Carmen's bookshelf: all en-US Thu, 03 Apr 2025 02:56:34 -0700 60 Carmen's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Conclave 29397486
Behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel, one hundred and eighteen cardinals from all over the globe will cast their votes in the world’s most secretive election.

They are holy men. But they have ambition. And they have rivals.

Over the next seventy-two hours one of them will become the most powerful spiritual figure on earth.]]> 288 Robert Harris Carmen 4 4.01 2016 Conclave
author: Robert Harris
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
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]]> The Heart's Invisible Furies 33253215 real Avery or at least that’s what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn’t a real Avery, then who is he?

Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.

At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from � and over his three score years and ten, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country and much more.

In this, Boyne's most transcendent work to date, we are shown the story of Ireland from the 1940s to today through the eyes of one ordinary man. The Heart's Invisible Furies is a novel to make you laugh and cry while reminding us all of the redemptive power of the human spirit.]]> 582 John Boyne Carmen 0 currently-reading 4.51 2017 The Heart's Invisible Furies
author: John Boyne
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/03
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]]> A Far Better Thing 217388276 I feared this was the best of times; I hoped it could not get any worse.

The fairies stole Sydney Carton as a child, and made him a mortal servant of the Faerie Realm. Now, he has a rare opportunity for revenge against the fae and Charles Darnay, the changeling left in his stead.

It will take magic and cunning—cold iron and Realm silver—to hide his intentions from humans and fae and bring his plans to fruition.

Shuttling between London and Paris during the Reign of Terror, generations of violence-begetting-violence lead him to a heartbreaking choice in the shadow of the guillotine.]]> 416 H.G. Parry 1250334187 Carmen 0 to-read 4.17 2025 A Far Better Thing
author: H.G. Parry
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/17
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]]> <![CDATA[Benedictus: A Book of Blessings]]> 1056526
In sharing words of profound grace and wisdom, master storyteller John O'Donohue's Benedictus offers blessings to shelter us as we confront the many challenges we face on our journey through life.

Living in an anxious world - a world so often dominated by unwelcome change, unhappiness and even despair - many readers will find comfort in John O'Donohue's illuminating introductions, covering areas such as Beginnings, Desires, States of the Heart, Callings and Beyond Endings, and the blessings themselves provide an inspiring and reassuring new vision of possibility. It is also a vision of hope and belonging for this sometimes troubled world.]]> 233 John O'Donohue 0593058623 Carmen 0 to-read 4.63 2007 Benedictus: A Book of Blessings
author: John O'Donohue
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.63
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture]]> 372623 288 John Shelby Spong 0060675187 Carmen 0 to-read 4.01 1991 Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture
author: John Shelby Spong
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1991
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation]]> 44174516 Ěý
In this momentous book, David Bentley Hart makes the case that nearly two millennia of dogmatic tradition have misled readers on the crucial matter of universal salvation. On the basis of the earliest Christian writings, theological tradition, scripture, and logic, Hart argues that if God is the good creator of all, he is the savior of all, without fail. And if he is not the savior of all, the Kingdom is only a dream, and creation something considerably worse than a nightmare. But it is not so. There is no such thing as eternal damnation; all will be saved. With great rhetorical power, wit, and emotional range, Hart offers a new perspective on one of Christianity’s most important themes.]]> 232 David Bentley Hart 0300246226 Carmen 0 to-read 4.24 2019 That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation
author: David Bentley Hart
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> Dead Money 212294441 “A stone-cold banger of a novel—a twisty journey through Silicon Valley’s dark side, wrapped in a stunning mystery package with some wild surprises along the way.”—Blake Crouch, New York Timesbestselling author of Dark Matter

Don’t call me a fixer. This isn’t HBO.

In her job as unofficial “problem solver� for Silicon Valley’s most ruthless venture capitalist, Mackenzie Clyde’s gotten used to playing for high stakes. Even if none of those tech-bro millions she’s so good at wrangling ever make it into her pockets.

But this time, she’s in way over her head—or so it seems.

The lightning-rod CEO of tech’s hottest startup has just been murdered, leaving behind billions in “dead money� frozen in his will. As the company’s chief investor, Mackenzie’s boss has a fortune on the line—and with the police treading water, it’s up to Mackenzie to step up and resolve things, fast.

Mackenzie’s a lawyer, not a detective. Cracking this fiendishly clever killing, with its list of suspects that reads like a who’s-who of Valley power players, should be way out of her league.

Except that Mackenzie’s used to being underestimated. In fact, she’s counting on it.

Because the way she sees it, this isn’t an investigation. It’s an opportunity. And she’ll do anything it takes to seize it.

Anything at all.

Featuring jaw-dropping twists and a wily, outsider heroine you can’t help rooting for, Dead Money is a brilliant sleight-of-hand mystery. Written by a longtime insider, it is also a dead-on snapshot of the Valley’s rich and famous—and a glimpse at the darkness lurking behind the tech world’s cheery facade.]]> 416 Jakob Kerr 0593726707 Carmen 0 currently-reading 4.02 2025 Dead Money
author: Jakob Kerr
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/10
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]]> Once Upon a Wardrobe 57099601 Megs Devonshire sets out to fulfill her younger brother George’s last wish by uncovering the truth behind his favorite story. The answer provides hope and healing and a magical journey for anyone whose life has ever been changed by a book.

1950:ĚýMargaret Devonshire (Megs) is a seventeen-year-old student of mathematics and physics at Oxford University. When her beloved eight-year-old brother asks Megs if Narnia is real, logical Megs tells him it’s just a book for children, and certainly not true. Homebound due to his illness, and remaining fixated on his favorite books, George presses her to ask the author of the recently released novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe a question: “Where did Narnia come from?â€�

Despite her fear about approaching the famous author, who is a professor at her school, Megs soon finds herself taking tea with C. S. Lewis and his own brother Warnie, begging them for answers.

Rather than directly telling her where Narnia came from, Lewis encourages Megs to form her own conclusion as he slowly tells her the little-known stories from his own life that led to his inspiration. As she takes these stories home to George, the little boy travels farther in his imagination than he ever could in real life.

Lewis’s answers will reveal to Megs and her family many truths that science and math cannot, and the gift she thought she was giving to her brother—the story behind Narnia—turns out to be his gift to her, instead: hope.]]> 320 Patti Callahan Henry 0785251723 Carmen 5 4.31 2021 Once Upon a Wardrobe
author: Patti Callahan Henry
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/02/10
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]]> The Wisest Fool 1460357 Nigel Tranter 0340202998 Carmen 0 to-read 4.02 1974 The Wisest Fool
author: Nigel Tranter
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Shift: Surviving and Thriving After Moving from Conservative to Progressive Christianity]]> 52364699 200 Colby Martin 1506455492 Carmen 0 to-read 4.23 The Shift: Surviving and Thriving After Moving from Conservative to Progressive Christianity
author: Colby Martin
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.23
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Granddaughter 199340852 'Anyone who wants to understand contemporary Germany must read The Granddaughter now' Le Monde
'The great novel of German reunification' Le Figaro
'A masterpiece' Maurice Szafran

May, 1964. At a youth festival in East Berlin, an unlikely young couple fall in love. In the bright spring days, anything seems possible for them - it is only many years later, after her death, that Kaspar discovers the price his wife paid to get to him in West Berlin.

Shattered by grief, Kaspar sets off to uncover Birgit's secrets in the East. His search leads him to a rural community of neo-Nazis, and to a young girl who accepts him as her grandfather. Their worlds could not be more different - but he is determined to fight for her.

From the author of the no.1 international bestseller The Reader, The Granddaughter is a gripping novel that transports us from the divided Germany of the 1960s to contemporary Australia, asking what might be found when it seems like all is lost.

Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins ]]> 324 Bernhard Schlink 1399614886 Carmen 0 to-read 4.34 2021 The Granddaughter
author: Bernhard Schlink
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/03
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]]> Broken Country 214151202 “The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.�

Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager—the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.

As Beth is pulled back into Gabriel’s life, tensions around the village rise and dangerous secrets and jealousies from the past resurface, this time with deadly consequences. Beth is forced to make a choice between the woman she once was, and the woman she has become.

A sweeping love story with the pace and twists of a thriller, Broken Country is a novel of simmering passion, impossible choices, and explosive consequences that toggles between the past and present to explore the far-reaching legacy of first love.]]> 320 Clare Leslie Hall 166807818X Carmen 0 to-read 4.45 2025 Broken Country
author: Clare Leslie Hall
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/30
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]]> Parade 195790675
Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.

In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.

When a mother dies, her children confront her the stories she told; the roles she assigned to them; the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.

An artist takes on a series of pseudonyms to conceal his work from his mother and father. His brother does the opposite. They share the same parents, but they’ve inherited different things.

Parade is a story that confronts and demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell a true story—about art, family, morality, gender, and how we compose ourselves. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.]]> 198 Rachel Cusk 0374610045 Carmen 0 currently-reading 3.55 2024 Parade
author: Rachel Cusk
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/30
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]]> Blue Ruin 196845471 From one of the sharpest voices in fiction today, a profound and enthralling novel about beauty, power, and capital’s influence on art and those who devote their lives to creating it.

Once, Jay was an artist. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career already taking shape before him. Now, undocumented in the United States, he lives out of his car and makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. The pandemic is still at its height—the greater public panicked in quarantine—and though he has returned to work, Jay hasn’t recovered from the effects of a recent Covid case.

When Jay arrives at a house set in an enormous acreage of woodland, he finds the last person he ever expected to see Alice, a former lover from his art school days. Their relationship was tumultuous and destructive, ultimately ending when she ghosted him and left for America with his best friend and fellow artist, Rob. In the twenty years since, their fortunes could not be more as Jay teeters on the edge of collapse, Alice and Rob have found prosperity in a life surrounded by beauty. Ashamed, Jay hopes she won’t recognize him behind his dirty surgical mask; when she does, she invites him to recover on the property—where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well—setting a reckoning decades in the making into motion.

Gripping and brilliantly orchestrated, Blue Ruin moves back and forth through time to deliver an extraordinary portrait of an artist as he reunites with his past and confronts the world he once loved and left behind.]]> 272 Hari Kunzru 0593801377 Carmen 4 3.82 2024 Blue Ruin
author: Hari Kunzru
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/30
date added: 2025/01/30
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]]> <![CDATA[The Will of the Many (Hierarchy, #1)]]> 58416952 At the elite Catenan Academy, a young fugitive uncovers layered mysteries and world-changing secrets in this new fantasy series by internationally bestselling author of The Licanius Trilogy, James Islington.

AUDI. VIDE. TACE.

The Catenan Republic � the Hierarchy � may rule the world now, but they do not know everything.

I tell them my name is Vis Telimus. I tell them I was orphaned after a tragic accident three years ago, and that good fortune alone has led to my acceptance into their most prestigious school. I tell them that once I graduate, I will gladly join the rest of civilised society in allowing my strength, my drive and my focus � what they call Will � to be leeched away and added to the power of those above me, as millions already do. As all must eventually do.

I tell them that I belong, and they believe me.

But the truth is that I have been sent to the Academy to find answers. To solve a murder. To search for an ancient weapon. To uncover secrets that may tear the Republic apart.

And that I will never, ever cede my Will to the empire that executed my family.

To survive, though, I will still have to rise through the Academy’s ranks. I will have to smile, and make friends, and pretend to be one of them and win. Because if I cannot, then those who want to control me, who know my real name, will no longer have any use for me.

And if the Hierarchy finds out who I truly am, they will kill me.]]> 639 James Islington 1982141190 Carmen 0 4.61 2023 The Will of the Many (Hierarchy, #1)
author: James Islington
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves: owned-books-in-to-be-read-pile
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]]> Prophet Song 158875813
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.

How far will she go to save her family? And what � or who � is she willing to leave behind?

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.]]> 259 Paul Lynch Carmen 0 4.03 2023 Prophet Song
author: Paul Lynch
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/28
shelves: owned-books-in-to-be-read-pile
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]]> <![CDATA[The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue]]> 50623864
Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.

But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.]]> 448 Victoria E. Schwab 0765387565 Carmen 0 4.16 2020 The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
author: Victoria E. Schwab
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/28
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]]> <![CDATA[The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store]]> 65678550
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents—roused by Chona's kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.]]> 385 James McBride 0593422945 Carmen 0 to-read 3.84 2023 The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
author: James McBride
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/28
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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 Carmen 0 to-read 4.25 2025 Homeseeking
author: Karissa Chen
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/28
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]]> Red Pill 49188384 From the widely acclaimed author of White Tears, a bold new novel about searching for order in a world that frames madness as truth.

After receiving a prestigious writing fellowship in Germany, the narrator of Red Pill arrives in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee and struggles to accomplish anything at all. Instead of working on the book he has proposed to write, he takes long walks and binge-watches Blue Lives--a violent cop show that becomes weirdly compelling in its bleak, Darwinian view of life--and soon begins to wonder if his writing has any value at all.

Wannsee is a place full of ghosts: Across the lake, the narrator can see the villa where the Nazis planned the Final Solution, and in his walks he passes the grave of the Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist, who killed himself after deciding that "no happiness was possible here on earth." When some friends drag him to a party where he meets Anton, the creator of Blue Lives, the narrator begins to believe that the two of them are involved in a cosmic battle, and that Anton is "red-pilling" his viewers--turning them toward an ugly, alt-rightish worldview--ultimately forcing the narrator to wonder if he is losing his mind.]]> 304 Hari Kunzru 0451493710 Carmen 0 to-read 3.66 2020 Red Pill
author: Hari Kunzru
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/28
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]]> ShĹŤgun, Volume 1 12319445 533 James Clavell Carmen 0 4.52 1975 ShĹŤgun, Volume 1
author: James Clavell
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.52
book published: 1975
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/01/28
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]]> Penitence 211003837 For readers of Ann Patchett and Celeste Ng, Penitence is a poignant exploration of love and forgiveness. It’s a suspenseful, addictive page-turner filled with literary insight that compels readers to consider whether each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.

When a shocking murder occurs in the home of Angie and David Sheehan, their lives are shattered. Desperate to defend their family, they turn to small-town lawyer Martine Dumont for help, but Martine isn’t just legal counsel—she’s also the mother of Angie’s first love, Julian, a now-successful New York City criminal defense attorney. As Julian and Angie confront their shared past and long-buried guilt from a tragic accident years ago, they must navigate their own culpability and the unresolved feelings between them.

Spanning decades, from the ski slopes of rural Colorado to the streets of post-9/11 New York City and back again, Kristin Koval’s debut novel Penitence is an examination of the complexities of familial loyalty, the journey of redemption, and the profound experience of true forgiveness.]]> 320 Kristin Koval 1250342996 Carmen 0 to-read 3.70 2025 Penitence
author: Kristin Koval
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/27
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]]> A Killing Cold 211004079 A woman invited to her wealthy fiance’s family retreat realizes they are hiding a terrible secret—and that she’s been there before, by the bestselling author of What Lies in the Woods.

A whirlwind romance.
When Theodora Scott met Connor—wealthy, charming, and a member of the powerful Dalton family—she fell in love in an instant. Six months later, he’s brought her to Idlewood, his family’s isolated winter retreat, to win over his skeptical relatives.

Stay away from Connor Dalton.
Theo has tried to ignore the threatening messages on her phone, but she can’t ignore the footprints in the snow outside the cabin window or the strange sense of familiarity she has about this place. Then, in a disused cabin, Theo finds something impossible: a photo of herself as a child. A photo taken at Idlewood.

I’ve been here before.
Theo has almost no recollection of her earliest years, but now she begins to piece together the fragments of her memories. Someone here has a shocking secret that they will do anything to keep hidden, and Theo is in terrible danger. Because the Daltons do not lose, and discovering what happened at Idlewood may cost Theo everything.]]> 291 Kate Alice Marshall 1250343054 Carmen 0 3.80 2025 A Killing Cold
author: Kate Alice Marshall
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/21
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]]> <![CDATA[Rebel Witch (The Crimson Moth, #2)]]> 60217777 The stakes are even higher in this epic, romantic conclusion to the New York Times bestselling Crimson Moth duology.

A WITCH...
Rune Winters is on the run. Ever since the boy she loved, Gideon Sharpe, revealed who she was and delivered her into enemy hands, everyone wants her dead. If Rune hopes to survive, she must ally herself with the cruel and dangerous Cressida Roseblood, who’s planning to take back the Republic and reinstate a Reign of Witches—something Cressida needs Rune to accomplish.

A WITCH HUNTER...
Apparently it wasn’t enough for Rune to deceive Gideon; she’s now betrayed him by allying herself with the witch who made his life a living hell. Gideon won’t allow the Republic to fall to the witches and be plunged back into the nightmares of the past. In order to protect this new world he fought for, every last witch must die—especially Rune Winters.

AN IMPOSSIBLE CHOICE...
When Rune makes Gideon an offer he can’t refuse, the two must pair up to accomplish dangerous goals. The more they’re forced into each other’s company, the more Gideon realizes the feelings he had for Rune aren’t as dead and buried as he thought. Now he’s faced with a terrible choice: sacrifice the girl he loves to stop a monster taking back power, or let Rune live and watch the world he fought so hard for burn.

In Kristen Ciccarelli's Rebel Witch, the exciting conclusion to The Crimson Moth duology, love has never been so deadly.]]> 464 Kristen Ciccarelli Carmen 0 to-read 4.25 2025 Rebel Witch (The Crimson Moth, #2)
author: Kristen Ciccarelli
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/31
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]]> <![CDATA[The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)]]> 205335957
Sybil Delling has spent nine years dreaming of having no dreams at all. Like the other foundling girls who traded a decade of service for a home in the great cathedral, Sybil is a Diviner. In her dreams she receives visions from six unearthly figures known as Omens. From them, she can predict terrible things before they occur, and lords and common folk alike travel across the kingdom of Traum's windswept moors to learn their futures by her dreams.

Just as she and her sister Diviners near the end of their service, a mysterious knight arrives at the cathedral. Rude, heretical, and devilishly handsome, the knight Rodrick has no respect for Sybil's visions. But when Sybil's fellow Diviners begin to vanish one by one, she has no choice but to seek his help in finding them. For the world outside the cathedral's cloister is wrought with peril. Only the gods have the answers she is seeking, and as much as she'd rather avoid Rodrick's dark eyes and sharp tongue, only a heretic can defeat a god.]]> 400 Rachel Gillig 0356522962 Carmen 0 to-read 4.61 2025 The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)
author: Rachel Gillig
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Lightfall (The Everlands Trilogy, #1)]]> 211003690 An epic fantasy of vampires, werewolves and sorcerers, Lightfall is the debut novel of Ed Crocker, for fans of Jay Kristoff’s Empire of the Vampire and Richard Swan’s The Justice of Kings.

No humans here. Just immortals: their politics, their feuds—and their long buried secrets.

For centuries, vampires freely roamed the land until the Grays came out of nowhere, wiping out half the population in a night. The survivors fled to the last vampire city of First Light, where the rules are simple. If you’re poor, you drink weak blood. If you’re nobility, you get the good stuff. And you can never, ever leave.

Palace maid Sam has had enough of these rules, and she’s definitely had enough of cleaning the bedpans of the lords who enforce them. When the son of the city’s ruler is murdered and she finds the only clue to his death, she seizes the chance to blackmail her way into a better class and better blood. She falls in with the Leeches, a group of rebel maids who rein in the worst of the Lords. Soon she’s in league with a sorcerer whose deductive skills make up for his lack of magic, a deadly werewolf assassin and a countess who knows a city’s worth of secrets.

There’s just one problem. What began as a murder investigation has uncovered a vast conspiracy by the ruling elite, and now Sam must find the truth before she becomes another victim. If she can avoid getting murdered, she might just live forever.]]> 384 Ed Crocker 1250287731 Carmen 0 to-read 3.55 2025 Lightfall (The Everlands Trilogy, #1)
author: Ed Crocker
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Wolf at the Table 63099208 Ěý
As late summer 1951 descends on Elmira, New York, Myra Larkin, thirteen, the oldest child of a large Catholic family, meets a young man she believes to be Mickey Mantle. He chats her up at a local diner and gives her a ride home. The matter consumes her until later that night, when a triple homicide occurs just down the street, opening a specter of violence that will haunt the Larkins for half a century.

As the siblings leave home and fan across the country, each pursues a shard of the American dream. Myra serves as a prison nurse while raising her son, Ronan. Her middle sisters, Lexy and Fiona, find themselves on opposite sides of class and power. Alec, once an altar boy, is banished from the house and drifts into oblivion. As he becomes an increasingly alienated loner, his mother begins to receive postcards full of ominous portent. What they reveal, and what they require, will shatter a family and lead to devastating reckoning.

Through one family’s pursuit of the American dream,Ěý Wolf at the Table Ěýexplores our consistent proximity to violence and its effects over time. Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Rapp writes with gorgeous acuity, cutting to the heart of each character as he reveals the devastating reality beneath the veneer of good society.
Ěý]]> 480 Adam Rapp 0316434167 Carmen 0 to-read 3.84 2024 Wolf at the Table
author: Adam Rapp
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/27
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]]> Cross My Heart 214152422 She has his dead wife’s heart; the one she wants is his. The author of The Family Plot brings her signature prose to a twisty novel about a heart transplant patient who becomes romantically obsessed with her donor’s husband.

Rosie Lachlan wants nothing more than to find The One.

A year after she was dumped in her wedding dress, she’s working at her parents� bridal salon, anxious for a happy ending that can’t come soon enough. After receiving a life-saving heart transplant, Rosie knows her health is precious and precarious. She suspects her heart donor is Daphne Thorne, the wife of local celebrity author Morgan Thorne, who she begins messaging via an anonymous service called DonorConnect, ostensibly to learn more about Daphne. But Rosie has a secret: She’s convinced that now that she has his wife’s heart, she and Morgan are meant to be together.

As she and Morgan correspond, the pretense of avoiding personal details soon disappears, even if Rosie’s keeping some cards close to her chest. But as she digs deeper into Morgan’s previous marriage, she discovers disturbing rumors about the man she’s falling for. Could Morgan have had something to do with his late wife’s death? And can Rosie’s heart sustain another break—or is she next?]]> 309 Megan Collins 1668048078 Carmen 0 to-read 3.63 2025 Cross My Heart
author: Megan Collins
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/26
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]]> <![CDATA[The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness]]> 171681821
A must-read for all parents: the generation-defining investigation into the collapse of youth mental health in the era of smartphones, social media, and big tech—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.

“With tenacity and candor, Haidt lays out the consequences that have come with allowing kids to drift further into the virtual world . . . While also offering suggestions and solutions that could help protect a new generation of kids.� —Shannon Carlin, ,i>TIME, 100 Must-Read Books of 2024

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood� began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood� in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood� has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems� that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.]]> 400 Jonathan Haidt 0593655036 Carmen 4 4.36 2024 The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
author: Jonathan Haidt
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/19
date added: 2024/12/19
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Traitor of Sherwood Forest]]> 216970868 An immersive, sultry, heart-pounding historical reimagining of the Robin Hood ballads, told through the piercing eyes of one of his spies

Jane Crowe is an ordinary peasant girl who never dreamed she would work for the infamous Lord of the Greenwood. But when she’s forced out of her home, she has no choice but to turn to Robin Hood for help—and he makes her an irresistible offer. He needs a pair of eyes in the King’s Houses, and quiet, unassuming Jane—who has spent her whole life going unnoticed—will be the perfect spy.

At first, Jane’s work for Robin seems straightforward. She whispers to him about the nobles at King’s Houses and all their secrets, including the new Sheriff of Nottingham, who would like nothing more than to see Robin Hood’s head on a spike. But the more Jane is drawn into Robin’s world, the more she’s drawn to Robin himself—a man as charismatic as he is cunning, capable of plucking at her heart as easily as he notches an arrow. As Robin’s tricks grow increasingly dangerous, and shockingly violent, Jane starts to suspect that her hero cares more about his own legacy than helping the common people—and that despite his declarations of affection, he sees her as just another object to be stolen.

When Robin’s schemes implicate Jane in a brutal murder, she must decide: is she prize to be won, a pawn to be used and discarded—or is she an equal player in the game between nobles and thieves?]]> 416 Amy S. Kaufman 014313812X Carmen 0 to-read 3.64 2025 The Traitor of Sherwood Forest
author: Amy S. Kaufman
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/27
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]]> Mansfield Park 45032 488 Jane Austen Carmen 5 read-more-than-once
Much more thorough reviewers have addressed and countered the common critiques against this book (too moralistic, etc) and especially its protagonist (Fanny is regarded as boring, timid, a goody-two-shoes, etc). I'll just say that I have always related to Fanny and will always love her story. She is a different heroine than Austen's others, but I hope you'll give her a chance. ]]> 3.86 1814 Mansfield Park
author: Jane Austen
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1814
rating: 5
read at: 2022/02/17
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves: read-more-than-once
review:
Going against the general consensus, Manfield Park is and always will be my favorite Austen novel. I loven more than Pride and Predjudice and it is one of my go-to comfort reads.

Much more thorough reviewers have addressed and countered the common critiques against this book (too moralistic, etc) and especially its protagonist (Fanny is regarded as boring, timid, a goody-two-shoes, etc). I'll just say that I have always related to Fanny and will always love her story. She is a different heroine than Austen's others, but I hope you'll give her a chance.
]]> The Briar Club 181110045 A haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, D.C. boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.

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

Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears apart the house, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: Who is the true enemy in their midst?]]> 432 Kate Quinn 0063244748 Carmen 0 to-read 4.26 2024 The Briar Club
author: Kate Quinn
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/26
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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 Carmen 0 4.48 2024 The Lion Women of Tehran
author: Marjan Kamali
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/26
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]]> <![CDATA[Ruthless Vows (Letters of Enchantment, #2)]]> 127280062 Torn apart by war. Reunited by love?

Two weeks have passed since Iris returned home bruised and heartbroken from the front, but the war is far from over.

Roman is missing, lost behind enemy lines, with no memory of his past, or Iris. Hoping his memories return, he begins to write again � but this time for the enemy.

When a strange letter arrives through his wardrobe door, he strikes up a correspondence with a penpal who seems at once mysterious� and strangely familiar.

As their connection deepens, the two of them will risk their very hearts and futures to change the tides of the war.]]> 420 Rebecca Ross 1250857457 Carmen 0 3.99 2023 Ruthless Vows (Letters of Enchantment, #2)
author: Rebecca Ross
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/26
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]]> The Book of Doors 156009464
Cassie Andrews works in a New York City bookshop, shelving books, making coffee for customers, and living an unassuming, ordinary life. Until the day one of her favorite customers—a lonely yet charming old man—dies right in front of her. Cassie is devastated. She always loved his stories, and now she has nothing to remember him by. Nothing but the last book he was reading.

But this is no ordinary book�

It is the Book of Doors.

Inscribed with enigmatic words and mysterious drawings, it promises Cassie that any door is every door. You just need to know how to open them.

Then she’s approached by a gaunt stranger in a rumpled black suit with a Scottish brogue who calls himself Drummond Fox. He’s a librarian who keeps watch over a unique set of rare volumes. The tome now in Cassie’s possession is not the only book with great power, but it is the one most coveted by those who collect them.

Now Cassie is being hunted by those few who know of the Special Books. With only her roommate Izzy to confide in, she has to decide if she will help the mysterious and haunted Drummond protect the Book of Doors—and the other books in his secret library’s care—from those who will do evil. Because only Drummond knows where the unique library is and only Cassie’s book can get them there.

But there are those willing to kill to obtain those secrets. And a dark force—in the form of a shadowy, sadistic woman—is at the very top of that list.]]> 404 Gareth Brown 0063323982 Carmen 0 4.00 2024 The Book of Doors
author: Gareth Brown
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> A Sorceress Comes to Call 195790847 A dark retelling of the Brothers Grimm's Goose Girl, rife with secrets, murder, and forbidden magic

Cordelia knows her mother is unusual. Their house doesn’t have any doors between rooms, and her mother doesn't allow Cordelia to have a single friend—unless you count Falada, her mother's beautiful white horse. The only time Cordelia feels truly free is on her daily rides with him. But more than simple eccentricity sets her mother apart. Other mothers don’t force their daughters to be silent and motionless for hours, sometimes days, on end. Other mothers aren’t sorcerers.

After a suspicious death in their small town, Cordelia’s mother insists they leave in the middle of the night, riding away on Falada’s sturdy back, leaving behind all Cordelia has ever known. They arrive at the remote country manor of a wealthy older man, the Squire, and his unwed sister, Hester. Cordelia’s mother intends to lure the Squire into marriage, and Cordelia knows this can only be bad news for the bumbling gentleman and his kind, intelligent sister.

Hester sees the way Cordelia shrinks away from her mother, how the young girl sits eerily still at dinner every night. Hester knows that to save her brother from bewitchment and to rescue the terrified Cordelia, she will have to face down a wicked witch of the worst kind.]]> 327 T. Kingfisher 1250244072 Carmen 0 4.07 2024 A Sorceress Comes to Call
author: T. Kingfisher
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/26
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]]> The Fox Wife 127278666 Some people think foxes are similar to ghosts because we go around collecting qi, but nothing could be further than the truth. We are living creatures, just like you, only usually better looking . . .

Manchuria, 1908.
In the last years of the dying Qing Empire, a courtesan is found frozen in a doorway. Her death is clouded by rumors of foxes, which are believed to lure people by transforming themselves into beautiful women and handsome men. Bao, a detective with an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth, is hired to uncover the dead woman’s identity. Since childhood, Bao has been intrigued by the fox gods, yet they’ve remained tantalizingly out of reach—until, perhaps, now.

Meanwhile, a family who owns a famous Chinese medicine shop can cure ailments but can’t escape the curse that afflicts them—their eldest sons die before their twenty-fourth birthdays. When a disruptively winsome servant named Snow enters their household, the family’s luck seems to change—or does it?

Snow is a creature of many secrets, but most of all she’s a mother seeking vengeance for her lost child. Hunting a murderer, she will follow the trail from northern China to Japan, while Bao follows doggedly behind. Navigating the myths and misconceptions of fox spirits, both Snow and Bao will encounter old friends and new foes, even as more deaths occur.

New York Times bestselling author Yangsze Choo brilliantly explores a world of mortals and spirits, humans and beasts, and their dazzling intersection. Epic in scope and full of singular, unforgettable characters, The Fox Wife is a stunning novel about old loves and second chances, the depths of maternal love, and ancient folktales that may very well be true.]]> 390 Yangsze Choo 1250266017 Carmen 0 3.97 2024 The Fox Wife
author: Yangsze Choo
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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]]> The Family Experiment 197108968 From the acclaimed author of The One and The Marriage Act, The Family Experiment is a dark and brilliant speculative thriller about families: real and virtual.

Some families are virtually perfect�

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

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

Set in the same universe as John Marrs's bestselling novel The One and The Marriage Act, The Family Experiment is a dark and twisted thriller about the ultimate Tamagotchi—a virtual baby.]]> 384 John Marrs 1335000364 Carmen 0 to-read 4.01 2024 The Family Experiment
author: John Marrs
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/26
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]]> <![CDATA[The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read [and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did]]]> 42348818 This book is about how we have relationships with our children, what gets in the way of a good connection and what can enhance it


The most influential relationships are between parents and children. Yet for so many families, these relationships go can wrong and it may be difficult to get back on track.

In The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad that You Did), renowned psychotherapist Philippa Perry shows how strong and loving bonds are made with your children and how such attachments give a better chance of good mental health, in childhood and beyond.

She'll help you to:
- Understand how your own upbringing may be impacting upon your parenting style
- Contain, express, accept and validate your own and your child's feelings
- Understand that all behaviour is communication
- Break negative cycles and patterns
- Accept that you will make mistakes and what to do about them

Almost every parent loves their children, but by following the refreshing, sage and sane advice and steps in this book you will also find yourselves liking one another too.

]]> 240 Philippa Perry Carmen 0 to-read 4.10 2019 The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read [and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did]
author: Philippa Perry
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/26
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]]> The Children's Book 6280379
When Olive Wellwood’s oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of the new Victoria and Albert Museum—a talented working-class boy who could be a character out of one of Olive’s magical tales—she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends.

But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house—and the separate, private books she writes for each of her seven children—conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined. As these lives—of adults and children alike—unfold, lies are revealed, hearts are broken, and the damaging truth about the Wellwoods slowly emerges. But their personal struggles, their hidden desires, will soon be eclipsed by far greater forces, as the tides turn across Europe and a golden era comes to an end.

Taking us from the cliff-lined shores of England to Paris, Munich, and the trenches of the Somme, The Children’s Book is a deeply affecting story of a singular family, played out against the great, rippling tides of the day. It is a masterly literary achievement by one of our most essential writers.]]> 675 A.S. Byatt 0307272095 Carmen 0 3.67 2009 The Children's Book
author: A.S. Byatt
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: owned-books-in-to-be-read-pile
review:

]]> Eleanore of Avignon 203956661 Eleanore of Avignon is the story of a woman who is unwilling to bend to the limitations her society places upon her when she becomes the unlikely apprentice to the pope’s physician at the most challenging and dangerous moment in medieval European history.

Provence, 1347. Eleanore (Elea) Blanchet is a midwife and budding herbalist with remarkable skills. But as she knows all too well from her late mother’s fate, she must be careful to stay within her station. So, she quietly accepts her role tending to the pregnant women in her home city of Avignon; spending time with her father and beloved twin sister, Margot; and escaping to the surrounding woods to forage for herbs when she can. At the very least, she is determined to preserve the little freedom she does have by staying unwed—unlike Margot, who is about to marry a man with painful connections to their mother’s death.

Then, in a chance encounter, Elea meets Guy de Chauliac, “Guigo,� the enigmatic personal physician to the powerful Pope Clement, who, against all odds, agrees to take her on as his apprentice. Under his tutelage, a whole new world opens to Elea—a world of status, wealth, and fascinating medical cases—but just as she starts to settle into her new position, the much-feared plague hits Europe, making Elea and Guigo's work more urgent than ever. And as if that weren’t enough, the disgraced Queen Joanna of Naples arrives in Avignon to stand trial for her husband’s murder—and she is pregnant and in need of a midwife, a role only Elea can fill.

As the Black Death spreads like wildfire, leaving half the city dead in its wake—and as the queen's childbirth approaches—Elea finds herself battling what seems to be an unwinnable war. All the while, the people of Avignon are becoming more and more desperate for a scapegoat, and a group of religious heretics launch a witch hunt, one that could cost her everything.]]> 320 Elizabeth DeLozier 0593475038 Carmen 0 to-read 4.29 2024 Eleanore of Avignon
author: Elizabeth DeLozier
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/25
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]]> We Were the Lucky Ones 30267929
As one sibling is forced into exile, another attempts to flee the continent, while others struggle to escape certain death, either by working grueling hours on empty stomachs in the factories of the ghetto or by hiding as gentiles in plain sight. Driven by an unwavering will to survive and by the fear that they may never see one another again, the Kurcs must rely on hope, ingenuity, and inner strength to persevere.

An extraordinary, propulsive novel, We Were the Lucky Ones demonstrates how in the face of the twentieth century’s darkest moment, the human spirit can endure and even thrive.]]> 403 Georgia Hunter 0399563083 Carmen 4 4.39 2017 We Were the Lucky Ones
author: Georgia Hunter
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/25
date added: 2024/11/25
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review:

]]> Shy Creatures 199531966
Croydon, 1964. Helen Hansford is in her thirties and an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital where she has been having a long love affair with a charismatic, married doctor.

One spring afternoon they receive a call about a disturbance from a derelict house not far from Helen's home. A mute, thirty-seven-year-old man called William Tapping, with a beard down to his waist, has been discovered along with his elderly aunt. It is clear he has been shut up in the house for decades, but when it emerges that William is a talented artist, Helen is determined to discover his story.

Shy Creatures is a life-affirming novel about all the different ways we can be confined, how ordinary lives are built of delicate layers of experience, the joy of freedom and the transformative power of kindness.]]> 400 Clare Chambers 0063258226 Carmen 0 to-read 3.99 2024 Shy Creatures
author: Clare Chambers
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/19
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]]> The Sunflower House 203579150 Family secrets come to light as a young woman fights to save herself, and others, in a Nazi-run baby factory—a real-life Handmaid's Tale—during World War II.

In a sleepy German village, Allina Strauss’s life seems idyllic: she works at her uncle’s bookshop, makes strudel with her aunt, and spends weekends with her friends and fiancé. But it's 1939, Adolf Hitler is Chancellor, and Allina’s family hides a terrifying secret—her birth mother was Jewish, making her a Mischling.

One fateful night after losing everyone she loves, Allina is forced into service as a nurse at a state-run baby factory called Hochland Home. There, she becomes both witness and participant to the horrors of Heinrich Himmler’s ruthless eugenics program.

The Sunflower House is a meticulously-researched debut historical novel that uncovers the notorious Lebensborn Program of Nazi Germany. Women of “pure� blood stayed in Lebensborn homes for the sole purpose of perpetuating the Aryan population, giving birth to thousands of babies who were adopted out to “good� Nazi families. Allina must keep her Jewish identity a secret in order to survive, but when she discovers the neglect occurring within the home, she’s determined not only to save herself, but also the children in her care.

A tale of one woman’s determination to resist and survive, The Sunflower House is also a love story. When Allina meets Karl, a high-ranking SS officer with secrets of his own, the two must decide how much they are willing to share with each other—and how much they can stand to risk as they join forces to save as many children as they can. The threads of this poignant and heartrending novel weave a tale of loss and love, friendship and betrayal, and the secrets we bury in order to save ourselves.]]> 336 Adriana Allegri 1250326524 Carmen 0 to-read 4.37 2024 The Sunflower House
author: Adriana Allegri
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/11
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]]> Where I End 204294822 At night, my mother creaks. The house creaks along with her. Sometimes in the morning we find her in places. We never see her move. We just come upon her.

Aoileann is cursed. She has no friends, never gone to school. She has never left this windswept craggy isle off the coast of Ireland.

Her mother is cursed: a silent wreck Aoileann calls the “bed-thing.� Alongside her grandmother, Aoileann’s days are an endless monotony of feeding, changing, and caring for the bed-thing.

Their island seems cursed, whispering secrets only Aoileann hears. Then Rachel, a vivacious artist from the mainland, arrives with her colicky newborn. Rachel arouses yearnings Aoileann cannot fully comprehend. Soon, the unfolding of her mother’s secret tragedy and Aoileann’s pursuit of her own dark desires are both destined to unleash a maelstrom upon all three of their lives.]]> 256 Sophie White 1645661857 Carmen 3 3.68 2022 Where I End
author: Sophie White
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/19
date added: 2024/10/19
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]]> Any Bitter Thing 139605 Any Bitter Thing, Wood's brilliant new novel, is her breakout book, a timely, gripping, and compassionate tale of family, faith, and deeply hidden truths. One of its greatest strengths is its continuous ability to defy expectations. It's not what you think. It is worse. Lizzy Mitchell was raised from the age of two by her uncle, a Catholic priest. When she was nine, he was falsely accused of improprieties with her and dismissed from his church, and she was sent away to boarding school. Now thirty years old and in a failing marriage, she is nearly killed in a traffic accident. What she discovers when she sets out to find the truths surrounding the accident and about the accusations that led to her uncle's death does more than change her life. With deft insight into the snares of the human heart, Monica Wood has written an intimate and emotionally expansive novel full of understanding and hope.]]> 356 Monica Wood 0345477685 Carmen 4 3.81 2005 Any Bitter Thing
author: Monica Wood
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/18
date added: 2024/10/18
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review:

]]> Small Things Like These 58662236
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 128 Claire Keegan 0802158749 Carmen 5 4.14 2021 Small Things Like These
author: Claire Keegan
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/12
date added: 2024/10/12
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]]> The Ministry of Time 199798179 A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all:

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats� from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge�: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as �1847� or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,� “Spotify,� and “the collapse of the British Empire.� But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.]]> 339 Kaliane Bradley 1668045141 Carmen 0 3.54 2024 The Ministry of Time
author: Kaliane Bradley
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/22
date added: 2024/10/08
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]]> The God of the Woods 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

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

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 490 Liz Moore Carmen 0 4.16 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/22
date added: 2024/10/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The Bone Season (The Bone Season, #1)]]> 63132313 Welcome to Scion. No safer place.

The year is 2059. For two centuries, the Republic of Scion has led an oppressive campaign against unnaturalness in Europe.

In London, Paige Mahoney holds a high rank in the criminal underworld. The right hand of the ruthless White Binder, Paige is a dreamwalker, a rare and formidable kind of clairvoyant. Under Scion law, she commits treason simply by breathing.

When Paige is arrested for murder, she meets the mysterious founders of Scion, who have designs on her uncommon abilities. If she is to survive and escape, Paige must use every skill at her disposal � and put her trust in someone who ought to be her enemy.]]> 560 Samantha Shannon 1639732233 Carmen 0 4.25 2013 The Bone Season (The Bone Season, #1)
author: Samantha Shannon
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/31
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves:
review:
This has been in my TBR for years. When I saw a revised edition was being released, I decided to finally read it and I'm so glad I did. I don't think I'll ever recapture the feeling of reading Harry Potter for the first time in 3rd Grade, or reading the Hunger Games for the first time in High School, but reading "The Bone Season" came pretty darn close.
]]> 11/22/63 10644930
In 2011, Jake Epping, an English teacher from Lisbon Falls, Maine, sets out on an insane � and insanely possible � mission to prevent the Kennedy assassination.

Leaving behind a world of computers and mobile phones, he goes back to a time of big American cars and diners, of Lindy Hopping, the sound of Elvis, and the taste of root beer.

In this haunting world, Jake falls in love with Sadie, a beautiful high school librarian. And, as the ominous date of 11/22/63 approaches, he encounters a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald...]]> 849 Stephen King 1451627289 Carmen 5 4.33 2011 11/22/63
author: Stephen King
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/03
date added: 2024/10/03
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]]> <![CDATA[The Dagger and the Flame (The City of Fantome #1)]]> 174547967 From the number one bestselling author Catherine Doyle comes the most fiery enemies-to-lovers romantasy of the year. Perfect for fans of Sarah J. Maas, Leigh Bardugo and Stephanie Garber.ĚýĚý

In the dark underbelly of a beautiful city, two rival assassins are pitted against each other in a deadly game of revenge, where the most dangerous mistake of all is falling in love�

In Fantome, a kingdom of cobbled streets, flickering lamplight, beautiful buildings, and secret catacombs, Shade-magic is a scarce and deadly commodity controlled by two enemy the Cloaks and the Daggers � the thieves and the assassins. On the night of her mother’s murder, 17-year-old Seraphine runs for her life. Seeking sanctuary with the Cloaks, Sera’s heart is set on revenge. But are her secret abilities a match for the dark-haired boy whose quicksilver eyes follow her around the city?

Nothing can prepare Sera for the moment she finally comes face-to-face with Ransom, heir to the Order of Daggers. And Ransom is shocked to discover that this unassuming farmgirl wields a strange and blazing magic he has never seen beforeâ€� Among rumours of monsters stalking the streets and the rival guilds grappling for control of Fantome’s underworld, Sera and Ransom are drawn together by something more than just magic and must face a deadly choice - forgiveness or vengeance? Kiss or kill? Dagger or Flame? Ěý]]> 509 Catherine Doyle 1398528455 Carmen 0 to-read 3.87 2024 The Dagger and the Flame (The City of Fantome #1)
author: Catherine Doyle
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/29
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]]> <![CDATA[A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot, #1)]]> 40864002 ASIN B08H831J18 moved to the more recent edition

Centuries before, robots of Panga gained self-awareness, laid down their tools, wandered, en masse into the wilderness, never to be seen again. They faded into myth and urban legend.

Now the life of the tea monk who tells this story is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of "what do people need?" is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They will need to ask it a lot. Chambers' series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter?]]> 151 Becky Chambers Carmen 0 to-read 4.25 2021 A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot, #1)
author: Becky Chambers
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/28
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]]> The Lightning Bottles 207294976 He was the troubled face of rock â€nâ€� roll…until he suddenly disappeared without a trace.

Jane Pyre was once half of the famous rock â€nâ€� roll duo, the Lightning Bottles. Years later, she’s perhaps the most hated—and least understood—woman in music. She was never as popular with fans as her bandmate (and soulmate), Elijah Hart—even if Jane was the one who wrote the songs that catapulted the Lightning Bottles to instant, dizzying fame, first in the Seattle grunge scene, then around the world.

But ever since Elijah disappeared five years earlier and the band’s meteoric rise to fame came crashing down, the public hatred of Jane has taken on new levels, and all she wants to do is retreat. What she doesn’t anticipate is the bombshell that awaits her at her new home in the German countryside: the sullen teenaged girl next door—a Lightning Bottles superfan—who claims to have proof that not only is Elijah alive, he’s also been leaving secret messages for Jane. And they need to find him right away.

A cross-continent road trip about two misunderstood outsiders brought together by their shared love of music, The Lightning Bottles is “both a page-turning mystery and a love letter to the grunge era� (LitHub) that captures a searing portrait of the cost of fame.]]> 304 Marissa Stapley 1668015765 Carmen 0 to-read 3.95 2024 The Lightning Bottles
author: Marissa Stapley
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/26
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]]> The October Country 93251
Contents:

· The Dwarf · ss Fantastic Jan/Feb �54
· The Next in Line · nv Dark Carnival, Arkham House: Sauk City, WI, 1947
· The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Mar �54
· Skeleton · ss Weird Tales Sep �45
· The Jar · ss Weird Tales Nov �44
· The Lake · ss Weird Tales May �44
· The Emissary · ss Dark Carnival, Arkham House: Sauk City, WI, 1947
· Touched with Fire [“Shopping for Death”] · ss Maclean’s Jun 1 �54
· The Small Assassin · ss Dime Mystery Magazine Nov �46
· The Crowd · ss Weird Tales May �43
· Jack-in-the-Box · ss Dark Carnival, Arkham House: Sauk City, WI, 1947
· The Scythe · ss Weird Tales Jul �43
· Uncle Einar · ss Dark Carnival, Arkham House: Sauk City, WI, 1947
· The Wind · ss Weird Tales Mar �43
· The Man Upstairs · ss Harper’s Mar �47
· There Was an Old Woman · ss Weird Tales Jul �44
· The Cistern · ss Mademoiselle May �47
· Homecoming · ss Mademoiselle Oct �46
· The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone · ss Charm Jul �54]]> 334 Ray Bradbury 0380973871 Carmen 0 to-read 4.13 1955 The October Country
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1955
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/25
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]]> The Silence in the Garden 1078837 208 William Trevor 0140120653 Carmen 0 to-read 3.68 1988 The Silence in the Garden
author: William Trevor
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.68
book published: 1988
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1)]]> 52439531
To receive her inheritance, Avery must move into sprawling, secret passage-filled Hawthorne House, where every room bears the old man's touch -- and his love of puzzles, riddles, and codes. Unfortunately for Avery, Hawthorne House is also occupied by the family that Tobias Hawthorne just dispossessed. This includes the four Hawthorne grandsons: dangerous, magnetic, brilliant boys who grew up with every expectation that one day, they would inherit billions. Heir apparent Grayson Hawthorne is convinced that Avery must be a conwoman, and he's determined to take her down. His brother, Jameson, views her as their grandfather's last hurrah: a twisted riddle, a puzzle to be solved. Caught in a world of wealth and privilege, with danger around every turn, Avery will have to play the game herself just to survive.]]> 386 Jennifer Lynn Barnes 1368052401 Carmen 4 4.13 2020 The Inheritance Games (The Inheritance Games, #1)
author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/20
date added: 2024/09/20
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]]> The People of Paper 43603 256 Salvador Plascencia 0156032112 Carmen 0 to-read 4.07 2005 The People of Paper
author: Salvador Plascencia
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane]]> 7558367 512 Andrew Graham-Dixon 0713996749 Carmen 0 currently-reading 4.11 2011 Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane
author: Andrew Graham-Dixon
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Thirteenth Child 205181098 This is the story of Hazel, a young healer navigating a ruthless court to save the life of the king, grappling with a pantheon of gods with questionable agendas as she fights for agency and true love in her own life as the goddaughter of none other than Death himself.

All gifts come with a price.

Hazel Trépas has always known she wasn’t like the rest of her siblings. A thirteenth child, promised away to one of the gods, she spends her childhood waiting for her godfather—Merrick, the Dreaded End—to arrive.

When he does, he lays out exactly how he’s planned Hazel’s future. She will become a great healer, known throughout the kingdom for her precision and skill. To aid her endeavors, Merrick blesses Hazel with a gift, the ability to instantly deduce the exact cure needed to treat the sick.

But all gifts come with a price. Hazel can see when Death has claimed a patient—when all hope is gone—and is tasked to end their suffering, permanently. Haunted by the ghosts of those she’s killed, Hazel longs to run. But destiny brings her to the royal court, where she meets Leo, a rakish prince with a disdain for everything and everyone. And it’s where Hazel faces her biggest dilemma yet—to save the life of a king marked to die. Hazel knows what she is meant to do and knows what her heart is urging her toward, but what will happen if she goes against the will of Death?

From the astonishing mind of Erin A. Craig comes the breathtaking fairy tale retelling readers have been waiting for� what does a life well-lived mean, and how do we justify the impossible choices we make for the ones we love?]]> 512 Erin A. Craig 0593482581 Carmen 0 to-read 4.08 2024 The Thirteenth Child
author: Erin A. Craig
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Shady Hollow (Shady Hollow, #1)]]> 58735031 The first book in the Shady Hollow series, in which we are introduced to the village of Shady Hollow, a place where woodland creatures live together in harmony--until a curmudgeonly toad turns up dead and the local reporter has to solve the case.

Reporter Vera Vixen is a relative newcomer to Shady Hollow. The fox has a nose for news, so when she catches wind that the death might be a murder, she resolves to get to the bottom of the case, no matter where it leads. As she stirs up still waters, the fox exposes more than one mystery, and discovers that additional lives are in jeopardy.

Vera finds more to this town than she ever suspected. It seems someone in the Hollow will do anything to keep her from solving the murder, and soon it will take all of Vera's cunning and quickness to crack the case.

A VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD ORIGINAL.
]]> 222 Juneau Black 0593315715 Carmen 4 3.77 2015 Shady Hollow (Shady Hollow, #1)
author: Juneau Black
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/11
date added: 2024/09/11
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]]> Peggy 202102027 A dazzling novel about Peggy Guggenheim—a story of art, family, love, and becoming oneself—by the award-winning author of Under the Bridge, now a Hulu limited series starring Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone

“Godfrey brilliantly resurrects the avant-garde adventurer Peggy Guggenheim as a feminist icon for our times.”—Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation

Venice, 1958. Peggy Guggenheim, heiress and now legendary art collector, sits in the sun at her white marble palazzo on the Grand Canal. She’s in a reflective mood, thinking back on her thrilling, tragic, nearly impossible journey from her sheltered, old-fashioned family in New York to here: iconoclast and independent woman.

Rebecca Godfrey’s Peggy is a blazingly fresh interpretation of a woman who defies every expectation to become an original. The daughter of two Jewish dynasties, Peggy finds her cloistered life turned upside down at fourteen, when her beloved father perishes on the Titanic. His death prompts Peggy to seek a life of passion and personal freedom and, above all, to believe in the transformative power of art. We follow Peggy as she makes her way through the glamorous but sexist and anti-Semitic art worlds of New York and Europe and meet the numerous men who love her (and her money) while underestimating her intellect, talent, and vision. Along the way, Peggy must balance her loyalty to her family with her need to break free from their narrow, snobbish ways and the unexpected restrictions that come with vast fortune.

Rebecca Godfrey’s final book—completed by her friend, the acclaimed writer Leslie Jamison, following Godfrey’s death in 2022—brings to life the woman who helped make the Guggenheim name synonymous with art and genius.]]> 384 Rebecca Godfrey 0385538286 Carmen 0 to-read 3.51 2024 Peggy
author: Rebecca Godfrey
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> Evidence of Things Unseen 128109
Fos has returned to Tennessee from the trenches of France. Intrigued with electricity, bioluminescence, and especially x-rays, he believes in science and the future of technology. On a trip to the Outer Banks to study the Perseid meteor shower, he falls in love with Opal, whose father is a glassblower who can spin color out of light.

Fos brings his new wife back to Knoxville where he runs a photography studio with his former Army buddy Flash. A witty rogue and a staunch disbeliever in Prohibition, Flash brings tragedy to the couple when his appetite for pleasure runs up against both the law and the Ku Klux Klan. Fos and Opal are forced to move to Opal's mother's farm on the Clinch River, and soon they have a son, Lightfoot. But when the New Deal claims their farm for the TVA, Fos seeks work at the Oak Ridge Laboratory -- Site X in the government's race to build the bomb.

And it is there, when Opal falls ill with radiation poisoning, that Fos's great faith in science deserts him. Their lives have traveled with touching inevitability from their innocence and fascination with "things that glow" to the new world of manmade suns.

Hypnotic and powerful, Evidence of Things Unseen constructs a heartbreaking arc through twentieth-century American life and belief.]]> 400 Marianne Wiggins 0743258096 Carmen 0 to-read 4.10 2003 Evidence of Things Unseen
author: Marianne Wiggins
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Namesake 33917 Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors it received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America.

In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail � the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase � that opens whole worlds of emotion.

The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name.

Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves.]]> 304 Jhumpa Lahiri 0618485228 Carmen 0 to-read 4.01 2003 The Namesake
author: Jhumpa Lahiri
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/07
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]]> The Bright Sword 201750794
They aren’t the heroes of legend, like Lancelot or Gawain. They’re the oddballs of the Round Tables, from the edges of the stories, like Sir Palomides, the Saracen Knight and Sir Dagonet, Arthur’s fool, who was knighted as a joke. They’re joined by Nimue, who was Merlin’s apprentice until she turned on him and buried him under a hill. Together this ragtag fellowship will set out to rebuild Camelot in a world that has lost its balance.

But Arthur’s death has revealed Britain’s fault lines. God has abandoned it, and the fairies and monsters and old gods are returning, led by Arthur’s half-sister Morgan le Fay. Kingdoms are turning on each other, warlords are laying siege to Camelot, and rival factions are forming around the disgraced Lancelot and the fallen Queen Guinevere. It is up to Collum and his companions to reclaim Excalibur, solve the mysteries of this ruined world and make it whole again. But before they can restore Camelot they’ll have to learn the truth of why the lonely, brilliant King Arthur fell and lay to rest the ghosts of his troubled family and of Britain’s dark past.]]> 673 Lev Grossman 0735224048 Carmen 5 3.94 2024 The Bright Sword
author: Lev Grossman
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/09/01
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The 600+ pages flew by. This is probably my favorite book of the year!
]]> <![CDATA[The Blacktongue Thief (Blacktongue, #1)]]> 55077697
But today, Kinch Na Shannack has picked the wrong mark.

Galva is a knight, a survivor of the brutal goblin wars, and handmaiden of the goddess of death. She is searching for her queen, missing since a distant northern city fell to giants.

Unsuccessful in his robbery and lucky to escape with his life, Kinch now finds his fate entangled with Galva's. Common enemies and uncommon dangers force thief and knight on an epic journey where goblins hunger for human flesh, krakens hunt in dark waters, and honor is a luxury few can afford.]]> 416 Christopher Buehlman 1250621194 Carmen 0 to-read 4.18 2021 The Blacktongue Thief (Blacktongue, #1)
author: Christopher Buehlman
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> Tales of Mystery and Madness 603729 144 Edgar Allan Poe 068986115X Carmen 0 to-read 4.55 Tales of Mystery and Madness
author: Edgar Allan Poe
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.55
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/27
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]]> The Other Valley 176450755
Sixteen-year-old Odile is an awkward, quiet girl vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns the position, she’ll decide who may cross her town’s heavily guarded borders. On the other side, it’s the same valley, the same town--except to the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time. To the west, it’s twenty years behind. The towns repeat in an endless sequence across the wilderness.

When Odile recognizes two visitors she wasn’t supposed to see, she realizes that the parents of her friend Edme have been escorted across the border from the future, on a mourning tour, to view their son while he’s still alive in Odile’s present. Edme––who is brilliant, funny, and the only person to truly see Odile––is about to die. Sworn to secrecy in order to preserve the timeline, Odile now becomes the Conseil’s top candidate, yet she finds herself drawing closer to the doomed boy, imperiling her entire future.]]> 290 Scott Alexander Howard 1668015471 Carmen 0 3.86 2024 The Other Valley
author: Scott Alexander Howard
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/21
date added: 2024/08/22
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]]> <![CDATA[The Mime Order (The Bone Season, #2)]]> 199701668 The stunning second novel in the New York Times bestselling Bone Season series expands Samantha Shannon's epic world of Scion in a new heart-pounding story of revolution.

Paige Mahoney has escaped the clandestine prison city of Oxford. Now a fugitive in London, she nurtures a new taste for revolution.

Oxford may be behind her, but the Republic of Scion is undefeated. As it turns its all-seeing eye on Paige, she is forced to return to Jaxon Hall, her charismatic and brutal employer, to keep her foothold in the underworld.

But Paige will bow to one now, and not even Jaxon will stop her exposing the corruption in the syndicate. As she plots to win the fabled Rose Crown, both sides of an ancient conflict seek her talents for themselves.]]> 560 Samantha Shannon 1639734597 Carmen 4 4.33 2015 The Mime Order (The Bone Season, #2)
author: Samantha Shannon
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/22
date added: 2024/08/22
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]]> The Bog Wife 205673392 In this atmospheric Appalachian gothic, the Haddesley siblings of West Virginia must unearth long-buried secrets to carve out a future when the supernatural bargain entwining their fate with their ancestral land is suddenly ruptured

Since time immemorial, the Haddesley family has tended the cranberry bog. In exchange, the bog sustains them. The staunch seasons of their lives are governed by a strict covenant that is renewed each generation with the ritual sacrifice of their patriarch, and in return, the bog produces a “bog-wife.� Brought to life from vegetation, this woman is meant to carry on the family line. But when the bog fails—or refuses—to honor the bargain, the Haddesleys, a group of discordant siblings still grieving the mother who mysteriously disappeared years earlier, face an unknown future.

Middle child Wenna, summoned back to the dilapidated family manor just as her marriage is collapsing, believes the Haddesleys must abandon their patrimony. Her siblings are not so easily persuaded. Eldest daughter Eda, de facto head of the household, seeks to salvage the compact by desecrating it. Younger son Percy retreats into the wilderness in a dangerous bid to summon his own bog-wife. And as youngest daughter Nora takes desperate measures to keep her warring siblings together, fledgling patriarch Charlie uncovers a disturbing secret that casts doubt over everything the family has ever believed about itself.

Brimming with aching loss and the universal struggle between honoring family commitments and the drive to strike out on one’s own, The Bog Wife is a haunting invocation of the arcane power of the habits and habitats that bound us.]]> 336 Kay Chronister 1640096620 Carmen 0 to-read 3.59 2024 The Bog Wife
author: Kay Chronister
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/20
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]]> Beauty Is a Wound 24826361 Beauty Is a Wound astonishes from its opening line: “One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years . . .�

Across generations, the beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu, her daughters, and her grandchildren are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, and the often fiercely vengeful undead.

Kurniawan mixes tender lyricism and gleefully grotesque hyperbole to offer entertainment of a rare order as well as a scathing critique of his young nation’s troubled past: the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders of perhaps a million “communists,� followed by three decades of Suharto’s despotic rule.

Drawing on local sources—folk tales and the all-night shadow-puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scope—and inspired by Melville and Gogol, Kurniawan’s distinctive West Javanese voice brings something luscious yet astringent to literature today. Beauty Is a Wound is a prime example of the bravura resilience of art in Indonesia, blossoming after the fall of Suharto.]]> 470 Eka Kurniawan 0811223639 Carmen 0 to-read 3.94 2002 Beauty Is a Wound
author: Eka Kurniawan
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2002
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> Long Island Compromise 55777544 “Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?�

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.

But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives� successes and failures.

Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives� tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.]]> 464 Taffy Brodesser-Akner 0593133498 Carmen 0 to-read 3.72 2024 Long Island Compromise
author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/08
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]]> <![CDATA[The World: A Family History of Humanity]]> 60018232 From the master storyteller and internationally bestselling author - the story of humanity from prehistory to the present day, told through the one thing all humans have in common: family.

We begin with the footsteps of a family walking along a beach 950,000 years ago. From here, Montefiore takes us on an exhilarating epic journey through the families that have shaped our world: the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mughals, Bonapartes, Habsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Krupps, Churchills, Kennedys, Castros, Nehrus, Pahlavis and Kenyattas, Saudis, Kims and Assads.

A rich cast of complex characters form the beating heart of the story. Some are well-known leaders, from Alexander the Great, Attila, Ivan the Terrible and Genghis Khan to Hitler, Thatcher, Obama, Putin and Zelensky. Some are creative, from Socrates, Michelangelo and Shakespeare to Newton, Mozart, Balzac, Freud, Bowie and Tim Berners-Lee.

Others are lesser-known: Hongwu, who began life as a beggar and founded the Ming dynasty; Kamehameha, conqueror of Hawaii; Zenobia, Arab empress who defied Rome; King Henry of Haiti; Lady Murasaki, first female novelist; Sayyida al-Hurra, Moroccan pirate-queen. Here are not just conquerors and queens but prophets, charlatans, actors, gangsters, artists, scientists, doctors, tycoons, lovers, wives, husbands and children.

This is world history on the most grand and intimate scale - spanning centuries, continents and cultures, and linking grand themes of war, migration, plague, religion, medicine and technology to the people at the centre of the human drama.

As spellbinding as fiction, The World captures the story of humankind in all its joy, sorrow, romance, ingenuity and cruelty in a ground-breaking, single narrative that will forever shift the boundaries of what history can achieve.]]> 1344 Simon Sebag Montefiore 0525659536 Carmen 0 to-read 3.91 2022 The World: A Family History of Humanity
author: Simon Sebag Montefiore
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/14
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]]> The City of Falling Angels 12786
Venice, a city steeped in a thousand years of history, art and architecture, teeters in precarious balance between endurance and decay. Its architectural treasures crumble—foundations shift, marble ornaments fall—even as efforts to preserve them are underway. The City of Falling Angels opens on the evening of January 29, 1996, when a dramatic fire destroys the historic Fenice opera house. The loss of the Fenice, where five of Verdi's operas premiered, is a catastrophe for Venetians. Arriving in Venice three days after the fire, Berendt becomes a kind of detective—inquiring into the nature of life in this remarkable museum-city—while gradually revealing the truth about the fire.

In the course of his investigations, Berendt introduces us to a rich cast of characters: a prominent Venetian poet whose shocking "suicide" prompts his skeptical friends to pursue a murder suspect on their own; the first family of American expatriates that loses possession of the family palace after four generations of ownership; an organization of high-society, partygoing Americans who raise money to preserve the art and architecture of Venice, while quarreling in public among themselves, questioning one another's motives and drawing startled Venetians into the fray; a contemporary Venetian surrealist painter and outrageous provocateur; the master glassblower of Venice; and numerous others-stool pigeons, scapegoats, hustlers, sleepwalkers, believers in Martians, the Plant Man, the Rat Man, and Henry James.

Berendt tells a tale full of atmosphere and surprise as the stories build, one after the other, ultimately coming together to reveal a world as finely drawn as a still-life painting. The fire and its aftermath serve as a leitmotif that runs throughout, adding the elements of chaos, corruption, and crime and contributing to the ever-mounting suspense of this brilliant book.]]> 414 John Berendt 0143036939 Carmen 0 to-read 3.54 2005 The City of Falling Angels
author: John Berendt
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> Hum 195791689 From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a wife and mother who—after losing her job to AI—undergoes a procedure that renders her undetectable to surveillance…but at what cost?

In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,� May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.

Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights� respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family.

Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities. As New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer says, “Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.”]]> 262 Helen Phillips 1668008831 Carmen 0 to-read 3.49 2024 Hum
author: Helen Phillips
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/23
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]]> The Lost Story 199927030 The Chronicles of Narnia, this wild and wondrous novel is a fairy tale for grown-ups who still knock on the back of wardrobes—just in case—from the author of The Wishing Game.

As boys, best friends Jeremy Cox and Rafe Howell went missing in a vast West Virginia state forest, only to mysteriously reappear six months later with no explanation for where they’d gone or how they’d survived.

Fifteen years after their miraculous homecoming, Rafe is a reclusive artist who still bears scars inside and out but has no memory of what happened during those months. Meanwhile, Jeremy has become a famed missing persons� investigator. With his uncanny abilities, he is the one person who can help vet tech Emilie Wendell find her sister, who vanished in the very same forest as Rafe and Jeremy.

Jeremy alone knows the fantastical truth about the disappearances, for while the rest of the world was searching for them, the two missing boys were in a magical realm filled with impossible beauty and terrible danger. He believes it is there that they will find Emilie’s sister. However, Jeremy has kept Rafe in the dark since their return for his own inscrutable reasons. But the time for burying secrets comes to an end as the quest for Emilie’s sister begins. The former lost boys must confront their shared past, no matter how traumatic the memories.

Alongside the headstrong Emilie, Rafe and Jeremy must return to the enchanted world they called home for six months—for only then can they get back everything and everyone they’ve lost.]]> 352 Meg Shaffer 0593598873 Carmen 0 to-read 3.79 2024 The Lost Story
author: Meg Shaffer
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/21
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]]> <![CDATA[Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food]]> 62586003 A manifesto to change how you eat and how you think about the human body.

It’s not you, it’s the food.

We have entered a new age of eating. For the first time in human history, most of our calories come from an entirely novel set of substances called Ultra-Processed Food. There’s a long, formal scientific definition, but it can be boiled down to this: if it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t find in your kitchen, it’s UPF.

These products are specifically engineered to behave as addictive substances, driving excess consumption. They are now linked to the leading cause of early death globally and the number one cause of environmental destruction. Yet almost all our staple foods are ultra-processed. UPF is our food culture and for many people it is the only available and affordable food.

In this book, Chris van Tulleken, father, scientist, doctor, and award-winning BBC broadcaster, marshals the latest evidence to show how governments, scientists, and doctors have allowed transnational food companies to create a pandemic of diet-related disease. The solutions don’t lie in willpower, personal responsibility, or exercise. You’ll find no diet plan in this book―but join Chris as he undertakes a powerful self-experiment that made headlines around the world: under the supervision of colleagues at University College London he spent a month eating a diet of 80 percent UPF, typical for many children and adults in the United States. While his body became the subject of scientific scrutiny, he spoke to the world’s leading experts from academia, agriculture, and―most important―the food industry itself. But more than teaching him about the experience of the food, the diet switched off Chris’s own addiction to UPF.

In a fast-paced and eye-opening narrative he explores the origins, science, and economics of UPF to reveal its catastrophic impact on our bodies and the planet. And he proposes real solutions for doctors, for policy makers, and for all of us who have to eat. A book that won’t only upend the way you shop and eat, Ultra-Processed People will open your eyes to the need for action on a global scale.]]> 384 Chris van Tulleken 1324036729 Carmen 5 4.41 2023 Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food
author: Chris van Tulleken
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/21
date added: 2024/05/21
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]]> James 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Carmen 3 4.47 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/21
date added: 2024/05/21
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]]> Cutting for Stone 44643401
Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles—and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined. --back cover]]> 658 Abraham Verghese 0375714367 Carmen 5 4.45 2009 Cutting for Stone
author: Abraham Verghese
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/02
date added: 2024/05/02
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]]> The Return of Ellie Black 199798460
It’s been twenty years since Detective Chelsey Calhoun’s sister vanished when they were teenagers, and ever since she’s been searching: for signs, for closure, for other missing girls. But happy endings are rare in Chelsey’s line of work.

Then a glimmer: local teenager Ellie Black, who disappeared without a trace two years earlier, has been found alive in the woods of Washington State.

But something is not right with Ellie. She won’t say where she’s been, or who she’s protecting, and it’s up to Chelsey to find the answers. She needs to get to the bottom of what happened to Ellie: for herself, and for the memory of her sister, but mostly for the next girl who could be taken—and who, unlike Ellie, might never return.

The debut thriller from New York Times bestselling author Emiko Jean, The Return of Ellie Black is both a feminist tour de force about the embers of hope that burn in the aftermath of tragedy and a twisty page-turner that will shock and surprise you right up until the final page.]]> 299 Emiko Jean 1668023938 Carmen 0 to-read 3.97 2024 The Return of Ellie Black
author: Emiko Jean
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/27
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]]> Apples Never Fall 56143578 #1 New York Times Bestseller
A Peacock Original TV Series–Streaming Soon

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Liane Moriarty comes a novel that looks at marriage, siblings, and how the people we love the most can hurt us the deepest

The Delaney family love one another dearly—it’s just that sometimes they want to murder each other . . .

If your mother was missing, would you tell the police? Even if the most obvious suspect was your father?

This is the dilemma facing the four grown Delaney siblings.

The Delaneys are fixtures in their community. The parents, Stan and Joy, are the envy of all of their friends. They’re killers on the tennis court, and off it their chemistry is palpable. But after fifty years of marriage, they’ve finally sold their famed tennis academy and are ready to start what should be the golden years of their lives. So why are Stan and Joy so miserable?

The four Delaney children—Amy, Logan, Troy, and Brooke—were tennis stars in their own right, yet as their father will tell you, none of them had what it took to go all the way. But that’s okay, now that they’re all successful grown-ups and there is the wonderful possibility of grandchildren on the horizon.

One night a stranger named Savannah knocks on Stan and Joy’s door, bleeding after a fight with her boyfriend. The Delaneys are more than happy to give her the small kindness she sorely needs. If only that was all she wanted.

Later, when Joy goes missing, and Savannah is nowhere to be found, the police question the one person who remains: Stan. But for someone who claims to be innocent, he, like many spouses, seems to have a lot to hide. Two of the Delaney children think their father is innocent, two are not so sure—but as the two sides square off against each other in perhaps their biggest match ever, all of the Delaneys will start to reexamine their shared family history in a very new light.]]> 467 Liane Moriarty 1250220254 Carmen 3 3.69 2021 Apples Never Fall
author: Liane Moriarty
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/23
date added: 2024/04/23
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]]> Summer After Summer 195830998
Olivia Taylor's marriage is in a death spiral when she agrees to come home to the Hamptons to help her father and sisters pack up the family estate. If it looks like she’s running away from her soon-to-be-ex Wes and New York City, well, she is. But someone has to take care of things and that’s always been Olivia’s role in the family. After years of financial trouble, someone’s finally bailing them out with a huge offer to buy their beachfront property, which is a good thing, although it means losing the home she grew up in, where her mother died, and where she first met Fred, the love of her life.

It’s been five years since the last time things blew up between Olivia and Fred, but much longer since the first time. At this point, Olivia fears it was never meant to be, so there’s no reason to feel butterflies in her stomach at the idea of seeing him again. They’ve already tried, and tried again…and again…but she’s newly single, and she isn’t the same person she was the last time–and Fred has changed, too.

This time, things will be different. Maybe, just maybe, the fifth time’s the charm.]]> 336 Lauren Bailey 1639106553 Carmen 0 to-read 3.62 2024 Summer After Summer
author: Lauren Bailey
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/19
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]]> A Splendid Defiance 40487661
But Abby was no ordinary woman. She was beautiful and she was brave. She was also young and terrfied of her brother, a religious fanatic and self-sworn enemy of all Royalists.

When the rebel army unleashed its might on the castle, Justin fought tirelessly to break the siege. But even his closest friends did not know what tormented him. And Abby, as she sat with the rebel commanders at her brother's table, dreamed of a man she could not, must not love...]]> 371 Stella Riley Carmen 0 to-read 4.21 1985 A Splendid Defiance
author: Stella Riley
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/17
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]]> <![CDATA[The Black Madonna (Roundheads and Cavaliers, #1)]]> 50913323
Red-haired and independent of spirit, Kate Maxwell is determined not to let the coming conflict disrupt the lives of those she loves. During her father's forced absence she vows to hold their home against marauding forces from both camps.

More threatening to her peace of mind than the actions of either the Parliamentarians or the Royalists is her growing attraction to the diabolically clever and irresistibly magnetic goldsmith and usurer, Luciano del Santi.

Hampered by the battling English, Luciano is fighting a fierce campaign close to his own heart - to avenge his father's execution at the hands of false accusers and to repay the loan which has financed the venture. Failure will result in ruin, perhaps even death; but success will allow him to reclaim the Black Madonna - the carved obsidian symbol of his heritage and his vendetta...]]> 618 Stella Riley Carmen 0 to-read 4.33 1992 The Black Madonna (Roundheads and Cavaliers, #1)
author: Stella Riley
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/17
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]]> <![CDATA[Half a Soul (Regency Faerie Tales, #1)]]> 60717747 It's difficult to find a husband in Regency England when you're a young lady with only half a soul.

Ever since she was cursed by a faerie, Theodora Ettings has had no sense of fear or embarrassment - a condition which makes her prone to accidental scandal. Dora hopes to be a quiet, sensible wallflower during the London Season - but when the strange, handsome and utterly uncouth Lord Sorcier discovers her condition, she is instead drawn into dangerous and peculiar faerie affairs.

If Dora's reputation can survive both her curse and her sudden connection with the least-liked man in all of high society, then she may yet reclaim her normal place in the world. . . but the longer Dora spends with Elias Wilder, the more she begins to suspect that one may indeed fall in love, even with only half a soul.

Bridgerton meets Howl's Moving Castle in this enchanting historical fantasy, where the only thing more meddlesome than faeries is a marriage-minded mother.

Pick up HALF A SOUL, and be stolen away into Olivia Atwater's charming, magical version of Regency England!]]> 304 Olivia Atwater Carmen 0 to-read 4.04 2020 Half a Soul (Regency Faerie Tales, #1)
author: Olivia Atwater
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/11
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]]> Home Is Where the Bodies Are 194020321
After their mother passes, three estranged siblings reunite to sort out her estate. Beth, the oldest, never left home. She stayed with her mom, caring for her until the very end. Nicole, the middle child, has been kept at arm’s length due to her ongoing battle with a serious drug addiction. Michael, the youngest, lives out of state and hasn’t been back to their small Wisconsin town since their father ran out on them seven years before.

While going through their parent’s belongings, the siblings stumble upon a collection of home videos and decide to revisit those happier memories. However, the nostalgia is cut short when one of the VHS tapes reveals a night back in 1999 that none of them have any recollection of. On screen, their father appears covered in blood. What follows is a dead body and a pact between their parents to get rid of it, before the video abruptly ends.

Beth, Nicole, and Michael must now decide whether to leave the past in the past or uncover the dark secret their mother took to her grave.]]> 256 Jeneva Rose Carmen 0 to-read 3.77 2024 Home Is Where the Bodies Are
author: Jeneva Rose
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/11
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]]> Rednecks 195790759 Winner of the Southern Book Prize for Fiction

A historical drama based on the Battle of Blair Mountain, pitting a multi-ethnic army of 10,000 coal miners against mine owners, state militia, and the United States government in the largest labor uprising in American history.

Rednecks is a tour de force, big canvas historical novel that dramatizes the 1920 to 1921 events of the West Virginia Mine Wars—from the Matewan Massacre through the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed conflict on American soil since the Civil War, when some one million rounds were fired, bombs were dropped on Appalachia, and the term “redneck� would come to have an unexpected origin story.

Brimming with the high stakes drama of America’s buried history, Rednecks tells a powerful story of rebellion against oppression. In a land where the coal companies use violence and intimidation to keep miners from organizing, “Doc Moo" Muhanna, a Lebanese-American doctor (inspired by the author’s own great-grandfather), toils amid the blood and injustice of the mining camps. When Frank Hugham, a Black World War One veteran and coal miner, takes dramatic steps to lead a miners' revolt with a band of fellow veterans, Doc Moo risks his life and career to treat sick and wounded miners, while Frank's grandmother, Beulah, fights her own battle to save her home and grandson.

Real-life historical figures burn bright among the hills: the fiery Mother Jones, an Irish-born labor organizer once known as "The Most Dangerous Woman in America," struggles to maintain the ear of the miners ("her boys") amid the tide of rebellion, while the sharp-shooting police chief "Smilin" Sid Hatfield dares to stand up to the "gun thugs" of the coal companies, becoming a folk hero of the mine wars.

Award-winning novelist Taylor Brown brings to life one of the most compelling events in 20th century American history, reminding us of the hard-won origins of today's unions. Rednecks is a propulsive, character-driven tale that’s both a century old and blisteringly contemporary: a story of unexpected friendship, heroism in the face of injustice, and the power of love and community against all odds.]]> 310 Taylor Brown 1250329337 Carmen 0 to-read 3.81 2024 Rednecks
author: Taylor Brown
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/11
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]]> Saving Noah 36121086 We forgive murderers, not pedophiles.

Not since Lionel Shriver brought us We Need to Talk About Kevin has a writer delved into the complexities of a disturbed mother/son relationship. Until now.

Meet Noah—an A-honor roll student, award-winning swimmer, and small-town star destined for greatness. There weren’t any signs that something was wrong until the day he confesses to molesting little girls during swim team practice. He’s sentenced to eighteen months in a juvenile sexual rehabilitation center.

His mother, Adrianne, refuses to turn her back on him despite his horrific crimes, but her husband won’t allow Noah back into their home. In a series of shocking and shattering revelations, Adrianne is forced to make the hardest decision of her life. Just how far will she go to protect her son?

Saving Noah challenges everything you think you know about teenage sexual offenders. It will keep you up at night long after you've read the last page, questioning beliefs you once thought were true.]]> 259 Lucinda Berry Carmen 0 to-read 3.89 2017 Saving Noah
author: Lucinda Berry
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Dead Things Are Closer than They Appear]]> 176442743
High school is hard enough to survive without an apocalypse to navigate.

Sid Spencer has always been the most normal girl in her abnormal hometown, a tourist trap built over one of the fault lines that seal magic away from the world. Meanwhile, all Sid has to deal with is hair-ruining humidity, painful awkwardness, being one of four Asians in town, and her friends dumping her when they start dating each other—just days after one of the most humiliating romantic rejections faced by anyone, ever, in all of history.

Then someone kills one of the Guardians who protect the seal. The earth rips open and unleashes the magic trapped inside. Monsters crawl from the ground, no one can enter or leave, and the man behind it all is roaming the streets with a gang of violent vigilantes. Suddenly, Sid’s life becomes a lot less ordinary. When she finds out her missing brother is involved, she joins the remaining Guardians, desperate to find him and close the fault line for good.

Fighting through hordes of living corpses and uncontrollable growths of forest, Sid and a ragtag crew of would-be heroes are the only thing standing between their town and the end of the world as they know it. Between magic, murderers, and burgeoning crushes, Sid must survive being a perfectly normal girl caught in a perfectly abnormal apocalypse.

Only—how can someone so ordinary make it in such an extraordinary world?]]> 416 Robin Wasley 1665914602 Carmen 0 to-read 3.94 2024 Dead Things Are Closer than They Appear
author: Robin Wasley
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/04
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]]> The Devil and Mrs. Davenport 162505604 The bestselling author of The Witch of Tin Mountain and Parting the Veil mines the subtle horrors of 1950s America in a gripping novel about a woman under pressure—from the living and the dead.

The first day of autumn brought the fever, and with the fever came the voices.

Missouri, 1955. Loretta Davenport has led an isolated life as a young mother and a wife to Pete, an ambitious assistant professor at a Bible college. They’re the picture of domestic tranquillity—until a local girl is murdered and Loretta begins receiving messages from beyond. Pete dismisses them as delusions of a fevered female imagination. Loretta knows they’re real—and frightening. Defying Pete’s demands, Loretta finds an encouraging supporter in parapsychologist Dr. Curtis Hansen. He sees a woman with a rare gift, more blessing than curse.

With Dr. Hansen’s help, Loretta’s life opens up to an empowering new purpose. But for Pete, the God-fearing image he’s worked so hard to cultivate is under threat. No longer in control of his dutiful wife, he sees the Devil at work. As Loretta’s powers grow stronger and the pleading spirits beckon, Pete is determined to deliver his wife from evil. To solve the mysteries of the dead, Loretta must first save herself.]]> 347 Paulette Kennedy 1662514875 Carmen 0 to-read 4.21 2024 The Devil and Mrs. Davenport
author: Paulette Kennedy
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/04
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]]> <![CDATA[The Secrets Beneath (Treasures of the Earth, #1)]]> 90197522
Medical student Joshua Ziegler left his hometown to forget the one woman he truly loved and deeply hurt--Anna Lakeman. But when he returns, time hasn't erased the feelings they've always had for each other. When Joshua's nephew goes missing--just like his sister did years ago--and Anna's job is threatened, tensions mount and dangerous secrets are unburied. How can they keep the perils of the past from threatening their renewed affection?

Bestselling and award-winning author Kimberley Woodhouse takes readers on a touching journey of faith, adventure, and romance in this dramatic historical romance.]]> 336 Kimberley Woodhouse 0764241680 Carmen 0 to-read 4.08 2023 The Secrets Beneath (Treasures of the Earth, #1)
author: Kimberley Woodhouse
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[A Beautiful Disguise (The Imposters, #1)]]> 62611264
Sir Merritt Livingstone has spent a decade serving the monarch in the most elite guard, but when pneumonia lands him behind a desk in the War Office Intelligence Division just as they're creating a new secret intelligence branch, he's intent on showing his worth. He suspects a man of leaking information to Germany as tensions mount between the two countries, but needs someone to help him prove it, so he turns to The Imposters, Ltd. No one knows who they are, but their results are beyond compare.

Lady Marigold is determined to discover the truth for her friend's sake, and she's more determined still to keep her heart from getting involved with this enigmatic new client . . . who can't possibly be as noble as he seems.]]> 400 Roseanna M. White 0764240927 Carmen 0 to-read 4.17 2023 A Beautiful Disguise (The Imposters, #1)
author: Roseanna M. White
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Inheritance (The Lost Bride Trilogy, #1)]]> 65213377 Inheritance is the first in The Lost Bride Trilogy by #1 New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts―a tale of tragedies, loves found and lost, and a family haunted for generations.

1806: Astrid Poole sits in her bridal clothes, overwhelmed with happiness. But before her marriage can be consummated, she is murdered, and the circle of gold torn from her finger. Her last words are a promise to Collin never to leave him�

Graphic designer Sonya MacTavish is stunned to learn that her late father had a twin he never knew about―and that her newly discovered uncle, Collin Poole, has left her almost everything he owned, including a majestic Victorian house on the Maine coast, which the will stipulates she must live in it for at least three years. Her engagement recently broken, she sets off to find out why the boys were separated at birth―and why it was all kept secret until a genealogy website brought it to light.

Trey, the young lawyer who greets her at the sprawling clifftop manor, notes Sonya’s unease―and acknowledges that yes, the place is haunted…but just a little. Sure enough, Sonya finds objects moved and music playing out of nowhere. She sees a painting by her father inexplicably hanging in her deceased uncle’s office, and a portrait of a woman named Astrid, whom the lawyer refers to as “the first lost bride.� It’s becoming clear that Sonya has inherited far more than a house. She has inherited a centuries-old curse, and a puzzle to be solved if there is any hope of breaking it�
]]> 419 Nora Roberts 1250288320 Carmen 4 4.17 2023 Inheritance (The Lost Bride Trilogy, #1)
author: Nora Roberts
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/02
date added: 2024/04/02
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Stranger I Wed (The Doves of New York, #1)]]> 194803825 New to wealth and to London high society, American heiress Cora Dove discovers that with the right man, marriage might not be such an inconvenience after all. . . .

Cora Dove and her sisters� questionable legitimacy has been the lifelong subject of New York’s gossipmongers and a continual stain on their father’s reputation. So when the girls each receive a generous, guilt-induced dowry from their dying grandmother, the sly Mr. Hathaway vows to release their funds only if Cora and her sisters can procure suitable husbands—far from New York. For Cora, England is a fresh start. She has no delusions of love, but a husband who will respect her independence? That’s an earl worth fighting for.

Enter: Leopold Brendon, Earl of Devonworth, a no-nonsense member of Parliament whose plan to pass a Public Health bill that would provide clean water to the working class requires the backing of a wealthy wife. He just never expected to crave Cora’s touch or yearn to hear her thoughts on his campaign—or to discover that his seemingly perfect bride protects so many secrets...

But secrets have a way of bubbling to the surface, and Devonworth has a few of his own. With their pasts laid bare and Cora’s budding passion for women’s rights taking a dangerous turn, they’ll learn the true cost of losing their heart to a stranger—and that love is worth any price.]]> 344 Harper St. George 0593441001 Carmen 0 to-read 3.67 2024 The Stranger I Wed (The Doves of New York, #1)
author: Harper St. George
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Two Twisted Crowns (The Shepherd King, #2)]]> 63910262 In the luscious, dark sequel to One Dark Window, Elspeth must face the consequences of what she's wrought - perfect for readers of Hannah Whitten's For the Wolf and Alexis Henderson's The Year of the Witching.

Elspeth and Ravyn have gathered most of the twelve Providence Cards, but the last, and most important one remains to be found: The Twin Alders.

If they are going to find it before the Solstice and cure the kingdom of the dark magic infecting it, they will need to journey beyond the dangerous mist-cloaked forest that surrounds their kingdom.

And the only one who can lead them there is the monster that shares Elspeth's head. The Nightmare. And he's not eager to share any longer.]]> 437 Rachel Gillig 0356519503 Carmen 4 4.39 2023 Two Twisted Crowns (The Shepherd King, #2)
author: Rachel Gillig
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/24
date added: 2024/03/24
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review:

]]> <![CDATA[Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel, #1)]]> 35271523
Soon after arriving for his honeymoon at the Tower, the mild-mannered headmaster of a small village school, Thomas Senlin, gets separated from his wife, Marya, in the overwhelming swarm of tourists, residents, and miscreants.

Senlin is determined to find Marya, but to do so he'll have to navigate madhouses, ballrooms, and burlesque theaters. He must survive betrayal, assassins, and the long guns of a flying fortress. But if he hopes to find his wife, he will have to do more than just endure.

This quiet man of letters must become a man of action.

The first book in the stunning and strange debut fantasy series that's receiving major praise from some of fantasy's biggest authors such as Mark Lawrence and Django Wexler.]]> 448 Josiah Bancroft 0316517917 Carmen 0 to-read 4.08 2013 Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel, #1)
author: Josiah Bancroft
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Hunger of the Gods (The Bloodsworn Saga, #2)]]> 57341045
Lik-Rifa, the dragon god of legend, has been freed from her eternal prison. Now she plots a new age of blood and conquest.

As Orka continues the hunt for her missing son, the Bloodsworn sweep south in a desperate race to save one of their own–and Varg takes the first steps on the path of vengeance.

Elvar has sworn to fulfil her blood oath and rescue a prisoner from the clutches of Lik-Rifa and her dragonborn followers, but first she must persuade the Battle-Grim to follow her. Yet even the might of the Bloodsworn and Battle-Grim cannot stand alone against a dragon god.

Their only hope lies within the mad writings of a chained god. A book of forbidden magic with the power to raise the wolf god Ulfrir from the dead…and bring about a battle that will shake the foundations of the earth.]]> 633 John Gwynne 0356514226 Carmen 0 to-read 4.52 2022 The Hunger of the Gods (The Bloodsworn Saga, #2)
author: John Gwynne
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/19
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]]> <![CDATA[The Shadow of the Gods (The Bloodsworn Saga, #1)]]> 52694527 Set in a brand-new, Norse-inspired world, and packed with myth, magic and bloody vengeance, The Shadow of the Gods begins an epic new fantasy saga from bestselling author John Gwynne.

After the gods warred and drove themselves to extinction, the cataclysm of their fall shattered the land of VigriĂ°.

Now a new world is rising, where power-hungry jarls feud and monsters stalk the woods and mountains. A world where the bones of the dead gods still hold great power for those brave - or desperate - enough to seek them out.

Now, as whispers of war echo across the mountains and fjords, fate follows in the footsteps of three people: a huntress on a dangerous quest, a noblewoman who has rejected privilege in pursuit of battle fame, and a thrall who seeks vengeance among the famed mercenaries known as the Bloodsworn.

All three will shape the fate of the world as it once more falls under the shadow of the gods . . .]]> 480 John Gwynne 0356514188 Carmen 0 to-read 4.19 2021 The Shadow of the Gods (The Bloodsworn Saga, #1)
author: John Gwynne
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> Nettle & Bone 56179377
Seeking help from a powerful gravewitch, Marra is offered the tools to kill a prince—if she can complete three impossible tasks. But, as is the way in tales of princes, witches, and daughters, the impossible is only the beginning.

On her quest, Marra is joined by the gravewitch, a reluctant fairy godmother, a strapping former knight, and a chicken possessed by a demon. Together, the five of them intend to be the hand that closes around the throat of the prince and frees Marra's family and their kingdom from its tyrannous ruler at last.]]> 243 T. Kingfisher 1250244048 Carmen 0 to-read 4.08 2022 Nettle & Bone
author: T. Kingfisher
name: Carmen
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/03/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> Belladonna (Belladonna, #1) 59227936
Orphaned as a baby, nineteen-year-old Signa has been raised by a string of guardians, each one more interested in her wealth than her well-being—and each has met an untimely end. Her remaining relatives are the elusive Hawthornes, an eccentric family living at Thorn Grove, an estate both glittering and gloomy. Its patriarch mourns his late wife through wild parties, while his son grapples for control of the family’s waning reputation, and his daughter suffers from a mysterious illness. But when their mother’s restless spirit appears claiming she was poisoned, Signa realizes that the family she depends on could be in grave danger and enlists the help of a surly stable boy to hunt down the killer.
Ěý
However, Signa’s best chance of uncovering the murderer is an alliance with Death himself, a fascinating, dangerous shadow who has never been far from her side. Though he’s made her life a living hell, Death shows Signa that their growing connection may be more powerful—and more irresistible—than she ever dared imagine.]]> 409 Adalyn Grace 0316158232 Carmen 0 to-read 3.97 2022 Belladonna (Belladonna, #1)
author: Adalyn Grace
name: Carmen
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/19
shelves: to-read
review:

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