Jessica's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 30 Apr 2025 15:00:24 -0700 60 Jessica's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Chain-Gang All-Stars 61190770
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE's corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences.

Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system's unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means.]]> 367 Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah 0593317335 Jessica 0 4.13 2023 Chain-Gang All-Stars
author: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves:
review:

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

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

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

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content� for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.� She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.]]> 277 Danzy Senna Jessica 3 3.53 2024 Colored Television
author: Danzy Senna
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/24
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves:
review:

]]> Husbands & Lovers 199223201 Two women—separated by decades and continents, and united by a mysterious family heirloom—discover second chances at love in this sweeping novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer Wives.

New England, 2022. Three years ago, single mother Mallory Dunne received the telephone call every parent dreads—her ten-year-old son, Sam, had been airlifted from summer camp with acute poisoning from a toxic death cap mushroom, leaving him fighting for his life. Now, searching for the donor kidney that will give her son a chance for a normal life, Mallory’s forced to confront two harrowing secrets from her past: her mother’s adoption from an infamous Irish orphanage in 1952, and her own all-consuming summer romance fourteen years earlier with her childhood best friend, Monk Adams� one of the world’s most beloved singer-songwriters—a fairy tale cut short by a devastating betrayal.

Cairo, 1951. After suffering tragedy beyond comprehension in the war, Hungarian refugee Hannah Ainsworth has forged a respectable new life for herself—marriage to a wealthy British diplomat with a coveted posting in glamorous Cairo. But a fateful encounter with the enigmatic manager of a hotel bristling with spies leads to a passionate affair that will reawaken Hannah’s longing for everything she once lost. As revolution simmers in the Egyptian streets, a pregnant Hannah finds herself snared in a game of intrigue between two men . . . and an act of sacrifice that will echo down the generations.

Timeless and bittersweet, Husbands & Lovers takes readers on an unforgettable journey of heartbreak and redemption, from the revolutionary fires of midcentury Egypt to the moneyed beaches of contemporary New England. Acclaimed author Beatriz Williams has written a poignant and beautifully voiced novel of deeply human characters entangled by morally complex issues—of privilege, class, and the female experience—inside worlds brought shimmeringly to life.]]> 384 Beatriz Williams 0593724224 Jessica 0 currently-reading 4.08 2024 Husbands & Lovers
author: Beatriz Williams
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Yours Truly (Part of Your World, #2)]]> 61918816 A novel of terrible first impressions, hilarious second chances, and the joy in finding your perfect match.

Dr. Briana Ortiz’s life is seriously flatlining. Her divorce is just about finalized, her brother’s running out of time to find a kidney donor, and that promotion she wants? Oh, that’s probably going to the new man-doctor who’s already registering eighty-friggin�-seven on Briana’s “pain in my ass� scale. But just when all systems are set to hate, Dr. Jacob Maddox completely flips the game . . . by sending Briana a letter.

And it’s a really good letter. Like the kind that proves that Jacob isn’t actually Satan. Worse, he might be this fantastically funny and subversively likeable guy who’s terrible at first impressions. Because suddenly he and Bri are exchanging letters, sharing lunch dates in her “sob closet,â€� and discussing the merits of freakishly tiny horses. But when Jacob decides to give Briana the best gift imaginable—a kidney for her brother—she wonders just how she can resist this quietly sexy new doctor . . . especially when he calls in a favor she ł¦˛ą˛Ô’t refuse.]]> 416 Abby Jimenez 1538704390 Jessica 3 4.29 2023 Yours Truly (Part of Your World, #2)
author: Abby Jimenez
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/19
date added: 2025/04/19
shelves:
review:

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

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

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

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.]]> 384 Alison Espach Jessica 5 4.11 2024 The Wedding People
author: Alison Espach
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/14
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves:
review:

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

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

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

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

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

“A wholly original novel. . . . Thorpe is both poetic and profound in the way she brings her remarkable story to an end.� —The Associated Press]]> 304 Rufi Thorpe 0063356589 Jessica 2 Too quirky and exhausting 3.86 2024 Margo's Got Money Troubles
author: Rufi Thorpe
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/09
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves:
review:
Too quirky and exhausting
]]> Good Material 96177629
Now he is. . .

Without a home

Waiting for his stand-up career to take off

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

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

In this sharply funny and exquisitely relatable story of romantic disaster and friendship, Dolly Alderton offers up a love story with two endings, demonstrating once again why she is one of the most exciting writers today, and the true voice of a generation.]]> 345 Dolly Alderton 0241523672 Jessica 4 3.85 2023 Good Material
author: Dolly Alderton
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves:
review:

]]> Home Body 49656780
i dive into the well of my body
and end up in another world
everything i need
already exists in me
there’s no need
to look anywhere else
� home]]> 192 Rupi Kaur 1982172452 Jessica 0 4.06 2020 Home Body
author: Rupi Kaur
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves:
review:

]]> Freshwater 35412372 Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born "with one foot on the other side." Unsettling, heartwrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater is a sharp evocation of a rare way of experiencing the world, one that illuminates how we all construct our identities.

Ada begins her life in the south of Nigeria as a troubled baby and a source of deep concern to her family. Her parents, Saul and Saachi, successfully prayed her into existence, but as she grows into a volatile and splintered child, it becomes clear that something went terribly awry. When Ada comes of age and moves to America for college, the group of selves within her grows in power and agency. A traumatic assault leads to a crystallization of her alternate selves: Asụghara and Saint Vincent. As Ada fades into the background of her own mind and these selves--now protective, now hedonistic--move into control, Ada's life spirals in a dark and dangerous direction.

Narrated by the various selves within Ada and based in the author's realities, Freshwater dazzles with ferocious energy and serpentine grace, heralding the arrival of a fierce new literary voice.]]> 229 Akwaeke Emezi 0802127355 Jessica 4 4.03 2018 Freshwater
author: Akwaeke Emezi
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves:
review:

]]> All Adults Here 51907346
Astrid’s youngest son is drifting and unfocused, making parenting mistakes of his own. Her daughter is intentionally pregnant yet struggling to give up her own adolescence. And her eldest seems to measure his adult life according to standards no one else shares. But who gets to decide, so many years later, which long-ago lapses were the ones that mattered? Who decides which apologies really count? It might be that only Astrid’s thirteen-year-old granddaughter and her new friend really understand the courage it takes to tell the truth to the people you love the most.

In All Adults Here, Emma Straub’s unique alchemy of wisdom, humor, and insight come together in a deeply satisfying story about adult siblings, aging parents, high school boyfriends, middle school mean girls, the lifelong effects of birth order, and all the other things that follow us into adulthood, whether we like them to or not.]]> 356 Emma Straub 1594634696 Jessica 2 3.54 2020 All Adults Here
author: Emma Straub
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Life’s Too Short (The Friend Zone, #3)]]> 54377375
When Vanessa Price quit her job to pursue her dream of traveling the globe, she wasn't expecting to gain millions of YouTube followers who shared her joy of seizing every moment. For her, living each day to its fullest isn't just a motto. Her mother and sister never saw the age of 30, and Vanessa doesn't want to take anything for granted.

But after her half-sister suddenly leaves Vanessa in custody of her infant daughter, life goes from "daily adventure" to "next-level bad" (now with bonus baby vomit in hair). The last person Vanessa expects to show up offering help is the hot lawyer next door, Adrian Copeland. After all, she barely knows him. No one warned her that he was the Secret Baby Tamer or that she'd be spending a whole lot of time with him and his geriatric Chihuahua.

Now she's feeling things she's vowed not to feel. Because the only thing worse than falling for Adrian is finding a little hope for a future she may never see.]]> 384 Abby Jimenez 1538715686 Jessica 2 4.13 2021 Life’s Too Short (The Friend Zone, #3)
author: Abby Jimenez
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves:
review:
I’m sorry but y’all lied about this one.
]]> <![CDATA[The Happy Ever After Playlist (The Friend Zone, #2)]]> 50208350 The Friend Zone.

Two years after losing her fiancé, Sloan Monroe still can't seem to get her life back on track. But one trouble-making pup with a "take me home" look in his eyes is about to change everything. With her new pet by her side, Sloan finally starts to feel more like herself. Then, after weeks of unanswered texts, Tucker's owner reaches out. He's a musician on tour in Australia. And bottom line: He wants Tucker back.

Well, Sloan's not about to give up her dog without a fight. As their flirty texts turn into long calls, Sloan can't deny a connection. There's no telling what could happen when they meet in person. The question is: With his music career on the rise, how long will Jason really stick around? And is it possible for Sloan to survive another heartbreak?]]> 401 Abby Jimenez Jessica 4 4.14 2020 The Happy Ever After Playlist (The Friend Zone, #2)
author: Abby Jimenez
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/13
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Friend Zone (The Friend Zone, #1)]]> 41945163
Planning her best friend's wedding is bittersweet for Kristen—especially when she meets the best man, Josh Copeland. He's funny, sexy, never offended by her mile-wide streak of sarcasm, and always one chicken enchilada ahead of her hangry. Even her dog, Stuntman Mike, adores him. The only catch: Josh wants a big family someday. Kristen knows he'd be better off with someone else, but as their attraction grows, it's harder and harder to keep him at arm's length.

The Friend Zone will have you laughing one moment and grabbing for tissues the next as it tackles the realities of infertility and loss with wit, heart, and a lot of sass.]]> 372 Abby Jimenez Jessica 3 3.85 2019 The Friend Zone (The Friend Zone, #1)
author: Abby Jimenez
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves:
review:

]]> Sandwich 200028726 From the beloved author of We All Want Impossible Things, a moving, hilarious story of a family summer vacation full of secrets, lunch, and learning to let go.

For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their humble beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, sunny days, great meals, and messes of all kinds: emotional, marital, and—thanks to the cottage’s ancient plumbing—septic too.

This year’s vacation, with Rocky sandwiched between her half-grown kids and fully aging parents, promises to be just as delightful as summers past—except, perhaps, for Rocky’s hormonal bouts of rage and melancholy. (Hello, menopause!) Her body is changing—her life is, too. And then a chain of events sends Rocky into the past, reliving both the tenderness and sorrow of a handful of long-ago summers.

It's one precious week: everything is in balance; everything is in flux. And when Rocky comes face to face with her family’s history and future, she is forced to accept that she can no longer hide her secrets from the people she loves.]]> 240 Catherine Newman 0063345161 Jessica 4 3.55 2024 Sandwich
author: Catherine Newman
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves:
review:
“I want to behave badly and be immediately forgiven�
]]> The Turn of the Key 42080142
What she doesn’t know is that she’s stepping into a nightmare—one that will end with a child dead and herself in prison awaiting trial for murder.

Writing to her lawyer from prison, she struggles to explain the unravelling events that led to her incarceration. It wasn’t just the constant surveillance from the cameras installed around the house, or the malfunctioning technology that woke the household with booming music, or turned the lights off at the worst possible time. It wasn’t just the girls, who turned out to be a far cry from the immaculately behaved model children she met at her interview. It wasn’t even the way she was left alone for weeks at a time, with no adults around apart from the enigmatic handyman, Jack Grant.

It was everything.

She knows she’s made mistakes. She admits that she lied to obtain the post, and that her behavior toward the children wasn’t always ideal. She’s not innocent, by any means. But, she maintains, she’s not guilty—at least not of murder. Which means someone else is.

Full of spellbinding menace and told in Ruth Ware’s signature suspenseful style, The Turn of the Key is an unputdownable thriller from the Agatha Christie of our time.]]> 337 Ruth Ware 1501188771 Jessica 0 3.91 2019 The Turn of the Key
author: Ruth Ware
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves:
review:

]]> Erasure 355862 We's Lives in Da Ghetto, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection.

Even as his career as a writer appears to have stalled, Monk finds himself coping with changes in his personal life. In need of distraction from old memories, new responsibilities, and his professional stagnation, Monk composes, in a heat of inspiration and energy, a fierce parody of the sort of exploitative, ghetto wanna-be lit represented by We's Lives in Da Ghetto.

But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk -- or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh -- is offered money, fame, success beyond anything he has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems.]]> 280 Percival Everett 0786888156 Jessica 5 4.17 2001 Erasure
author: Percival Everett
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/05
shelves:
review:

]]> The Optimist's Daughter 12585

From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 180 Eudora Welty 037550835X Jessica 3 3.51 1972 The Optimist's Daughter
author: Eudora Welty
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.51
book published: 1972
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:

]]> The Joy Luck Club 7763 Alternate cover editions of ISBN 9780143038092 can be found here.

Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives � until their own inner crises reveal how much they've unknowingly inherited of their mothers' pasts.

With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.]]> 288 Amy Tan Jessica 5 3.96 1989 The Joy Luck Club
author: Amy Tan
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1989
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:

]]> All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Jessica 3 3.52 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/25
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Hundred Years� War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917�2017]]> 41812831
In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.� Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.

Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.

Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.]]> 336 Rashid Khalidi 1627798552 Jessica 5 4.50 2020 The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017
author: Rashid Khalidi
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves:
review:

]]> The Alice Network 32051912
1947. In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive. So when Charlie's parents banish her to Europe to have her "little problem" taken care of, Charlie breaks free and heads to London, determined to find out what happened to the cousin she loves like a sister.

1915. A year into the Great War, Eve Gardiner burns to join the fight against the Germans and unexpectedly gets her chance when she's recruited to work as a spy. Sent into enemy-occupied France, she's trained by the mesmerizing Lili, code name Alice, the "queen of spies", who manages a vast network of secret agents right under the enemy's nose.

Thirty years later, haunted by the betrayal that ultimately tore apart the Alice Network, Eve spends her days drunk and secluded in her crumbling London house. Until a young American barges in uttering a name Eve hasn't heard in decades, and launches them both on a mission to find the truth...no matter where it leads.]]> 503 Kate Quinn 0062654195 Jessica 2 4.30 2017 The Alice Network
author: Kate Quinn
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2017
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/19
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves:
review:
This one was really disappointing- I had a hard time wanting to pick it up. I loved Briar Club so I thought this one would be just as fun and interesting but the characters were flat and the relationships felt convenient and forced. On to the next one.
]]> <![CDATA[Part of Your World (Part of Your World, #1)]]> 58684524
While her ultra-wealthy parents want her to carry on the family legacy of world-renowned surgeons, Alexis doesn’t need glory or fame. She’s fine with being a “mere� ER doctor. And every minute she spends with Daniel and the tight-knit town where he lives, she’s discovering just what’s really important. Yet letting their relationship become anything more than a short-term fling would mean turning her back on her family and giving up the opportunity to help thousands of people.

Bringing Daniel into her world is impossible, and yet she ł¦˛ą˛Ô’t just give up the joy she’s found with him either. With so many differences between them, how can Alexis possibly choose between her world and his?

The New York Times bestselling author of Life's Too Short delivers a refreshingly modern fairy tale perfect for fans of Casey McQuiston and Emily Henry.]]> 389 Abby Jimenez 1538704374 Jessica 5 4.26 2022 Part of Your World (Part of Your World, #1)
author: Abby Jimenez
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/14
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves:
review:

]]> The Message 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk� city of “old traditions and new machinery,� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning� of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]> 232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 Jessica 4 4.51 2024 The Message
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/12
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home]]> 42202117 Now a limited Netflix series starring Zoe Saldana!

This Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick and New York Times bestseller is “a captivating story of love lost and found� (Kirkus Reviews) set in the lush Sicilian countryside, where one woman discovers the healing powers of food, family, and unexpected grace in her darkest hours.

It was love at first sight when actress Tembi met professional chef, Saro, on a street in Florence. There was just one problem: Saro’s traditional Sicilian family did not approve of his marrying a black American woman. However, the couple, heartbroken but undeterred, forged on. They built a happy life in Los Angeles, with fulfilling careers, deep friendships, and the love of their lives: a baby girl they adopted at birth. Eventually, they reconciled with Saro’s family just as he faced a formidable cancer that would consume all their dreams.

From Scratch chronicles three summers Tembi spends in Sicily with her daughter, Zoela, as she begins to piece together a life without her husband in his tiny hometown hamlet of farmers. Where once Tembi was estranged from Saro’s family, now she finds solace and nourishment—literally and spiritually—at her mother-in-law’s table. In the Sicilian countryside, she discovers the healing gifts of simple fresh food, the embrace of a close knit community, and timeless traditions and wisdom that light a path forward. All along the way she reflects on her and Saro’s romance—an incredible love story that leaps off the pages.

In Sicily, it is said that every story begins with a marriage or a death—in Tembi Locke’s case, it is both. “Locke’s raw and heartfelt memoir will uplift readers suffering from the loss of their own loved ones� (Publishers Weekly), but her story is also about love, finding a home, and chasing flavor as an act of remembrance. From Scratch is for anyone who has dared to reach for big love, fought for what mattered most, and those who needed a powerful reminder that life is...delicious.]]> 339 Tembi Locke 1501187651 Jessica 5 3.94 2019 From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home
author: Tembi Locke
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/09
date added: 2025/02/09
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Just for the Summer (Part of Your World, #3)]]> 195820807
Emma hadn't planned that her next assignment as a traveling nurse would be in Minnesota, but she and her best friend agree that dating Justin is too good of an opportunity to pass up, especially when they get to rent an adorable cottage on a private island on Lake Minnetonka.

It's supposed to be a quick fling, just for the summer. But when Emma's toxic mother shows up and Justin has to assume guardianship of his three siblings, they're suddenly navigating a lot more than they expected--including catching real feelings for each other. What if this time Fate has actually brought the perfect pair together?]]> 432 Abby Jimenez 1538704439 Jessica 4 4.35 2024 Just for the Summer (Part of Your World, #3)
author: Abby Jimenez
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/04
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves:
review:

]]> The God of the Woods 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

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

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 490 Liz Moore Jessica 3 4.15 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/31
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Be Ready When the Luck Happens]]> 209192698 In her long-awaited memoir, Ina Garten—aka the Barefoot Contessa, author of thirteen bestselling cookbooks, beloved Food Network personality, Instagram sensation, and cultural icon—shares her personal story with readers hungry for a seat at her table.Ěý

Here, for the first time, Ina Garten presents an intimate, entertaining, and inspiring account of her remarkable journey. Ina’s gift is to make everything look easy, yet all her accomplishments have been the result of hard work, audacious choices, and exquisite attention to detail. In her unmistakable voice (no one tells a story like Ina), she brings her past and her process to life in a high-spirited and no-holds-barred memoir that chronicles decades of personal challenges, adventures (and misadventures) and unexpected career twists, all delivered with her signature combination of playfulness and purpose.

From a difficult childhood to meeting the love of her life, Jeffrey, and marrying him while still in college, from a boring bureaucratic job in Washington, D.C., to answering an ad for a specialty food store in the Hamptons, from the owner of one Barefoot Contessa shop to author of bestselling cookbooks and celebrated television host, Ina has blazed her own trail and, in the meantime, taught millions of people how to cook and entertain. Now, she invites them to come closer to experience her story in vivid detail and to share the important life lessons she learned along the way: do what you love because if you love it you’ll be really good at it, swing for the fences, and always Be Ready When the Luck Happens.]]> 320 Ina Garten 0593799895 Jessica 4 3.5. Lovely and fun 4.25 2024 Be Ready When the Luck Happens
author: Ina Garten
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves:
review:
3.5. Lovely and fun
]]> 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 Jessica 4 4.08 2024 Beautyland
author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/24
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves:
review:

]]> The Frozen River 216390667 A gripping historical mystery inspired by the life and diary of Martha Ballard, a renowned 18th-century midwife who defied the legal system and wrote herself into American history.

Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Months earlier, Martha documented the details of an alleged rape committed by two of the town’s most respected gentlemen—one of whom has now been found dead in the ice. But when a local physician undermines her conclusion, declaring the death to be an accident, Martha is forced to investigate the shocking murder on her own.

Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves, and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie.

Clever, layered, and subversive, Ariel Lawhon’s newest offering introduces an unsung heroine who refused to accept anything less than justice at a time when women were considered best seen and not heard. The Frozen River is a thrilling, tense, and tender story about a remarkable woman who left an unparalleled legacy yet remains nearly forgotten to this day.]]> 432 Ariel Lawhon 0593312074 Jessica 5 4.43 2023 The Frozen River
author: Ariel Lawhon
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Yellowface 62047984
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 319 R.F. Kuang 000853277X Jessica 4 3.69 2023 Yellowface
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/19
date added: 2025/01/19
shelves:
review:

]]> Late Bloomers 61151272 An Indian American family is turned upside down when the parents divorce thirty-six years into their arranged marriage� in this witty, big-hearted debut.

I have a soft spot for underdogs. And late bloomers. You've told me a lot of things about yourself, so let me tell you something about me.

After thirty-six years of a dutiful but unhappy arranged marriage, recently divorced Suresh and Lata Raman find themselves starting new paths in life. Suresh is trying to navigate the world of online dating on a website that caters to Indians and is striking out at every turn--until he meets a mysterious, devastatingly attractive younger woman who seems to be smitten with him. Lata is enjoying her newfound independence, but she's caught off guard when a professor in his early sixties starts to flirt with her.

Meanwhile, Suresh and Lata's daughter, Priya, thinks her father's online pursuits are distasteful even as she embarks upon a clandestine affair of her own. And their son, Nikesh, pretends at a seemingly perfect marriage with his law-firm colleague and their young son, but hides the truth of what his relationship really entails. Over the course of three weeks in August, the whole family will uncover one another's secrets, confront the limits of love and loyalty, and explore life's second chances.

Charming, funny, and moving, Late Bloomers introduces a delightful new voice in fiction with the story of four individuals trying to understand how to be happy in their own lives--and as a family.]]> 368 Deepa Varadarajan 059349802X Jessica 5 3.72 2023 Late Bloomers
author: Deepa Varadarajan
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves:
review:

]]> Final Girls 59350631 Ten years ago, college student Quincy Carpenter went on vacation with five friends and came back alone, the only survivor of a horror movie-scale massacre. In an instant, she became a member of a club no one wants to belong to—a group of similar survivors known in the press as the Final Girls. Lisa, who lost nine sorority sisters to a college dropout's knife; Sam, who went up against the Sack Man during her shift at the Nightlight Inn; and now Quincy, who ran bleeding through the woods to escape Pine Cottage and the man she refers to onlyĚýas Him. The three girls are all attempting to put their nightmares behind them, and, with that, one another. Despite the media's attempts, they never meet.

Now, Quincy is doing well—maybe even great, thanks to her Xanax prescription. She has a caring almost-fiancé, Jeff; a popular baking blog; a beautiful apartment; and a therapeutic presence in Coop, the police officer who saved her life all those years ago. Her memory won’t even allow her to recall the events of that night; the past is in the past.

That is, until Lisa, the first Final Girl, is found dead in her bathtub, wrists slit, and Sam, the second, appears on Quincy's doorstep. Blowing through Quincy's life like a whirlwind, Sam seems intent on making Quincy relive the past, with increasingly dire consequences, all of which makes Quincy question why Sam is really seeking her out. And when new details about Lisa's death come to light, Quincy's life becomes a race against time as she tries to unravel Sam's truths from her lies, evade the police and hungry reporters, and, most crucially, remember what really happened at Pine Cottage, before what was started ten years ago is finished.

*From the Hardcover edition.

]]> 373 Riley Sager Jessica 3 4.00 2017 Final Girls
author: Riley Sager
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves:
review:

]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Jessica 5 4.46 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/09
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves:
review:

]]> Martyr! 139400713 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

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

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Jessica 4 4.22 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/05
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves:
review:

]]> Consent: A Memoir 200798634 Half a Life. She asks herself whether she told the whole truth back then. What did truth look like to her in the era of love-bead curtains, when no one asked who was served by the permissibility of May-December romance? With new understanding about the imbalance of power between an older man and a minor girl, Ciment re-explores the erotic wild ride and intellectual flowering that shaped an improbable but blissful marriage that lasted for forty-five years, until her husband’s death at age ninety-three.]]> 145 Jill Ciment 0593701062 Jessica 3 3.83 2024 Consent: A Memoir
author: Jill Ciment
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves:
review:

]]> The Briar Club 181110045 A haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, D.C. boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.

Washington, D.C., 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital, where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; police officer’s daughter Nora, who is entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Bea, whose career has ended along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.

Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears apart the house, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: Who is the true enemy in their midst?]]> 432 Kate Quinn 0063244748 Jessica 5 4.26 2024 The Briar Club
author: Kate Quinn
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves:
review:

]]> Stay True 59900070 New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art.

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

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

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.]]> 208 Hua Hsu 0385547773 Jessica 0 4.00 2022 Stay True
author: Hua Hsu
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves:
review:

]]> Private Equity: A Memoir 195267508 A gripping memoir of one woman’s self-discovery inside a top Wall Street firm, and an urgent indictment of privilege, extreme wealth, and work culture

When we meet Carrie Sun, she ł¦˛ą˛Ô’t shake the feeling that she’s wasting her life. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Carrie excelled in school, graduated early from MIT, and climbed the corporate ladder, all in pursuit of the American dream. But at twenty-nine, she’s left her analyst job, dropped out of an MBA program, and is trapped in an unhappy engagement. So when she gets the rare opportunity to work at one of the most prestigious hedge funds in the world, she knows she ł¦˛ą˛Ô’t say no. Fourteen interviews later, she’s in.

Carrie is the sole assistant to the firm’s billionaire founder. She manages his work life, becoming the right hand to an investor who can move mountains and markets with a single phone call. Eager to impress, she dives headfirst into the firm’s culture, which values return on time above all else. A luxury-laden world opens up for her, and Carrie learns that money can solve nearly everything.

Playing the game at the highest levels, amid the ultimate winners in our winner-take-all economy, Carrie soon finds her identity swallowed whole by work. With her physical and mental health deteriorating, she begins to rethink what it actually means to waste one’s life. A searing examination of our relationship to work, Carrie’s story illuminates the struggle for balance in a world of extremes: efficiency and excess, status and aspiration, power and fortune. Private Equity is a universal tale of self-invention from a dazzling new voice, daring to ask what we’re willing to sacrifice to get to the top—and what it might take to break free and leave it all behind.]]> 352 Carrie Sun 0593654994 Jessica 3 3.54 2024 Private Equity: A Memoir
author: Carrie Sun
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves:
review:

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

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

Complex and rich with detail, the Anthropocene's reviews have been praised as 'observations that double as exercises in memoiristic empathy', with over 10 million lifetime downloads. John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this artfully curated collection about the shared human experience; it includes beloved essays along with six all-new pieces exclusive to the book.]]> 304 John Green 0525555218 Jessica 0 4.37 2021 The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
author: John Green
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2022/03/28
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves:
review:

]]> A Spool of Blue Thread 22501028 From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author--now in the fiftieth year of her remarkable career--a brilliantly observed, joyful and wrenching, funny and true new novel that reveals, as only she can, the very nature of a family's life.
ĚýĚýĚýĚýĚý"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon." This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The whole family--their two daughters and two sons, their grandchildren, even their faithful old dog--is on the porch, listening contentedly as Abby tells the tale they have heard so many times before. And yet this gathering is different too: Abby and Red are growing older, and decisions must be made about how best to look after them, and the fate of the house so lovingly built by Red's father. Brimming with the luminous insight, humor, and compassion that are Anne Tyler's hallmarks, this capacious novel takes us across three generations of the Whitshanks, their shared stories and long-held secrets, all the unguarded and richly lived moments that combine to define who and what they are as a family.]]> 358 Anne Tyler 0385683421 Jessica 3 3.39 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread
author: Anne Tyler
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/17
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves:
review:

]]> The Surrogate Mother 40893132
But after years of failed infertility treatments and adoptions that have fallen through, it seems like motherhood is not in her future. That is, until her personal assistant Monica makes a generous offer that will make all of Abby's dreams come true.

Or all of her nightmares.

Because it turns out Monica isn't who she says she is. The woman now carrying Abby's child has dark, twisted secrets.

And she will stop at nothing to get what she wants. ]]> 341 Freida McFadden Jessica 0 3.94 2018 The Surrogate Mother
author: Freida McFadden
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/15
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store]]> 65678550
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents—roused by Chona's kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.]]> 385 James McBride 0593422945 Jessica 0 3.83 2023 The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
author: James McBride
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality]]> 176443264 Cultish and host of the podcast Sounds Like a Cult, a delicious blend of cultural criticism and personal narrative that explores our cognitive biases and the power, disadvantages, and highlights of magical thinking.

Utilizing the linguistic insights of her “witty and brilliant� first book Wordslut and the sociological explorations of her breakout hit Cultish, Amanda Montell now turns her erudite eye to the inner workings of the human mind and its biases in her most personal and electrifying work yet.

“Magical thinking� can be broadly defined as the belief that one’s internal thoughts can affect unrelated events in the external Think of the conviction that one can manifest their way out of poverty, stave off cancer with positive vibes, thwart the apocalypse by learning to can their own peaches, or transform an unhealthy relationship to a glorious one with loyalty alone. In all its forms, magical thinking works in service of restoring agency amid chaos, but in The Age of Magical Overthinking, Montell argues that in the modern information age, our brain’s coping mechanisms have been overloaded, and our irrationality turned up to an eleven.

In a series of razor sharp, deeply funny chapters, Montell delves into a cornucopia of the cognitive biases that run rampant in our brains, from how the “Halo effect� cultivates worship (and hatred) of larger than life celebrities, to how the “Sunk Cost Fallacy� can keep us in detrimental relationships long after we’ve realized they’re not serving us. As she illuminates these concepts with her signature brilliance and wit, Montell’s prevailing message is one of hope, empathy, and ultimately forgiveness for our anxiety-addled human selves. If you have all but lost faith in our ability to reason, Montell aims to make some sense of the senseless. To crack open a window in our minds, and let a warm breeze in. To help quiet the cacophony for a while, or even hear a melody in it.]]> 259 Amanda Montell 1668007975 Jessica 4 3.45 2024 The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality
author: Amanda Montell
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/17
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves:
review:

]]> Night Sky with Exit Wounds 23841432 89 Ocean Vuong Jessica 0 4.20 2016 Night Sky with Exit Wounds
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2021/09/19
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves:
review:

]]> The Paper Palace 55994372
Now, over the next twenty-four hours, Elle will have to decide between the life she has made with her genuinely beloved husband, Peter, and the life she always imagined she would have had with her childhood love, Jonas, if a tragic event hadn't forever changed the course of their lives.

As Heller colors in the experiences that have led Elle to this day, we arrive at her ultimate decision with all its complexity. Tender yet devastating, The Paper Palace considers the tensions between desire and dignity, the legacies of abuse, and the crimes and misdemeanors of families.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593329825.]]> 400 Miranda Cowley Heller Jessica 2 3.73 2021 The Paper Palace
author: Miranda Cowley Heller
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/09
date added: 2024/10/09
shelves:
review:

]]> Survive the Night 55628983
Behind the wheel is Josh Baxter, a stranger Charlie met by the college ride share board, who also has a good reason for leaving university in the middle of term. On the road they share their stories, carefully avoiding the subject dominating the news - the Campus Killer, who's tied up and stabbed three students in the span of a year, has just struck again.

Travelling the lengthy journey between university and their final destination, Charlie begins to notice discrepancies in Josh's story.

As she begins to plan her escape from the man she is becoming certain is the killer, she starts to suspect that Josh knows exactly what she's thinking.

Meaning that she could very well end up as his next victim.]]> 336 Riley Sager 0593183169 Jessica 2 3.51 2021 Survive the Night
author: Riley Sager
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2024/07/27
date added: 2024/07/27
shelves:
review:

]]> Wrong Place Wrong Time 59947696
It is midnight on the morning of Halloween, and Jen anxiously waits up for her 18-year-old son, Todd, to return home. But worries about his broken curfew transform into something much more dangerous when Todd finally emerges from the darkness. As Jen watches through the window, she sees her funny, seemingly happy teenage son stab a total stranger.

She doesn’t know who the victim is, or why Todd has committed such a devastating act of violence. All she knows is that her life, and Todd’s, have been shattered.

After her son is taken into custody, Jen falls asleep in despair. But when she wakes up� it is yesterday. The murder has not happened yet—and there may be a chance to stop it. Each morning, when Jen wakes, she is further back in the past, first weeks, then years, before the murder. And Jen realizes that somewhere in the past lies the trigger for Todd’s terrible crime…and it is her mission to find it, and prevent it from taking place.]]> 416 Gillian McAllister 0063252341 Jessica 4 3.95 2022 Wrong Place Wrong Time
author: Gillian McAllister
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/18
date added: 2024/07/18
shelves:
review:

]]> Lies and Weddings 197144545 A forbidden affair erupts dramatically amid a decadent Hawaiian wedding in this hilarious, sophisticated, and thrillingly plotted story of love, money, murder, sex—and the lies we tell about them all.
Ěý
Rufus Leung Gresham, future Earl of Greshambury and son of a former Hong Kong supermodel, has a problem: his family fortune, the legendary Gresham Trust, has been depleted by decades of profligate spending. While magazine covers and Instagram stories display impeccably designed manors and shiny new yachts, the secret reality holds nothing more than a gargantuan mountain of debt. The only solution, put forth by Rufus’s scheming mother, is for Rufus to seduce a woman with money, thereby securing the family's precarious financial future.

Should he marry Solène de Courcy, a French hotel heiress with honey-blond tresses and a royal bloodline? Should he pursue Martha Dung, the tattooed venture capital genius who passes out billions like lollipops? Or should he follow his heart, betray his family, squander his legacy, and finally confess his love to the literal girl next door, the humble daughter of a doctor, Eden Tong?

When the Gresham family descends on the Big Island of Hawaii to host a veritable who's who of sultans, barons, and oligarchs for the wedding of the decade, Rufus must merely flex his famous abs to bewitch the heiress of his choice. But instead a hot mic exposes a secret tryst, a volcanic eruption burns through the nuptials, and the Gresham family's plans—and their reputation—go up in flames.

Can the once-great earldom rise from the ashes? Or will a secret tragedy, hidden for two decades, reveal a shocking twist? Spanning the black sand beaches of Hawaii, the red city of Marrakech, the Los Angeles bachelor pad of a billionaire playboy, and the inner sanctum of England’s oldest family estate, Lies and Weddings reveals an enthralling family saga that is as scandalous and satirical as it is full of heart.]]> 437 Kevin Kwan 0385546297 Jessica 0 3.69 2024 Lies and Weddings
author: Kevin Kwan
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/11
date added: 2024/07/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Age of Vice 60177466 This is the age of vice, where money, pleasure, and power are everything, and the family ties that bind can also kill.

New Delhi, 3 a.m. A speeding Mercedes jumps the curb and in the blink of an eye, five people are dead. It’s a rich man’s car, but when the dust settles there is no rich man at all, just a shell-shocked servant who cannot explain the strange series of events that led to this crime. Nor can he foresee the dark drama that is about to unfold.

Deftly shifting through time and perspective in contemporary India, Age of Vice is an epic, action-packed story propelled by the seductive wealth, startling corruption, and bloodthirsty violence of the Wadia family � loved by some, loathed by others, feared by all.

In the shadow of lavish estates, extravagant parties, predatory business deals and calculated political influence, three lives become dangerously intertwined: Ajay is the watchful servant, born into poverty, who rises through the family’s ranks. Sunny is the playboy heir who dreams of outshining his father, whatever the cost. And Neda is the curious journalist caught between morality and desire. Against a sweeping plot fueled by loss, pleasure, greed, yearning, violence and revenge, will these characters� connections become a path to escape, or a trigger of further destruction?

Equal parts crime thriller and family saga, transporting readers from the dusty villages of Uttar Pradesh to the urban energy of New Delhi, Age of Vice is an intoxicating novel of gangsters and lovers, false friendships, forbidden romance, and the consequences of corruption. It is binge-worthy entertainment at its literary best.]]> 544 Deepti Kapoor 0593328795 Jessica 0 revisiting-later 3.55 2023 Age of Vice
author: Deepti Kapoor
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/22
shelves: revisiting-later
review:

]]> <![CDATA[There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension]]> 181346634
There’s Always This Year is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus—whether it's basketball, or music, or performance—Hanif Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.]]> 334 Hanif Abdurraqib 0593448790 Jessica 5 4.32 2024 There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
author: Hanif Abdurraqib
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/02
date added: 2024/06/02
shelves:
review:

]]> The Absolutist 13414716
But the letters are not the real reason for Tristan's visit. He can no longer keep a secret and has finally found the courage to unburden himself of it. As Tristan recounts the horrific details of what to him became a senseless war, he also speaks of his friendship with Will - from their first meeting on the training grounds at Aldershot to their farewell in the trenches of northern France. The intensity of their bond brought Tristan happiness and self-discovery as well as confusion and unbearable pain.

The Absolutist is a masterful tale of passion, jealousy, heroism, and betrayal set in one of the most gruesome trenches of France during World War I. This novel will keep readers on the edge of their seats until its most extraordinary and unexpected conclusion, and will stay with them long after they've turned the last page.]]> 311 John Boyne Jessica 5 4.07 2011 The Absolutist
author: John Boyne
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/02
date added: 2024/06/02
shelves:
review:

]]> The Women 127305853 From the celebrated author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds comes Kristin Hannah's The Women—at once an intimate portrait of coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of a nation divided.

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

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

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

The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm’s way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has too often been forgotten. A novel about deep friendships and bold patriotism, The Women is a richly drawn story with a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage under fire will come to define an era.]]> 471 Kristin Hannah 1250178630 Jessica 4 4.58 2024 The Women
author: Kristin Hannah
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/12
date added: 2024/05/12
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business]]> 58537351
“I hope fans of comedy will get a kick out of the stories behind my work, and really enjoy taking this remarkable ride with me.”—Mel Brooks

For anyone who loves American comedy, the long wait is over. Here are the never-before-told, behind-the-scenes anecdotes and remembrances from a master storyteller, filmmaker, and creator of all things funny.

All About Me! charts Mel Brooks’s meteoric rise from a Depression-era kid in Brooklyn to the recipient of the National Medal of Arts. Whether serving in the United States Army in World War II, or during his burgeoning career as a teenage comedian in the Catskills, Mel was always mining his experiences for material, always looking for the perfect joke. His iconic career began with Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, where he was part of the greatest writers� room in history, which included Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, and Larry Gelbart. After co-creating both the mega-hit 2000 Year Old Man comedy albums and the classic television series Get Smart, Brooks’s stellar film career took off. He would go on to write, direct, and star in The Producers, The Twelve Chairs, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, and Spaceballs, as well as produce groundbreaking and eclectic films, including The Elephant Man, The Fly, and My Favorite Year. Brooks then went on to conquer Broadway with his record-breaking, Tony-winning musical, The Producers.

All About Me! offers fans insight into the inspiration behind the ideas for his outstanding collection of boundary-breaking work, and offers details about the many close friendships and collaborations Brooks had, including those with Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, Gene Wilder, Madeleine Kahn, Alfred Hitchcock, and the great love of his life, Anne Bancroft.

Filled with tales of struggle, achievement, and camaraderie (and dozens of photographs), readers will gain a more personal and deeper understanding of the incredible body of work behind one of the most accomplished and beloved entertainers in history.]]> 480 Mel Brooks 059315911X Jessica 0 4.19 2021 All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business
author: Mel Brooks
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/27
date added: 2024/04/27
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Heartstopper: Volume Five (Heartstopper, #5)]]> 53344030
Nick and Charlie are very much in love. They've finally said those three little words, and Charlie has almost persuaded his mum to let him sleep over at Nick's house ... But with Nick going off to university next year, is everything about to change?

By Alice Oseman, winner of the YA Book Prize, Heartstopper encompasses all the small moments of Nick and Charlie's lives that together make up something larger, which speaks to all of us.

Contains discussions around mental health and eating disorders, and sexual references.]]> 336 Alice Oseman 1444957651 Jessica 5 4.47 2023 Heartstopper: Volume Five (Heartstopper, #5)
author: Alice Oseman
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/12
date added: 2024/04/12
shelves:
review:

]]> The Nix 28251002
To save her, Samuel will have to embark on his own journey, uncovering long-buried secrets about the woman he thought he knew, secrets that stretch across generations and have their origin all the way back in Norway, home of the mysterious Nix. As he does so, Samuel will confront not only Faye’s losses but also his own lost love, and will relearn everything he thought he knew about his mother, and himself.]]> 625 Nathan Hill 110194661X Jessica 5 4.08 2016 The Nix
author: Nathan Hill
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/12
date added: 2024/04/12
shelves:
review:

]]> Infinite Country 57772571 For readers of Valeria Luiselli and Edwidge Danticat, an urgent and lyrical novel about a Colombian family fractured by deportation, offering an intimate perspective on an experience that so many have endured—and are enduring right now.

At the dawn of the new millennium, Colombia is a country devastated by half a century of violence. Elena and Mauro are teenagers when they meet, their blooming love an antidote to the mounting brutality of life in Bogotá. Once their first daughter is born, and facing grim economic prospects, they set their sights on the United States.

They travel to Houston and send wages back to Elena’s mother, all the while weighing whether to risk overstaying their tourist visas or to return to Bogotá. As their family expands, and they move again and again, their decision to ignore their exit dates plunges the young family into the precariousness of undocumented status, the threat of discovery menacing a life already strained. When Mauro is deported, Elena, now tasked with caring for their three small children, makes a difficult choice that will ease her burdens but splinter the family even further.

Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Patricia Engel, herself the daughter of Colombian immigrants and a dual citizen, gives voice to Mauro and Elena, as well as their children, Karina, Nando, and Talia—each one navigating a divided existence, weighing their allegiance to the past, the future, to one another, and to themselves. Rich with Bogotá urban life, steeped in Andean myth, and tense with the daily reality for the undocumented in America, Infinite Country is the story of two countries and one mixed-status family—for whom every triumph is stitched with regret and every dream pursued bears the weight of a dream deferred.]]> 256 Patricia Engel 1982159472 Jessica 0 3.83 2021 Infinite Country
author: Patricia Engel
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/31
date added: 2024/03/31
shelves:
review:

]]> Wellness 65650229 A witty and poignant novel about marriage, middle age, tech-obsessed health culture and the bonds that keep people together

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the '90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago's thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit.ĚýFast-forward twenty years to married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter cults disguised as mindfulness support groups, polyamorous would-be suitors, Facebook wars, and something called Love Potion Number Nine. For the first time Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize one another, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.Ěý]]> 611 Nathan Hill 0593536118 Jessica 5 3.97 2023 Wellness
author: Nathan Hill
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/21
date added: 2024/03/21
shelves:
review:

]]> Quietly Hostile: Essays 62052300
The success of Irby's career has taken her to new heights. She fields calls with job offers from Hollywood and walks the red carpet with the iconic ladies of Sex and the City. Finally, she has made it. But, behind all that new-found glam, Irby is just trying to keep her life together as she always had.

Her teeth are poisoning her from inside her mouth, and her diarrhea is back. She gets turned away from a restaurant for wearing ugly clothes, she goes to therapy and tries out Lexapro, gets healed with Reiki, explores the power of crystals, and becomes addicted to QVC. Making light of herself as she takes us on an outrageously funny tour of all the details that make up a true portrait of her life, Irby is once again the relatable, uproarious tonic we all need.]]> 290 Samantha Irby 0593315693 Jessica 3 3.66 2023 Quietly Hostile: Essays
author: Samantha Irby
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/16
date added: 2024/03/16
shelves:
review:

]]> Music Is History 56969492
Focusing on the years 1971 to the present, Questlove finds the hidden connections in the American tapestry, whether investigating how the blaxploitation era reshaped Black identity or considering the way disco took an assembly line approach to Black genius. And these critical inquiries are complemented by his own memories as a music fan, and the way his appetite for pop culture taught him about America.

A history of the last half-century and an intimate conversation with one of music’s most influential and original voices, Music Is History is a singular look at contemporary America.

“An entertaining, informative and far-reaching work, meticulously excavating American culture and history with the eye of a seasoned cratedigger.� � The Washington Post]]> 352 Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson 1419751433 Jessica 3 3.86 2021 Music Is History
author: Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/28
date added: 2024/02/28
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In]]> 123921296
One In a Millennial is an exploration of pop culture, nostalgia, the millennial zeitgeist, and the life lessons learned (for better and for worse) from coming of age as a member of a much-maligned generation.

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

With her trademark style and vulnerability, One In a Millennial is sharp, hilarious, and heartwarming all at once. She tackles AOL Instant Messenger, purity culture, American Girl Dolls, going out tops, Spice Girl feminism, her feelings about millennial motherhood, and more. Kate’s laugh-out-loud asides and keen observations will have you nodding your head and maybe even tearing up.]]> 328 Kate Kennedy 1250285127 Jessica 0 3.73 2024 One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In
author: Kate Kennedy
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/27
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves:
review:

]]> Demon Copperhead 60194162 "Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver 0063251922 Jessica 2 4.46 2022 Demon Copperhead
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2024/02/17
date added: 2024/02/17
shelves:
review:
This may be a case of right book, wrong time but I’m not sure if I’ll ever find out. The writing was good- characters strong and in all honesty it had all the makings of a book I would have normally devoured, cherished, and recommended. That being said, I lost interest after about 75 pages and for some reason held on to hope that I too would see this book as a 5 star beauty but that never came to pass. Demon felt like a Holden Caufield to me and let’s just say I didn’t care for Catcher in the Rye. This was my first Kingsolver book but it won’t be my last. I probably wont stop asking lovers of this novel what I must have missed because clearly I’m the odd one out here. On to the next�
]]> Your House Will Pay 43615778
In the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager, Los Angeles is as tense as it’s been since the unrest of the early 1990s.ĚýProtests and vigils are being staged all over the city.ĚýIt’s in this dangerous tinderbox that two families must finally confront their pasts.

Grace Park lives a sheltered existence: living at home with her Korean-immigrant parents, working at the family pharmacy, and trying her best to understand why her sister Miriam hasn’t spoken to their mother in years.ĚýThe chasm in her family is growing wider by the day and Grace is desperate for reconciliation, and frustrated by the feeling that her sister and parents are shielding her from the true cause of the falling out.

Shawn Matthews is dealing with a fractured family of his own.ĚýHis sister, Ava, was murdered as a teenager back in 1991, and this new shooting is bringing up painful memories.ĚýPlus, his cousin Ray is just released from prison and needs to reconnect with their family after so many years away. While Shawn is trying his best to keep his demons at bay, he’s not sure Ray can do the same.

When another shocking crime hits LA, the Parks and the Matthewses collide in ways they never could have expected.ĚýAfter decades of loss, violence, and injustice, tensions come to a head and force a reckoning that could clear the air or lead to more violence.]]> 304 Steph Cha 0062868853 Jessica 0 4.08 2019 Your House Will Pay
author: Steph Cha
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/28
date added: 2024/01/28
shelves:
review:

]]> Happiness Falls 75495002 When a father goes missing, his family's desperate search leads them to question everything they know about him and one another--both a riveting page-turner and a deeply moving portrait of a family in crisis from the award-winning author of Miracle Creek.

"We didn't call the police right away." Those are the first words of this extraordinary novel about a biracial Korean-American family in Virginia whose lives are upended when their beloved father and husband goes missing.

Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything--which is why she isn't initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don't return from a walk in a nearby park. They must have lost their phone. Or stopped for an errand somewhere. But by the time Mia's brother runs through the front door bloody and alone, it becomes clear that the father in this tight-knit family is missing and the only witness is Eugene, who has the rare genetic condition Angelman syndrome and cannot speak.

What follows is both a ticking-clock investigation into the whereabouts of a father and an emotionally rich portrait of a family whose most personal secrets just may be at the heart of his disappearance. Full of shocking twists and fascinating questions of love, language, race, and human connection, Happiness Falls is a mystery, a family drama, and a novel of profound philosophical inquiry. With all the powerful storytelling she brought to her award-winning debut Miracle Creek, Angie Kim turns the missing person story into something wholly original, creating an indelible tale of a family who must go to remarkable lengths to truly understand one another.]]> 387 Angie Kim 0593448200 Jessica 3 3.72 2023 Happiness Falls
author: Angie Kim
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/17
date added: 2024/01/17
shelves:
review:

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

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

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

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

Based on the history of a real reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped and destroyed the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative by a great American novelist whose work is essential to understanding the current reality of the United States.]]> 213 Colson Whitehead Jessica 3 4.25 2019 The Nickel Boys
author: Colson Whitehead
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/08
date added: 2024/01/17
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury]]> 62039162 A memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America.

To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two world wars and the depression that connected them had unleashed a torrent of expectations and dissatisfactions--not only in global affairs but in American society and Americans' lives.

To be a privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was to be expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For young Drew Gilpin Faust, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial privilege proved intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become "well adjusted" and to fill the role of a poised young lady that her upbringing imposed, she found resistance was the necessary price of survival. During the 1960s, through her love of learning and her active engagement in the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements, Faust forged a path of her own--one that would eventually lead her to become a historian of the very conflicts that were instrumental in shaping the world she grew up in.

Culminating in the upheavals of 1968, Necessary Trouble captures a time of rapid change and fierce reaction in one young woman's life, tracing the transformations and aftershocks that we continue to grapple with today.

Includes black-and-white images]]> 320 Drew Gilpin Faust 0374601801 Jessica 3 3.92 2023 Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury
author: Drew Gilpin Faust
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/17
date added: 2024/01/17
shelves:
review:

]]> I Have Some Questions for You 61053829
But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn't as much of an outsider at Granby as she'd thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.]]> 438 Rebecca Makkai 0593490142 Jessica 0 dnf 3.57 2023 I Have Some Questions for You
author: Rebecca Makkai
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/09
shelves: dnf
review:

]]> All My Rage 60015448 New York Times bestselling author Sabaa Tahir comes a brilliant, unforgettable, and heart-wrenching contemporary novel about family and forgiveness, love and loss, in a sweeping story that crosses generations and continents.

Lahore, Pakistan. Then.
Misbah is a dreamer and storyteller, newly married to Toufiq in an arranged match. After their young life is shaken by tragedy, they come to the United States and open the Clouds' Rest Inn Motel, hoping for a new start.

Juniper, California. Now.
Salahudin and Noor are more than best friends; they are family. Growing up as outcasts in the small desert town of Juniper, California, they understand each other the way no one else does. Until The Fight, which destroys their bond with the swift fury of a star exploding.

Now, Sal scrambles to run the family motel as his mother Misbah's health fails and his grieving father loses himself to alcoholism. Noor, meanwhile, walks a harrowing tightrope: working at her wrathful uncle's liquor store while hiding the fact that she's applying to college so she can escape him--and Juniper--forever.

When Sal's attempts to save the motel spiral out of control, he and Noor must ask themselves what friendship is worth--and what it takes to defeat the monsters in their pasts and the ones in their midst.

From one of today's most cherished and bestselling young adult authors comes a breathtaking novel of young love, old regrets, and forgiveness--one that's both tragic and poignant in its tender ferocity.]]> 400 Sabaa Tahir 0593202368 Jessica 5 4.51 2022 All My Rage
author: Sabaa Tahir
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/08
date added: 2024/01/08
shelves:
review:

]]> The Guest 61986136 A young woman pretends to be someone she isn't in this stunning novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls.

Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome.

A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she's been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city.

With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarified world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.

Taut, propulsive, and impossible to look away from, Emma Cline's The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.]]> 304 Emma Cline 0812998626 Jessica 5 3.29 2023 The Guest
author: Emma Cline
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/05
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves:
review:
I get why this book wouldn’t be a lot of people’s cup of tea- it’s stressful, the main character isn’t exactly likable, and the ending is abrupt, and there is a lot left unsaid..but if I couldn’t get enough of Emma Clines prose and story building. This is a new favorite for sure.
]]> Stoner 166997
John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.]]> 292 John Williams 1590171993 Jessica 5 4.35 1965 Stoner
author: John Williams
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1965
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/03
date added: 2024/01/03
shelves:
review:

]]> Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2) 90202302 “The first year is when some of us lose our lives. The second year is when the rest of us lose our humanity.� —Xaden Riorson

Everyone expected Violet Sorrengail to die during her first year at Basgiath War College—Violet included. But Threshing was only the first impossible test meant to weed out the weak-willed, the unworthy, and the unlucky.

Now the real training begins, and Violet’s already wondering how she’ll get through. It’s not just that it’s grueling and maliciously brutal, or even that it’s designed to stretch the riders� capacity for pain beyond endurance. It’s the new vice commandant, who’s made it his personal mission to teach Violet exactly how powerless she is–unless she betrays the man she loves.

Although Violet’s body might be weaker and frailer than everyone else’s, she still has her wits—and a will of iron. And leadership is forgetting the most important lesson Basgiath has taught her: Dragon riders make their own rules.

But a determination to survive won’t be enough this year.

Because Violet knows the real secret hidden for centuries at Basgiath War College—and nothing, not even dragon fire, may be enough to save them in the end.]]> 623 Rebecca Yarros 1649374178 Jessica 3 4.33 2023 Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2)
author: Rebecca Yarros
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/03
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls]]> 40242278 260 Lisa Damour 0399180060 Jessica 4 4.32 2019 Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls
author: Lisa Damour
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/31
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves:
review:

]]> Here Goes Nothing: A Novel 52556989 112 Eamon McGrath 1770414436 Jessica 3 2.44 Here Goes Nothing: A Novel
author: Eamon McGrath
name: Jessica
average rating: 2.44
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/31
date added: 2023/12/31
shelves:
review:

]]> All the Sinners Bleed 61884832 A Black sheriff. A serial killer. A small town ready to combust.

Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, Charon has had only two murders. After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface.

Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. Those festering secrets are now out in the open and ready to tear the town apart.

As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon. With the killer’s possible connections to a local church and the town’s harrowing history weighing on him, Titus projects confidence about closing the case while concealing a painful secret from his own past. At the same time, he also has to contend with a far-right group that wants to hold a parade in celebration of the town’s Confederate history.

Powerful and unforgettable, All the Sinners Bleed confirms S. A. Cosby as “one of the most muscular, distinctive, grab-you-by-both-ears voices in American crime fiction� (The Washington Post).]]> 338 S.A. Cosby 1250831911 Jessica 4 4.19 2023 All the Sinners Bleed
author: S.A. Cosby
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/29
date added: 2023/12/29
shelves:
review:

]]> The Woman in Me 63133205 The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.

In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history.

Written with remarkable candor and humor, Spears’s groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love—and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.]]> 288 Britney Spears 1668009048 Jessica 3 3.83 2023 The Woman in Me
author: Britney Spears
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/14
date added: 2023/12/14
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut]]> 58527303 Cutting ties with a toxic family member is a crucial step away from a legacy of dysfunction and toward healing and happiness. This compassionate guide will help you embrace your decision with a sense of pride, validation, and faith in yourself; and provides powerful tools for creating boundaries, coping with judgment, and overcoming self-doubt.

Do you have a toxic family member? Do you feel like cutting ties with this person—even as painful and scary as that may sound—would dramatically increase your well-being and improve your life? You're not alone. Severing ties with a family member can be devastating; and cutting this toxic person out of your life may bring up feelings of guilt and uncertainty—especially if you feel judged by others regarding your decision. Fortunately, you can free yourself from this toxic family member in a healthy, responsible, and liberating way.

In Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members, psychologist and toxic-family survivor Sherrie Campbell offers effective strategies for setting strong boundaries after ending contact with a toxic family member, and provides powerful tools to help you heal from shame, self-doubt, and stigma. You'll find the validation you need to embrace your decision with pride and acknowledgement of your self-worth. You'll learn how to let go of negative thoughts and feelings. And finally, you'll develop the skills needed to rediscover self-care, self-love, self-reliance, and healthy loving relationships.

Whether you're ready to sever ties with a toxic family member, or already have, this book will help guide you, every step of the way.]]> 224 Sherrie Campbell 1684039282 Jessica 4 4.30 Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut
author: Sherrie Campbell
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.30
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2023/12/10
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Freaks, Gleeks, and Dawson's Creek: How Seven Teen Shows Transformed Television]]> 62873960 The untold stories of seven revolutionary teen shows (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, My So-Called Life, Dawson’s Creek, Freaks and Geeks, The O.C., Friday Night Lights, and Glee) that shaped the course of modern television and our pop cultural landscape forever.

The modern television landscape is defined by influential and ambitious shows for and about teenagers. Groundbreaking series like Euphoria, Sex Education, andĚýPen15Ěýdominate awards season and lead the way when it comes to progressive, diverse, and creative storytelling. So how did we get here from Beverly Hills, 90210?

In Freaks, Gleeks, and Dawson’s Creek, entertainment journalist Thea Glassman takes readers behind the scenes of seven of the most culturally significant series of the last three decades, drawing on dozens of new interviews with showrunners, cast, crewmembers, and more. These shows not only launched the careers of such superstars as Will Smith, Michael B. Jordan, Claire Danes, and Seth Rogen, but they also took young people seriously, proving that teen TV could be smart, revolutionary, and “important”—and stay firmly entrenched in pop culture long after it finished airing. And while many critics insist that prestige dramas likeĚýThe Sopranos and Mad MenĚýpaved the way for television, some of the most groundbreaking work was actually happening inside the fictional hallways of high schools across America in teen shows whoseĚýimpact remains visible on our screens today.]]> 241 Thea Glassman 1668628228 Jessica 4 3.82 2023 Freaks, Gleeks, and Dawson's Creek: How Seven Teen Shows Transformed Television
author: Thea Glassman
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/08
date added: 2023/12/08
shelves:
review:

]]> The Personal Librarian 55333938 This is a previously-published edition of ISBN 9780593101537.

The remarkable, little-known story of Belle da Costa Greene, J. P. Morgan's personal librarian—who became one of the most powerful women in New York despite the dangerous secret she kept in order to make her dreams come true, from New York Times bestselling author Marie Benedict and acclaimed author Victoria Christopher Murray.

In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture on the New York society scene and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps build a world-class collection.

But Belle has a secret, one she must protect at all costs. She was born not Belle da Costa Greene but Belle Marion Greener. She is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and a well-known advocate for equality. Belle's complexion isn't dark because of her alleged Portuguese heritage that lets her pass as white—her complexion is dark because she is African American.

The Personal Librarian tells the story of an extraordinary woman, famous for her intellect, style, and wit, and shares the lengths to which she must go—for the protection of her family and her legacy—to preserve her carefully crafted white identity in the racist world in which she lives.]]> 341 Marie Benedict Jessica 3 3.98 2021 The Personal Librarian
author: Marie Benedict
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/02
date added: 2023/12/02
shelves:
review:

]]> Mad Honey 59912428 A soul-stirring novel about what we choose to keep from our past, and what we choose to leave behind.

Olivia McAfee knows what it feels like to start over. Her picture-perfect life—living in Boston, married to a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon, raising a beautiful son, Asher—was upended when her husband revealed a darker side. She never imagined she would end up back in her sleepy New Hampshire hometown, living in the house she grew up in, and taking over her father's beekeeping business.

Lily Campanello is familiar with do-overs, too. When she and her mom relocate to Adams, New Hampshire, for her final year of high school, they both hope it will be a fresh start.

And for just a short while, these new beginnings are exactly what Olivia and Lily need. Their paths cross when Asher falls for the new girl in school, and Lily ł¦˛ą˛Ô’t help but fall for him, too. With Ash, she feels happy for the first time. Yet at times, she wonders if she can she trust him completely . . .

Then one day, Olivia receives a phone call: Lily is dead, and Asher is being questioned by the police. Olivia is adamant that her son is innocent. But she would be lying if she didn’t acknowledge the flashes of his father’s temper in him, and as the case against him unfolds, she realizes he’s hidden more than he’s shared with her.

Mad Honey is a riveting novel of suspense, an unforgettable love story, and a moving and powerful exploration of the secrets we keep and the risks we take in order to become ourselves.]]> 464 Jodi Picoult 1984818384 Jessica 3 4.05 2022 Mad Honey
author: Jodi Picoult
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/20
date added: 2023/11/20
shelves:
review:

]]> If You Would Have Told Me 77920725 New York Times Bestseller

�...I love him, and I respect him, and I need him. We all do.�
—from the foreword by Jamie Lee Curtis

If you would have told a young John Stamos flipping burgers at his dad’s fast-food joint that one day he’d be a household name and that, at the height of his success, he’d be living alone, divorced, with no kids, high on a cocktail of forgetting, he might’ve asked, “You want fries with that?�

John burst onto the scene in General Hospital, propelling him into the teen idol stratosphere, a place that’s often a point of no return. But Stamos beat the odds and over the past four decades has proved himself to be one of his generation’s most successful and beloved actors. Whether showing off his comedic chops on Full House or his dramatic skills on ER, pushing the boundaries on Broadway or living out his youthful dreams as an honorary Beach Boy, John has surprised everyone, most of all himself.

A universal story about friendship, love, loss, and the courage to embrace love once more, John Stamos’s memoir is filled with some of the most memorable names in Hollywood, both old and new. Funny, deeply poignant, and brutally honest, If You Would Have Told Me is a portrait of a boy who went from believing in Disney magic to a man who learns that we have to create our own magical moments in life.]]> 333 John Stamos 1250890977 Jessica 4 3.78 2023 If You Would Have Told Me
author: John Stamos
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/19
date added: 2023/11/19
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening]]> 61357874 256 Ari Shapiro 0063221349 Jessica 4 4.00 2023 The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening
author: Ari Shapiro
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/08
date added: 2023/11/08
shelves:
review:

]]> Tom Lake 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

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

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X Jessica 5 3.92 2023 Tom Lake
author: Ann Patchett
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/11/04
date added: 2023/11/04
shelves:
review:

]]> <![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]]> 528 Rebecca Yarros 1649374046 Jessica 3 4.56 2023 Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1)
author: Rebecca Yarros
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/01
date added: 2023/11/01
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI]]> 29496076 Ěý
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

Then, one by one, they began to be killed off. One Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, watched as her family was murdered. Her older sister was shot. Her mother was then slowly poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances.

In this last remnant of the Wild West—where oilmen like J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes such as Al Spencer, “the Phantom Terror,� roamed � virtually anyone who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll surpassed more than twenty-four Osage, the newly created F.B.I. took up the case, in what became one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations. But the bureau was then notoriously corrupt and initially bungled the case. Eventually the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only Native American agents in the bureau. They infiltrated the region, struggling to adopt the latest modern techniques of detection. Together with the Osage they began to expose one of the most sinister conspiracies in American history.

In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann revisits a shocking series of crimes in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. The book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, as each step in the investigation reveals a series of sinister secrets and reversals. But more than that, it is a searing indictment of the callousness and prejudice toward Native Americans that allowed the murderers to operate with impunity for so long. Killers of the Flower Moon is utterly riveting, but also emotionally devastating.]]> 359 David Grann 0385534256 Jessica 4 4.12 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
author: David Grann
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/16
date added: 2023/10/16
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (American Music Series)]]> 41864516 The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders. Seventeen years after their last album, they resurrected themselves with an intense, socially conscious record, We Got It from Here . . . Thank You 4 Your Service, which arrived when fans needed it most, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib digs into the group's history and draws from his own experience to reflect on how its distinctive sound resonated among fans like himself. The result is as ambitious and genre-bending as the rap group itself.

Abdurraqib traces the Tribe's creative career, from their early days as part of the Afrocentric rap collective known as the Native Tongues, through their first three classic albums, to their eventual breakup and long hiatus. Their work is placed in the context of the broader rap landscape of the 1990s, one upended by sampling laws that forced a reinvention in production methods, the East Coast-West Coast rivalry that threatened to destroy the genre, and some record labels' shift from focusing on groups to individual MCs. Throughout the narrative Abdurraqib connects the music and cultural history to their street-level impact. Whether he's remembering The Source magazine cover announcing the Tribe's 1998 breakup or writing personal letters to the group after bandmate Phife Dawg's death, Abdurraqib seeks the deeper truths of A Tribe Called Quest; truths that--like the low end, the bass--are not simply heard in the head, but felt in the chest.]]> 207 Hanif Abdurraqib 1477316485 Jessica 4 4.47 2019 Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (American Music Series)
author: Hanif Abdurraqib
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/10
date added: 2023/10/10
shelves:
review:

]]> The House Is on Fire 61273814 The author of Florence Adler Swims Forever returns with a masterful work of historical fiction about an incendiary tragedy that shocked a young nation and tore apart a community in a single night—told from the perspectives of four people whose actions during the inferno changed the course of history.

Richmond, Virginia 1811. It’s the height of the winter social season. The General Assembly is in session, and many of Virginia’s gentleman planters, along with their wives and children, have made the long and arduous journey to the capital in hopes of whiling away the darkest days of the year. At the city’s only theater, the Charleston-based Placide & Green Company puts on two plays a night to meet the demand of a populace that’s done looking for enlightenment in a church.

On the night after Christmas, the theater is packed with more than six hundred holiday revelers. In the third-floor boxes, sits newly widowed Sally Henry Campbell, who is glad for any opportunity to relive the happy times she shared with her husband. One floor away, in the colored gallery, Cecily Patterson doesn’t give a whit about the play but is grateful for a four-hour reprieve from a life that has recently gone from bad to worse. Backstage, young stagehand Jack Gibson hopes that, if he can impress the theater’s managers, he’ll be offered a permanent job with the company. And on the other side of town, blacksmith Gilbert Hunt dreams of one day being able to bring his wife to the theater, but he’ll have to buy her freedom first.

When the theater goes up in flames in the middle of the performance, Sally, Cecily, Jack, and Gilbert make a series of split-second decisions that will not only affect their own lives but those of countless others. And in the days following the fire, as news of the disaster spreads across the United States, the paths of these four people will become forever intertwined.

Based on the true story of Richmond’s theater fire, The House Is on Fire offers proof that sometimes, in the midst of great tragedy, we are offered our most precious—and fleeting—chances at redemption.]]> 376 Rachel Beanland 1982186143 Jessica 5 4.07 2023 The House Is on Fire
author: Rachel Beanland
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/09
date added: 2023/10/09
shelves:
review:

]]> Deacon King Kong 51045613 The funny, sharp, and surprising story of the shooting of a Brooklyn drug dealer and the people who witnessed it—from James McBride, author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird

In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known in the neighborhood as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Causeway Housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range.

The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride's novel and his first since his National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird. In McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local NYPD cops assigned to investigate what happened, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood's Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.

As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters—caught in the tumultuous swirl of New York in the late 1960s—overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth finally emerges, McBride shows us that not all secrets can be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in compassion and hope.]]> 370 James McBride 073521672X Jessica 0 4.11 2020 Deacon King Kong
author: James McBride
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2023/09/27
date added: 2023/09/27
shelves:
review:

]]> Bel Canto 40222562 Now a major motion picture starring Julianne Moore and Ken Watanabe.

Ann Patchett’s award winning, bestselling novel that balances themes of love and crisis as disparate characters learn that music is their only common language—now a major motion picture starring Julianne Moore and Ken Watanabe.

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing.

It is a perfect evening—until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots, intimate friends, and lovers.

Ěý]]> 352 Ann Patchett 0062891901 Jessica 4 3.85 2001 Bel Canto
author: Ann Patchett
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/15
date added: 2023/09/15
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Caesar's Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us]]> 32940866
In Caesar's Last Breath, New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean takes us on a journey through the periodic table, around the globe, and across time to tell the story of the air we breathe, which, it turns out, is also the story of earth and our existence on it.

With every breath, you literally inhale the history of the world. On the ides of March, 44 BC, Julius Caesar died of stab wounds on the Senate floor, but the story of his last breath is still unfolding; in fact, you're probably inhaling some of it now. Of the sextillions of molecules entering or leaving your lungs at this moment, some might well bear traces of Cleopatra's perfumes, German mustard gas, particles exhaled by dinosaurs or emitted by atomic bombs, even remnants of stardust from the universe's creation.

Tracing the origins and ingredients of our atmosphere, Kean reveals how the alchemy of air reshaped our continents, steered human progress, powered revolutions, and continues to influence everything we do. Along the way, we'll swim with radioactive pigs, witness the most important chemical reactions humans have discovered, and join the crowd at the Moulin Rouge for some of the crudest performance art of all time. Lively, witty, and filled with the astounding science of ordinary life, Caesar's Last Breath illuminates the science stories swirling around us every second.]]> 384 Sam Kean 0316381640 Jessica 4 4.24 2017 Caesar's Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us
author: Sam Kean
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2023/09/07
date added: 2023/09/07
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Good Talk, Dad: The Birds and the Bees...and Other Conversations We Forgot to Have]]> 18453450 250 Bill Geist 1455547204 Jessica 4 3.86 2014 Good Talk, Dad: The Birds and the Bees...and Other Conversations We Forgot to Have
author: Bill Geist
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/26
date added: 2023/08/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The City We Became (Great Cities, #1)]]> 42074525
Every city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York City? She's got five.

But every city also has a dark side. A roiling, ancient evil stirs beneath the earth, threatening to destroy the city and her five protectors unless they can come together and stop it once and for all.]]> 437 N.K. Jemisin Jessica 0 revisiting-later 3.83 2020 The City We Became (Great Cities, #1)
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/08/26
shelves: revisiting-later
review:

]]> The Sense of an Ending 10746542 An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse.

This intense novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about - until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he'd left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he'd understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes's oeuvre.]]> 150 Julian Barnes 0224094157 Jessica 3 3.73 2011 The Sense of an Ending
author: Julian Barnes
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2023/04/18
date added: 2023/07/29
shelves:
review:

]]> The Book of Two Ways 58354662
Dawn, miraculously, survives the crash, but so do all the doubts that have suddenly been raised. She has led a good life. Back in Boston, there is her husband, Brian, her beloved daughter, and her work as a death doula, where she helps ease the transition between life and death for patients in hospice.

But somewhere in Egypt is Wyatt Armstrong, who works as an archaeologist unearthing ancient burial sites, a job she once studied for, but was forced to abandon when life suddenly intervened. And now, when it seems that fate is offering her second chances, she is not as sure of the choice she once made.

After the crash landing, the airline ensures the survivors are seen by a doctor, then offers transportation wherever they want to go. The obvious option for Dawn is to continue down the path she is on and go home to her family. The other is to return to the archaeological site she left years before, reconnect with Wyatt and their unresolved history, and maybe even complete her research on The Book of Two Ways--the first known map of the afterlife.

As the story unfolds, Dawn's two possible futures unspool side by side, as do the secrets and doubts long buried beside them. Dawn must confront the questions she's never truly asked: What does a life well-lived look like? When we leave this earth, what do we leave behind? Do we make choices...or do our choices make us? And who would you be, if you hadn't turned out to be the person you are right now?]]> 406 Jodi Picoult 1984818376 Jessica 4 3.63 2020 The Book of Two Ways
author: Jodi Picoult
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/27
date added: 2023/07/29
shelves:
review:

]]> Book Lovers 58690308 One summer. Two rivals. A plot twist they didn't see coming....

Nora Stephens� life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby.

Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters� trip away—with visions of a small-town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute.

If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again—in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow—what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.]]> 377 Emily Henry 0593334833 Jessica 0 revisiting-later 4.09 2022 Book Lovers
author: Emily Henry
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/22
shelves: revisiting-later
review:

]]> Memphis 52268640
Summer 1995: Ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father’s explosive temper and seek refuge at her mother’s ancestral home in Memphis. This is not the first time violence has altered the course of the family’s trajectory. Half a century earlier, Joan’s grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglass—only to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city. Joan tries to settle into her new life, but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected.

As she grows up, Joan finds relief in her artwork, painting portraits of the community in Memphis. One of her subjects is their enigmatic neighbor Miss Dawn, who claims to know something about curses, and whose stories about the past help Joan see how her passion, imagination, and relentless hope are, in fact, the continuation of a long matrilineal tradition. Joan begins to understand that her mother, her mother’s mother, and the mothers before them persevered, made impossible choices, and put their dreams on hold so that her life would not have to be defined by loss and anger—that the sole instrument she needs for healing is her paintbrush.

Unfolding over seventy years through a chorus of unforgettable voices that move back and forth in time, Memphis paints an indelible portrait of inheritance, celebrating the full complexity of what we pass down, in a family and as a country: brutality and justice, faith and forgiveness, sacrifice and love.]]> 272 Tara M. Stringfellow 0593230485 Jessica 4 4.05 2022 Memphis
author: Tara M. Stringfellow
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/22
date added: 2023/07/22
shelves:
review:

]]> Blacktop Wasteland 51182571
After a series of financial calamities (worsened by the racial prejudices of the small town he lives in) Bug reluctantly takes part in a daring diamond heist to solve his money troubles - and to go straight once and for all. However, when it goes horrifically wrong, he's sucked into a grimy underworld which threatens everything, and everyone, he holds dear . . .]]> 285 S.A. Cosby Jessica 4 4.06 2020 Blacktop Wasteland
author: S.A. Cosby
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/16
date added: 2023/07/16
shelves:
review:

]]> Pageboy 60473073 Pageboy is a groundbreaking coming-of-age memoir from the Academy Award-nominated actor Elliot Page. A generation-defining actor and one of the most famous trans advocates of our time, Elliot will now be known as an uncommon literary talent, as he shares never-before-heard details and intimate interrogations on gender, love, mental health, relationships, and Hollywood.]]> 271 Elliot Page Jessica 4 3.72 2023 Pageboy
author: Elliot Page
name: Jessica
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/06/23
date added: 2023/06/23
shelves:
review:

]]> The Wreckage of My Presence 54798456 Laugh-out-loud, deeply insightful, and emotion-filled essays from multi-talented actress, comedian, podcaster, and writer Casey Wilson.

Casey Wilson has a lot on her mind and she isn’t afraid to share. In this dazzling collection of essays, skillfully constructed and brimming with emotion, she shares her thoughts on the joys and vagaries of modern-day womanhood and motherhood, introduces the not-quite-typical family that made her who she is, and persuasively argues that lowbrow pop culture is the perfect lens through which to understand human nature.

Whether she’s extolling the virtues of eating in bed, processing the humiliation over her father’s late in life perm, or exploring her pathological need to be liked, Casey is witty, candid, and full of poignant and funny surprises. Humorous dives into her obsessions and areas of personal expertise—Scientology and self-help, nice guys, reality television shows—are matched by touching meditations on female friendship, grief, motherhood, and identity.Ěý

Reading The Wreckage of My Presence is like spending time with a close friend—a deeply passionate, full-tilt, joyous, excessive, compulsive, shameless, hungry-for-it-all, loyal, cheerleading friend. A friend who is ready for any big feeling that comes her way and isn’t afraid to embrace it.

Bed person --
The wreckage of my presence --
To all the boys I loved before --
Cool girl --
A saber story --
Send in the clowns --
Flyentology --
Hide your phones --
Expect a miracle --
Hiked out --
The BBQ --
Tears of a clown --
Happy endings --
My husband's just not that into me; or Afrin: a love story --
Grandpa's pretty girl --
It doesn't do --
What dis --
Open-door policy --
Mother's day --
People don't know how to act --
Gimme some sugar; or, the wreckage of my presence redux]]> 288 Casey Wilson 006296058X Jessica 5 4.13 2021 The Wreckage of My Presence
author: Casey Wilson
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/08
date added: 2023/06/08
shelves:
review:

]]> Half Broke Horses 6366437
"Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did." So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, Jeannette Walls's no nonsense, resourceful, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town -- riding five hundred miles on her pony, alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car ("I loved cars even more than I loved horses. They didn't need to be fed if they weren't working, and they didn't leave big piles of manure all over the place") and fly a plane. And, with her husband Jim, she ran a vast ranch in Arizona. She raised two children, one of whom is Jeannette's memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, unforgettably portrayed in The Glass Castle.

Lily survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy. She bristled at prejudice of all kinds -- against women, Native Americans, and anyone else who didn't fit the mold. Rosemary Smith Walls always told Jeannette that she was like her grandmother, and in this true-life novel, Jeannette Walls channels that kindred spirit. Half Broke Horses is Laura Ingalls Wilder for adults, as riveting and dramatic as Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa or Beryl Markham's West with the Night. Destined to become a classic, it will transfix audiences everywhere.]]> 272 Jeannette Walls 1416586288 Jessica 0 revisiting-later 4.07 2009 Half Broke Horses
author: Jeannette Walls
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/15
shelves: revisiting-later
review:

]]> Punch Me Up to the Gods 53968494 Punch Me Up to the Gods introduces a powerful new talent in Brian Broome, whose early years growing up in Ohio as a dark-skinnedĚýBlack boy harboring crushes on other boys propel forward this gorgeous, aching, and unforgettable debut. Brian’s recounting of his experiences—in all their cringe-worthy, hilarious, and heartbreaking glory—reveal a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in.

Indiscriminate sex and escalating drug use help to soothe his hurt, young psyche, usually to uproarious and devastating effect. A no-nonsense mother and broken father play crucial roles in our misfit’s origin story. But it is Brian’s voice in the retelling that shows the true depth of vulnerability for young Black boys that is often quietly near to bursting at the seams.

Cleverly framed around Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool,� the iconic and loving ode to Black boyhood, Punch Me Up to the Gods is at once playful, poignant, and wholly original. Broome’s writing brims with swagger and sensitivity, bringing an exquisite and fresh voice to ongoing cultural conversations about Blackness in America.]]> 250 Brian Broome 0358439108 Jessica 4 4.32 2021 Punch Me Up to the Gods
author: Brian Broome
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/09
date added: 2023/05/09
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself]]> 55782639
Healthy boundaries. We all know we should have them–in order to achieve work/life balance, cope with toxic people, and enjoy rewarding relationships with partners, friends, and family. But what do “healthy boundaries� really mean–and how can we successfully express our needs, say “no,� and be assertive without offending others?

Licensed counselor, sought-after relationship expert, and one of the most influential therapists on Instagram Nedra Glover Tawwab demystifies this complex topic for today’s world. In a relatable and inclusive tone, Set Boundaries, Find Peace presents simple-yet-powerful ways to establish healthy boundaries in all aspects of life. Rooted in the latest research and best practices used in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), these techniques help us identify and express our needs clearly and without apology–and unravel a root problem behind codependency, power struggles, anxiety, depression, burnout, and more.]]> 282 Nedra Glover Tawwab 0593192109 Jessica 4 4.25 2021 Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself
author: Nedra Glover Tawwab
name: Jessica
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/25
date added: 2023/04/25
shelves:
review:

]]>