en-US Fri, 04 Apr 2025 11:35:09 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 96177629
Now he is. . .

Without a home

Waiting for his stand-up career to take off

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

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

In this sharply funny and exquisitely relatable story of romantic disaster and friendship, Dolly Alderton offers up a love story with two endings, demonstrating once again why she is one of the most exciting writers today, and the true voice of a generation.]]> 345 Dolly Alderton 0241523672 Ellie 0 currently-reading 3.85 2023
author: Dolly Alderton
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> 63026545
Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been.

In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. From his early experiences of sexual violence, to his suspension from college, to his trek to New York as a young college professor, Laymon charts his complex relationship with his mother, grandmother, anorexia, obesity, sex, writing, and ultimately gambling. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.

A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family that begins with a confusing childhood—and continues through twenty-five years of haunting implosions and long reverberations.]]> 248 Kiese Laymon Ellie 0 to-read 4.47 2018
author: Kiese Laymon
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
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]]> 40605223 Now a Netflix original movie, this deeply scary and intensely unnerving novel follows a couple in the midst of a twisted unraveling of the darkest unease. You will be scared. But you won’t know why�

I’m thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. It sticks. It lingers. It’s always there. Always.

Jake once said, “Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can’t fake a thought.�

And here’s what I’m thinking: I don’t want to be here.

In this smart and intense literary suspense novel, Iain Reid explores the depths of the human psyche, questioning consciousness, free will, the value of relationships, fear, and the limitations of solitude. Tense, gripping, and atmospheric, I’m Thinking of Ending Things pulls you in from the very first page…and never lets you go.]]> 241 Iain Reid Ellie 0 Wut 3.53 2016
author: Iain Reid
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/11
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Wut
]]> 207006355 What do you want, when no one is watching?
What do you want, when the lights are off?
What do you want, when you are anonymous?

When we talk about sex, we talk about womanhood and motherhood, infidelity and exploitation, consent and respect, fairness and egalitarianism, love and hate, pleasure and pain. And yet for many reasons � some complicated, some not � so many of us don't talk about it. Our deepest, most intimate fears and fantasies remain locked away inside of us, until someone comes along with the key. Here's the key. In this generation-defining book, Gillian Anderson collects and introduces the anonymous letters of hundreds of women from around the world (along with her own anonymous letter). Want reveals how women feel about sex when they have the freedom to be totally anonymous.]]> 372 Gillian Anderson 1419777297 Ellie 0 to-read 3.45 2024
author: Gillian Anderson
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/08
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]]> 214151601 The long-awaited new novel from the author of global sensation Tender Is the Flesh: a thrilling work of literary horror about a woman cloistered in a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos.

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.

But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?

A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.]]> 192 Agustina Bazterrica 1668051885 Ellie 0 to-read 3.67 2023
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/08
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]]> 43352954 Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There's still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war.]]> 209 Amal El-Mohtar Ellie 0 to-read 3.87 2019
author: Amal El-Mohtar
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/01
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]]> 219520677 From the author of Oprah's Book Club pick and New York Times best seller Nightcrawling, here is an astonishing new novel about the joys and entanglements of a fierce group of teenage mothers in a small town on the Florida panhandle.

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

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

Full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends� secrets and betrayals, The Girls Who Grew Big confirms Leila Mottley’s promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.]]> 352 Leila Mottley 0593801121 Ellie 0 to-read 4.18 2025
author: Leila Mottley
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/20
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]]> 211708771 Shotgun Lovesongs comes an exquisitely written, small-town story about one couple's hard-won second chance at love, forty years after their divorce.

Charlie and Vivian parted ways after just four years of marriage. Too many problems, too many struggles, even though the love didn't quite die. When Charlie returns to Wisconsin forty years later, he's not sure what he'll find. He is sure of one thing -- he must try to reconnect with Vivian to pick up the broken pieces of their past. But forty years is a long time. It's forty years of other relationships, forty years of building new lives, and forty years of long-held regrets, mistakes, and painful secrets.

A brave and triumphant exploration of redemption and sunset triumph, A Forty Year Kiss is a once-in-a-lifetime love story, written with dazzling lyricism and remarkable clarity of spirit, from a celebrated author at the top of his game. It's a literary valentine that promises to be a love story for the ages.]]> 352 Nickolas Butler 1464221243 Ellie 0 to-read 3.58 2025
author: Nickolas Butler
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/19
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]]> 7894 180 Maud Hart Lovelace 0064400999 Ellie 0 to-read 4.19 1942
author: Maud Hart Lovelace
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1942
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/16
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]]> 60701439
One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in town and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship…]]> 336 Jen Beagin 1982153083 Ellie 5 3.69 2023
author: Jen Beagin
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/02/10
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]]> 213618152 From a rising literary star and the author of How to Be a Good Girl comes a 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 to life after death.]]> 336 Jamie Hood 059370097X Ellie 0 to-read 4.56 2025
author: Jamie Hood
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/05
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]]> 194985431
Kristine S. Ervin was just eight years old when her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was abducted from an Oklahoma mall parking lot and violently murdered in an oil field. First, there was grief. Then the desire to what happened to her, what she felt in her last terrible moments, and all she was before these acts of violence defined her life.

In her mother’s absence, Ervin tries to reconstruct a woman she can never fully grasp—from her own memory, from letters she uncovers, and the stories of other family members. As more information about her mother's death comes to light, Ervin’s drive to know her mother only intensifies, winding its way into her own fraught adolescence. In the process of both, she reckons with contradictions of what a woman is allowed to be—a self beyond the roles of wife, mother, daughter, victim—what a “true� victim is supposed to look like, and, finally, how complicated and elusive justice can be.

Told fearlessly and poetically, Rabbit Heart weaves together themes of power, gender, and justice into a manifesto of grief and our stories do not need to be simple to be true, and there is power in the telling.]]> 304 Kristine S. Ervin 164009637X Ellie 0 to-read 3.99 2024
author: Kristine S. Ervin
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> 213870131 When a husband asks his reluctant wife to consider what might be missing from their marriage, what follows surprises them both—sex, heartbreak and heart rekindling, and a rediscovered sense of all that is possible

She’s happy and settled and productive and content in her full life—a child, a career, an admirable marriage, deep friendships, happy parents, and a spouse she still loves. But when her husband urges her to address what the narrow labels of “husband� and “wife� force them to edit out of their lives, the very best kind of hell breaks loose. 

Using the author’s personal experiences as a jumping-off point, Crush is about the danger and liberation of chasing desire, the havoc it can wreak, and most of all the clear sense of self one finds when the storm passes. Destined to become a classic novel of marriage, and tackling the big questions being asked about partnership in postpandemic relationships, Crush is a sharp, funny, seductive, and revelatory novel about holding on to everything it’s possible to love—friends, children, parents, passion, lovers, husbands, all of the world’s good books, and most of all one’s own deep sense of purpose.]]> 288 Ada Calhoun 0593832027 Ellie 0 to-read 3.04 2025
author: Ada Calhoun
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> 216818681
Over the fifty years that Lorne Michaels has been at the helm of Saturday Night Live, he has become a revered, inimitable, and bewildering presence in the entertainment world. He’s a tastemaker, a mogul, a withholding father figure, a genius spotter of talent, a shrewd businessman, a name-dropper, a raconteur, the inspiration for Dr. Evil, the winner of more than a hundred Emmys—and, essentially, a mystery. Generations of writers and performers have spent their lives trying to figure him out, by turns demonizing and lionizing him. He’s “Obi-Wan Kenobi� (Tracy Morgan), the “great and powerful Oz� (Kate McKinnon), or “some kind of very distant, strange comedy god� (Bob Odenkirk).

Lorne will introduce you to him, in full, for the first time. With unprecedented access to Michaels and the entire SNL apparatus, Susan Morrison takes readers behind the curtain for the lively, up-and-down, definitive story of how Michaels created and maintained the institution that changed comedy forever.

Drawn from hundreds of interviews—with Michaels, his friends, and SNL’s iconic stars and writers, from Will Ferrell to Tina Fey to John Mulaney to Chris Rock to Dan Aykroyd�Lorne is a deeply reported, wildly entertaining account of a man singularly obsessed with the show that would define his life—and have a profound impact on American culture.]]> 656 Susan Morrison 0812988876 Ellie 0 to-read 4.25 2025
author: Susan Morrison
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2025
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date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> 213243949 A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: a socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter's wedding.

Gail Baines is having a bad day. To start, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the mother of the groom. Then, Gail’s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay, and without even a suit.

But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband to be. It will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max’s past.

Told with deep sensitivity and a tart sense of humor, full of the joys and heartbreaks of love and marriage and family life, Three Days in June is a triumph, and gives us the perennially bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer at the height of her powers

]]> 165 Anne Tyler 0593803485 Ellie 0 to-read 3.65 2025
author: Anne Tyler
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> 203767887 250 Ona Gritz 162720508X Ellie 0 to-read 4.46
author: Ona Gritz
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.46
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/31
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]]> 59808605 Strangers to Ourselves, a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman, celebrated as a saint, who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children’s forgiveness after recovering from psychosis; a man who devotes his life to seeking revenge upon his psychoanalysts; and an affluent young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to go off her meds because she doesn’t know who she is without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv’s exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel―until it no longer does.

Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental disorders shape their course in our lives. Challenging the way we understand and talk about illness, her account is a testament to the porousness and resilience of the mind.]]> 288 Rachel Aviv 0374600848 Ellie 0 to-read 4.10 2022
author: Rachel Aviv
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/31
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]]> 200307455
Sometimes I wonder what it is I could tell you about her for my job here to be done. I am looking for a short­cut. . . .But that would be asking too much from you. It wasn’t you who loved her.

A young writer moves from the country to the city and falls in love with another woman for the very first time. From the start, the relationship is doomed; Finn is nineteen years older, wears men’s clothes, has a cocky smirk of a smile . . . and a long-term girlfriend.

With startling clarity and breathtaking tenderness, Chloe Caldwell writes the story of a love in of nights spent drunkenly hurling a phone against a brick wall; of early mornings hungover in bed, curled up together; of emails and poems exchanged at breakneck speed. In Women, Caldwell lays bare the feverish obsession of addictive love, and asks the what, if anything, can who we love teach us about who we are?

In this beautiful, transcendent, bracingly sexy novella, Caldwell tells a lust-love story that will bring you to your knees. Capturing the feverish heartbreak of Sapphic romance, painting a stark picture of an identity in crisis, and illuminating the exploratory possibilities of queer life, Women is an incandescent novella that brands the heart and sears the soul.]]> 160 Chloé Caldwell 0063387077 Ellie 0 4.01 2014
author: Chloé Caldwell
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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]]> 62873979 Eight years later, they were dead.

Bustle editor Samantha Leach and her childhood best friend, Elissa, met as infants in the suburbs of Providence, Rhode Island, where they attended nursery, elementary school, and temple together. As seventh graders, they would steal drinks from bar mitzvahs and have boys over in Samantha’s basement—innocent, early acts of rebellion. But after one of their shared acts, Samantha was given a disciplinary warning by their private school while Elissa was dismissed altogether, and later sent away. Samantha did not know then, but Elissa had just become one of the fifty-thousand-plus kids per year who enter the Troubled Teen Industry: a network of unregulated programs meant to reform wealthy, wayward youth.

Less than a year after graduation from Ponca Pines Academy, Elissa died at eighteen years old. In Samantha’s grief, she fixated on Elissa’s last years at the therapeutic boarding school, eager to understand why their paths diverged. As she spoke to mutual friends and scoured social media pages, Samantha learned of Alyssa and Alissa, Elissa’s closest friends at the school who shared both her name and penchant for partying, where drugs and alcohol became their norm. The matching Save Our Souls tattoo all three girls also had further fueled Samantha’s fixation, as she watched their lives play out online. Four years after Elissa’s death, Alyssa died, then Alissa at twenty-six.

In The Elissas, Samantha endeavors to understand why they ultimately met a shared, tragic fate that she was spared, in turn, offering a chilling account of the secret lives of young suburban women.]]> 256 Samantha Leach 0306826917 Ellie 0 3.16 2023
author: Samantha Leach
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.16
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/01/31
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]]> 60880820 A sensational new novel from the best-selling author of Less Than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms that tracks a group of privileged Los Angeles high school friends as a serial killer strikes across the city.

Bret Easton Ellis's masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.

17-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret's obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling pre-occupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them--and Bret in particular--with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends--or his own mind--to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between The Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.

Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero LA, The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret's life at 17-sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best.
]]> 595 Bret Easton Ellis 059353560X Ellie 0 to-read 3.98 2023
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> 59900070 New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art.

In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken--with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity--is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes 'zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them.

But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the textbook successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.]]> 208 Hua Hsu 0385547773 Ellie 0 to-read 4.01 2022
author: Hua Hsu
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> 214269394
Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost? Or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice?

Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.]]> 277 Holly Brickley 0593799089 Ellie 0 to-read 3.82 2025
author: Holly Brickley
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/29
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]]> 44279110
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.]]> 289 Ottessa Moshfegh 0525522131 Ellie 5 3.62 2018
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/01/28
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]]> 63184768 A gripping literary page-turner from a rising Irish talent in which former friends, estranged for twenty years, reckon with the terrifying events of the summer that changed their lives.

In the seaside village of Kinlough, on Ireland’s west coast, three old friends meet for the first time in years. They—Helen, Joe and Mush—were part of an original group of six inseparable teenagers in the summer of 2003, with motherless, reckless Kala Lanann at its white-hot center. But later that year, Kala disappeared without a trace. Now remains have been discovered in the woods—including a skull with a Polaroid photo tucked inside—and the town is both aghast and titillated at reopening this old wound.

On the eve of this gruesome discovery, Helen had reluctantly returned for her father’s wedding, the world-famous musician Joe had come home to dry out and reconnect with something authentic, and Mush had never left, too shattered by the events of that summer to venture beyond the counter of his mother’s café. But when two more girls go missing, they are forced to confront their own complicity in the events that led to Kala’s disappearance. Ultimately, they must do what others should have done before to stop the violent patterns of their town’s past repeating themselves once again.

In cracklingly vivid prose, Kala brilliantly examines the sometimes brutal costs of belonging, as well as the battle in the human heart between vengeance and forgiveness, despair and redemption.]]> 416 Colin Walsh 0385549636 Ellie 0 to-read 3.97 2023
author: Colin Walsh
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/27
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]]> 212923993 A mother and son, estranged but yearning for reunion, reckon at last with the secret that has kept them apart for decades in this highly anticipated novel by "one of the country's most talented writers" (Wall Street Journal�)

At forty, Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York City, is overworked and isolated. He spends his days immersed in the struggles of his clients only to return to an empty apartment and occasional hook-ups with a man who wants more than Peter can give. But when the asylum case of a young gay man pierces Peter's numbness, the event that he has avoided for twenty years returns to haunt him.

Ann, his mother, who runs a women's retreat center she founded after leaving his father, is wounded by the estrangement from Peter but cherishes the world she has built. She long ago banished from her mind the decision that divided her from her son. But as Peter’s case plunges him further into the memory of his first love and the night of violence that changed his life forever, he and his mother must confront the secret that tore them apart.

With unsurpassed emotional depth, Mothers and Sons reveals all that is lost by looking away from the past and what might be restored by facing it. In his spellbinding new novel, Adam Haslett demonstrates yet again his mastery of “a rich assortment of literary gifts� (New York Times).]]> 336 Adam Haslett 0316574716 Ellie 0 to-read 3.82 2025
author: Adam Haslett
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/27
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]]> 214868013 A terrible heatwave. A very tense baby shower. It will all end in tears...

Nicki, Lauren, Charlotte and Steffi have been friends since university. Now in their thirties, life is pulling them in different directions - but when Charlotte organises the baby shower of hell for pregnant Nicki, the girls are reunited.

Under a sweltering hot summer day, tensions rise - and by the end of the evening, nothing will ever be the same. Someone started a fire at the house - and everyone's a suspect... Is it Steffi, happily child-free but feeling judged by her friends? Is it Charlotte, desperate to conceive and jealous of those who have? Is it Lauren, who is finding motherhood far, far worse than she imagined? Or is it Nicki herself, who never wanted a baby shower anyway?

In the aftermath, the police put together the facts - but the truth will shock everyone. Even you.

BIG LITTLE LIES meets REALLY GOOD, ACTUALLY in the incredible new novel from Holly Bourne - it's the book you'll want to read three times, then give to every woman in your life.]]> 423 Holly Bourne 1529301645 Ellie 0 to-read 4.01 2025
author: Holly Bourne
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/26
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]]> 200987323 In this wildly funny and heartwarming office comedy, an admin worker accidentally gains access to her colleagues� private emails and DMs and decides to use this intel to save her job—a laugh-till-you-cry debut novel you’ll be eager to share with your entire list of contacts, perfect for fans of Anxious People and Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.

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

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

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

Crackling with laugh-out-loud dialogue and relatable observations, I Hope This Finds You Well is a fresh and surprisingly tender comedy about loneliness and love beyond our computer screens. This sparkling debut novel will open your heart to the everyday eccentricities of work culture and the undeniable human connection that comes with it.]]> 338 Natalie Sue 0063320363 Ellie 0 3.75 2024
author: Natalie Sue
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/23
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]]> 124950295 397 Hannah Bonam-Young 1778027784 Ellie 0 to-read 4.26 2023
author: Hannah Bonam-Young
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves: to-read
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]]> 199018245 155 Nolwenn Le Blevennec 1908670835 Ellie 0 to-read 3.52
author: Nolwenn Le Blevennec
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.52
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 202875 224 Penelope Lively 0060928557 Ellie 0 to-read 3.82 1996
author: Penelope Lively
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 50157578
Oscar hopes that leaving New York for a few months will give Mina the space to heal. They travel to London, to an apartment wall-papered with indigo-eyed birds, to Oscar's oldest friends, to a canal and blooming flower market. Mina, a classicist, searches for solutions to her failing mental health using mythological women. But she finds a beam of light in a living woman. Friendship and attraction blossom until Oscar and Mina's complicated love is tested.]]> 304 Rowan Hisayo Buchanan 1419743597 Ellie 0 to-read 3.65 2019
author: Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 197536849
Newlywed Rosie has grown disenchanted with NYC. Inspired by Instagram ads, she starts thirsting for a rural life upstate—one full of beauty and authenticity. She just needs to convince her tech-bro husband, Jordan, of her vision for the future. Willing to do anything for Rosie’s happiness, Jordan signs on, and they offer—well above asking price—on a beautiful, historic fixer-upper in the Hudson Valley.

But when Jordan suddenly loses his job, the couple is forced to rent out the property’s dilapidated outbuilding. There’s no heat, it’s overrun with mold, and nothing works.

Enter Dylan and an incredibly attractive and handy queer couple who offer to rent the outbuilding and help Rosie and Jordan with repairs. They also happen to be living the life Rosie had envisioned for hand-built furniture, herbal tinctures, guinea hens, and hand-dyed linens. Rosie grows increasingly infatuated with their new tenants, especially with model-esque, charismatic Dylan � to Jordan’s increasing distress.

Whip-smart and wickedly funny, Trust and Safety examines questions of authenticity, betrayal, belonging, and entitlement, while poking fun at contemporary fear of the “gay agenda.”]]> 320 Laura Blackett 059347368X Ellie 0 to-read 3.82 2024
author: Laura Blackett
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 193559888
Ella's with you at the party when you first kiss a girl.

And Ella takes you to the hospital the first time you're diagnosed.

Over the next few years you have a string of relationships and jobs, but you can always count on Ella to be there for you - until the drinking and the parties, the hospital visits and late-night calls, blur the lines of your friendship into something unbalanced and fragile, at risk of breaking altogether.

The worst part is you can see it coming. The worst part is you don't know how to stop.

Gender Theory is the dizzying debut from Madeline Docherty, an incisive, affecting novel about illness, finding your place, and how we care for those around us.]]> 186 Madeline Docherty 1399812211 Ellie 0 to-read 4.02 2024
author: Madeline Docherty
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 19161835 Her pupils killed her daughter.
Now, she will have her revenge.

After calling off her engagement in wake of a tragic revelation, Yuko Moriguchi had nothing to live for except her only child, four-year-old Manami. Now, following an accident on the grounds of the middle school where she teaches, Yuko has given up and tendered her resignation.

But first she has one last lecture to deliver. She tells a story that upends everything her students ever thought they knew about two of their peers, and sets in motion a maniacal plot for revenge.

Narrated in alternating voices, with twists you'll never see coming, Confessions explores the limits of punishment, despair, and tragic love, culminating in a harrowing confrontation between teacher and student that will place the occupants of an entire school in danger. You'll never look at a classroom the same way again.]]> 240 Kanae Minato 0316200921 Ellie 0 to-read 3.91 2008
author: Kanae Minato
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 51587 The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth. Explicit, shocking, comical, and displaying the author's signature flair for blending structural complexity with direct, stylish, accessible language, The Sluts is Cooper's most transgressive novel since Frisk, and one of his most innovative works of fiction to date.]]> 263 Dennis Cooper 0786716746 Ellie 0 to-read 3.79 2004
author: Dennis Cooper
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 41057294
A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.]]> 273 Sally Rooney 1984822179 Ellie 5 3.81 2018
author: Sally Rooney
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
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]]> 36692478 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780525520375.

Tommy Orange's wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.

Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle's death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American--grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism.

Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.]]> 294 Tommy Orange Ellie 0 to-read 3.98 2018
author: Tommy Orange
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/28
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]]> 45304101 A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.

Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

The Great Believers has become a critically acclaimed, indelible piece of literature; it was selected as one of New York Times Best 10 Books of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Book, a Buzzfeed Book of the Year, a Skimm Reads pick, and a pick for the New York Public Library's Best Books of the year.]]> 421 Rebecca Makkai 073522353X Ellie 0 to-read 4.26 2018
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 53414230
At once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity, Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most essential British debut of recent years.]]> 145 Caleb Azumah Nelson 0241448778 Ellie 0 to-read 4.03 2021
author: Caleb Azumah Nelson
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read
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]]> 48989372
From growing up in a family of firefighters on Staten Island to commuting three hours a day to high school and “seeing the sights� (like watching a Russian woman throw a stroller off the back of a ferry), to attending Harvard while Facebook was created, Jost shares how he has navigated the world like a slightly smarter Forrest Gump.

You’ll also discover things about Jost that will surprise and confuse you, like how Jimmy Buffett saved his life, how Czech teenagers attacked him with potato salad, how an insect laid eggs inside his legs, and how he competed in a twenty-five-man match at WrestleMania (and almost won). You’ll go behind the scenes at SNL and Weekend Update (where he’s written some of the most memorable sketches and jokes of the past fifteen years). And you’ll experience the life of a touring stand-up comedian—from performing in rural college cafeterias at noon to opening for Dave Chappelle at Radio City Music Hall.

For every accomplishment (hosting the Emmys), there is a setback (hosting the Emmys). And for every absurd moment (watching paramedics give CPR to a raccoon), there is an honest, emotional one (recounting his mother’s experience on the scene of the Twin Towers� collapse on 9/11). Told with a healthy dose of self-deprecation, A Very Punchable Face reveals the brilliant mind behind some of the dumbest sketches on television, and lays bare the heart and humor of a hardworking guy—with a face you can’t help but want to punch.]]> 312 Colin Jost 1101906324 Ellie 0 Ily Colin 4.20 2020
author: Colin Jost
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/20
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Ily Colin
]]> 54304256 Kink is a groundbreaking anthology of literary short fiction exploring love and desire, BDSM, and interests across the sexual spectrum, edited by lauded writers R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell, and featuring a roster of all-star contributors including Alexander Chee, Roxane Gay, Carmen Maria Machado, and more.

Kink is a dynamic anthology of literary fiction that opens an imaginative door into the world of desire. The stories within this collection portray love, desire, BDSM, and sexual kinks in all their glory with a bold new vision. The collection includes works by renowned fiction writers such as Callum Angus, Alexander Chee, Vanessa Clark, Melissa Febos, Kim Fu, Roxane Gay, Cara Hoffman, Zeyn Joukhadar, Chris Kraus, Carmen Maria Machado, Peter Mountford, Larissa Pham, and Brandon Taylor, with Garth Greenwell and R.O. Kwon as editors.

The stories within explore bondage, power-play, and submissive-dominant relationships; we are taken to private estates, therapists� offices, underground sex clubs, and even a sex theater in early-20th century Paris. While there are whips and chains, sure, the true power of these stories lies in their beautiful, moving dispatches from across the sexual spectrum of interest and desires, as portrayed by some of today’s most exciting writers.]]> 288 R.O. Kwon 198211021X Ellie 0 to-read 3.11 2021
author: R.O. Kwon
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.11
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/20
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]]> 210331628 A suspenseful, satirical dark comedy about a struggling writer who wakes up to find his date from the night before dead—and must then decide how far he’s willing to go to spin the misadventure into his next big book.

A few years ago, David Alvarez had it all: a six-figure book deal, a loving boyfriend, and an exciting writing career. His debut novel was a resounding success, which made the publication of his second book—a total flop—all the more devastating. Now, David is single, lonely, and desperately trying to come up with the next great idea for his third manuscript, one that will redeem him in the eyes of readers, reviewers…and maybe even his ex-boyfriend.

The issue is, good ideas are hard to come by, and the mounting pressure of a near-empty bank account isn’t helping. But when David connects with a sexy stranger on a dating app, he figures a wild night out in New York City may be just what he needs to find inspiration. Lucky for him, his date turns out to be handsome, confident, and wealthy, not to mention the perfect distraction from yet another evening staring at a blank screen.

After one of the best nights of his life, David wakes up hungover but giddy—only to find prince charming dead next to him in bed. Horrified, completely confused, and suddenly faced with the implausible-but-somehow-plausible idea that he may have actually killed his date, David calls the only person he can trust in a moment of crisis: his literary agent, Stacey.

Together, David and Stacey must untangle the events of the previous night, cover their tracks, and spin the entire misadventure into David’s career-defining novel—if only they can figure out what to do with the body first.]]> 329 Daniel Aleman 1538766345 Ellie 0 to-read 3.61 2024
author: Daniel Aleman
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/20
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]]> 52656911
The bride � The plus one � The best man � The wedding planner � The bridesmaid � The body

On an island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate two people joining their lives together as one. The groom: handsome and charming, a rising television star. The bride: smart and ambitious, a magazine publisher. It’s a wedding for a magazine, or for a celebrity: the designer dress, the remote location, the luxe party favors, the boutique whiskey. The cell phone service may be spotty and the waves may be rough, but every detail has been expertly planned and will be expertly executed.

But perfection is for plans, and people are all too human. As the champagne is popped and the festivities begin, resentments and petty jealousies begin to mingle with the reminiscences and well wishes. The groomsmen begin the drinking game from their school days. The bridesmaid not-so-accidentally ruins her dress. The bride’s oldest (male) friend gives an uncomfortably caring toast.

And then someone turns up dead. Who didn’t wish the happy couple well? And perhaps more important, why?]]> 319 Lucy Foley Ellie 0 3.82 2020
author: Lucy Foley
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/17
date added: 2024/12/17
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]]> 122762546 Mei loses her Japanese mother at age six. Growing up in suburban Surrey, she yearns to fit in, suppressing both her heritage and her growing love for her best friend Fran.

Yuki leaves the Japanese countryside to pursue her dream of becoming a concert violinist in London. Lonely and far from home, she finds herself caught up in the charms of her older teacher.

Haruka attempts to navigate Tokyo’s nightlife and all of its many vices, working as a hostess in seedy bars. She grieves a mother who hid so many secrets from her, until finally one of those secrets comes to light . . .

Shifting between three intertwining narratives, Mongrel reveals a tangled web of isolation, desire, love, and ultimately, hope.]]> 352 Hanako Footman 1804440434 Ellie 0 to-read 4.31 2024
author: Hanako Footman
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> 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 Ellie 4 4.12 2024
author: Alison Espach
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/09
date added: 2024/12/09
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]]> 199927666 A ferocious novel by one of the boldest voices in American fiction and the author of The New Me, the “definitive work of millennial literature� (The New Yorker)

Margaret Anne (“Moddie�) Yance had just returned to her native land in the Midwestern town of X, to mingle with the friends of her youth, to get back in touch with her roots, and to recover from a stressful decade of living in the city in a small apartment with a man she now believed to be a megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist.

So begins Halle Butler's sadistically precise and hilarious Banal Nightmare, which follows Moddie as she abruptly ends her long-term relationship and moves back to her Midwestern hometown, throwing herself at the mercy of her old friends as they, all suddenly tipping toward middle age, go to parties, size each other up, obsess over past slights, and dream of wild triumphs and elaborate revenge fantasies. When her friend Pam invites a mysterious East Coast artist to take up a winter residency at the local university, Moddie has no choice but to confront the demons of her past and grapple with the reality of what her life has become. As the day of reckoning approaches, friends will become enemies, enemies will become mortal enemies, and old loyalties will be tested to their extreme.

Banal Nightmare is filled with complicated characters who will dazzle you in their rendering just as often as they will infuriate you with their decisions. Halle Butler singularly captures the volatile, angry, aggrieved, surreal and entirely disorienting atmosphere of the modern era.]]> 336 Halle Butler 0593730356 Ellie 0 to-read 3.45 2024
author: Halle Butler
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/06
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]]> 127279000 What if you thought you murdered your best friend? And if everyone else thought so too? And what if the truth doesn't matter?

Lucy and Savvy were the golden girls of their small Texas town: pretty, smart, and enviable. Lucy married a dream guy with a big ring and an even bigger new home. Savvy was the social butterfly loved by all and, if you believe the rumors, especially popular with the men in town. But after Lucy is found wandering the streets, covered in her best friend Savvy’s blood, everyone thinks she is a murderer.

It’s been years since that horrible night, a night Lucy can’t remember anything about, and she has since moved to LA and started a new life. But now the phenomenally huge hit true crime podcast Listen for the Lie and its too-good looking host, Ben Owens, have decided to investigate Savvy’s murder for the show’s second season. Lucy is forced to return to the place she vowed never to set foot in again to solve her friend’s murder, even if she is the one who did it.

The truth is out there, if we just listen.]]> 352 Amy Tintera 1250880319 Ellie 3 A classic whodunnit. 4.07 2024
author: Amy Tintera
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/19
date added: 2024/12/06
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A classic whodunnit.
]]> 33795 °ä˛ąłÜł¦˛ą˛őľ±˛ąâ€�Danzy Senna's extraordinary debut novel and national bestseller—Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother, intellectuals and activists in the Civil Rights Movement in 1970s Boston. The sisters are so close that they have created a private language, yet to the outside world they can't be sisters: Birdie appears to be white, while Cole is dark enough to fit in with the other kids at the Afrocentric school they attend. For Birdie, Cole is the mirror in which she can see her own blackness. Then their parents' marriage falls apart. Their father's new black girlfriend won't even look at Birdie, while their mother gives her life over to the Movement: at night the sisters watch mysterious men arrive with bundles shaped like rifles.

One night Birdie watches her father and his girlfriend drive away with Cole—they have gone to Brazil, she will later learn, where her father hopes for a racial equality he will never find in the States. The next morning—in the belief that the Feds are after them—Birdie and her mother leave everything behind: their house and possessions, their friends, and—most disturbing of all—their identity. Passing as the daughter and wife of a deceased Jewish professor, Birdie and her mother finally make their home in New Hampshire.

Desperate to find Cole, yet afraid of betraying her mother and herself to some unknown danger, Birdie must learn to navigate the white world—so that when she sets off in search of her sister, she is ready for what she will find. At once a powerful coming-of-age story and a groundbreaking work on identity and race in America, "Caucasia deserves to be read all over" (Glamour).]]> 413 Danzy Senna 1573227161 Ellie 0 to-read 4.07 1998
author: Danzy Senna
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 195660460
Saffy Huntley-Oliver is an intelligent and glamorous socialite; she also happens to be a proficient serial killer. For the past fifteen years, she's hunted down and dispatched rapists, murderers, domestic abusers—bad men all. But leading a double life has left her lonely—dating’s tough when your boyfriend might turn out to be your next victim. Saffy thinks she's finally found a truly good man in Jonathan Desrosiers, a true-crime podcaster who’s amassed legions of die-hard fans for cracking cold cases and bringing justice to victims­­.

When a decapitated body shows up on Jon's doorstep the morning after his wife leaves him, he becomes the chief suspect for a murder he insists he didn’t commit. Saffy’s crush becomes an obsession as she orchestrates a meet-cute and volunteers to help Jon clear his name, using every trick up her sleeve to find the real killer and get her man—no matter the cost.

Darkly comic and addictively readable, Bad Men is a wild romp of a feminist thriller that asks if even a serial killer can have a happily ever after.]]> 320 Julie Mae Cohen 1419772333 Ellie 1 3.53 2023
author: Julie Mae Cohen
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/01
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Not to be dramatic but this was the worst book I have ever read.
]]> 53138095
The one person who ignites her temper more than any other is Cassian, the battle-scarred warrior whose position in Rhysand and Feyre's Night Court keeps him constantly in Nesta's orbit. But her temper isn't the only thing Cassian ignites. The fire between them is undeniable, and only burns hotter as they are forced into close quarters with each other.

Meanwhile, the treacherous human queens who returned to the Continent during the last war have forged a dangerous new alliance, threatening the fragile peace that has settled over the realms. And the key to halting them might very well rely on Cassian and Nesta facing their haunting pasts.

Against the sweeping backdrop of a world seared by war and plagued with uncertainty, Nesta and Cassian battle monsters from within and without as they search for acceptance-and healing-in each other's arms.]]> 757 Sarah J. Maas 168119628X Ellie 5 4.44 2021
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/11/28
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]]> 165940214 A personal and cultural look at the dark underbelly of Western beauty standards and the lethal culture of disordered eating they've wreaked

In Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein tells the story of her own disordered eating alongside, and through, other women from history, pop culture and the girls she's known and loved. Tracing the medical and cultural history of anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and orthorexia, Clein investigates the economic conditions underpinning our eating disorder epidemic, and illuminates the ways racism and today's feminism have been complicit in propping up the thin ideal. While examining Goop, Simone Weil, pro-anorexia blogs, and the flawed logic of our current treatment methods, Clein grapples with the myriad ways disordered eating has affected her own friendships and romantic relationships.

Dead Weight makes the case that we are faced with a culture of suppression and denial that is insidious, pervasive, and dangerous, one that internalizes and promotes the fetish of self-shrinking as a core tenet of the American cult of femininity. This is replicated in our algorithms, our television shows, our novels, and our relationships with one another. Dead Weight is a sharp, perceptive, and revelatory polemic for readers fascinated by the external forces shaping their lives.]]> 288 Emmeline Clein 0593536908 Ellie 0 to-read 3.87 2024
author: Emmeline Clein
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 57768107 Feminism, power and sex play out through the eyes of young Australian uni students in a contemporary narrative that is fiercely authentic

Whenever I say I was at university with Eve, people ask me what she was like, sceptical perhaps that she could have always been as whole and self-assured as she now appears. To which I say something like: �People are infinitely complex.� But I say it in such a way—so pregnant with misanthropy—that it’s obvious I hate her.

​Michaela and Eve are two bright, bold women who befriend each other their first year at a residential college at university, where they live in adjacent rooms. They could not be more different; one assured and popular � the other uncertain and eager-to-please. But something happens one night in O-week � a drunken encounter, a foggy memory that will force them to confront the realities of consent and wrestle with the dynamics of power.

Initially bonded by their wit and sharp eye for the colleges� mix of material wealth and moral poverty, Michaela and Eve soon discover how fragile friendship is, and how capable of betrayal they both are.
�
Written with a strikingly contemporary voice that is both wickedly clever and incisive, issues of consent, class and institutional privilege, and feminism become provocations for enduring philosophical questions we face today.]]> 320 Diana Reid 1761150111 Ellie 0 to-read 3.89
author: Diana Reid
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.89
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date added: 2024/11/25
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]]> 62919844
When Jess first meets Josh at their Ivy League college she dislikes him immediately: an entitled guy in chinos, ready to take over the world. Meanwhile Jess is almost always the only Black woman in their class. And Josh can’t accept that life might be easier for him because he’s white.

After graduating, Jess and Josh end up working together in the same investment bank. As they lunch, spar and pick each other’s brains, Jess begins to see Josh in a different light.

Soon, their tempestuous friendship turns into an electrifying romance that shocks them both, and Jess finds herself questioning who she really is and whether she's willing to compromise that for love.]]> 336 Cecilia Rabess 1982187700 Ellie 0 to-read 3.48 2023
author: Cecilia Rabess
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/25
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]]> 208503280 She's looking for the perfect man. He's looking for the perfect victim.

Sydney Shaw, like every single woman in New York, has terrible luck with dating. She’s seen it men who lie in their dating profile, men who stick her with the dinner bill, and worst of all, men who can't shut up about their mothers. But finally, she hits the jackpot.

Her new boyfriend is utterly perfect. He's charming, handsome, and works as a doctor at a local hospital. Sydney is swept off her feet.

Then the brutal murder of a young woman―the latest in a string of deaths across the coast―confounds police. The primary suspect? A mystery man who dates his victims before he kills them.

Sydney should feel safe. After all, she is dating the guy of her dreams. But she can’t shake her own suspicions that the perfect man may not be as perfect as he seems. Because someone is watching her every move, and if she doesn’t get to the truth, she’ll be the killer’s next victim...

A dark story about obsession and the things we’ll do for love, #1 New York Times bestselling author Freida McFadden proves that crimes of passion are often the bloodiest…]]> 368 Freida McFadden 1728296226 Ellie 0 3.95 2024
author: Freida McFadden
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/18
date added: 2024/11/18
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]]> 59808316 In the vein of Educated and The Glass Castle, Daniella Mestyanek Young's Uncultured is more than a memoir about an exceptional upbringing, but about a woman who, no matter the lack of tools given to her, is determined to overcome.

Behind the tall, foreboding gates of a commune in Brazil, Daniella Mestyanek Young was raised in the religious cult The Children of God, also known as The Family, as the daughter of high-ranking members. Her great-grandmother donated land for one of The Family’s first communes in Texas. Her mother, at thirteen, was forced to marry the leader and served as his secretary for many years. Beholden to The Family’s strict rules, Daniella suffers physical, emotional, and sexual abuse�masked as godly discipline and divine love�and is forbidden from getting a traditional education.

At fifteen years old, fed up with The Family and determined to build a better and freer life for herself, Daniella escapes to Texas. There, she bravely enrolls herself in high school and excels, later graduating as valedictorian of her college class, then electing to join the military to begin a career as an intelligence officer, where she believes she will finally belong.

But she soon learns that her new world�surrounded by men on the sands of Afghanistan�looks remarkably similar to the one she desperately tried to leave behind.

Told in a beautiful, propulsive voice and with clear-eyed honesty, Uncultured explores the dangers unleashed when harmful group mentality goes unrecognized, and is emblematic of the many ways women have to contort themselves to survive.]]> 339 Daniella Mestyanek Young 1250280117 Ellie 0 to-read 4.10 2022
author: Daniella Mestyanek Young
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/13
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]]> 56609421 Elle Nash Ellie 0 to-read 4.09 2021
author: Elle Nash
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/13
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]]> 193438781 At a meatpacking facility in the Missouri Ozarks, Dee-Dee and her co-workers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift.

The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee’s more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term. Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges Dee-Dee to quit living in sin and marry her boyfriend Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect fetish.

With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother’s and boyfriend’s newfound parturient attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She will be complete. When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go back to living in the shadows. Neither the ultimate indignity of yet another miscarriage nor Sloane’s own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby’s arrival.]]> 275 Elle Nash Ellie 0 to-read 3.81 2023
author: Elle Nash
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> 200100950

When Stephanie Kiser moves to New York City after college to pursue a career in writing, she quickly learns that her entry-level salary won't cover the high cost of living―never mind her crushing student loan debt. But there is one in-demand job that pays more than enough to allow Stephanie to stay in the city: nannying for the 1%. Desperate to escape the poverty of her own childhood, Stephanie falls into a job that hijacks her life for the next seven years: a glorified personal assistant to toddlers on Manhattan's Upper East Side.


At first, nannying seems like the perfect solution―the high pay covers Stephanie's bills, and she's surprised by how attached she becomes to the kids she cares for, even as she gasps over Prada baby onesies and preschools that cost more than her college tuition. But the grueling twelve-hour days leave her little time to see her friends, date, or pursue any creative projects that might lead to a more prestigious career. The allure of the seemingly-glamorous job begins to dull as Stephanie comes to understand more about what really happens behind the closed doors of million-dollar Park Avenue apartments―and that money doesn't guarantee happiness. Soon she will have to decide whether to stay with the children she's grown to love, or if there's something better out there just beyond her reach.


Wanted: Toddler's Personal Assistant is alternately poignant and funny, a portrait of a generation of Americans struggling to find work they love balanced against the headwinds of global uncertainty and an economy stacked against anyone trying to work their way up from the bottom. It's a provocative story of class, caregiving, friendship, and family―and a juicy, voyeuristic peek behind the curtain of obscene wealth and the privilege and opportunity that comes with it. In this unputdownable memoir, Stephanie chronicles her journey from newbie nanny to beloved caregiver—and the painful decision to eventually say goodbye to the children she has grown to love.]]> 336 Stephanie Kiser 1728298164 Ellie 2
The only interesting aspects of this book were her comparisons as a white woman to the nanny’s in her circle who were poc. She was VERY open about coming from a conservative family and holding racist views until she made a rather unconvincing argument that she had become a liberal after reading one book. Also! Also! This is the reality for so many Americans. They do jobs that they don’t like or aren’t their “dream jobs,� but they support their family and make sacrifices. I’m sorry she didn’t like to nanny and was addicted to the money, but she had an opportunity to do what she wanted to do, live where she wanted to live and get on her feet. And it allowed her to do what she really wanted to do—write!
Clearly she had some warped perspective on what she “should have� been doing her twenties.]]> 3.62 2024
author: Stephanie Kiser
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/01
date added: 2024/11/13
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Ugh. As a nanny I understand where she’s coming from, but the book was 300 pages of pure resentment. It didn’t paint anyone in a good light, especially herself. She completely bashed the nannying profession and acted as if she weren’t doing anything important.

The only interesting aspects of this book were her comparisons as a white woman to the nanny’s in her circle who were poc. She was VERY open about coming from a conservative family and holding racist views until she made a rather unconvincing argument that she had become a liberal after reading one book. Also! Also! This is the reality for so many Americans. They do jobs that they don’t like or aren’t their “dream jobs,� but they support their family and make sacrifices. I’m sorry she didn’t like to nanny and was addicted to the money, but she had an opportunity to do what she wanted to do, live where she wanted to live and get on her feet. And it allowed her to do what she really wanted to do—write!
Clearly she had some warped perspective on what she “should have� been doing her twenties.
]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]> 401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Ellie 5 4.12 2022
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/13
date added: 2024/11/13
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I can’t believe I put it off this long. Beautiful, beautiful, amazing book.
]]> 209455843
Sure, Dom was Josh’s life-long best friend. He’s also the infuriating man who broke Maddie’s heart back when she was naïve enough to give it to him. But since Dom insists on following the rules and Josh didn’t leave much room for Maddie to argue the matter, they embark together on a farewell trip that spans thousands of miles, exploring new places and revisiting their complicated history along the way.

After a snowstorm leads to a shared bed, Maddie starts to wonder if her brother might be matchmaking from the grave. But when grief also reopens old wounds between them, Maddie will need more than Josh’s ghostly guidance to trust Dom again.]]> 432 Lauren Connolly Ellie 0 to-read 4.07 2024
author: Lauren Connolly
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 33413128
People say Beartown is finished. A tiny community nestled deep in the forest, it is slowly losing ground to the ever encroaching trees. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink, built generations ago by the working men who founded this town. And in that ice rink is the reason people in Beartown believe tomorrow will be better than today. Their junior ice hockey team is about to compete in the national semi-finals, and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys.

Being responsible for the hopes of an entire town is a heavy burden, and the semi-final match is the catalyst for a violent act that will leave a young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil. Accusations are made and, like ripples on a pond, they travel through all of Beartown, leaving no resident unaffected.

Beartown explores the hopes that bring a small community together, the secrets that tear it apart, and the courage it takes for an individual to go against the grain. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.]]> 432 Fredrik Backman Ellie 0 to-read 4.27 2016
author: Fredrik Backman
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/07
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]]> 61287037
Daddy Boy follows Emerson as they pack into a van with a rag-tag group of storm chasers and drive up and down tornado ally―from Texas to North Dakota―staying in motels and eating at gas stations and hunting down storms like so many white whales.

In heading with them to Texas, we return, too, to the only site of adulthood Emerson has ever known: their childhood. Interspersed throughout this trip are memories of dad―both Emerson’s stepdad, Hank, present and unflinching and extremely Texan; and their biological dad, who they hardly knew. With his cowboy hats and random girlfriends, he always seemed so sweet and lost.

Through these childhood vignettes, coupled with queer theory and weeks spent reading the clouds like oracles, wanting nothing more than to drive straight into the eye of a storm, Emerson frames these probing questions of manhood against the dusty, loaded background of the American West.]]> 161 Emerson Whitney Ellie 0 to-read 3.61 2023
author: Emerson Whitney
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/06
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]]> 194802722 A shimmering, joyful new novel about a pair of opposites with the wrong thing in common, from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.

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

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

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

But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex... right?]]> 400 Emily Henry Ellie 0 Precious and predictable 4.21 2024
author: Emily Henry
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/03
date added: 2024/11/04
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Precious and predictable
]]> 15771862 274 Sonali Deraniyagala Ellie 0 to-read 3.76 2013
author: Sonali Deraniyagala
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> 201626978
A riveting, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most is an epic story in one single day, masterly breaching the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath.]]> 144 Jessica Anthony 0316576379 Ellie 0 to-read 3.31 2024
author: Jessica Anthony
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/04
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]]> 185767235 The Hearing Test, an artist in her late twenties, awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear, she is diagnosed with sudden deafness but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the specter of total deafness looms, she keeps a record of her year—a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned—while living alone in a New York City studio apartment with her dog.

Through a series of fleeting and often humorous encounters—with neighbors, an ex-lover, doctors, strangers, family members, faraway friends, and with the lives and works of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and philosophers—making meaning becomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival. 

At once a rumination on silence and a novel on seeing, The Hearing Test is a work of vitalizing intellect and playfulness that marks the arrival of a major new literary writer with a rare command of form, compression, and intent.]]> 162 Eliza Barry Callahan 164622213X Ellie 0 3.28 2024
author: Eliza Barry Callahan
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/20
date added: 2024/11/03
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I’m not gonna lie guys I dozed off while reading this book and I remember nothing about it
]]> 6553843 308 Don Carpenter 1590173244 Ellie 0 to-read 4.13 1966
author: Don Carpenter
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1966
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> 205673381 Franz Kafka meets Yorgos Lanthimos in this provocative new novel from one of America’s most brilliant and distinctive writers

In a speculative future, Abel, a menial worker, is called to serve in a secretive and fabled jury system. At the heart of this system is the repeat room, where a single juror, selected from hundreds of candidates, is able to inhabit the defendant’s lived experience, to see as if through their eyes.

The case to which Abel is assigned is revealed in the novel’s shocking second act. We receive a record of a boy’s broken and constrained life, a tale that reveals an illicit and passionate psycho-sexual relationship, its end as tragic as the circumstances of its conception.

Artful in its suspense, and sharp in its evocation of a byzantine and cruel bureaucracy, The Repeat Room is an exciting and pointed critique of the nature of knowledge and judgment, and a vivid framing of Ball’s absurd and nihilistic philosophy of love.]]> 256 Jesse Ball 1646221400 Ellie 0 to-read 3.14 2024
author: Jesse Ball
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.14
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/01
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]]> 60741808 An incisive, deeply resonant debut novel about a nonconsensual sexual encounter that propels one woman’s final semester at an elite New England college into controversy and chaos—and into an ill-advised affair with a married professor.

It’s 1998 and Isabel Rosen, the only daughter of a Lower East Side appetizing store owner, has one semester left at Wilder College, a prestigious school in New Hampshire. Desperate to shed her working-class roots and still mourning the death of her mother four years earlier, Isabel has always felt like an outsider at Wilder but now, in her final semester, she believes she has found her place—until a nonconsensual sexual encounter with one of the only other Jewish students on campus leaves her reeling.

Enter R. H. Connelly, a once-famous poet and Isabel’s writing professor, a man with secrets of his own. Connelly makes Isabel feel seen, beautiful, talented: the woman she longs to become. His belief in her ignites a belief in herself, and the two begin an affair that shakes the foundation of who Isabel thinks she is, for better and worse. As the lives of the adults around her slowly come apart, Isabel discovers that the line between youth and adulthood is less defined than she thought.

A coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, Daisy Alpert Florin's My Last Innocent Year is a timely and wise portrait of a young woman learning to trust her voice and move toward independence while recognizing the beauty and grit of where she came from.]]> 304 Daisy Alpert Florin 1250857031 Ellie 3 3.70 2023
author: Daisy Alpert Florin
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/30
date added: 2024/10/30
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]]> 199798201
A house is a precious thing...

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

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

Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is a brilliantly plotted and provocative debut novel you won’t soon forget.]]> 272 Yael van der Wouden 1668034344 Ellie 0 to-read 4.05 2024
author: Yael van der Wouden
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/30
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]]> 10956 250 Jeffrey Eugenides 0747560595 Ellie 0 to-read 3.81 1993
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/30
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]]> 2187 Middlesex tells the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City and the race riots of 1967 before moving out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.]]> 529 Jeffrey Eugenides 0312422156 Ellie 0 to-read 4.03 2002
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> 40163119
Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders.

Patrick Radden Keefe writes an intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.]]> 441 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385521316 Ellie 0 to-read 4.47 2018
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/30
shelves: to-read
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]]> 207294976 He was the troubled face of rock �n� roll…until he suddenly disappeared without a trace.

Jane Pyre was once half of the famous rock �n� roll duo, the Lightning Bottles. Years later, she’s perhaps the most hated—and least understood—woman in music. She was never as popular with fans as her bandmate (and soulmate), Elijah Hart—even if Jane was the one who wrote the songs that catapulted the Lightning Bottles to instant, dizzying fame, first in the Seattle grunge scene, then around the world.

But ever since Elijah disappeared five years earlier and the band’s meteoric rise to fame came crashing down, the public hatred of Jane has taken on new levels, and all she wants to do is retreat. What she doesn’t anticipate is the bombshell that awaits her at her new home in the German countryside: the sullen teenaged girl next door—a Lightning Bottles superfan—who claims to have proof that not only is Elijah alive, he’s also been leaving secret messages for Jane. And they need to find him right away.

A cross-continent road trip about two misunderstood outsiders brought together by their shared love of music, The Lightning Bottles is “both a page-turning mystery and a love letter to the grunge era� (LitHub) that captures a searing portrait of the cost of fame.]]> 304 Marissa Stapley 1668015765 Ellie 0 to-read 3.95 2024
author: Marissa Stapley
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 203956646 From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex (“introspective and breathtakingly honest”�New York Times Book Review,), a memoir about sex, drugs, and techno in a time of madness

In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.

In Health and Safety, Witt charts her immersion into New York City’s dance music underground. Emily would come to lead a double life. By day she worked as a journalist, covering gun violence, climate catastrophes, and the rallies of right-wing militias. And by night she pushed the limits of consciousness in hollowed-out office spaces and warehouses to music that sounded like the future. But no counterculture, no matter how utopian, could stave off the squalor of American politics and the cataclysm of 2020.

Affectionate yet never sentimental, Health and Safety is a lament for a broken relationship, for a changed nightlife scene, and for New York City just before the fall. Sparing no one—least of all herself—Witt offers her life as a lens onto an era of American delirium and dissolution.]]> 264 Emily Witt 0593317645 Ellie 0 to-read 3.52 2024
author: Emily Witt
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 23942 160 William S. Burroughs 0330300164 Ellie 0 to-read 3.57 1985
author: William S. Burroughs
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 53095648 You know you're strange and wrong. You've known it from the beginning.

This is the voice that rings in your ears. That worries you never say the right thing and you’re probably a disappointment to your parents. That you’re a far cry from pretty � and your thoughts are ugly too. It says no one will ever like you just as you are.

But you know what it is to laugh with your best friend until your stomach hurts, to feel the first delicious tingles of attraction, to take exquisite pleasure in the goriness of your ingrowing toenail.

There is a place for you out there. You just need to find it.

TENNIS LESSONS is the unflinchingly honest story of one misfit and her uncertain journey to something like happiness. Stopping by each year along the way, she navigates disastrous dates, dead pets, crashed cars, best friends and lost loves. Susannah Dickey reminds us that we're all a bit weird. And that's just fine.]]> 256 Susannah Dickey 0857526863 Ellie 0 to-read 3.39 2020
author: Susannah Dickey
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/21
shelves: to-read
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]]> 41074912 272 Autumn Christian 1944866191 Ellie 0 to-read 3.82 2019
author: Autumn Christian
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 55648820
When Shane and Eva meet unexpectedly at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their past buried traumas, but the eyebrows of New York's Black literati. What no one knows is that twenty years earlier, teenage Eva and Shane spent one crazy, torrid week madly in love. They may be pretending that everything is fine now, but they can't deny their chemistry - or the fact that they've been secretly writing to each other in their books ever since.

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

With its keen observations of Black life and the condition of modern motherhood, as well as the consequences of motherless-ness, Seven Days in June is by turns humorous, warm and deeply sensual.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781538719107.]]> 336 Tia Williams Ellie 0 to-read 3.98 2021
author: Tia Williams
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 791345
Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three of the girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of Hanging Rock. Further, higher, till at last they disappeared.

They never returned.

Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction the reader must decide for themselves.]]> 189 Joan Lindsay 0099750619 Ellie 0 to-read 3.65 1967
author: Joan Lindsay
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.65
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> 181346404
Her desire used to work perfectly. Over the years she kept meticulous track of it - tallying her orgasms, maintaining a Top Humps list, and keeping a score system to rate how her conquests excite her mentally versus physically - all with the purpose of finding a great, fantastic love match.

Now, after moving into her thirties and settling down with Serious Boyfriend Number Three (aka THE-ONE), she's run into a problem.

Sex hurts. She can’t get wet. Her fanny, which has never led her astray before, suddenly seems like it might be broken.

Surely there must be some way to make sex work for her again?

From doctors to drugs to completely unorthodox methods she embarks on a journey of desperation and self-discovery.

She’ll try anything to fix it but maybe desire and long-term love just don’t work together�

Sexually frank, wildly funny, psychologically raw, I’m F*cking Amazing marks the fiction debut of a red-hot talent, perfect for fans of Fleabag.]]> 352 Anoushka Warden 0385549822 Ellie 0 to-read 3.32 2024
author: Anoushka Warden
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 127482608
It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardised by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks and illicit intrigue.

A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption and reckless abandon, Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion, and bad behavior.]]> 400 Kiley Reid 0593328205 Ellie 5 3.32 2024
author: Kiley Reid
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/18
date added: 2024/10/18
shelves:
review:
I love the way Kiley Reid writes.
]]> 26192646 Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler deftly conjures with heart-stopping accuracy the nonstop and high-adrenaline world of the restaurant industry and evokes the infinite possibilities, the unbearable beauty, and the fragility and brutality of being young in New York.]]> 356 Stephanie Danler 1101875941 Ellie 0 to-read 3.32 2016
author: Stephanie Danler
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 33294200 Fans of Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Medina, and Jason Reynolds will fall hard for this astonishing New York Times-bestselling novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afro-Latina heroine who tells her story with blazing words and powerful truth.

Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking.

But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about.

With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school’s slam poetry club, she doesn’t know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can’t stop thinking about performing her poems.

Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent.]]> 368 Elizabeth Acevedo Ellie 0 to-read 4.37 2018
author: Elizabeth Acevedo
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 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 Ellie 5 3.54 2024
author: Miranda July
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/11
date added: 2024/10/11
shelves:
review:
Let’s just say I was not the target audience for this book. Gorgeous gowns nonetheless.
]]> 11996 "As far back as I can recall, I have been in the bunker."

A young woman is kept in a cage underground with thirty-nine other females, guarded by armed men who never speak; her crimes unremembered... if indeed there were crimes.

The youngest of forty—a child with no name and no past—she survives for some purpose long forgotten in a world ravaged and wasted. In this reality where intimacy is forbidden—in the unrelenting sameness of the artificial days and nights—she knows nothing of books and time, of needs and feelings.

Then everything changes... and nothing changes.

A young woman who has never known men—a child who knows of no history before the bars and restraints—must now reinvent herself, piece by piece, in a place she has never been... and in the face of the most challenging and terrifying of unknowns: freedom.]]> 208 Jacqueline Harpman 0380731819 Ellie 0 to-read 4.22 1995
author: Jacqueline Harpman
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62047984
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 319 R.F. Kuang 000853277X Ellie 3 3.69 2023
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/06
date added: 2024/10/11
shelves:
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]]> 199534613
Margo braucht Geld. Seit sie ungewollt von ihrem Collegeprofessor, der sie jetzt mit dem Kind alleinlässt, schwanger wurde, mehr denn je. Wie Margo es auch dreht und wendet, kein Job scheint passend zu sein, oder könnte auch nur ansatzweise ihr Leben mit einem Baby finanzieren. Durch einen Zufall wird sie auf die Plattform OnlyFans aufmerksam, und Margo ist fasziniert von dieser Welt, in der Frauen mit sich und ihrem Körper experimentieren, und offenbar gut dabei verdienen. Also beginnt auch sie, Inhalte zu produzieren. Dabei erhält sie Unterstützung von ihrer Mitbewohnerin Suzie, einem großen Cosplay-Fan, und auch von ihrem Vater Jinx, einem Ex-Wrestlingprofi. Ehe sie sich versieht, ist Margo ein Online-Phänomen. Könnte dies die Antwort auf all ihre Probleme sein, oder hat der Internet-Ruhm einen zu hohen Preis?]]> 304 Rufi Thorpe 0063356589 Ellie 0 3.87 2024
author: Rufi Thorpe
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/09
date added: 2024/10/11
shelves:
review:
It was fun, I liked the characters and the pace.
]]> 123206645 A masterfully paced thriller about a reclusive ex–movie star and her famous friends whose spontaneous trip to a private Greek island is upended by a murder � from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Patient.

This is a tale of murder.

Or maybe that’s not quite true. At its heart, it’s a love story, isn’t it?

Lana Farrar is a reclusive ex–movie star and one of the most famous women in the world. Every year, she invites her closest friends to escape the English weather and spend Easter on her idyllic private Greek island.

I tell you this because you may think you know this story. You probably read about it at the time � it caused a real stir in the tabloids, if you remember. It had all the necessary ingredients for a press a celebrity; a private island cut off by the wind…and a murder.

We found ourselves trapped there overnight. Our old friendships concealed hatred and a desire for revenge. What followed was a game of cat and mouse � a battle of wits, full of twists and turns, building to an unforgettable climax. The night ended in violence and death, as one of us was found murdered.

But who am I?

My name is Elliot Chase, and I’m going to tell you a story unlike any you’ve ever heard.]]> 298 Alex Michaelides 125075898X Ellie 3 This book felt like it was written for the sole purpose of becoming a movie. NEXT! ]]> 3.34 2024
author: Alex Michaelides
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/11
date added: 2024/10/11
shelves:
review:
“The Fury: Starring Nicole Kidman�
This book felt like it was written for the sole purpose of becoming a movie. NEXT!
]]> 199722544 “Swoony, sexy, and melancholy. . . a tattered love letter to youth, music, and Nashville.� —Daisy Alpert Florin, author of My Last Innocent Year

In the sweaty music clubs and late-night house parties of Nashville, an aspiring songwriter tries to make friends, find love, and write songs—without losing herself

Alison Hunter came to Nashville for the music, a town where everyone—herself included—wants to make it in the business. Most nights, you’ll find her at The Venue, the kind of sweaty Nashville spot that’s on the circuit for bands like Bon Iver and Death Cab. Sounds glamorous—but not for Al, who stamps hands at the door with Julien, the quiet coworker who treats her like a little sister. She bums drinks from the tattooed bartender and watches the bands, wondering if she’ll ever finish a song of her own after her disastrous attempt to play in public. After a once-in-a-century storm hits and her lead singer ex-boyfriend shows up at the door, Al finds herself stuck in a perpetual cycle of late nights, new flings, and old flames. Obsessed with the disappearance of a troubled indie star, she slowly starts to lose it herself—until one reckless night threatens to derail everything. As propulsive and sexy as the rasp of a static-driven amp, Lo Fi is an open-hearted tribute to the messy truth of the creative life, the clash of lust and love, and the yearning to be heard.]]> 320 Liz Riggs 0593714571 Ellie 0 to-read 3.50 2024
author: Liz Riggs
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 58349243
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction
Finalist for the California Book Awards
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Novel

Rachel Kushner meets David Lynch in this fever dream of an LA novel about a young woman who commits a drunken act of violence just before her sister vanishes without a trace.

On the night of her high school graduation, a young woman follows her older sister Debbie to Salvation, a Los Angeles bar patronized by energy healers, aspiring actors, and all-around misfits. After the two share a bag of unidentified pills, the evening turns into a haze of sensual and risky interactions—nothing unusual for two sisters bound in an incredibly toxic relationship. Our unnamed narrator has always been under the spell of the alluring and rebellious Debbie and, despite her own hesitations, she has always said yes to nights like these. That is, until Debbie disappears.

Falling deeper into the life she cultivated with her sister, our narrator gets a job as an emergency room secretary where she steals pills to sell on the side. Cue Sasha, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who arrives at the hospital claiming to be a psychic tasked with acting as the narrator’s spiritual guide. The nature of this relationship evolves and blurs, a kaleidoscope of friendship, sex, mysticism, and ambiguous power dynamics.

With prose pulsing like a neon sign, Ruth Madievsky’s All-Night Pharmacy is an intoxicating portrait of a young woman consumed with unease over how a person should be. As she attempts sobriety and sexual embodiment, she must decide whether to search for her estranged sister, or allow her to remain a relic of the past.]]> 304 Ruth Madievsky Ellie 4 3.48 2023
author: Ruth Madievsky
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/18
date added: 2024/09/18
shelves:
review:
Waaaait I kind of liked this one
]]> 204041701
When she’s having sex with her boss, Iris likes to have the lights on so he can see how much younger she is than his wife. She likes watching her colleagues eat unhealthy lunches at their desk while her stomach aches with emptiness. She likes coasting at work knowing she’s going to land a big promotion anyway.

So why when it arrives does she find herself sprawled on her hallway floor, crying uncontrollably? Why, instead of a sense of triumph, does a crippling depression threaten to overwhelm her? Why does the support and stability of her family and friends feel so suffocating? And why, torn between her flatmate George � good, kind, reliable George � and cold, indifferent Patrick, does she only seem capable of making choices that cause her pain?]]> 352 Emily Slapper 0008629129 Ellie 0 to-read 3.45 2024
author: Emily Slapper
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 129552261
Over the next fifteen years, they share grief, laughter, friendship, bottles of cider, cigarettes in the rain. But there’s one thing Ella can never ask whether he feels the same way about her. And every time Lowe kisses another girl, Ella feels her heart break just that little bit more.

So can you ever really just be friends with the love of your life? And what happens when the day comes when you can’t keep the beautiful, terrifying, all-consuming truth to yourself anymore?

From a unique new voice in adult fiction, I Love You, I Love You, I Love You is a glorious nostalgia trip for anyone who has ever known the exquisite pain and pleasure of first love.]]> 349 Laura Dockrill 0008587019 Ellie 0 to-read 4.01 2024
author: Laura Dockrill
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 123183412
This commitment to authenticity has never been more on display than in Down the Drain . With writing that is both eloquent and accessible, Fox recounts her turbulent path to cultural her parents� volatile relationship that divided her childhood between Italy and New York City and left her largely raising herself; a possessive and abusive drug-dealing boyfriend whose torment continued even from within Rikers Island; her own trips to jail as well as to a psychiatric hospital; her work as a dominatrix that led to a complicated entanglement with a sugar daddy; a heroin habit that led to New Orleans trap houses and that she would kick only after the fatal overdose of her best friend; her own near-lethal overdoses and the deaths of still more friends from drugs and suicide; an emotionally explosive, tabloid-dominating romance with a figure she dubs “The Artist�; a whirlwind, short-lived marriage and her trials as a single parent striving to support her young son. Yet as extraordinary as her story is, its universality is what makes it so powerful. Fox doesn’t just capture her improbable evolution from grade-school outcast to fashion-world icon, she captures her transition from girlhood to womanhood to motherhood. Family and friendship, sex and death, violence and love, money and power, innocence and experience—it’s all here, in raw, remarkable and riveting detail.

More than a year before the book’s publication, Fox’s description of it as “a masterpiece� in a red carpet interview went viral. As always, she was just being honest. Down the Drain is a true literary achievement, as one-of-a-kind as its author.]]> 318 Julia Fox 1668011506 Ellie 5 Obsessed with her 4.38 2023
author: Julia Fox
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves:
review:
Obsessed with her
]]> 49083140
Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina’s relationship with her obsessive best friend, and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention�

Boy Parts is the incendiary debut novel from Eliza Clark, a pitch-black comedy both shocking and hilarious, fearlessly exploring the taboo regions of sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century.]]> 304 Eliza Clark 1910312649 Ellie 0 3.74 2020
author: Eliza Clark
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/02
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves:
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]]> 203608552 A woman must learn to take life by the throat after a night out leads to irrevocable changes in this juicy, thrilling novel from the USA Today bestselling author of Such Sharp Teeth and Black Sheep.

Sloane Parker is dreading her birthday. She doesn’t need a reminder she’s getting older, or that she’s feeling indifferent about her own life.

Her husband surprises her with a birthday weekend getaway—not with him, but with Sloane’s longtime best friend, troublemaker extraordinaire Naomi.

Sloane anticipates a weekend of wine tastings and cozy robes and strategic avoidance of issues she’d rather not confront, like her husband’s repeated infidelity. But when they arrive at their rental cottage, it becomes clear Naomi has something else in mind. She wants Sloane to stop letting things happen to her, for Sloane to really live. So Naomi orchestrates a wild night out with a group of mysterious strangers, only for it to take a horrifying turn that changes Sloane’s and Naomi’s lives literally forever.

The friends are forced to come to terms with some pretty eternal consequences in this bloody, seductive novel about how it’s never too late to find satisfaction, even though it might taste different than expected.]]> 304 Rachel Harrison 0593642546 Ellie 0 to-read 3.50 2024
author: Rachel Harrison
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> 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 Ellie 0 to-read 3.54 2024
author: Danzy Senna
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 50659471
Yet even the festive atmosphere can't keep the shadows of the past from looming. As Feyre navigates her first Winter Solstice as High Lady, her concern for those dearest to her deepens. They have more wounds than she anticipated-scars that will have a far-reaching impact on the future of their court.

Bridging the events of A Court of Wings and Ruin with the later books in the series, A Court of Frost and Starlight explores the far-reaching effects of a devastating war and the fierce love between friends.]]> 272 Sarah J. Maas 1635575621 Ellie 5 3.69 2019
author: Sarah J. Maas
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/02
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves:
review:
It was a nice little brain break before the fifth one. I’m not thinking about it too much. Obviously I’m rating it 5 stars.
]]> 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 Ellie 0 A magic apartment ????? 4.18 2023
author: Ashley Poston
name: Ellie
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/08
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves:
review:
A magic apartment ?????
]]> 199026522 In the latest jaw-dropping thriller from New York Times bestselling author Riley Sager, a man must contend with the long-ago disappearance of his childhood best friend—and the dark secrets lurking just beyond the safe confines of his picture-perfect neighborhood.

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

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

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

The closer Ethan gets to the truth, the more he realizes that no place—be it quiet forest or suburban street—is completely safe. And that the past has a way of haunting the present.]]> 367 Riley Sager 0593472373 Ellie 0 3.66 2024
author: Riley Sager
name: Ellie
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/09
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves:
review:
One thing about Riley Sager is that he WILL rely on the supernatural to explain his plot holes.
]]>