Lani's bookshelf: all en-US Sun, 04 May 2025 09:24:30 -0700 60 Lani's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam]]> 3873 496 Karen Armstrong 0517223120 Lani 0 to-read 3.89 1993 A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam
author: Karen Armstrong
name: Lani
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/04
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]]> <![CDATA[A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years]]> 6957725 The Reformation returns with the definitive history of Christianity for our time. Once in a generation a historian will redefine his field, producing a book that demands to be read--a product of electrifying scholarship conveyed with commanding skill. Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity is such a book. Ambitious, it ranges back to the origins of the Hebrew Bible and covers the world, following the three main strands of the Christian faith.

Christianity will teach modern readers things that have been lost in time about how Jesus' message spread and how the New Testament was formed. It follows the Christian story to all corners of the globe, filling in often neglected accounts of conversions and confrontations in Africa and Asia. It discovers the roots of the faith that galvanized America, charting the rise of the evangelical movement from its origins in Germany and England. This book encompasses all of intellectual history--we meet monks and crusaders, heretics and saints, slave traders and abolitionists, and discover Christianity's essential role in driving the Enlightenment and the age of exploration, and shaping the course of WWI and WWII.

We live in a time of tremendous religious awareness, when both believers & non-believers are engaged by questions of religion and tradition, seeking to understand the violence sometimes perpetrated in the name of God. The son of an Anglican clergyman, MacCulloch writes with feeling about faith. His last book, The Reformation, was chosen by dozens of publications as Best Book of the Year & won the Nat'l Book Critics Circle Award. This inspiring follow-up is a landmark new history of the faith that continues to shape the world.]]> 1016 Diarmaid MacCulloch 0713998695 Lani 0 to-read 4.11 2009 A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years
author: Diarmaid MacCulloch
name: Lani
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Accidentally Compromising the Duke (Wedded by Scandal, #1)]]> 28644556 England, 1817. Miss Adeline Hays is out of options. Determined to escape marriage to a repugnant earl, Adeline plans to deliberately allow herself to be caught in a compromising position at a house party with the much kinder man she’d hoped to marry. Instead, Adeline accidentally enters the wrong chamber and tumbles into the bed of the mad duke.

Edmond Rochester, the duke of Wolverton, is seeking a wife to care for his two daughters. A young lady of sensibilities, accomplishment, and most importantly, one who he is not attracted to—a complete opposite of the bewitching beauty who traps him into marriage. But despite the lust he feels for his new duchess, Edmond is resolved to never allow them intimacy, refusing to ever again suffer the tormenting loss of a loved one.]]> 224 Stacy Reid 163375653X Lani 5 3.96 2016 Accidentally Compromising the Duke (Wedded by Scandal, #1)
author: Stacy Reid
name: Lani
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/19
date added: 2025/04/19
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]]> <![CDATA[A Duke in Disguise (Unconventional Ladies, #3)]]> 60675670
Theo Vance has lived and worked the farm that her father leases from the duke all of her life, but with their funds depleting further each passing quarter day, desperate measures must be taken lest they find themselves evicted. When Mr. Dryden arrives at her farm, summoned by the belligerent letter she’d penned to the duke, and claiming that he has come to resolve the issue, she is doubtful that anything will come of it—but her father nevertheless agrees to let Mr. Dryden stay on to conduct his investigation, so long as he also provides much-needed labor on their farm.

It takes little more than a day for Theo to see through Mr. Dryden’s disguise, and when she realizes that she has got a duke playing at being a farm laborer, she can’t resist the impulse to make him miserable as retribution for the suffering the town has endured beneath his neglect. But she finds it harder and harder to keep hold of her resentment, when he’s not at all the kind of man she expected him to be…]]> 365 Aydra Richards Lani 3 3.5 3.90 2022 A Duke in Disguise (Unconventional Ladies, #3)
author: Aydra Richards
name: Lani
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/13
date added: 2025/04/13
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3.5
]]> <![CDATA[The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade]]> 116477 Roe v. Wade

In this deeply moving work, Ann Fessler brings to light the lives of hundreds of thousands of young single American women forced to give up their newborn children in the years following World War II and before Roe v. Wade. The Girls Who Went Away tells a story not of wild and carefree sexual liberation, but rather of a devastating double standard that has had punishing long-term effects on these women and on the children they gave up for adoption. Based on Fessler's groundbreaking interviews, it brings to brilliant life these women's voices and the spirit of the time, allowing each to share her own experience in gripping and intimate detail. Today, when the future of the Roe decision and women's reproductive rights stand squarely at the front of a divisive national debate, Fessler brings to the fore a long-overlooked history of single women in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies.

In 2002, Fessler, an adoptee herself, traveled the country interviewing women willing to speak publicly about why they relinquished their children. Researching archival records and the political and social climate of the time, she uncovered a story of three decades of women who, under enormous social and family pressure, were coerced or outright forced to give their babies up for adoption. Fessler deftly describes the impossible position in which these women found themselves: as a sexual revolution heated up in the postwar years, birth control was tightly restricted, and abortion proved prohibitively expensive or life endangering. At the same time, a postwar economic boom brought millions of American families into the middle class, exerting its own pressures to conform to a model of family perfection. Caught in the middle, single pregnant women were shunned by family and friends, evicted from schools, sent away to maternity homes to have their children alone, and often treated with cold contempt by doctors, nurses, and clergy.

The majority of the women Fessler interviewed have never spoken of their experiences, and most have been haunted by grief and shame their entire adult lives. A searing and important look into a long-overlooked social history, The Girls Who Went Away is their story.]]> 354 Ann Fessler 1594200947 Lani 0 to-read 4.23 2006 The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade
author: Ann Fessler
name: Lani
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/11
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]]> Wake Up and Open Your Eyes 204640265 From Vulture's "master of horror" Clay McLeod Chapman, a relentless and emotionally charged social horror novel about a family on the run from a demonic possession epidemic that spreads through media, for fans of The Last of Us and When Evil Lurks

Noah Fairchild has been losing his formerly polite Southern parents to far-right cable news for years, so when his mother leaves him a voicemail warning him that the “Great Reawakening� is here, he assumes it’s related to one of the many conspiracy theories she believes in. But when his own phone calls go unanswered, Noah makes the long drive from Brooklyn to Richmond, Virginia. There, he discovers his childhood home in shambles, a fridge full of spoiled food, and his parents locked in a terrifying trance-like state in front of the TV. Panicked, Noah attempts to snap them out of it and get medical help.

Then Noah’s mother brutally attacks him.

But Noah isn’t the only person to be attacked by a loved one. Families across the country are tearing each other apart-–literally-–as people succumb to a form of possession that gets worse the more time they spend watching particular channels, using certain apps, or visiting certain websites. In Noah’s Richmond-based family, only he and his young nephew Marcus are unaffected. Together, they must race back to the safe haven of Brooklyn�-but can they make it before they fall prey to the violent hordes?

This ambitious, searing novel from "one of horror's modern masters" holds a mirror to our divided nation, and will shake readers to the core.]]> 384 Clay McLeod Chapman Lani 0 to-read 3.37 2025 Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
author: Clay McLeod Chapman
name: Lani
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/09
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]]> The Wood at Midwinter 206101583 'A church is a sort of wood. A wood is a sort of church. They're the same thing really.'

Nineteen-year-old Merowdis Scott is an unusual girl. She can talk to animals and trees—and she is only ever happy when she is walking in the woods.

One snowy afternoon, out with her dogs and Apple the pig, Merowdis encounters a blackbird and a fox. As darkness falls, a strange figure enters in their midst—and the path of her life is changed forever.

From the internationally bestselling and prize-winning author of Piranesi and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an enchanting, beautifully illustrated short story set in the Strange universe. Featuring an introduction by Susanna Clarke and gorgeous illustrations from Victoria Sawdon truly worthy of the magic of this story, this is a mesmerising, must-have addition to any fantasy reader's bookshelf.]]> 64 Susanna Clarke 1639734481 Lani 0 3.47 2024 The Wood at Midwinter
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Lani
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/03
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This short story gave nothing, but it did have beautiful illustrations!
]]> The Wood at Midwinter 218464066 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

From the bestselling and prize-winning author of Piranesi and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an enchanting, beautifully illustrated short story set in the world of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

'A church is a sort of wood. A wood is a sort of church. They're the same thing really.'

Nineteen-year-old Merowdis Scot is an unusual girl. She can talk to animals and trees-and she is only ever happy when she is walking in the woods.

One snowy afternoon, out with her dogs and Apple the pig, Merowdis encounters a blackbird and a fox. As darkness falls, a strange figure enters in their midst-and the path of her life is changed forever.

Featuring gorgeous illustrations truly worthy of the magic of this story and an afterword by Susanna Clarke explaining how she came to write it, this is a mesmerizing, must-have addition to any fantasy reader's bookshelf.]]> 64 Susanna Clarke Lani 2 3.49 2024 The Wood at Midwinter
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Lani
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> The Dollhouse Academy 211004158 From the national bestselling author of Oona Out of Order, a novel about two best friends and aspiring actresses who join The Dollhouse Academy, where stars are made and dangerous secrets are hidden

Ivy Gordon is living a borrowed life on borrowed time. For the past eighteen years, she has been the most famous star at the Dollhouse Academy, the ultra-secretive, elite boarding school and talent incubator that every aspiring performer dreams of attending. But now, at age thirty-four, she is tired of pretending everything is fine. In secret diary entries, Ivy begins to reveal the sordid truth of her life at the strange medical exams, mysterious supplements, and something unspeakable that’s left Ivy terrified and feeling like a prisoner. As she forces herself to confront the most painful parts of her past, she begins to realize that something truly sinister might be powering the Dollhouse’s success.

Ramona Halloway and her best friend, Grace Ludlow, grew up idolizing Ivy. Now both twenty-two, neither has made much headway in showbiz, until a lucky break grants them entry to the Dollhouse. They’re enchanted by the picturesque campus and the chance to perform alongside their idols—though nothing prepares them for the fiercely competitive training bootcamp. When Ramona begins to receive anonymous, threatening messages, it’s easy to dismiss them as a prank from a rival. Her bigger concern is Grace’s skyrocketing success, while Ramona falls ever further behind. But the messages grow more unsettling, as does life at the Dollhouse. Can Ramona overcome her jealousy and resentment to figure out what’s really going on? And can Ivy finally find her voice, before another young performer follows her catastrophic path to stardom?

With dark academia twists and enormous heart, The Dollhouse Academy is a novel about the complexities of friendship, our desire to be seen and understood, and the true cost of making our dreams a reality.]]> 320 Margarita Montimore 1250320658 Lani 0 to-read 3.55 2025 The Dollhouse Academy
author: Margarita Montimore
name: Lani
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2025
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]]> The September House 61311377 A woman is determined to stay in her dream home even after it becomes a haunted nightmare in this compulsively readable, twisty, and layered debut novel.

When Margaret and her husband Hal bought the large Victorian house on Hawthorn Street—for sale at a surprisingly reasonable price—they couldn’t believe they finally had a home of their own. Then they discovered the hauntings. Every September, the walls drip blood. The ghosts of former inhabitants appear, and all of them are terrified of something that lurks in the basement. Most people would flee.

Margaret is not most people.

Margaret is staying. It’s her house. But after four years Hal can’t take it anymore, and he leaves abruptly. Now, he’s not returning calls, and their daughter Katherine—who knows nothing about the hauntings—arrives, intent on looking for her missing father. To make things worse, September has just begun, and with every attempt Margaret and Katherine make at finding Hal, the hauntings grow more harrowing, because there are some secrets the house needs to keep.]]> 352 Carissa Orlando 0593548639 Lani 0 gave-up-on 3.99 2023 The September House
author: Carissa Orlando
name: Lani
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> Oona Out of Order 45046893 A remarkably inventive novel that explores what it means to live a life fully in the moment, even if those moments are out of order.

It’s New Year’s Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. At the stroke of midnight she will turn nineteen, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence. Should she go to London to study economics, or remain at home in Brooklyn to pursue her passion for music and be with her boyfriend? As the countdown to the New Year begins, Oona faints and awakens thirty-two years in the future in her fifty-one-year-old body. Greeted by a friendly stranger in a beautiful house she’s told is her own, Oona learns that with each passing year she will leap to another age at random. And so begins Oona Out of Order...

Hopping through decades, pop culture fads, and much-needed stock tips, Oona is still a young woman on the inside but ever changing on the outside. Who will she be next year? Philanthropist? Club Kid? World traveler? Wife to a man she’s never met? Surprising, magical, and heart-wrenching, Margarita Montimore has crafted an unforgettable story about the burdens of time, the endurance of love, and the power of family.]]> 339 Margarita Montimore 1250236606 Lani 5 3.84 2020 Oona Out of Order
author: Margarita Montimore
name: Lani
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/02
date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> <![CDATA[A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?]]> 125084292
Can you make babies in space? Should corporations govern space settlements? What about space war? Are we headed for a housing crisis on the Moon’s Peaks of Eternal Light—and what happens if you’re left in the Craters of Eternal Darkness? Why do astronauts love taco sauce? Speaking of meals, what’s the legal status of space cannibalism?

With deep expertise, a winning sense of humor, and art from the beloved creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, the Weinersmiths investigate perhaps the biggest questions humanity will ever ask itself—whether and how to become multiplanetary.

Get in, we’re going to Mars.]]> 448 Kelly Weinersmith 1984881736 Lani 0 to-read 4.04 2023 A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
author: Kelly Weinersmith
name: Lani
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
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]]> <![CDATA[The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride]]> 6033525
In this gripping narrative, Daniel James Brown sheds new light on one of the most infamous events in American history. Following every painful footstep of Sarah's journey with the Donner Party, Brown produces a tale both spellbinding and richly informative.]]> 352 Daniel James Brown 0061348104 Lani 4 4.24 2009 The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride
author: Daniel James Brown
name: Lani
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/02/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Not Fade Away: A Memoir of Senses Lost and Found]]> 20893350
Born with a rare genetic mutation called Usher Syndrome type III, Rebecca Alexander has been simultaneously losing both her sight and hearing since she was a child,Ěýand was told that she wouldĚýlikely be completely blind and deaf by age 30. Then, at 18, a fall from a window left her athletic body completely shattered.
Ěý
None of us know what we would do in the face of such devastation. What Rebecca did was rise to every challenge she faced. She was losing her vision and hearing and her body was broken, but she refused to lose her drive, her zest for life and â€� maybe most importantly â€� her sense of humor. Now, at 35, with only a sliver of sight and significantly deteriorated hearing, she is a psychotherapist with two mastersâ€� degrees from Columbia University, and an athlete who teaches spin classes and regularly competes in extreme endurance races. She greets every day as if it were a gift, with boundless energy, innate curiosity, and a strength of spirit that have led her to places we can't imagine.Ěý
Ěý
In Not Fade Away , Rebecca tells her extraordinary story, by turns harrowing, funny and inspiring. She meditates on what she’s lost—from the sound of a whisper to seeing a sky full of stars, and what she’s found in return—an exquisite sense of intimacy with those she is closest to, a love of silence, a profound gratitude for everything she still has, and a joy in simple pleasures that most of us forget to notice.

Not Fade Away is both a memoir of the senses and a unique look at the obstacles we all face—physical, psychological, and philosophical—exploring the extraordinary powers of memory, love, and perseverance. It is a gripping story, an offering of hope and motivation, and an exquisite reminder to live each day to its fullest.]]> 320 Rebecca Alexander 1592408311 Lani 0 to-read 3.89 2014 Not Fade Away: A Memoir of Senses Lost and Found
author: Rebecca Alexander
name: Lani
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/27
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]]> Lost Ark Dreaming 195790767
Off the coast of West Africa, decades after the dangerous rise of the Atlantic Ocean, the region’s survivors live inside five partially submerged, kilometers-high towers originally created as a playground for the wealthy. Now the towers� most affluent rule from their lofty perch at the top while the rest are crammed into the dark, fetid floors below sea level.

There are also those who were left for dead in the Atlantic, only to be reawakened by an ancient power, and who seek vengeance on those who offered them up to the waves.

Three lives within the towers are pulled to the fore of this Yekini, an earnest, mid-level rookie analyst; Tuoyo, an undersea mechanic mourning a tremendous loss; and Ngozi, an egotistical bureaucrat from the highest levels of governance. They will need to work together if there is to be any hope of a future that is worth living―for everyone.]]> 179 Suyi Davies Okungbowa 1250890756 Lani 0 to-read 3.63 2024 Lost Ark Dreaming
author: Suyi Davies Okungbowa
name: Lani
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future]]> 207294076 From Yale professor and bestselling author of How Fascism Works, a searing confrontation with the authoritarian right’s efforts to annihilate public education, silence teachers, and use taxpayer money to undo a century of work to advance social justice action on race, gender, sexuality, and class.Combining historical research with an in-depth analysis of our modern political landscape, Erasing History issues a dire warning for America and the the worst fascist movements of humanity’s past began in schools; the same place so many of today’s right-wing political parties have trained their most vicious attacks. Donald Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recip Erdogan, and Argentina’s Javier Milei have all reached the same if you want to roll back the clock on civil rights, equity, and inclusion, a great place to start is in our schools. Yale professor Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the right’s tactics and traces their inspirations and funding back to some of the most dangerous ideas of human history. He shows that hearts and minds are won in our elementary schools, high schools, and universities—and that governments are currently ill-prepared to do the work of uprooting fascist policies being foisted upon our children through school boards, in courtrooms, and in the boardrooms of the companies trusted to train our teachers and create the materials they’ll share with their students. Deeply informed and urgently needed, this book is a vibrant call to action for lovers of democracy worldwide.]]> 256 Jason F. Stanley 1668056917 Lani 0 to-read 4.31 2024 Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future
author: Jason F. Stanley
name: Lani
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/26
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]]> Just Last Night 54870201
But then, in an instant, their lives are changed forever.

In the aftermath, Eve’s world is upended. As stunning secrets are revealed, she begins to wonder if she really knew her friends as well as she thought. And when someone from the past comes back into her life, Eve’s future veers in a surprising new direction...

They say every love story starts with a single moment. What if it was just last night?]]> 393 Mhairi McFarlane 0063036851 Lani 5 3.96 2021 Just Last Night
author: Mhairi McFarlane
name: Lani
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/25
date added: 2025/01/25
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]]> <![CDATA[What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator]]> 62919823 288 Barbara Butcher 1982179384 Lani 0 to-read 4.13 2023 What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator
author: Barbara Butcher
name: Lani
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/24
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]]> Raising Hare: A Memoir 214269337 A moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world, explored through the story of one woman’s unlikely friendship with a wild hare.

Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and slept in your house for hours on end and gave birth to leverets in your study. For political advisor and speechwriter Chloe Dalton, who spent lockdown deep in the English countryside, far away from her usual busy London life, this became her unexpected reality.

In February 2021, Dalton stumbles upon a newborn hare—a leveret—that had been chased by a dog. Fearing for its life, she brings it home, only to discover how impossible it is to rear a wild hare, most of whom perish in captivity from either shock or starvation. Through trial and error, she learns to feed and care for the leveret with every intention of returning it to the wilderness. Instead, it becomes her constant companion, wandering the fields and woods at night and returning to Dalton’s house by day. Though Dalton feared that the hare would be preyed upon by foxes, stoats, feral cats, raptors, and even people, she never tried to restrict it to the house. Each time the hare leaves, Chloe knows she may never see it again. Yet she also understands that to confine it would be its own kind of death.

Raising Hare chronicles their journey together, while also taking a deep dive into the lives and nature of hares, and the way they have been viewed historically in art, literature, and folklore. We witness first-hand the joy at this extraordinary relationship between human and animal, which serves as a reminder that the best things, and most beautiful experiences, arise when we least expect them.]]> 285 Chloe Dalton 0593701844 Lani 0 to-read 4.42 2025 Raising Hare: A Memoir
author: Chloe Dalton
name: Lani
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/24
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]]> <![CDATA[The Summer that Melted Everything]]> 26114523 Fielding Bliss has never forgotten the summer of 1984:
the year a heatwave scorched the small town of Breathed, Ohio.
The year he became friends with the devil.


When local prosecutor Autopsy Bliss publishes an invitation to the devil to come to the country town of Breathed, Ohio, nobody quite expected that he would turn up. They especially didn't expect him to turn up a tattered and bruised thirteen-year-old boy.


Fielding, the son of Autopsy, finds the boy outside the courthouse and brings him home, and he is welcomed into the Bliss family. The Blisses believe the boy, who calls himself Sal, is a runaway from a nearby farm town. Then, as a series of strange incidents implicate Sal � and riled by the feverish heatwave baking the town from the inside out � there are some around town who start to believe that maybe Sal is exactly who he claims to be.


But whether he's a traumatised child or the devil incarnate, Sal is certainly one strange fruit: he talks in riddles, his uncanny knowledge and understanding reaches far outside the realm of a normal child � and ultimately his eerily affecting stories of Heaven, Hell, and earth will mesmerise and enflame the entire town.


Devastatingly beautiful, The Summer That Melted Everything is a captivating story about community, redemption, and the dark places where evil really lies.

]]> 320 Tiffany McDaniel 1250078067 Lani 0 to-read 3.97 2016 The Summer that Melted Everything
author: Tiffany McDaniel
name: Lani
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/24
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]]> Elegy for the Undead 53387857
Fond remembrances of young love meet the challenges of navigating a partner's terminal illness in this bittersweet tale that explores both how we fall in love and how we say goodbye when the time comes far too soon.]]> 188 Matthew Vesely 1941360459 Lani 0 to-read 3.84 2020 Elegy for the Undead
author: Matthew Vesely
name: Lani
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/24
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]]> Klara and the Sun 54120408
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?]]> 340 Kazuo Ishiguro 059331817X Lani 0 to-read 3.71 2021 Klara and the Sun
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Lani
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/24
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]]> A Children's Bible 55298364 A Children’s Bible follows a group of twelve eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their families at a sprawling lakeside mansion. Contemptuous of their parents, the children decide to run away when a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, embarking on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside. Lydia Millet’s prophetic and heartbreaking story of generational divide offers a haunting vision of what awaits us on the far side of Revelation.]]> 224 Lydia Millet 0393867382 Lani 0 to-read 3.70 2020 A Children's Bible
author: Lydia Millet
name: Lani
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> <![CDATA[Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1)]]> 61431922 Enter the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragon riders...

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.

But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile� humans. They incinerate them.

With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.

She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.

Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom's protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.

Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die]]> 517 Rebecca Yarros 1649374046 Lani 0 currently-reading 4.56 2023 Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1)
author: Rebecca Yarros
name: Lani
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
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]]> <![CDATA[The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World]]> 35820369 The dinosaurs. Sixty-six million years ago, the Earth’s most fearsome creatures vanished. Today they remain one of our planet’s great mysteries. Now The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs reveals their extraordinary, 200-million-year-long story as never before.

In this captivating narrative (enlivened with more than seventy original illustrations and photographs), Steve Brusatte, a young American paleontologist who has emerged as one of the foremost stars of the field—naming fifteen new species and leading groundbreaking scientific studies and fieldwork—masterfully tells the complete, surprising, and new history of the dinosaurs, drawing on cutting-edge science to dramatically bring to life their lost world and illuminate their enigmatic origins, spectacular flourishing, astonishing diversity, cataclysmic extinction, and startling living legacy. Captivating and revelatory, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a book for the ages.

Brusatte traces the evolution of dinosaurs from their inauspicious start as small shadow dwellers—themselves the beneficiaries of a mass extinction caused by volcanic eruptions at the beginning of the Triassic period—into the dominant array of species every wide-eyed child memorizes today, T. rex, Triceratops, Brontosaurus, and more. This gifted scientist and writer re-creates the dinosaurs� peak during the Jurassic and Cretaceous, when thousands of species thrived, and winged and feathered dinosaurs, the prehistoric ancestors of modern birds, emerged. The story continues to the end of the Cretaceous period, when a giant asteroid or comet struck the planet and nearly every dinosaur species (but not all) died out, in the most extraordinary extinction event in earth’s history, one full of lessons for today as we confront a “sixth extinction.�

Brusatte also recalls compelling stories from his globe-trotting expeditions during one of the most exciting eras in dinosaur research—which he calls “a new golden age of discovery”—and offers thrilling accounts of some of the remarkable findings he and his colleagues have made, including primitive human-sized tyrannosaurs; monstrous carnivores even larger than T. rex; and paradigm-shifting feathered raptors from China.

An electrifying scientific history that unearths the dinosaurs� epic saga, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs will be a definitive and treasured account for decades to come.

Includes 75 images, world maps of the prehistoric earth, and a dinosaur family tree.]]> 404 Steve Brusatte 0062490427 Lani 4 4.24 2018 The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
author: Steve Brusatte
name: Lani
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/01/22
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[I'm Sorry for My Loss: An Urgent Examination of Reproductive Care in America]]> 203751764
More than a million women lose a pregnancy each year, whether through miscarriage, stillbirth, or termination for medical reasons. For most, the experience often casts a shadow of isolation, shame, and blame. In the aftermath of the 2022 decision to overturn Roe v Wade, 25 million women of childbearing age live in states with laws that restrict access to abortion, including for those who never wanted to end their pregnancies. How did we get here?

Rebecca Little and Colleen Long, childhood friends who grew up to be journalists, both experienced late-term loss, and together they take an incisive, deeply reported look at the issue, working to shatter taboos that have made so many pregnant women feel ashamed and alone. They trace the experience of pregnancy loss and reproductive care from America's founding to the present day, exposing the deep impact made by a dangerous tangle of laws, politics, medicine, racism, and misogyny. Combining powerful personal narratives with exhaustive research, I'm Sorry for My Loss is a comprehensive examination on how pregnancy loss came to be so stigmatized and politicized, and why a system of more compassionate care is critical for everyone.]]> 496 1728292751 Lani 0 to-read 4.40 2024 I'm Sorry for My Loss: An Urgent Examination of Reproductive Care in America
author: Rebecca Little and Colleen Long
name: Lani
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence]]> 61885057 From award-winning journalist Meg Kissinger, a searing memoir of a family besieged by mental illness, as well as an incisive exploration of the systems that failed them and a testament to the love that sustained them.

Growing up in the 1960s in the suburbs of Chicago, Meg Kissinger’s family seemed to live a charmed life. With eight kids and two loving parents, the Kissingers radiated a warm, boisterous energy. Whether they were spending summer days on the shores of Lake Michigan, barreling down the ski slopes, or navigating the trials of their Catholic school, the Kissingers always knew how to live large and play hard.

But behind closed doors, a harsher reality was unfolding—a heavily medicated mother hospitalized for anxiety and depression, a manic father prone to violence, and children in the throes of bipolar disorder and depression, two of whom would take their own lives. Through it all, the Kissingers faced the world with their signature dark humor and the unspoken family rule: never talk about it.

While You Were Out begins as the personal story of one family’s struggles then opens outward, as Kissinger details how childhood tragedy catalyzed a journalism career focused on exposing our country’s flawed mental health care. Combining the intimacy of memoir with the rigor of investigative reporting, the book explores the consequences of shame, the havoc of botched public policy, and the hope offered by new treatment strategies.

Powerful, candid and filled with surprising humor, this is the story of one family’s love and resilience in face of great loss.]]> 320 Meg Kissinger 1250793777 Lani 0 to-read 4.26 2023 While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence
author: Meg Kissinger
name: Lani
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/20
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]]> <![CDATA[Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion]]> 61278539 Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle BlairĚýoffers a provocative reframing of the abortion issue in post-Roe America. In a series of 28Ěýbrief arguments, she deftly makes the case for moving the abortion debate away fromĚýcontrolling and legislating women’s bodies and instead directs the focus on men’s lack of accountability in preventing unwanted pregnancies.

Highly readable, accessible, funny, and unflinching, Blair builds her argument by walking readers through the basics of fertility (men are 50 times more fertile than woman), the unfair burden placed on women when it comes to preventing pregnancy (90% of the birth control market is for women), the wrongheaded stigmas around birth control for men (condoms make sex less pleasurable, vasectomies are scary and emasculating), and the counterintuitive reality that men, who are fertile 100% of the time, take little to no responsibility for preventing pregnancy.Ěý

The result is a compelling and convincing case for placing the responsibility—and burden—ofĚýpreventing unwanted pregnancies away from women andĚýonto men.]]> 137 Gabrielle Stanley Blair 1523523182 Lani 0 to-read 4.51 2022 Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion
author: Gabrielle Stanley Blair
name: Lani
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/20
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]]> <![CDATA[Love That Journey for Me: The Queer Revolution of Schitt's Creek (Inklings, #1)]]> 58102856
By discussing how the show reshapes LGBTQ+ narratives from the crafting of the town itself, and celebratory influences including Cabaret, to how writer-creator Dan Levy utilised and subverted expectations throughout his work, Emily Garside will showcase how one TV show became a watershed moment in queer representation and gay relationships on screen.

Part analysis of Schitt’s Creek’s importance, part homage to a cultural landmark, this is a show that � in the words of David Rose himself � needs to be celebrated. This book is that celebration.

This book is unofficial, and unaffiliated with Schitt’s Creek and its brand.]]> 112 Emily Garside 1912489341 Lani 0 to-read 4.13 Love That Journey for Me: The Queer Revolution of Schitt's Creek (Inklings, #1)
author: Emily Garside
name: Lani
average rating: 4.13
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/19
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]]> <![CDATA[Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology]]> 40740411 The fascinating untold story of how the ancients imagined robots and other forms of artificial life—and even invented real automated machines The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. More than 2,500 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek mythology was exploring ideas about creating artificial life—and grappling with still-unresolved ethical concerns about biotechne, “life through craft.� In this compelling, richly illustrated book, Adrienne Mayor tells the fascinating story of how ancient Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese myths envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices, and human enhancements—and how these visions relate to and reflect the ancient invention of real animated machines.As early as Homer, Greeks were imagining robotic servants, animated statues, and even ancient versions of Artificial Intelligence, while in Indian legend, Buddha’s precious relics were defended by robot warriors copied from Greco-Roman designs for real automata. Mythic automata appear in tales about Jason and the Argonauts, Medea, Daedalus, Prometheus, and Pandora, and many of these machines are described as being built with the same materials and methods that human artisans used to make tools and statues. And, indeed, many sophisticated animated devices were actually built in antiquity, reaching a climax with the creation of a host of automata in the ancient city of learning, Alexandria, the original Silicon Valley.A groundbreaking account of the earliest expressions of the timeless impulse to create artificial life, Gods and Robots reveals how some of today’s most advanced innovations in robotics and AI were foreshadowed in ancient myth—and how science has always been driven by imagination. This is mythology for the age of AI.]]> 407 Adrienne Mayor 0691185441 Lani 0 to-read 3.66 2018 Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology
author: Adrienne Mayor
name: Lani
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/19
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]]> <![CDATA[Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age]]> 38240525 A disturbing exposé of how today's alt-right men's groups use ancient sources to promote a new brand of toxic masculinity online.

A virulent strain of antifeminism is thriving online that treats women's empowerment as a mortal threat to men and to the integrity of Western civilization. Its proponents cite ancient Greek and Latin texts to support their claims--arguing that they articulate a model of masculinity that sustained generations but is now under siege.

Donna Zuckerberg dives deep into the virtual communities of the far right, where men lament their loss of power and privilege, and strategize about how to reclaim them. She finds, mixed in with weightlifting tips and misogynistic vitriol, the words of the Stoics deployed to support an ideal vision of masculine life. On other sites, pickup artists quote Ovid's Ars Amatoria to justify ignoring women's boundaries. By appropriating the Classics, these men lend a veneer of intellectual authority and ancient wisdom to their project of patriarchal white supremacy. In defense or retaliation, feminists have also taken up the Classics online, to counter the sanctioning of violence against women.

Not All Dead White Men reveals that some of the most controversial and consequential debates about the legacy of the ancients are raging not in universities but online.]]> 288 Donna Zuckerberg 0674975553 Lani 0 to-read 3.85 2018 Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age
author: Donna Zuckerberg
name: Lani
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/19
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]]> <![CDATA[The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11]]> 44571964
Over the past eighteen years, monumental literature has been published about 9/11, from Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, which traced the rise of al-Qaeda, to The 9/11 Commission Report, the government’s definitive factual retrospective of the attacks. But one perspective has been missing up to this point—a 360-degree account of the day told through the voices of the people who experienced it.

Now, in The Only Plane in the Sky, award-winning journalist and bestselling historian Garrett Graff tells the story of the day as it was lived—in the words of those who lived it. Drawing on never-before-published transcripts, recently declassified documents, original interviews, and oral histories from nearly five hundred government officials, first responders, witnesses, survivors, friends, and family members, Graff paints the most vivid and human portrait of the September 11 attacks yet.

Beginning in the predawn hours of airports in the Northeast, we meet the ticket agents who unknowingly usher terrorists onto their flights, and the flight attendants inside the hijacked planes. In New York City, first responders confront a scene of unimaginable horror at the Twin Towers. From a secret bunker underneath the White House, officials watch for incoming planes on radar. Aboard the small number of unarmed fighter jets in the air, pilots make a pact to fly into a hijacked airliner if necessary to bring it down. In the skies above Pennsylvania, civilians aboard United Flight 93 make the ultimate sacrifice in their place. Then, as the day moves forward and flights are grounded nationwide, Air Force One circles the country alone, its passengers isolated and afraid.

More than simply a collection of eyewitness testimonies, The Only Plane in the Sky is the historic narrative of how ordinary people grappled with extraordinary events in real time: the father and son working in the North Tower, caught on different ends of the impact zone; the firefighter searching for his wife who works at the World Trade Center; the operator of in-flight telephone calls who promises to share a passenger’s last words with his family; the beloved FDNY chaplain who bravely performs last rites for the dying, losing his own life when the Towers collapse; and the generals at the Pentagon who break down and weep when they are barred from rushing into the burning building to try to rescue their colleagues.

At once a powerful tribute to the courage of everyday Americans and an essential addition to the literature of 9/11, The Only Plane in the Sky weaves together the unforgettable personal experiences of the men and women who found themselves caught at the center of an unprecedented human drama. The result is a unique, profound, and searing exploration of humanity on a day that changed the course of history, and all of our lives.]]> 513 Garrett M. Graff 1501182226 Lani 5 4.68 2019 The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11
author: Garrett M. Graff
name: Lani
average rating: 4.68
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/01/19
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]]> All the Colors of the Dark 215153740
When the daughter of a wealthy family is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges—Patch, a local boy, who saves the girl, and, in doing so, leaves heartache in his wake.

Patch and those who love him soon discover that the line between triumph and tragedy has never been finer. And that their search for answers will lead them to truths that could mean losing one another.

A missing person mystery, a serial killer thriller, a love story, a unique twist on each, Chris Whitaker has written a novel about what lurks in the shadows of obsession and the blinding light of hope.]]> 597 Chris Whitaker 0593798880 Lani 0 to-read 4.44 2024 All the Colors of the Dark
author: Chris Whitaker
name: Lani
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/19
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]]> <![CDATA[Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare]]> 65211335 From major new storytelling talent Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, a blazing, bodily, raucous journey through contemporary Hawaiian identity and womanhood.

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto's wrenching and sensational debut story collection follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women through a contemporary landscape thick with inherited wisdom and the ghosts of colonization. This is a Hawai'i where unruly sexuality and generational memory overflow the postcard image of paradise and the boundaries of the real, where the superstitions born of the islands take on the weight of truth.

A childhood encounter with a wild pua'a (pig) on the haunted Pali highway portends one young woman's fraught relationship with her pregnant body. An elderly widow begins seeing her deceased lover in a giant flower. A kanaka writer, mid-manuscript, feels her raw pages quaking and knocking in the briefcase.

Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare is both a fierce love letter to Hawaiian identity and mythology, and a searing dispatch from an occupied territory threatening to erupt with violent secrets.]]> 272 Megan Kamalei Kakimoto 1639731164 Lani 0 to-read 3.62 2023 Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare
author: Megan Kamalei Kakimoto
name: Lani
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> <![CDATA[The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: Vol. 1: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island]]> 179949266 From global art superstar Kent Monkman and his long-time collaborator Gisèle Gordon, a transformational work of true stories and imagined history that will remake readers� understanding of the land called North America.For decades, the singular and provocative paintings by Cree artist Kent Monkman have featured a recurring character—an alter ego of sorts, a shape-shifting, time-travelling elemental being named Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Though we have glimpsed her across the years in films and on countless canvases, it is finally time to hear her story, in her own words. And, in doing so, to hear the whole history of Turtle Island anew. The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island is a genre-demolishing work of genius, the imagined history of a legendary figure through which profound truths emerge—a deeply Cree and gloriously queer understanding of our shared world, its past, its present, and its possibilities.Volume One, which covers the period from the creation of the universe to the confederation of Canada, follows Miss Chief as she moves through time, from a complex lived experience of Cree cosmology to the arrival of European settlers, many of whom will be familiar to students of history. An open-hearted being, she tries to live among those settlers, and guide them to a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of all beings and the world itself. As their numbers grow, though, so does conflict, and Miss Chief begins to understand that the challenges posed by the hordes of newly arrived Europeans will mean ever greater danger for her, her people, and, by extension, all of the world she cherishes.Blending history, fiction, and memoir in bold new ways, The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle are unlike anything published before. And in their power to reshape our shared understanding, they promise to change the way we see everything that lies ahead.]]> 263 Kent Monkman 0771061234 Lani 0 to-read 4.26 2023 The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: Vol. 1: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island
author: Kent Monkman
name: Lani
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/15
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]]> Januaries 204253852 Januaries is a collection of new and iconic short stories and novellas from New York Times bestselling author Olivie Blake.

Once upon a time in a land far, far away, the tutelary spirit to a magical bridge rapidly approaches burnout. Meanwhile, congress enacts a complex auditing system designed to un-waste your youth, a banished fairy answers a Craigslist ad, a Victorian orphan gains literacy for her occult situationship, and a multiverse assassin contemplates the one who got away. Escape the slow trudge of mortality with these magical ruminations on life, death, and the love (or revenge) that outlasts both, featuring modified fairytales, contemporary heists, absurdist poetry, and at least one set of actual wedding vows.

Also by Olivie Blake
The Atlas Six
The Atlas Paradox
The Atlas Complex
Alone with You in the Ether
One for My Enemy
Masters of Death]]> 480 Olivie Blake 1250330696 Lani 0 currently-reading 3.85 2024 Januaries
author: Olivie Blake
name: Lani
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
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]]> <![CDATA[Again the Magic (Wallflowers, #0)]]> 38340339 She gave him her innocence...

Lady Aline Marsden was brought up to marry a man of her own class, but from the moment she meets John McKenna, she risks everything to be with him.

He gave her his heart

Although their love is forbidden, McKenna's passion for the beautiful Aline is too compelling to deny.

When their secret is discovered, their world is shattered. McKenna is forced to leave forever, unaware that the only reason Aline has given him up is to save him.

Now McKenna has returned, a powerful man determined to take revenge against the woman who broke his heart. But the magic between them burns as fiercely as ever... and as McKenna uncovers Aline's deepest secret, together they discover a love that will defy Fate itself.]]> 421 Lisa Kleypas 0061793477 Lani 5 4.24 2004 Again the Magic (Wallflowers, #0)
author: Lisa Kleypas
name: Lani
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/19
date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> The Spellshop 217206125 The Spellshop is Sarah Beth Durst’s romantasy debut–a lush cottagecore tale full of stolen spellbooks, unexpected friendships, sweet jams, and even sweeter love.

Kiela has always had trouble dealing with people. Thankfully, as a librarian at the Great Library of Alyssium, she and her assistant, Caz—a magically sentient spider plant—have spent the last decade sequestered among the empire’s most precious spellbooks, preserving their magic for the city’s elite.

When a revolution begins and the library goes up in flames, she and Caz flee with all the spellbooks they can carry and head to a remote island Kiela never thought she’d see again: her childhood home. Taking refuge there, Kiela discovers, much to her dismay, a nosy—and very handsome—neighbor who can’t take a hint and keeps showing up day after day to make sure she’s fed and to help fix up her new home.

In need of income, Kiela identifies something that even the bakery in town doesn’t have: jam. With the help of an old recipe book her parents left her and a bit of illegal magic, her cottage garden is soon covered in ripe berries.

But magic can do more than make life a little sweeter, so Kiela risks the consequences of using unsanctioned spells and opens the island’s first-ever and much needed secret spellshop.

Like a Hallmark rom-com full of mythical creatures and fueled by cinnamon rolls and magic, The Spellshop will heal your heart and feed your soul.]]> 377 Sarah Beth Durst 1250333970 Lani 4 3.97 2024 The Spellshop
author: Sarah Beth Durst
name: Lani
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> We Used to Live Here 199798006
As a young, queer couple who flip houses, Charlie and Eve can’t believe the killer deal they’ve just gotten on an old house in a picturesque neighborhood. As they’re working in the house one day, there’s a knock on the door. A man stands there with his family, claiming to have lived there years before and asking if it would be alright if he showed his kids around. People pleaser to a fault, Eve lets them in.

As soon as the strangers enter their home, inexplicable things start happening, including the family’s youngest child going missing and a ghostly presence materializing in the basement. Even more weird, the family can’t seem to take the hint that their visit should be over. And when Charlie suddenly vanishes, Eve slowly loses her grip on reality. Something is terribly wrong with the house and with the visiting family—or is Eve just imagining things?

This unputdownable and spine-tingling novel “is like quicksand: the further you delve into its pages, the more immobilized you become by a spiral of terror. We Used to Live Here will haunt you even after you have finished it� (Agustina Bazterrica, author of Tender Is the Flesh).]]> 312 Marcus Kliewer 1982198788 Lani 5 3.66 2024 We Used to Live Here
author: Marcus Kliewer
name: Lani
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/11
date added: 2025/01/11
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I have no idea what happened, but I was scared by all of it.
]]> <![CDATA[The House of My Mother: A Daughter's Quest for Freedom]]> 214151420 From eldest daughter Shari Franke, the shocking true story behind the viral 8 Passengers family vlog and the hidden abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother, and how, in the face of unimaginable pain, she found freedom and healing.

Shari Franke’s childhood was a constant battle for survival. Her mother, Ruby Franke, enforced a severe moral code while maintaining a façade of a picture-perfect family for their wildly popular YouTube channel 8 Passengers, which documented the day-to-day life of raising six children for a staggering 2.5 million subscribers. But a darker truth lurked beneath the surface—Ruby’s wholesome online persona masked a more tyrannical parenting style than anyone could have imagined.

As the family’s YouTube notoriety grew, so too did Ruby’s delusions of righteousness. Fueled by the sadistic influence of relationship coach Jodi Hildebrandt, together they implemented an inhumane and merciless disciplinary regime.

Ruby and Jodi were arrested in Utah in 2023 on multiple charges of aggravated child abuse. On that fateful day, Shari shared a photo online of a police car outside their home. Her caption had one word: “Finally.�

For the first time, Shari will reveal the disturbing truth behind 8 Passengers and her family’s devastating involvement with Jodi Hildebrandt’s cultish life coaching program, “ConneXions.� No stone is left unturned as Shari exposes the perils of influencer culture and shares for the first time her battle for truth and survival in the face of her mother’s cruelty.]]> 320 Shari Franke 1668065398 Lani 0 to-read 4.42 2025 The House of My Mother: A Daughter's Quest for Freedom
author: Shari Franke
name: Lani
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/11
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed]]> 37570546 From a psychotherapist, and national advice columnist comes a thought-provoking new book that takes us behind the scenes of a therapist's world -- where her patients are looking for answers (and so is she).

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

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

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

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is revolutionary in its candor, offering a deeply personal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly revealing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly funny and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them.]]> 415 Lori Gottlieb 1328662055 Lani 0 to-read 4.36 2019 Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
author: Lori Gottlieb
name: Lani
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/11
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]]> Ghost Eaters 60095973
Erin hasn’t been able to set a single boundary with her charismatic but reckless college ex-boyfriend, Silas. When he asks her to bail him out of rehab—again—she knows she needs to cut him off. But days after he gets out, Silas turns up dead of an overdose in their hometown of Richmond, Virginia, and Erin’s world falls apart.
Ěý
Then a friend tells her about Ghost, a new drug that allows users to see the dead. Wanna get haunted? he asks. Grieving and desperate for closure with Silas, Erin agrees to a pill-popping “séance.� But the drug has unfathomable side effects—and once you take it, you can never go back.]]> 304 Clay McLeod Chapman 1683692179 Lani 0 to-read 3.36 2022 Ghost Eaters
author: Clay McLeod Chapman
name: Lani
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/11
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People]]> 195660519
Born into the Waorani tribe of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest—one of the last to be contacted by missionaries in the 1950s—Nemonte Nenquimo had a singular upbringing. She was taught about plant medicines, foraging, oral storytelling, and shamanism by her elders. She played barefoot in the forest and didn’t walk on pavement, or see a car, until she was a teenager and left to study with an evangelical missionary group in the city. But after Nemonte’s ancestors began appearing in her dreams, pleading with her to return and embrace her own culture, she listened.

Nemonte returned to the forest and traditional ways of life and became one of the most forceful voices in climate change activism. She spearheaded an alliance of Indigenous nations across the Upper Amazon and led her people to a landmark victory against Big Oil, protecting over a half million acres of primary rainforest.

We Will Be Jaguars is an astonishing memoir by an equally astonishing woman. Nemonte digs into generations of oral history, uprooting centuries of conquest, and hacking away at racist notions of Indigenous peoples. Ultimately, she reveals a life story as rich, harsh, and vital as the Amazon rainforest herself.]]> 368 Nemonte Nenquimo 1419763776 Lani 0 to-read 4.46 2024 We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People
author: Nemonte Nenquimo
name: Lani
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> Looking for Smoke 198530958
Instead, a girl from the Giveaway, Samantha White Tail, is found murdered.

Because the four members of the Giveaway group were the last to see Samantha alive, each becomes a person of interest in the investigation. And all of them—Mara, Loren, Brody, and Eli—have a complicated history with Samantha.

Despite deep mistrust, the four must now take matters into their own hands and clear their names. Even though one of them may be the murderer.]]> 416 K.A. Cobell 0063318679 Lani 0 to-read 3.99 2024 Looking for Smoke
author: K.A. Cobell
name: Lani
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> City of Night Birds 209801563
On a White Night in 2019, prima ballerina Natalia Leonova returns to St. Petersburg two years after a devastating accident stalled her career. Once the most celebrated dancer of her generation, she now turns to pills and alcohol to numb the pain of her past.

She is unmoored in her old city as the ghosts of her former life begin to resurface: her loving but difficult mother, her absentee father, and the two gifted dancers who led to her downfall.

One of those dancers, Alexander, is the love of her life, who transformed both Natalia and her art. The other is Dmitri, a dark and treacherous genius. When the latter offers her a chance to return to the stage in her signature role, Natalia must decide whether she can again face the people responsible for both her soaring highs and darkest hours.

Painting a vivid portrait of the Russian ballet world, where cutthroat ambition, ever-shifting politics, and sublime artistry collide, City of Night Birds unveils the making of a dancer with both profound intimacy and breathtaking scope. Mysterious and alluring, passionate and virtuosic, Juhea Kim’s second novel is an affecting meditation on love, forgiveness, and the making of an artist in a turbulent world.]]> 320 Juhea Kim 0063394758 Lani 0 to-read 3.56 2024 City of Night Birds
author: Juhea Kim
name: Lani
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year]]> 123087784 The Comfort of Crows, Margaret Renkl presents a literary devotional: fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. As we move through the seasons—from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year, to the lingering bluebirds of December, revisiting the nest box they used in spring—what develops is a portrait of joy and grief: joy in the ongoing pleasures of the natural world, and grief over winters that end too soon and songbirds that grow fewer and fewer.

Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of a human life. Grown children, unexpectedly home during the pandemic, prepare to depart once more. Birdsong and night-blooming flowers evoke generations past. The city and the country where Renkl raised her family transform a little more with each passing day. And the natural world, now in visible flux, requires every ounce of hope and commitment from the author—and from us. For, as Renkl writes, “radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world.�

With fifty-two original color artworks by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, The Comfort of Crows is a lovely and deeply moving book from a cherished observer of the natural world.]]> 270 Margaret Renkl 1954118465 Lani 0 to-read 4.17 2023 The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
author: Margaret Renkl
name: Lani
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows]]> 32075853 Together Tea and Calendar Girls.

Every woman has a secret life . . .

Nikki lives in cosmopolitan West London, where she tends bar at the local pub. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she’s spent most of her twenty-odd years distancing herself from the traditional Sikh community of her childhood, preferring a more independent (that is, Western) life. When her father’s death leaves the family financially strapped, Nikki, a law school dropout, impulsively takes a job teaching a "creative writing" course at the community center in the beating heart of London’s close-knit Punjabi community.

Because of a miscommunication, the proper Sikh widows who show up are expecting to learn basic English literacy, not the art of short-story writing. When one of the widows finds a book of sexy stories in English and shares it with the class, Nikki realizes that beneath their white dupattas, her students have a wealth of fantasies and memories. Eager to liberate these modest women, she teaches them how to express their untold stories, unleashing creativity of the most unexpected—and exciting—kind.

As more women are drawn to the class, Nikki warns her students to keep their work secret from the Brotherhood, a group of highly conservative young men who have appointed themselves the community’s "moral police." But when the widows� gossip offers shocking insights into the death of a young wife—a modern woman like Nikki—and some of the class erotica is shared among friends, it sparks a scandal that threatens them all.]]> 304 Balli Kaur Jaswal 0062645129 Lani 0 to-read 3.92 2017 Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows
author: Balli Kaur Jaswal
name: Lani
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics]]> 199798813 This tour de force of investigative journalism—in the vein of The Next Civil War and Why We’re Polarized—depicts the United States of America as a country at a crossroads with the battle between the right and left spilling out from the darkest corners of the internet into the real world with often tragic consequences. Award-winning journalist and CNN correspondent Elle Reeve was not surprised by the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. With years of in-depth research and probing interviews under her belt, Reeve was aware of the preoccupations of the online far right and their journey from the computer to QAnon, militias, and racist groups. At the same time, Reeve saw a parallel growth of counterforces, with citizen vigilantes using new tools and tactics to take down the far right. This ongoing battle, long fought mainly on the internet, has spilled out into the real world with greater and greater frequency, culminating in the attempted coup on January 6th. Combining her years of on-the-ground reporting, Reeve clearly illustrates this shocking sweep of violence, where this cultural shift came from, and where it is going. She also introduces us to a shocking but powerful cast of characters, such as the creator of 8chan—an online hub for conspiracies and misogynistic rhetoric—and the white power leader who is still pulling the strings from a prison cell. Uncovering the hidden links between these events and how we can prevent further upheavals of this nature, Black Pill is a necessary read for any supporter of democracy.]]> 304 Elle Reeve 1982198885 Lani 4 4.18 2024 Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
author: Elle Reeve
name: Lani
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/09
date added: 2025/01/09
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]]> Beautyland 127282939 From the acclaimed author of Parakeet, Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth.

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

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

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.]]> 327 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374109281 Lani 0 to-read 4.08 2024 Beautyland
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Lani
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/07
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]]> The World After Alice 199463710 For readers of Seating Arrangements and The Most Fun We Ever Had, a gorgeous and gripping story of two families brought together to celebrate an unexpected marriage, twelve years after a devastating tragedy upended their lives

When Morgan and Benji surprise their families with a wedding invitation to Maine, they’re aware the news of their clandestine relationship will come as a shock. Twelve years have passed since the stunning loss of sixteen-year-old Alice, Benji’s sister and Morgan’s best friend, and no one is quite the same. But the young couple decide to plunge headlong into matrimony, marking the first time their fractured families will reunite since Alice’s funeral.

As the arriving guests descend upon the tranquil coastal town, they bring with them not only skepticism about the impromptu nuptials but also deep-seated secrets and agendas of their own. Peter, Morgan’s father, may be trying to dissuade his daughter from saying “I do,� while Linnie, Benji’s mother, introduces a new boyfriend with his own tumultuous past. Nick, Benji’s father, is scheming to secure a new job before his wife, Caro—formerly his secretary and mistress—discovers he lost his old one. Morgan, too, carries delicate secrets that threaten to jeopardize the happiness she has so longed for. And Benji is just trying to make sure the whole weekend doesn’t implode.

As the whirlwind weekend unfolds, old passions reignite, deep wounds resurface, and unearthed secrets threaten to shatter the fragile peace the wedding promises. With each new revelation, the to-be-weds and their complicated families are forced to question just how well they know the ones they hold dear.]]> 320 Lauren Aliza Green 0593654137 Lani 0 to-read 3.32 2024 The World After Alice
author: Lauren Aliza Green
name: Lani
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/06
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]]> <![CDATA[Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum]]> 145624993 The Immortal Life ofĚýHenriettaĚýLacks, a page-turning 93-year history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the nation’s last segregated asylums, thatĚý New York Times Ěýbestselling author Clint Smith describes as “a book that left me breathless.â€�

On a cold day in March ofĚý1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland.ĚýUnder the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve patients of the state’s Hospital for the Negro Insane. For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum.
Ěý
In Madness, Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family’s experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations.
Ěý
As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America’s evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. During its peak years, the hospital’s wards were overflowing with almost 2,700 patients. By the end of the 20th-century, the asylum faded from view as prisons and jails became America’s new focus.
Ěý
In Madness, Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable.
Ěý]]> 368 Antonia Hylton 1538723697 Lani 0 to-read 4.25 2024 Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum
author: Antonia Hylton
name: Lani
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story]]> 15654 The Stranger Beside Me defies our expectation that we would surely know if a monster lived among us, worked alongside of us, appeared as one of us. With a slow chill that intensifies with each heart-pounding page, Rule describes her dawning awareness that Ted Bundy, her sensitive coworker on a crisis hotline, was one of the most prolific serial killers in America. He would confess to killing at least thirty-six young women from coast to coast, and was eventually executed for three of those cases. Drawing from their correspondence that endured until shortly before Bundy's death, and striking a seamless balance between her deeply personal perspective and her role as a crime reporter on the hunt for a savage serial killer -- the brilliant and charismatic Bundy, the man she thought she knew -- Rule changed the course of true-crime literature with this unforgettable chronicle.]]> 548 Ann Rule 0451203267 Lani 0 to-read 4.13 1980 The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story
author: Ann Rule
name: Lani
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1980
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital]]> 17704902
After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths.

Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting, unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing.

In a voice at once involving and fair, masterful and intimate, Fink exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals just how ill-prepared we are in America for the impact of large-scale disasters—and how we can do better. A remarkable book, engrossing from start to finish, Five Days at Memorial radically transforms your understanding of human nature in crisis.]]> 558 Sheri Fink 0307718964 Lani 0 to-read 3.91 2013 Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
author: Sheri Fink
name: Lani
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues]]> 61327450 An account of how the major transformations in history—from the rise of Homo sapiens to the birth of capitalism—have been shaped not by humans but by germs

According to the accepted narrative of progress, humans have thrived thanks to their brains and brawn, collectively bending the arc of history. But in this revelatory book, Professor Jonathan Kennedy argues that the myth of human exceptionalism overstates the role that we play in social and political change. Instead, it is the humble microbe that wins wars and topples empires.

Drawing on the latest research in fields ranging from genetics and anthropology to archaeology and economics, Pathogenesis takes us through sixty thousand years of history, exploring eight major outbreaks of infectious disease that have made the modern world. Bacteria and viruses were protagonists in the demise of the Neanderthals, the growth of Islam, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the devastation wrought by European colonialism, and the evolution of the United States from an imperial backwater to a global superpower. Even Christianity rose to prominence in the wake of a series of deadly pandemics that swept through the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries: Caring for the sick turned what was a tiny sect into one of the world’s major religions.

By placing disease at the center of his wide-ranging history of humankind, Kennedy challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions about our collective past—and urges us to view this moment as another disease-driven inflection point that will change the course of history. Provocative and brimming with insight, Pathogenesis transforms our understanding of the human story.]]> 304 Jonathan Kennedy 0593240472 Lani 0 to-read 3.92 2023 Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues
author: Jonathan Kennedy
name: Lani
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[They Came for the Schools: One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America's Classrooms]]> 196775540 288 Mike Hixenbaugh 0063307243 Lani 3 3.5 4.45 2024 They Came for the Schools: One Town's Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America's Classrooms
author: Mike Hixenbaugh
name: Lani
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/05
date added: 2025/01/05
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3.5
]]> <![CDATA[After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search]]> 33413878 A fierce memoir of a mother’s murder, a daughter’s coming-of-age in the wake of immense loss, and her mission to know the woman who gave her life.

When Sarah Perry was twelve, she saw a partial eclipse of the sun, an event she took as a sign of good fortune for her and her mother, Crystal. But that brief moment of darkness ultimately foreshadowed a much larger one: two days later, Crystal was murdered in their home in rural Maine, just a few feet from Sarah’s bedroom.
Ěý
The killer escaped unseen; it would take the police twelve years to find him, time in which Sarah grew into adulthood, struggling with abandonment, police interrogations, and the effort of rebuilding her life when so much had been lost. Through it all she would dream of the eventual trial, a conviction—all her questions finally answered. But after the trial, Sarah’s questions only grew. She wanted to understand her mother’s life, not just her final hours, and so she began a personal investigation, one that drew her back to Maine, taking her deep into the abiding darkness of a small American town.
Ěý
Told in searing prose, After the Eclipse is a luminous memoir of uncomfortable truth and terrible beauty, an exquisite memorial for a mother stolen from her daughter, and a blazingly successful attempt to cast light on her life once more.
Ěý]]> 368 Sarah Perry 0544302656 Lani 0 to-read 4.13 2017 After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search
author: Sarah Perry
name: Lani
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/05
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]]> I Was a Teenage Slasher 199798522 Lamesa, Texas, July 1989

It’s the summer before senior year for best friends Tolly Driver and Amber Dennison. They’re not in the marching band, they’re not in the FFA � they don’t really count. Amber’s the only Native student in town, and Tolly’s only on the radar due to his father’s recent death.

This is all about to change.

Bodies are going to be dropping fast in this small West Texas town. For a few unbearably hot days that will resonate through the decades and even get made into a TV movie, Tolly and Amber will be famous. Notorious even. Finally, everyone will know their names.

This is Stephen Graham Jones x-raying the slasher genre, interrogating its motivations over the shoulder and in the voice of the killer itself � from a town he did some growing up in, in a year he was also seventeen.

The kills will be poignant, the jokes will hurt, and the violence will be endearing. Everything’s turned around for Tolly, for Amber � for all of Lamesa, Texas.

Be happy you weren’t there.

Be happy you’re only reading about it.]]> 373 Stephen Graham Jones 1668022249 Lani 0 gave-up-on 3.54 2024 I Was a Teenage Slasher
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Lani
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> With a Vengeance 219603177 One train. No stops. A deadly game of survival and revenge.

In 1942, six people destroyed Anna Matheson’s family.ĚýTwelve years later, she’s ready for retribution.

Under false pretenses, Anna has lured those responsible for her family’s downfall ontoĚýa luxuryĚýtrain from Philadelphia to Chicago,Ěýan overnightĚýjourney of fourteen hours. Her goal? Confront the people who’ve wronged her, get them to confess their crimes, and deliver them into the hands of authorities waiting at the end of the line. Justice will at last be served.

But Anna’s plan is quickly derailed by the murder of one of the passengers. As the train barrels through the night, it becomes clear that someone else on board is enacting their own form of revenge—and that they won’t stop until everyone else is dead.

With time running out before the train reaches its destination, Anna is forced to hunt the killer in their midst while protecting the people she hates the most. In order to destroy her enemies, she must first save them—even though it means putting her own life at risk.]]> 400 Riley Sager 0593472403 Lani 0 to-read 3.56 2025 With a Vengeance
author: Riley Sager
name: Lani
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> Just Kids 32315914 Just Kids, Patti Smith's first book of prose, the legendary American artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies. An honest and moving story of youth and friendship, Smith brings the same unique, lyrical quality to Just Kids as she has to the rest of her formidable body of work--from her influential 1975 album Horses to her visual art and poetry.]]> 320 Patti Smith Lani 3 Every fear I had once harbored seemed to materialize with the suddenness of a bright sail bursting into flames. My youthful premonition of Robert crumbling into dust returned with pitiless clarity.

So much of this memoir was beautifully written, fully described so many details of their relationship, and absolutely fulfilled her promise to Robert. I loved the first 20% and last 20% and have so many highlighted quotes that really struck me. However, the middle of the memoir felt so bogged down by repetitive descriptions of meeting a bunch of unfamiliar-to-me artists and their miserable living situations and it really started to drag. If the middle had been edited differently, I think I could have enjoyed this more.

3.5]]> 4.22 2010 Just Kids
author: Patti Smith
name: Lani
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/03
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves:
review:
Every fear I had once harbored seemed to materialize with the suddenness of a bright sail bursting into flames. My youthful premonition of Robert crumbling into dust returned with pitiless clarity.


So much of this memoir was beautifully written, fully described so many details of their relationship, and absolutely fulfilled her promise to Robert. I loved the first 20% and last 20% and have so many highlighted quotes that really struck me. However, the middle of the memoir felt so bogged down by repetitive descriptions of meeting a bunch of unfamiliar-to-me artists and their miserable living situations and it really started to drag. If the middle had been edited differently, I think I could have enjoyed this more.

3.5
]]> <![CDATA[Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America]]> 90590139
“A vibrant, and essential history of America's unending, enraging and utterly compelling struggle since its founding to live up to its own best ideals� It's both a cause for hope, and a call to arms.�--Jane Mayer, author Dark Money

From historian and author of the popular daily newsletter LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN, a vital narrative that explains how America, once a beacon of democracy, now teeters on the brink of autocracy -- and how we can turn back.

In the midst of the impeachment crisis of 2019, Heather Cox Richardson launched a daily Facebook essay providing the historical background of the daily torrent of news. It soon turned into a newsletter and its readership ballooned to more than 2 million dedicated readers who rely on her plainspoken and informed take on the present and past in America.

In Democracy Awakening , Richardson crafts a compelling and original narrative, explaining how, over the decades, a small group of wealthy people have made war on American ideals. By weaponizing language and promoting false history they have led us into authoritarianism -- creating a disaffected population and then promising to recreate an imagined past where those people could feel important again. She argues that taking our country back starts by remembering the elements of the nation’s true history that marginalized Americans have always upheld. Their dedication to the principles on which this nation was founded has enabled us to renew and expand our commitment to democracy in the past. Richardson sees this history as a roadmap for the nation’s future.

Richardson’s talent is to wrangle our giant, meandering, and confusing news feed into a coherent story that singles out what we should pay attention to, what the precedents are, and what possible paths lie ahead. In her trademark calm prose, she is realistic and optimistic about the future of democracy. Her command of history allows her to pivot effortlessly from the Founders to the abolitionists to Reconstruction to Goldwater to Mitch McConnell, highlighting the political legacies of the New Deal, the lingering fears of socialism, the death of the liberal consensus and birth of “movement conservatism.�

Many books tell us what has happened over the last five years. Democracy Awakening explains how we got to this perilous point, what our history really tells us about ourselves, and what the future of democracy can be.]]> 286 Heather Cox Richardson 0593652967 Lani 0 to-read 4.38 2023 Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America
author: Heather Cox Richardson
name: Lani
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol]]> 53331570 “At last, the feminist history of booze we’ve been waiting for!� —Amy Stewart, author of The Drunken Botanist

From Los Angeles Times bestselling author Mallory O’Meara comes a lively and engrossing feminist history of women drinking through the ages

Strawberry daiquiris. Skinny martinis. Vodka sodas with lime. These are the cocktails that come in sleek-stemmed glasses, bright colors and fruity flavors—these are the Girly Drinks.

From the earliest days of civilization, alcohol has been at the center of social rituals and cultures worldwide. But when exactly did drinking become a gendered act? And why have bars long been considered “places for men� when, without women, they might not even exist?

With whip-smart insight and boundless curiosity, Girly Drinks unveils an entire untold history of the female distillers, drinkers and brewers who have played a vital role in the creation and consumption of alcohol, from ancient Sumerian beer goddess Ninkasi to iconic 1920s bartender Ada Coleman. Filling a crucial gap in culinary history, O’Meara dismantles the long-standing patriarchal traditions at the heart of these very drinking cultures, in the hope that readers everywhere can look to each celebrated woman in this book—and proudly have what she’s having.]]> 384 Mallory O'Meara 1335282408 Lani 0 to-read 4.17 2021 Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol
author: Mallory O'Meara
name: Lani
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel's Tween Empire]]> 203578896 The first unauthorized look at the inner workings―and ultimate breakdown―of the Disney Channel machine

For many kids growing up in the 2000s, there was no cultural touchstone more powerful than Disney Channel, the most-watched cable channel in prime time at its peak. Today it might best be known for introducing the world to talents like Hilary Duff, Raven-Symoné, Zac Efron, Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, the Jonas Brothers, Demi Lovato, and Zendaya.

It wasn't always destined for greatness: When Disney Channel launched in 1983, it was a forgotten stepchild within the Walt Disney Company, forever in the shadow of Disney’s more profitable movies and theme parks. But after letting the stars of their Mickey Mouse Club revival―among them Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, and Ryan Gosling―slip through their fingers, Disney Channel reinvented itself as a powerhouse tween network. In the new millennium it churned out billions of dollars in original content and triple-threat stars whose careers were almost entirely controlled by the corporation. Suddenly everyone wanted a piece of the pie―and there were constant clashes between the studio, network, labels, and creatives as Disney Channel became a pressure cooker of perfection for its stars.

From private feuds and on-set disasters, to fanfare that swept the nation and the realities of child stardom, culture journalist Ashley Spencer offers the inside story of the heyday of TV’s House of Mouse, featuring hundreds of exclusive new interviews with former Disney executives, creatives, and celebrities to explore the highs, lows, and everything in between.]]> 336 Ashley Spencer 1250283450 Lani 0 to-read 4.01 2024 Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel's Tween Empire
author: Ashley Spencer
name: Lani
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
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]]> Clever Girl: Jurassic Park 209641604
The Jurassic Park series is one of the most famous and profitable movie franchises of all time � an entire generation of people has never known life without these CGI dinosaurs. The movie spectacle broke film and merchandising records, pioneered special effects, and made Jeff Goldblum into an unlikely sex symbol, and now it has also been re-envisioned as a classic of queer feminist storytelling.

In Clever Girl, Hannah McGregor argues that the female-only dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are stand-ins for monstrous women, engineered by men to be intelligent, violent, and adaptive, and whose chaos resists the systems designed to control them. As they run wild through their prison, a profit-driven theme park, they destroy the men and structures who mistakenly believed in their own colonialist and capitalist power, showing the audience what it means to be angry, monstrous, and free. The velociraptors were not just jump scares for children, but also revelatory and predatory symbols of feminist rage. Clever girls, indeed.]]> 112 Hannah McGregor 1770417397 Lani 0 to-read 4.21 2024 Clever Girl: Jurassic Park
author: Hannah McGregor
name: Lani
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History]]> 34017047 336 Tori Telfer 0062433733 Lani 0 to-read 3.80 2017 Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History
author: Tori Telfer
name: Lani
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies (The Vacation Mysteries, #1)]]> 195790849 Ten days, eight suspects, six cities, five authors, three bodies . . . one trip to die for.

All that bestselling author Eleanor Dash wants is to get through her book tour in Italy and kill off her main character, Connor Smith, in the next in her Vacation Mysteries series―is that too much to ask?

Clearly, because when an attempt is made on the real Connor’s life―the handsome but infuriating con man she got mixed up with ten years ago and now can't get out of her life―Eleanor’s enlisted to help solve the case.

Contending with literary rivals, rabid fans, a stalker―and even her ex, Oliver, who turns up unexpectedly―theories are bandied about, and rivalries, rifts, and broken hearts are revealed. But who’s really trying to get away with murder?

Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies is the irresistible and hilarious series debut from Catherine Mack, introducing bestselling fictional author Eleanor Dash on her Italian book tour that turns into a real-life murder mystery, as her life starts to imitate the world in her books.]]> 342 Catherine Mack 1250325854 Lani 0 to-read 3.47 2024 Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies (The Vacation Mysteries, #1)
author: Catherine Mack
name: Lani
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2024
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]]> <![CDATA[The Trees Grew Because I Bled There: Collected Stories]]> 61286907 Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes.

Eight stories of literary dark fiction from a master storyteller. Exploring the shadow side of love, these are tales of grief, obsession, control. Intricate examinations of trauma and tragedy in raw, poetic prose. In these narratives, a woman imagines horrific scenarios whilst caring for her infant niece; on-line posts chronicle a cancer diagnosis; a couple in the park with their small child encounter a stranger with horrific consequences; a toxic relationship reaches a terrifying resolution�

Originally published under the title The Strange Thing We Become and Other Dark Tales, this is a much-praised collection of deeply unsettling, painfully dark tales.]]> 205 Eric LaRocca 1803363002 Lani 0 to-read 3.69 2021 The Trees Grew Because I Bled There: Collected Stories
author: Eric LaRocca
name: Lani
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2021
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]]> Tell Me I’m Worthless 57307172
Memories of that night torment Alice, but when Ila asks her to return to the House, to go past the KEEP OUT sign and over the sick earth where teenagers dare each other to venture, Alice knows she must go.

Together, Alice and Ila must face the horrors that happened there, must pull themselves apart from the inside out, put their differences aside, and try to rescue Hannah, whom the House has chosen to make its own.]]> 264 Alison Rumfitt Lani 0 to-read 3.54 2021 Tell Me I’m Worthless
author: Alison Rumfitt
name: Lani
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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]]> The Employees 53780642 A workplace novel of the 22nd century

The near-distant future. Millions of kilometres from Earth.

The crew of the Six-Thousand ship consists of those who were born, and those who were created. Those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike find themselves longing for the same things: warmth and intimacy. Loved ones who have passed. Our shared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory.

Gradually, the crew members come to see themselves in a new light, and each employee is compelled to ask themselves whether their work can carry on as before � and what it means to be truly alive.

Structured as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace commission, Ravn’s crackling prose is as chilling as it is moving, as exhilarating as it is foreboding. Wracked by all kinds of longing, The Employees probes into what it means to be human, emotionally and ontologically, while simultaneously delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by work and the logic of productivity.]]> 136 Olga Ravn Lani 0 to-read 3.69 2018 The Employees
author: Olga Ravn
name: Lani
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World]]> 43706466 An intensely powerful new novel from the best-selling author of The Bastard of Istanbul and Honour

'In the first minute following her death, Tequila Leila's consciousness began to ebb, slowly and steadily, like a tide receding from the shore. Her brain cells, having run out of blood, were now completely deprived of oxygen. But they did not shut down. Not right away...'

For Leila, each minute after her death brings a sensuous memory: the taste of spiced goat stew, sacrificed by her father to celebrate the long-awaited birth of a son; the sight of bubbling vats of lemon and sugar which the women use to wax their legs while the men attend mosque; the scent of cardamom coffee that Leila shares with a handsome student in the brothel where she works. Each memory, too, recalls the friends she made at each key moment in her life - friends who are now desperately trying to find her. . .]]> 312 Elif Shafak 0241293863 Lani 0 to-read 4.09 2019 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
author: Elif Shafak
name: Lani
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> Junie 212806648 A young girl must face a life-altering decision after awakening her sister’s ghost, navigating truths about love, friendship, and power as the Civil War looms.

Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her family, and tending to the white master’s daughter, Violet. Her daydreams are filled with poetry and faraway worlds, while she spends her nights secretly roaming through the forest, consumed with grief over the sudden death of her older sister, Minnie.

When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at marriage for Violet and upending Junie’s life, she commits a desperate act—one that rouses Minnie’s spirit from the grave, tethered to this world unless Junie can free her. She enlists the aid of Caleb, the guests� coachman, and their friendship soon becomes something more. Yet as long-held truths begin to crumble, she realizes Bellereine is harboring dark and horrifying secrets that can no longer be ignored.

With time ticking down, Junie begins to push against the harsh current that has controlled her entire life. As she grapples with an increasingly unfamiliar world in which she has little control, she is forced to ask herself: When we choose love and liberation, what must we leave behind?]]> 368 Erin Crosby Eckstine 0593725115 Lani 0 to-read 4.21 2025 Junie
author: Erin Crosby Eckstine
name: Lani
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2025
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]]> The Trees 56269278 309 Percival Everett 164445064X Lani 0 to-read 4.06 2021 The Trees
author: Percival Everett
name: Lani
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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]]> Deep Cuts 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 Lani 0 to-read 3.74 2025 Deep Cuts
author: Holly Brickley
name: Lani
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies (The Ill-Mannered Ladies, #1)]]> 62313333
Lady Augusta Colebrook, “Gus,� is determinedly unmarried, bored by society life, and tired of being dismissed at the age of forty-two. She and her twin sister, Julia, who is grieving her dead betrothed, need a distraction. One soon presents to rescue their friend’s goddaughter, Caroline, from her violent husband.
Ěý
The sisters set out to Caroline’s country estate with a plan, but their carriage is accosted by a highwayman. In the scuffle, Gus accidentally shoots and injures the ruffian, only to discover he is Lord Evan Belford, an acquaintance from their past who was charged with murder and exiled to Australia twenty years ago.ĚýWhat follows is a high adventure full of danger, clever improvisation, heart-racing near misses, and a little help from a revived and rather charming Lord Evan.

Back in London, Gus can’t stop thinking about her unlikely (not to mention handsome) comrade-in-arms. She is convinced Lord Evan was falsely accused of murder, and she is going to prove it. She persuades Julia to join her in a quest to help Lord Evan, and others in need—society be damned! And so begins the beguiling secret life and adventures of the Colebrook twins.]]> 452 Alison Goodman 0593440811 Lani 0 to-read 4.14 2023 The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies (The Ill-Mannered Ladies, #1)
author: Alison Goodman
name: Lani
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[How to Lose a Lord in Ten Days]]> 202942192 From the Sunday Times bestselling author of A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting comes a delicious new Regency romance�

Rich, handsome, and titled Lord Ashford, has every lady in England longing for his hand in marriage.

Everyone, that is, except Miss Lydia Hanworth � the only young woman Ashford wishes to marry.

Pressured into accepting Ashford’s proposal, Lydia has just ten days to free herself from her obligations before the engagement is publicly announced� what can go wrong?]]> 384 Sophie Irwin 0008696748 Lani 0 to-read 4.42 2025 How to Lose a Lord in Ten Days
author: Sophie Irwin
name: Lani
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> Love Is a War Song 220687884 A Muscogee pop star and a cowboy who couldn’t be more different come together to strike a deal in this new romantic comedy by Danica Nava, author of The Truth According to Ember.

Pop singer Avery Fox has become a national joke after posing scantily clad on the cover of Rolling Stone in a feather warbonnet. What was meant to be a statement of her success as a Native American singer has turned her into a social pariah and dubbed her a fake. With threats coming from every direction and her career at a standstill, she escapes to her estranged grandmother Lottie’s ranch in Oklahoma. Living on the rez is new to Avery—not only does she have to work in the blazing summer heat to earn her keep, but the man who runs Lottie’s horse ranch despises her and wants her gone.

Red Fox Ranch has been home to Lucas Iron Eyes since he was sixteen years old. He has lived by three rules to keep himself out of trouble: 1) preserve the culture, 2) respect the horses, and 3) stick to himself. When he is tasked with picking up Lottie’s granddaughter at the bus station, the last person he expected to see is the Avery Fox. Lucas can’t stand what she represents, but when he’s forced to work with her on the ranch, he can’t get her out of his sight—or his head. He reminds himself to keep to his rules, especially after he finds out the ranch is under threat of being shut down.

It’s clear Avery doesn’t belong here, but they form a tentative truce and make a Avery will help raise funds to save the ranch, and in exchange, Lucas will show her what it really means to be an Indian. It’s purely transactional, absolutely no horsing around…but where’s the fun in that?]]> 336 Danica Nava 0593642627 Lani 0 to-read 4.27 2025 Love Is a War Song
author: Danica Nava
name: Lani
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Dream On, Ramona Riley (Clover Lake, #1)]]> 217453440 A small-town waitress and a Hollywood star’s worlds collide in this new romance by Ashley Herring Blake, USA Today bestselling author of Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date.

Once upon a time, Ramona Riley was a student at a prestigious art school, with dreams of landing in Hollywood as a costume designer to the stars. But after her father’s car accident, she had to quit and return to her small New Hampshire town, Clover Lake, to help take care of her younger sister. Twelve years later, Ramona is still working at the town’s café, all but given up on her dream. But when a big-budget romantic comedy comes to Clover Lake to film, she wonders if this could be her chance. There’s only one problem—Dylan Monroe, her first kiss and Hollywood’s favorite wild child—is the star.

Dylan Monroe has always lived an unconventional life, having famous rock icons for parents. But she wants to prove that she’s not some chaotic, talentless nepo baby, that she has actual skills, that she’s just a normal person. To do that, Dylan takes on a project at a charming lake town—she even works at the town’s café (very quaint), shadowing a local waitress there (very cute), and asks her to take Dylan around to do Normal People Things.

But Dylan soon realizes it’s not just some small-town waitress she’s getting to know—Ramona Riley is someone she’s met before, someone who remembers her even more vividly. Before long, however, reality hits them, and both women must decide if the spark between them can fan the flames of their individual dreams, or if it will extinguish their light.]]> 412 Ashley Herring Blake 0593816005 Lani 0 to-read 3.85 2025 Dream On, Ramona Riley (Clover Lake, #1)
author: Ashley Herring Blake
name: Lani
average rating: 3.85
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]]> The Love Haters 217387810 It’s a thin line between love and love-hating.

Katie Vaughn has been burned by love in the past—now she may be lighting her career on fire. She has two choices: wait to get laid off from her job as a video producer or, at her coworker Cole’s request, take a career-making gig profiling Tom “Hutch� Hutcheson, a Coast Guard rescue swimmer in Key West.

The catch? Katie’s not exactly qualified. She can’t swim—but fakes it that she can.

Plus: Cole is Hutch’s brother. And they don’t get along. Next stop paradise!

But paradise is messier than it seems. As Katie gets entangled with Hutch (the most scientifically good looking man she has ever seen . . . but also a bit of a love hater), along with his colorful Aunt Rue and his rescue Great Dane, she gets trapped in a lie. Or two.

Swim lessons, helicopter flights, conga lines, drinking contests, hurricanes, and stolen kisses ensue—along with chances to tell the truth, to face old fears, and to be truly brave at last.]]> 320 Katherine Center 1250283825 Lani 0 to-read 4.00 2025 The Love Haters
author: Katherine Center
name: Lani
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
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]]> Promise Me Sunshine 214269328 Grieving the loss of her best friend, a young woman’s life is turned upside down when she meets a grumpy stranger who swears he can help her live again, in this heartwarming, slow-burn romance by the author of Ready or Not

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

Miles sees right through her though. Turns out, he knows a lot about grief and, surprisingly, he offers her a proposition. He’ll help her complete everything on her “live again� list if she’ll help him connect with Ainsley and overcome his complicated relationship with Reese. Lenny doubts anything can fill the Lou has left behind, but she begins to spend more time with Miles, Lenny is surprised to discover that, sometimes, losing everything is only the first step to finding yourself, and love, again.]]> 416 Cara Bastone 0593595734 Lani 0 to-read 4.22 2025 Promise Me Sunshine
author: Cara Bastone
name: Lani
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[First-Time Caller (Heartstrings, #1)]]> 213243908 A hopeless romantic meets a jaded radio host in this cozy, Sleepless in Seattle-inspired love story from beloved author B.K. Borison.

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

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

Everyone wants Lucie to find her happy ending... even the handsome, temperamental man calling the shots. But when sparks start to fly behind the scenes, Lucie must make the final call between the radio-sponsored happily ever after or the man in the headphones next to her.]]> 448 B.K. Borison 0593641191 Lani 0 to-read 4.04 2025 First-Time Caller (Heartstrings, #1)
author: B.K. Borison
name: Lani
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
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]]> The Grip of It 31574739 A chilling literary horror novel about a young couple who purchase and live in a haunted house. Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It tells the eerie story of a young couple haunted by their new home.

Julie and James settle into a house in a small town outside the city where they met. The move—prompted by James’s penchant for gambling, his inability to keep his impulses in check—is quick and seamless; both Julie and James are happy to leave behind their usual haunts and start afresh. But this house, which sits between ocean and forest, has plans for the unsuspecting couple. As Julie and James try to settle into their home and their relationship, the house and its surrounding terrain become the locus of increasingly strange happenings. The architecture—claustrophobic, riddled with hidden rooms within rooms—becomes unrecognizable, decaying before their eyes. Stains are animated on the wall—contracting, expanding—and map themselves onto Julie’s body in the form of bruises; mold spores taint the water that James pours from the sink. Together the couple embark on a panicked search for the source of their mutual torment, a journey that mires them in the history of their peculiar neighbors and the mysterious residents who lived in the house before Julia and James.

Written in creepy, potent prose, The Grip of It is an enthralling, psychologically intense novel that deals in questions of home: how we make it and how it in turn makes us, mapping itself onto bodies and the relationships we cherish.]]> 276 Jac Jemc 0374536910 Lani 0 to-read 3.17 2017 The Grip of It
author: Jac Jemc
name: Lani
average rating: 3.17
book published: 2017
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]]> Knock Knock, Open Wide 65214176 Knock Knock, Open Wide weaves horror and Celtic myth into a terrifying, heartbreaking supernatural tale of fractured family bonds, the secrets we carry, and the veiled forces that guide Irish life.

Driving home late one night, Etain Larkin finds a corpse on a pitch-black country road deep in the Irish countryside. She takes the corpse to a remote farmhouse. So begins a night of unspeakable horror that will take her to the very brink of sanity.

She will never speak of it again.

Two decades later, Betty Fitzpatrick, newly arrived at college in Dublin, has already fallen in love with the drama society, and the beautiful but troubled Ashling Mallen. As their relationship blossoms, Ashling goes to great lengths to keep Betty away from her family, especially her alcoholic mother, Etain.

As their relationship blossoms, Betty learns her lover's terrifying family history, and Ashling's secret obsession. Ashling has become convinced that the horrors inflicted on her family are connected to a seemingly innocent children's TV show. Everyone in Ireland watched this show in their youth, but Ash soon discovers that no one remembers it quite the same way. And only Ashling seems to remember its a small black goat puppet who lives in a box and only comes out if you don’t behave. They say he’s never come out.

Almost never.

When the door between the known and unknown opens, it can never close again.]]> 326 Neil Sharpson 1250785421 Lani 0 to-read 3.93 2023 Knock Knock, Open Wide
author: Neil Sharpson
name: Lani
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
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]]> The Underground Railroad 30555488
In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor--engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.

Like the protagonist of Gulliver's Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey--hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.]]> 320 Colson Whitehead 0385542364 Lani 0 to-read 4.04 2016 The Underground Railroad
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Lani
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2016
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]]> Brotherless Night 60324341 In this searing novel, a courageous young woman tries to protect her dream of becoming a doctor as civil war devastates Sri Lanka.

Jaffna, 1981. Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, a vicious civil war tears through her home, and her dream spins off course as she sees her four beloved brothers and their friend K swept up in the mounting violence. Desperate to act, Sashi accepts K's invitation to work as a medic at the field hospital for the militant Tamil Tigers, who, following years of state discrimination and violence, are fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority. But after the Tigers murder one of her teachers and Indian peacekeepers arrive only to commit further atrocities, Sashi begins to question where she stands. When one of her medical school professors, a Tamil feminist and dissident, invites her to join a secret project documenting human rights violations, she embarks on a dangerous path that will change her forever.

Set during the early years of Sri Lanka's three-decade civil war, Brotherless Night is a heartrending portrait of one woman's moral journey and a testament to both the enduring impact of war and the bonds of home.]]> 348 V.V. Ganeshananthan 0812997158 Lani 0 to-read 4.45 2023 Brotherless Night
author: V.V. Ganeshananthan
name: Lani
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[My Year of Rest and Relaxation]]> 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 Lani 0 to-read 3.62 2018 My Year of Rest and Relaxation
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Lani
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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]]> Before I Let Go (Skyland, #1) 60568471
It couldn’t save their marriage.

Yasmen wasn’t prepared for how her life fell apart, but she is finally starting to find joy again. She and Josiah have found a new rhythm, co-parenting their two kids and running a thriving business together. Yet like magnets, they’re always drawn back to each other, and now they’re beginning to wonder if they’re truly ready to let go of everything they once had.

Soon, one stolen kiss leads to another…and then more. It's hot. It's illicit. It's all good—until old wounds reopen. Is it too late for them to find forever? Or could they even be better, the second time around?

Award-winning and bestselling "powerhouse" author Kennedy Ryan is at her absolute best in this compelling, scorching novel about hope and healing, and what it truly means to love for a lifetime (USA Today).]]> 391 Kennedy Ryan 1538706792 Lani 0 to-read 4.31 2022 Before I Let Go (Skyland, #1)
author: Kennedy Ryan
name: Lani
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[I Think We've Been Here Before]]> 198190462
In the same week, Marlen and Hilda’s family receives two significant pieces of news: One, Marlen has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Two, a cosmic blast is set to render humanity extinct within a matter of months. It seems the coming Christmas on their Saskatchewan farm could be everyone’s last.

Preparing for the inevitable, they navigate the time they have left together. Marlen and Hilda channel their energy into improbably prophetic works of art. Hilda’s elderly father receives a longed-for visitor from his past. Hilda’s preteen nephew goes missing, and his mother refuses to believe the world is ending. All the while, Hilda’s daughter struggles to find her way home from Berlin with the help of an oddly familiar stranger. For everyone, there’s an unsettling feeling that this unprecedented reality is somehow something they all remember.

As the planet holds its collective breath to see what happens next, the family—amid chaos, denial, acceptance, and hope—determines to live every moment as if it is their last. Because, well, it just might be.]]> 310 Suzy Krause 166251753X Lani 0 to-read 4.03 2024 I Think We've Been Here Before
author: Suzy Krause
name: Lani
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Hobbit, or There and Back Again]]> 5907 Written for J.R.R. Tolkien’s own children, The Hobbit met with instant critical acclaim when it was first published in 1937. Now recognized as a timeless classic, this introduction to the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, the wizard Gandalf, Gollum, and the spectacular world of Middle-earth recounts of the adventures of a reluctant hero, a powerful and dangerous ring, and the cruel dragon Smaug the Magnificent. The text in this 372-page paperback edition is based on that first published in Great Britain by Collins Modern Classics (1998), and includes a note on the text by Douglas A. Anderson (2001).]]> 366 J.R.R. Tolkien Lani 5 4.29 1937 The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
author: J.R.R. Tolkien
name: Lani
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1937
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> On the Same Page 195096868 Riley Beckett met Gianna Mäkinen � drop-dead gorgeous influencer, trilingual, daughter of world-famous models, yes, that Gianna Mäkinen � their first year at Boston University, and it changed everything for the both of them. After all, when you find the person who just gets you, nothing feels quite "the same" right?


And in the ten years since, Riley has come to depend on Gianna more than anyone else in her life. She knows Gianna just as well as she knows herself � maybe better, some days. She knows Gianna is incredibly sex-positive, she knows Gianna doesn't do romance or relationships, and she knows nothing could ever come between them.


This is what makes sense to her, all of this is status-quo. But when a holiday party mix-up sets in motion a domino effect of changes to these previously inalienable truths, Riley has to question everything she thought she knew about their relationship. What, exactly, does Gianna mean to her after all?

]]> 468 Haley Cass Lani 5 4.36 2023 On the Same Page
author: Haley Cass
name: Lani
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
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review:
This was the PERFECT romance and now I'm sold on friends-to-lovers.
]]> <![CDATA[Fevered Star (Between Earth and Sky, #2)]]> 57339626 There are no tides more treacherous than those of the heart. —Teek saying

The great city of Tova is shattered. The sun is held within the smothering grip of the Crow God’s eclipse, but a comet that marks the death of a ruler and heralds the rise of a new order is imminent.

The Meridian: a land where magic has been codified and the worship of gods suppressed. How do you live when legends come to life, and the faith you had is rewarded?

As sea captain Xiala is swept up in the chaos and currents of change, she finds an unexpected ally in the former Priest of Knives. For the Clan Matriarchs of Tova, tense alliances form as far-flung enemies gather and the war in the heavens is reflected upon the earth.

And for Serapio and Naranpa, both now living avatars, the struggle for free will and personhood in the face of destiny rages. How will Serapio stay human when he is steeped in prophecy and surrounded by those who desire only his power? Is there a future for Naranpa in a transformed Tova without her total destruction?]]> 384 Rebecca Roanhorse Lani 5 4.09 2022 Fevered Star (Between Earth and Sky, #2)
author: Rebecca Roanhorse
name: Lani
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> The Eyes Are the Best Part 195703882 Crying in H-Mart meets My Sister, the Serial Killer in this feminist psychological horror about the making of a female serial killer from a Korean-American perspective.

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

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

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

A brilliantly inventive, subversive novel about a young woman unraveling, Monika Kim’s The Eyes Are the Best Part is a story of a family falling apart and trying to find their way back to each other, marking a bold new voice in horror that will leave readers mesmerized and craving more.]]> 278 Monika Kim 1645661237 Lani 4 3.81 2024 The Eyes Are the Best Part
author: Monika Kim
name: Lani
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/31
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This is the first horror book to make me nauseous.
]]> A House in the Sky 18039963 The dramatic and redemptive memoir of a woman whose curiosity led her to the world’s most beautiful and remote places, its most imperiled and perilous countries, and then into fifteen months of harrowing captivity—an exquisitely written story of courage, resilience, and grace.

As a child, Amanda Lindhout escaped a violent household by paging through issues of National Geographic and imagining herself in its exotic locales. At the age of nineteen, working as a cocktail waitress in Calgary, Alberta, she began saving her tips so she could travel the globe. Aspiring to understand the world and live a significant life, she backpacked through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India, and emboldened by each adventure, went on to Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career as a television reporter. And then, in August 2008, she traveled to Somalia—“the most dangerous place on earth.� On her fourth day, she was abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road.

Held hostage for 460 days, Amanda converts to Islam as a survival tactic, receives “wife lessons� from one of her captors, and risks a daring escape. Moved between a series of abandoned houses in the desert, she survives on memory—every lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivity—and on strategy, fortitude, and hope. When she is most desperate, she visits a house in the sky, high above the woman kept in chains, in the dark, being tortured.

Vivid and suspenseful, as artfully written as the finest novel, A House in the Sky is the searingly intimate story of an intrepid young woman and her search for compassion in the face of unimaginable adversity.]]> 373 Amanda Lindhout 1451651694 Lani 0 to-read 4.26 2013 A House in the Sky
author: Amanda Lindhout
name: Lani
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> <![CDATA[The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row]]> 34964905 A powerful, revealing story of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn't commit.

In 1985, Anthony Ray Hinton was arrested and charged with two counts of capital murder in Alabama. Stunned, confused, and only twenty-nine years old, Hinton knew that it was a case of mistaken identity and believed that the truth would prove his innocence and ultimately set him free.

But with no money and a different system of justice for a poor black man in the South, Hinton was sentenced to death by electrocution. He spent his first three years on Death Row at Holman State Prison in agonizing silence—full of despair and anger toward all those who had sent an innocent man to his death. But as Hinton realized and accepted his fate, he resolved not only to survive, but find a way to live on Death Row. For the next twenty-seven years he was a beacon—transforming not only his own spirit, but those of his fellow inmates, fifty-four of whom were executed mere feet from his cell. With the help of civil rights attorney and bestselling author of Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson, Hinton won his release in 2015.

With a foreword by Stevenson, The Sun Does Shine is an extraordinary testament to the power of hope sustained through the darkest times. Destined to be a classic memoir of wrongful imprisonment and freedom won, Hinton’s memoir tells his dramatic thirty-year journey and shows how you can take away a man’s freedom, but you can’t take away his imagination, humor, or joy.]]> 272 Anthony Ray Hinton 1250124719 Lani 0 to-read 4.64 2018 The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row
author: Anthony Ray Hinton
name: Lani
average rating: 4.64
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> <![CDATA[Out of My Mind (The Out of My Mind Series)]]> 19442239 301 Sharon M. Draper Lani 3 4.51 2010 Out of My Mind (The Out of My Mind Series)
author: Sharon M. Draper
name: Lani
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> <![CDATA[The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle, #1)]]> 51190882
Rabbit, a handmaiden, sold by her parents to the palace for the lack of five baskets of dye, befriends the emperor's lonely new wife and gets more than she bargained for.

At once feminist high fantasy and an indictment of monarchy, this evocative debut follows the rise of the empress In-yo, who has few resources and fewer friends. She's a northern daughter in a mage-made summer exile, but she will bend history to her will and bring down her enemies, piece by piece.

Librarian Note: Older cover of B07VH6Y4JD.]]> 119 Nghi Vo Lani 4 3.91 2020 The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle, #1)
author: Nghi Vo
name: Lani
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> The Dutch House 44318414
The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures.

Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives, they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.]]> 337 Ann Patchett 0062963678 Lani 0 to-read 4.08 2019 The Dutch House
author: Ann Patchett
name: Lani
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees]]> 195924473
InĚýBite by Bite, poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores the way food and drink evoke our associations and remembrances—a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia.

Nezhukmatathil restores our astonishment and wonder about food through her encounters with a range of foods and food traditions. From shave ice to lumpia, mangoes to pecans, rambutan to vanilla, she investigates how food marks our experiences and identities, the boundaries between heritage and memory, and the ethics and environmental pressures around gathering and consuming food.

Bite by BiteĚýoffers a rich and textured kaleidoscope of vignettes and visions into the world of food and nature, drawn together by intimate and funny personal reflections, with Fumi Nakamura’s gorgeous imagery and illustration.]]> 224 Aimee Nezhukumatathil 0063282283 Lani 0 currently-reading 4.14 2024 Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees
author: Aimee Nezhukumatathil
name: Lani
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> Wrong Place Wrong Time 58530636 Can you stop a murder after it’s already happened?

Late October. After midnight. You’re waiting up for your seventeen-year-old son. He’s late. As you watch from the window, he emerges, and you realize he isn’t he’s walking toward a man, and he’s armed.

You can’t believe it when you see him do your funny, happy teenage son, he kills a stranger, right there on the street outside your house. You don’t know who. You don’t know why. You only know your son is now in custody. His future shattered.

That night you fall asleep in despair. All is lost. Until you wake . . .

. . . and it is yesterday.

And then you wake again . . .

. . . and it is the day before yesterday.

Every morning you wake up a day earlier, another day before the murder. With another chance to stop it. Somewhere in the past lies an answer. The trigger for this crime—and you don’t have a choice but to find it . . .]]> 368 Gillian McAllister 0063252368 Lani 5 4.09 2022 Wrong Place Wrong Time
author: Gillian McAllister
name: Lani
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
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]]> We Could Be Rats 214152402 A moving story about two very different sisters, and a love letter to childhood, growing up, and the power of imagination—from the bestselling author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead and Interesting Facts About Space.

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

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

What unfolds is an unforgettable story of two sisters finding their way back to each other, and a celebration of that transcendent, unshakable bond.]]> 256 Emily R. Austin 1668058146 Lani 0 to-read 4.06 2025 We Could Be Rats
author: Emily R. Austin
name: Lani
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> The Anthropologists 195391751
As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, spends her days gathering footage from the neighborhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,� chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.� Life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues-parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope, into something that will be distinctly theirs. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?

Hailed by Lauren Groff and Marina Abramovic, Savas's fine, precise craft turns The Anthropologist's simple apartment search into a soulful, often funny, examination of modern coupledom, home-building, and expat life in the universal modern city.]]> 192 AysegĂĽl Savas 163973306X Lani 0 to-read 3.88 2024 The Anthropologists
author: AysegĂĽl Savas
name: Lani
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> Mrs Death Misses Death 52568660
Mrs Death has had enough. She is exhausted from spending eternity doing her job and now she seeks someone to unburden her conscience to. Wolf Willeford, a troubled young writer, is well acquainted with death, but until now hadn’t met Death in person � a black, working-class woman who shape-shifts and does her work unseen.

Enthralled by her stories, Wolf becomes Mrs Death’s scribe, and begins to write her memoirs. Using their desk as a vessel and conduit, Wolf travels across time and place with Mrs Death to witness deaths of past and present and discuss what the future holds for humanity. As the two reflect on the losses they have experienced � or, in the case of Mrs Death, facilitated � their friendship grows into a surprising affirmation of hope, resilience and love. All the while, despite her world-weariness, Death must continue to hold humans� fates in her hands, appearing in our lives when we least expect her . . .]]> 302 Salena Godden 1838851194 Lani 0 to-read 3.50 2021 Mrs Death Misses Death
author: Salena Godden
name: Lani
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/29
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]]>