Terri's bookshelf: all

Terri's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 13 May 2025 22:27:12 -0700 60 Terri's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Tell: A Memoir 214537759 “Where are you, Mom?�� So began Amy’s quest to solve a mystery trapped in the deep recesses of her own memory—a journey that would take her into the burgeoning field of psychedelic therapy, to the limits of the judicial system, and ultimately, home to the Texas panhandle, where her story began.

In her search for the truth, to understand and begin to recover from buried childhood trauma, Griffin interrogates the pursuit of perfectionism, control, and maintaining appearances that drives so many women, asking, when, in our path from girlhood to womanhood, did we learn to look outside ourselves for validation? What kind of freedom is possible if we accept the whole story and embrace who we really are? With hope, heart, and relentless honesty, she points a way forward for all of us, revealing the power of radical truth-telling to deepen our connections—with others and ourselves.]]> 288 Amy Griffin 0593731204 Terri 2
Cut to:

It’s two years later. Now that Amy has faced her demons, she’s doing great. Fantastic! Way to go, Amy! It’s just �� I don’t need a detailed tour of her childhood home. Or transcripts of her therapy sessions. Or the millionth realization that she didn’t have to be perfect, she always was perfect, there was no such thing as perfect ��. sometimes, you have to wonder, where was the book editor?

Are there still book editors?

As long as I’m in curmudgeon mode:

There is no tell in “The Tell��, which is a great title and totally got me to read this book. A tell is mostly a poker term �� it’s an unconscious gesture that indicates a player is bluffing. The author has bursts of agitation, an involuntary reflex which indicate that she’s hiding something. That’s not a tell. That’s a trigger. ]]> 4.17 2025 The Tell: A Memoir

author: Amy Griffin
name: Terri
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/05/13
date added: 2025/05/13
shelves:
review:
Two-thirds of “The Tell�� is a courageous and harrowing memoir. The author, Amy Griffin, recovers the memory of a childhood trauma (courtesy of therapeutic ecstasy �� remember when that was supposedly going to be a thing?). It’s a terrible knowledge, but it’s from 30 years ago, too late to do anything about it, except share it with family and friends, who feel tremendous guilt that they did nothing to stop it.

Cut to:

It’s two years later. Now that Amy has faced her demons, she’s doing great. Fantastic! Way to go, Amy! It’s just �� I don’t need a detailed tour of her childhood home. Or transcripts of her therapy sessions. Or the millionth realization that she didn’t have to be perfect, she always was perfect, there was no such thing as perfect ��. sometimes, you have to wonder, where was the book editor?

Are there still book editors?

As long as I’m in curmudgeon mode:

There is no tell in “The Tell��, which is a great title and totally got me to read this book. A tell is mostly a poker term �� it’s an unconscious gesture that indicates a player is bluffing. The author has bursts of agitation, an involuntary reflex which indicate that she’s hiding something. That’s not a tell. That’s a trigger.
]]> Pet 122892583 A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE

A suspenseful new psychological thriller from the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlisted and Dublin Literary Award shortlisted author of Remote Sympathy, Catherine Chidgey.

Like every other girl in her class, twelve-year-old Justine is drawn to her glamorous, charismatic new teacher and longs to be her pet. However, when a thief begins to target the school, Justine’s sense that something isn’t quite right grows ever stronger. With each twist of the plot, this gripping story of deception and the corrosive power of guilt takes a yet darker turn. Justine must decide where her loyalties lie.

Set in New Zealand in the 1980s and probing themes of racism, misogyny and the oppressive reaches of Catholicism, Pet will take a rightful place next to other classic portraits of childhood betrayal and psychological suspense: Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping among them.

“Refreshing, compelling and surprising.”—Ann Morgan, author of Beside Myself and Reading the World]]> 332 Catherine Chidgey 1609459318 Terri 3 4.10 2023 Pet

author: Catherine Chidgey
name: Terri
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/14
date added: 2025/05/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Confessions 19161835 Her pupils killed her daughter.
Now, she will have her revenge.

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

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

Narrated in alternating voices, with twists you'll never see coming, Confessions explores the limits of punishment, despair, and tragic love, culminating in a harrowing confrontation between teacher and student that will place the occupants of an entire school in danger. You'll never look at a classroom the same way again.]]> 240 Kanae Minato 0316200921 Terri 3 3.91 2008 Confessions

author: Kanae Minato
name: Terri
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/05/11
shelves:
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]]> Headshot 174156218 An electrifying debut novel from an “unusually gifted writer�� (Lorrie Moore) about the radical intimacy of physical competition

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

Frenetic, surprising, and strikingly original, Headshot is a portrait of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness, and sheer physical pleasure that motivates young women to fight—even, and perhaps especially, when no one else is watching.]]> 224 Rita Bullwinkel 0593654102 Terri 4 3.49 2024 Headshot

author: Rita Bullwinkel
name: Terri
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/19
date added: 2025/05/11
shelves:
review:

]]> The Swimming-Pool Library 30106 352 Alan Hollinghurst 0679722564 Terri 5 3.77 1988

author: Alan Hollinghurst
name: Terri
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/05/11
shelves:
review:

]]> The Poisonwood Bible 7244 The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.]]> 546 Barbara Kingsolver 0060786507 Terri 4 4.10 1998 The Poisonwood Bible

author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Terri
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/26
date added: 2025/05/11
shelves:
review:

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

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Terri 3 3.51 2024 All Fours

author: Miranda July
name: Terri
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/05/11
shelves:
review:

]]> The Family Experiment 197108968 From the acclaimed author of The One and The Marriage Act, The Family Experiment is a dark and brilliant speculative thriller about families: real and virtual.

Some families are virtually perfect��

The world's population is soaring, creating overcrowded cities and an economic crisis. And in the UK, the breaking point has arrived. A growing number of people can no longer afford to start families, let alone raise them.

But for those desperate to experience parenthood, there is an alternative. For a monthly subscription fee, clients can create a virtual child from scratch who they can access via the metaverse and a VR headset. To launch this new initiative, the company behind Virtual Children has created a reality TV show called The Substitute. It will follow ten couples as they raise a Virtual Child from birth to the age of eighteen but in a condensed nine-month time period. The prize: the right to keep their virtual child, or risk it all for the chance of a real baby��

Set in the same universe as John Marrs's bestselling novel The One and The Marriage Act, The Family Experiment is a dark and twisted thriller about the ultimate Tamagotchi—a virtual baby.]]> 384 John Marrs 1335000364 Terri 3 4.00 2024

author: John Marrs
name: Terri
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/05/11
shelves:
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]]> Our Evenings 209891406 From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize, a piercing novel that envisions modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience, as he struggles with class and race, art and sexuality, love and violence.

Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, and oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I’d lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.

Dave Win, the son of a British dressmaker and a Burmese man he’s never met, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities lie before Dave, even as he is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates, above all that of Giles Hadlow, whose worldly parents sponsored the scholarship and who find in Dave someone they can more easily nurture than their brutish son.

Our Evenings follows Dave from the 1960s on—through the possibilities that remained open for him, and others that proved to be illusory: as a working-class brown child in a decidedly white institution; a young man discovering queer culture and experiencing his first, formative love affairs; a talented but often overlooked actor, on the road with an experimental theater company; and an older Londoner whose late-in-life marriage fills his days with an unexpected sense of happiness and security.

Moving in and out of Dave’s orbit are the Hadlows. Estranged from his parents, who remain close to Dave, Giles directs his privilege into a career as a powerful right-wing politician, whose reactionary vision for England pokes perilous holes in Dave’s stability. And as the novel accelerates towards the present day, the two men’s lives and values will finally collide in a cruel shock of violence.

This is “one of our most gifted writers�� (The Boston Globe) sweeping readers from our past to our present through the beauty, pain, and joy of one deeply observed life.]]> 496 Alan Hollinghurst 0593243064 Terri 3 3.91 2024 Our Evenings

author: Alan Hollinghurst
name: Terri
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/05/11
shelves:
review:

]]> The Shards 60880820 A sensational new novel from the best-selling author of Less Than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms that tracks a group of privileged Los Angeles high school friends as a serial killer strikes across the city.

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

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

Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero LA, The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret's life at 17-sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best.
]]> 595 Bret Easton Ellis 059353560X Terri 4 3.98 2023

author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: Terri
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/09
date added: 2025/05/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell 14201
Proceeding to London, he raises a beautiful woman from the dead and summons an army of ghostly ships to terrify the French. Yet the cautious, fussy Norrell is challenged by the emergence of another magician: the brilliant novice Jonathan Strange.

Young, handsome and daring, Strange is the very antithesis of Norrell. So begins a dangerous battle between these two great men which overwhelms that between England and France. And their own obsessions and secret dabblings with the dark arts are going to cause more trouble than they can imagine.]]> 1006 Susanna Clarke Terri 5 3.84 2004 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

author: Susanna Clarke
name: Terri
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/26
date added: 2025/05/11
shelves:
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 Terri 3 4.08 2023 None of This Is True

author: Lisa Jewell
name: Terri
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/13
date added: 2025/05/11
shelves:
review:

]]> The List 75498179
It began as a crowdsourced collection of names and somehow morphed into an anonymous account posting allegations on social media. Ola would usually be the first to support such a list—she’d retweet it, call for the men to be fired, write article after article. Except this time Michael’s name is on it.]]> 336 Yomi Adegoke 0063274876 Terri 2 2.98 2023 The List

author: Yomi Adegoke
name: Terri
average rating: 2.98
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/08
date added: 2025/05/11
shelves:
review:

]]> A Gorgeous Excitement 211953309 A dazzling debut novel set in 1980s New York, when cocaine is as easy to get as ice cream, about one young woman’s summer of infinite possibility—and looming danger.

It was the summer of 1986, when the girl was found dead in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum—half-naked, legs splayed, arms flung over her head. Larynx crushed.

There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother’s depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible—when her mother isn’t lying in bed for days, she’s lashing out at Nina over any perceived slight. And after a blowjob gone spectacularly wrong, Nina is the talk of Flanagan’s, the Upper East Side bar where young Manhattan society congregates. It doesn’t help that she’s Jewish, an outsider among the blue-eyed blondes who populate this rarified world. She can fit in, kind of, with enough alcohol and prescription drugs stolen from her parents�� medicine cabinet.

Flanagan’s is where she pines for the handsome, preppy, and charismatic Gardner Reed, whom every girl wants to sleep with and every guy wants to be. After she’s introduced to cocaine, Nina plunges headlong into her pursuit of Gardner, oblivious to the warning signs. When a new medication seemingly frees her mother from darkness, and Nina and Gardner grow closer, it seems like Nina might finally get what she wants. But at what cost?

Freud called cocaine “a gorgeous excitement,�� but a gorgeous excitement for the wrong guy can be lethal.]]> 368 Cynthia Weiner 0593798848 Terri 4 3.70

author: Cynthia Weiner
name: Terri
average rating: 3.70
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/28
date added: 2025/05/11
shelves:
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]]> Mystic River 21671
Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay -- demons that urge him to do terrible things. When Jimmy's daughter is found murdered, Sean is assigned to the case. His investigation brings him into conflict with Jimmy, who finds his old criminal impulses tempt him to solve the crime with brutal justice. And then there is Dave, who came home the night Jimmy's daughter died covered in someone else's blood.

A tense and unnerving psychological thriller, Mystic River is also an epic novel of love and loyalty, faith and family, in which people irrevocably marked by the past find themselves on a collision course with the darkest truths of their own hidden selves.]]> 416 Dennis Lehane 0060584750 Terri 5 4.17 2001 Mystic River

author: Dennis Lehane
name: Terri
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2025/05/04
date added: 2025/05/11
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street (Collins Business Essentials)]]> 226313
First published in 1982, this now classic story of greed and lies in Tinseltown appears here with a stunning final chapter on Begelman's post-Columbia career as he continued to dazzle and defraud . . . until his last hours in a Hollywood hotel room, where his story dramatically and poignantly would end.]]> 576 David McClintick 0060508159 Terri 5 3.95 1982 Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street (Collins Business Essentials)

Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street (Collins Business Essentials)

author: David McClintick
name: Terri
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1982
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/15
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Plot (The Book Series, #1)]]> 55315487 Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot is a psychologically suspenseful novel about a story too good not to steal, and the writer who steals it.

Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he’s teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what’s left of his self-respect; he hasn’t written—let alone published—anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student, announces he doesn’t need Jake’s help because the plot of his book in progress is a sure thing, Jake is prepared to dismiss the boast as typical amateur narcissism. But then . . . he hears the plot.

Jake returns to the downward trajectory of his own career and braces himself for the supernova publication of Evan Parker’s first novel: but it never comes. When he discovers that his former student has died, presumably without ever completing his book, Jake does what any self-respecting writer would do with a story like that—a story that absolutely needs to be told.

In a few short years, all of Evan Parker’s predictions have come true, but Jake is the author enjoying the wave. He is wealthy, famous, praised and read all over the world. But at the height of his glorious new life, an e-mail arrives, the first salvo in a terrifying, anonymous campaign: You are a thief, it says.

As Jake struggles to understand his antagonist and hide the truth from his readers and his publishers, he begins to learn more about his late student, and what he discovers both amazes and terrifies him. Who was Evan Parker, and how did he get the idea for his “sure thing�� of a novel? What is the real story behind the plot, and who stole it from whom?]]> 320 Jean Hanff Korelitz 125079076X Terri 2
]]> 3.75 2021 The Plot (The Book Series, #1)

author: Jean Hanff Korelitz
name: Terri
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2021/06/10
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
review:
Why do writers so often write about writers? Writers are a persistently unhappy breed; they’re very attached to their misery. Jake, the protagonist, is completely on brand. He is tormented. He thinks all his ideas suck. He feels he is a failure. (Show me a happy writer, and you have not shown me a writer.) Three hundred and twenty pages is a long time to spend in this guy’s head. Yet I had a hard time putting the book down. It turns out that the author, Jean Hanff Korelitz, is the writer her main character could never hope to be.

]]> The Bee Sting 62039166 From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under―but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 Terri 5 3.92 2023 The Bee Sting

author: Paul Murray
name: Terri
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/19
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
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]]> The Photograph 202858
Propelled by the author's signature mastery of narrative and psychology, The Photograph is Lively at her very best, the dazzling climax to all she has written before.]]> 231 Penelope Lively 0142004421 Terri 3 3.34 2003

author: Penelope Lively
name: Terri
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/26
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Succession �� Season One: The Complete Scripts]]> 79330740 The complete, authorised scripts, including deleted scenes, of the multiple award-winning Succession .

** Winner of nineteen Emmys, nine Golden Globes, three BAFTAs and a Grammy. **
With an exclusive introduction from creator Jesse Armstrong.
'The most thrilling and beautifully obscene TV there is.' Guardian

'Extraordinarily entertaining and incisive.' Empire

'One of the most relentlessly paced shows on television.' Rolling Stone
Everything I've done in my life is for my children.

When Logan Roy, the head of one of the world's largest media and entertainment conglomerates, decides to retire, each of his four grown children follows a personal agenda that doesn't always sync with those of their siblings -- or their father.

Collected here for the first time, the complete scripts of Season One feature unseen extra material, including deleted scenes, alternative dialogue and character directions. They reveal a unique insight into the writing, creation and development of a TV sensation and a screen-writing masterpiece.
'Monstrous, near-Shakespearean perfection.' New Statesman]]> 840 Jesse Armstrong 0571384005 Terri 5 4.85 Succession – Season One: The Complete Scripts

Succession – Season One: The Complete Scripts

author: Jesse Armstrong
name: Terri
average rating: 4.85
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/10
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Entitlement 209330233 A novel of money and morality from the New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind.

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

Taut, unsettling, and alive to the seductive distortions of money, Entitlement is a riveting tale for our new gilded age, a story that confidently considers questions about need and worth, race and privilege, philanthropy and generosity, passion and obsession. It is a provocative, propulsive novel about the American imagination.]]> 288 Rumaan Alam 0593718461 Terri 4 2.99 2024 Entitlement

author: Rumaan Alam
name: Terri
average rating: 2.99
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/03
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
review:

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

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

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

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.]]> 327 Marie-Helene Bertino 0374109281 Terri 4 4.08 2024 Beautyland

author: Marie-Helene Bertino
name: Terri
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/20
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
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]]> Service 65599686
When Hannah learns that famed chef Daniel Costello is facing accusations of sexual assault, she’s thrust back to the summer she spent as a waitress at his high-end Dublin restaurant. Drawn in by the plush splendour of the dining rooms, the elegance of the food, the wild parties after service, Hannah also remembers the sizzling tension of the kitchens. And how the attention from Daniel morphed from kindness into something darker��

His restaurant shuttered, his lawyers breathing down his neck, Daniel is in a state of disbelief. Decades of hard graft, of fighting to earn recognition for his talent �� is it all to fall apart because of something he can barely remember?

Hiding behind the bedroom curtains from the paparazzi lenses, Julie is raking through more than two decades spent acting the supportive wife, the good mother, and asking herself what it’s all been for.

Their three different voices reveal a story of power and abuse, victimhood and complicity. This is a novel about the facades that we maintain, the lies that we tell and the courage it takes to face the truth.]]> 256 Sarah Gilmartin 1911590804 Terri 4 4.21 2023 Service

author: Sarah Gilmartin
name: Terri
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/15
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions]]> 209192724
When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle, New York in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of professors, the boys were best friends and fierce rivals who soon followed each other to Yale University.

Michael blazed through Yale in three years, graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. Then one day, Jonathan received a devastating Michael had suffered a psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital.

Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Michael was still in hospital when he learned he'd been accepted to Yale Law School, and living in a halfway house when he decided, against all odds, to enroll. Still battling delusions, he managed to graduate, and after his triumphant story was featured in The New York Times , sold a memoir for a vast sum. Ron Howard bought film rights, completing the dream for Michael and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend Carrie, and Brad Pitt was set to star. But then Michael, in the grip of psychosis, committed a horrific act that made him a front-page story of an entirely different sort.

The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen's powerful account of an American tragedy, set in the final decades of the American century, an era that coincided with the emptying out of state mental hospitals. It is a story about the bonds of friendship, the price of delusion and the mystery of identity. Tender, funny, and harrowing by turns, The Best Minds is both a beautifully rendered coming of age story and an indictment of the profound neglect of mental illness in our society.]]> 576 Jonathan Rosen 014313289X Terri 2 3.94 2023 The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

author: Jonathan Rosen
name: Terri
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/06/12
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
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]]> Runaway: Stories 14280 Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster of her intimate relationships.

In Munro’s hands, the people she writes about–women of all ages and circumstances, and their friends, lovers, parents, and children–become as vivid as our own neighbors. It is her miraculous gift to make these stories as real and unforgettable as our own. (back cover)

Runaway
Chance
Soon
Silence
Passion
Trespasses
Tricks
Powers]]> 335 Alice Munro 1400077915 Terri 0 4.00 2004 Runaway: Stories

author: Alice Munro
name: Terri
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/30
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
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]]> False Dawn 722236 143 Edith Wharton 9997519388 Terri 2 3.63 1924

author: Edith Wharton
name: Terri
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1924
rating: 2
read at: 2024/03/08
date added: 2024/05/23
shelves:
review:

]]> The Spell 30104 The Spell details the restlessness of every human heart.]]> 272 Alan Hollinghurst 0140286373 Terri 4 3.55 1998

author: Alan Hollinghurst
name: Terri
average rating: 3.55
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/16
date added: 2024/05/23
shelves:
review:

]]> The Devil's Grip 182506562 Wickedly dark with a mystical edge, this story of an Italian love affair gone bad captures the irresistible pull of toxic relationships—from the acclaimed author of Carnality.

A woman arrives in Florence, overwhelmed by the strange, warm city so different from her home. Amidst the Renaissance architecture and amorous couples, she finds an unexpected love of her own. With his dark, ugly looks, people might stop and stare, wondering what someone like her was doing with someone like him. But he’s the Mickey to her Minnie, and she can fix him—they can fix each other. She feels bound to him, body and soul.

It’s not long before the lying starts. Other women have begun to notice him, and she spirals into paranoia. Soon they’re both cheating and lashing out, and she becomes more and more convinced he’s not merely a violent there’s a demon inside him, and inside her too. Their grip on each other is so strong, it might be impossible to break, even after she puts an ocean between them, following another man to New Orleans.

Heady, unsettling, and shockingly funny with its dead-on descriptions of codependent and abusive relationships, The Devil’s Grip takes us on a breathless journey with the shadow selves we can’t escape.]]> 288 Lina Wolff 1635424208 Terri 4 3.48 2022 The Devil's Grip

author: Lina Wolff
name: Terri
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/12
date added: 2024/05/23
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]]> Friday Black 37570595
These stories explore urgent instances of racism and cultural unrest, and the ways we fight for humanity in an unforgiving world. In “The Finkelstein Five,�� Adjei-Brenyah reckons with the brutal prejudice of our justice system. In “Zimmer Land,�� we see a far-too-easy-to-believe imagining of racism as sport. And “Friday Black�� and “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing�� show the horrors of consumerism and the toll it takes on us all.

Entirely fresh in its style and perspective, and sure to appeal to fans of Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, and George Saunders, Friday Black confronts readers with a complicated, insistent, wrenching chorus of emotions, the final note of which, remarkably, is hope.]]> 194 Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah 1328911241 Terri 4 4.06 2018

author: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
name: Terri
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/23
date added: 2024/02/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood]]> 123088295 310 Patty Lin 1958506060 Terri 1 3.73 2023

End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood

author: Patty Lin
name: Terri
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2024/02/15
date added: 2024/02/23
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]]> The Pessimists 57500768
Welcome to small-town Connecticut, a place whose inhabitants seem to have it all -- the status, the homes, the money, and the ennui. There's Tripp and Virginia, beloved hosts whom the community idolizes, whose basement hides among other things a secret stash of guns and a drastic plan to survive the end times. There's Gunter and Rachel, recent transplants who left New York City to raise their children, only to feel both imprisoned by the banality of suburbia. And Richard and Margot, community veterans whose extramarital affairs and battles with mental health are disguised by their enviably polished veneers and perfect children. At the center of it all is the Petra School, the most coveted of all the private schools in the state, a supposed utopia of mindfulness and creativity, with a history as murky and suspect as our character's inner worlds.

With deep wit and delicious incisiveness, in The Pessimists, Bethany Ball peels back the veneer of upper-class white suburbia to expose the destructive consequences of unchecked privilege and moral apathy in a world that is rapidly evolving without them. This is a superbly drawn portrait of a community, and its couples, torn apart by unmet desires, duplicity, hypocrisy, and dangerous levels of discontent.]]> 304 Bethany Ball 0802158889 Terri 2 3.33 2021 The Pessimists

author: Bethany Ball
name: Terri
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2024/02/07
date added: 2024/02/13
shelves:
review:
I got sucked (suckered more like) by the back cover blurb that said this book “reinvents cheever country for the 21st century.�� these vaguely discontented suburbanites bear no resemblance to the dark, tragic inhabitants of cheever country. nothing happens in “the pessimists.�� nobody moves more than an inch or two from where they started. after i finished this book, i read “the swimmer�� and realized the only way to cheever country is through john cheever.
]]> <![CDATA[The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial: A Drama In Two Acts]]> 42382 103 Herman Wouk 0385514417 Terri 4 4.11 1954

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial: A Drama In Two Acts

author: Herman Wouk
name: Terri
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1954
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/28
date added: 2023/09/09
shelves:
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]]> Roman Fever and Other Stories 767955
Roman fever (1934)
Xingu (1911)
The other two (1904)
Souls belated (1899)
The angel at the grave (1901)
The last asset (1904)
After Holbein (1928)
Autres temps (1911)]]> 304 Edith Wharton 0684829908 Terri 5 4.11 1934 Roman Fever and Other Stories

author: Edith Wharton
name: Terri
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1934
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/27
date added: 2023/09/09
shelves:
review:

]]> Last Night in Montreal 40605629
Last Night in Montreal is a story of love, amnesia, compulsive travel, the depths and the limits of family bonds, and the nature of obsession. In this extraordinary debut, Emily St. John Mandel casts a powerful spell that captures the reader in a gritty, youthful world charged with an atmosphere of mystery, promise and foreboding where small revelations continuously change our understanding of the truth and lead to desperate consequences. Mandel's characters will resonate with you long after the final page is turned.]]> 230 Emily St. John Mandel 1936071452 Terri 2 3.77 2009 Last Night in Montreal

author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Terri
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2009
rating: 2
read at: 2023/08/20
date added: 2023/09/09
shelves:
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]]> May We Be Forgiven 17707741 "A big American story with big American themes" (Elle) from the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir The Mistress’s Daughter

In this vivid, transfixing new novel, A. M. Homes presents a darkly comic look at twenty-first-century domestic life and the possibility of personal transformation. Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his more successful younger brother, George, acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in the suburbs of New York City. When George’s murderous temper results in a shocking act of violence, both men are hurled into entirely new lives. May We Be Forgiven digs deeply into the near biblical intensity of fraternal relationships, our need to make sense of things, and our craving for connection. It is an unnerving tale of unexpected intimacies and of how one deeply fractured family might begin to put itself back together.]]> 481 A.M. Homes 014750970X Terri 2 3.66 2012 May We Be Forgiven

author: A.M. Homes
name: Terri
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2012
rating: 2
read at: 2023/08/13
date added: 2023/09/09
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]]> Birnam Wood 60784757 Birnam Wood is on the move . . .

Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.

But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker--or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama, and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.]]> 432 Eleanor Catton 0374110336 Terri 5 3.79 2023 Birnam Wood

author: Eleanor Catton
name: Terri
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/30
date added: 2023/08/03
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]]> Yellowface 59357120
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 329 R.F. Kuang Terri 2 3.84 2023 Yellowface

author: R.F. Kuang
name: Terri
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2023/07/10
date added: 2023/08/03
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]]> The Soulmate 60784540
Picture a lovely cottage on a cliff, with sloping lawns, walking paths, and beautiful flowers. It’s Gabe and Pippa Gerard’s dream home in a sleepy coastal town. But their perfect house hides something sinister. The tall cliffs have become a popular spot for people to end their lives. Over the past several months, Gabe comes to their rescue, literally talking them off the ledge.

Until one day, he doesn’t. When Pippa discovers Gabe knew the victim, the questions spiral. . . .Did the victim jump? Was she pushed? And would Gabe, the love of Pippa’s life, her soulmate . . . lie? As the perfect façade of their marriage begins to crack, the deepest and darkest secrets begin to unravel. Because sometimes, the most convincing lies are the ones we tell ourselves.]]> 327 Sally Hepworth 1250229707 Terri 0 to-read 3.78 2022 The Soulmate

author: Sally Hepworth
name: Terri
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/07/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Expendable Man 12459312
Dorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith as a master of mid-century noir. In books like In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse, she exposed a seething discontent underneath the veneer of twentieth-century prosperity. With The Expendable Man, first published in 1963, Hughes upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes.]]> 252 Dorothy B. Hughes 159017495X Terri 3 4.04 1963 The Expendable Man

author: Dorothy B. Hughes
name: Terri
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1963
rating: 3
read at: 2023/05/09
date added: 2023/06/19
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Gloria (Acting Edition for Theater Productions)]]> 31430302 59 Branden Jacobs-Jenkins 0822234335 Terri 5 4.21 2016

Gloria (Acting Edition for Theater Productions)

author: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
name: Terri
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/17
date added: 2023/06/19
shelves:
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]]> <![CDATA[Appropriate/An Octoroon: Plays]]> 23282186 260 Branden Jacobs-Jenkins 1559364904 Terri 5 4.31 2015

author: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
name: Terri
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2023/06/15
date added: 2023/06/19
shelves:
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]]> Hello Beautiful 61771675
But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters�� unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?]]> 416 Ann Napolitano Terri 3 4.14 2023 Hello Beautiful

author: Ann Napolitano
name: Terri
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/19
date added: 2023/06/19
shelves:
review:

]]> Horse 59109077 A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history

Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack.

New York City, 1954. Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a nineteenth-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.

Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse--one studying the stallion's bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.

Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.]]> 401 Geraldine Brooks 0399562966 Terri 3 4.17 2022 Horse

author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Terri
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/30
date added: 2023/06/19
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]]> Demon Copperhead 60194162 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780063251922.

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

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

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver Terri 5 4.46 2022

author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Terri
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/03/17
date added: 2023/06/19
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]]> The Latecomer 57693566 From the New York Times bestselling author of The Plot, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Latecomer is a layered and immersive literary novel about three siblings, desperate to escape one another, and the upending of their family by the late arrival of a fourth.

The Latecomer follows the story of the wealthy, New York City-based Oppenheimer family, from the first meeting of parents Salo and Johanna, under tragic circumstances, to their triplets born during the early days of IVF. As children, the three siblings--Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally--feel no strong familial bond and cannot wait to go their separate ways, even as their father becomes more distanced and their mother more desperate. When the triplets leave for college, Johanna, faced with being truly alone, makes the decision to have a fourth child. What role will the “latecomer�� play in this fractured family?

A complex novel that builds slowly and deliberately, The Latecomer touches on the topics of grief and guilt, generational trauma, privilege and race, traditions and religion, and family dynamics. It is a profound and witty family story from an accomplished author, known for the depth of her character studies, expertly woven storylines, and plot twists.]]> 439 Jean Hanff Korelitz 1250790794 Terri 3 3.93 2022 The Latecomer

author: Jean Hanff Korelitz
name: Terri
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/01/14
date added: 2023/02/17
shelves:
review:
Four stars for the first two-thirds of the book -- a Jonathan Franzen-like dense, complicated, compelling family portrait. Two stars for the last third -- a warp-speed untying of all the knots and they all lived happily ever after. What?
]]> Severance 36348525
Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale and satire.]]> 291 Ling Ma 0374261598 Terri 4 3.90 2018

author: Ling Ma
name: Terri
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2023/01/18
date added: 2023/02/17
shelves:
review:

]]> A Head Full of Ghosts 23019294
To her parents' despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie's descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession. He also contacts a production company that is eager to document the Barretts' plight. With John, Marjorie's father, out of work for more than a year and the medical bills looming, the family agrees to be filmed, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality television show. When events in the Barrett household explode in tragedy, the show and the shocking incidents it captures become the stuff of urban legend.

Fifteen years later, a bestselling writer interviews Marjorie's younger sister, Merry. As she recalls those long ago events that took place when she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets and painful memories that clash with what was broadcast on television begin to surface--and a mind-bending tale of psychological horror is unleashed, raising vexing questions about memory and reality, science and religion, and the very nature of evil.]]> 287 Paul Tremblay 0062363239 Terri 1 3.78 2015 A Head Full of Ghosts

author: Paul Tremblay
name: Terri
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2015
rating: 1
read at: 2022/12/25
date added: 2022/12/25
shelves:
review:
“Exorcist��-lite told from three points of view, all the same person: Merry, an eight-year-old girl whose sister is “possessed��; Merry, 15 years later, revisiting the past; and Karen, the pseudonym Merry uses to write a blog about her vast knowledge of horror movies. Karen thinks she is fascinating and witty. She is not. She is a windbag and I have no clue what purpose she serves. The book is repetitive and dull, but I held out for a plot twist at the end worthy of a Stephen King front cover blurb. Thanks for nothing, Stephen.
]]> The Island 58340727 It was just supposed to be a family vacation.
A terrible accident changed everything.
You don't know what you're capable of until they come for your family.

After moving from a small country town to Seattle, Heather Baxter marries Tom, a widowed doctor with a young son and teenage daughter. A working vacation overseas seems like the perfect way to bring the new family together, but once they’re deep in the Australian outback, the jet-lagged and exhausted kids are so over their new mom.

When they discover remote Dutch Island, off-limits to outside visitors, the family talks their way onto the ferry, taking a chance on an adventure far from the reach of iPhones and Instagram.

But as soon as they set foot on the island, which is run by a tightly knit clan of locals, everything feels wrong. Then a shocking accident propels the Baxters from an unsettling situation into an absolute nightmare.

When Heather and the kids are separated from Tom, they are forced to escape alone, seconds ahead of their pursuers.

Now it’s up to Heather to save herself and the kids, even though they don’t trust her, the harsh bushland is filled with danger, and the locals want her dead.

Heather has been underestimated her entire life, but she knows that only she can bring her family home again and become the mother the children desperately need, even if it means doing the unthinkable to keep them all alive.]]> 375 Adrian McKinty 0316531286 Terri 0 to-read 3.71 2022 The Island

author: Adrian McKinty
name: Terri
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Murder Rule 57409438 For fans of the compulsive psychological suspense of Ruth Ware and Tana French, a mother daughter story—one running from a horrible truth, and the other fighting to reveal it—that twists and turns in shocking ways, from the internationally bestselling author of The Scholar and The Ruin.

First Rule: Make them like you.

Second Rule: Make them need you.

Third Rule: Make them pay.

They think I’m a young, idealistic law student, that I’m passionate about reforming a corrupt and brutal system.

They think I’m working hard to impress them.

They think I’m here to save an innocent man on death row.

They're wrong. I’m going to bury him.]]> 295 Dervla McTiernan 0063042207 Terri 0 to-read 3.61 2022 The Murder Rule

author: Dervla McTiernan
name: Terri
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Appeal (The Appeal, #1) 54621096 447 Janice Hallett 1788165292 Terri 0 to-read 3.83 2021

author: Janice Hallett
name: Terri
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Broken Summer 60600503 A death, a lie, a secret. For twenty-six summers he didn’t have the courage to face the past.

Lee Hanjo is an artist at the peak of his fame, envied and celebrated. Then, on his forty-third birthday, he awakens to find that his devoted wife has disappeared, leaving behind a soon-to-be-published novel she’d secretly written about the sordid past and questionable morality of an artist with a trajectory similar to Hanjo’s. It’s clear to him that his life is about to shatter and the demons from his past will come out. But why did his wife do it? Why now?

The book forces Hanjo to reflect on a summer from his youth when a deadly lie irreversibly and tragically determined the fates of two families.

From master storyteller J.M. Lee, one of Korea’s most renowned authors, comes an unforgettable novel of hidden truths, denials, and their inevitable repercussions. Everyone still left standing from that terrible summer so long ago must finally reckon with the deceptions that started it all and, twist after shocking twist, reap both the suffering and the vindication that comes with revenge.]]> 251 Jung-Myung Lee 1662505051 Terri 0 to-read 3.30 2021 Broken Summer

author: Jung-Myung Lee
name: Terri
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Sputnik Sweetheart 9557 alternate cover can be found here

Sumire is in love with a woman seventeen years her senior. But whereas Miu is glamorous and successful, Sumire is an aspiring writer who dresses in an oversized second-hand coat and heavy boots like a character in a Kerouac novel.

Sumire spends hours on the phone talking to her best friend K about the big questions in life: what is sexual desire, and should she ever tell Miu how she feels for her? Meanwhile K wonders whether he should confess his own unrequited love for Sumire.

Then, a desperate Miu calls from a small Greek island: Sumire has mysteriously vanished...]]> 229 Haruki Murakami 0099448475 Terri 0 to-read 3.85 1999 Sputnik Sweetheart

author: Haruki Murakami
name: Terri
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/12/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> NSFW 58673061 Blisteringly sharp, hypersmart, and compulsively readable―meet Isabel Kaplan’s searing debut novel about a young woman trying to succeed in Hollywood without selling her soul.

From the outside, the unnamed protagonist in NSFW appears the vision of success. She has landed an entry-level position at a leading TV network that thousands of college grads would kill for. And sure, she has much to learn. The daughter of a prominent feminist attorney, she grew up outside the industry, better versed in gender dynamics than box office hits. But she’s resourceful and hardworking―what could go wrong?

At first, the high adrenaline work environment motivates her, yet as she climbs the ranks, she confronts the reality of creating change from the inside. Her points only get attention when echoed by male colleagues. She hears whispers of abuse and sexual misconduct. Her mother says to keep her head down until she’s the one in charge―a scenario that seems idealistic at best, morally questionable at worst.

When her personal and professional lives collide, threatening both the network and her future, she must finally decide what to protect: the career she’s given everything for or the empowered woman she claims to be.]]> 272 Isabel Kaplan 1250822890 Terri 4 3.48 2022 NSFW

author: Isabel Kaplan
name: Terri
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/10
date added: 2022/12/13
shelves:
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Truthfully, my favorite part of this book is the post-publication essay the author wrote for The Guardian, about how her boyfriend �� a writer �� handled her success as a writer. Which is to say, very badly. “NSFW�� is a fictionalized account of the author’s life after college. It’s highly entertaining, if somewhat slight, but then, so was “Heartburn,�� which this book seems pretty clearly modeled on. However, the essay in The Guardian is not fiction, it is fact, and Isabel Kaplan is one of those writers who is able to mine her own life with self-deprecating detachment. She can be extremely amusing with her personal pain. This is an art form created by Nora Ephron. Those who revere Nora Ephron (I am one) believe there will never be another writer like her. She is not in a league of her own �� she is the entire league. But now I have to say, based on this early evidence, Isabel Kaplan looks to be a very promising rookie.
]]> <![CDATA[Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

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

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]> 401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Terri 5 4.12 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Terri
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/10/06
date added: 2022/10/06
shelves:
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I am not a gamer. I have no desire to be one. I don’t think stories should have levels and puzzles that need to be solved to advance. I want to read a story, not actively participate in the writing of it. AND YET �� I wish I could read this book again and meet these people for the first time and not know what’s going to happen. I crave stories with a magnificent, touching, completely earned and true ending, which this one has. But for once, I can’t accept that it’s over.
]]> Ill Will 30687788 Two sensational unsolved crimes—one in the past, another in the present—are linked by one man’s memory and self-deception in this chilling novel of literary suspense from National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon.

“We are always telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves,�� Dustin Tillman likes to say. It’s one of the little mantras he shares with his patients, and it’s meant to be reassuring. But what if that story is a lie?

A psychologist in suburban Cleveland, Dustin is drifting through his forties when he hears the news: His adopted brother, Rusty, is being released from prison. Thirty years ago, Rusty received a life sentence for the massacre of Dustin’s parents, aunt, and uncle. The trial came to symbolize the 1980s hysteria over Satanic cults; despite the lack of physical evidence, the jury believed the outlandish accusations Dustin and his cousin made against Rusty. Now, after DNA analysis has overturned the conviction, Dustin braces for a reckoning.

Meanwhile, one of Dustin’s patients gets him deeply engaged in a string of drowning deaths involving drunk college boys. At first Dustin dismisses talk of a serial killer as paranoid thinking, but as he gets wrapped up in their amateur investigation, Dustin starts to believe that there’s more to the deaths than coincidence. Soon he becomes obsessed, crossing all professional boundaries—and putting his own family in harm’s way.

From one of today’s most renowned practitioners of literary suspense, Ill Will is an intimate thriller about the failures of memory and the perils of self-deception. In Dan Chaon’s nimble, chilling prose, the past looms over the present, turning each into a haunted place.]]> 496 Dan Chaon 0345476042 Terri 4 3.35 2017 Ill Will

author: Dan Chaon
name: Terri
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2022/09/04
date added: 2022/10/02
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]]> The Last Housewife 59349100 From the author of the acclaimed In My Dreams I Hold a Knife comes a pitch-black thriller about a woman determined to destroy a powerful cult and avenge the deaths of the women taken in by it, no matter the cost.

While in college in upstate New York, Shay Evans and her best friends met a captivating man who seduced them with a web of lies about the way the world works, bringing them under his thrall. By senior year, Shay and her friend Laurel were the only ones who managed to escape. Now, eight years later, Shay's built a new life in a tiny Texas suburb. But when she hears the horrifying news of Laurel's death—delivered, of all ways, by her favorite true-crime podcast crusader—she begins to suspect that the past she thought she buried is still very much alive, and the predators more dangerous than ever.

Recruiting the help of the podcast host, Shay goes back to the place she vowed never to return to in search of answers. As she follows the threads of her friend's life, she's pulled into a dark, seductive world, where wealth and privilege shield brutal philosophies that feel all too familiar. When Shay's obsession with uncovering the truth becomes so consuming she can no longer separate her desire for justice from darker desires newly reawakened, she must confront the depths of her own complicity and conditioning. But in a world built for men to rule it—both inside the cult and outside of it—is justice even possible, and if so, how far will Shay go to get it?]]> 385 Ashley Winstead 172822991X Terri 3 3.68 2022 The Last Housewife

author: Ashley Winstead
name: Terri
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/09/24
date added: 2022/10/02
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]]> If We Were Villains 34275217
As one of seven young actors studying Shakespeare at an elite arts college, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingenue, extra. But when the casting changes, and the secondary characters usurp the stars, the plays spill dangerously over into life, and one of them is found dead. The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless.]]> 354 M.L. Rio 1250095298 Terri 2 4.21 2017 If We Were Villains

author: M.L. Rio
name: Terri
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2017
rating: 2
read at: 2022/09/09
date added: 2022/10/02
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]]> My Face for the World to See 17262518
My Face for the World to See is set in Hollywood, where the tonic for anonymity is fame and you’re only as real as your image. At a party, the narrator, a screenwriter, rescues a young woman who staggers with drunken determination into the Pacific. He is living far from his wife in New York and long ago shed any illusions about the value of his work. He just wants to be left alone. And yet without really meaning to, he gets involved with the young woman, who has, it seems, no illusions about love, especially with married men. She’s a survivor, even if her beauty is a little battered from years of not quite making it in the pictures. She’s just like him, he thinks, and as their casual relationship takes on an increasingly troubled and destructive intensity, it seems that might just be true, only not in the way he supposes.]]> 131 Alfred Hayes 1590176677 Terri 1 3.74 1958 My Face for the World to See

author: Alfred Hayes
name: Terri
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1958
rating: 1
read at: 2022/08/31
date added: 2022/10/02
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]]> Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont 58664440
Mrs. Palfrey prides herself on having always known “the right thing to do,�� but in this new situation she discovers that resource is much reduced. Before she knows it, in fact, she tries something else.

Elizabeth Taylor’s final and most popular novel is as unsparing as it is, ultimately, heartbreaking.]]> 224 Elizabeth Taylor 1681375648 Terri 3 4.25 1971 Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

author: Elizabeth Taylor
name: Terri
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1971
rating: 3
read at: 2022/08/26
date added: 2022/10/02
shelves:
review:

]]> Atonement 6867
On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses the flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony's incomplete grasp of adult motives—together with her precocious literary gifts—brings about a crime that will change all their lives.

As it follows that crime's repercussions through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century, Atonement engages the reader on every conceivable level, with an ease and authority that mark it as a genuine masterpiece.]]> 351 Ian McEwan 038572179X Terri 4 3.94 2001

author: Ian McEwan
name: Terri
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/15
date added: 2022/10/02
shelves:
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]]> I'm Glad My Mom Died 59364173
Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,�� eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?�� She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly , she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!��), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.]]> 320 Jennette McCurdy Terri 5 4.45 2022 I'm Glad My Mom Died

author: Jennette McCurdy
name: Terri
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/08/05
date added: 2022/08/13
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“I’m Glad My Mom Died�� is like “The Diary of Anne Frank,�� if Anne Frank were a child actor on a Nickelodeon show.
]]> The Singer's Gun 7617564 287 Emily St. John Mandel 1936071649 Terri 4 3.79 2010

author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Terri
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/04
date added: 2022/08/05
shelves:
review:
When I read, I mentally divide books into beginning, middle and end, and I tend not to like them all the same. I’m disappointed, even angry, when a book starts great, wanders off the premise (the premises?) in the middle, and ends with a thud. Sometimes, the middle is when the story takes off, and you’re hurtling to the ending, and then you get there, and it turns out to be a day-old carton of chinese food leftovers �� not as good as you thought it would be. Emily St. John Mandel is one of those rare writers who can deliver on all fronts �� in “Station Eleven�� and “Sea of Tranquility.�� In the case of “The Singer’s Gun,�� she had me at hello, I was up reading late at night in the middle �� but then, it just kind of ended. No chill, no fizz, nothing that would make you think: “I will definitely read this book again.�� Emily St. John Mandel is a genius storyteller, and I loved “The Singer’s Gun.�� I just didn’t love love it.
]]> <![CDATA[Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years]]> 97936
Widely acclaimed as a major text of the Watergate saga, J. Anthony Lukas’s Nightmare is a masterwork of investigation, highlighted by in-depth character sketches of the key players. For students of history coming to these events for the first time, this book reveals in depth the particular trauma of a nation in turmoil; for those who remember, the upheaval and what was at stake are once more brought to life.]]> 648 J. Anthony Lukas 0821412876 Terri 0 to-read 4.42 1973 Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years

Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years

author: J. Anthony Lukas
name: Terri
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1973
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/07/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Sleepwalk 57771216 A high speed and darkly comic road trip through a near future America with a big hearted mercenary, from beloved and acclaimed novelist Dan Chaon

��ɲ��’s hero, Will Bear, is a man with so many aliases that he simply thinks of himself as the Barely Blur. At fifty years old, he’s been living off the grid for over half his life. He’s never had a real job, never paid taxes, never been in a committed relationship. A good-natured henchman with a complicated and lonely past and an LSD microdosing problem, he spends his time hopscotching across state lines in his beloved camper van, running sometimes shady, often dangerous errands for a powerful and ruthless operation he’s never troubled himself to learn too much about. He has lots of connections, but no true ties. His longest relationships are with an old rescue dog with posttraumatic stress, and a childhood friend as deeply entrenched in the underworld as he is, who, lately, he’s less and less sure he can trust.

Out of the blue, one of his many burner phones heralds a call from a twenty-year-old woman claiming to be his biological daughter, Cammie. She says she’s the product of one of his long-ago sperm donations; he’s half certain she’s AI. She needs his help. She’s entrenched in a widespread and nefarious plot involving Will’s employers, and continuing to have any contact with her increasingly fuzzes the line between the people Will is working for and the people he’s running from.

With his signature blend of haunting emotional realism and fast-paced intrigue, Chaon populates his fractured America with characters who ring all too true. Gazing both back to the past and forward to an inevitable enough seeming future, Sleepwalk examines where we’ve been and where we’re going, and the curses and joys of being human that will never change, no matter how far we travel to dodge them, or how cleverly we hide.]]> 320 Dan Chaon 1250175216 Terri 4 ]]> 3.61 2022 Sleepwalk

author: Dan Chaon
name: Terri
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/07/03
date added: 2022/07/03
shelves:
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If you are ever in a bookstore, randomly looking for something good to read, and all you know is that you want it to be the opposite of a Sally Rooney novel, pick up a Dan Chaon book and read the first page. I defy you not to turn it. He uses words like bait. It astounds me to know he taught creative writing at Oberlin for 10 years. How incredible it must have been to be in his class! (You know who was? Lena Dunham. It’s in his Wikipedia bio. I hope he is mentioned in her Wikipedia bio.)

]]> How Beautiful We Were 51794532 From the celebrated author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, comes a sweeping, wrenching story about the collision of a small African village and an America oil company.

"We should have known the end was near."

So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company.

Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean-up and financial reparations to the villagers are made—and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interest. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle would last for decades and come at a steep price.

Told through the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold onto its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.

"The unforgettable story of a community on the wrong end of Western greed, How Beautiful We Were will enthrall you, appall you, and show you what is possible when a few people stand up and say this is not right. A masterful novel by a spellbinding writer engaged with the most urgent questions of our day.”—David Ebershoff, bestselling author of The Danish Girl]]> 364 Imbolo Mbue 0593132424 Terri 0 to-read 3.92 2021 How Beautiful We Were

author: Imbolo Mbue
name: Terri
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/05/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> Women Talking 40046077
While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women—all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in—have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they’ve ever known or should they dare to escape?

Based on real events and told through the “minutes�� of the women’s all-female symposium, Toews’s masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.]]> 216 Miriam Toews 1635572584 Terri 0 to-read 3.61 2018 Women Talking

author: Miriam Toews
name: Terri
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/05/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> You Remind Me of Me 227481
You Remind Me of Me begins with a series of separate In 1977, a little boy is savagely attacked by his mother’s pet Doberman; in 1997 another little boy disappears from his grandmother’s backyard on a sunny summer morning; in 1966, a pregnant teenager admits herself to a maternity home, with the intention of giving her child up for adoption; in 1991, a young man drifts toward a career as a drug dealer, even as he hopes for something better. With penetrating insight and a deep devotion to his characters, Dan Chaon explores the secret connections that irrevocably link them. In the process he examines questions of identity, fate, and Why do we become the people that we become? How do we end up stuck in lives that we never wanted? And can we change the course of what seems inevitable?

In language that is both unflinching and exquisite, Chaon moves deftly between the past and the present in the small-town prairie Midwest and shows us the extraordinary lives of “ordinary�� people.]]> 356 Dan Chaon 0345441419 Terri 3 3.63 2004 You Remind Me of Me

author: Dan Chaon
name: Terri
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2022/05/20
date added: 2022/05/24
shelves:
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]]> Pachinko 34051011
Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters—strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis—survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.]]> 496 Min Jin Lee Terri 5 4.35 2017 Pachinko

author: Min Jin Lee
name: Terri
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2022/05/05
date added: 2022/05/24
shelves:
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]]> Await Your Reply 6251222
Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can't stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed.

A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy Lattimore sneaks away from the small town of Pompey, Ohio, with her charismatic former history teacher. They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life. But soon Lucy begins to feel quietly uneasy.

My whole life is a lie, thinks Ryan Schuyler, who has recently learned some shocking news. In response, he walks off the Northwestern University campus, hops on a bus, and breaks loose from his existence, which suddenly seems abstract and tenuous. Presumed dead, Ryan decides to remake himself through unconventional and precarious means.

Await Your Reply is a literary masterwork with the momentum of a thriller, an unforgettable novel in which pasts are invented and reinvented and the future is both seductively uncharted and perilously unmoored.
(jacket)]]> 324 Dan Chaon 0345476026 Terri 5 3.54 2009 Await Your Reply

author: Dan Chaon
name: Terri
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/22
date added: 2022/04/23
shelves:
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If I were a novelist, this is the novel I would want to be able to write. It’s rare for me to be able to visualize a book so completely, and that wasn’t always a good thing. There were times I would gasp and turn away from the book, as if I were watching it, not reading it. A limited TV series is inevitable, I thought. I’m completely in awe �� but also a little bummed �� that there can never be one.
]]> 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 Terri 5 4.04 2022

author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Terri
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/11
date added: 2022/04/22
shelves:
review:
Until recently, there was only one author whose every book I wanted to (and did) read, and that was Patricia Highsmith. Even though I own all her books, I still start any visit to a bookstore at the shelves where her name is on the bindings. It’s like seeing a friend at a big party where I don’t really know anyone else. Then my daughter introduced me to Emily St. John Mandel. Right away, she reminded me of Patricia Highsmith �� they both have the ability to make the unthinkable thinkable. Death is at the heart of their books. It’s my least favorite subject, but they are fascinated and inspired by it. They give life to death. I read “Station Eleven�� twice, during a pandemic. I was at the Strand bookstore in New York City on April 8th, to buy “Sea of Tranquility�� on its publication date. Hey, everybody! I made a new friend!
]]> Free Food for Millionaires 40727626
Free Food For Millionaires offers up a fresh exploration of the complex layers we inhabit both in society and within ourselves. Inspired by 19th century novels such as Vanity Fair and Middlemarch, Min Jin Lee examines maintaining one's identity within changing communities in what is her remarkably assured debut.]]> 577 Min Jin Lee Terri 3 3.91 2007 Free Food for Millionaires

author: Min Jin Lee
name: Terri
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2022/04/01
date added: 2022/04/22
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]]> Notes on an Execution 57773248
Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he’s done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn’t want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood. He hoped it wouldn’t end like this, not for him.

Through a kaleidoscope of women—a mother, a sister, a homicide detective—we learn the story of Ansel’s life. We meet his mother, Lavender, a seventeen-year-old girl pushed to desperation; Hazel, twin sister to Ansel’s wife, inseparable since birth, forced to watch helplessly as her sister’s relationship threatens to devour them all; and finally, Saffy, the homicide detective hot on his trail, who has devoted herself to bringing bad men to justice but struggles to see her own life clearly. As the clock ticks down, these three women sift through the choices that culminate in tragedy, exploring the rippling fissures that such destruction inevitably leaves in its wake.

Blending breathtaking suspense with astonishing empathy, Notes on an Execution presents a chilling portrait of womanhood as it simultaneously unravels the familiar narrative of the American serial killer, interrogating our system of justice and our cultural obsession with crime stories, asking readers to consider the false promise of looking for meaning in the psyches of violent men.]]> 306 Danya Kukafka 0063052733 Terri 3 4.04 2022 Notes on an Execution

author: Danya Kukafka
name: Terri
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2022/03/15
date added: 2022/04/22
shelves:
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]]> The Mephisto Waltz 223691 256 Fred Mustard Stewart 071810692X Terri 4 3.77 1969

author: Fred Mustard Stewart
name: Terri
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/24
date added: 2022/04/22
shelves:
review:

]]> To Paradise 57739876 From the author of the classic A Little Life, a bold, brilliant novel spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, about lovers, family, loss and the elusive promise of utopia.

In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist’s damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him—and solve the mystery of her husband’s disappearances.

These three sections are joined in an enthralling and ingenious symphony, as recurring notes and themes deepen and enrich one another: A townhouse in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village; illness, and treatments that come at a terrible cost; wealth and squalor; the weak and the strong; race; the definition of family, and of nationhood; the dangerous righteousness of the powerful, and of revolutionaries; the longing to find a place in an earthly paradise, and the gradual realization that it can’t exist. What unites not just the characters, but these Americas, are their reckonings with the qualities that make us human: Fear. Love. Shame. Need. Loneliness.

To Paradise is a fin de siècle novel of marvellous literary effect, but above all it is a work of emotional genius. The great power of this remarkable novel is driven by Yanagihara’s understanding of the aching desire to protect those we love �� partners, lovers, children, friends, family and even our fellow citizens �� and the pain that ensues when we cannot.]]> 720 Hanya Yanagihara 0385547935 Terri 5 3.74 2022 To Paradise

author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Terri
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/18
date added: 2022/03/09
shelves:
review:
People may fantasize there is such a place as paradise, maybe even that they’ve been there on their last vacation. But people cannot exist in a paradise; if they try, the paradise ceases to be. This book has three separate stories �� the first two are parables about men who live in their own personal paradise, which they ultimately have to escape to survive. And these are light-hearted tales by comparison to the third story. In that one, we are the people and the world is our paradise, which we have casually robbed of all its gifts. Now nature is coming for us, with one vicious, incurable virus after another. Unfortunately, this is not a fictional dystopia. Hanya Yanagihara has written a diary of our future.
]]> The School for Good Mothers 57846320 An alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781982156121 can be found here.

In this taut and explosive debut novel, one lapse in judgement lands a young mother in a government reform program where custody of her child hangs in the balance.

Frida Liu is struggling. She doesn’t have a career worthy of her Chinese immigrant parents�� sacrifices. What’s worse is she can’t persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with their angelic daughter Harriet does Frida finally feel she’s attained the perfection expected of her. Harriet may be all she has, but she’s just enough.

Until Frida has a horrible day.

The state has its eyes on mothers like Frida �� ones who check their phones while their kids are on the playground; who let their children walk home alone; in other words, mothers who only have one lapse of judgement. Now, a host of government officials will determine if Frida is a candidate for a Big Brother-like institution that measures the success or failure of a mother’s devotion. Faced with the possibility of losing Harriet, Frida must prove that she can live up to the standards set for mothers �� that she can learn to be good.

This propulsive, witty page-turner explores the perils of “perfect�� upper-middle-class parenting, the violence enacted upon women by the state and each other, and the boundless love a mother has for her daughter.]]> 336 Jessamine Chan Terri 4 3.51 2022 The School for Good Mothers

author: Jessamine Chan
name: Terri
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/17
date added: 2022/01/17
shelves:
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"The School for Good Mothers" may be the scariest book I have ever read. This isn't a dystopian future; this is for anyone who lived through the Great Mindfuck of the late 1990s, when stay-at-home moms came for the working mothers. We were hit with the shrapnel of "Is your job more important than your child?" and "You have your whole life to work, but your child is only young once." Threatened with potential damage to our child's psyche by never being the mom on the class field trip. Hoping the brownies we made for the school bake sale might be rewarded with eye contact from the PTA overlords. Jessamine Chan has given this conflict the "Man in the High Castle" treatment -- an alternate timeline where less-than-perfect mothers can be sentenced to 12 months in a behavior modification boot camp, after which a judge decides if they get to keep their child. The most disturbing thing about "The School for Good Mothers" is that it felt so real, I had to remind myself, more than once, that it wasn't.
]]> Siren Queen 58724597
Luli Wei is beautiful, talented, and desperate to be a star. Coming of age in pre-Code Hollywood, she knows how dangerous the movie business is and how limited the roles are for a Chinese American girl from Hungarian Hill—but she doesn’t care. She’d rather play a monster than a maid.

But in Luli’s world, the worst monsters in Hollywood are not the ones on screen. The studios want to own everything from her face to her name to the women she loves, and they run on a system of bargains made in blood and ancient magic, powered by the endless sacrifice of unlucky starlets like her. For those who do survive to earn their fame, success comes with a steep price. Luli is willing to do whatever it takes—even if that means becoming the monster herself.

Siren Queen offers up an enthralling exploration of an outsider achieving stardom on her own terms, in a fantastical Hollywood where the monsters are real and the magic of the silver screen illuminates every page.]]> 280 Nghi Vo 1250788838 Terri 0 to-read 3.69 2022 Siren Queen

author: Nghi Vo
name: Terri
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/01/13
shelves: to-read
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]]> Behind Her Eyes 28965131 Why is everyone talking about the ending of Sarah Pinborough's Behind Her Eyes?

Louise is a single mom, a secretary, stuck in a modern-day rut. On a rare night out, she meets a man in a bar and sparks fly. Though he leaves after they kiss, she’s thrilled she finally connected with someone.

When Louise arrives at work on Monday, she meets her new boss, David. The man from the bar. The very married man from the bar…who says the kiss was a terrible mistake but who still can’t keep his eyes off Louise.

And then Louise bumps into Adele, who’s new to town and in need of a friend, but she also just happens to be married to David. David and Adele look like the picture-perfect husband and wife, but then why is David so controlling, and why is Adele so scared of him?

As Louise is drawn into David and Adele’s orbit, she uncovers more puzzling questions than answers. The only thing that is crystal clear is that something in this marriage is very, very wrong, but Louise can’t guess how wrong―and how far a person might go to protect their marriage’s secrets.]]> 307 Sarah Pinborough 125011117X Terri 4
Yes. Yes, there is.]]> 3.79 2017 Behind Her Eyes

author: Sarah Pinborough
name: Terri
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/13
date added: 2022/01/13
shelves:
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Oh geez, I thought. A twist ending you don’t see coming. Is there really such a thing anymore?

Yes. Yes, there is.
]]> The Lying Life of Adults 48616787 336 Elena Ferrante 1609455916 Terri 4 3.67 2019

author: Elena Ferrante
name: Terri
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/08
date added: 2022/01/08
shelves:
review:

]]> Station Eleven 20170404 An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.]]> 333 Emily St. John Mandel 0385353308 Terri 5 4.05 2014 Station Eleven

author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Terri
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2021/12/28
date added: 2021/12/28
shelves:
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]]> The Oasis 16071855 The Oasis, McCarthy's second novel, won a contest organized by Cyril Connelly, the British critic and editor of the prestigious literary magazine Horizon, and was first published as the February 1949 edition of that magazine. Connelly called the book "brilliant and true and funny and beautifully written and intelligently thought and felt."

The Oasis is a wickedly satiric roman a clef about a group of urban American intellectuals who try unsuccessfully to establish a rural utopian colony just as the Cold War is setting in and fear of the atomic bomb is reaching panic proportions. At its appearance a few months later in the U.S., the novel caused a scandal, alienating a number of McCarthy's friends.

One of her former lovers, the critic Philip Rahv, was so upset at the character based on him that he tried to stop its publication. At the same time, a then relatively new acquaintance who later became McCarthy's closest friend, Hannah Arendt, wrote her: "I just read The Oasis and must tell you that it was pure delight. You have written a veritable little masterpiece."

]]> 133 Mary McCarthy 1612192289 Terri 4 3.30 1949 The Oasis

author: Mary McCarthy
name: Terri
average rating: 3.30
book published: 1949
rating: 4
read at: 2021/12/23
date added: 2021/12/23
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]]> Lemon 58574082
Seventeen years pass without any resolution for those who knew and loved Hae-on, and the grief and uncertainty take a cruel toll on her younger sister, Da-on, in particular. Unable to move on with her life, Da-on tries in her own twisted way to recover some of what she's lost, ultimately setting out to find the truth of what happened.

Told at different points in time from the perspectives of Da-on and two of Hae-on's classmates, Lemon loosely follows the structure of a detective novel. But finding the perpetrator is not the main objective here. Instead, the work explores grief and trauma, raising important questions about guilt, retribution, and the meaning of death and life.]]> 147 Kwon Yeo-Sun 1635420881 Terri 3 3.41 2019 Lemon

author: Kwon Yeo-Sun
name: Terri
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2021/11/20
date added: 2021/12/15
shelves:
review:

]]> Nightmare Alley 7140096 Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a carnival-show geek—alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd’s gleeful disgust and derision—going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There’s no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him.

And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute assistant (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. At least for now.]]> 275 William Lindsay Gresham 1590173481 Terri 3 3.87 1946 Nightmare Alley

author: William Lindsay Gresham
name: Terri
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1946
rating: 3
read at: 2021/12/09
date added: 2021/12/15
shelves:
review:

]]> The Power of the Dog 128073
Phil and George are brothers, more than partners, joint owners of the biggest ranch in their Montana valley. Phil is the bright one, George the plodder. Phil is tall and angular; George is stocky and silent. Phil is a brilliant chess player, a voracious reader, an eloquent storyteller; George learns slowly, and devotes himself to the business.

Phil is a vicious sadist, with a seething contempt for weakness to match his thirst for dominance; George has a gentle, loving soul. They sleep in the room they shared as boys, and so it has been for forty years. When George unexpectedly marries a young widow and brings her to live at the ranch, Phil begins a relentless campaign to destroy his brother's new wife. But he reckons without an unlikely protector.

From its visceral first paragraph to its devastating twist of an ending, The Power of the Dog will hold you in its grip.

WITH AN AFTERWORD BY ANNIE PROULX]]> 293 Thomas Savage 0316610895 Terri 4 4.16 1967

author: Thomas Savage
name: Terri
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1967
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/30
date added: 2021/12/15
shelves:
review:

]]> The Anomaly 56920684
In June 2021, a senseless event upends the lives of hundreds of men and women, all passengers on a flight from Paris to New York. Among them: Blake, a respectable family man, though he works as a contract killer; Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star tired of living a lie; Joanna, a formidable lawyer whose flaws have caught up with her; and Victor Miesel, a critically acclaimed yet commercially unsuccessful writer who suddenly becomes a cult hit. All of them believed they had double lives. None imagined just how true that was.

This witty variation on the doppelgänger theme, which takes us on a journey from Lagos and Mumbai to the White House, is Hervé Le Tellier's most ambitious work yet.]]> 391 Hervé Le Tellier 1635421691 Terri 2
The next 238 pages drains that world of all its color and hypnotic allure, until it’s just a bunch of politicians and scientists and �� gahhhhh �� philosophers sitting in heavily guarded secret rooms, trying to explain what happened in the first 153 pages.

If you watched “Lost�� all the way to its excruciatingly pointless end, it’s like that, but shorter.]]> 3.80 2020 The Anomaly

author: Hervé Le Tellier
name: Terri
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2021/12/15
date added: 2021/12/15
shelves:
review:
The first 153 pages of this book are exhilarating �� you are drawn into this fascinating, wonderfully mysterious world, which looks familiar, but tantalizingly isn’t.

The next 238 pages drains that world of all its color and hypnotic allure, until it’s just a bunch of politicians and scientists and �� gahhhhh �� philosophers sitting in heavily guarded secret rooms, trying to explain what happened in the first 153 pages.

If you watched “Lost�� all the way to its excruciatingly pointless end, it’s like that, but shorter.
]]> <![CDATA[What It Takes: The Way to the White House]]> 380057 1051 Richard Ben Cramer 0679746498 Terri 0 to-read 4.42 1992

What It Takes: The Way to the White House

author: Richard Ben Cramer
name: Terri
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2021/11/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Silence of the Girls (Women of Troy, #1)]]> 37969723
When Agamemnon, the brutal political leader of the Greek forces, demands Briseis for himself, she finds herself caught between the two most powerful of the Greeks. Achilles refuses to fight in protest, and the Greeks begin to lose ground to their Trojan opponents. Keenly observant and coolly unflinching about the daily horrors of war, Briseis finds herself in an unprecedented position, able to observe the two men driving the Greek army in what will become their final confrontation, deciding the fate not only of Briseis's people but also of the ancient world at large.

Briseis is just one among thousands of women living behind the scenes in this war—the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead—all of them erased by history. With breathtaking historical detail and luminous prose, Pat Barker brings the teeming world of the Greek camp to vivid life. She offers nuanced, complex portraits of characters and stories familiar from mythology, which, seen from Briseis's perspective, are rife with newfound revelations. Barker's latest builds on her decades-long study of war and its impact on individual lives—and it is nothing short of magnificent.]]> 325 Pat Barker Terri 2
A friend of mine fixed me up with "The Silence of the Girls." It's "The Iliad" told from the point of view of Achilles' other lover, Briseis.

I kept hoping it would fill the empty space left by "The Song of Achilles." It didn't. It just made me long for that version of the Trojan War even more.

I wonder if I would like "The Iliad."]]> 3.88 2018 The Silence of the Girls (Women of Troy, #1)

The Silence of the Girls (Women of Troy, #1)

author: Pat Barker
name: Terri
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2018
rating: 2
read at: 2021/10/15
date added: 2021/11/12
shelves:
review:
You know how it is when you pick up a book and start reading it, you find yourself falling in love with it, you're unable to go anywhere without it, you can barely sleep because you don't want to part with it. Then ... you finish it. It was so beautiful while it lasted. You reach for it in the morning, and realize, it's already on your bookshelf. You miss it terribly. That's how I felt about "The Song of Achilles," a retelling of "The Iliad" from the point of view of Achilles' lover, Patroclus.

A friend of mine fixed me up with "The Silence of the Girls." It's "The Iliad" told from the point of view of Achilles' other lover, Briseis.

I kept hoping it would fill the empty space left by "The Song of Achilles." It didn't. It just made me long for that version of the Trojan War even more.

I wonder if I would like "The Iliad."
]]> Crossroads 55881796 Jonathan Franzen's gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads.

It's December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless--unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem's sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who's been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.

Jonathan Franzen's novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and for their keen-eyed take on contemporary America. Now, in Crossroads, Franzen ventures back into the past and explores the history of two generations. With characteristic humor and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that resonates powerfully with our own.

A tour de force of interwoven perspectives and sustained suspense, its action largely unfolding on a single winter day, Crossroads is the story of a Midwestern family at a pivotal moment of moral crisis. Jonathan Franzen's gift for melding the small picture and the big picture has never been more dazzlingly evident.]]> 592 Jonathan Franzen 0374181179 Terri 4 4.05 2021 Crossroads

author: Jonathan Franzen
name: Terri
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2021/11/11
date added: 2021/11/12
shelves:
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]]> All's Well 53256108 From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny, a darkly funny novel about a theater professor suffering chronic pain, who in the process of staging a troubled production of Shakespeare’s most maligned play, suddenly and miraculously recovers.

Miranda Fitch’s life is a waking nightmare. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating, chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. Determined to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised, and cost, her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.

That’s when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of Miranda’s past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what’s coming to them, and the invisible, doubted pain that’s kept her from the spotlight is made known.

With prose Margaret Atwood has described as “no punches pulled, no hilarities dodged...genius,�� Mona Awad has concocted her most potent, subversive novel yet. All’s Well is the story of a woman at her breaking point and a formidable, piercingly funny indictment of our collective refusal to witness and believe female pain.]]> 352 Mona Awad Terri 3 3.70 2021 All's Well

author: Mona Awad
name: Terri
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/10/21
date added: 2021/11/12
shelves:
review:

]]> Housekeeping 11741 Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.]]> 219 Marilynne Robinson 0312424094 Terri 0 3.82 1980 Housekeeping

author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Terri
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at: 2021/08/09
date added: 2021/10/02
shelves:
review:

]]> Godshot 41719463
Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. But then her life explodes in a single unimaginable act of abandonment: her mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves Lacey and runs off with a man she barely knows. Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her widowed grandma, Cherry, who is more concerned with her taxidermy mice collection than her own granddaughter. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules, and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother, no matter what it takes. With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances.

Possessed of an unstoppable plot and a brilliantly soulful voice, Godshot is a book of grit and humor and heart, a debut novel about female friendship and resilience, mother-loss and motherhood, and seeking salvation in unexpected places. It introduces a writer who gives Flannery O’Connor’s Gothic parables a Californian twist and who emerges with a miracle that is all her own.]]> 325 Chelsea Bieker 1948226480 Terri 2 3.77 2020 Godshot

author: Chelsea Bieker
name: Terri
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2020
rating: 2
read at: 2021/08/28
date added: 2021/10/02
shelves:
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]]> Nine Perfect Strangers 39280445 Could ten days at a health resort really change you forever?

These nine perfect strangers are about to find out...

Nine people gather at a remote health resort. Some are here to lose weight, some are here to get a reboot on life, some are here for reasons they can’t even admit to themselves. Amidst all of the luxury and pampering, the mindfulness and meditation, they know these ten days might involve some real work. But none of them could imagine just how challenging the next ten days are going to be.

Frances Welty, the formerly best-selling romantic novelist, arrives at Tranquillum House nursing a bad back, a broken heart, and an exquisitely painful paper cut. She’s immediately intrigued by her fellow guests. Most of them don’t look to be in need of a health resort at all. But the person that intrigues her most is the strange and charismatic owner/director of Tranquillum House. Could this person really have the answers Frances didn’t even know she was seeking? Should Frances put aside her doubts and immerse herself in everything Tranquillum House has to offer—or should she run while she still can?

It’s not long before every guest at Tranquillum House is asking exactly the same question.

Combining all of the hallmarks that have made Liane Moriarty's writing a go-to for anyone looking for wickedly smart, page-turning fiction that will make you laugh and gasp, Nine Perfect Strangers once again shows why she is a master of her craft.]]> 453 Liane Moriarty 1250069823 Terri 1 3.53 2018

author: Liane Moriarty
name: Terri
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2018
rating: 1
read at: 2021/08/22
date added: 2021/10/02
shelves:
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]]> Anatomy of a Scandal 34791469 400 Sarah Vaughan 1501172174 Terri 2 3.47 2018

author: Sarah Vaughan
name: Terri
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2018
rating: 2
read at: 2021/08/14
date added: 2021/10/02
shelves:
review:

]]> Bluebeard 9601 318 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 038533351X Terri 4 4.06

author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
name: Terri
average rating: 4.06
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/07
date added: 2021/10/02
shelves:
review:

]]> The Other Black Girl 55711688 Get Out meets The Stepford Wives in this electric debut about the tension that unfurls when two young Black women meet against the starkly white backdrop of New York City book publishing.

Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and microaggressions, she’s thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They’ve only just started comparing natural hair care regimens, though, when a string of uncomfortable events elevates Hazel to Office Darling, and Nella is left in the dust.

Then the notes begin to appear on Nella’s desk: LEAVE WAGNER. NOW.

It’s hard to believe Hazel is behind these hostile messages. But as Nella starts to spiral and obsess over the sinister forces at play, she soon realizes that there’s a lot more at stake than just her career.

A whip-smart and dynamic thriller and sly social commentary that is perfect for anyone who has ever felt manipulated, threatened, or overlooked in the workplace, The Other Black Girl will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last twist.]]> 357 Zakiya Dalila Harris 1982160136 Terri 3 3.34 2021

author: Zakiya Dalila Harris
name: Terri
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/08/03
date added: 2021/10/02
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]]> The Nature of Fragile Things 53398512
Sophie Whalen is a young Irish immigrant so desperate to get out of a New York tenement that she answers a mail-order bride ad and agrees to marry a man she knows nothing about. San Francisco widower Martin Hocking proves to be as aloof as he is mesmerizingly handsome. Sophie quickly develops deep affection for Kat, Martin's silent five-year-old daughter, but Martin's odd behavior leaves her with the uneasy feeling that something about her newfound situation isn't right.

Then one early-spring evening, a stranger at the door sets in motion a transforming chain of events. Sophie discovers hidden ties to two other women. The first, pretty and pregnant, is standing on her doorstep. The second is hundreds of miles away in the American Southwest, grieving the loss of everything she once loved.

The fates of these three women intertwine on the eve of the devastating earthquake, thrusting them onto a perilous journey that will test their resiliency and resolve and, ultimately, their belief that love can overcome fear.

From the acclaimed author of The Last Year of the War and As Bright as Heaven comes a gripping novel about the bonds of friendship and mother love, and the power of female solidarity.]]> 367 Susan Meissner 0451492188 Terri 1 4.21 2021 The Nature of Fragile Things

author: Susan Meissner
name: Terri
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2021
rating: 1
read at: 2021/07/28
date added: 2021/10/02
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]]> A Touch of Jen 55867897
Imagine their confused excitement when they run into Jen, in the flesh, and she invites them on a surfing trip to the Hamptons with her wealthy boyfriend and their group. Once there, Remy and Alicia try (a little too hard) to fit into Jen’s exalted social circle, but violent desire and class resentment bubble beneath the surface of this beach-side paradise, threatening to erupt. As small disturbances escalate into outright horror, Remy and Alicia tumble into an uncanny alternate reality, one shaped by their most unspeakable, deviant, and intoxicating fantasies. Is this what “self-actualization�� looks like?

Part millennial social comedy, part psychedelic horror, and all wildly entertaining, A Touch of Jen is a sly, unflinching examination of the hidden drives that lurk just outside the frame of our carefully curated selves.]]> 320 Beth Morgan 0316704261 Terri 2 3.26 2021

author: Beth Morgan
name: Terri
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2021
rating: 2
read at: 2021/07/24
date added: 2021/10/02
shelves:
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]]> Home Fire 33621427
Then Eamonn enters the sisters�� lives. Son of a powerful political figure, he has his own birthright to live up to—or defy. Is he to be a chance at love? The means of Parvaiz’s salvation? Suddenly, two families�� fates are inextricably, devastatingly entwined, in this searing novel that asks: What sacrifices will we make in the name of love?

The suspenseful and heartbreaking story of an immigrant family driven to pit love against loyalty, with devastating consequences ]]> 276 Kamila Shamsie 0735217688 Terri 5 4.00 2017 Home Fire

author: Kamila Shamsie
name: Terri
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2021/07/20
date added: 2021/07/21
shelves:
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]]> Anxious People 49127718 A poignant, charming novel about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find they have more in common than they ever imagined

Looking at real estate isn't usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple who relentlessly hunt down fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth that they can't fix up their own marriage. There's a wealthy banker who has been too busy making money to care about anyone else and a young couple who are about to have their first child but can't seem to agree on anything, from where they want to live to how they met in the first place. Add to the mix an eighty-seven-year-old woman who has lived long enough not to be afraid of someone waving a gun in her face, a flustered but still-ready-to-make-a-deal real estate agent, and a mystery man who has locked himself in the apartment's only bathroom, and you've got the worst group of hostages in the world.

Each of them carries a lifetime of grievances, hurts, secrets, and passions that are ready to boil over. None of them is entirely who they appear to be. And all of them—the bank robber included—desperately crave some sort of rescue. As the authorities and the media surround the premises, these reluctant allies will reveal surprising truths about themselves and set in a motion a chain of events so unexpected that even they can hardly explain what happens next.

Humorous, compassionate, and wise, Anxious People is an ingeniously constructed story about the enduring power of friendship, forgiveness, and hope—the things that save us, even in the most anxious of times.

Includes short story - The Last Round of Golf]]> 336 Fredrik Backman 198216963X Terri 3 4.17 2019 Anxious People

author: Fredrik Backman
name: Terri
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2021/07/17
date added: 2021/07/17
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Reading this book is like trying to read a bowl of sugar. Everyone is so sweet to each other; they pat each other, and smile weakly, and grin. Fredrik Backman is a very prolific writer; this book feels like he was in a rush of some kind and didn't have time to use the search-and-replace function. Okay, repetitive word use is something which troubles few people; I just happen to be one of them. But this book goes nowhere. Literally. It's like being trapped at a really dull party with eight people -- or "idiots" as the author would say, another word that gets a lot of page time. But then, "idiot" has many uses in "Anxious People." It's an insult, it's a realization that you are one, it's a term of endearment; it's just a word comically employed to describe a bunch of people. Sometimes, it's hard to tell which "idiot" is up at bat. And the author goes to a lot of trouble to show that his characters are not idiots. They just like to talk about their problems in great detail. Do I sound like a bitchy curmudgeon? Well, I definitely feel like one, having read the last three pages, where Fredrik Bachman transforms this book into a beautiful, soulful examination of people in the company of people. And I feel my judgy eyerolls for the first 332 pages are now petty and meaningless. But I'm including this screed so you can see how far I had to come. Any criticism I had has disappeared. I am in awe. And I now understand what "idiot" means.
]]> A Suspension of Mercy 158885 Sydney Bartleby has killed his wife, Alicia—at least he has thought about it, compulsively, over and over again, plotting schemes, designing escapes, forging alibis. Of course he has; he's a mystery-script writer. But when Alicia takes a long, unannounced vacation, Sydney seizes the opportunity to perfect his artistic method.

With her characteristic precision and unrivaled sensitivity to the inner tremblings of human character, Patricia Highsmith shockingly portrays Sydney's descent into the treacherous world of his own fictions. Once again Highsmith proves herself to be a master at depicting the unsettling forces that boil beneath the surface of everyday life.]]> 235 Patricia Highsmith 0393321975 Terri 4 3.83 1965 A Suspension of Mercy

author: Patricia Highsmith
name: Terri
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1965
rating: 4
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date added: 2021/07/17
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]]> Hangsaman 131177 Hangsaman is Miss Jackson's second novel. The story is a simple one but the overtones are immediately present. "Natalie Waite who was seventeen years old but who felt that she had been truly conscious only since she was about fifteen lived in an odd corner of a world of sound and sight, past the daily voices of her father and mother and their incomprehensible actions." In a few graphic pages, the family is before us—Arnold Waite, a writer, egotistical and embittered; his wife, the complaining martyr; Bud, the younger brother who has not yet felt the need to establish his independence; and Natalie, in the nightmare of being seventeen.

The Sunday afternoon cocktail party, to which Arnold Waite has invited his literary friends and neighbors, serves to etch in the details of this family's life, and to draw Natalie into the vortex. The story concentrates on the next few critical months in Natalie's life, away at college, where each experience reproduces on a larger scale the crucial failure of her emotional life at home. With a mounting tension rising from character and situation as well as the particular magic of which Miss Jackson is master, the novel proceeds inexorably to the stinging melodrama of its conclusion. The bitter cruelty of the passage from adolescence to womanhood, of a sensitive and lonely girl caught in a world not of her own devising, is a theme well suited to Miss Jackson's brilliant talent.]]> 191 Shirley Jackson 0445031174 Terri 5 3.78 1951 Hangsaman

author: Shirley Jackson
name: Terri
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1951
rating: 5
read at: 2021/02/05
date added: 2021/07/17
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