeting, A discovers that SOSAD doesn’t just feel soul-sucking . . . it’s run by an actual demon who feeds off the pain and misery of kids like him. And it’s not just SOSAD—the entire world is beset by demons dining on what seems like an endless buffet of pain and bigotry.

But how is one trans kid who hasn’t even chosen a name supposed to save his friend, let alone the world? And is a world that seems hellbent on rejecting him even worth saving at all?]]> 344 Kyle Lukoff 059361898X Cricket 0 to-read 3.99 2025 A World Worth Saving
author: Kyle Lukoff
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> Entitlement 209330233 A novel of money and morality from the New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind.

Brooke wants. She isn’t in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief?

Taut, unsettling, and alive to the seductive distortions of money, Entitlement is a riveting tale for our new gilded age, a story that confidently considers questions about need and worth, race and privilege, philanthropy and generosity, passion and obsession. It is a provocative, propulsive novel about the American imagination.]]> 288 Rumaan Alam 0593718461 Cricket 2 audiobook, philosophical 3.00 2024 Entitlement
author: Rumaan Alam
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/11
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: audiobook, philosophical
review:
Feels like a sibling to The Guest, but I liked The Guest better. Might need to chew on it a little to see if I should push the rating up.
]]> Homeseeking 211025407 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593712993.

An epic and intimate tale of one couple across sixty years as world events pull them together and apart, illuminating the Chinese diaspora and exploring what it means to find home far from your homeland.

A single choice can define an entire life.

Haiwen is buying bananas at a 99 Ranch Market in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, his Suchi, for the first time in sixty years. To recently widowed Haiwen it feels like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back.

Suchi was seven when she first met Haiwen in their Shanghai neighborhood, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship blossomed into soul-deep love, but when Haiwen secretly enlisted in the Nationalist army in 1947 to save his brother from the draft, she was left with just his violin and a note: Forgive me.

Homeseeking follows the separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history as war, famine, and opportunity take them separately to the song halls of Hong Kong, the military encampments of Taiwan, the bustling streets of New York, and sunny California, telling Haiwen’s story from the present to the past while tracing Suchi’s from her childhood to the present, meeting in the crucible of their lives. Throughout, Haiwen holds his memories close while Suchi forces herself to look only forward, neither losing sight of the home they hold in their hearts.

At once epic and intimate, Homeseeking is a story of family, sacrifice, and loyalty, and of the power of love to endure beyond distance, beyond time.]]> 512 Karissa Chen Cricket 0 to-read 4.25 2025 Homeseeking
author: Karissa Chen
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Black Power Scorecard: Measuring the Racial Gap and What We Can Do to Close It]]> 211004887 From the creator of “a unified field theory of racism� (NPR’s Planet Money), a dollars-and-cents reckoning of the state of Black America and a new framework to close the power gap

Historically, Black Americans� quest for power has been understood as an attempt to gain equal protections under the law. But power in America requires more than basic democratic freedoms. It is inextricably linked with economic influence and ownership—of one’s self, home, business, and creations.

Andre M. Perry draws on extensive research and analysis to quantify how much power Black Americans actually have. Ranging from property, business, and wealth to education, health, and social mobility, Black Power Scorecard moves across the country, evaluating people’s ability to set the rules of the game and calculating how that translates into the ultimate means of power—life itself, and the longevity of Black communities. Along the way, Andre M. Perry identifies woefully overlooked areas of investment that could close the racial gap and benefit all.

An expansive take on power supported by documentation and data, Black Power Scorecard is a fresh contribution to the country’s reckoning with structural inequality, one that offers a new approach to redressing it.]]> 256 Andre M. Perry 1250869714 Cricket 0 to-read 3.93 Black Power Scorecard: Measuring the Racial Gap and What We Can Do to Close It
author: Andre M. Perry
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.93
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People]]> 199534697 A surprising and beautiful meditation on the color blue—and its fascinating role in Black history and culture—from National Book Award winner Imani Perry

Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways. Blue skies and blue water offer hope for that which lies beyond the current conditions. But blue is also the color of deep melancholy and heartache, echoing Louis Armstrong’s question, “What did I do to be so Black and blue?� In this book, celebrated author Imani Perry uses the world’s favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey—an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology.

Perry traces both blue and Blackness from their earliest roots to their many embodiments of contemporary culture, drawing deeply from her own life as well as art and history: The dyed indigo cloths of West Africa that were traded for human life in the 16th century. The mixture of awe and aversion in the old-fashioned characterization of dark-skinned people as “Blue Black.� The fundamentally American art form of blues music, sitting at the crossroads of pain and pleasure. The blue flowers Perry plants to honor a loved one gone too soon.

Poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original, Black in Blues is a brilliant new work that could only have come from the mind of one of our greatest writers and thinkers. Attuned to the harrowing and the sublime aspects of the human experience, it is every bit as vivid, rich, and striking as blue itself.]]> 256 Imani Perry 0062977393 Cricket 0 to-read 4.34 2025 Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People
author: Imani Perry
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> Trauma Plot: A Life 213618152 From a rising literary star and the author of How to Be a Good Girl comesa brilliant, biting, and beautifully wrought memoir of trauma and the cost of survival

In the thick of lockdown, 2020, poet, critic, and memoirist Jamie Hood published her debut, How to Be a Good Girl,an interrogation of modern femininity and the narratives of love, desire, and violence yoked to it. The Rumpus praised Hood's “bold vulnerability,� and Vogue named it a Best Book of 2020.

In Trauma Plot, her long-awaited follow-up, Hood turns her eye to the archetype of the rape survivor, who must perform penitence long after living through the unthinkable. In her trademark blend of memoir and criticism, Hood investigates the lives of art's most infamous women, from Ovid's Philomela and David Lynch’s Laura Palmer to Artemisia Gentileschi, the painter who captured Judith’s wrath—as well as Hood herself,reckoning with three decades of sexual violence and the wreckage left behind. In so doing, she What do we as a culture demand of survivors? And what do survivors, in turn, owe a world that has abandoned them?

Trauma Plot is a scalding work of personal and literary criticism. It is a send-up of our culture's pious disdain for “trauma porn,� a dirge for the broken promises of #MeToo, and a paean tolife after death.]]> 336 Jamie Hood 059370097X Cricket 0 to-read 4.62 2025 Trauma Plot: A Life
author: Jamie Hood
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Lilac People 217045791 For readers of All the Light We Cannot See and In Memoriam, a moving and deeply humane story about a trans man who must relinquish the freedoms of prewar Berlin to survive first the Nazis then the Allies while protecting the ones he loves

In 1932 Berlin, Bertie, a trans man, and his friends spend carefree nights at the Eldorado Club, the epicenter of Berlin’s thriving queer community. An employee of the renowned Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute of Sexual Science, Bertie works to improve queer rights in Germany and beyond, but everything changes when Hitler rises to power. The institute is raided, the Eldorado is shuttered, and queer people are rounded up. Bertie barely escapes with his girlfriend, Sofie, to a nearby farm. There they take on the identities of an elderly couple and live for more than a decade in isolation.

In the final days of the war, with their freedom in sight, Bertie and Sofie find a young trans man collapsed on their property, still dressed in Holocaust prison clothes. They vow to protect him—not from the Nazis, but from the Allied forces who are arresting queer prisoners while liberating the rest of the country. Ironically, as the Allies� vise grip closes on Bertie and his family, their only salvation becomes fleeing to the United States.

Brimming with hope, resilience, and the enduring power of community, The Lilac People tells an extraordinary story inspired by real events and recovers an occluded moment of trans history.]]> 320 Milo Todd 1640097031 Cricket 0 to-read 4.35 The Lilac People
author: Milo Todd
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.35
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]]> Mother of Rome 211399780 A powerful and fierce reimagining of the earliest Roman legend: the twins, Romulus and Remus, mythical founders of history’s greatest empire, and the woman whose sacrifice made it all possible.

The names Romulus and Remus may be immortalized in map and stone and chronicle, but their mother exists only as a preface to her sons� journey, the princess turned oath-breaking priestess, condemned to death alongside her children.

But she did not die; she survived. And so does her story.

Beautiful, royal, rich: Rhea has it all—until her father loses his kingdom in a treacherous coup, and she is sent to the order of the Vestal Virgins to ensure she will never produce an heir.

Except when mortals scheme, gods laugh.

Rhea becomes pregnant, and human society turns against her. Abandoned, ostracized, and facing the gravest punishment, Rhea forges a dangerous deal with the divine, one that will forever change the trajectory of her life…and her beloved land.

To save her sons and reclaim their birthright, Rhea must summon nature’s mightiest force � a mother’s love � and fight.

All roads may lead to Rome, but they began with Rhea Silvia.]]> 400 Lauren J.A. Bear 0593638948 Cricket 0 to-read 4.35 2025 Mother of Rome
author: Lauren J.A. Bear
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe]]> 211025400 The essential biography of the controversial rebel, traitor, and only king of Haiti. Henry Christophe (1767 - 1820) is one of the most richly complex figures in the history of the Americas, and was, in his time, popular and famous the world over: in The First and Last King of Haiti, a brilliant, award-winning Yale scholar unravels the still controversial enigma that he was.

Slave, revolutionary, traitor, king, and suicide, Henry Christophe was, in his time, popular and famous the world over. Born to an enslaved mother on the Caribbean island of Grenada, Christophe first fought to overthrow the British in North America, before helping his fellow enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then called, to gain their freedom from France. Yet in an incredible twist of fate, Christophe ended up fighting with Napoleon's forces against the very enslaved men and women he had once fought alongside. Later, reuniting with those he had betrayed, he offered to lead them and made himself their king. But it all came to a sudden and tragic end when Christophe--after nine years of his rule as King Henry I--shot himself in the heart, some say with a silver bullet.

Why did Christophe turn his back on Toussaint Louverture and the very revolution with which his name is so indelibly associated? How did it come to pass that Christophe found himself accused of participating in the plot to assassinate Haiti's first ruler, Dessalines? What caused Haiti to eventually split into two countries, one ruled by Christophe in the north, who made himself king, the other led by President Pétion in the south?

The First and Last King of Haiti is a riveting story of not only geopolitical clashes on a grand scale but also of friendship and loyalty, treachery and betrayal, heroism and strife in an era of revolutionary upheaval.]]> 656 Marlene L. Daut 0593316169 Cricket 0 to-read 4.11 2025 The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe
author: Marlene L. Daut
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Drunken Dragon 221235630 His observations on knightly codes and the whole business of questing will leave you chuckling even as they provoke mature reflection on why people would want to do that sort of thing and how did we get into that business anyway �
If Groucho Marx had done GOT from a dragon’s perspective it might have turned out like this.]]> 458 George Morrison Cricket 0 to-read 4.18 The Drunken Dragon
author: George Morrison
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.18
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> Any Trope but You 214151426 A bestselling romance author flees to Alaska to reinvent herself and write her first murder mystery, but the rugged resort proprietor soon has her fearing she’s living in a rom-com plot instead in this earnestly spectacular debut by a stunning new voice.

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

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

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

As long snowy nights and one unlikely trope after another draw Margot and Forrest together, they’ll each have to learn to overcome their fears and set their aside assumptions before Margot leaves—or risk becoming a Happily Never After story themselves.]]> 336 Victoria Lavine 1668079275 Cricket 0 to-read 4.10 2025 Any Trope but You
author: Victoria Lavine
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> Bibliophobia: A Memoir 212806663 “A wise, tremendously moving exploration of what it means to seek companionship and understanding, in books and in life.”—Hua Hsu, author of Stay True

“A must for the obsessive reader.”—Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or and The Idiot

Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this kind of unsettling literary encounter. Sarah calls books that have this effect “Life Ruiners�.

Her Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school when its electrifying treatment of race exposed Sarah’s deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland. But Sarah had always lived through her books, seeking escape, self-definition, and rules for living. She built her life around reading, wrote criticism, and taught literature at an Ivy League University. Then she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, and the world became an unreadable blank page. In the aftermath, she was faced with a question. Could we ever truly rewrite the stories that govern our lives?

Bibliophobia is an alternately searing and darkly humorous story of breakdown and survival told through books. Delving into texts such as Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, The Last Samurai, Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the intoxicating, sometimes painful, ways books push back on those who love them.]]> 240 Sarah Chihaya 059359472X Cricket 0 to-read 3.77 2025 Bibliophobia: A Memoir
author: Sarah Chihaya
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Punishment-Free Parenting: The Brain-Based Way to Raise Kids Without Raising Your Voice]]> 212294424 A no-judgment parenting guide that helps you better understand your own emotions as well as your children's needs without resorting to threats or punishment—from a regular dad who made it his mission to share what he learned from his hard-won experiences and personal research

Every parent has had that painful moment of messing up and seeing that they need help if they're going to raise happy, emotionally healthy kids. For Jon Fogel, that moment came after yelling at his son and realizing he was making the same mistakes as his own parents. He knew something had to change. More than figuring out how best to parent his little boy, he needed to understand and redirect his own emotions. That put Fogel on a path towards understanding himself, learning about the brain, naming his emotions, becoming a whole parent. In a few short years, Jon became an inspiration to over a million parents around the world who were striving to be the best parents they could be too.

Now with Punishment-Free Parenting, Fogel, a father of three, pastor, and parenting educator, brings to parents the hard-won insights from his research and work as a parenting coach. In memorable advice and with compassionate insight, Fogel offers moms and dads a clear path to their own wholeness as parents—from learning to recognize and name their own emotional triggers to responding to children with a keener awareness of their developmental processes. What emerges is a path forward into partnership with children and without the drama of punishment.

In these pages, readers will be heartened to meet other parents just like them, and children just like their own, who have learned to use the tools and tips that Fogel offers. Packed with the most helpful research findings from child psychology, neurology, and pediatric medicine, Punishment-Free Parenting is the simple, accessible, no-judgment book for parents who want the support and guidance of a dad just like them.]]> 256 Jon Fogel 0593735463 Cricket 0 to-read 4.65 Punishment-Free Parenting: The Brain-Based Way to Raise Kids Without Raising Your Voice
author: Jon Fogel
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.65
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]]> Help Wanted 150778765 In Help Wanted, Adelle Waldman brings her unparalleled wit and knack for social observation to the world of work.

At a big-box store in a small town in upstate New York, the members of Team Movement clock in every morning at 3:55. Under the eye of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day’s truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scatter before customers arrive. When a golden opportunity for a promotion presents itself, the diverse members of Movement―among them a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging to her “cool kid� status from high school, a college football hopeful trying to find a new path―band together and set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot into motion. A darkly comic workplace caper that explores the aches and uses of solidarity, Help Wanted is a deeply human portrait of people trying, against increasingly long odds, to make a living.]]> 288 Adelle Waldman 132402044X Cricket 3 realistic-fiction 3.56 2024 Help Wanted
author: Adelle Waldman
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/05
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves: realistic-fiction
review:

]]> The Vulnerables 216662314
Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel. The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past.

Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others, who here include an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot named Eureka. The Vulnerables reveals what happens when strangers are willing to open their hearts to each other and how far even small acts of caring can go to ease another’s distress. A search for understanding about some of the most critical matters of our time, Nunez’s new novel is also an inquiry into the nature and purpose of writing itself.]]> 272 Sigrid Nunez 0593715527 Cricket 0 to-read 3.71 2023 The Vulnerables
author: Sigrid Nunez
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> Poverty, by America 204736844 The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in because the rest of us benefit from it. ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2023: The Washington Post, Time, Esquire, Newsweek, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Elle, Salon, Lit Hub, Kirkus ReviewsThe United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages? In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow. Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.]]> 320 Matthew Desmond 0593239938 Cricket 0 to-read 4.24 2023 Poverty, by America
author: Matthew Desmond
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> For She Is Wrath 61070523 A sweeping, Pakistani romantic fantasy retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, where one girl seeks revenge against those who betrayed her—including the boy she used to love.

Three hundred and sixty-four days.
Framed for a crime she didn't commit, Dania counts down her days in prison until she can exact revenge on Mazin, the boy responsible for her downfall, the boy she once loved—and still can't forget. When she discovers a fellow prisoner may have the key to exacting that vengeance--a stolen djinn treasure--they execute a daring escape together and search for the hidden treasure.

Armed with dark magic and a new identity, Dania enacts a plan to bring down those who betrayed her and her family, even though Mazin stands in her way. But seeking revenge becomes a complicated game of cat and mouse, especially when an undeniable fire still burns between them, and the power to destroy her enemies has a price. As Dania falls deeper into her web of traps and lies, she risks losing her humanity to her fight for vengeance--and her heart to the only boy she's ever loved.]]> 439 Emily Varga 1250877385 Cricket 0 to-read 3.67 2024 For She Is Wrath
author: Emily Varga
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Sky Daddy 216248716 Subversive and unexpectedly heartwarming, Sky Daddy hijacks the classic love story, exploring desire, fate, and the longing to be accepted for who we truly are.

Linda is doing her best to lead a life that would appear normal to the casual observer. Weekdays, she earns $20 an hour moderating comments for a video-sharing platform, then rides the bus home to the windowless garage she rents on the outskirts of San Francisco. But on the last Friday of each month, she indulges in her true passion: taking BART to SFO for a round-trip flight to a regional hub. The destination is irrelevant because each trip means a new date with a handsome stranger—a stranger whose intelligent windscreens, sleek fuselages, and powerful engines make Linda feel a way that no human ever could.

Linda knows that she can’t tell anyone she’s sexually obsessed with planes—nor can she reveal her belief her destiny is to “marry� one of her suitors by dying in a plane crash, thereby uniting her with her soulmate plane for eternity. But when an opportunity arises to hasten her dream of eternal partnership, and the carefully balanced elements of her life begin to spin out of control, she must choose between maintaining the trappings of normalcy and launching herself headlong toward the love she’s always dreamed of.]]> 368 Kate Folk 0593231503 Cricket 0 to-read 4.38 2025 Sky Daddy
author: Kate Folk
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Dyke and the Dybbuk 2716235
As the hilarious tale unfolds, both Rainbow and her dybbuk discover that History still holds a few tricks up her sleeve.]]> 248 Ellen Galford 1878067516 Cricket 0 to-read 3.94 1993 The Dyke and the Dybbuk
author: Ellen Galford
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Charlotte Illes Is Not a Detective (Not a Detective Mysteries, #1)]]> 59841496 For anyone seeking to satisfy their Harriet the Spy, Encyclopedia Brown, or Nancy Drew nostalgia, this charming, entertaining debut based on the popular @katiefliesaway TikTok series stars a twentysomething former kid detective who’s coaxed out of retirement for one last case.

The downside of being a famous child detective is that sooner or later, you have to grow up . . .

As a kid, Charlotte Illes� uncanny sleuthing abilities made her a minor celebrity. But in high school, she hung up her detective’s hat and stashed away the signature blue landline in her “office”—aka garage—convinced that finding her adult purpose would be as easy as tracking down missing pudding cups or locating stolen diamonds.

Now twenty-five, Charlotte has a nagging fear that she hit her peak in middle school. She’s living with her mom, scrolling through job listings, and her love life consists mostly of first dates. When it comes to knowing what to do next, Charlotte hasn’t got a clue.

And then, her old blue phone rings . . .

Reluctantly, Charlotte is pulled back into the mystery-solving world she knew—just one more time. But that world is a whole lot more complicated for an adult. As a kid, she was able to crack the case and still get her homework done on time. Now she’s dealing with dead bodies, missing persons, and villains who actually see her as a viable threat. And the detective skills she was once so eager to never use again are the only things that can stop a killer ready to make sure her next retirement is permanent . . .]]> 372 Katie Siegel 149674098X Cricket 0 to-read 3.37 2023 Charlotte Illes Is Not a Detective (Not a Detective Mysteries, #1)
author: Katie Siegel
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse, #1)]]> 8855321
Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, the Scopuli, they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for—and kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why.

Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to the Scopuli and rebel sympathizer Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything.

Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporations—and the odds are against them. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe.]]> 592 James S.A. Corey 1841499889 Cricket 2 4.30 2011 Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse, #1)
author: James S.A. Corey
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2011
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/28
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: could-cut-the-sexism-with-a-knife, sci-fi
review:

]]> Moths (Moths, #1) 63205993
A divergent future with a thought-provoking feminist slant, perfect for those who loved The Power, The Handmaid's Tale and Vox.

Mary considers tying her teenage son to the radiator.

Olivia flees the bloody scalpel of a surgeon, as he hunts her through the corridors of A&E.

All around the world men are turning into crazed killers or dying in their sleep, as toxic threads find passage on every breath of wind.

Humankind will survive. But only just.

________________________________

‘Out they came, away from natural predators, nesting in damp corners and in the tops of trees, crossbreeding with common cousins and laying thousands upon thousands of eggs. Then� the eggs hatched and an army of hungry caterpillars spread their tiny toxic threads on every breath of wind.�

The threads spell doom for humanity � half of it, at least. All around the world, men are dying in their sleep or turning into rage-fuelled killers. The world, as we know it, ends. However, humanity adapts and society moves on.

Many years later, very few even remember what life was like before the change. Mary does, though, and when an opportunity presents itself, she is faced with soul-searching decisions to make. Will she cling to the only strand of the past she has left or will she risk it all in the name of equality?

________________________________]]> 303 Jane Hennigan 1915202698 Cricket 0 to-read 3.86 2023 Moths (Moths, #1)
author: Jane Hennigan
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Third Rule of Time Travel 215815771 Rule One: Travel can only occur to a point within your lifetime.
Rule Two: You can only travel for ninety seconds.
Rule Three: You can only observe.
The rules cannot be broken.

In this riveting science fiction novel from acclaimed author Philip Fracassi, a scientist has unlocked the mysteries of time travel. This is not the story you think you know. And the rules are only the beginning.

Scientist Beth Darlow has discovered the unimaginable. She's built a machine that allows human consciousness to travel through time—to any point in the traveler's lifetime—and relive moments of their life. An impossible breakthrough, but it's not perfect: the traveler has no way to interact with the past. They can only observe.

After Beth's husband, Colson, the co-creator of the machine, dies in a tragic car accident, Beth is left to raise Isabella—their only daughter—and continue the work they started. Mired in grief and threatened by her ruthless CEO, Beth pushes herself to the limit to prove the value of her technology.

Then the impossible happens. Simply viewing personal history should not alter the present, but with each new observation she makes, her own timeline begins to warp.

As her reality constantly shifts, Beth must solve the puzzles of her past, even if it means forsaking her future.]]> 325 Philip Fracassi 0316572527 Cricket 0 to-read 3.89 2025 The Third Rule of Time Travel
author: Philip Fracassi
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Show Don't Tell 213870083 A funny, fiercely intelligent, and moving collection exploring marriage, friendship, fame, and artistic ambition—including a story that revisits the main character from Curtis Sittenfeld’s iconic novel Prep—from the New York Times bestselling author of Eligible and Romantic Comedy

In her second story collection, Sittenfeld shows why she’s as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels. In these dazzling stories, she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends, laying bare the moments when their long held beliefs are overturned.

In “The Patron Saints of Middle Age,� a woman visits two friends she hasn’t seen since her divorce. In “A for Alone,� a married artist embarks on a creative project intended to disprove the so-called Mike Pence Rule, which suggests that women and men can’t spend time alone together without lusting after each other. And in “Lost but Not Forgotten,� Sittenfeld gives readers of her novel Prep a window into the world of her beloved character Lee Fiora, decades later, when Lee attends an alumni reunion at her boarding school.

Hilarious, thought-provoking, and full of tenderness for her characters, Sittenfeld’s stories peel back layer after layer of our inner lives, keeping us riveted to the page with her utterly distinctive voice.]]> 320 Curtis Sittenfeld 0593446739 Cricket 0 to-read 3.94 2025 Show Don't Tell
author: Curtis Sittenfeld
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Nations Rage: A Novel of Human Hypocrisy]]> 215760917 516 Kylian Gates Cricket 0 to-read 5.00 The Nations Rage: A Novel of Human Hypocrisy
author: Kylian Gates
name: Cricket
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Butcher & Blackbird (The Ruinous Love Trilogy, #1)]]> 214310537

The viral TikTok friends-to-lovers dark romantic comedy full of murder, chaos, and spice—unlike anything you’ve read before—now available in all bookstores.


When a chance encounter sparks an unlikely bond between rival murderers Sloane and Rowan, the two find something elusive—the friendship of like-minded, pitch-black souls. From small town West Virginia to upscale California, from downtown Boston to rural Texas, the two hunters collide in an annual game of blood and suffering, one that pits them against the most dangerous monsters in the country.


But as their friendship develops into something more, the restless ghosts left in their wake are only a few steps behind, ready to claim more than just their newfound love. Can Rowan and Sloane dig themselves out of a game of graves? Or have they finally met their match?

]]> 368 Brynne Weaver 1638932352 Cricket 0 to-read 4.16 2023 Butcher & Blackbird (The Ruinous Love Trilogy, #1)
author: Brynne Weaver
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The House Across the Lake 58909880 The New York Times best-selling author of Final Girls and Survive the Night is back with his most unexpected thriller yet.

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

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

With his trademark blend of sharp characters, psychological suspense, and gasp-worthy surprises, Riley Sager’s The House Across the Lake unveils more than one twist that will shock readers until the very last page.]]> 369 Riley Sager Cricket 0 to-read 3.57 2022 The House Across the Lake
author: Riley Sager
name: Cricket
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Seven Year Slip 62926938 An overworked book publicist with a perfectly planned future hits a snag when she falls in love with her temporary roommate…only to discover he lives seven years in the past, in this witty and wise new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Dead Romantics.

Sometimes, the worst day of your life happens, and you have to figure out how to live after it.

So Clementine forms a plan to keep her heart safe: work hard, find someone decent to love, and try to remember to chase the moon. The last one is silly and obviously metaphorical, but her aunt always told her that you needed at least one big dream to keep going. And for the last year, that plan has gone off without a hitch. Mostly. The love part is hard because she doesn’t want to get too close to anyone—she isn’t sure her heart can take it.

And then she finds a strange man standing in the kitchen of her late aunt’s apartment. A man with kind eyes and a Southern drawl and a taste for lemon pies. The kind of man that, before it all, she would’ve fallen head-over-heels for. And she might again.

Except, he exists in the past. Seven years ago, to be exact. And she, quite literally, lives seven years in his future.

Her aunt always said the apartment was a pinch in time, a place where moments blended together like watercolors. And Clementine knows that if she lets her heart fall, she’ll be doomed.

After all, love is never a matter of time—but a matter of timing.]]> 336 Ashley Poston Cricket 0 to-read 4.18 2023 The Seven Year Slip
author: Ashley Poston
name: Cricket
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>