Bella's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 16 Apr 2025 14:25:08 -0700 60 Bella's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg When the World Tips Over 203820262 An explosive new novel brimming with love, secrets, and enchantment

The Fall siblings live in hot Northern California wine country, where the sun pours out of the sky, and the devil winds blow so hard they whip the sense right out of your head.

Years ago, the Fall kids� father mysteriously disappeared, cracking the family into pieces. Now Dizzy Fall, age twelve, bakes cakes, sees spirits, and wishes she were a heroine of a romance novel. Miles Fall, seventeen, brainiac, athlete, and dog-whisperer, is a raving beauty, but also lost, and desperate to meet the kind of guy he dreams of. And Wynton Fall, nineteen, who raises the temperature of a room just by entering it, is a virtuoso violinist set on a crash course for fame . . . or self-destruction.

Then an enigmatic rainbow-haired girl shows up, tipping the Falls� world over. She might be an angel. Or a saint. Or an ordinary girl. Somehow, she is vital to each of them. But before anyone can figure out who she is, catastrophe strikes, leaving the Falls more broken than ever. And more desperate to be whole.

With road trips, rivalries, family curses, love stories within love stories within love stories, and sorrows and joys passed from generation to generation, this is the intricate, luminous tale of a family’s complicated past and present. And only in telling their stories can they hope to rewrite their futures.]]> 528 Jandy Nelson 0525429093 Bella 0 currently-reading 4.19 2024 When the World Tips Over
author: Jandy Nelson
name: Bella
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Kings Head 214505008 A fierce story about friendship and competition set among London's forgotten girl gangs

We never ran the place on paper, but we had reigned here as Kings, reigned over the world we created for ourselves.

1957, London. A gang of girls called the Kings rule the bomb-struck streets of Finsbury Park. When Harry, their unpredictable but charismatic leader, tries to encroach on the territory of the rival Seven Sisters gang, the Kings know they're in for a fight.

Armed with flick knives and fists, they do battle in dancehalls and on football fields. But with the authorities closing in and conscripted boys threatening to reclaim what was once theirs, the Kings must ask if they're willing to pay the price of loyalty.

Bound by wild friendship and brutal competition, these young women will do anything to carve a space for themselves in this ruthless city.]]> 230 Kelly Frost 1805462393 Bella 0 currently-reading 3.42 The Kings Head
author: Kelly Frost
name: Bella
average rating: 3.42
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> Heart the Lover 228110489 “Lily King is one of our great literary treasures.”—Madeline Miller

From the New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers comes a magnificent and intimate new novel of desire, friendship, loss, and the lasting impact of first love

You knew I’d write a book about you someday.

Our narrator understands good love stories—their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules.

In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit Sam and Yash. Best friends living off-campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. Youthful passion is unpredictable though, and she soon finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever.

Decades later, Jordan is living the life she dreamed of, and the vulnerable days of her youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news brings the past crashing into the present, Jordan returns to a world she left behind and is forced to confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.

Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics of Lily King have come to adore, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving story that celebrates love, friendship, and the transformative nature of forgiveness. Wise, unforgettable, and with a delightful connective thread to Writers & Lovers, this is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today.]]> 256 Lily King 0802165176 Bella 0 to-read 0.0 Heart the Lover
author: Lily King
name: Bella
average rating: 0.0
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/16
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]]> <![CDATA[Death at La Fenice (Commissario Brunetti, #1)]]> 68099 But as the investigation unfolds, a chilling picture slowly begins to take shape--a detailed portrait of revenge painted with vivid strokes of hatred and shocking depravity. And the dilemma for Guido Brunetti will not be finding a murder suspect, but rather narrowing the choices down to one. . . .

]]> 270 Donna Leon 006074068X Bella 3 3.81 1992 Death at La Fenice (Commissario Brunetti, #1)
author: Donna Leon
name: Bella
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1992
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/16
date added: 2025/04/16
shelves:
review:
It was okay! I was sometimes bored! At least Venice is beautiful!
]]> <![CDATA[Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland]]> 40163119
Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders.

Patrick Radden Keefe writes an intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.]]> 441 Patrick Radden Keefe 0385521316 Bella 0 to-read 4.47 2018 Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
author: Patrick Radden Keefe
name: Bella
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Night in Question (The Agathas #2)]]> 62361548 How do you solve a murder? Follow the lessons of the master—Agatha Christie! Iris and Alice find themselves in the middle of another Castle Cove mystery in the sequel to New York Times bestseller The Agathas, by powerhouse authors Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson.

Alice Ogilvie and Iris Adams became the talk of Castle Cove when they cracked the biggest case of the fall: the death of Brooke Donovan. Together, the Agathas put Brooke's killer away for good, and since then things around town have been almost back to normal. Quiet, even.

But if Alice and Iris know anything, it's that sometimes quiet is just the calm before the storm. The truth is, Brooke's disappearance wasn't the first mystery to rock Castle Cove, and it won't be the last. So when their school dance at the infamous Levy Castle—the site of film starlet Mona Moody's unsolved death back in the 1940s—is interrupted by a violent assault, Iris and Alice pull out their murder boards and get back to work.

To understand the present, sometimes you need to look into the past. And if the Agathas want a chance at solving their new case, that's exactly where they'll need to start digging. Only, what they uncover might very well kill them.]]> 416 Kathleen Glasgow 0593645839 Bella 3 3.89 2023 The Night in Question (The Agathas #2)
author: Kathleen Glasgow
name: Bella
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/12
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves:
review:
3.5 stars. So long as you’re willing to suspend your disbelief (and then some), this is a delightful, well-paced follow-up to THE AGATHAS. I love a teenage detective story.
]]> Woodworking 217311813 An unforgettable and heartwarming debut following a trans high school teacher from a small town in South Dakota who befriends the only other trans woman she knows: one of her students.

Erica Skyberg is thirty-five years old, recently divorced—and trans. Not that she's told anyone yet. Mitchell, South Dakota, isn't exactly bursting with other trans women. Instead, she keeps to herself, teaching by day and directing community theater by night. That is, until Abigail Hawkes enters her orbit.

Abigail is seventeen, Mitchell High’s resident political dissident and Only Trans Girl. It’s a role she plays faultlessly, albeit a little reluctantly. She's also annoyed by the idea of spending her senior year secretly guiding her English teacher through her transition. But Abigail remembers the uncertainty—and loneliness—that comes with it. Besides, Erica isn’t the only one struggling to shed the weight of others� expectations.

As their unlikely friendship evolves under the increasing scrutiny of their community, both women—and those closest to them—will come to realize that sometimes there is nothing more radical than letting the world see who you really are.

Detransition Baby meets Fleishman is in Trouble in this remarkable debut novel from an incisive contemporary voice. A story about the awkwardness of growing up and the greatest love story of all, that between us and our friends, Woodworking is a tonic for the moment and a celebration of womanhood in all its multifaceted joy.]]> 351 Emily St. James 163893147X Bella 0 to-read 4.43 2025 Woodworking
author: Emily St. James
name: Bella
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/07
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]]> Stag Dance 215362032 In this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing.

In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.

Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones� imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In “The Chaser,� a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, “The Masker,� a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood.

Acidly funny and breathtaking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles, and delights.]]> 304 Torrey Peters 0593595645 Bella 0 to-read 4.09 2025 Stag Dance
author: Torrey Peters
name: Bella
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth]]> 216654637 AN IRISH INDEPENDENT AND IRISH TIMES BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2025

'An original voice' Colm Tóibín

'Duncan brings a new way of seeing' Irish Times

'A deliberative and delicate reading experience, revelatory in the truest sense of that word' Guardian

During winter season in a secluded Alpine city, John Molloy, an Irish restorative sculptor, meets Bernadette, an enigmatic Italian sociologist. As John falls in love, a distressing moment from his youth rises into view, the disastrous fallout of which has reverberated unchecked through his life.

Years later, a letter from home arrives, asking him to pray for the speedy death of an ailing friend. Over a day-long odyssey through the ancient streets and churches of Bologna, John is forced to confront his present, his past and the bedrock of his psyche. A delicately crafted novel of two halves, a decade apart, The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth is a masterful excavation of human desires, inhibitions, and the patterns of habit to which we unwittingly fall prey.]]> 224 Adrian Duncan 1805221957 Bella 0 to-read 3.74 The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth
author: Adrian Duncan
name: Bella
average rating: 3.74
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Class: Welcome to the Little School by the Sea (Maggie Adair #1)]]> 31286922 It's about love lives . . .
Maggie has been dating Stan for years - safe, comfortable and about as exciting as soggy toast. Can their relationship survive? Especially when Maggie meets David McDonald, her opposite number at the boys' boarding school over the hill. Every single girl in the school has a crush on him, but not Maggie . . . yet.

It's about school lives . . .
Two girls. Same form. Simone Kardashian has won a scholarship and is determined to make her parents proud. Fliss Prosser is furious at being so far from home and her friends. As Simone tries desperately to fit in, Fliss tries desperately to get out.

It's about private lives . . .
Veronica Deveral knows how to manage a school. Routine and discipline are fundamental to her role. But Veronica has a secret that could ruin her career . . .

]]> 336 Jane Beaton Bella 2 3.67 2008 Class: Welcome to the Little School by the Sea (Maggie Adair #1)
author: Jane Beaton
name: Bella
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2008
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves:
review:
This is delightfully reminiscent of a subgenre I didn't know I adored: middle grade boarding school fiction. Less delightful is the constant fat-shaming, which I recognise is a product of early 2000s diet culture but nevertheless find painful to read.
]]> Bud Finds Her Gift 222156785 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass comes a beautiful and lushly illustrated tale celebrating gratitude, reciprocity, and finding our place in the natural world, ideal for sharing with the youngest readers.

When young Bud sees people bustling around, intent on their chores and their screens, she is certain they must be doing important things—and she wants to be included. But wise Nokomis, her grandmother, shows her that there is a different way to find belonging, one that relies on stillness and observing the natural world. As Bud discovers the freely given gifts of the Earth, she wonders if she has something important to give back: What is her gift?

Infused with warmth, humor, and insight, and beautifully illustrated by Naoko Stoop, the first picture book by renowned author and Indigenous ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer inspires readers to treasure nature’s generosity and the gifts each one of us can share with the Earth.]]> 40 Robin Wall Kimmerer 0063324423 Bella 0 to-read 0.0 2025 Bud Finds Her Gift
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Bella
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Lost Evangeline (The Norendy Tales)]]> 223121168 Two-time Newbery Medalist Kate DiCamillo reunites with two-time Caldecott Medalist Sophie Blackall in an original fairy tale set in the world of The Puppets of Spelhorst and The Hotel Balzaar.

When a shoemaker discovers a tiny girl (as small as a mouse!) in his shop, he takes her in, names her Evangeline, and raises her as his own. The shoemaker’s wife, however, fears that Evangeline has bewitched her husband, so when an opportunity arises to rid herself of the girl, she takes it. Evangeline finds herself far from her adopted father and her home, a tiny girl lost in the wide world. But she is brave, and she is resourceful, and with the help of those she meets on her journey—including a disdainful and self-satisfied cat—she may just find her way again. Return to the magical land of Norendy in this third original fairy tale by renowned storyteller Kate DiCamillo, perfect for savoring alone or for reading aloud with someone you love. Graced with exquisite black-and-white illustrations by Sophie Blackall, this timeless story of a girl and her father will make you believe in the impossible.]]> 160 Kate DiCamillo 1536225525 Bella 0 to-read 5.00 2025 Lost Evangeline (The Norendy Tales)
author: Kate DiCamillo
name: Bella
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Experiment 220908981 Nathan wants to help his people, but first he has to figure out who they are.

Nathan never understood what was "fun" about secrets, probably because he’s always had to keep a very big one.

Although he appears to be a typical sixth-grader (with parents, homework and a best friend, Victor), Nathan learned at an early age that his family is from another planet. Now, their time on Earth may be coming to an end.

Nathan, his parents and nine other families are part of an experiment that suddenly seems to be going wrong. Some of the experimenters, including Nathan's first crush, Izzy, are disappearing without a word. After his family is called back to the mothership, Nathan begins to question everything he’s been taught to believe about who he is and why he's on Earth.

The Experiment is a fast-paced coming-of-age novel - with aliens - that asks universal questions about how we figure out who we want to be, and whether it’s ever too late to change.]]> 288 Rebecca Stead 1250374766 Bella 0 to-read 4.25 2025 The Experiment
author: Rebecca Stead
name: Bella
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> If Looks Could Kill 224003878 From Printz Honor–winning and New York Times bestselling author Julie Berry, a true-crime-nailbiter-turned-mythic-odyssey pitting Jack the Ripper against Medusa. A defiant love song to sisterhood, a survivors� battle cry, and a romantic literary tour de force laced with humor.

It’s autumn 1888, and Jack the Ripper is on the run. As London police close in, he flees England for New York City seeking new victims. But a primal force of female vengeance has had enough. With serpents for hair and a fearsome gaze, an awakened Medusa is hunting for one Jack.

And other dangers lurk in Manhattan’s Bowery. Salvation Army volunteers Tabitha and Pearl discover that a girl they once helped has been forced to work in a local brothel. Tabitha’s an upstate city girl with a wry humor and a thirst for adventure, while farmgirl Pearl takes everything with stone-cold seriousness. Their brittle partnership is tested as they team up with an aspiring girl reporter and a handsome Irish bartender to mount a rescue effort, only to find their fates entwine with Medusa’s and Jack’s.]]> 448 Julie Berry 1534470816 Bella 0 to-read 4.80 2025 If Looks Could Kill
author: Julie Berry
name: Bella
average rating: 4.80
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> We Met Like This: A Novel 222376740 Beloved author Kasie West's sparkling adult rom-com debut about a hopeless romantic falling for the one man she never expected

Can a swipe right turn into swept away?

Margot Hart is a hopeless romantic. That’s why she wants to be a literary agent—to help bring romance books to the world. It’s also why she hates dating apps with all her romance loving soul. She wants her own love story to be just as much fun as the books she reads—a mixed up coffee order, a mistaken identity. She’s not going to tell the story that she swiped right on future husband’s shirtless pic for the rest of her life.

The problem is that her most consistent relationship over the last several years is with Oliver, a guy she keeps rematching with on the apps. They’ve only been on one date and it was a disaster…well, until the make out session in the car before parting ways. But, she keeps reminding herself, a make out session does not a relationship make. And so there will not be a date two regardless of how witty their app banter is.

When Margot gets fired from her job on the same day she meets Oliver again, her life becomes a veritable shit show. Her dream career is dying right before her eyes, and Oliver thinks she’s interested in only one a repeat of the hot make out session they had three years ago so she can get him out of her system. And maybe that is all she wants from him, because she and Oliver are definitely not compatible—he doesn’t hit the snooze button, he runs five miles every morning, he reads nonfiction, and worst of all, she didn’t meet him in cute way! But in her scramble to keep her dream career alive, by opening her own agency, Oliver is there with his golden retriever energy, more steady and helpful than any man she’s ever dated. Just when she thinks she’s overcome her app bias, she realizes that maybe it’s not her who’s holding back, but him. And his reasons are more than she bargained for.

Kasie West's romantic adult debut is full of witty banter, meet cutes gone awry and, ultimately, true love.]]> 368 Kasie West 1250349141 Bella 0 to-read 4.32 2025 We Met Like This: A Novel
author: Kasie West
name: Bella
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Golden Boy's Guide to Bipolar]]> 222658364 From bestselling author Sonora Reyes comes a poignant and searingly honest companion novel to the multi-award-winning The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School, following beloved character Cesar Flores as he comes to terms with his sexuality, his new bipolar diagnosis, and more mistakes than he can count.

Seventeen-year-old Cesar Flores is finally ready to win back his ex-boyfriend. Since breaking up with Jamal in a last-ditch effort to stay in the closet, he’s come out to Mami, his sister, Yami, and their friends, taken his meds faithfully, and gotten his therapist’s blessing to reunite with Jamal.

Everything would be perfect if it weren’t for The Thoughts—the ones that won’t let all his Catholic guilt and internalizations stay buried where he wants them. The louder they become, the more Cesar is once again convinced that he doesn't deserve someone like Jamal—or anyone really.

Cesar can hide a fair amount of shame behind jokes and his “gifted� reputation, but when a manic episode makes his inner turmoil impossible to hide, he’s faced with a stark burn every bridge he has left or, worse—ask for help. But is the mortifying vulnerability of being loved by the people he’s hurt the most a risk he’s willing to take?]]> 384 Sonora Reyes 0063358409 Bella 0 to-read 4.53 2025 The Golden Boy's Guide to Bipolar
author: Sonora Reyes
name: Bella
average rating: 4.53
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> Hot Wax 224103430 The new novel from the bestselling author of If We Were Villains and Graveyard Shift—a vivid and immersive tale of one woman’s reckless mission to make sense of the events that shattered her childhood, and made her who she is

Summer, 1989: ten-year-old Suzanne is drawn like a magnet to her father’s forbidden world of electric guitars and tricked-out cars. When her mother remarries, she jumps at the chance to tag along on the concert tour that just might be Gil and the Kills� wild ride to glory. But fame has sharper fangs than anybody realized, and as the band blazes up the charts, internal power struggles set Gil and his group on a collision course destined for a bloody reckoning—one shrouded in mystery and lore for decades to come.

The only witness to a desperate act of violence, Suzanne spends the next twenty-nine years trying to disappear. She trades the music and mayhem of her youth for the quiet of the suburbs and the company of her mild-mannered husband Rob. But when her father’s sudden death resurrects the troubled past she tried so hard to bury, she leaves it all behind and hits the road in search of answers. Hitching her fate and Gil’s beloved car to two vagabonds who call an old Airstream trailer home, she finds everything she thought she’d lost desire, adventure, and the woman she once wanted to be. But Rob refuses to let her go. Determined to bring her back where she belongs, he chases her across the country—and drives her to a desperation all her own.

Drenched in knock-down drag-out rock and roll, Hot Wax is a raucous, breakneck ride to hell and back—where getting lost might be the only way to find yourself and save your soul.]]> 400 M.L. Rio 1668070022 Bella 0 to-read 4.19 2025 Hot Wax
author: M.L. Rio
name: Bella
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> Wild Reverence 222376906
Ten years ago, Vincent of Beckett wrote to Matilda on the darkest night of his life―begging the goddess he befriended in dreams to help him. When his request went unanswered, Vincent moved on, becoming the hardened, irreverent lord of the river who has long forgotten Matilda. That is, until she comes tumbling into his bedroom window with a letter for him.

As Fate would have it, Matilda and Vincent were destined to find each other beyond dreams. There may be a chance for Matilda to rewrite the blood-soaked ways of the gods, but at immense sacrifice. She will have to face something she fears even more than losing her magic: to be vulnerable, and to allow herself to finally be loved.]]> 544 Rebecca Ross 1250373352 Bella 0 to-read 4.73 2025 Wild Reverence
author: Rebecca Ross
name: Bella
average rating: 4.73
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> L.A. Women 221251764 An electrifying novel about the complicated friendship between two ambitious and talented female writers in 1960s Los Angeles and the ultimate artistic one writes a book based on the other's life� from the author of Reese's Book Club Pick Before We Were Innocent.

After a steady descent from literary stardom, Lane Warren is back. She’s secured a new book deal based off the life of her sometimes friend and more often rival, notorious free spirit and muse, Gala Margolis. Lane’s only problem is that Gala has been missing for months…nobody can find her.

Ten years earlier, Gala was a charming socialite and Lane was a Hollywood outsider amidst the glittering 1960’s LA party scene. Though never best friends, Lane found Gala sharp and compelling. Gala liked that Lane took her seriously. They were both writers. They were drawn to each other.

That is until Gala’s star began to rise, and Lane grew more envious. Then Lane decided to do something that she wouldn’t ever be able to take back…changing the trajectory of both their lives.]]> 416 Ella Berman 0593639154 Bella 0 to-read 3.79 2025 L.A. Women
author: Ella Berman
name: Bella
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Girls Who Grew Big 219520677 From the author of Oprah's Book Club pick and New York Times best seller Nightcrawling, here is an astonishing new novel about the joys and entanglements of a fierce group of teenage mothers in a small town on the Florida panhandle.

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

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

Full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends� secrets and betrayals, The Girls Who Grew Big confirms Leila Mottley’s promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.]]> 352 Leila Mottley 0593801121 Bella 0 to-read 4.21 2025 The Girls Who Grew Big
author: Leila Mottley
name: Bella
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> Albion 218431634 A finely crafted, propulsive, and nuanced story of family, inheritance, and accountability that shakes the country house novel to its foundations from the internationally acclaimed author of Expectation.

The Brookes are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home—twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone—to bury their patriarch, Philip. Father, grandfather, husband, landowner, one-time hippy, long-time philanderer, Philip was the blinding sun around which the family has orbited their entire lives.

Eldest daughter Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres of English countryside, mother to a daughter whose future she fears for, dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to a last line of defense against the coming climate catastrophe. Her brother Milo envisages a treetop haven for the super-rich where, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, a new ruling class will be reborn to create a better world. Each believes their father has given them his blessing and are set on a collision course with the other.

Isa, Philip’s estranged youngest child, only hopes to reconnect with her childhood love who still lives on the estate, to discover if her feelings for him are creating the fault lines in her marriage. Grace, bruised and diminished after fifty years in a loveless marriage, is at a crossroads, wondering whether she may finally have the strength to choose between freedom and duty. And then there is Clara, who arrives from America, shrouded in secrets and bearing a truth that will fracture the dreams on which they’ve built their lives.

Beautifully layered and utterly compelling, Anna Hope’s multigenerational saga is a bold, brilliant, and deeply contemporary examination of family dynamics, colonial legacies, and class, set against the backdrop of the climate crisis.]]> 288 Anna Hope Bella 0 to-read 4.19 2025 Albion
author: Anna Hope
name: Bella
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension]]> 181346634
There’s Always This Year is a triumph, brimming with joy, pain, solidarity, comfort, outrage, and hope. No matter the subject of his keen focus—whether it's basketball, or music, or performance—Hanif Abdurraqib’s exquisite writing is always poetry, always profound, and always a clarion call to radically reimagine how we think about our culture, our country, and ourselves.]]> 334 Hanif Abdurraqib 0593448790 Bella 0 to-read 4.32 2024 There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
author: Hanif Abdurraqib
name: Bella
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> My Ántonia 17150 219 Willa Cather 1583485090 Bella 0 to-read 3.81 1918 My Ántonia
author: Willa Cather
name: Bella
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1918
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> Piglet 127282554 A New York Times Book Review Editors� Choice
A Belletrist Book Club Pick

An elegant, razor-sharp debut about women's ambitions and appetites—and the truth about having it all

Outside of a childhood nickname she can’t shake, Piglet’s rather pleased with how her life’s turned out. An up-and-coming cookbook editor at a London publishing house, she’s got lovely, loyal friends and a handsome fiancé, Kit, whose rarefied family she actually, most of the time, likes, despite their upper-class eccentricities. One of the many, many things Kit loves about Piglet is the delicious, unfathomably elaborate meals she’s always cooking.

But when Kit confesses a horrible betrayal two weeks before they’re set to be married, Piglet finds herself suddenly…hungry. The couple decides to move forward with the wedding as planned, but as it nears and Piglet balances family expectations, pressure at work, and her quest to make the perfect cake, she finds herself increasingly unsettled, behaving in ways even she can’t explain. Torn between a life she’s always wanted and the ravenousness that comes with not getting what she knows she deserves, Piglet is, by the day of her wedding, undone, but also ready to look beyond the lies we sometimes tell ourselves to get by.

A stylish, uncommonly clever novel about the things we want and the things we think we want, Piglet is both an examination of women’s often complicated relationship with food and a celebration of the messes life sometimes makes for us.]]> 320 Lottie Hazell 125028984X Bella 0 to-read 3.40 2024 Piglet
author: Lottie Hazell
name: Bella
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
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]]> The Bluest Eye 11337 The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom. Pecola's life does change—in painful, devastating ways.

With its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child's yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. The Bluest Eye remains one of Toni Morrison's most powerful, unforgettable novels- and a significant work of American fiction.]]> 216 Toni Morrison Bella 0 to-read 4.13 1970 The Bluest Eye
author: Toni Morrison
name: Bella
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1970
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise]]> 200869482
But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.

The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.]]> 336 Olivia Laing 0393882004 Bella 0 currently-reading 3.87 2024 The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
author: Olivia Laing
name: Bella
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf]]> 211025375 A sexy, atmospheric mid-century novel about two Shakespearean actors in an unusual marriage during one summer that will drive them closer than ever or rip them apart for good.

Up-and-coming stage actress Margaret Shoard has just taken a bow as Lady Macbeth, the role she has always believed was destined for her. At home, she plays wife to her best friend Wesley, even if she doesn’t hold his sole attention romantically. After a public breakdown threatens all she holds dear, Margaret’s doctor prescribes her uppers—just a little help to get through the days.

When Wesley is invited by eccentric director Vaughn Kline to join the cast for an inaugural Shakespeare performance in the New Mexico desert, Margaret decides to accompany him in the hopes that time away from the city will set her back to rights . . . but the world she finds in Vaughn’s company is filled with obsession and betrayal. Margaret and Wesley, embroiled in an affair with a man who may not be all he seems, must find a way forward together before their story becomes the real tragedy.]]> 368 Isa Arsén 0593718364 Bella 3
All that said, I enjoyed this, but not as much as I had hoped (especially given the theatrical focus!). A solid read perhaps read at the wrong time�?]]> 3.44 2025 The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf
author: Isa Arsén
name: Bella
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/03/13
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Imagine Macbeth and Lady Macbeth x Bonnie and Clyde. Truthfully, it’s a book about power; there came a point where I was struck by the number of men who sought control over Margaret. All I really wanted for her was for her to feel able to start her life anew.

All that said, I enjoyed this, but not as much as I had hoped (especially given the theatrical focus!). A solid read perhaps read at the wrong time�?
]]> Seduction Theory 222139714 For fans of Conversations with FriendsԻVladimir comes a magnetic, fresh take on marriage and when two married professors tiptoe toward infidelity, their transgressions are brought to light in a graduate student’s searing thesis project.

Simone is the star of Edwards University’s creative writing renowned Woolf scholar, grief memoirist, and campus sex icon. Her less glamorous and ostensibly devoted husband, Ethan, is a forgotten novelist and lecturer in the same department. But when Ethan and the department administrative assistant Abigail have sex, Simone and Ethan’s faith in their flawless marriage is rattled.

Simone has secrets of her own. While Ethan’s away for the summer, she becomes inordinately close with her advisee, graduate student Roberta “Robbie� Green. In Robbie, Simone finds a new running partner, confidante, and disciple—or so she believes. Behind Simone’s back, Robbie fictionalizes her mentor’s marriage in a breathtakingly invasive MFA thesis. Determined to tell her version of the story, Robbie paints a revealing portrait of Simone, Ethan, Abigail, and even herself, scratching at the very surface of what may—or may not—be the truth.

Innovative, witty, and tender, Seduction Theory exposes the intoxicating nature of power and attraction, masterfully demonstrating how love and betrayal can coexist.]]> 224 Emily Adrian 0316584517 Bella 0 to-read 4.11 2025 Seduction Theory
author: Emily Adrian
name: Bella
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/02
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]]> <![CDATA[The Blonde Who Came in from the Cold: An Action Packed, Hilarious Rivals-to-Lovers Rom Com]]> 221905378 Ten years ago, they joined the CIA. Six years ago, he left the game.
Five years ago, they fell in love. One year ago, she ran out into the cold with absolutely no intention of ever coming back.
And two minutes ago, they woke up, bloody and bruised and handcuffed together in the dark. . .

They don’t know where they are. They don’t know how they got there. And they have absolutely no idea who is after them or what this nameless, faceless villain wants. The only thing that’s clear is that, after ten years of covers and chemistry, secrets and lies, these two rival spies have been sucked into their greatest mission yet, and now they’re going to have to team up to stay alive. If they don’t kill each other first. . .

The Blonde Who Came in from the Cold is an action-packed, second-chance rom-com about two rival spies who must join forces in order to stay alive, from New York Times bestselling author Ally Carter.

Praise for Ally

'Delightful, hilarious, unputdownable' � Ali Hazelwood, bestselling author of The Love Hypothesis

'Brilliant banter, clever humor, and so many swoon worthy scenes' � Stephanie Garber, author of the Caraval series

'Ally is a rom-com genius!' � Sarah Adams, author of Practice Makes Perfect]]> Ally Carter 103506572X Bella 0 to-read 5.00 2025 The Blonde Who Came in from the Cold: An Action Packed, Hilarious Rivals-to-Lovers Rom Com
author: Ally Carter
name: Bella
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/02
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]]> Amelia, If Only 218266465 in love with Walter Holland. He just happens to be her favorite moderately famous, chaotically bisexual YouTuber. Who she just happened to invite to prom. (But it’s fine. No, for real. If you delete the post, it didn’t happen.)

Okay, maybe her friends are right: She’s slightly parasocially infatuated. But Amelia just knows sparks would fly—if only she could connect with Walter for real.

If only he would host a meet and greet.

If only it were just a short road trip away.

And if only Amelia could talk her best friends into making it the perfect last hurrah before graduation—even her newly single, always-cynical, guitar-toting best friend Natalie.

One thing’s for sure: All roads lead to butterflies.

But what if Amelia’s butterflies aren’t for Walter at all?]]> 304 Becky Albertalli 0063045923 Bella 0 to-read 4.06 2025 Amelia, If Only
author: Becky Albertalli
name: Bella
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/02
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]]> <![CDATA[The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource]]> 217868334 From the New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society

We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, “With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.� Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens� Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance.

Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes writes, “Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.� The Sirens� Call is the big book we all need to snap everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.]]> 332 Chris Hayes 0593653122 Bella 0 to-read 4.35 2025 The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource
author: Chris Hayes
name: Bella
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/22
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]]> Ugliness 204237247 224 Moshtari Hilal 195440428X Bella 0 to-read 4.22 2023 Ugliness
author: Moshtari Hilal
name: Bella
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/21
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]]> Trowbridge Road 42397582 In a stunning novel set in the 1980s, a girl with heavy secrets awakens her sleepy street to the complexities of love and courage.

It’s the summer of �83 on Trowbridge Road, and June Bug Jordan is hungry. Months after her father’s death from complications from AIDS, her mother has stopped cooking and refuses to leave the house, instead locking herself away to scour at the germs she believes are everywhere. June Bug threatens this precarious existence by going out into the neighborhood, gradually befriending Ziggy, an imaginative boy who is living with his Nana Jean after experiencing troubles of his own.

But as June Bug’s connection to the world grows stronger, her mother’s grows more distant � even dangerous � pushing June Bug to choose between truth and healing and the only home she has ever known.

Trowbridge Road paints an unwavering portrait of a girl and her family touched by mental illness and grief. Set in the Boston suburbs during the first years of the AIDS epidemic, the novel explores how a seemingly perfect neighborhood can contain restless ghosts and unspoken secrets. Written with deep insight and subtle lyricism by acclaimed author Marcella Pixley, Trowbridge Road demonstrates our power to rescue one another even when our hearts are broken.]]> 336 Marcella Pixley 1536207500 Bella 4 4.17 2020 Trowbridge Road
author: Marcella Pixley
name: Bella
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
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I thought I had held it together, but the last chapter had me crying. Some readers may find it too twee or sentimental, but a story about love, family, and accepting the help of one's found community is right up my (literary) alley. The brief moments of magical realism are an added delight.
]]> A Life of One's Own 580200 226 Joanna Field 0874771935 Bella 0 to-read 3.99 1934 A Life of One's Own
author: Joanna Field
name: Bella
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1934
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/19
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]]> The Agathas (The Agathas, #1) 58186377
In order to get the reward and prove Steve's innocence, they need to figure out who killed Brooke Donovan. And luckily Alice has exactly what they need--the complete works of Agatha Christie. If there's anyone that can teach the girls how to solve a mystery it's the master herself. But the town of Castle Cove holds many secrets, and Alice and Iris have no idea how much danger they're about to walk into.]]> 411 Kathleen Glasgow 0593431138 Bella 3 3.99 2022 The Agathas (The Agathas, #1)
author: Kathleen Glasgow
name: Bella
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves:
review:
Like my favourite teenage detective mystery shows in book form. Big fan, even if some of their clues felt too easily obtained.
]]> The Heart of Winter 211025449
Abe Winter and Ruth Warneke were never meant to be together—at least if you ask Ruth. Yet their catastrophic blind date in college evolved into a seventy-year marriage and a life on a farm on Bainbridge Island with their hens and beloved Labrador, Megs. Through the years, the Winters have fallen in and out of lockstep, and from their haunting losses and guarded secrets, a dependable partnership has been forged.

But when Ruth’s loose tooth turns out to be something much more malicious, the beautiful, reliable life they’ve created together comes to a crisis. As Ruth struggles with her crumbling independence, Abe must learn how to take care of her while their three living children question his ability to look after his wife. And once again, the couple has to reconfigure how to be there for each other.

In this bighearted and profound portrait of a marriage, Jonathan Evison explores seventy years of big moments in subtle ways, elegantly braiding the Winters� turbulent history with their present-day battles, showing us how the oddly paired college kids became parents, fell apart and back together, andgrew into the Abe and Ruth of today. Endlessly heartwarming and moving, The Heart of Winter is a reminder that true love lives in small, everyday moments.]]> 368 Jonathan Evison 059347354X Bella 0 to-read 4.11 2025 The Heart of Winter
author: Jonathan Evison
name: Bella
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> The Trouble with Heroes 214868940 Bestselling and award-winning author Kate Messner takes readers on a heart-filling journey as a boy finds his path to healing.

One summer.
46 mountain peaks.
A second chance to make things right.

Finn Connelly is nothing like his dad, a star athlete and firefighter hero who always ran toward danger until he died two years ago. Finn's about to fail seventh grade and has never made headlines . . . until now.

Caught on camera vandalizing a cemetery, he's in big trouble for kicking down some dead old lady's headstone. But it turns out that grave belongs to a legendary local mountain climber, and her daughter makes Finn an unusual offer...climb all forty-six Adirondack High Peaks with her dead mother's dog, and they can call it even.

In a wild three months of misadventures, mountain mud, and unexpected mentors, Finn begins to find his way on the trails. At the top of each peak, he can see for miles and slowly begins to understand more about himself and his dad. But the mountains don't care about any of that, and as the clock ticks down to September, they have more surprises in store. Finn's final summit challenge may be more than even a hero can face.]]> 368 Kate Messner 1547616393 Bella 0 to-read 4.80 The Trouble with Heroes
author: Kate Messner
name: Bella
average rating: 4.80
book published:
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Wesleyan Poetry Series)]]> 215511891
Into this "distance between the learning and the telling," Wenstrup inserts The Curator and her sukdu'a, her own interpretive text. There, The Curator questions the space between her familial history and colonial constructs of authenticity. In particular, the poems explore how women experience embodiment when they are seen through filters of race, gender, and "Always, I've known I embody that which harms me." At the heart of the sukdu'a is the desire to find a form that allows the speaker's story to be heard.

Through love letters, received forms, and found text, the poems reclaim their right to interpret, reinvent, and even disregard artifacts of their own mythos to imagine a future that exists despite the series of disasters and apocalypses documented inside the museum. Eventually it begins to dawn on us that this museum may not be separable from the world, and that there may be no exit from its unnatural histories, composed of beauty and foil wrappers, wilderness and contaminated waters. Here, it is up to each one to "decide/who you must become."

[Sample Poem]

Ggugguyni in the Museum Parking Lot


I watch her crow. Not as a crow crows
but as herself. She's not here for the art.
She's here for the minivans that devour

diaper bags, car seats, children. She waits
for the doors to retract and expel fruit,
Goldfish, and fries. Free for the taking.

She scavenges in lurching, crab-like steps.
Like me, she won't appear human here.
While her legs bring her from one delicious

scrap to another, I work my own inventory.
Once my parents named me Swift Raven�
a real Indian Princess name.

I flew unblinded, my hair in a blue-black
braid down my back. Now, I'm ungainly,
more harpy than girl. My mouth, a curve

calling for carrion. I'm not here for the art.
I'm here for the mirrors, here to unpair
earrings and unclasp foil from gum. My beak

ready to unbind carapace from quiver.
Like Ggugguyni, I'm a scavenger
lurching from one disaster to another.

See how we curate cataclysms' aftermath.
While we work, Ggugguyni tells me a story.
Once, my grandfather said, a long time ago

there was a raven. He opened a door
and it was day. Then he drew his wing shut.
What Ggugguyni didn't say, but what I once

he closed the door and it was night. Today
I'm telling you this story my mouth
is a comma, my mouth is exclamation,

my mouth is my body holding open the door.
Witness my body create day.]]> 104 Annie Wenstrup 0819501875 Bella 0 to-read 4.80 The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
author: Annie Wenstrup
name: Bella
average rating: 4.80
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> The Strange Case of Jane O. 213870076
In the first year after her child is born, Jane suffers a series of strange episodes: amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations, and an inexplicable sense of dread. As her psychiatrist struggles to solve the mystery of what is happening to Jane’s mind, she suddenly goes missing. A day later she is found unconscious in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in the midst of what seems to be an episode of dissociative fugue; when she comes to, she has no memory of what has happened to her.

Are Jane’s strange experiences related to the overwhelm of single motherhood, or are they the manifestation of a long-buried trauma from her past? Why is she having visions of a young man who died twenty years ago, who warns her of a disaster ahead? Jane’s symptoms lead her psychiatrist ever-deeper into the furthest reaches of her mind, and cause him to question everything he thought he knew about so-called reality—including events in his own life.

Karen Thompson Walker’s profound and beautifully written novel is a speculative mystery about memory, identity, and fate, a mesmerizing story about the bonds of love between a mother and child, a man and a woman, and those who we’ve lost but may still be alive among us.]]> 288 Karen Thompson Walker 1984853945 Bella 0 to-read 3.92 2025 The Strange Case of Jane O.
author: Karen Thompson Walker
name: Bella
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life]]> 214152280 New York Times bestselling author and poet Maggie Smith distills creativity and the craft of writing with a practical guide perfect for fans of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.

Drawing from her twenty years of teaching experience and her bestselling Substack newsletter, For Dear Life, Maggie Smith breaks down creativity into ten essential attention, wonder, vision, play, surprise, vulnerability, restlessness, tenacity, connection, and hope. Each element is explored through short, inspiring, and craft-focused essays, followed by generative writing prompts. Dear Writer provides tools that artists of all experience levels can apply to their own creative practices and carry with them into all genres and all areas of life. ]]> 272 Maggie Smith 1982170840 Bella 0 to-read 4.44 Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life
author: Maggie Smith
name: Bella
average rating: 4.44
book published:
rating: 0
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]]> Raising Hare: A Memoir 214269337 A moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world, explored through the story of one woman’s unlikely friendship with a wild hare.

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

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

Raising Hare chronicles their journey together, while also taking a deep dive into the lives and nature of hares, and the way they have been viewed historically in art, literature, and folklore. We witness first-hand the joy at this extraordinary relationship between human and animal, which serves as a reminder that the best things, and most beautiful experiences, arise when we least expect them.]]> 285 Chloe Dalton 0593701844 Bella 0 to-read 4.43 2025 Raising Hare: A Memoir
author: Chloe Dalton
name: Bella
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> <![CDATA[Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth (Wave Books)]]> 216282964 It’s not the dream that matters, it’s the telling of the dream � the words you choose, the risks you take in externalising your mind

This is a dreamlike portrait of a body in struggle to connect with itself and others. As the narrator contends with chronic pain, and with a pandemic raging in the background, she sets out to examine the literal and symbolic role of the mouth in the life of a writer.

Merging dreams and dailies, Pathemata recounts the narrator’s tragicomic search to alleviate her suffering, a search that eventually becomes a reckoning with various forms of loss � the loss of intimacy, the loss of her father and the loss of a pivotal friend and mentor. In exacting, distilled prose, her account blurs the lines between embodied, unconscious and everyday life.

With characteristic precision, humour and compassion, Nelson explores the limits of language to describe experience, while also offering a portrait of an unnerving and isolating time in our shared history. A stunning, original experiment in interiority by the adored author of Bluets and The Argonauts, Pathemata is a personal and poetic reckoning with pain and loss, both physical and emotional, as well as an uncanny meditation on love, affliction and resilience.]]> 80 Maggie Nelson Bella 0 to-read 4.39 Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth (Wave Books)
author: Maggie Nelson
name: Bella
average rating: 4.39
book published:
rating: 0
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]]> The Original Daughter 217245582 In this dazzling debut, Stegner Fellow Jemimah Wei explores the formation and dissolution of family bonds in a story of ambition and sisterhood in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore.

Before Arin, Genevieve Yang was an only child. Living with her parents and grandmother in a single-room flat in working-class Bedok, Genevieve is saddled with an unexpected sibling when Arin appears, the shameful legacy of a grandfather long believed to be dead. As the two girls grow closer, they must navigate the intensity of life in a place where the urgent insistence on achievement demands constant sacrifice. Knowing that failure is not an option, the sisters learn to depend entirely on one another as they spurn outside friendships, leisure, and any semblance of a social life in pursuit of academic perfection and passage to a better future.

When a stinging betrayal violently estranges Genevieve and Arin, Genevieve must weigh the value of ambition versus familial love, home versus the outside world, and allegiance to herself versus allegiance to the people who made her who she is.

In the story of a family and its contention with the roiling changes of our rapidly modernizing, winner-take-all world, The Original Daughter is a major literary debut, rife with emotional clarity and searing social insight.]]> 368 Jemimah Wei 0385551010 Bella 0 to-read 4.15 2025 The Original Daughter
author: Jemimah Wei
name: Bella
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> The Death of the Heart 91494 The Death of the Heart is perhaps Elizabeth Bowen's best-known book. As she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen reveals herself as a masterful novelist who combines a sense of humor with a devastating gift for divining human motivations.

In this piercing story of innocence betrayed set in the thirties, the orphaned Portia is stranded in the sophisticated and politely treacherous world of her wealthy half-brother's home in London. There she encounters the attractive, carefree cad Eddie. To him, Portia is at once child and woman, and he fears her gushing love. To her, Eddie is the only reason to be alive. But when Eddie follows Portia to a sea-side resort, the flash of a cigarette lighter in a darkened cinema illuminates a stunning romantic betrayal—and sets in motion one of the most moving and desperate flights of the heart in modern literature.]]> 418 Elizabeth Bowen 0385720173 Bella 0 to-read 3.66 1938 The Death of the Heart
author: Elizabeth Bowen
name: Bella
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1938
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> The Bewitching 220458657 Three women in three different eras encounter danger and witchcraft in this eerie multigenerational horror saga from the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic.

“Back then, when I was a young woman, there were still witches�: That was how Nana Alba always began the stories she told her great-granddaughter Minerva—stories that have stayed with Minerva all her life. Perhaps that’s why Minerva has become a graduate student focused on the history of horror literature and is researching the life of Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure author of macabre tales.

In the course of assembling her thesis, Minerva uncovers information that reveals that Tremblay’s most famous novel, The Vanishing, was inspired by a true story: Decades earlier, during the Great Depression, Tremblay attended the same university where Minerva is now studying and became obsessed with her beautiful and otherworldly roommate, who then disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

As Minerva descends ever deeper into Tremblay’s manuscript, she begins to sense that the malign force that stalked Tremblay and the missing girl might still walk the halls of the campus. These disturbing events also echo the stories Nana Alba told about her girlhood in 1900s Mexico, where she had a terrifying encounter with a witch.

Minerva suspects that the same shadow that darkened the lives of her great-grandmother and Beatrice Tremblay is now threatening her own in 1990s Massachusetts. An academic career can be a punishing pursuit, but it might turn outright deadly when witchcraft is involved.]]> 368 Silvia Moreno-Garcia 0593874323 Bella 0 to-read 4.37 2025 The Bewitching
author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia
name: Bella
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/10
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]]> <![CDATA[Glorious Rivals (The Grandest Game, #2)]]> 216635092 Millions, hearts, and lives are on the line in this heart-stopping sequel to The Grandest Game by #1 bestselling author Jennifer Lynn Barnes.

Seven players arrived on Hawthorne Island, each with their own secrets and motivations to win the Grandest Game. Millions are at stake, but so are hearts—and lives. The players now must race to win the game, solve myriad mysteries, and survive the twists and turns of Glorious Rivals.

The stakes get higher, the game gets twistier, and everything heats up in this newest installment in the TikTok sensation Inheritance Games Saga.]]> 400 Jennifer Lynn Barnes 0316481319 Bella 0 to-read 4.49 2025 Glorious Rivals (The Grandest Game, #2)
author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
name: Bella
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2025
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]]> Blood in the Water 216968938 Get ready for THE (creepy) beach read of the summer! Mega bestselling and award-winning author Tiffany D. Jackson (The Weight of Blood; White Smoke) makes her thrilling middle-grade debut with this can't-put-it-down murder mystery set on Martha's Vineyard. Think JAWS for a whole new generation!



This summer, there's blood in the water...watch out for sharks!

Kaylani is a born-and-bred Brooklyn girl. She expects to feel like a fish out of water spending the hot and sticky summer on Martha's Vineyard with family friends, the Watsons. But her mother insists, especially since Kaylani still spends long hours on the phone with her imprisoned father.

The Watsons live in the town of Oak Bluffs, a place with a rich Black history that fascinates Kaylani. Though the Watsons' daughter, London, is snobby and unfriendly, Kaylani ends up connecting with some other kids in the town, who show her around. The beach IS really nice, and there's good ice cream to be had. Maybe there's something to Martha's Vineyard...

But then a shocking murder--or was it a drowning? A shark attack?--rocks the community to its core.

Kaylani is determined to solve the mystery but in order to do so, she will come face-to-face with sinister truths and shocking secrets that promise to forever change her life as she knows it.

Tiffany D. Jackon's acclaimed and bestselling YA thriller have made her one of today's biggest authors. Now she brings her dazzling talents to a slightly younger audience, and lucky us--we get to be the publisher!]]> 272 Tiffany D. Jackson 1338849913 Bella 0 to-read 4.26 2025 Blood in the Water
author: Tiffany D. Jackson
name: Bella
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2025
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]]> This Is a Love Story 216426697 An intimate and lyrical celebration of great love, great art, and the sacrifices we make for both

For fifty years Abe and Jane have been coming to Central Park, as starry-eyed young lovers, as frustrated and exhausted parents, as artists watching their careers take flight. They came alone when they needed to get away from each other, and together when they had something important to discuss. The Park has been their witness for half a century of love. Until now.

Jane is dying, and Abe is recounting their life together as a way of keeping them going: the parts they knew—their courtship and early marriage, their blossoming creative lives—and the parts they didn’t always want to know—the determined young student of Abe’s looking for a love story of her own, and their son, Max, who believes his mother chose art over parenthood and who has avoided love and intimacy at all costs. Told in various points of view, even in conversation with Central Park itself, these voices weave in and out to paint a portrait as complicated and essential as love itself.]]> 304 Jessica Soffer 0593851269 Bella 0 to-read 3.21 This Is a Love Story
author: Jessica Soffer
name: Bella
average rating: 3.21
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]]> <![CDATA[The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists of New York]]> 203708515 An intimate history of America’s first publicly funded artists� housing project, the artists who lived there, and the transformation of New York’s West Village across five decades.Westbeth Artists Housing was founded in 1970 to provide affordable housing for artists and their families. The complex of buildings occupies a full city block—three quarters of a million square feet—of prime New York real estate in the now-trendy Meatpacking District. It is a kind of Great Society for bohemians, a freakish utopia for more than three hundred and eighty artists—painters, sculptors, poets, playwrights, actors, dancers, performance artists, and at last count one puppeteer—and their families. Its residents have included Diane Arbus and Robert Di Niro, Sr., Merce Cunningham and Muriel Rukeyser, jazz composer Gil Evans and novelist Tama Janowitz.While some Westbeth residents achieved fame, obscurity drove others to bitterness and despair. The Last Artists in New York tells the story of Westbeth through the life and tragic death of the flamboyantly eccentric Gay Edward Milius III, an idealistic artist, flea market picker, and aspiring novelist who moved into the building in 1976. In January 2006, Milius III took his life in his thirteenth floor apartment. He wasn’t the first Westbeth’s tenant to commit suicide—that was probably Arbus, who took her life on July 26, 1971, a year after Westbeth opened.Before Westbeth’s waiting list was closed in 2007—and again in May 2019, only a few months after it had reopened—it was more than ten years long. Has it become a naturally occurring retirement community, an arty senior center? The Last Artists in New York is a chronicle of the changing notions of what it means to be a successful artist and the impossibility of attaining the twenty-first century version of it while staying true to the old bohemian ethos. It is the story of individuals, some of whom became famous in the worlds of art, music, theater, dance, and literature, some of whom survive only in the memories of aging friends and lovers. It is for any reader interested in social history as well as artistic cultural history.]]> 344 Peter Trachtenberg 1574232517 Bella 0 to-read 4.40 The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists of New York
author: Peter Trachtenberg
name: Bella
average rating: 4.40
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]]> The Sea 3656 The Untouchable (“contemporary fiction gets no better than this”—Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory. The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife’s death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child—a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time.

The seductive mother; the imperious father; the twins—Chloe, fiery and forthright, and Myles, silent and expressionless—in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled, each of them a part of the “barely bearable raw immediacy� of his childhood memories. Interwoven with this story are Morden’s memories of his wife, Anna—of their life together, of her death—and the moments, both significant and mundane, that make up his life now: his relationship with his grown daughter, Claire, desperate to pull him from his grief; and with the other boarders at the house where he is staying, where the past beats inside him “like a second heart.� What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, vividly dramatic, beautifully written novel—among the finest we have had from this extraordinary writer]]> 195 John Banville 1400097029 Bella 0 to-read 3.54 2005 The Sea
author: John Banville
name: Bella
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2005
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]]> <![CDATA[The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story]]> 112974865
When journalist Pagan Kennedy went looking for this forgotten pioneer, she discovered that even Marty Goddard's closest friends had lost track of her. As Pagan followed a trail of clues to solve the mystery of Marty, she also delved into the problematic history of forensics in America. The Secret History of the Rape Kit chronicles one journalist's mission to understand a crucial innovation in forensics and the woman who championed it. As Pagan Kennedy hunts for answers, she reflects on her own experiences with sexual assault and her own desire for justice.]]> 237 Pagan Kennedy 0593314727 Bella 0 to-read 3.90 2025 The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story
author: Pagan Kennedy
name: Bella
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2025
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]]> <![CDATA[Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us]]> 211004927 What is the difference between men and women? Jennifer Finney Boylan, bestselling author of She’s Not There and co-author of Mad Honey with Jodi Picoult, examines the divisions—as well as the common ground—between the genders, and reflects on her own experiences, both difficult and joyful, as a transgender American.

Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There was the first bestselling work written by a transgender American. Since its publication twenty years ago, she has become the go-to person for insight into the impact of gender on our lives, from the food we eat to the dreams we dream, both for ourselves and for our children. But Cleavage is more than a deep dive into gender identity; it’s also a look at the difference between coming out as trans in 2000—when many people reacted to Boylan’s transition with love—and the present era of blowback and fear.

How does gender affect our sense of self? Our body image? The passage of time? The friends we lose—and keep? Boylan considers her womanhood, reflects on the boys and men who shaped her, and reconceives of herself as a writer, activist, parent, and spouse. With heart-wrenching honesty, she illustrates the feeling of liminality that followed her to adulthood, but demonstrates the redemptive power of love through it all.

With Boylan’s trademark humor and poignancy, Cleavage is a sharp, witty, and captivating look at the triumphs and losses of a life lived in two genders. Cleavage provides hope for a future in which we all have the freedom to live joyfully as men, as women, and in the space between us.]]> 256 Jennifer Finney Boylan 1250261880 Bella 0 to-read 3.80 2025 Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us
author: Jennifer Finney Boylan
name: Bella
average rating: 3.80
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]]> Red Clay 215003781
In 1943, when a frail old white woman shows up in Red Clay, Alabama, at the home of a Black former slave—on the morning following his funeral—his family hardly knows what to expect after she utters the words “� a lifetime ago, my family owned yours.� Adelaide Parker has a story to tell—one of ambition, betrayal, violence, and redemption—that shaped both the fate of her family and that of the late Felix H. Parker.

But there are gaps in her knowledge, and she’s come to Red Clay seeking answers from a family with whom she shares a name and a history that neither knows in full. In an epic saga that takes us from Red Clay to Paris, to the Côte d’Azur and New Orleans, human frailties are pushed to their limits as secrets are exposed and the line between good and evil becomes ever more difficult to discern. Red Clay is a tale that deftly lays bare the ugliness of slavery, the uncertainty of the final months of the Civil War, the optimism of Reconstruction, and the pain and frustration of Jim Crow.

With a vivid sense of place and a cast of memorable characters, Charles B. Fancher draws upon his own family history to weave a riveting tale of triumph over adversity, set against a backdrop of societal change and racial animus that reverberates in contemporary America. Through seasons of joy and unspeakable pain, Fancher delivers rich moments as allies become enemies, and enemies—to their great surprise—find new respect for each other.]]> 336 Charles B. Fancher Bella 0 to-read 4.45 Red Clay
author: Charles B. Fancher
name: Bella
average rating: 4.45
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]]> Deep Cuts 214269394
Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost? Or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice?

Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.]]> 277 Holly Brickley 0593799089 Bella 0 to-read 3.79 2025 Deep Cuts
author: Holly Brickley
name: Bella
average rating: 3.79
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]]> Fundamentally 213870133 A wickedly funny and audacious debut novel following an academic who flees from heartbreak and lands in Iraq with a one-of-a-kind job offer—only to be forced to do the work of confronting herself.

When Nadia Amin, a witty and bighearted PhD, publishes an article on deradicalization, everything changes. The United Nations comes calling with an opportunity to put her theory into practice and lead a rehabilitation program for women caught in the crosshairs of harmful ideology. And why not? Abandoned by her mother and devastated by unrequited love, she leaps at the chance.

In Iraq, Nadia quickly realizes she’s in over her head. The UN is a mess of competing interests, and her team consists of Goody Two-shoes Sherri who never passes up an opportunity to remind Nadia of her objections; and Pierre, a snippy Frenchman who has no qualms about perpetually scrolling through Grindr. But then Nadia meets Sara, a hilarious, foul-mouthed East Londoner who was pulled into radicalism at just fifteen. The two are kindred spirits, and Nadia vows to get Sara home.

As the rehabilitation program picks up traction, Sara reveals a secret that upends everything, forcing Nadia to make a drastic choice. In the fallout, Nadia’s brown-savior fantasies crumble, leaving her to wonder if she can save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.

A fierce, wildly funny, and razor-sharp exploration of radicalism, family, and the quest for belonging, Fundamentally boldly inspects one of the defining controversies of our age and introduces a fearless new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 352 Nussaibah Younis 0593851382 Bella 0 to-read 3.83 2025 Fundamentally
author: Nussaibah Younis
name: Bella
average rating: 3.83
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]]> People of Means 213344051 From the acclaimed author of The Kindest Lie, a propulsive novel about a mother and daughter each seeking justice and following their dreams during moments of social reckoning�1960s Nashville and 1992 Chicago—perfect for readers of Brit Bennett and Tayari Jones.

Two women. Two pivotal moments. One dream for justice and equality.

It’s 1959, and Freda Gilroy has just arrived at Nashville’s Fisk University, eager to begin her studies and uphold the tradition of Black Excellence instilled in her by her parents back home in Chicago. Coming from an upper-middle-class lifestyle where Black and white people lived together in relative harmony, Freda is surprised to discover the menace of racism down South. When a chance encounter with an intriguing young man draws her into the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, Freda finds herself caught between two worlds, and two loves, and must decide how much she’s willing to sacrifice in the name of justice, equality, and the advancement of her people.

In 1992 Chicago, Freda’s daughter Tulip is an ambitious PR professional on track for a big promotion, if workplace politics and racial microaggressions don’t get in her way. With the ruling in the Rodney King trial weighing heavily on her, Tulip feels increasingly agitated and decides she can no longer stay quiet. Called to action by a series of glaring injustices, Tulip makes an irreversible professional misstep as she seeks to uplift her community. Will she find the courage to veer off the “safe� path and follow her heart, just as her mother had three decades prior?

Insightful, evocative, and richly imagined with stories of hidden history, People of Means is an emotional tour de force that offers a glimpse into the quest for racial equality, the pursuit of personal and communal success, and the power of love and family ties.]]> 368 Nancy Johnson 0063157519 Bella 0 to-read 4.00 2025 People of Means
author: Nancy Johnson
name: Bella
average rating: 4.00
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]]> <![CDATA[Literacy for All: A Framework for Anti-oppressive Teaching (Equity and Social Justice in Education)]]> 62585999 256 Shawna Coppola 1324031018 Bella 0 to-read 4.71 Literacy for All: A Framework for Anti-oppressive Teaching (Equity and Social Justice in Education)
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name: Bella
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]]> <![CDATA[Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth)]]> 213111930
There’s a madman dog beside me, and the hounds of memory ahead of us . . . It’s love and beasts and wild mistakes, and regret, but never to change things.

What happens when the Zusak family opens their home to three big, wild, street-hardened dogs—Reuben, more wolf than hound; Archer, blond, beautiful, destructive; and the rancorously smiling Frosty, who walks like a rolling thunderstorm?

The answer can only be chaos: There are street fights, park fights, public shamings, property damages, injuries, hospital visits, wellness checks, pure comedy, shocking tragedy, and carnage that must be read to be believed.

There is a reckoning of shortcomings and failure, a strengthening of will, but most important of all, an explosion of love—and the joy and recognition of family.

Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth) is a tender, motley, and exquisitely written memoir about the human need for both connection and disorder, a love letter to the animals who bring hilarity and beauty—but also the visceral truth of the natural world—straight to our doors and into our lives and change us forever.]]> 240 Markus Zusak 0063426072 Bella 0 to-read 4.02 2024 Three Wild Dogs (and the Truth)
author: Markus Zusak
name: Bella
average rating: 4.02
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]]> We Pretty Pieces of Flesh 211003695 An exuberant and ribald debut novel about three adolescent girls coming of age in a gritty post-industrial town in Yorkshire, England in the �90s who are as sweetly vulnerable and funny as they are cunning and tough

“Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.� But it’s also the home of Rach, Kel, and Shaz, bezzies since childhood. From scheming one another’s first kisses, to sneaking vodka (or the occasional Cointreau) into school in water bottles, to accompanying one another to Family Planning for pregnancy tests, the girls come of age together, Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin plotting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace � the girls are inseparable, their friendship as indestructible as they are. But as the girls grow up and away from each other, a long-festering secret threatens to rip the trio apart. Is their shared past enough to keep them close?

Written in a Yorkshire dialect that brings a place and its people magnificently to life, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh spans decades and continents as its heroines come of age, never shying from the ugly truths of girlhood. Like Trainspotting and Shuggie Bain, it tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, making one overlooked and forgotten place the very center of the world.]]> 336 Colwill Brown 1250342880 Bella 0 to-read 4.17 2025 We Pretty Pieces of Flesh
author: Colwill Brown
name: Bella
average rating: 4.17
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]]> Notes on Infinity 217387909 Harvard students Zoe and Jack find themselves propelled into the intoxicating biotech startup world when they announce they’ve discovered the cure for ageing.

Zoe, the daughter of an MIT professor who grew up in her brother’s shadow, can envision her future anew at Harvard University. Jack, a boy in Zoe’s organic chemistry class with unruly hair and a gleam of competitiveness, matches her intellect and curiosity with every breath. When Jack refers Zoe for a position in a prestigious professor’s lab, the two become entwined as colleagues, staying up late to discuss scientific ideas. They find themselves on the cusp of a breakthrough: the promise of immortality through a novel anti-ageing drug.

Zoe and Jack set off on their new project in secret. Finding encouraging results, they bring their work to an investor, drop out of Harvard, and form a startup. But after the money, the magazine covers, and the national news stories detailing their success, Zoe and Jack receive a startling accusation that threatens to destroy both the company they built and their partnership.]]> 400 Austin Taylor 1250376106 Bella 0 to-read 4.06 Notes on Infinity
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name: Bella
average rating: 4.06
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]]> This Is Not a Game 216247527
Widow Mimi lives on idyllic Mackinac Island where cars are not allowed and a Gibson with three onions at the witching hour is compulsory. Her granddaughter, Addie, is getting over the heartbreak of her fiancé, Brian, dumping her and cutting her out of the deal for the brilliantly successful video game, Murderscape, they invented together (with Addie doing most of the heavy lifting).

When Mimi gets an invitation from local socialite Jane Ireland--a seventysomething narcissist who is having an affair with her son-in-law--to a charity auction, it is the perfect excuse to get Addie to join her for the weekend. What Mimi isn’t telling Addie is that a blackmail threat from Jane looms over the party’s invitation.

In case the scene wasn’t already set for a turbulent weekend, a big storm rolls in, trapping everyone in the mansion. And then, Jane’s body is found. Soon Mimi and Addie are caught in a dangerous game, relying on their skills (Mimi loves a crossword puzzle, and Addie is a brilliant game designer, after all) to narrow down the suspects. When another body turns up, the sleuthing pair realize someone else is playing a deadly game, and they might not survive the night. . . .]]> 320 Kelly Mullen 0593854470 Bella 0 to-read 3.64 2025 This Is Not a Game
author: Kelly Mullen
name: Bella
average rating: 3.64
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]]> Sweet Fury 214152057 When a beloved actress is cast in a feminist adaptation of a Fitzgerald classic, she finds herself the victim in a deadly game of revenge in which everyone, on screen and off, is playing a part.

Lila Crayne is America’s sweetheart: she’s generous and kind, gorgeous and magnetic. She and her fiancé, visionary filmmaker Kurt Royall, have settled into a stunning new West Village apartment and are set to begin filming their feminist adaptation of Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.

To prepare for the leading role, Lila begins working with charming and accomplished therapist Jonah Gabriel to dig into the trauma of her past. Soon, Lila’s impeccably manicured life begins to unravel on the therapy couch—and Jonah is just the man to pick up the pieces. But everyone has a secret, and no one is quite who they seem.

A twisty, thought-provoking novel of construction and deconstruction in conversation with the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and told through the lens of the film industry, Sweet Fury is an incisive and bold critique of America’s deep-rooted misogyny. With this novel, Bischoff examines the narratives we tell ourselves, and what happens when we co-opt others into those stories; and she probes the blurred lines between victim and perpetrator and the true meaning of justice.]]> 288 Sash Bischoff 1668043254 Bella 0 to-read 3.41 Sweet Fury
author: Sash Bischoff
name: Bella
average rating: 3.41
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]]> A Family Matter 220161203 An exquisite and revelatory debut novel about the devastating consequences of one woman’s affair.

1982. Dawn is a young mother, still adjusting to life with her husband, when Hazel lights up her world like a torch in the dark. Theirs is the kind of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly life is more complicated, and more joyful, than Dawn ever expected. But she has responsibilities and commitments. She has a daughter.

2022. Heron has just received news from his doctor that turns everything upside down. He’s an older man, stuck in the habits of a quiet existence. Telling Maggie, his only child—the person around whom his life has revolved—seems impossible. Heron can’t tell her about his diagnosis, just as he can’t reveal all the other secrets he’s been keeping from her for so many years.

A Family Matter is a heartbreaking and hopeful exploration of love and loss, intimacy and injustice, custody and care, and whether it is possible to heal from the wounds of the past in the changed world of today.]]> 240 Claire Lynch 1668078899 Bella 0 to-read 4.27 A Family Matter
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average rating: 4.27
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]]> My Other Heart 219848331 A mother's missing child, a search for identity, and ever-changing notions of “home”—class and race intersect with belonging in this stunning debut novel of mothers, daughters, and best friends.

In June 2000, Mimi Truang is on her way home to Vietnam when her toddler daughter vanishes in the Philadelphia airport.

Seventeen years later, two best friends graduate from high school in the WASP-y town of Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania. Kit is half-Japanese, half-American, and interracially adopted by white well-to-do parents. Sabrina is the daughter of a Chinese immigrant single mother who brandishes strict household rules to hide her own secrets.

During that last summer before college, Kit travels to Tokyo, determined to uncover her Japanese identity. Her dizzying weeks in Tokyo offer her a critical distance from everything she holds dear—and a taste of first love that refines her understanding of what it means to belong.

Sabrina had hoped to take a similar trip to China, but money is tight. Her disappointment quickly subsides, however, as her bold, uncompromising boss becomes a mentor, prompting Sabrina to ask questions she’s avoided all her life. Meanwhile, Mimi purchases a plane ticket to Philadelphia. She finally has a lead to renew her search in the country where she and her daughter were parted.

When Mimi, Kit, and Sabrina come face-to-face at the end of this transformative summer, they will confront the people they truly are, dismantling their own assumptions about belonging and the importance of blood ties.]]> 416 Emma Nanami Strenner 0593831012 Bella 0 to-read 3.92 My Other Heart
author: Emma Nanami Strenner
name: Bella
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]]> The House with Nine Locks 212219355
'A wonderfully original and atmospheric crime novel� [a] beautifully modulated tale of forgery, gambling, ballroom dancing and star-crossed love' � Mail on Sunday

'A page-turner: morally complex and beautifully written' Leonora Nattrass, bestselling author of Blue Water

In post-war Flanders, Adelais de Wolf's family is slowly, inexplicably, falling apart: her mother evermore lost to religious devotion, her father to alcohol. But with the death of a beloved uncle, Adelais finds herself in receipt of an unexpected legacy: a shuttered house in a rundown district and its contents � contents that hold the promise of independence and wealth. All that is required is application, nerve, and a willingness to break the law.

Adelais stifles her doubts and her fortunes are transformed. But with her rise come complications: her victimless crimes may not be as victimless as she supposed. Nor has she counted on the singular fanaticism of Major de Smet of the Federal Gendarmerie, a brutal detective who never forgives and never forgets.

Caught in a dangerous game of cat and mouse, will Adelais find that her new life comes at too high a price?

Cinematic and seductive, The House with Nine Locks is a compelling and sweeping historical novel with characters you won’t soon forget.]]> 402 Philip Gray 152992295X Bella 0 to-read 4.52 The House with Nine Locks
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]]> <![CDATA[American Bulk: Essays on Excess]]> 205478800 Raised with hoarding and compulsive shopping, Emily Mester is caught in between. What happens when consumption begins to consume you back?

In a series of deeply personal essays, Mester explores how the things we buy, eat, amass, and discard become an intimate part of our lives. We guiltily watch Amazon boxes pile up on the porch, wade through endless reviews to find the perfect product, and crave the comforting indulgence of a chain restaurant. With humor and sharp intellect, Mester reflects on the joys and anxieties of Costco trips, how a seasonal stint at Ulta Beauty taught her the insidious art of the sale, and what it means to get “mall sad.� In a nuanced examination of diet culture and fatness, Mester recounts her teenage summer at fat camp and the unexpected liberation she finds there. Finally, she ventures to Storm Lake, Iowa, to reckon with her grandmother’s abandoned hoard, excavating the dysfunction that lies at the heart of her family’s obsession with stuff. American Bulk introduces readers to a striking new literary talent from the American heartland, one who dares to ask us to regard consumption not with guilt but with grace and empathy.]]> 240 Emily Mester 1324035234 Bella 0 to-read 3.89 2024 American Bulk: Essays on Excess
author: Emily Mester
name: Bella
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> The Lion Women of Tehran 199798217 A heartfelt novel of friendship, betrayal, and redemption set against three transformative decades in Tehran, Iran.

In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams of a friend to alleviate her isolation.

Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind, passionate girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the stone kitchen of Homa’s warm home, wander through the colorful stalls of the Grand Bazaar, and share their ambitions for becoming “lion women.�

But their happiness is disrupted when Ellie and her mother are afforded the opportunity to return to their previous bourgeois life. Now a popular student at the best girls� high school in Iran, Ellie’s memories of Homa begin to fade. Years later, however, her sudden reappearance in Ellie’s privileged world alters the course of both of their lives.

Together, the two young women come of age and pursue their own goals for meaningful futures. But as the political turmoil in Iran builds to a breaking point, one earth-shattering betrayal will have enormous consequences.]]> 327 Marjan Kamali 1668036584 Bella 0 to-read 4.48 2024 The Lion Women of Tehran
author: Marjan Kamali
name: Bella
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/21
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]]> O Pioneers! 140963 O Pioneers! (1913) was Willa Cather's first great novel, and to many it remains her unchallenged masterpiece. No other work of fiction so faithfully conveys both the sharp physical realities and the mythic sweep of the transformation of the American frontier—and the transformation of the people who settled it. Cather's heroine is Alexandra Bergson, who arrives on the wind-blasted prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, as a girl and grows up to make it a prosperous farm. But this archetypal success story is darkened by loss, and Alexandra's devotion to the land may come at the cost of love itself.

At once a sophisticated pastoral and a prototype for later feminist novels, O Pioneers! is a work in which triumph is inextricably enmeshed with tragedy, a story of people who do not claim a land so much as they submit to it and, in the process, become greater than they were.]]> 159 Willa Cather 0679743626 Bella 4
The comparisons to THE AWAKENING—one of my favourite books from my high school curriculum—feel apt. To reading more Willa Cather!]]> 3.89 1913 O Pioneers!
author: Willa Cather
name: Bella
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1913
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/01/14
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review:
O PIONEERS! was both darker and more forgiving than I expected to be. The characters, none the least the land itself, are clearly and beautifully drawn.

The comparisons to THE AWAKENING—one of my favourite books from my high school curriculum—feel apt. To reading more Willa Cather!
]]> Trauma Plot: A Life 213618152 From a rising literary star and the author of How to Be a Good Girl comes a brilliant, biting, and beautifully wrought memoir of trauma and the cost of survival

In the thick of lockdown, 2020, poet, critic, and memoirist Jamie Hood published her debut, How to Be a Good Girl, an interrogation of modern femininity and the narratives of love, desire, and violence yoked to it. The Rumpus praised Hood's “bold vulnerability,� and Vogue named it a Best Book of 2020. 

In Trauma Plot, her long-awaited follow-up, Hood turns her eye to the archetype of the rape survivor, who must perform penitence long after living through the unthinkable. In her trademark blend of memoir and criticism, Hood investigates the lives of art's most infamous women, from Ovid's Philomela and David Lynch’s Laura Palmer to Artemisia Gentileschi, the painter who captured Judith’s wrath—as well as Hood herself, reckoning with three decades of sexual violence and the wreckage left behind. In so doing, she What do we as a culture demand of survivors? And what do survivors, in turn, owe a world that has abandoned them? 

Trauma Plot is a scalding work of personal and literary criticism. It is a send-up of our culture's pious disdain for “trauma porn,� a dirge for the broken promises of #MeToo, and a paean to life after death.]]> 336 Jamie Hood 059370097X Bella 0 to-read 4.63 2025 Trauma Plot: A Life
author: Jamie Hood
name: Bella
average rating: 4.63
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
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]]> <![CDATA[You Don't Need a Budget: Stop Worrying about Debt, Spend without Shame, and Manage Money with Ease]]> 210594636 336 Dana Miranda 0316568937 Bella 0 to-read 3.30 You Don't Need a Budget: Stop Worrying about Debt, Spend without Shame, and Manage Money with Ease
author: Dana Miranda
name: Bella
average rating: 3.30
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> <![CDATA[More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI]]> 214175198
More Than Words argues that generative AI programs like ChatGPT not only can kill the student essay but should, since these assignments don’t challenge students to do the real work of writing. To Warner, writing is thinking—discovering your ideas while trying to capture them on a page—and feeling—grappling with what it fundamentally means to be human. The fact that we ask students to complete so many assignments that a machine could do is a sign that something has gone very wrong with writing instruction. More Than Words calls for us to use AI as an opportunity to reckon with how we work with words—and how all of us should rethink our relationship with writing.
ձ> 320 John Warner 1541605500 Bella 0 to-read 4.08 2025 More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
author: John Warner
name: Bella
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> The River Is Waiting 219319489 480 Wally Lamb 1668006391 Bella 0 to-read 4.41 2025 The River Is Waiting
author: Wally Lamb
name: Bella
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> <![CDATA[Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism]]> 198563691 Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: What if they’re actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America’s classrooms were designed to do the opposite: to maintain the nation’s inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel.

If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour de force makes it clear that the opposite is true: The U.S. school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives.

In Original Sins, Ewing demonstrates that our schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to “civilize� Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Education was not an afterthought for the Founding Fathers; it was envisioned by Thomas Jefferson as an institution that would fortify the country’s racial hierarchy. Ewing argues that these dynamics persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history. The most insidious aspects of this system fall below the radar in the forms of standardized testing, academic tracking, disciplinary policies, and uneven access to resources.

By demonstrating that it’s in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and underacknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality in this country today, Ewing makes the case that we need a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This book will change the way people understand the place we send our children for eight hours a day.]]> 400 Eve L. Ewing 0593243706 Bella 0 to-read 4.58 2025 Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism
author: Eve L. Ewing
name: Bella
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> <![CDATA[The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus]]> 216247502
Arriving at the University of Edinburgh for her first term, Pen knows her divorced parents back in Canada are hiding something from her. She believes she’ll find the answer here in Scotland, where an old friend of her father’s—now a famous writer known as Lord Lennox—lives. When she is invited to spend the weekend at Lord Lennox’s centuries-old estate with his enveloping, fascinating family, Pen begins to unravel her parents� secret, just as she’s falling in love for the first time . . .

As Pen experiences the sharp shock of adulthood, she comes to rely on herself for the first time in her life. A rich and rewarding novel of campus life, of sexual awakening, and ultimately, of the many ways women can become mothers in this world, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus asks to what extent we need to look back in order to move forward.]]> 384 Emma Knight 0593830458 Bella 0 to-read 3.40 The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus
author: Emma Knight
name: Bella
average rating: 3.40
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
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]]> Scaffolding 201826095 The story of two couples who live in the same apartment in north-east Paris almost fifty years apart.

In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London. Hence, she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clémentine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood…Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy, against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, unaware that they once inhabited the same space. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we’ve known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who’ve lived in them and the stories that have been told there.]]> 388 Lauren Elkin 1529926459 Bella 4 3.71 2024 Scaffolding
author: Lauren Elkin
name: Bella
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/03
date added: 2025/01/04
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Messy overthinking humans living in romantic European cities are my literary catnip, apparently. This was beautifully written, if slightly disjointed.
]]> The Lamb 216867498
But Mama’s want is stronger than her hunger sometimes, and when a beautiful, white-toothed stray named Eden turns up in the heart of a snowstorm, Margot must confront the shifting dynamics of her family, untangle her own desires, and make her own bid for freedom.

With this gothic coming-of-age tale, novelist Lucy Rose explores how women swallow their anger, desire, and animal instincts—and wrings the relationship between mother and daughter until blood drips from it.]]> 336 Lucy Rose 1399619713 Bella 0 to-read 3.94 2025 The Lamb
author: Lucy Rose
name: Bella
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> Pure Colour 57693639 Pure Colour is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an absurdly funny guide to the great (and terrible) things about being alive. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.

Here we are, just living in the first draft of Creation, which was made by some great artist, who is now getting ready to tear it apart.

In this first draft of the world, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira’s chest like a portal—to what, she doesn’t know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and his spirit passes into her. Together, they become a leaf on a tree. But photosynthesis gets boring, and being alive is a problem that cannot be solved, even by a leaf. Eventually, Mira must remember the human world she’s left behind, including Annie, and choose whether or not to return.]]> 224 Sheila Heti 0374603944 Bella 0 to-read 3.46 2022 Pure Colour
author: Sheila Heti
name: Bella
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/01
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]]> <![CDATA[Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church]]> 195791354
“The revolution I wanted to be part of was in the church.�

Americans have been leaving their churches. Some drift away. Some stay home. Many search for more authentic ways to find and follow Jesus.

Circle of Hope tells of one such “radical outpost of Jesus followers� in Philadelphia, dedicated to service, the Sermon on the Mount, and working toward justice for all in this life, not just salvation for some in the next. Part of a little-known yet influential movement at the edge of American evangelicalism, Circle grows for forty years, plants four congregations, and then finds itself in crisis.

Immersive, explosive, and tender-hearted, Pulitzer Prize winner Eliza Griswold offers an American allegory full of urgent How do we commit to one another and our better selves in a fracturing world? Where does power live? Can it be shared? How do we make “the least of these� welcome?

Building on years of deep reporting, Griswold chronicles Circle’s journey as its devoted pastors and members strive toward change that might help the church survive. Through generational rifts, an increasingly politicized religious landscape, a pandemic that prevents gathering in worship, and a rise in foundation-shaking activism, Circle of Hope tells a propulsive, layered story of what we do to stay true to our beliefs. It is a soaring, searing examination of what it means for a community to love, to grow, and to disagree.]]> 352 Eliza Griswold 0374601682 Bella 0 to-read 3.98 2024 Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church
author: Eliza Griswold
name: Bella
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> Creation Lake 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Bella 4 3.35 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Bella
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/30
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The more I read, the more this grew on me. While I worry that I've finished it missing some of the point—earner of such literary acclaim but why!—I don't regret reading it. Sadie's a cynic, but she makes interesting company.
]]> Everything We Never Had 202775014 A novel about four generations of Filipino American boys grappling with identity, masculinity, and their fraught father-son relationships.

Watsonville, 1930. Francisco Maghabol barely ekes out a living in the fields of California. As he spends what little money he earns at dance halls and faces increasing violence from white men in town, Francisco wonders if he should’ve never left the Philippines.

Stockton, 1965. Between school days full of prejudice from white students and teachers and night shifts working at his aunt’s restaurant, Emil refuses to follow in the footsteps of his labor organizer father, Francisco. He’s going to make it in this country no matter what or who he has to leave behind.

Denver, 1983. Chris is determined to prove that his overbearing father, Emil, can’t control him. However, when a missed assignment on “ancestral history� sends Chris off the football team and into the library, he discovers a desire to know more about Filipino history―even if his father dismisses his interest as unamerican and unimportant.

Philadelphia, 2020. Enzo struggles to keep his anxiety in check as a global pandemic breaks out and his abrasive grandfather moves in. While tensions are high between his dad and his lolo, Enzo’s daily walks with Lolo Emil have him wondering if maybe he can help bridge their decades-long rift.]]> 288 Randy Ribay 059346141X Bella 0 to-read 4.17 2024 Everything We Never Had
author: Randy Ribay
name: Bella
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> We Do Not Part 61121126 Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter of Korean history.

One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama.

A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend's house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.]]> 256 Han Kang Bella 0 to-read 4.03 2021 We Do Not Part
author: Han Kang
name: Bella
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> The Emperor of Gladness 219848315 Ocean Vuong returns with a big-hearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Vuong’s writing � formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness � are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.]]> 416 Ocean Vuong 059383187X Bella 0 to-read 4.34 2025 The Emperor of Gladness
author: Ocean Vuong
name: Bella
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> Not Quite Dead Yet 220223963 The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder—now a hit Netflix series—returns with her first novel for adults: a twisty thriller about a young woman trying to solve her own murder.

In seven days Jet Mason will be dead.

Jet is the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Woodstock, Vermont. Twenty-seven years old, she’s still waiting for her life to begin. I’ll do it later, she always says. She has time.

Until Halloween night, when Jet is violently attacked by an unseen intruder.

She suffers a catastrophic head injury. The doctor is certain that within a week, the injury will trigger a deadly aneurysm.

Jet has never thought of herself as having enemies. But now she looks at everyone in a new light: her family, her former best friend turned sister-in-law, her ex-boyfriend.

She has at most seven days, and as her condition deteriorates she has only her childhood friend Billy for help. But nevertheless, she’s absolutely determined to finally finish something:

Jet is going to solve her own murder.]]> 400 Holly Jackson 059397705X Bella 0 to-read 4.39 2025 Not Quite Dead Yet
author: Holly Jackson
name: Bella
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> Open, Heaven 216634841 A stunning debut novel from the acclaimed young Irish poet Seán Hewitt, reminiscent of Garth Greenwell and Douglas Stuart in the intensity of its evocation of sexual awakening.

Set in a remote village in the North of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two sixteen year old boys meet and transform each other’s lives.

James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old—is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village’s leaf-ribboned boundaries, beyond his autonomy, tenderness, sex. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents—his father imprisoned, and his mother having moved to France for another man—Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle at their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him, like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre, drawn to this boy who is beautiful and impulsive, charismatic, troubled. But underneath Luke’s bravado is a deep wound—a longing for the love of his father and for the stability of family life.

Open, Heaven is a novel about desire, yearning, and the terror of first love. With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms. A truly exceptional debut.]]> 204 Seán Hewitt 1039056571 Bella 0 to-read 4.28 Open, Heaven
author: Seán Hewitt
name: Bella
average rating: 4.28
book published:
rating: 0
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]]> When the Cranes Fly South 217516420
When the Cranes Fly South is a profoundly moving debut about an ageing man’s fight to keep the power over his own life.]]> Lisa Ridzén 1529942225 Bella 0 to-read 4.69 2024 When the Cranes Fly South
author: Lisa Ridzén
name: Bella
average rating: 4.69
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> The Favourites 210141949 To the world, they were a scandal. To each other, an obsession.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER � An epic love story set in the sparkling, savage sphere of elite figure skating, starring a woman determined to carve her own path on and off the ice

“P Wuthering Heights and part Daisy Jones & The Six, this novel is as brilliantly choreographed as a gold medal performance and will keep you guessing until its last page.”—Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of By Any Other Name

She might not have a famous name, funding, or her family’s support, but Katarina Shaw has always known that she was destined to become an Olympic skater. When she meets Heath Rocha, a lonely kid stuck in the foster care system, their instant connection makes them a formidable duo on the ice. Clinging to skating—and each other—to escape their turbulent lives, Kat and Heath go from childhood sweethearts to champion ice dancers, captivating the world with their scorching chemistry, rebellious style, and roller-coaster relationship.

Until a shocking incident at the Olympic Games brings their partnership to a sudden end.

As the ten-year anniversary of their final skate approaches, an unauthorized documentary reignites the public obsession with Shaw and Rocha, claiming to uncover the “real story� through interviews with their closest friends and fiercest rivals. Kat wants nothing to do with the documentary, but she can’t stand the thought of someone else defining her legacy. So, after a decade of silence, she’s telling her story: from the childhood tragedies that created her all-consuming bond with Heath to the clash of desires that tore them apart. Sensational rumors have haunted their every step for years, but the truth may be even more shocking than the headlines.]]> 464 Layne Fargo 152992734X Bella 0 to-read 4.15 2025 The Favourites
author: Layne Fargo
name: Bella
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> Sunstruck 209542003 WINNER OF THE #MERKY BOOKS 2022 NEW WRITER'S PRIZE

It’s summer and a young man walks through the gates of a luxurious mansion in the south of France. At the dinner table, the Blakes are waiting for Annie, the family matriarch and world-famous singer, her inscrutable husband David and their children, Dot, aloof and rebellious, Lily, the man’s carefree university friend, and their enigmatic older brother Felix.

Between sun-drenched days spent lounging by the pool and nights blurring into endless, opulent parties far from the reality of life in London, a restless attraction grows between Felix and the man. The possibility to be part of a family � and an entire world � in which he doesn’t belong is suddenly within reach.

But the idyllic haze of the summer slowly fades as they return to the city. While the man struggles with his troubled past and the challenges of navigating Felix’s world as a black, working-class person, Felix is tormented by demons of his own. As their lives spiral out of control, the couple’s bond will not only be tested but pulled apart at the seams, altering the course of their lives and the future of those around them.

Sunstruck is a dazzling and poignant exploration of race, status and the parts of ourselves we risk losing when we fall in love. ]]> 0 William Rayfet Hunter 1529919800 Bella 0 to-read 4.07 Sunstruck
author: William Rayfet Hunter
name: Bella
average rating: 4.07
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> Good Dirt 213618132 The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom in this moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake, a Read with Jenna Book Club Pick

When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well.

The crime was never solved—and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England—the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans want is another media frenzy splashing their family across the papers, but when Ebby's high profile romance falls apart without any explanation, that's exactly what they get.

So Ebby flees to France, only for her past to follow her there. And as she tries to process what's happened, she begins to think about the other loss her family suffered on that day eighteen years ago—the stoneware jar that had been in their family for generations, brought North by an enslaved ancestor. But little does she know that the handcrafted piece of pottery held more than just her family's history—it might also hold the key to unlocking her own future.

In this sweeping, evocative novel, Charmaine Wilkerson brings to life a multi-generational epic that examines how the past informs our present.]]> 368 Charmaine Wilkerson 0593358368 Bella 0 to-read 4.06 2025 Good Dirt
author: Charmaine Wilkerson
name: Bella
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> Nova Scotia House 218583908 ‘A work of genius� Philip Hoare
‘One of the best things I’ve read in many many years� Hilton Als
'Beautifully provocative ... the most compelling exploration of life, death, love and resistance that I've read for a very long time' Eimear McBride

A story of loss and grief, sex and love, and refusing to relinquish dreams
He said he would understand if it was too much for me, that I could leave him, that I was young, I should be living, I said to him, I am living.

Johnny Grant faces stark life decisions. Seeking answers, he looks back to his relationship with Jerry Field. When they met, nearly thirty years ago, Johnny was 19, Jerry was 45. They fell in love and made a life on their own terms in Jerry’s 1, Nova Scotia House. Johnny is still there today � but Jerry is gone, and so is the world they knew.

As Johnny’s mind travels between then and now, he begins to remember stories of Jerry’s of experiments in living; of radical philosophies; of the many possibilities of love, sex and friendship before the AIDS crisis devastated the queer community. Slowly, he realizes what he must do next—and attempts to restore ways of being that could be lost forever.

Nova Scotia House takes us to the heart of a relationship, a community and an era. It is both a love story and a lament; bearing witness to the enduring pain of the AIDS pandemic and honouring the joys and creativity of queer life. Intimate, visionary, and profoundly original, it marks the debut of a vibrant new voice in contemporary fiction, and a writer with a liberating new story to tell.
]]> 224 Charlie Porter 1802067450 Bella 0 to-read 4.10 Nova Scotia House
author: Charlie Porter
name: Bella
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> Three Days in June 213243949 A new Anne Tyler novel destined to be an instant classic: a socially awkward mother of the bride navigates the days before and after her daughter's wedding.

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

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

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

]]> 165 Anne Tyler 0593803485 Bella 0 to-read 3.63 2025 Three Days in June
author: Anne Tyler
name: Bella
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2025
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date added: 2024/12/30
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]]> Love in Exile 60683642 ‘We ache for love, but love eludes us. Out of this crisis comes so much of what it means to be human�

Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every aspect and corner of her life. It was a fear that would erupt in destructive, counterfeit versions of the real love she craved: addictions and short-lived romances that were either euphoric and fantastical, or excruciatingly painful and unhinged, often both. Faye’s experience of the world as a trans woman, who grew up visibly queer, exacerbated her fears. But, as she confronted her damaging ideas about love and lovelessness, she came to realize that this sense of exclusion is symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture.

Love, she argues, is as much a collective question as a personal one. Yet our collective ideals of love have developed in a society which is itself profoundly sick and loveless; in which consumer capitalism sells us ever new, engrossing fantasies of becoming more loved or lovable. In this highly politicized terrain, boundaries are purposefully drawn to keep some in and to keep others out. Those who exist outside them are ignored, denigrated, exiled.

In Love in Exile, Shon Faye shows love is much greater than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave so desperately that we are willing to bend and break ourselves to fit them. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, this is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love, in whatever form it takes, is the meaning of life itself.]]> 208 Shon Faye 0241605989 Bella 0 to-read 4.29 Love in Exile
author: Shon Faye
name: Bella
average rating: 4.29
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]]> <![CDATA[We Were There: How Black culture, resistance and community shaped modern Britain]]> 216758925 We Were There is about a Black Britain that for too long has been unknown and unexplored � the one that exists beyond London.

'A vital corrective that enhances our understanding of black British history' STEVE MCQUEEN
'Utterly brilliant' DIPO FALOYIN
'Captivated me from the first page' PRAGYA AGARWAL
'Essential reading' EKOW ESHUN

From the late 1970s to the early 1990s Britain was in rocked by Margaret Thatcher’s radical economic policy, the rise of the National Front, widespread civil unrest. With anti-immigration policies in the political mainstream, Black lives were on the frontline of a racial reckoning. But it was also a time of unrivalled Black cultural creation, organising and resistance. This was the crucible in which modern Britain came into existence.

We Were There brings into the spotlight for the first time extraordinary Black lives in once-rich cities now home to failing the foundries of Birmingham, the docks of Liverpool and Cardiff, the mills of Bradford. We are in Wigan, Wolverhampton, Manchester and the green expanse of the British countryside. We meet feminists and Rastafarians, academics and pan-Africanists, environmental campaigners and rugby-league superstars; witness landmark campaigns against miscarriages of justice; encounter radical groups of artists and pioneering thinkers; tread dancefloors that hosted Northern Soul all-nighters and the birth of Acid House.

Together, these voices and stories rewrite our idea of Black British culture. London was only ever part of the picture � We Were There is about incorporating a vastly broader range of Black Britons into the fabric of our national story.

Alive with energy and purpose, We Were There decisively expands our sense of who we are. Confronting, joyful and thrilling, this is a profoundly important new portrait of modern Britain.]]> Lanre Bakare 1529946611 Bella 0 to-read 5.00 We Were There: How Black culture, resistance and community shaped modern Britain
author: Lanre Bakare
name: Bella
average rating: 5.00
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]]> <![CDATA[Heist Royale (Thieves' Gambit, #2)]]> 208515903
It's been six months since the end of the Gambit. Instead of winning an impossible wish, Ross has the threat of her family’s execution hanging over her head. Devroe, the only person Ross thought she could trust, could wish the Quests into oblivion at any time. Shockingly, despite his betrayal, Devroe is still making a play for Ross’s heart as the two work together pulling jobs for the Organization. But Ross has learned her lesson: A Quest can only trust another Quest.

When Ross finds herself at the center of a power struggle within the Organization, she sees her chance to change her fortunes. As a new deadly Gambit develops for control of the criminal underworld, Ross strikes a risky deal to guarantee protection for herself and her family.

In this final clash, Ross will square off against a ruthless opponent who will stop at nothing to seize power, and in their corner will be not only Devroe but his mother, who wants to destroy the Quests at any cost.

The new Gambit takes Ross and her crew into the intoxicating casinos of Monte Carlo and across treacherous snow-covered slopes in Antarctica as Ross competes against Devroe in a fight for her life. Loyalties will be tested, backs stabbed, hearts broken. May the best thief win.]]> 311 Kayvion Lewis 0593625404 Bella 4 3.82 2024 Heist Royale (Thieves' Gambit, #2)
author: Kayvion Lewis
name: Bella
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2024/12/30
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There is something so delightful about discovering the power of friendship while conducting multiple international heists. Make this a television series, please.
]]> Loved and Missed 58283993
Love and Missed is a whip-smart, incisive, and mordantly witty novel about love's gains and missteps. British writer Susie Boyt's seventh novel, and the first to be published in the United States, is a triumph.]]> Susie Boyt Bella 0 to-read 4.24 2023 Loved and Missed
author: Susie Boyt
name: Bella
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> City of Laughter 128713487 A rich and riveting debut spanning four generations of Eastern European Jewish women bound by blood, half-hidden secrets, and the fantastical visitation of a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 years.

An ambitious, delirious novel that tangles with queerness, spirituality, and generational silence,  City of Laughter announces Temim Fruchter as a fresh and assured new literary voice. The tale of a young queer woman stuck in a thicket of generational secrets, the novel follows her back to her family’s origins, where ancestral clues begin to reveal a lineage both haunted and shaped by desire.

Ropshitz, Poland, was once known as the City of Laughter. As this story opens, an 18th century badchan, a holy jester whose job is to make wedding guests laugh, receives a visitation from a mysterious stranger—bringing the laughter the people of Ropshitz desperately need, and triggering a sequence of events that will reverberate across the coming century.

In the present day, Shiva Margolin, recovering from the heartbreak of her first big queer love and grieving the death of her beloved father, struggles to connect with her guarded mother, who spends most of her time at the local funeral home. A student of Jewish folklore, Shiva seizes an opportunity to visit Poland, hoping her family’s mysteries will make more sense if she walks in the footsteps of her great-grandmother Mira, about whom no one speaks.

What she finds will make her question not only her past and her future, but also her present. Electric and sharply intimate,  City of Laughter zigzags between our universe and a tapestry of real and invented Jewish folklore, asking how far we can travel from the stories that have raised us without leaving them behind.]]> 384 Temim Fruchter 0802161286 Bella 0 to-read 3.75 2024 City of Laughter
author: Temim Fruchter
name: Bella
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
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]]> Chickenpox 208185056 This hilarious and heartwarming contemporary middle-grade graphic novel is about eldest sister Abby, who is sick of being trapped at home with her FOUR younger siblings as they all suffer from the chickenpox―for fans of Guts and Allergic.

All big sister Abby wants is to spend more time with her friends, far away from the sticky fingers and snooping eyes of her annoying brothers and sisters. But when a case of the chickenpox leaves the Lai kids covered in scratchy red spots and stuck at home together for two weeks of nonstop mayhem, Abby thinks this might be the end . . . of her sanity. Yet she feels responsible for the situation since her best friend was Patient Zero and brought chickenpox into their home.

Will the itch to escape her siblings overwhelm Abby or will she realize being a big sister isn’t all bad? Full of heart and hijinks, Chickenpox showcases what gets us through good times and bad: family.]]> 240 Remy Lai 1250863295 Bella 0 to-read 3.91 Chickenpox
author: Remy Lai
name: Bella
average rating: 3.91
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]]> Definitely Better Now 204906164 A touching and deeply funny debut about starting over sober only to discover life’s biggest messes are still waiting right where you left them.

The very last person anyone should worry about is Emma. Yes, hi, she’s an alcoholic. But she’s officially been sober for one entire year. That’s twelve months of better health. Fifty-two whole weeks of focusing on nothing but her nine-to-five office job, group meetings, and avoiding the kind of bad decisions that previously left her awash in shame and regret. It’s also been 365 days of not dating. And with her new dating profile, Emma, 26, of New York is ready to put herself back out there.

Except—was dating always this complicated? And did Emma’s mother really have to choose now to move in with her new boyfriend? Being assigned to plan her office’s holiday party feels like icing on the suddenly very overwhelming cake until her estranged father reappears with devastating news. Icing, meet cherry on top. But then there’s Ben, the charming IT guy who, despite Emma’s awkwardness and shortcomings, seems to maybe actually get her? Sobriety is turning out to be far from the flawless future Emma had once envisioned for herself, but as she allows herself to open up to Ben and confront difficult past relationships, she’s beginning to realize that taking things one day at a time might just be the perfectly imperfect path she’s meant to be on.

Bittersweet and darkly hilarious, Ava Robinson’s debut novel about navigating sobriety and complicated family dynamics is witty, heartbreaking, and profoundly relatable.]]> 352 Ava Robinson 0778310590 Bella 0 to-read 3.83 2024 Definitely Better Now
author: Ava Robinson
name: Bella
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> I'll Come to You 208425024 A story of family, I'll Come to You chronicles intersecting lives over the course of 1995, anchored by the anticipation and arrival of a child.

With empathy, insight, and humor, Rebecca Kauffman explores overlapping narratives involving a couple whose struggle to become pregnant has both softened and hardened them; a woman whose husband of forty years has left her for reasons he’s unwilling to share and the man who is now disastrously attempting to woo her; a couple in denial about a looming health crisis, and their son who is fumbling toward middle age and can’t stop lying. These storylines converge into a dramatic and harrowing turn of events.]]> 224 Rebecca Kauffman 164009671X Bella 0 to-read 3.68 2025 I'll Come to You
author: Rebecca Kauffman
name: Bella
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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]]> Homeseeking 211025407 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593712993.

An epic and intimate tale of one couple across sixty years as world events pull them together and apart, illuminating the Chinese diaspora and exploring what it means to find home far from your homeland.

A single choice can define an entire life.

Haiwen is buying bananas at a 99 Ranch Market in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, his Suchi, for the first time in sixty years. To recently widowed Haiwen it feels like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back.

Suchi was seven when she first met Haiwen in their Shanghai neighborhood, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship blossomed into soul-deep love, but when Haiwen secretly enlisted in the Nationalist army in 1947 to save his brother from the draft, she was left with just his violin and a note: Forgive me.

Homeseeking follows the separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history as war, famine, and opportunity take them separately to the song halls of Hong Kong, the military encampments of Taiwan, the bustling streets of New York, and sunny California, telling Haiwen’s story from the present to the past while tracing Suchi’s from her childhood to the present, meeting in the crucible of their lives. Throughout, Haiwen holds his memories close while Suchi forces herself to look only forward, neither losing sight of the home they hold in their hearts.

At once epic and intimate, Homeseeking is a story of family, sacrifice, and loyalty, and of the power of love to endure beyond distance, beyond time.]]> 512 Karissa Chen Bella 0 to-read 4.25 2025 Homeseeking
author: Karissa Chen
name: Bella
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2025
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]]> Confessions 211642069 For fans of The Goldfinch ԻTomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, an ambitious and absorbing debut that follows three generations of women from New York to rural Ireland and back again.

New York City, late September 2001. The walls of the city are papered over with photos of the missing. Cora Brady’s father is there, the poster she made taped to columns and bridges. When a letter arrives from an aunt she didn’t know existed in Ireland with the offer of a new life, the name jogs a an old videocassette game Cora used to play as a child where two sisters must save the students of a mysterious boarding school.

County Donegal, 1974. An eclectic group of artists known as the Screamers arrives in Burtonport and moves into the old schoolhouse down the road from where Roisin lives with her older sister Moira. Alternately kind and cruel, brilliant artist Moira is a mystery to Roisin, as is Moira’s relationship with the boy next door, Michael. When the Screamers look to hire an artist in residence, Roisin enlists Michael’s help to get Moira the job, setting in motion a chain of events that will put an ocean between the sisters and threaten to tear them apart forever.

Burtonport, 2018. Lyca Brady lives in a sprawling old house with her mother, Cora, and great aunt, Ro. Abortion has just been legalized in Ireland, and Lyca is struggling to find herself outside her mother’s activism. An unexpected message from a childhood friend sends Lyca searching her house’s mysterious attic, with its strange collection of old medical equipment, piles of paperwork, and dusty boxes of ancient video games. There, she unearths secrets hidden for decades—secrets perhaps better left unknown.

Catherine Airey’s haunting debut spins a mesmerizing story of family and fate, survival and revelation, examining the irresistible gravity of the past—how it endures through generations, pervasively present even when buried or forgotten.


]]> 480 Catherine Airey 0063380137 Bella 0 to-read 3.84 2025 Confessions
author: Catherine Airey
name: Bella
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/29
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