Eavan's bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 28 Apr 2025 04:35:32 -0700 60 Eavan's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Die BrĂĽcke vom Goldenen Horn. 33367997 333 Emine Sevgi Ă–zdamar 3462031805 Eavan 0 to-read 3.88 1998 Die BrĂĽcke vom Goldenen Horn.
author: Emine Sevgi Ă–zdamar
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/28
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]]> Charlotte's Reject 217486756
Then it after weeks of bullying, a searing connection pulls Joseph and Charlotte into a mate bond, awakening heated instincts that tell them they belong together. Joseph thinks he's going crazy, but Charlotte gets pissed.

What happens when a mean girl with a wild side can’t help but fall for you? You get the most dangerous—and desirable—kisses of your life.

Charlotte’s Reject is an open door m/f shifter romance stuffed with high-calorie tropes from the 2 AM drive-thru. A female bully, her rejected mate, evil plots, and multiple brawls are in the bag. Plus nachos.]]> 398 K. R. Treadway Eavan 0 to-read 4.46 Charlotte's Reject
author: K. R. Treadway
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.46
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/24
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]]> Noli Me Tangere 1645545 Noli Me Tangere by Jose P. Rizal, national hero of the Philippines, is the novel with the greatest impact on Filipino political thinking in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as the widest influence on contemporary fiction, drama, opera, dance and film. Its popularity was rooted in its reflection of the times in which it was written, and has continued because of the characters Rizal created, set in situations that still ring true today.

Rizal finished the Noli in 1887, and published 2,000 copies in Berlin. Many thousands more have since circulated, in the original Spanish, and in translations into German, French, Chinese, English, Filipino, and other Philippine languages. The best known translations in English are those by Charles Derbyshire (1912) and Leon Ma. Guerrero (1961).

In this new translation, Soledad Lacson-Locsin, a bilingual writer, has restored the unpublished chapter about Elias and Salome, as well as the whole of the "Canto de Maria Clara," wishing her translation to be a faithful rendition of the original.]]> 452 José Rizal 9715691870 Eavan 0 to-read 4.26 1887 Noli Me Tangere
author: José Rizal
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1887
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Witch Roads (The Witch Roads, #1)]]> 217388109 Status is hereditary, class is bestowed, trust must be earned.

When an arrogant prince (and his equally arrogant entourage) gets stuck in Orledder Halt as part of brutal political intrigue, competent and sunny deputy courier Elen―once a child slave meant to shield noblemen from the poisonous Pall―is assigned to guide him through the hills to reach his destination.

When she warns him not to enter the haunted Spires, the prince doesn’t heed her advice, and the man who emerges from the towers isn’t the same man who entered.

The journey that follows is fraught with danger. Can a group taught to ignore and despise the lower classes survive with a mere deputy courier as their guide?

The Witch Roads is the latest epic novel by fan favorite, Kate Elliott.]]> 448 Kate Elliott 1250338611 Eavan 0 to-read 4.19 2025 The Witch Roads (The Witch Roads, #1)
author: Kate Elliott
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/12
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]]> Hunchback 214986269 A bombshell bestseller in Japan, a provocative, defiant debut novel about a young woman in a care home seeking autonomy and the full possibilities of her life.

Born with a congenital muscle disorder,ĚýShaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka's physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“If I were to live again, I’d want to be a high-class prostituteâ€�). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor. To her surprise, her new nurse accepts the dare, unleashing a series of events that will forever change Shaka's sense of herself as a woman in the world.

Hunchback has shaken Japanese literary culture with its skillful depiction of the physical body andĚýunrepentant humor. Winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, it's a feminist story about the dignity of an individual who insists on her right to make choices for herself, no matter the consequences. Formally creative and refreshingly unsentimental, Hunchback depicts the joy, anger, and desires of a woman demanding autonomy in a world that doesn't aways grant it to people like her. Full of wit, bite, and heart, this unforgettable novel reminds us all of the full potentialĚýof our lives, no matter the limitations we experience.]]> 112 Saou Ichikawa 0593734718 Eavan 0 to-read 3.51 2023 Hunchback
author: Saou Ichikawa
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/12
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]]> All the Lovers in the Night 59336625
As the long overdue change occurs, however, painful episodes from Fuyuko’s past surface and her behavior slips further and further beyond the pale. All the Lovers in the Night is acute and insightful, entertaining and engaging; it will make readers laugh, and it will make them cry, but it will also remind them, as only the best books do, that sometimes the pain is worth it.]]> 224 Mieko Kawakami 1609456998 Eavan 2 3.70 2011 All the Lovers in the Night
author: Mieko Kawakami
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2011
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/04/11
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Slow and offputting, but the happy ending is two single ladies and a baby, so I have to give it some points for that.
]]> Certain Dark Things 28220785
Atl needs to quickly escape the city, far from the rival narco-vampire clan relentlessly pursuing her. Her plan doesn't include Domingo, but little by little, Atl finds herself warming up to the scrappy young man and his undeniable charm. As the trail of corpses stretches behind her, local cops and crime bosses both start closing in.

Vampires, humans, cops, and criminals collide in the dark streets of Mexico City. Do Atl and Domingo even stand a chance of making it out alive? Or will the city devour them all?]]> 336 Silvia Moreno-Garcia 1250099080 Eavan 3 3.67 2016 Certain Dark Things
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/06
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]]> <![CDATA[To The Bright Edge of the World]]> 27917957 The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey's second novel is a breathtaking story of discovery and adventure, set at the end of the nineteenth century, and of a marriage tested by a closely held secret.

Colonel Allen Forrester receives the commission of a lifetime when he is charged to navigate Alaska's hitherto impassable Wolverine River, with only a small group of men. The Wolverine is the key to opening up Alaska and its huge reserves of gold to the outside world, but previous attempts have ended in tragedy.

For Forrester, the decision to accept this mission is even more difficult, as he is only recently married to Sophie, the wife he had perhaps never expected to find. Sophie is pregnant with their first child, and does not relish the prospect of a year in a military barracks while her husband embarks upon the journey of a lifetime. She has genuine cause to worry about her pregnancy, and it is with deep uncertainty about what their future holds that she and her husband part.

A story shot through with a darker but potent strand of the magic that illuminated The Snow Child, and with the sweep and insight that characterizes Rose Tremain's The Colour, this novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Eowyn Ivey singles her out as a major literary talent.]]> 417 Eowyn Ivey 0316242853 Eavan 0 to-read 4.10 2016 To The Bright Edge of the World
author: Eowyn Ivey
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Shipping News 7354
A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family, The Shipping News shows why E. Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.
(back cover)]]> 337 Annie Proulx 0743225422 Eavan 0 to-read 3.88 1993 The Shipping News
author: Annie Proulx
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[They Will Know Me By My Teeth: Stories and Poems of Lesbian Struggle, Celebration, And Survival]]> 170203409 117 Elana Dykewoman Eavan 2 2.00 They Will Know Me By My Teeth: Stories and Poems of Lesbian Struggle, Celebration, And Survival
author: Elana Dykewoman
name: Eavan
average rating: 2.00
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
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Picked up while browsing at Quatrefoil. A collection of poetry and short stories. Feels mean saying this about something so personal and heartfelt, but I don't think it's very good. The book is blessedly short if we're being honest.
]]> Hood 18881573 A tale of grief and lust, frustration and hilarity, death and family

Penelope O’Grady and Cara Wall are risking disaster when, like teenagers in any intolerant time and place—here, a Dublin convent school in the late 1970s—they fall in love. Yet Cara, the free spirit, and Pen, the stoic, craft a bond so strong it seems as though nothing could sever it: not the bickering, not the secrets, not even Cara’s infidelities.

But thirteen years on, a car crash kills Cara and rips the lid off Pen’s world. Pen is still in the closet, teaching at her old school, living under the roof of Cara’s gentle father, who thinks of her as his daughter’s friend. How can she survive widowhood without even daring to claim the word? Over the course of one surreal week of bereavement, she is battered by memories that range from the humiliating, to the exalted, to the erotic, to the funny. It will take Pen all her intelligence and wit to sort through her tumultuous past with Cara, and all the nerve she can muster to start remaking her life.

]]> 336 Emma Donoghue 0062316818 Eavan 3 3.50 1995 Hood
author: Emma Donoghue
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.50
book published: 1995
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/23
date added: 2025/03/29
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I couldn't help thinking that a ruthless editor might have pared this down to a short story in the New Yorker, but then we would have lost out on some darling metaphors, anecdotes, and turns of phrase. Not a book written for me (it's about grief, long-term relationships, and being a closeted lesbian in 20th-century Dublin), but you can trust Emma Donoghue to take any reader along for the ride.
]]> The Break 29220494 2016 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize finalist

When Stella, a young Métis mother, looks out her window one evening and spots someone in trouble on the Break � a barren field on an isolated strip of land outside her house � she calls the police to alert them to a possible crime.

In a series of shifting narratives, people who are connected, both directly and indirectly, with the victim � police, family, and friends � tell their personal stories leading up to that fateful night. Lou, a social worker, grapples with the departure of her live-in boyfriend. Cheryl, an artist, mourns the premature death of her sister Rain. Paulina, a single mother, struggles to trust her new partner. Phoenix, a homeless teenager, is released from a youth detention centre. Officer Scott, a Métis policeman, feels caught between two worlds as he patrols the city. Through their various perspectives a larger, more comprehensive story about lives of the residents in Winnipeg’s North End is exposed.

A powerful intergenerational family saga, The Break showcases Vermette’s abundant writing talent and positions her as an exciting new voice in Canadian literature.]]> 350 Katherena Vermette 1487001118 Eavan 3
The cast is large, mostly MĂ©tis women who are all one another's friends or family. They all have trauma and they're all working on healing. There is a trigger warning at the beginning of the novel and I would say that's a good call. It gets a little graphic in a few places, but in a way that actually does feel necessary.

The style is a little too MFA grad for me, but unlike a lot of MFA grads she has a story to tell. Multiple stories. I do think that her desire to pack a lot of people's stories into one novel results in thin characterization. You get Lou who's the tough one, Paul who's the fragile one, the grandmother who's... the grandmother. Etc. ]]> 4.29 2016 The Break
author: Katherena Vermette
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/14
date added: 2025/03/29
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I read this, by complete coincidence, on Canadian Thanksgiving. Which also happened to be the first wintry-feeling day where I live, so the frequent references to cold (characters shivering, getting frostbite, stumbling in snow) were more effective than they would have been a week ago.

The cast is large, mostly MĂ©tis women who are all one another's friends or family. They all have trauma and they're all working on healing. There is a trigger warning at the beginning of the novel and I would say that's a good call. It gets a little graphic in a few places, but in a way that actually does feel necessary.

The style is a little too MFA grad for me, but unlike a lot of MFA grads she has a story to tell. Multiple stories. I do think that her desire to pack a lot of people's stories into one novel results in thin characterization. You get Lou who's the tough one, Paul who's the fragile one, the grandmother who's... the grandmother. Etc.
]]> <![CDATA[Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World]]> 138505710
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us―and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.]]> 416 Naomi Klein 0374610320 Eavan 3 4.21 2023 Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
author: Naomi Klein
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport 65211707
Lina, a daughter of failed revolutionaries, has no desire to escape Shantiport. She loves her city and would do anything to save its people. This is, in fact, the plan for her life, made before she was even born.

Her brother, Bador, is a small monkey bot with a big attitude and bigger ambitions. He wants a chance to leave this dead-end planet and explore the universe on his own terms. But that would mean abandoning the family he loves―even if they do take him for granted.

When Shantiport's resident tech billionaire coerces Lina into retrieving a powerful artifact rumored to be able to reshape reality, forces from before their time begin coalescing around the siblings. And when you throw in a piece of sentient, off-world tech with the ability to grant three wishes into the mix� None of the city's powers will know what hit them.]]> 404 Samit Basu 1250827515 Eavan 2 3.53 2023 The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport
author: Samit Basu
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2023
rating: 2
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> Translation State 62873999
Qven was created to be a Presger translator. The pride of their Clade, they always had a clear path before them: learn human ways, and eventually, make a match and serve as an intermediary between the dangerous alien Presger and the human worlds. The realization that they might want something else isn't "optimal behavior". I's the type of behavior that results in elimination.

But Qven rebels. And in doing so, their path collides with those of two others. Enae, a reluctant diplomat whose dead grandmaman has left hir an impossible task as an inheritance: hunting down a fugitive who has been missing for over 200 years. And Reet, an adopted mechanic who is increasingly desperate to learn about his genetic roots--or anything that might explain why he operates so differently from those around him.

As a Conclave of the various species approaches--and the long-standing treaty between the humans and the Presger is on the line--the decisions of all three will have ripple effects across the stars.

Masterfully merging space adventure and mystery, and a poignant exploration about relationships and belonging, Translation State is a standalone story set in Leckie's celebrated Imperial Radch universe.]]> 422 Ann Leckie 031628971X Eavan 2 3.96 2023 Translation State
author: Ann Leckie
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2023
rating: 2
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Super-sticky WeChat and Chinese Society (Emerald Points)]]> 41807922 0 Yujie Chen 1787439445 Eavan 2 3.00 Super-sticky WeChat and Chinese Society (Emerald Points)
author: Yujie Chen
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 2
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> Carmilla 48037
But as Carmilla becomes increasingly strange and volatile, prone to eerie nocturnal wanderings, Laura finds herself tormented by nightmares and growing weaker by the day� Pre-dating Dracula by twenty-six years, Carmilla is the original vampire story, steeped in sexual tension and gothic romance.]]> 108 J. Sheridan Le Fanu 0809510839 Eavan 2
There is certainly a lot of evil kissing, if you're into that. ]]> 3.88 1872 Carmilla
author: J. Sheridan Le Fanu
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1872
rating: 2
read at: 2024/02/16
date added: 2025/03/29
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Predictable and repetitive buildup to an abrupt denouement. There's no mystery whatsoever about who Carmilla is and what she does, so reading the story is a matter of waiting for the inevitable.

There is certainly a lot of evil kissing, if you're into that.
]]> <![CDATA[Seasparrow (Graceling Realm, #5)]]> 57503085 The fifth novel in the bestselling and award winning Graceling Realm series focuses on Hava, Queen Bitterblue's spy, and her harrowing journey back to Monsea after the events of 2021's Winterkeep.

In the immediate aftermath of the events of Winterkeep, Bitterblue and her entourage begin the journey back to Monsea with the only copies of the formulas for the zilphium weapon. Bitterblue must decide what she will do with her world-shaping power. But before they've even made it halfway home, storms drive their ship off course and then wrecking them in the ice far north of the Royal Continent. The survivors must make a harrowing trek across the ice in order to make it back to Monsea.

Seasparrow is told entirely from the point of view of Hava, Bitterblue's personal spy and secret half-sister. And while Bitterblue grapples with how to carry the responsibility of a weapon of mass destruction, Hava must decide what she will do with herself in the new world Bitterblue will make.]]> 624 Kristin Cashore 0593616030 Eavan 3 4.06 2022 Seasparrow (Graceling Realm, #5)
author: Kristin Cashore
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Managing Up: How to Move Up, Win at Work, and Succeed with Any Type of Boss]]> 39107310 276 Mary Abbajay 1119437164 Eavan 0 3.77 2018 Managing Up: How to Move Up, Win at Work, and Succeed with Any Type of Boss
author: Mary Abbajay
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> The Book of Tea 904538 Now available in a gorgeous hardcover slipcase edition, this "object d'art" will be sure to add grace and elegance to tea shelves, coffee tables and bookshelves. A keepsake enjoyed by tea lovers for over a hundred years, The Book of Tea Classic Edition will enhance your enjoyment and understanding of the seemingly simple act of making and drinking tea.

In 1906 in turn-of-the-century Boston, a small, esoteric book about tea was written with the intention of being read aloud in the famous salon of Isabella Gardner, Boston's most notorious socialite. It was authored by Okakura Kakuzo, a Japanese philosopher, art expert, and curator. Little known at the time, Kakuzo would emerge as one of the great thinkers of the early 20th century, a genius who was insightful, witty—and greatly responsible for bridging Western and Eastern cultures. Okakura had been taught at a young age to speak English and was more than capable of expressing to Westerners the nuances of tea and the Japanese Tea Ceremony.

In The Book of Tea Classic Edition, he discusses such topics as Zen and Taoism, but also the secular aspects of tea and Japanese life. The book emphasizes how Teaism taught the Japanese many things; most importantly, simplicity. Kakuzo argues that tea-induced simplicity affected the culture, art and architecture of Japan.

Nearly a century later, Kakuzo's The Book of Tea Classic Edition is still beloved the world over, making it an essential part of any tea enthusiast's collection. Interwoven with a rich history of Japanese tea and its place in Japanese society is a poignant commentary on Asian culture and our ongoing fascination with it, as well as illuminating essays on art, spirituality, poetry, and more. The Book of Tea Classic Edition is a delightful cup of enlightenment from a man far ahead of his time.]]> 133 KakuzĹŤ Okakura 0804800693 Eavan 0 3.91 1906 The Book of Tea
author: KakuzĹŤ Okakura
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1906
rating: 0
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]]> Violeta 57933338 The epic story of Violeta del Valle, a woman whose life spans one hundred years and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century.

Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family of five boisterous sons. From the start, her life will be marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth.

Through her father's prescience, the family will come through that crisis unscathed, only to face a new one as the Great Depression transforms the genteel city life she has known. Her family loses all and is forced to retreat to a wild and beautiful but remote part of the country. There, she will come of age, and her first suitor will come calling. . . .

She tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves above all others, recounting devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, times of both poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy. Her life will be shaped by some of the most important events of history: the fight for women's rights, the rise and fall of tyrants, and, ultimately, not one but two pandemics.

Told through the eyes of a woman whose unforgettable passion, determination, and sense of humor will carry her through a lifetime of upheaval, Isabel Allende once more brings us an epic that is both fiercely inspiring and deeply emotional.]]> 322 Isabel Allende 0593496205 Eavan 3 3.97 2022 Violeta
author: Isabel Allende
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/09
date added: 2025/03/29
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A quick and interesting read, covering 100 years of Chilean history as told through the lifetime of an unusually independent woman. Mercifully free of magical realism.
]]> <![CDATA[Tess of the Road (Tess of the Road, #1)]]> 35046472 Meet Tess, a brave new heroine from beloved epic fantasy author Rachel Hartman.

In the medieval kingdom of Goredd, women are expected to be ladies, men are their protectors, and dragons get to be whomever they want. Tess, stubbornly, is a troublemaker. You can’t make a scene at your sister’s wedding and break a relative’s nose with one punch (no matter how pompous he is) and not suffer the consequences. As her family plans to send her to a nunnery, Tess yanks on her boots and sets out on a journey across the Southlands, alone and pretending to be a boy.

Where Tess is headed is a mystery, even to her. So when she runs into an old friend, it’s a stroke of luck. This friend is a quigutl—a subspecies of dragon—who gives her both a purpose and protection on the road. But Tess is guarding a troubling secret. Her tumultuous past is a heavy burden to carry, and the memories she’s tried to forget threaten to expose her to the world in more ways than one.

Returning to the fascinating world she created in the award-winning and New York Times bestselling Seraphina, Rachel Hartman introduces readers to a new character and a new quest, pushing the boundaries of genre once again in this wholly original fantasy.]]> 544 Rachel Hartman 1101931280 Eavan 3 3.88 2018 Tess of the Road (Tess of the Road, #1)
author: Rachel Hartman
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2018
rating: 3
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> Convenience Store Woman 38357895
A brilliant depiction of an unusual psyche and a world hidden from view, Convenience Store Woman is an ironic and sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures to conform, as well as a charming and completely fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine.]]> 163 Sayaka Murata Eavan 4 3.70 2016 Convenience Store Woman
author: Sayaka Murata
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> <![CDATA[Winterkeep (Graceling Realm, #4)]]> 53624358 Something is rotten in the heart of Winterkeep...

Four years after Bitterblue left off, a new land has been discovered to the east: Torla; and the closest nation to Monsea is Winterkeep. Winterkeep is a land of miracles, a democratic republic run by people who like each other, where people speak to telepathic sea creatures, adopt telepathic foxes as pets, and fly across the sky in ships attached to balloons.

But when Bitterblue’s envoys to Winterkeep drown under suspicious circumstances, she and Giddon and her half sister, Hava, set off to discover the truth–putting both Bitterblue’s life and Giddon’s heart to the test when Bitterbue is kidnapped. Giddon believes she has drowned, leaving him and Hava to solve the mystery of what’s wrong in Winterkeep.

Lovisa Cavenda is the teenage daughter of a powerful Scholar and Industrialist (the opposing governing parties) with a fire inside her that is always hungry, always just nearly about to make something happen. She is the key to everything, but only if she can figure out what’s going on before anyone else, and only if she’s willing to transcend the person she’s been all her life.]]> 528 Kristin Cashore 0803741502 Eavan 2 3.98 2021 Winterkeep (Graceling Realm, #4)
author: Kristin Cashore
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2023/03/22
date added: 2025/03/29
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Unfortunately, I found that I didn't really care about any of the characters or their countries.
]]> Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 46041199 A fierce international bestseller that launched Korea’s new feminist movement, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 follows one woman’s psychic deterioration in the face of rigid misogyny.

Truly, flawlessly, completely, she became that person.

In a small, tidy apartment on the outskirts of the frenzied metropolis of Seoul lives Kim Jiyoung. A thirtysomething-year-old “millennial everywoman,� she has recently left her white-collar desk job—in order to care for her newborn daughter full-time—as so many Korean women are expected to do. But she quickly begins to exhibit strange symptoms that alarm her husband, parents, and in-laws: Jiyoung impersonates the voices of other women—alive and even dead, both known and unknown to her. As she plunges deeper into this psychosis, her discomfited husband sends her to a male psychiatrist.

In a chilling, eerily truncated third-person voice, Jiyoung’s entire life is recounted to the psychiatrist—a narrative infused with disparate elements of frustration, perseverance, and submission. Born in 1982 and given the most common name for Korean baby girls, Jiyoung quickly becomes the unfavored sister to her princeling little brother. Always, her behavior is policed by the male figures around her—from the elementary school teachers who enforce strict uniforms for girls, to the coworkers who install a hidden camera in the women’s restroom and post their photos online. In her father’s eyes, it is Jiyoung’s fault that men harass her late at night; in her husband’s eyes, it is Jiyoung’s duty to forsake her career to take care of him and their child—to put them first.

Jiyoung’s painfully common life is juxtaposed against a backdrop of an advancing Korea, as it abandons “family planning� birth control policies and passes new legislation against gender discrimination. But can her doctor flawlessly, completely cure her, or even discover what truly ails her?

Rendered in minimalist yet lacerating prose, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 sits at the center of our global #MeToo movement and announces the arrival of writer of international significance]]> 163 Cho Nam-Joo 1631496700 Eavan 3 4.17 2016 Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
author: Cho Nam-Joo
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Daughter of the Forest (Sevenwaters, #1)]]> 13928
But Sorcha's joy is shattered when her father is bewitched by his new wife, an evil enchantress who binds her brothers with a terrible spell, a spell which only Sorcha can lift—by staying silent. If she speaks before she completes the quest set to her by the Fair Folk and their queen, the Lady of the Forest, she will lose her brothers forever.

When Sorcha is kidnapped by the enemies of Sevenwaters and taken to a foreign land, she is torn between the desire to save her beloved brothers, and a love that comes only once. Sorcha despairs at ever being able to complete her task, but the magic of the Fair Folk knows no boundaries, and love is the strongest magic of them all...]]> 554 Juliet Marillier Eavan 2 4.27 1999 Daughter of the Forest (Sevenwaters, #1)
author: Juliet Marillier
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1999
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves:
review:

]]> The Pull of the Stars 52722079
In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other's lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.

In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds.]]> 295 Emma Donoghue 0316499013 Eavan 3
Seasonal, though. It covers Halloween, All Saints' Day, and All Souls' Day, (October 31-Nov 2) so this is the perfect time to be reading it. Makes absolute sense, too, to set a book about a ward full of sick, pregnant women in a time of year when life and death are unusually co-present. Metaphysically speaking.

Non-spoiler comments: The opening scene of the book is weak; it made me wonder how her writing ability could have dropped so far before the pandemic rotted everyone's brains. Fortunately, once she got down to work for real, the fast-paced, high-stakes hospital environment took over and Donoghue was back to her immersive self. I thought she built and then punctured the tension splendidly, and I enjoyed her characterizations (including various characters' changing feelings about each other). There's a heroine from history dropped in as a minor character, which was fun. The novel does suffer throughout from Too Much Research Disease, by which I mean that we get quite a few details on Midwifery, Misogyny, Medical Practice, and Life Generally in 1918, not all that subtly embedded in the narrative. But I mean. It's educational. I like to be educated.

Spoiler comments: [spoilers removed]

Recommended if: You can't get enough Call the Midwife, you really like historical fiction set during the Great War, you get off on medical history, or you just like Emma Donoghue's books and want to read another one.

Not recommended if: Dialogue without quotation marks drives you crazy, you're squeamish about gross bodily fluids etc, you're sensitive to depictions of death or plague, or you -- wait, that's a spoiler. Hm. Well, good luck with that.]]> 3.91 2020 The Pull of the Stars
author: Emma Donoghue
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/31
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves:
review:
I've made it my autumn mission to catch up on the many Emma Donoghue novels I haven't read. I started with this one because I thought would be less of a downer than some of the others I got off the hold shelf at the same time. I guess I'll have to read the rest to know for sure, but I gotta say: It's a downer!

Seasonal, though. It covers Halloween, All Saints' Day, and All Souls' Day, (October 31-Nov 2) so this is the perfect time to be reading it. Makes absolute sense, too, to set a book about a ward full of sick, pregnant women in a time of year when life and death are unusually co-present. Metaphysically speaking.

Non-spoiler comments: The opening scene of the book is weak; it made me wonder how her writing ability could have dropped so far before the pandemic rotted everyone's brains. Fortunately, once she got down to work for real, the fast-paced, high-stakes hospital environment took over and Donoghue was back to her immersive self. I thought she built and then punctured the tension splendidly, and I enjoyed her characterizations (including various characters' changing feelings about each other). There's a heroine from history dropped in as a minor character, which was fun. The novel does suffer throughout from Too Much Research Disease, by which I mean that we get quite a few details on Midwifery, Misogyny, Medical Practice, and Life Generally in 1918, not all that subtly embedded in the narrative. But I mean. It's educational. I like to be educated.

Spoiler comments: [spoilers removed]

Recommended if: You can't get enough Call the Midwife, you really like historical fiction set during the Great War, you get off on medical history, or you just like Emma Donoghue's books and want to read another one.

Not recommended if: Dialogue without quotation marks drives you crazy, you're squeamish about gross bodily fluids etc, you're sensitive to depictions of death or plague, or you -- wait, that's a spoiler. Hm. Well, good luck with that.
]]> <![CDATA[The Witness for the Dead (The Cemeteries of Amalo, #1)]]> 41302953 Katherine Addison returns to the glittering world she created for her beloved novel, 'The Goblin Emperor', in this stand-alone sequel.

When the young half-goblin emperor Maia sought to learn who had killed his father and half-brothers, he turned to an obscure resident of his Court, a Prelate of Ulis and a Witness for the Dead. Thara Celehar found the truth, though it did him no good to discover it. He lost his place as a retainer of his cousin the former Empress, and made far too many enemies among the many factions vying for power in the new Court. The favor of the Emperor is a dangerous coin.

Now Celehar lives in the city of Amalo, far from the Court though not exactly in exile. He has not escaped from politics, but his position gives him the ability to serve the common people of the city, which is his preference. He lives modestly, but his decency and fundamental honesty will not permit him to live quietly. As a Witness for the Dead, he can, sometimes, speak to the recently dead: see the last thing they saw, know the last thought they had, experience the last thing they felt. it is his duty to use that ability to resolve disputes, to ascertain the intent of the dead, to find the killers of the murdered.

Celehar's skills now lead him out of the quiet and into a morass of treachery, murder, and injustice. No matter his own background with the imperial house, Celehar will stand with the commoners, and possibly find a light in the darkness.]]> 240 Katherine Addison 0765387441 Eavan 2 The Goblin Emperor was, to be fair.)]]> 4.11 2021 The Witness for the Dead (The Cemeteries of Amalo, #1)
author: Katherine Addison
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2023/03/22
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves:
review:
The extensive tea-drinking and use of public transit in this novel served only to make me long for a different, more interesting story set in the same world. (Which The Goblin Emperor was, to be fair.)
]]> Half of a Yellow Sun 32572001 Half of a Yellow Sun is a tremendously evocative novel of the promise, hope, and disappointment of the Biafran war.]]> 543 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Eavan 3 4.36 2006 Half of a Yellow Sun
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/13
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves:
review:
An unromantic look at the Biafran war, as experienced by one family. I cared enough about the characters to be afraid for them with each new twist in the war plot, although not enough to find their melodramatic love lives interesting.
]]> <![CDATA[The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America]]> 32191706 de facto segregation—that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation—the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments—that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north.

As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post–World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. “The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book� (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein’s invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.]]> 368 Richard Rothstein 1631492853 Eavan 0 4.44 2017 The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
author: Richard Rothstein
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy]]> 28186015 But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O'Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they're wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination--propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process.]]> 259 Cathy O'Neil 0553418815 Eavan 3 3.86 2016 Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
author: Cathy O'Neil
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves:
review:

]]> Rose Under Fire 17262236
Elizabeth Wein, author of the critically-acclaimed and best-selling Code Name Verity, delivers another stunning WWII thriller. The unforgettable story of Rose Justice is forged from heart-wrenching courage, resolve, and the slim, bright chance of survival.]]> 360 Elizabeth Wein 1423183096 Eavan 2 like it. I'd rather have read a true RavensbrĂĽck memoir. ]]> 4.10 2013 Rose Under Fire
author: Elizabeth Wein
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2013
rating: 2
read at: 2024/01/07
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves:
review:
I feel bad giving this two stars solely on the basis of how I feel about it. Technically, it's not bad. But I didn't like it. I'd rather have read a true RavensbrĂĽck memoir.
]]> <![CDATA[Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City]]> 25852784 Evicted, Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of 21st-century America's most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.]]> 418 Matthew Desmond 0553447432 Eavan 3 4.47 2016 Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
author: Matthew Desmond
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/29
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review:

]]> Hamnet 43890641 Hamnet is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child.

Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet.

Award-winning author Maggie O'Farrell's new novel breathes full-blooded life into the story of a loss usually consigned to literary footnotes, and provides an unforgettable vindication of Agnes, a woman intriguingly absent from history.

A New York Times Notable Book (2020), Best Book of 2020: Guardian, Financial Times, Literary Hub, and NPR.]]> 372 Maggie O'Farrell 1472223799 Eavan 0 to-read 4.16 2020 Hamnet
author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Saltcrop 222376600 From the acclaimed author of The Stardust Grail comes the epic tale of two sisters who sail across oceans to find their missing third sister―and Earth’s environmental salvation.

In Earth's not too distant future, seas consume coastal cities, highways disintegrate underwater, and mutant fish lurk in pirate-controlled depths. Skipper, a skilled sailor and the youngest of three sisters, earns money skimming and reselling plastic from the ocean to care for her ailing grandmother.

But then her eldest sister, Nora, goes missing. Nora left home a decade ago in pursuit of a cure for failing crops all over the world. When Skipper and her other sister, Carmen, receive a cryptic plea for help, they must put aside their differences and set out across the sea to find―and save―her. As they voyage through a dying world both beautiful and strange, encountering other travelers along the way, they learn more about their sister's work and the corporations that want what she discovered.

But the farther they go, the more uncertain their mission becomes: What dangerous attention did Nora attract, and how well do they really know their sister―or each other? Thus begins an epic journey spanning oceans and continents and a wistful rumination on sisterhood, friendship, and ecological disaster.

--

Content warnings available on the author's website (see author bio).]]> 384 Yume Kitasei 1250380960 Eavan 0 to-read 4.11 2025 Saltcrop
author: Yume Kitasei
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Stardust Grail 195791479 Save one world. Doom her own.

From the acclaimed author of The Deep Sky comes a thrilling anti-colonial space heist to save an alien civilization.

Maya Hoshimoto was once the best art thief in the galaxy. For ten years, she returned stolen artifacts to alien civilizations—until a disastrous job forced her into hiding. Now she just wants to enjoy a quiet life as a graduate student of anthropology, but she’s haunted by persistent and disturbing visions of the future.

Then an old friend comes to her with a job she can’t refuse: find a powerful object that could save an alien species from extinction. Except no one has seen it in living memory, and they aren’t the only ones hunting for it.

Maya sets out on a breakneck quest through a universe teeming with strange life and ancient ruins. But the farther she goes, the more her visions cast a dark shadow over her team of friends new and old. Someone will betray her along the way. Worse yet, in choosing to save one species, she may condemn humanity and Earth itself.

--

Content warnings are available at the author's website (see author bio).]]> 312 Yume Kitasei 1250875374 Eavan 0 to-read 3.63 2024 The Stardust Grail
author: Yume Kitasei
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Deep Sky 61884842 Yume Kitasei's The Deep Sky is an enthralling sci fi thriller debut about a mission into deep space that begins with a lethal explosion that leaves the survivors questioning the loyalty of the crew.

They left Earth to save humanity. They’ll have to save themselves first.

It is the eve of Earth’s environmental collapse. A single ship carries humanity’s last hope: eighty elite graduates of a competitive program, who will give birth to a generation of children in deep space. But halfway to a distant but livable planet, a lethal bomb kills three of the crew and knocks The Phoenix off course. Asuka, the only surviving witness, is an immediate suspect.

Asuka already felt like an impostor before the explosion. She was the last picked for the mission, she struggled during training back on Earth, and she was chosen to represent Japan, a country she only partly knows as a half-Japanese girl raised in America. But estranged from her mother back home, The Phoenix is all she has left.

With the crew turning on each other, Asuka is determined to find the culprit before they all lose faith in the mission—or worse, the bomber strikes again.

---

Content warnings are available at the author's website (see author bio).]]> 399 Yume Kitasei 1250875331 Eavan 0 to-read 3.66 2023 The Deep Sky
author: Yume Kitasei
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Women We Buried, Women We Burned: A Memoir]]> 60784732 Women We Buried, Women We Burned is her own story.

Snyder was eight years old when her mother died, and her distraught father thrust the family into an evangelical, cult-like existence halfway across the country. Furiously rebellious, she was expelled from school and home at age 16. Living out of her car and relying on strangers, Rachel found herself masquerading as an adult, talking her way into college, and eventually travelling the globe.

Survival became her reporter's beat. In places like India, Tibet, and Niger, she interviewed those who had been through the unimaginable. In Cambodia, where she lived for six years, she watched a country reckon with the horrors of its own recent history. When she returned to the States with a family of her own, it was with a new perspective on old family wounds, and a chance for healing from the most unexpected place.

A piercing account of Snyder's journey from teenage runaway to reporter on the global epidemic of domestic violence, Women We Buried, Women We Burned is a memoir that embodies the transformative power of resilience.]]> 272 Rachel Louise Snyder 1635579120 Eavan 0 to-read 3.90 2023 Women We Buried, Women We Burned: A Memoir
author: Rachel Louise Snyder
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Normal People 37539457
A year later, they're both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.]]> 266 Sally Rooney 0571334644 Eavan 0 to-read 3.93 2018 Normal People
author: Sally Rooney
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[He/She/They: How We Talk About Gender and Why It Matters]]> 123204337 He/She/They clearly and compassionately addresses fundamental topics, from why being transgender is not a choice and why pronouns are important, to more complex issues including how gender-affirming healthcare can be lifesaving and why allowing trans youth to play sports is good for all kids. With a relatable narrative rooted in facts, science, and history, Schuyler helps restore common sense and humanity to a discussion that continues to be divisively coopted and deceptively politicized.

Schuyler Bailar didn’t set out to be an activist, but his very public transition to the Harvard men’s swim team put him in the spotlight. His choice to be open about his transition and share his experience has touched people around the world. His plain-spoken education has evolved into tireless advocacy for inclusion and collective liberation. In He/She/They, Schuyler uses storytelling and the art of conversation to give us the essential language and context of gender, meeting everyone where they are and paving the way for understanding, acceptance, and, most connection. He/She/They is more than a book on allyship; it also speaks to trans folks directly, answering the question, “does it get better?”Ěýwith a resounding yes, celebrating radical trans joy. Myth-busting, affirming, compassionate, and fierce, He/She/They is a crucial, urgent--and lifesaving--book that forever changes the conversation about gender.]]> 384 Schuyler Bailar 0306831872 Eavan 0 to-read 4.59 2023 He/She/They: How We Talk About Gender and Why It Matters
author: Schuyler Bailar
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> Transcription 37946414
Ten years later, now a radio producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat. A bill of reckoning is due, and she finally begins to realize that there is no action without consequence.]]> 343 Kate Atkinson 031617663X Eavan 0 to-read 3.44 2018 Transcription
author: Kate Atkinson
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[My name is Patrick: St Patrick's Confessio]]> 17319632 42 Patrick of Ireland 1904890849 Eavan 0 to-read 4.06 425 My name is Patrick: St Patrick's Confessio
author: Patrick of Ireland
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.06
book published: 425
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Early Medieval Ireland 400 - 1200]]> 2367411 Longman History of Ireland in fine style.]]> 400 Dáibhí Ó Cróinín 0582015650 Eavan 0 to-read 3.94 1995 Early Medieval Ireland 400 - 1200
author: Dáibhí Ó Cróinín
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Odyssey 34068470 The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty, and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home.

In this fresh, authoritative version--the first English translation of The Odyssey by a woman--this stirring tale of shipwrecks, monsters, and magic comes alive in an entirely new way. Written in iambic pentameter verse and a vivid, contemporary idiom, this engrossing translation matches the number of lines in the Greek original, thus striding at Homer's sprightly pace and singing with a voice that echoes Homer's music.

Wilson's Odyssey captures the beauty and enchantment of this ancient poem as well as the suspense and drama of its narrative. Its characters are unforgettable, from the cunning goddess Athena, whose interventions guide and protect the hero, to the awkward teenage son, Telemachus, who struggles to achieve adulthood and find his father; from the cautious, clever, and miserable Penelope, who somehow keeps clamoring suitors at bay during her husband's long absence, to the "complicated" hero himself, a man of many disguises, many tricks, and many moods, who emerges in this translation as a more fully rounded human being than ever before.

A fascinating introduction provides an informative overview of the Bronze Age milieu that produced the epic, the major themes of the poem, the controversies about its origins, and the unparalleled scope of its impact and influence. Maps drawn especially for this volume, a pronunciation glossary, and extensive notes and summaries of each book make this an Odyssey that will be treasured by a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers alike.]]> 582 Homer 0393089053 Eavan 3 4.30 -700 The Odyssey
author: Homer
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.30
book published: -700
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves:
review:
First-ever reading and it was Emily Wilson's translation. The introduction and translator's note were more interesting than the story itself, though it certainly had its moments.
]]> <![CDATA[The Story of the Jews : A 4,000-Year Adventure]]> 553824 304 Stan Mack 1580231551 Eavan 0 to-read 4.02 1998 The Story of the Jews : A 4,000-Year Adventure
author: Stan Mack
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> My Darling Dreadful Thing 193544852
Spirits are drawn to salt, be it blood or tears.

Roos Beckman has a spirit companion only she can see. Ruth—strange, corpse-like, and dead for centuries—is the light of Roos' life. That is, until the wealthy young widow Agnes Knoop visits one of Roos' backroom seances, and the two strike up a connection.

Soon, Roos is whisked away to the crumbling estate Agnes inherited upon the death of her husband, where an ill woman haunts the halls, strange smells drift through the air, and mysterious stone statues reside in the family chapel. Something dreadful festers in the manor, but still, the attraction between Roos and Agnes is undeniable.

Then, someone is murdered.

Poor, alone, and with a history of 'hysterics', Roos is the obvious culprit. With her sanity and innocence in question, she'll have to prove who—or what—is at fault or lose everything she holds dear.

"A Sapphic seance of preternatural proportions, My Darling Dreadful Thing summons a stunning new literary voice to be reckoned with. Johanna van Veen reaches beyond the veil to conjure up a gothic shocker like no other."—Clay McLeod Chapman, author of What Kind of Mother and Ghost Eaters

©2024 Johanna van Veen (P)2024 Tantor]]> 375 Johanna van Veen 1728281547 Eavan 0 to-read 3.85 2024 My Darling Dreadful Thing
author: Johanna van Veen
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Works and Days (Penguin Classics)]]> 32024554 'Stallings's new translation of Hesiod's Works and Days - witty, gritty, and unsettlingly relevant - is not to be missed' TLS, Books of the Year

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 RUNCIMAN AWARD

A new verse translation of one of the foundational ancient Greek works by the award-winning poet A. E. Stallings.

Hesiod was the first self-styled 'poet' in western literature, revered by the ancient Greeks. Ostensibly written to chide and educate his lazy brother, Works and Days tells the story of Pandora's jar and humanity's place in a fallen world. Blending the cosmic and the earthy, and mixing myth, lyrical description, personal asides, astronomy, proverbs and down-to-earth advice on rural tasks and rituals, it is also a hymn to honest toil as man's salvation. This vibrant new verse translation by award-winning poet A. E. Stallings conveys the clarity and unexpected humour of a founding work of classical literature.]]> 112 Hesiod 0141197528 Eavan 2 3.55 -700 Works and Days (Penguin Classics)
author: Hesiod
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.55
book published: -700
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves:
review:
I found the translator's introduction more engaging than the work itself, to be quite honest. Which isn't to say he isn't occasionally funny or witty, but I think she sees things in Hesiod that I... don't, yet. Maybe in another 20 years.
]]> Quatrefoil 3174011
When it was first published in 1950, 'Quatrefoil' marked a milestone in gay writing. Now, four decades later, this book remains a magnificent love story and a tribute to the human spirit. In a new epilogue the author reveals for the first time, the story behind his ground-breaking novel.]]> 373 James Barr 0932870163 Eavan 0 3.97 1950 Quatrefoil
author: James Barr
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1950
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/26
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves:
review:
As a piece of literary history, it's important. As a novel, it's not my cup of tea.
]]> <![CDATA[The Sisters of the Winter Wood]]> 37854049
But before they leave, Liba discovers the secret that their Tati can transform into a bear, and their Mami into a swan. Perhaps, Liba realizes, the old fairy tales are true. She must guard this secret carefully, even from her beloved sister.

Soon a troupe of mysterious men appear in town and Laya falls under their spell-despite their mother's warning to be wary of strangers. And these are not the only dangers lurking in the woods...

The sisters will need each other if they are to become the women they need to be - and save their people from the dark forces that draw closer.]]> 464 Rena Rossner 035651143X Eavan 0 to-read 3.48 2018 The Sisters of the Winter Wood
author: Rena Rossner
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Home in a Lunchbox 200150490
When Jun moves from Hong Kong to America, the only words she knows are hello, thank you , I don’t know , and toilet . Her new school feels foreign and terrifying.

But when she opens her lunchbox to find her favorite meals—like bao, dumplings, and bok choy—she realizes home isn’t so far away after all.

Through lush art and spare dialogue, Cherry Mo’s breathtakingly beautiful debut picture book reminds readers that friendship and belonging can be found in every bite.]]> 40 Cherry Mo 0593661346 Eavan 0 to-read 4.60 2024 Home in a Lunchbox
author: Cherry Mo
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.60
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Drama 13436373
Callie loves theater. And while she would totally try out for her middle school's production of Moon Over Mississippi, she can't really sing. Instead she's the set designer for the drama department stage crew, and this year she's determined to create a set worthy of Broadway on a middle-school budget. But how can she, when she doesn't know much about carpentry, ticket sales are down, and the crew members are having trouble working together? Not to mention the onstage AND offstage drama that occurs once the actors are chosen. And when two cute brothers enter the picture, things get even crazier!]]> 238 Raina Telgemeier 0545326990 Eavan 3
I'd heard of Raina Telgemeier, but hadn't read anything by her yet. Drama was pretty entertaining. It reminded me of musical productions back in high school. I was only ever in the audience, but some of my friends were in stage crew and I always thought they seemed like a great, tight-knit group having a lot of fun together.

As you might expect from the title, teenage romantic drama formed the basis for the plot, so I don't have much to say about that other than: Thank God I'm not 13 anymore. I do think that Telgemeier successfully stayed away from caricature and I appreciate that. Some characters are nicer, better, more honest people than others, but we didn't get any cartoon villains.

I don't read enough graphic novels to have an informed critique of the art. It worked for me. She draws her characters with very expressive faces, which I find immensely helpful in following the story. Sometimes I'll read a graphic novel where everyone is deadpan and I'm left guessing what the hell they are thinking and feeling in every scene. This book does not do that.

Her main cast, as well as the supporting background characters, are racially and ethnically diverse, which is always nice.

[spoilers removed]]]> 4.18 2012 Drama
author: Raina Telgemeier
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/15
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves:
review:
My sister's Christmas present to me was a stack of middle-grade graphic novels translated into Spanish. I've found that they're good reading practice, since any words I don't know are easy to guess from the illustrations.

I'd heard of Raina Telgemeier, but hadn't read anything by her yet. Drama was pretty entertaining. It reminded me of musical productions back in high school. I was only ever in the audience, but some of my friends were in stage crew and I always thought they seemed like a great, tight-knit group having a lot of fun together.

As you might expect from the title, teenage romantic drama formed the basis for the plot, so I don't have much to say about that other than: Thank God I'm not 13 anymore. I do think that Telgemeier successfully stayed away from caricature and I appreciate that. Some characters are nicer, better, more honest people than others, but we didn't get any cartoon villains.

I don't read enough graphic novels to have an informed critique of the art. It worked for me. She draws her characters with very expressive faces, which I find immensely helpful in following the story. Sometimes I'll read a graphic novel where everyone is deadpan and I'm left guessing what the hell they are thinking and feeling in every scene. This book does not do that.

Her main cast, as well as the supporting background characters, are racially and ethnically diverse, which is always nice.

[spoilers removed]
]]> <![CDATA[Darius the Great Deserves Better (Darius the Great, #2)]]> 49025767 In this companion to the award-winning Darius the Great Is Not Okay, Darius suddenly has it all: a boyfriend, an internship, a spot on the soccer team. It’s everything he’s ever wanted–but what if he deserves better?

Darius Kellner is having a bit of a year. Since his trip to Iran this past spring, a lot has changed. He’s getting along with his dad, and his best friend Sohrab is only a Skype call away. Between his first boyfriend, Landon, his varsity soccer practices, and his internship at his favorite tea shop, Darius is feeling pretty okay. Like he finally knows what it means to be Darius Kellner.

Then, of course, everything changes. Darius’s grandmothers are in town for a long visit while his dad is gone on business, and Darius isn’t sure whether they even like him. The internship isn’t what Darius thought it would be, and now he doesn’t know about turning tea into his career. He was sure he liked Landon, but when he starts hanging out with Chip–soccer teammate and best friend of Trent Bolger, epic bully–well, he’s just not so sure about Landon anymore, either.

Darius thought he knew exactly who he was and what he wanted, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe he deserves better.]]> 342 Adib Khorram 059310823X Eavan 0 to-read 4.25 2020 Darius the Great Deserves Better (Darius the Great, #2)
author: Adib Khorram
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Darius the Great Is Not Okay (Darius The Great, #1)]]> 37506437 Darius doesn't think he'll ever be enough, in America or in Iran.

Darius Kellner speaks better Klingon than Farsi, and he knows more about Hobbit social cues than Persian ones. He's about to take his first-ever trip to Iran, and it's pretty overwhelming—especially when he's also dealing with clinical depression, a disapproving dad, and a chronically anemic social life. In Iran, he gets to know his ailing but still formidable grandfather, his loving grandmother, and the rest of his mom's family for the first time. And he meets Sohrab, the boy next door who changes everything.

Sohrab makes sure people speak English so Darius can understand what's going on. He gets Darius an Iranian National Football Team jersey that makes him feel like a True Persian for the first time. And he understands that sometimes, best friends don't have to talk. Darius has never had a true friend before, but now he's spending his days with Sohrab playing soccer, eating rosewater ice cream, and sitting together for hours in their special place, a rooftop overlooking the Yazdi skyline.

Sohrab calls him Darioush—the original Persian version of his name—and Darius has never felt more like himself than he does now that he's Darioush to Sohrab. When it's time to go home to America, he'll have to find a way to be Darioush on his own.]]> 316 Adib Khorram 0525552960 Eavan 0 to-read 4.23 2018 Darius the Great Is Not Okay (Darius The Great, #1)
author: Adib Khorram
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/05
shelves: to-read
review:

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

Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. Written along with the seasons and divided into the twelve months of the year, it is an unforgettable novel about secrets and fates that asks the timeless how do we live on, even after we’re gone?]]> 372 Daniel Mason 0593597036 Eavan 4 Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, if Hitty were a house and if there were ghosts, axe murders, and erotic encounters with nature.]]> 4.11 2023 North Woods
author: Daniel Mason
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves:
review:
Like Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, if Hitty were a house and if there were ghosts, axe murders, and erotic encounters with nature.
]]> Any Man 35068781
In this electric and provocative debut novel, Tamblyn blends genres of poetry, prose, and elements of suspense to give shape to the shocking narratives of victims of sexual violence, mapping the destructive ways in which our society perpetuates rape culture.

A violent serial rapist is on the loose, who goes by the name Maude. She hunts for men at bars, online, at home� the place doesn’t matter, neither does the man. Her victims then must live the aftermath of their assault in the form of doubt from the police, feelings of shame alienation from their friends and family and the haunting of a horrible woman who becomes the phantom on which society projects its greatest fears, fascinations and even misogyny. All the while the police are without leads and the media hound the victims, publicly dissecting the details of their attack.

What is extraordinary is how as years pass these men learn to heal, by banding together and finding a space to raise their voices. Told in alternating viewpoints signature to each voice and experience of the victim, these pages crackle with emotion, ranging from horror to breathtaking empathy.]]> 288 Amber Tamblyn 0062688936 Eavan 0 to-read 3.85 2018 Any Man
author: Amber Tamblyn
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> One Last Stop 54860443
But then, there’s this gorgeous girl on the train.

Jane. Dazzling, charming, mysterious, impossible Jane. Jane with her rough edges and swoopy hair and soft smile, showing up in a leather jacket to save August’s day when she needed it most. August’s subway crush becomes the best part of her day, but pretty soon, she discovers there’s one big problem: Jane doesn’t just look like an old school punk rocker. She’s literally displaced in time from the 1970s, and August is going to have to use everything she tried to leave in her own past to help her. Maybe it’s time to start believing in some things, after all.

Casey McQuiston’s One Last Stop is a magical, sexy, big-hearted romance where the impossible becomes possible as August does everything in her power to save the girl lost in time.]]> 418 Casey McQuiston 1250244498 Eavan 0 to-read 3.90 2021 One Last Stop
author: Casey McQuiston
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Six Characters in Search of an Author]]> 741618 Six Characters in Search of an Author, embodies the Nobel Prize-winning playwright's innovations by presenting an open-ended drama on a stage without sets.
First performed in 1923, this intellectual comedy introduces six individuals to a stage where a company of actors has assembled for a rehearsal. Claiming to be the incomplete, unused creations of an author's imagination, they demand lines for a story that will explain the details of their lives. In ensuing scenes, these "real-life characters," all professing to be part of an extended family, produce a drama of sorts � punctuated by disagreements, interruptions, and arguments. In the end they are dismissed by the irate manager, their dilemma unsolved and the "truth" a matter of individual viewpoints.
A tour de force exploring the many faces of reality, this classic is now available in an inexpensive edition that will be welcomed by amateur theatrical groups as well as by students of drama.]]> 64 Luigi Pirandello 0486299929 Eavan 0 to-read 3.82 1921 Six Characters in Search of an Author
author: Luigi Pirandello
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1921
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World]]> 208840291 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.

As indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love.

Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”]]> 112 Robin Wall Kimmerer 1668072246 Eavan 0 to-read 4.38 2024 The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden]]> 62919890 A seminal work that expands how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle Criticism finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage

In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013 with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant.

In resistance to the homogeneous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of the planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it.

Definitive and singular, Soil functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage readers to recognize the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.]]> 321 Camille T. Dungy 1982195304 Eavan 2
1) It was written during the pandemic, when very few people were doing their best work or thinking their best thoughts.
2) It's a memoir about one of the less-interesting aspects of an ordinary person's life, i.e. her backyard garden.
3) It's also a lot of other things. Strung together with very little to hold them. Even seen as an essay collection, it doesn't work for me; the essays themselves have little internal cohesion, IMO.

Very little new information and very few new insights for me here. Occasionally it's funny. There are some nice turns of phrase and some sharp anecdotes about racism and sexism. But were they worth the trouble of reading the whole book? No.

I was trying to be more generous in my judgment, I really was, but at the point where she's like, "We're being unfair to plants by not respecting their gender expression," I stopped caring about being nice. I don't think the author is stupid but she sure did a great stupid-person impression in that chapter.

It's unfortunate that this was my introduction to Dungy's work. I should go read some more of her actual poetry, because the few poems she included in the book were the best part. I especially enjoyed the poem about prairie -- it really spoke to my experience of walking prairie preserves in Nebraska and thinking about the rich life they're concealing. ]]> 4.15 2023 Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
author: Camille T. Dungy
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/24
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves:
review:
I've been trying to understand what made this book so frustrating to read, and I've got a couple of guesses:

1) It was written during the pandemic, when very few people were doing their best work or thinking their best thoughts.
2) It's a memoir about one of the less-interesting aspects of an ordinary person's life, i.e. her backyard garden.
3) It's also a lot of other things. Strung together with very little to hold them. Even seen as an essay collection, it doesn't work for me; the essays themselves have little internal cohesion, IMO.

Very little new information and very few new insights for me here. Occasionally it's funny. There are some nice turns of phrase and some sharp anecdotes about racism and sexism. But were they worth the trouble of reading the whole book? No.

I was trying to be more generous in my judgment, I really was, but at the point where she's like, "We're being unfair to plants by not respecting their gender expression," I stopped caring about being nice. I don't think the author is stupid but she sure did a great stupid-person impression in that chapter.

It's unfortunate that this was my introduction to Dungy's work. I should go read some more of her actual poetry, because the few poems she included in the book were the best part. I especially enjoyed the poem about prairie -- it really spoke to my experience of walking prairie preserves in Nebraska and thinking about the rich life they're concealing.
]]> The Wonder 28449257
An educated sceptic, Lib expects to expose the fast as a hoax right away. But as she gets to know the girl she becomes more and more unsure. Is Anna a fraud, or a 'living wonder'? Or is something more sinister unfolding right before Lib's eyes?

Written with all the propulsive tension that transported readers of Room, The Wonder asks what lengths we would go to for the love of a child.]]> 291 Emma Donoghue 0316393878 Eavan 4
]]> 3.60 2016 The Wonder
author: Emma Donoghue
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves:
review:
What a page-turner! I watched the film adaptation first; turns out it was largely faithful to the plot and atmosphere. [spoilers removed] I'd say you couldn't go wrong with either, as long as you were willing to suffer the complex mind games of Catholic guilt as patiently as the protagonist. [spoilers removed]


]]> Thief River Falls 43708240 Harrowing loss, psychological trauma, and a deadly mystery test the human will to survive in this electrifying novel from award-winning author Brian Freeman.

Lisa Power is a tortured ghost of her former self. The author of a bestselling thriller called Thief River Falls, named after her rural Minnesota hometown, Lisa is secluded in her remote house as she struggles with the loss of her entire family: a series of tragedies she calls the “Dark Star.�

Then a nameless runaway boy shows up at her door with a terrifying story: he’s just escaped death after witnessing a brutal murder—a crime the police want to cover up. Obsessed with the boy’s safety, Lisa resolves to expose this crime, but powerful men in Thief River Falls are desperate to get the boy back, and now they want her too.

Lisa and her young visitor have nowhere to go as the trap closes around them. Still under the strange, unforgiving threat of the Dark Star, Lisa must find a way to save them both, or they’ll become the victims of another shocking tragedy she can’t foresee]]> 314 Brian Freeman 1542093376 Eavan 0 to-read, minnesota 3.98 2020 Thief River Falls
author: Brian Freeman
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/20
shelves: to-read, minnesota
review:

]]> Where They Last Saw Her 209419483
All they heard was her scream.

Quill has lived on the Red Pine reservation in Minnesota her whole life. She knows what happens to people who look like her. Just a girl when Jimmy Sky jumped off the railway bridge and she ran for help, Quill realizes now that she hasn’t ever stopped running. As she trains for the Boston Marathon early one morning out in the woods, she hears a scream. When she investigates, she finds tire tracks and a lone, beaded earring.

Things are different now for Quill than when she was a lonely girl. Her friends Punk and Gaylyn are two women who don’t know what it means to quit; she has her loving husband, Crow, and two beautiful children who challenge her to be better every day. So when she realizes another woman has been stolen, she is determined to do something—and her first stop is the group of men working the pipeline construction just north of their homes.

As Quill closes in on the truth behind the missing woman in the woods, someone else disappears. In her quest to find justice for the women of the reservation, she is confronted with the hard truths of their home and the people who purport to serve them. When will she stop losing neighbors, friends, family? As Quill puts herself, her family, and everything she’s built on the line to make a difference, the novel asks searing questions about bystander culture, the reverberations of even one act of crime, and the long-lasting trauma of being invisible.]]> 336 Marcie R. Rendon 0593974875 Eavan 0 to-read, minnesota 3.85 2024 Where They Last Saw Her
author: Marcie R. Rendon
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/20
shelves: to-read, minnesota
review:

]]> Sea of Tranquility 58446227 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

"One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet." --The New York Times

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.]]> 259 Emily St. John Mandel 0593321448 Eavan 4 Still a delightful book. 4.04 2022 Sea of Tranquility
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves:
review:
Still a delightful book.
]]> <![CDATA[Uhren gibt es nicht mehr. Gespräche mit meiner Mutter in ihrem 102. Lebensjahr]]> 34570240
Worauf kommt es an im Leben? 102 Jahre alt ist Elisabeth Heller, und langsam, so sagt sie in den Gesprächen, die sie mit ihrem Sohn André in den vergangenen Monaten geführt hat, geht es ans Verabschieden. „Innerlich sieht man sich noch jung und freut sich auf den nächsten Tag�, sagt die alte Dame, die geboren wurde, als der Erste Weltkrieg ausbrach, und die mit gerade 19 den Süßwarenfabrikanten Stephan Heller heiratete. Ein anderes Mal wünscht sie sich, „dass das Körperwerkl in Gottesnamen auslaufen soll� und erzählt dann munter über einen Selbstmordversuch aus Liebe und über Lehár am Klavier in Bad Ischl. Ein kleines Buch von großer Weisheit, würdevoll, poetisch, komisch. Und das Dokument einer späten Liebe und großen Offenheit zwischen Mutter und Sohn.]]> 112 André Heller 3552058311 Eavan 0 to-read 4.06 2017 Uhren gibt es nicht mehr. Gespräche mit meiner Mutter in ihrem 102. Lebensjahr
author: André Heller
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Breath, Eyes, Memory 5186
At an astonishingly young age, Edwidge Danticat has become one of our most celebrated new novelists, a writer who evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti--and the enduring strength of Haiti's women--with a vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people's suffering and courage.]]> 234 Edwidge Danticat 037570504X Eavan 3 Well, that was a downer. 3.90 1994 Breath, Eyes, Memory
author: Edwidge Danticat
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1994
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/05
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves:
review:
Well, that was a downer.
]]> Women 44436327 144 Chloé Caldwell Eavan 0 to-read 3.58 2014 Women
author: Chloé Caldwell
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> May Day 210717991
These poems cast an eye over several decades of political activism, from the international solidarity of the Glasgow of Kay’s childhood, accompanying her parents� Socialist campaigns, through the feminist, LGBT+ and anti-racist movements of the 80s and 90s, up to the present day when a global pandemic intersects with the urgency of Black Lives Matter.

Kay brings to life a cast of influential figures, delving beneath the surfaces of received narratives: the Jamaican model Fanny Eaton, muse of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in England; Paul Robeson, Angela Davis and the poet Audre Lorde; and a â€what-ifâ€� poem concerning Rabbie Burns and a road-not-taken towards the West Indian slave trade. Woven through the collection is a suite of lyric poems concerning the recent losses of Kay’s parents: poems of grief and profound change that are infused with the light of love and celebration.]]> 96 Jackie Kay 1509864830 Eavan 0 to-read 4.48 2024 May Day
author: Jackie Kay
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: to-read
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 Eavan 0 to-read 4.15 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Work 260669 443 Louisa May Alcott 0805205632 Eavan 0 to-read 3.56 1873 Work
author: Louisa May Alcott
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1873
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Adulthood Is a Gift! (Sarah's Scribbles, #5)]]> 207294874 With new and classic Sarah's Scribbles comics, essays, stickers, and more, this book is a celebration of one of the best loved comic voices of a generation.

With 100 comics, 15 essays, and dozens of photos and sketches, the fifth Sarah's Scribbles book offers a rare look behind the creative process of one of the most original and beloved comic artists of a generation. A comedic companion to her first book, the bestselling Adulthood is a Myth, the artwork and writing in Adulthood is a Gift! is a celebration of the many experiences and life lessons the author has picked up in her decade of making viral, relatable, and award-winning comics and books. This book also includes a sticker sheet.]]> 140 Sarah Andersen 1524890405 Eavan 0 to-read 4.34 2024 Adulthood Is a Gift! (Sarah's Scribbles, #5)
author: Sarah Andersen
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Hope It All Works Out!: A Poorly Drawn Lines Collection]]> 207294878 The absurd antics, good-natured sarcasm, and misguided optimism of Mouse, Bird, Turtle, and Snail are inspiring and infectious, and a reminder that sometimes the best plan is to have no plans at all. The perfect book for comic lovers of all kinds,ĚýHope It All Works Out offersĚýa deep dive into theĚýPoorly Drawn LinesĚýcomics of New York Times bestselling author Reza Farazmand.

On the surface, the animals in Poorly Drawn Lines are sophisticated, decadent creatures â€� Turtle sports a beret, Snail wears shades, Bird smokes cigarettes, and Mouse assumes a fighting stance when anyone challenges his emotional fragility. But lurking beneath their surface images is a surprising warmth and charming naivete that provides the perfect setup for Reza Farazmand’s unparalleled sense of humor. This author-curated collection of new comics and greatest hits showcases the unique and charming world of these small animals and the amusing gap between their tough guy images and animal innocence. Familiar to millions of readers of theĚýPoorly Drawn LinesĚýwebcomic and FX animated series on Hulu, this book collection includes dozens of never-before-seen comics.Ěý]]> 208 Reza Farazmand 1524893897 Eavan 0 to-read 4.21 Hope It All Works Out!: A Poorly Drawn Lines Collection
author: Reza Farazmand
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.21
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Voyage of the Damned 210298804 The TikTok sensation from the UK has come to North America! This special first edition hardcover will include a gorgeous, shimmering jacket with effects, beautifully illustrated endpapers and detailed-stained edges.

A mind-blowing murder mystery on a ship full of magical passengers. If Agatha Christie wrote fantasy, this would be it!

For a thousand years, Concordia has maintained peace between its provinces. To mark this incredible feat, the emperor’s ship embarks upon a twelve-day voyage to the sacred Goddess’s Mountain. Aboard are the twelve heirs of the provinces of Concordia, each graced with a unique and secret magical ability known as a Blessing.

All except one: Ganymedes Piscero—class clown, slacker and all-around disappointment.

When a beloved heir is murdered, everyone is a suspect. Stuck at sea and surrounded by powerful people and without a Blessing to protect him, Ganymedes’s odds of survival are slim.

But as the bodies pile higher, Ganymedes must become the hero he was not born to be. Can he unmask the killer and their secret Blessing before this bloody crusade reaches the shores of Concordia?

Or will the empire as he knows it fall?]]> 464 Frances White 0778387429 Eavan 0 to-read 3.80 2024 Voyage of the Damned
author: Frances White
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life]]> 12458390

“Far greater even than the loss of land, or the relentless coercion to surrender cultural traditions, the deaths of over six hundred children by the spring of 1864 were an unbearable tragedy. Nearly one hundred and fifty years after the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862, Dakota people are still struggling with the effects of this unimaginable loss.�

Among the Dakota, the Beloved Child ceremony marked the special, tender affection that parents felt toward a child whose life had been threatened. In this
moving book, author Diane Wilson explores the work of several modern Dakota people who are continuing to raise beloved children: Gabrielle Tateyuskanskan,
an artist and poet; Clifford Canku, a spiritual leader and language teacher; Alameda Rocha, a boarding school survivor; Harley and Sue Eagle, Canadian activists; and Delores Brunelle, an Ojibwe counselor. each of these humble but powerful people teaches children to believe in the “genius and brilliance� of Dakota culture as a way of surviving historical trauma.

Crucial to true healing, Wilson has learned, is a willingness to begin with yourself. Each of these people works to transform the effects of genocide, restoring a way of life that regards our beloved children as wakan, sacred.

Ěý

Diane Wilson, director of Dream of Wild Health Farm, is the author of Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past, which won a Minnesota Book award. She is a Mdewakanton descendent; her mother was enrolled on the Rosebud Reservation.

Ěý

]]> 224 Diane Wilson 0873518268 Eavan 0 to-read 4.18 2011 Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life
author: Diane Wilson
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past]]> 1383256
Ěý

Growing up in the 1950s in suburban Minneapolis, Diane Wilson had a family like everybody else’s. Her Swedish American father was a salesman at Sears and her mother drove her brothers to baseball practice and went to parent-teacher conferences.

Ěý

But in her thirties, Diane began to wonder why her mother didn’t speak of her past. So she traveled to South Dakota and Nebraska, searching out records of her relatives through six generations, hungering to know their stories. She began to write a haunting account of the lives of her Dakota Indian family, based on research, to recreate their oral history that was lost, or repressed, or simply set aside as gritty issues of survival demanded attention.

Ěý

Spirit Car is an exquisite counterpoint of memoir and carefully researched fiction, a remarkable narrative that ties modern Minnesotans to the trauma of the Dakota War. Wilson found her family’s love and humor—and she discovered just how deeply our identities are shaped by the forces of history.]]> 224 Diane Wilson 0873515706 Eavan 4 3.79 2006 Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past
author: Diane Wilson
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves:
review:

]]> Project Hail Mary 54493401
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.

Or does he?]]> 476 Andy Weir 0593135202 Eavan 3
1. Elements of the story are very entertaining. It's often funny, and it has good plotting. Lots of twists and turns. Action scenes. Pathos. Flashbacks that work.
2. It's not my kind of sci-fi, in that there are many paragraphs I find intolerably boring and/or incomprehensible. I'm sure they're fun for people who like math and physics.
3. The one subject on which I would have enjoyed lengthy paragraphs full of thought process and minute detail -- linguistics -- was handwaved to an infuriating extent. I note that the acknowledgments at the end do not mention any linguists, and boy does it show.]]> 4.49 2021 Project Hail Mary
author: Andy Weir
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/30
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves:
review:
I have three thoughts on this novel:

1. Elements of the story are very entertaining. It's often funny, and it has good plotting. Lots of twists and turns. Action scenes. Pathos. Flashbacks that work.
2. It's not my kind of sci-fi, in that there are many paragraphs I find intolerably boring and/or incomprehensible. I'm sure they're fun for people who like math and physics.
3. The one subject on which I would have enjoyed lengthy paragraphs full of thought process and minute detail -- linguistics -- was handwaved to an infuriating extent. I note that the acknowledgments at the end do not mention any linguists, and boy does it show.
]]> <![CDATA[Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi (Novel) Vol. 1]]> 58701673
Years later, he awakens in the body of an aggrieved young man who sacrifices his soul so that Wei Wuxian can exact revenge on his behalf. Though granted a second life, Wei Wuxian is not free from his first, nor the mysteries that appear before him now. Yet this time, he'll face it all with the righteous and esteemed Lan Wangji at his side, another powerful cultivator whose unwavering dedication and shared memories of their past will help shine a light on the dark truths that surround them.]]> 395 Mò XiÄng TĂłng XiĂą 1648279198 Eavan 2 The Untamed. The writing style is childish and descriptions are not remotely evocative. Too many characters are introduced, with only the thinnest of characterization. (Obviously much is lost in translation, but even if I read Chinese, I don't think it would work for me.)

With that said, having started the print edition of the English translation of the novel, I am determined to continue to the end.]]> 4.56 2016 Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi (Novel) Vol. 1
author: Mò XiÄng TĂłng XiĂą
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/30
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves:
review:
I think this might be one of those rare instances when the television adaptation is better than the book. Volume 1 made a three-hour plane trip go by quickly, but I would have been lost and bored if I hadn't already watched The Untamed. The writing style is childish and descriptions are not remotely evocative. Too many characters are introduced, with only the thinnest of characterization. (Obviously much is lost in translation, but even if I read Chinese, I don't think it would work for me.)

With that said, having started the print edition of the English translation of the novel, I am determined to continue to the end.
]]> When My Name Was Keoko 613218 199 Linda Sue Park 0440419441 Eavan 0 to-read 4.15 2002 When My Name Was Keoko
author: Linda Sue Park
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Walking Stones 54097 168 Mollie Hunter 0152009957 Eavan 0 to-read 3.89 1970 The Walking Stones
author: Mollie Hunter
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1970
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Kelpie's Pearls 54098 182 Mollie Hunter 0862414431 Eavan 0 to-read 4.05 1964 The Kelpie's Pearls
author: Mollie Hunter
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Mermaid Summer 1002892 128 Mollie Hunter 0064403440 Eavan 3 3.87 1988 The Mermaid Summer
author: Mollie Hunter
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1988
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Hold on to love 368706 251 Mollie Hunter 0060226870 Eavan 3 3.84 1983 Hold on to love
author: Mollie Hunter
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1983
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Frog Music 18295858
The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Over the next three days, she will risk everything to bring Jenny's murderer to justice--if he doesn't track her down first. The story Blanche struggles to piece together is one of free-love bohemians, desperate paupers, and arrogant millionaires; of jealous men, icy women, and damaged children. It's the secret life of Jenny herself, a notorious character who breaks the law every morning by getting dressed: a charmer as slippery as the frogs she hunts.

In thrilling, cinematic style, FROG MUSIC digs up a long-forgotten, never-solved crime. Full of songs that migrated across the world, Emma Donoghue's lyrical tale of love and bloodshed among lowlifes captures the pulse of a boomtown like no other.]]> 405 Emma Donoghue 031632468X Eavan 2 3.18 2014 Frog Music
author: Emma Donoghue
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/02
date added: 2024/11/02
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-32]]> 306107 I, Catherine Cabot Hall, aged 13 years, 6 months, 29 days…do begin this book.

So begins the journal of a girl coming of age in nineteenth-century New Hampshire. Catherine records both the hardships of pioneer life and its many triumphs. Even as she struggles with her mother’s death and father’s eventual remarriage, Catherine’s indomitable spirit makes this saga an oftentimes uplifting and joyous one.

Quiet yet powerful, this Newbery Medal–winning book is sure to touch all who read it.]]> 144 Joan W. Blos 0689829914 Eavan 0 to-read 3.54 1979 A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-32
author: Joan W. Blos
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.54
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Friend Zone Experiment 195791545
But Renee is lonely. Estranged from her family in Singapore, she practically lives at the office, and now she’s just been dumped by her supposed boyfriend. Who she never saw anyway, so why is she ruining her Instagram-ready makeup by crying?

Before she can curl up on the couch with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, Renee’s father calls. He’s retiring, and, thanks to the screw-ups of her wastrel brothers, he is considering her as the next CEO of the family Chahaya Group, one of the largest conglomerates in Southeast Asia. That stamp of her father’s approval would mean everything to Renee, but can she cooperate with the brothers who drove her out of Singapore?

But fate isn’t done with her. That same night, Renee bumps into her first love, Yap Ket Siong, who broke her heart during university. They spend a wonderful night together, but Ket Siong is pursuing a dangerous vengeance for his family. In the light of day is there any hope for the two of them?]]> 352 Zen Cho 1250330394 Eavan 3 anything and I would enjoy it. Horror. Grimdark fantasy. A food processor manual.]]> 3.44 2024 The Friend Zone Experiment
author: Zen Cho
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/01
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves:
review:
I can't give it more than three stars because this is so not my genre, but yes, I will read a fluffy, tropey heterosexual rom-com about rich people if Zen Cho writes it. At this point I'm pretty sure she could write anything and I would enjoy it. Horror. Grimdark fantasy. A food processor manual.
]]> <![CDATA[Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (Vorkosigan Saga, #16)]]> 25155958
FUTURE IMPERFECT

Three years after her famous husband's death, Cordelia Vorkosigan, widowed Vicereine of Sergyar, stands ready to spin her life in a new direction. Oliver Jole, Admiral, Sergyar Fleet, finds himself caught up in her web of plans in ways he'd never imagined, bringing him to an unexpected crossroads in his life.

Meanwhile, Miles Vorkosigan, one of Emperor Gregor's key investigators, this time dispatches himself on a mission of inquiry, into a mystery he never anticipated; his own mother.

Plans, wills, and expectations collide in this sparkling science-fiction social comedy, as the impact of galactic technology on the range of the possible changes all the old rules, and Miles learns that not only is the future not what he expects, neither is the past.]]> 352 Lois McMaster Bujold 1625794800 Eavan 0 to-read 3.73 2016 Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (Vorkosigan Saga, #16)
author: Lois McMaster Bujold
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Sentence 56816904
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.

The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written]]> 387 Louise Erdrich 006267112X Eavan 4 minnesota 3.92 2021 The Sentence
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/08
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: minnesota
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary]]> 6052
Three sisters live comfortably with their Juniper, 16, who likes cooking and computer chats; Gentian, 13, who likes plays and astronomy; Rosemary, 11, who likes Girl Scouts. Enter Dominic, handsome as the night, quoting poetry, telling riddles, and asking help for a complex and fascinating science project.

Gentian isn't interested at first--she has her own life. But gradually her life, and her time, belong more and more to Dominic and his project, and her father begins to fear that the lad may be more than a charmer. . . .]]> 350 Pamela Dean 0312859708 Eavan 3 minnesota 3.56 1998 Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary
author: Pamela Dean
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.56
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves: minnesota
review:
I can't remember when and where I first found this book -- maybe in the public library in middle school? Or, less plausibly, in the school library in high school? But I remember enjoying the first 80% very much, and on every re-read I have the same experience: long stretches of dreamlike weirdness, friendship negotiations, and family squabbles, culminating abruptly and oddly in a tiny climax, followed by a denouement in which all is explained, but not in a particularly satisfying way. So, typical Pamela Dean. You really have to be in it for the journey.
]]> <![CDATA[Finding the Light: A Mother's Journey from Trauma to Healing]]> 176440021
This poignant graphic memoir describes the most difficult conversation between a mother and her son â€� the one about the two rapes she experienced as a young woman. It’s something she always knew she would share with her son, but the process of doing so is harder —Ěýand more freeing —Ěýthan she could have imagined. This difficult but beautiful story chronicles how she overcame trauma and violence to find love and healing as a mother. Drawing on her decades as a professional cartoonist, Henley’s elegant black ink illustrations, trademark humor, and witty writing style shine through even in the darkest moments and tell a story of survivorship, parenting, and hope.]]> 208 Marian Henley 1524884693 Eavan 0 to-read 4.24 Finding the Light: A Mother's Journey from Trauma to Healing
author: Marian Henley
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.24
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Everything I Never Told You 29367399 Librarian's note: This is an Alternate Cover Edition for ISBN10: 0349134286 ISBN13: 9780349134284.

“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.�

So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos.

A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.
]]> 292 Celeste Ng Eavan 3 3.99 2014 Everything I Never Told You
author: Celeste Ng
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/03
date added: 2024/10/20
shelves:
review:
I dunno, man. It wasn't bad, but it was unrelentingly sad.
]]> The Warm Hands of Ghosts 154462576 New York Times bestselling author of The Bear and the Nightingale

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

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

As shells rain down on Flanders, and ghosts move among those yet living, Laura’s and Freddie’s deepest traumas are reawakened. Now they must decide whether their world is worth salvaging—or better left behind entirely.]]> 325 Katherine Arden 0593128257 Eavan 4 3.96 2024 The Warm Hands of Ghosts
author: Katherine Arden
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/05
date added: 2024/10/20
shelves:
review:
If your idea of a good October activity is to read a novel about ghosts, the devil, and the Great War, then this is the book for you.
]]> Ordinary Human Failings 173403932
It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the "peasants" -- ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star seems set to rise when he stumbles across a sensational a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents beloved across the neighborhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and “bad apples�: the Greens.

At their heart sits beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life - and love - got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there's nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.]]> 224 Megan Nolan 0316567787 Eavan 2 3.79 2023 Ordinary Human Failings
author: Megan Nolan
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/11
date added: 2024/10/20
shelves:
review:

]]> All My Rage 57899793 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 Cloud’s 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.]]> 376 Sabaa Tahir 0593202341 Eavan 2 4.48 2022 All My Rage
author: Sabaa Tahir
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/19
date added: 2024/10/19
shelves:
review:
At some point one of the characters remarks that unlike the protags of a YA problem novel, they have not just one but all the problems. If only Tahir could have transcended YA cliches in some more meaningful way.
]]> Obit 53029244 Obit, Chang writes of "the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking." These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died ("civility," "language," "the future," "Mother's blue dress") and the cultural impact of death on the living. Whereas elegy attempts to immortalize the dead, an obituary expresses loss, and the love for the dead becomes a conduit for self-expression. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living.]]> 113 Victoria Chang 1556595743 Eavan 0 to-read 4.29 2020 Obit
author: Victoria Chang
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Beautiful World, Where Are You]]> 75555793 *The Sunday Times and Global number one bestseller*
*Winner of Novel of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards*
*A Book of the Year in The Times, the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Financial Times*

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.

Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young - but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they worry about sex and friendship and the times they live in. Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?]]> 337 Sally Rooney 0571365442 Eavan 0 to-read 3.50 2021 Beautiful World, Where Are You
author: Sally Rooney
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Thread of Grace 16047 The Sparrow and Children of God.

It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand. She and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to be safe at last, now that the Italians have broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful, as it becomes overnight an open battleground among the Nazis, the Allies, resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italian civilians trying to survive.

Mary Doria Russell sets her first historical novel against this dramatic background, tracing the lives of a handful of fascinating characters. Through them, she tells the little-known but true story of the network of Italian citizens who saved the lives of forty-three thousand Jews during the war’s final phase.

The result of five years of meticulous research, A Thread of Grace is an ambitious, engrossing novel of ideas, history, and marvelous characters that will please Russell’s many fans and earn her even more.]]> 442 Mary Doria Russell 0449004139 Eavan 0 to-read 4.00 2005 A Thread of Grace
author: Mary Doria Russell
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich]]> 25622818 512 Walter Kempowski 0393352269 Eavan 0 to-read 4.19 2007 Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich
author: Walter Kempowski
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> None of This Is True 62334530
A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix’s children’s school. Josie has been listening to Alix’s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.

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

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

Who is Josie Fair? And what has she done?]]> 390 Lisa Jewell 1982179007 Eavan 0 to-read 4.08 2023 None of This Is True
author: Lisa Jewell
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> When Stars Are Scattered 52024847 Heartbreak and hope exist together in this remarkable graphic novel about growing up in a refugee camp, as told by a Somali refugee to the Newbery Honor-winning creator of Roller Girl.

Omar and his little brother, Hassan, arrived in Dadaab, a refugee camp in Kenya, seven years ago. Their father was killed the day they left home, and they haven't seen their mother since they joined their neighbors who were fleeing to Dadaab. Now Omar is eleven and Hassan is nine, and Omar has quit school to look after his brother, who has an intellectual disability.

When Omar is given the opportunity to return to school and carve out a future for himself and Hassan, he feels torn. He loves school and could have the opportunity to earn a coveted scholarship to a North American university--and with it a visa for himself and Hassan. But is it worth the risk and heartache of leaving his vulnerable brother for hours each day?

Told in Victoria Jamieson's engaging and accessible graphic-novel style and based on Omar Mohamed's gripping true story, this book is an intimate, important look at day-to-day life in a refugee camp.]]> 264 Omar Mohamed 0525553916 Eavan 3
If have a quibble it's that it blends memoir and fiction. Omar and Hassan are real people with photos and followups at the back of the book, but Nimo and Maryam are invented or at least a composite. You don't know that until you read the notes at the end.

My artistic quibble is that the stylized depiction of people's posture makes anyone in hijab look inhuman. If you read it you will see what I mean.]]> 4.65 2020 When Stars Are Scattered
author: Omar Mohamed
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.65
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/03
date added: 2024/10/04
shelves:
review:
Well-drawn for the most part and an unusually detailed look at life in a long-term refugee camp. I really felt the highs and lows and appreciated some of the more philosophical notes. It's very carefully written for the younger target audience -- recommended.

If have a quibble it's that it blends memoir and fiction. Omar and Hassan are real people with photos and followups at the back of the book, but Nimo and Maryam are invented or at least a composite. You don't know that until you read the notes at the end.

My artistic quibble is that the stylized depiction of people's posture makes anyone in hijab look inhuman. If you read it you will see what I mean.
]]> <![CDATA[Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again]]> 60980330 Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening--and how to get our attention back.

Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding it much harder to focus than he used to. He found that a life of constantly switching from device to device, from tab to tab, is diminishing and depressing. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions--even abandoning his phone for three months--but in the long-term, nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention and to study their scientific findings--and learned that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.

In the U.S., teenagers now focus on a task for only sixty-five seconds on average, and office workers manage only three minutes. We think this inability to focus is a personal flaw, an individual failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: Our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces, and the science shows that these forces have been ramping up for decades--leaving us uniquely vulnerable, when social media arrived, to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. These forces have been so successful that our collapse in attention is behind many of the wider problems society faces.

In Stolen Focus, Hari embarks on a thrilling journey, taking readers from veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD, to Silicon Valley dissidents who exposed social media companies' furtive attempts to hack our focus; from a favela in Rio where everyone lost their attention in a particularly catastrophic way, to an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore their workers' attention.

In this urgent, deeply researched book, Hari shows that if we understand the twelve true causes of this crisis--from the collapse of sustained reading to the disruption of boredom to rising pollution--we, as individuals and as a society, can finally begin to solve it by staging an attention rebellion. Finally, we have a way to get our focus back.
]]> 368 Johann Hari 0593506006 Eavan 0 to-read 4.18 2022 Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again
author: Johann Hari
name: Eavan
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Spinning 33163388 Spinning, captures what it's like to come of age, come out, and come to terms with leaving behind everything you used to know.

It was the same every morning. Wake up, grab the ice skates, and head to the rink while the world was still dark.

Weekends were spent in glitter and tights at competitions. Perform. Smile. And do it again.

She was good. She won. And she hated it.

For ten years, figure skating was Tillie Walden's life. She woke before dawn for morning lessons, went straight to group practice after school, and spent weekends competing at ice rinks across the state. It was a central piece of her identity, her safe haven from the stress of school, bullies, and family. But over time, as she switched schools, got into art, and fell in love with her first girlfriend, she began to question how the close-minded world of figure skating fit in with the rest of her life, and whether all the work was worth it given the reality: that she, and her friends on the figure skating team, were nowhere close to Olympic hopefuls. It all led to one question: What was the point? The more Tillie thought about it, the more Tillie realized she'd outgrown her passion--and she finally needed to find her own voice.]]> 400 Tillie Walden 1626727724 Eavan 0 to-read 3.90 2017 Spinning
author: Tillie Walden
name: Eavan
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: to-read
review:

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