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.]]>
author: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
name: Heather
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: 2025-read, audiobooks
review:
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A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew.
It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.
In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.]]>
author: Alison Espach
name: Heather
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: 2025-read, audiobooks
review:
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Then Matthew started doing things he couldn't do before, like counting in binary-code mathematics. So he told them about Chocky—the person who lived in his head.
Cover Artist: Harry Willock.]]>
author: John Wyndham
name: Heather
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1968
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: 2025-read, audiobooks
review:
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And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides--or are chosen. A world in which good rides on the frail shoulders of the 108-year-old Mother Abagail--and the worst nightmares of evil are embodied in a man with a lethal smile and unspeakable powers: Randall Flagg, the dark man.
In 1978 Stephen King published The Stand, the novel that is now considered to be one of his finest works. But as it was first published, The Stand was incomplete, since more than 150,000 words had been cut from the original manuscript.
Now Stephen King's apocalyptic vision of a world blasted by plague and embroiled in an elemental struggle between good and evil has been restored to its entirety. The Stand : The Complete And Uncut Edition includes more than five hundred pages of material previously deleted, along with new material that King added as he reworked the manuscript for a new generation. It gives us new characters and endows familiar ones with new depths. It has a new beginning and a new ending. What emerges is a gripping work with the scope and moral complexity of a true epic.
For hundreds of thousands of fans who read The Stand in its original version and wanted more, this new edition is Stephen King's gift. And those who are reading The Stand for the first time will discover a triumphant and eerily plausible work of the imagination that takes on the issues that will determine our survival.
Length: 2880 Minutes]]>
author: Stephen King
name: Heather
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1978
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: 2021-read, audiobooks
review:
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Shari Franke’s childhood was a constant battle for survival. Her mother, Ruby Franke, enforced a severe moral code while maintaining a façade of a picture-perfect family for their wildly popular YouTube channel 8 Passengers, which documented the day-to-day life of raising six children for a staggering 2.5 million subscribers. But a darker truth lurked beneath the surface—Ruby’s wholesome online persona masked a more tyrannical parenting style than anyone could have imagined.
As the family’s YouTube notoriety grew, so too did Ruby’s delusions of righteousness. Fueled by the sadistic influence of relationship coach Jodi Hildebrandt, together they implemented an inhumane and merciless disciplinary regime.
Ruby and Jodi were arrested in Utah in 2023 on multiple charges of aggravated child abuse. On that fateful day, Shari shared a photo online of a police car outside their home. Her caption had one word: “Finally.�
For the first time, Shari will reveal the disturbing truth behind 8 Passengers and her family’s devastating involvement with Jodi Hildebrandt’s cultish life coaching program, “ConneXions.� No stone is left unturned as Shari exposes the perils of influencer culture and shares for the first time her battle for truth and survival in the face of her mother’s cruelty.]]>
author: Shari Franke
name: Heather
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/07
shelves: 2025-read, audiobooks
review:
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In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don't speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling.
Then Kacey disappears, suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey's district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit--and her sister--before it's too late.
Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters' childhood and adolescence, Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and heart-wrenching: a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate.]]>
author: Liz Moore
name: Heather
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: 2025-read, audiobooks
review:
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Their last one begins here.
Life is short. No-one knows that better than seventeen year old Lenni living on the terminal ward. But as she is about to learn, it's not only what you make of life that matters, but who you share it with.
Dodging doctor's orders, she joins an art class where she bumps into fellow patient Margot, a rebel-hearted eighty three year old from the next ward. Their bond is instant as they realize that together they have lived an astonishing one hundred years.
To celebrate their shared century, they decide to paint their life stories: of growing old and staying young, of giving joy, of receiving kindness, of losing love, of finding the person who is everything.
As their extraordinary friendship deepens, it becomes vividly clear that life is not done with Lenni and Margot yet.
Fiercely alive, disarmingly funny and brimming with tenderness, THE ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF LENNI AND MARGOT unwraps the extraordinary gift of life even when it is about to be taken away, and revels in our infinite capacity for friendship and love when we need them most. ]]>
author: Marianne Cronin
name: Heather
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: 2025-read, audiobooks
review:
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Zijn de fossiele dinosaurusbotten tot leven gekomen?
Zijn de geruchten over een monster waar?
Antropologe Margo Green ontdekt een verband tussen de moorden, een mislukte Amazone-expeditie en een vreemd afgodsbeeld dat jarenlang in de donkere kelders van het museum lag. Maar kan zij voorkomen dat er nog meer slachtoffers vallen, want het zwarte hart van het oerwoud vergeet niets..]]>
author: Douglas Preston
name: Heather
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: to-read
review:
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Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie� McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.
As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is over-whelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. Each day is a gamble of life and death, hope and betrayal; friendships run deep and can be shattered in an instant. In war, she meets—and becomes one of—the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost.
But war is just the beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends. The real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam.
The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm’s way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has too often been forgotten. A novel about deep friendships and bold patriotism, The Women is a richly drawn story with a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage under fire will come to define an era.]]>
author: Kristin Hannah
name: Heather
average rating: 4.59
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: 2025-read, audiobooks
review:
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I'm Ernest Cunningham. Call me Ern or Ernie. I wish I'd killed whoever decided our family reunion should be at a ski resort, but it's a little more complicated than that.
Have I killed someone? Yes. I have.
Who was it?
Let's get started.
EVERYONE IN MY FAMILY HAS KILLED SOMEONE
My brother
My stepsister
My wife
My father
My mother
My sister-in-law
My uncle
My stepfather
My aunt
Me]]>
author: Benjamin Stevenson
name: Heather
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: 2025-read, audiobooks
review:
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As a young, queer couple who flip houses, Charlie and Eve can’t believe the killer deal they’ve just gotten on an old house in a picturesque neighborhood. As they’re working in the house one day, there’s a knock on the door. A man stands there with his family, claiming to have lived there years before and asking if it would be alright if he showed his kids around. People pleaser to a fault, Eve lets them in.
As soon as the strangers enter their home, inexplicable things start happening, including the family’s youngest child going missing and a ghostly presence materializing in the basement. Even more weird, the family can’t seem to take the hint that their visit should be over. And when Charlie suddenly vanishes, Eve slowly loses her grip on reality. Something is terribly wrong with the house and with the visiting family—or is Eve just imagining things?
This unputdownable and spine-tingling novel “is like quicksand: the further you delve into its pages, the more immobilized you become by a spiral of terror. We Used to Live Here will haunt you even after you have finished it� (Agustina Bazterrica, author of Tender Is the Flesh).]]>
author: Marcus Kliewer
name: Heather
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/15
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: 2025-read, audiobooks
review:
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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.]]>
author: Liane Moriarty
name: Heather
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: 2025-read, audiobooks
review:
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In her early-thirties, with two kids, a soda and processed-food addiction, and no expensive gym membership, Melissa Alcantara had enough. She realized her daily hour at the gym was reflected in every part of life, from her productivity and performance to her relationships and sex. She decided to get uncomfortable, to stop “working out� and start working—to kick her own ass at the gym and at home. Because the only thing holding her back from achieving the body she wanted was herself.
Now, she shares the ass-kicking plan that transformed her life with everyone. The Turnaround is a path to self-discovery through fitness. When you begin to truly work your work out and your diet, you will learn to love and intimately know your body—maybe for the first time ever—and its responses, and accept and embrace every part of yourself for who you are. It’s all based on her four-step process that goes beyond good health and focuses on four
Control
Connection
Concentration
Consistency
As Mel persuasively demonstrates, the Turnaround goes beyond fitness. It’s life.
What do you want? To have biceps, a butt, and defined abs? To wear anything with confidence? To feel resilient and capable in every situation? There’s no insta-anything. It’s about work. If you’re ready to put in the time, commitment, and energy, she promises she’ll get you there.
The Turnaround is illustrated with two-color food and exercise photographs throughout.]]>
author: Melissa Alcantara
name: Heather
average rating: 3.55
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: to-read
review:
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Robbie lives by his gun and one hard-learned other people aren't safe.
After a brutal accident entwines the three of them, this found family of survivors must navigate murderous TERFs, a sociopathic billionaire bunker brat, and awkward relationship dynamics―all while outrunning packs of feral men, and their own demons.]]>
author: Gretchen Felker-Martin
name: Heather
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2022
rating: 1
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks, could-not-finish
review:
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Gracetown, Florida
June 1950
Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.
Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Through his friends Redbone and Blue, Robbie is learning not just the rules but how to survive. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.
The Reformatory is a haunting work of historical fiction written as only American Book Award–winning author Tananarive Due could, by piecing together the life of the relative her family never spoke of and bringing his tragedy and those of so many others at the infamous Dozier School for Boys to the light in this riveting novel.]]>
author: Tananarive Due
name: Heather
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: 2025-read, audiobooks
review:
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In this gripping narrative, Daniel James Brown sheds new light on one of the most infamous events in American history. Following every painful footstep of Sarah's journey with the Donner Party, Brown produces a tale both spellbinding and richly informative.]]>
author: Daniel James Brown
name: Heather
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: 2025-read, audiobooks
review:
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When Jo-Lynn Kirby's former best friend—pretty, nice Maddie Price—comes to her claiming to be in trouble, Jo assumes it's some kind of joke. After all, Jo has been an outcast ever since her nude photos were leaked—and since everyone decided she deserved it. There’s no way Maddie would actually come to her for help.
But then Maddie is gone.
Everyone is quick to write off Maddie as a runaway, but Jo can’t shake the feeling there's more to the story. To find out the truth, Jo needs to get back in with the people who left her behind—and the only way back in is through Hudson Harper-Moore. An old fling of Jo’s with his own reasons for wanting to find Maddie, Hudson hatches a fake dating scheme to get Jo back into their clique. But being back on the inside means Jo must confront everything she’d rather forget: the boys who betrayed her, the whispers that she had it coming, and the secrets that tore her and Maddie apart. As Jo digs deeper into Maddie’s disappearance, she’s left to wonder who she’s really searching for: Maddie, or the girl she used to be.
Not Like Other Girls is a stunning debut that takes a hard look at how we treat young women and their trauma, through the lens of a missing girl and a girl trying to find herself again.]]>
author: Meredith Adamo
name: Heather
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves: 2025-read, audiobooks
review:
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The drought—or the Tap-Out, as everyone calls it—has been going on for a while now. Everyone’s lives have become an endless list of don’ts: don’t water the lawn, don’t fill up your pool, don’t take long showers.
Until the taps run dry.
Suddenly, Alyssa’s quiet suburban street spirals into a warzone of desperation; neighbors and families turned against each other on the hunt for water. And when her parents don’t return and her life—and the life of her brother—is threatened, Alyssa has to make impossible choices if she’s going to survive.]]>
author: Neal Shusterman
name: Heather
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves: 2025-read, audiobooks
review:
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As she gets to know the residents and staff of the Bartholomew, Jules finds herself drawn to fellow apartment sitter Ingrid, who comfortingly, disturbingly reminds her of the sister she lost eight years ago. When Ingrid confides that the Bartholomew is not what it seems and the dark history hidden beneath its gleaming facade is starting to frighten her, Jules brushes it off as a harmless ghost story—until the next day, when Ingrid disappears.
Searching for the truth about Ingrid's disappearance, Jules digs deeper into the Bartholomew's dark past and into the secrets kept within its walls. Her discovery that Ingrid is not the first apartment sitter to go missing at the Bartholomew pits Jules against the clock as she races to unmask a killer, expose the building's hidden past, and escape the Bartholomew before her temporary status becomes permanent.]]>
author: Riley Sager
name: Heather
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves: 2025-read, audiobooks
review:
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Bringing the magic and suspense of the All Souls Trilogy to a deeply satisfying conclusion, this highly anticipated finale went straight to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. In The Book of Life, Diana and Matthew time-travel back from Elizabethan London to make a dramatic return to the present—facing new crises and old enemies. At Matthew’s ancestral home, Sept-Tours, they reunite with the beloved cast of characters from A Discovery of Witches—with one significant exception. But the real threat to their future has yet to be revealed, and when it is, the search for Ashmole 782 and its missing pages takes on even more urgency.]]>
author: Deborah Harkness
name: Heather
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves: to-read
review:
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When robot Roz opens her eyes for the first time, she discovers that she is all alone on a remote, wild island. She has no idea how she got there or what her purpose is—but she knows she needs to survive. After battling a violent storm and escaping a vicious bear attack, she realizes that her only hope for survival is to adapt to her surroundings and learn from the island's unwelcoming animal inhabitants.
As Roz slowly befriends the animals, the island starts to feel like home—until, one day, the robot's mysterious past comes back to haunt her.
From bestselling and award-winning author and illustrator Peter Brown comes a heartwarming and action-packed novel about what happens when nature and technology collide.]]>
author: Peter Brown
name: Heather
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: 2025-read, audiobooks
review:
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A month later, Lisa Marie was dead, and the world would never know her story in her own words, never know the passionate, joyful, caring, and complicated woman that Riley loved and grieved.
Riley got the tapes that her mother had recorded for the book, laid in her bed, and listened as Lisa Marie told story after story about smashing golf carts together in the yards of Graceland, about the unconditional love she felt from her father, about being upstairs, just the two of them. About getting dragged screaming out of the bathroom as she ran towards his body on the floor. About living in Los Angeles with her mother, getting sent to school after school, always kicked out, always in trouble. About her singular, lifelong relationship with Danny Keough, about being married to Michael Jackson, what they shared in common. About motherhood. About deep addiction. About ever-present grief. Riley knew she had to fulfill her mother’s wish to reveal these memories, incandescent and painful, to the world.
To make her mother known.
This extraordinary book is written in both Lisa Marie’s and Riley’s voices, a mother and daughter communicating—from this world to the one beyond—as they try to heal each other. Profoundly moving and deeply revealing, From Here to the Great Unknown is a book like no other—the last words of the only child of an American icon.]]>
author: Lisa Marie Presley
name: Heather
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: 2025-read, audiobooks
review:
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On a sunny morning in June, Margaret Carpenter wakes up to find a new iPhone on her doorstep. She switches it on to find a text from her best friend, Charity Atwater. The problem is, Charity’s been missing for over a month. Most people in town—even the police—think she’s dead.
Margaret and Charity have been lifelong friends. They share everything, know the most intimate details about one another…but Charity carries a secret that even she is unaware of. A secret engraved into her DNA helix. For Charity is also known Subject Six, the crown jewel of Project Athena—a clandestine and unorthodox gene manipulation experiment, the brainchild of tech titan Rudyard Crate. And when Charity’s gene sequencing actualizes during a traumatic event at a high school party, it sets in motion a chain of events that will end in tragedy, bloodshed, and death.
And now Charity wants Margaret to know her story—the real story. In a narrative that takes place over one feverish day, Margaret follows a series of increasingly dreadful breadcrumbs as she forges deeper into the mystery of her best friend—a person she never truly knew at all…]]>
author: Nick Cutter
name: Heather
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/07
date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: 2025-read, audiobooks
review:
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Set over the course of fifteen years, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance is narrated by Sally as she addresses Kathy before, during, and after her death. We watch as Kathy’s absence creates a gaping hole that only Billy—now firmly off-limits to Sally—understands and might possibly begin to fill. Charting years of their shared history and missed connections, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance is both a breathtaking love story between two broken people who are unexplainably, inconveniently drawn to each other, and a wry, sharply observant coming-of-age story that looks at the ways the people we love the most continue to shape our lives long after they’re gone.]]>
author: Alison Espach
name: Heather
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: audiobooks, 2025-read
review:
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The survivors, including key witness Pamela Schumacher, will be forever changed by this night. They have all become victims. But they tell their perspectives here, they remain masters of their stories. And they hunt the perpetrator on their own - against resistance from the justice system and the police; against public opinion, which idolizes the serial killer.]]>
author: Jessica Knoll
name: Heather
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. Then, when Charlie is seventeen, he meets Howard Bowditch, a recluse with a big dog in a big house at the top of a big hill. In the backyard is a locked shed from which strange sounds emerge, as if some creature is trying to escape. When Mr. Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie the house, a massive amount of gold, a cassette tape telling a story that is impossible to believe, and a responsibility far too massive for a boy to shoulder.
Because within the shed is a portal to another world—one whose denizens are in peril and whose monstrous leaders may destroy their own world, and ours. In this parallel universe, where two moons race across the sky, and the grand towers of a sprawling palace pierce the clouds, there are exiled princesses and princes who suffer horrific punishments; there are dungeons; there are games in which men and women must fight each other to the death for the amusement of the “Fair One.� And there is a magic sundial that can turn back time.
A story as old as myth, and as startling and iconic as the rest of King’s work, Fairy Tale is about an ordinary guy forced into the hero’s role by circumstance, and it is both spectacularly suspenseful and satisfying.]]>
author: Stephen King
name: Heather
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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A Very Private School offers a clear-eyed, first-hand account of a culture of cruelty at the school Charles Spencer attended in his youth and provides important insights into an antiquated boarding system. Drawing on the memories of many of his schoolboy contemporaries, as well as his own letters and diaries from the time, he reflects on the hopelessness and abandonment he felt at aged eight, viscerally describing the intense pain of homesickness and the appalling inescapability of it all. Exploring the long-lasting impact of his experiences, Spencer presents a candid reckoning with his past and a reclamation of his childhood.]]>
author: Charles Spencer
name: Heather
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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When Daniel de La Luna arrives as a scholarship student at an elite East Coast university, he bears the weight of his family’s hopes and dreams, and the burden of sharing his late uncle’s name. Daniel flounders at first―but then Sam, his roommate, changes everything. As their relationship evolves from brotherly banter to something more intimate, Daniel soon finds himself in love with a man who helps him see himself in a new light.
But just as their relationship takes flight, Daniel is pulled away, first by Sam’s hesitation and then by a brutal turn of events that changes Daniel’s life forever. As he grapples with profound loss, Daniel finds himself in his family’s ancestral homeland in México for the summer, finding joy in this setting even as he struggles to come to terms with what’s happened and faces a host of new How does the person he is connect with this place his family comes from? How is his own story connected to his late uncle’s? And how might he reconcile the many parts of himself as he learns to move forward?
Equal parts tender and triumphant, Andrés N. Ordorica’s How We Named the Stars is a debut novel of love, heartache, redemption, and learning to honor the dead; a story of finding the strength to figure out who you are―and who you could be―if only the world would let you.]]>
author: Andrés N. Ordorica
name: Heather
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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In the wake of his parents' tragic deaths in a house fire, fourteen-year-old Richard Elauved has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the remote, insular town of Ballantyne. Richard quickly earns a reputation as an outcast, and when a classmate named Tom goes missing, everyone suspects the new, angry boy is responsible for his disappearance. No one believes him when he says the telephone booth out by the edge of the woods sucked Tom into the receiver like something out of a horror movie. No one, that is, except Karen, a beguiling fellow outsider who encourages Richard to pursue clues the police refuse to investigate. He traces the number that Tom prank called from the phone booth to an abandoned house in the Black Mirror Wood. There he catches a glimpse of a terrifying face in the window. And then the voices begin to whisper in his ear . . .
You know who I am. She's going to burn. The one you love is going to burn. There's not a thing you can do about it.
When another classmate disappears, Richard must find a way to prove his innocence--and preserve his sanity--as he grapples with the dark magic that is possessing Ballantyne and pursuing his destruction.
Then again, Richard may not be the most reliable narrator of his own story . . .]]>
author: Jo Nesbø
name: Heather
average rating: 3.23
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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A magical house. A secret past. A summons that could change everything.
Arthur Parnassus lives a good life built on the ashes of a bad one.
He’s the master of a strange orphanage on a distant and peculiar island, and he hopes to soon be the adoptive father to the six dangerous and magical children who live there.
Arthur works hard and loves with his whole heart so none of the children ever feel the neglect and pain that he once felt as an orphan on that very same island so long ago. He is not alone: joining him is the love of his life, Linus Baker, a former caseworker in the Department In Charge of Magical Youth. And there’s the island’s sprite, Zoe Chapelwhite, and her girlfriend, Mayor Helen Webb. Together, they will do anything to protect the children.
But when Arthur is summoned to make a public statement about his dark past, he finds himself at the helm of a fight for the future that his family, and all magical people, deserve.
And when a new magical child hopes to join them on their island home—one who finds power in calling himself monster, a name that Arthur worked so hard to protect his children from—Arthur knows they’re at a breaking point: their family will either grow stronger than ever or fall apart.
Welcome back to Marsyas Island. This is Arthur’s story.
Somewhere Beyond the Sea is a story of resistance, lovingly told, about the daunting experience of fighting for the life you want to live and doing the work to keep it.]]>
author: T.J. Klune
name: Heather
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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To unravel the mystery, three employees volunteer to work a nine-hour dusk-till-dawn shift. In the dead of the night, they’ll patrol the empty showroom floor, investigate strange sights and sounds, and encounter horrors that defy the imagination.
A traditional haunted house story in a thoroughly contemporary setting, ǰǰö is designed to retain its luster and natural appearance for a lifetime of use. Pleasingly proportioned with generous French flaps and a softcover binding, ǰǰö delivers the psychological terror you need in the elegant package you deserve.
Designed by Andie Reid, cover photography by Christine Ferrara.]]>
author: Grady Hendrix
name: Heather
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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Jonathan Reisman, M.D.―a physician, adventure traveler and naturalist―brings readers on an odyssey navigating our insides like an explorer discovering a new world with The Unseen Body. With unique insight, Reisman shows us how understanding mountain watersheds helps to diagnose heart attacks, how the body is made mostly of mucus, not water, and how urine carries within it a tale of humanity’s origins.
Through his offbeat adventures in healthcare and travel, Reisman discovers new perspectives on the body: a trip to the Alaskan Arctic reveals that fat is not the enemy, but the hero; a stint in the Himalayas uncovers the boundary where the brain ends and the mind begins; and eating a sheep’s head in Iceland offers a lesson in empathy. By relating rich experiences in far-flung lands and among unique cultures back to the body’s inner workings, he shows how our organs live inextricably intertwined lives―an internal ecosystem reflecting the natural world around us.
Reisman offers a new and deeply moving perspective, and helps us make sense of our bodies and how they work in a way readers have never before imagined.]]>
author: Jonathan Reisman
name: Heather
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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The women of the Cohen family are in crisis. Triggered by the death of their patriarch, Rudy, the glue that held them all together, everyone’s lives soon take a dramatic turn.
Shelly, the younger of the two Cohen sisters, runs off to the West Coast to immerse herself in the emerging (and lucrative) world of technology. Her sister, Nancy, gets married at the age of twenty-one to a traveling salesman with a shadowy lifestyle, while their mother, Frieda, hurls herself into a boozy, troubled existence in Miami, trying to forget the past even as it haunts her.
But they each learn in different ways that running from the past can’t save you—and then must make life-altering decisions about what they want their family to be and what they need to move forward.
Beginning in the 1970s and spanning forty years, A Reason to See You Again takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey through motherhood, the American workforce, the tech industry, the self-help movement, inherited trauma, the ever-evolving ways we communicate with one another, and the many unexpected forms that love can take.]]>
author: Jami Attenberg
name: Heather
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. She has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books� Splinters enters a new realm.
In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents� complicated bond. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once—a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover—Jamison places the magical and the mundane side by side in surprising ways: pumping breastmilk in a shared university office, driving the open highway in the throes of new love, growing a tender second skin of consciousness as she watches her daughter come alive to the world. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, an almost impossibly deep reckoning with the muchness of life and art, and a book that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.
How do we move forward into joy when we are haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we’ve caused? A memoir for which the very term tour de force seems to have been coined, Splinters plumbs these and other pressing questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page. Jamison has delivered a book with the linguistic daring and emotional acuity that made The Empathy Exams and The Recovering instant classics, even as she reaches new depths of understanding, piercing the reader to the core. A master of nonfiction, she evinces once again her ability to “stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon� (NPR).]]>
author: Leslie Jamison
name: Heather
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 1
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
Annoying and actually quite boring. Did not care about any of the characters.
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Ji-won’s life tumbles into disarray in the wake of her appa’s extramarital affair and subsequent departure. Her mother, distraught. Her younger sister, hurt and confused. Her college freshman grades, failing. Her dreams, horrifying� yet enticing.
In them, Ji-won walks through bloody rooms full of eyes. Succulent blue eyes. Salivatingly blue eyes. Eyes the same shape and shade as George’s, who is Umma’s obnoxious new boyfriend. George has already overstayed his welcome in her family’s claustrophobic apartment. He brags about his puffed-up consulting job, ogles Asian waitresses while dining out, and acts condescending toward Ji-won and her sister as if he deserves all of Umma’s fawning adoration. No, George doesn’t deserve anything from her family. Ji-won will make sure of that.
For no matter how many victims accumulate around her campus or how many people she must deceive and manipulate, Ji-won’s hunger and her rage deserve to be sated.
A brilliantly inventive, subversive novel about a young woman unraveling, Monika Kim’s The Eyes Are the Best Part is a story of a family falling apart and trying to find their way back to each other, marking a bold new voice in horror that will leave readers mesmerized and craving more.]]>
author: Monika Kim
name: Heather
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/01
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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Romilly Kemp and her eccentric father have happy but sheltered lives in a ramshackle mansion in the English countryside. To help make ends meet, he creates an illustrated book with Romilly—striking girl with red hair and a mole on her cheek—as the heroine with her cat, Monty. The book becomes an instant success and their estate is overrun with tourists and adventure seekers after rumors spread that hidden within its pages is an elaborate treasure hunt.
As Romilly gets older and her father writes more books, he starts disappearing within himself. She returns to his illustrations, looking for a way to connect with her ailing father, and finds a series of clues he’s left just for her. But this treasure hunt doesn’t lead her to gold or precious stones, but something worth far more—a shocking secret that is crucial to understanding her family.
Written with tremendous heart and charisma, The Book of Hidden Wonders is an unforgettable story about growing up, facing mortality and discovering the hidden wonders that make us who we are.]]>
author: Polly Crosby
name: Heather
average rating: 3.15
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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Kill for him.
High school senior Andrew Perrault finds refuge in the twisted fairytales that he writes for the only person who can ground him to reality―Thomas Rye, the boy with perpetually ink-stained hands and hair like autumn leaves. And with his twin sister, Dove, inexplicably keeping him at a cold distance upon their return to Wickwood Academy, Andrew finds himself leaning on his friend even more.
But something strange is going on with Thomas. His abusive parents have mysteriously vanished, and he arrives at school with blood on his sleeve. Thomas won't say a word about it, and shuts down whenever Andrew tries to ask him questions. Stranger still, Thomas is haunted by something, and he seems to have lost interest in his artwork―whimsically macabre sketches of the monsters from Andrew's wicked stories.
Desperate to figure out what's wrong with his friend, Andrew follows Thomas into the off-limits forest one night and catches him fighting a nightmarish monster―Thomas's drawings have come to life and are killing anyone close to him. To make sure no one else dies, the boys battle the monsters every night. But as their obsession with each other grows stronger, so do the monsters, and Andrew begins to fear that the only way to stop the creatures might be to destroy their creator...]]>
author: C.G. Drews
name: Heather
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.
Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]>
author: Miranda July
name: Heather
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/02
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: audiobooks
review:
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It’s Halloween night, 1984, in Coventry, Massachusetts, and two families are unraveling. Up and down the street, horrifying secrets are being revealed, and all the while, mixed in with the trick-or-treaters of all ages, four children who do not belong are walking door to door, merging with the kids of Parmenter Road. Children in vintage costumes with faded, eerie makeup. They seem terrified, and beg the neighborhood kids to hide them away, to keep them safe from The Cunning Man. There’s a small clearing in the woods now that was never there before, and a blackthorn tree that doesn’t belong at all. These odd children claim that The Cunning Man is coming for them...and they want the local kids to protect them. But with families falling apart and the neighborhood splintered by bitterness, who will save the children of Parmenter Road?
New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning author Christopher Golden is best known for his supernatural thrillers set in deadly, distant locales...but in this suburban Halloween drama, Golden brings the horror home.
All Hallows. The one night when everything is a mask...]]>
author: Christopher Golden
name: Heather
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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author: Gerald B. Keane
name: Heather
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves: to-read
review:
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A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella Especially Heinous, Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naively assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgangers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.
Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.
The husband stitch --
Inventory --
Mothers --
Especially heinous --
Real women have bodies --
Eight bites --
The resident --
Difficult at parties]]>
author: Carmen Maria Machado
name: Heather
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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author: Ananda Lima
name: Heather
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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“You like it darker? Fine, so do I,� writes Stephen King in the afterword to this magnificent new collection of twelve stories that delve into the darker part of life—both metaphorical and literal. King has, for half a century, been a master of the form, and these stories, about fate, mortality, luck, and the folds in reality where anything can happen, are as rich and riveting as his novels, both weighty in theme and a huge pleasure to read. King writes to feel “the exhilaration of leaving ordinary day-to-day life behind,� and in You Like It Darker, readers will feel that exhilaration too, again and again.
“Two Talented Bastids� explores the long-hidden secret of how the eponymous gentlemen got their skills. In “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,� a brief and unprecedented psychic flash upends dozens of lives, Danny’s most catastrophically. In “Rattlesnakes,� a sequel to Cujo, a grieving widower travels to Florida for respite and instead receives an unexpected inheritance—with major strings attached. In “The Dreamers,� a taciturn Vietnam vet answers a job ad and learns that there are some corners of the universe best left unexplored. “The Answer Man� asks if prescience is good luck or bad and reminds us that a life marked by unbearable tragedy can still be meaningful.
King’s ability to surprise, amaze, and bring us both terror and solace remains unsurpassed. Each of these stories holds its own thrills, joys, and mysteries; each feels iconic. You like it darker? You got it.]]>
author: Stephen King
name: Heather
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that?
And every year that follows?
--back cover]]>
author: David Nicholls
name: Heather
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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But lately, things have been changing inside Mary. Along with the hot flashes and body aches, she can’t look in a mirror without passing out, and the voices in her head have been urging her to do unspeakable things.
Fired from her job in New York, she moves back to her hometown, hoping to reconnect with her past and inner self. Instead, visions of terrifying, mutilated specters overwhelm her with increasing regularity and she begins auto-writing strange thoughts and phrases. Mary discovers that these experiences are echoes of an infamous serial killer.
Then the killings begin again.
Mary’s definitely going to find herself.]]>
author: Nat Cassidy
name: Heather
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
review:
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When Ralph and Abby Lamb move in with Ralph’s mother, Laura, Abby hopes it’s just what she and her mother-in-law need to finally connect. After a traumatic childhood, Abby is desperate for a mother figure, especially now that she and Ralph are trying to become parents themselves. Abby just has so much love to give—to Ralph, to Laura, and to Mrs. Bondy, her favorite resident at the long-term care home where she works. But Laura isn’t interested in bonding with her daughter-in-law. She’s venomous and cruel, especially to Abby, and life with her is hellish.
When Laura takes her own life, her ghost haunts Abby and Ralph in very different ways: Ralph is plunged into depression, and Abby is terrorized by a force intent on destroying everything she loves. To make matters worse, Mrs. Bondy’s daughter is threatening to move Mrs. Bondy from the home, leaving Abby totally alone. With everything on the line, Abby comes up with a chilling plan that will allow her to keep Mrs. Bondy, rescue Ralph from his tortured mind, and break Laura's hold on the family for good. All it requires is a little ingenuity, a lot of determination, and a unique recipe for chicken à la king…]]>
author: Ainslie Hogarth
name: Heather
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
review:
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Nobody has a “normal� family, but Vesper Wright’s is truly...something else. Vesper left home at eighteen and never looked back—mostly because she was told that leaving the staunchly religious community she grew up in meant she couldn’t return. But then an envelope arrives on her doorstep.
Inside is an invitation to the wedding of Vesper’s beloved cousin Rosie. It’s to be hosted at the family farm. Have they made an exception to the rule? It wouldn’t be the first time Vesper’s been given special treatment. Is the invite a sweet gesture? An olive branch? A trap? Doesn’t matter. Something inside her insists she go to the wedding. Even if it means returning to the toxic environment she escaped. Even if it means reuniting with her mother, Constance, a former horror film star and forever ice queen.
When Vesper’s homecoming exhumes a terrifying secret, she’s forced to reckon with her family’s beliefs and her own crisis of faith in this deliciously sinister novel that explores the way family ties can bind us as we struggle to find our place in the world.]]>
author: Rachel Harrison
name: Heather
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
review:
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That’s not the only thing that’s getting carved up, though � this, Jade knows, is the start of a slasher. But what kind? Who’s wearing the mask? Jade’s got an encyclopedic recall of every horror movie on the shelf, but� will that help her survive? Can she get a final girl trained enough to stop all this from happening? Does she even want to?
Isn’t a slasher exactly what her hometown deserves?
This new novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones, called “one of our most talented living writers� by Tommy Orange, explores the changing landscape of the West through his distinct voice of sharp humor and prophetic violence.
Go up the mountain to Proofrock. See if you’ve got what it takes � see if your heart, too, might be a chainsaw.]]>
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Heather
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
review:
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Food critic Dorothy Daniels loves what she does. Discerning, meticulous, and very, very smart, Dorothy's clear mastery of the culinary arts make it likely that she could, on any given night, whip up a more inspired dish than any one of the chefs she writes about.
Dorothy loves sex as much as she loves food, and while she has struggled to find a long-term partner that can keep up with her, she makes the best of her single life, frequently traveling from Manhattan to Italy for a taste of both. But there is something within Dorothy that's different from everyone else, and having suppressed it long enough, she starts to embrace what makes Dorothy uniquely, terrifyingly herself.
Recounting her life from a seemingly idyllic farm-to-table childhood, the heights of her career, to the moment she plunges an ice pick into a man's neck on Fire Island, Dorothy Daniels show us what happens when a woman finally embraces her superiority.
A satire of early foodieism, a critique of how gender is defined, and a showcase of virtuoso storytelling, Chelsea G. Summers' A Certain Hunger introduces us to the food world's most charming psychopath and an exciting new voice in fiction.]]>
author: Chelsea G. Summers
name: Heather
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
review:
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Seamlessly blending classic horror and a dramatic narrative with sharp social commentary, The Only Good Indians follows four American Indian men after a disturbing event from their youth puts them in a desperate struggle for their lives. Tracked by an entity bent on revenge, these childhood friends are helpless as the culture and traditions they left behind catch up to them in a violent, vengeful way.]]>
author: Stephen Graham Jones
name: Heather
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
review:
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When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruravia.
What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.
Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.]]>
author: T. Kingfisher
name: Heather
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
review:
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By turns elegiac and furious, wry and heartbreaking, Our Wives Under the Sea is an exploration of the unknowable depths within each of us and the love that compels us, nevertheless, toward one another. Fathomlessly inventive and original, Julia Armfield’s debut novel is a portrait of marriage as we’ve never seen it before.]]>
author: Julia Armfield
name: Heather
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
review:
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When a young family moves into an unfinished development community, cracks begin to emerge in both their new residence and their lives, as a mysterious online DIY instructor delivers dark subliminal suggestions about how to handle any problem around the house. The trials of home improvement, destructive insecurities, and haunted house horror all collide in this thrilling story perfect for fans of Nick Cutter’s bestsellers The Troop and The Deep.]]>
author: Nick Cutter
name: Heather
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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The last time Maeve saw her cousin was the night she escaped the cult they were raised in. For the past two decades, Maeve has worked hard to build a normal life in New York City, where she keeps everything—and everyone—at a safe distance.
When Andrea suddenly reappears, Maeve regains the only true friend she’s ever had. Soon she’s spending more time at Andrea’s remote Catskills estate than in her own cramped apartment. Maeve doesn’t even mind that her cousin’s wealthy work friends clearly disapprove of her single lifestyle. After all, Andrea has made her fortune in the fertility industry—baby fever comes with the territory.
The more Maeve immerses herself in Andrea’s world, the more disconnected she feels from her life back in the city; and the cousins� increasing attachment triggers memories Maeve has fought hard to bury. But confronting the terrors of her childhood may be the only way for Maeve to transcend the nightmare still to come…]]>
author: Anne Heltzel
name: Heather
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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The Velkwood Vicinity was the topic of occult theorists, tabloid one-hour documentaries, and even some pseudo-scientific investigations as the block of homes disappeared behind a near-impenetrable veil that only three survivors could enter—and only one has in the past twenty years, until now.
Talitha Velkwood has avoided anything to do with the tragedy that took her mother and eight-year-old sister, drifting from one job to another, never settling anywhere or with anyone, feeling as trapped by her past as if she was still there in the small town she so desperately wanted to escape from. When a new researcher tracks her down and offers to pay her to come back to enter the vicinity, Talitha claims she’s just doing it for the money. Of all the crackpot theories over the years, no one has discovered what happened the night Talitha, her estranged, former best friend Brett, and Grace, escaped their homes twenty years ago. Will she finally get the answers she’s been looking for all these years, or is this just another dead end?
Award-winning author Gwendolyn Kiste has created a suburban ghost story about a small town that trapped three young women who must confront the past if they’re going to have a future.]]>
author: Gwendolyn Kiste
name: Heather
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/04
date added: 2024/11/04
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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Eden, Kentucky, is just another dying, bad-luck town, known only for the legend of E. Starling, the reclusive nineteenth-century author and illustrator who wrote The Underland--and disappeared. Before she vanished, Starling House appeared. But everyone agrees that it’s best to let the uncanny house―and its last lonely heir, Arthur Starling―go to rot.
Opal knows better than to mess with haunted houses or brooding men, but an unexpected job offer might be a chance to get her brother out of Eden. Too quickly, though, Starling House starts to feel dangerously like something she’s never had: a home.
As sinister forces converge on Starling House, Opal and Arthur are going to have to make a dire choice to dig up the buried secrets of the past and confront their own fears, or let Eden be taken over by literal nightmares.
If Opal wants a home, she’ll have to fight for it.]]>
author: Alix E. Harrow
name: Heather
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/11/04
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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author: Dean Koontz
name: Heather
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1983
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/10/29
shelves:
review:
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Alison has never been a fan of Christmas. But with it right around the corner and her husband busily decorating their cozy Vermont home, she has no choice but to face it. Then she gets the call.
Mavis, Alison’s estranged mother, has been diagnosed with cancer and has only weeks to live. She wants to spend her remaining days with her daughter, son-in-law, and two granddaughters. But Alison grew up with her mother’s alcoholism and violent abuse and is reluctant to unearth these traumatic memories. Still, she eventually agrees to take in Mavis, hoping that she and her mother could finally heal and have the relationship she’s always dreamed of.
But when mysterious and otherworldly things start happening upon Mavis’s arrival, Alison begins to suspect her mother is not quite who she seems. And as the holiday festivities turn into a nightmare, she must confront just how far she is willing to go to protect her family.]]>
author: Jennifer McMahon
name: Heather
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2024/10/26
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
Rubbish.
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By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. As a performance artist, Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. As a coder thrilled by the internet’s early egalitarian promise, Jackie must contend with its more sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And as a community activist, Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighborhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves.
Moving from the predigital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a strikingly imagined portrait of the 2040s, Memory Piece is an innovative and audacious story of three lifelong friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.]]>
author: Lisa Ko
name: Heather
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/26
date added: 2024/10/26
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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Mansfield Park is Jane Austen's version of a Cinderella story. Fanny Price is a poor relation living with her rich uncle and aunt, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, and their children. Edmund, the second son, ias the only one who treats her with kindness and they develop a strong bond, until the dashing Henry Crawford and his lovely sister Mary come to visit. The Crawfords are outwardly charming, but their indifferent upbringing leaves them unable to distinguish right from wrong, and Fanny must watch her beloved Edmund almost fall into Mary's trap.
Fanny Price is meek and mild, and unfailingly good. When the Crawfords introduce risky activities into her social set, she tries to prevent disaster, but the production of a play leads all the members of the family astray and Edmund almost falls irretrievably in love with the beautiful Mary. Fanny watches with trepidation and much pain, until Edmund's own high sense of morality brings him to the right conclusions about which is the better woman, on the inside.]]>
author: Jane Austen
name: Heather
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1814
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/25
shelves: free
review:
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It’s been a year since his ex-boyfriend dumped him and moved from Auckland to Buenos Aires, and Valdin is doing fine. He has a good flat with his sister Greta, a good career where his colleagues only occasionally remind him that he is the sole Māori person in the office, and a good friend who he only sleeps with when he’s sad. But when work sends him to Argentina and he’s thrown back in his former lover’s orbit, Valdin is forced to confront the feelings he’s been trying to ignore—and the future he wants.
Greta is not letting her painfully unrequited crush (or her possibly pointless master’s thesis, or her pathetic academic salary...) get her down. She would love to focus on the charming fellow grad student she meets at a party and her friendships with a circle of similarly floundering twenty-somethings, but her chaotic family life won’t stop her mother is keeping secrets, her nephew is having a gay crisis, and her brother has suddenly flown to South America without a word.
Sharp, hilarious, and with an undeniable emotional momentum that builds to an exuberant conclusion, Greta & Valdin careens us through the siblings� misadventures and the messy dramas of their sprawling, eccentric Maaori-Russian-Catalonian family. An acclaimed bestseller in New Zealand, Greta & Valdin is fresh, joyful, and alive with the possibility of love in its many mystifying forms.]]>
author: Rebecca K. Reilly
name: Heather
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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On San Nicolas Island, dolphins flash in the surrounding blue waters, sea otter play in the vast kelp beds, and sea elephants loll on the stony beaches. Here, in the early 1800s, a girl named Karana spent eighteen years alone.
Karana had to contend with the ferocious pack of wild dogs that killed her younger brother, constantly guard against Aleutian sea otter hunters, and maintain a precarious food supply. Her courage, self-reliance, and grit has inspired millions of readers in this breathtaking adventure.
As Smithsonian magazine put "For kids all over the country, reading the book in language arts classes, Karana is a powerful symbol of their growing independence. Through her, they can imagine themselves making their way in the world alone--and thriving."]]>
author: Scott O'Dell
name: Heather
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1960
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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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.]]>
author: Percival Everett
name: Heather
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/10/05
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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Patrick O’Hara is back. It’s been five years since his summer as his niece Maisie and nephew Grant’s caretaker after their mother’s passing. The kids are back in Connecticut with their dad, and Patrick has relocated to New York to remain close by and relaunch his dormant acting career. After the run of his second successful sit-com comes to a close, Patrick feels on top of the world . . . professionally. But some things have had to take a back seat. Looking down both barrels at fifty, Patrick is single again after breaking things off with Emory. But at least he has a family to lean on. Until that family needs to again lean on him.
When Patrick's brother, Greg, announces he’s getting remarried in Italy, Maisie and Grant are not thrilled. Patrick feels drawn to take the two back under his wing. As they travel through Europe on their way to the wedding, Patrick tries his best to help them understand love, much as he once helped them comprehend grief. But when they arrive in Italy, Patrick is overextended managing a groom with cold feet; his sister, Clara, flirting with guests left and right; a growing rivalry with the kids� charming soon-to-be-launt (lesbian aunt), and two moody young teens trying to adjust to a new normal, all culminating in a disastrous rehearsal dinner.
Can Patrick save the day? Will teaching the kids about love help him repair his own love life? Can the change of scenery help Patrick come to terms with finally growing up?
Gracing the work with his signature blend of humor and heart, Steven Rowley charms with a beloved story about the complicated bonds of family, love, and what it takes to rediscover yourself, even at the ripe age of fifty.]]>
author: Steven Rowley
name: Heather
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/10/02
shelves: 2024-read, audiobooks
review:
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When Cate Callahan learns Jude Outlaw is coming home from the Terrorist Wars and is ready to claim her under the new law--with the help of his four remaining brothers--she steals their boat and escapes to the high seas. Unfortunately, her runaway bid for freedom doesn't last for long.
Quickly capturing his lover, Jude rekindles the flames between them preparing her body and seducing her mind into the prospect of experiencing the ultimate in a woman's pleasure...the Outlaw brothers. But will Jude be able to share the love of his life?]]>
author: Jan Springer
name: Heather
average rating: 2.98
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/30
shelves: free
review:
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Melina Wenham is worried and frustrated. Lately, her boyfriend of six months seems to have lost interest in her. Yes, she knows he s stressed about his big project at work, but jeez, it seems like he d rather go solo than have sex with her. Sexy lingerie, a Brazilian nothing seems to get his attention.
Gavin s frustrated too. He s under enough pressure at work, without feeling more from Melina every time he gets home.
Another night, another party, and Gavin is off talking to the boys. Feeling ignored yet again, Melina confides her troubles to an acquaintance, Abby, who suggests shaking him up by flirting with another guy. Hmm. Not a bad idea, except there are no flirt-worthy guys at this party.
Then Abby suggests a different tack flirt with her.
Could a little girl-on-girl tango be the match that reignites romance with Gavin? There s only one way to find out "]]>
author: Kelly Jamieson
name: Heather
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/30
shelves: free
review:
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author: Ella Monroe
name: Heather
average rating: 3.04
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: free
review:
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I Quit is for every person who thinks, I can't keep pretending everything is fine!'
Biblical quitting goes hand in hand with choosing. When we quit those things that are damaging to our souls or the souls of others, we are freed up to choose other ways of being and relating that are rooted in love and lead to life.
When we quit fear of what others think, we choose freedom.
When we quit lies, we choose truth.
When we quit blaming, we choose to take responsibility.
When we quit faulty thinking, we choose to live in reality.
When we quit for the right reasons, quitting changes us. Something breaks inside of us when we finally say, 'No more.' But it must be done for the right reasons, at the right time, and in the right way. That's what this book is about.
author: Geri Scazzero
name: Heather
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: free
review:
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The students at Eagle Elite are unlike any she's ever met . . . and they refuse to make things easy for her. There's Nixon, gorgeous, irresistible, and leader of a group that everyone fears: The Elect. Their rules are simple. 1. Do not touch The Elect. 2. Do not look at The Elect. 3. Do not speak to The Elect. No matter how hard she tries to stay away, The Elect are always around her and it isn't long until she finds out the reason why they keep their friends close and their enemies even closer. She just didn't realize she was the enemy -- until it was too late.
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author: Rachel Van Dyken
name: Heather
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: ng, to-read
review:
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Deep in the rugged Appalachians of North Carolina lies the cove, a dark, forbidding place where spirits and fetches wander, and even the light fears to travel. Or so the townsfolk of Mars Hill believe–just as they know that Laurel Shelton, the lonely young woman who lives within its shadows, is a witch. Alone except for her brother, Hank, newly returned from the trenches of France, she aches for her life to begin.
Then it happens–a stranger appears, carrying nothing but a beautiful silver flute and a note explaining that his name is Walter, he is mute, and is bound for New York. Laurel finds him in the woods, nearly stung to death by yellow jackets, and nurses him back to health. As the days pass, Walter slips easily into life in the cove and into Laurel's heart, bringing her the only real happiness she has ever known.
But Walter harbors a secret that could destroy everything–and danger is closer than they know. Though the war in Europe is near its end, patriotic fervor flourishes thanks to the likes of Chauncey Feith, an ambitious young army recruiter who stokes fear and outrage throughout the county. In a time of uncertainty, when fear and ignorance reign, Laurel and Walter will discover that love may not be enough to protect them.
This lyrical, heart-rending tale, as mesmerizing as its award-winning predecessor Serena, shows once again this masterful novelist at the height of his powers.]]>
author: Ron Rash
name: Heather
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2012
rating: 1
read at: 2012/07/23
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: kindle, 2012-books-read
review:
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In KEEP NO SECRETS, the controversial follow-up to Compton's debut legal thriller TELL NO LIES, a district attorney struggles to redeem himself after a one-night stand damaged his marriage and professional reputation.
After surviving the private and public fallout from a one-night stand four years before, St. Louis DA Jack Hilliard wants nothing more than to be trusted again by his wife, Claire, and to earn back the respect of the community he serves. Since the day Claire accepted him back into the family, he's vowed to be true to these goals, and so far he's succeeded.
But all of Jack's efforts begin to crumble when the woman involved in his earlier downfall, Jenny Dodson, returns to town claiming threats on her life and asking for his help, and resurrecting for Jack long-buried emotions and questions of her guilt for the murder of a client. Just when he thinks the pressure can't get any worse, his son's girlfriend, Celeste, accuses him of sexual assault, and he suddenly finds himself on the wrong end of a criminal case, battling for his freedom.
Can Jack trust his freedom to the legal system on which he built his career? Or will the ghost of his one-night stand four years before come back to haunt him, causing him to be convicted on the mistakes of his past?]]>
author: Julie Compton
name: Heather
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/29
shelves: to-read, ng
review:
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From the Trade Paperback edition.]]>
author: Lindy West
name: Heather
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:
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In this visionary adaptation of Maurice Sendak's classic work, Dave Eggers brings an imaginary world vividly to life, telling the story of a lonely boy navigating the emotional journey away from boyhood.]]>
author: Dave Eggers
name: Heather
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:
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author: Bob Hamer
name: Heather
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:
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The fateful tale of Selene and Alexander is brought brilliantly to life in Cleopatra’s Daughter. Recounted in Selene’s youthful and engaging voice, it introduces a compelling cast of historical Octavia, the emperor Octavian’s kind and compassionate sister, abandoned by Marc Antony for Cleopatra; Livia, Octavian's bitter and jealous wife; Marcellus, Octavian’s handsome, flirtatious nephew and heir apparent; Tiberius, Livia’s sardonic son and Marcellus’s great rival for power; and Juba, Octavian’s watchful aide, whose honored position at court has far-reaching effects on the lives of the young Egyptian royals.
Selene’s narrative is animated by the concerns of a young girl in any time and place–the possibility of finding love, the pull of friendship and family, and the pursuit of her unique interests and talents. While coping with the loss of both her family and her ancestral kingdom, Selene must find a path around the dangers of a foreign land. Her accounts of life in Rome are filled with historical details that vividly capture both the glories and horrors of the times. She dines with the empire’s most illustrious poets and politicians, witnesses the creation of the Pantheon, and navigates the colorful, crowded marketplaces of the city where Roman-style justice is meted out with merciless authority.
Based on meticulous research, Cleopatra’s Daughter is a fascinating portrait of imperial Rome and of the people and events of this glorious and most tumultuous period in human history. Emerging from the shadows of the past, Selene, a young woman of irresistible charm and preternatural intelligence, will capture your heart.
From the Hardcover edition.]]>
author: Michelle Moran
name: Heather
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:
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What can be done to stop this relentless march of drabbery? Nothing. Butperhaps this book can be used to dull the pain. Included
The Ten Worst Films of All Time, as Reviewed by Ezra Pound over ItalianRadio
Unused Audio Commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, Recorded Summer 2002, for "The Lord of the Fellowship of the Ring" DVD (Platinum SeriesExtended Edition), Part One.
How Important Moments in My Life Would Have Been Different If I Was Shot in the Stomach
My Beard, Reviewed
Circumstances under Which I Would Have Sex with Some of My Fellow Jurors
Words That Would Make Nice Names for Babies, If It Weren't for Their Unsuitable Meanings
As a Porn Movie Titler, I May Lack Promise
Ineffective Ways to Subdue aJaguar
Eleven Lunch Meats I Have Invented
Four Things I Would Have Said to Sylvia Plath if I Had Been HerBoyfriend
And much, much more, including 20 brilliant new lists . . .
"From the Trade Paperback edition."]]>
author: Dave Eggers
name: Heather
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:
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author: Kristin Newman
name: Heather
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:
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Must Love New Leash on Life (#2)
Must Love Fetch You Later (#3)
And stay tuned for lots more to come!
[email protected]
Be the first to hear about Claire's new
"Funny and pitch perfect." -Chicago Tribune
"Wildly witty" -USA Today
"Cook dishes up plenty of charm." -San Francisco Chronicle
"A hoot" -The Boston Globe
First the much-loved USA Today bestselling novel by Claire Cook. Then the romantic comedy movie adaptation starring Diane Lane and John Cusack. Now MUST LOVE DOGS is a series!
"Voluptuous, sensuous, alluring and fun. Barely 40 DWF seeks special man to share starlit nights. Must love dogs."
Divorced preschool teacher Sarah Hurlihy's first mistake is letting her bossy big sister write her personal ad. Her second mistake is showing up to meet her first date in more than a decade. Now she's juggling her teaching job, her big, rollicking, interfering south-of-Boston Irish family, and more men than she knows what to do with. And what's up with all these dogs that are suddenly galloping into her life?
"A hilariously original tale about dating and its place in a modern woman's life." -BookPage
"If Must Love Dogs is any indication of her talents, readers will hope that Claire Cook will be telling breezy summer stories from the South Shore of Massachusetts for seasons to come." -The Washington Post
"A laugh-out-loud novel . . . a light and lively read for anyone who has ever tried to re-enter the dating scene or tried to 'fix up' anyone else." -Boston Herald
"This utterly charming novel by Cook is a fun read, perfect for whiling away an afternoon on the beach." -Library Journal
"Claire Cook's Must Love Dogs, a book that's got more giggles than soda bread has raisins." -Hartford Courant
"Claire Cook (Must Love Dogs) has built a brand writing light-hearted women's fiction blending kernels of the absurd and comedic in compulsively readable combinations." -Shelf Awareness
"The exuberant and charming Claire Cook is one of the sassiest and funniest creators of contemporary women's fiction." -The Times-Picayune]]>
author: Claire Cook
name: Heather
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: free
review:
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author: Ashley Edward Miller
name: Heather
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:
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author: Anne Rice
name: Heather
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:
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As their fates become entwined, everyone is set down a terrifying and twisted path—leading them all toward a collision where loyalties will be betrayed, fears exposed, and lives shattered.
Now with Extra Libris material, includingrecommended readingand bonus content]]>
author: Kelly Braffet
name: Heather
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:
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Tall people: Smart. Wealthy. Successful. U.S. Presidents, Oscar Winners, NBA players, CEOs.
Scrunched into airplane seats. Unable to find good clothes. Why?
In this, the first book of its kind, Arianne Cohen—all 6�3" of her—takes us on a tour of the tall world, traveling from endocrinologists� offices to the annual European Tall Club Convention to unlock the mysteries at the center of talldom: why do tall people succeed professionally, financially and intellectually far more than others? Why are tall men the most successful dating and mating group on earth, while tall women have low birth rates? And who the hell is behind those airplane seats?
Part investigation and part personal story, The Tall Book follows Arianne as she circles the globe, meeting the tallest people in the world, questioning them on how to raise a well-adjusted tall kid, and yes, becoming one half of America’s tallest couple.
Lively, witty, and erudite, The Tall Book is a must-read for the tall, the not-so-tall—or anyone searching for the secrets of living the high life.
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author: Arianne Cohen
name: Heather
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:
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THE SKULL RING
Dr. Pamela Forrest is determined to bring Julia's memories to the surface, hoping to heal Julia's panic disorder. The therapist keeps returning Julia to a night twenty-three years ago when Julia was four. A night of hooded figures, strange chants, pain, and blood. The night her father disappeared from the face of the earth.
But the line between the past and the present begins to blur when Julia finds a silver skull ring that bears the name "Judas Stone." Someone is leaving strange messages inside her house, even though the door is locked. The handyman, who has a key, spends a lot of time in the woods behind her house. Her boyfriend Mitchell becomes distant and violent. And the cop who investigated her father's disappearance has followed her to the small Appalachian town of Elkwood.
Now she has a head full of memories, but she doesn't know which are real and which are the creations of Dr. Forrest. The shadows of Julia's panic are growing larger and darker. But succumbing to madness seems safer than heeding the whispers that claim ownership of her body and soul.
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Revised November 2010. DRM-free. A romantic psychological thriller from the bestselling Kindle author of LIQUID FEAR, DISINTEGRATION, CRIME BEAT, THE RED CHURCH, SPEED DATING WITH THE DEAD, and DRUMMER BOY. Visit Scott Nicholson's blog at Author Central on Amazon.
Excerpt bonus material
BENEATH by from Jeremy Robinson
33 A.D. by David McAfee
TORMENT by Jeremy Bishop.
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"A wonderful storyteller."-Sharyn McCrumb, author of The Ballad novels
"Always surprises and always entertains."--Jonathan Maberry, The Dragon Factory
"The Skull Ring creates unforgettable settings and characters. Nicholson weaves together fear and hope, cloaking his readers in palpable suspense."--Eric Wilson, NY Times best-selling Christian suspense novelist
"Scott Nicholson is a terrific writer. Like Stephen King, he has an eye and ear for the rhythms of rural America, and like King he knows how to summon serious scares. My advice? Buy everything he writes. This guy's the real deal.."--Bentley Little, His Father's Son
"Keep both hands on your pants, because Nicholson is about to scare them off."--J.A. Konrath, author of Shaken
"A chilling, suspense-filled psychological thriller." --Vicki Tyley, Thin Blood]]>
author: Scott Nicholson
name: Heather
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: free
review:
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The long-awaited new novel from Margaret Atwood. The Year of the Flood is a dystopic masterpiece and a testament to her visionary power.
The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners--a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life--has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God's Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible.
Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the shadowy, corrupt policing force of the ruling powers...
Meanwhile, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through this strange new world, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move. They can't stay locked away...
By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most brilliant and inventive.
Margaret Atwood on The Year of the Flood
I’ve never before gone back to a novel and written another novel related to it. Why this time? Partly because so many people asked me what happened right after the end of the 2003 novel, Oryx and Crake. I didn’t actually know, but the questions made me think about it. That was one reason. Another was that the core subject matter has continued to preoccupy me. When Oryx and Crake came out, it seemed to many like science fiction--way out there, too weird to be possible--but in the three years that passed before I began writing The Year of the Flood, the perceived gap between that supposedly unreal future and the harsh one we might very well live through was narrowing fast. What is happening to our world? What can we do to reverse the damage? How long have we got? And, most importantly--what kind of "we"? In other words, what kind of people might undertake the challenge? Dedicated ones--they’d have to be. And unless you believe our planet is worth saving, why bother?
So the question of inspirational belief entered the picture, and once you have a set of beliefs--as distinct from a body of measurable knowledge--you have a religion. The God’s Gardeners appear briefly in Oryx and Crake, but in The Year of the Flood, they’re central. Like all religions, the Gardeners have their own leader, Adam One. They also have their own honoured saints and martyrs, their special days, their theology. They may look strange and obsessive and even foolish to non-members, but they’re serious about what they profess; as are their predecessors, who are with us today. I’ve found out a great deal about rooftop gardens and urban beekeeping while writing this book!
Another question frequently asked about Oryx and Crake concerned gender. Why was the story told by a man? How would it have been different if the narrator had been a woman? Such questions led me to Ren and Toby, and then to their respective lives, and also to their places of refuge. A high-end sex club and a luxury spa would in fact be quite good locations in which to wait out a pandemic plague: at least you’d have bar snacks, and a lot of clean towels.
In his book, The Art Instinct, Denis Dutton proposes that our interest in narrative is built in--selected during the very long period the human race spent in the Pleistocene--because any species with the ability to tell stories about both past and future would have an evolutionary edge. Will there be a crocodile in the river tomorrow, as there was last year? If so, better not go there. Speculative fictions about the future, like The Year of the Flood, are narratives of that kind. Where will the crocodiles be? How will we avoid them? What are our chances? --Margaret Atwood
(Photo © George Whiteside)
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author: Margaret Atwood
name: Heather
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:
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The story is told through posts on a fictional Tumblr page, which the couple sets up to share their now-separate worlds. We watch as they communicate and miscommunicate with each other through their posts and photos, as they try to be honest about their lives but end up irresistibly manipulating their own experiences to get what they want.
Author Jeff Backhaus wrote the story based on thirty-nine photos he assembled from the thousands he's taken around the world—thin slices of his past he severed from his actual experience to create an illusion, a photofiction, a story.
Includes a special preview of the Backhaus's debut novel, Hikikomori and the Rental Sister.]]>
author: Jeff Backhaus
name: Heather
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: free
review:
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South Carolina, 1879. Prison guard Paul Constantine's quiet world is fractured when convicted murderer, Roy Pellerin--a childhood friend and sideshow performer born with alligator skin--pulls off a seemingly impossible escape.
Now Paul must track Roy down before former judge and haunted insomniac, Frank Ledger, delivers Roy to his own brand of shotgun justice.
How far can Roy run, and for how long? Whose quest will end when the terrifying past comes roaring into the present? And whose will end in the grave?
Drawing on his visionary talent, Scott J. Holliday delivers a gripping historical thriller about the bonds of friendship, the unexpected forms of love, and the stories found in our scars.]]>
author: Scott J. Holliday
name: Heather
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read, ng
review:
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author: Sybille Steinbacher
name: Heather
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
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This anthology includes the following stories:
Foundation by Ann Aguirre
The Department of Alterations by Gennifer Albin
Men Who Wish to Drown by Elizabeth Fama
Heads Will Roll by Lish McBride
Ruled by Caragh M. O'Brien
Jacks and Queens at the Green Mill by Marie Rutkoski
And the following bonus stories from Vol. 1:
The Witch of Duva by Leigh Bardugo
Glitches by Marissa Meyer]]>
author: Ann Aguirre
name: Heather
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: free
review:
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author: Christopher McDougall
name: Heather
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: to-read
review:
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Mercy Rathbone, fifteen years old, is the diminutive scion of the Rathbone clan. Her father, the last in the beleaguered dynasty, has been lost at sea for seven years - ever since the last whale was seen off the coast of Naiwayonk, Connecticut. Mercy's memories of her father grow dimmer each day, and she spends most of her time in the attic hideaway of her reclusive uncle Mordecai, who teaches her the secrets of Greek history and nautical navigation through his collection of specimens and moldering books. But when a strange, violent visitor turns up one night, Mercy and Mordecai are forced to flee the crumbling mansion and set sail on a journey that will bring them deep into the haunted history of the Rathbone family, and the reasons for its undoing.
As Mercy and Mordecai sail from island to island off the Connecticut coast, encountering dangers and mysteries, friends and foes, they untangle the knots of the Rathbone story, discovering secrets long encased in memory. They learn the history of the family’s founder and patriarch, Moses Rathbone, and the legendary empire he built of ships staffed with the sons of his many, many wives. Sons who stumbled in their father’s shadow, distracted by the arrival of the Stark sisters, a trio of “golden� girls, whose mesmerizing beauty may have sparked the Rathbone’s decline.
From the depths of the sea to the lonely heights of the widow’s walk; from the wisdom of the worn Rathbone wives to the mysterious origins of a sinking island, Mercy and Mordecai’s journey will bring them to places they never thought possible. But will they piece together a possible future from the mistakes of the past, or is the once great family’s fate doomed to match that of the whales themselves?
Inspired by The Odyssey by way of Edgar Allan Poe and Moby Dick, The Rathbones is an ambitious, mythic, and courageous tour de force that marks the debut of a dazzling new literary voice.]]>
author: Janice Clark
name: Heather
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: to-read
review:
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“A wonderfully creepy novel…magnificently eerie.� � The Observer
This House Is Haunted is a striking homage to the classic nineteenth-century ghost story. Set in Norfolk in 1867, Eliza Caine responds to an ad for a governess position at Gaudlin Hall. When she arrives at the hall, shaken by an unsettling disturbance that occurred during her travels, she is greeted by the two children now in her care, Isabella and Eustace. There is no adult present to represent her mysterious employer, and the children offer no explanation. Later that night in her room, another terrifying experience further reinforces the sense that something is very wrong.
From the moment Eliza rises the following morning, her every step seems dogged by a malign presence that lives within Gaudlin’s walls. Eliza realizes that if she and the children are to survive its violent attentions, she must first uncover the hall’s long-buried secrets and confront the demons of its past. Clever, captivating, and witty, This House Is Haunted is pure entertainment with a catch.]]>
author: John Boyne
name: Heather
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: to-read
review:
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In this short story prelude to "The Witching House," the year is 1972. Sheriff Travis Keagan is enjoying a beer at the local roadhouse when a blood-soaked girl enters the bar. Terrified and trembling, Abigail Blackwood claims her entire family was massacred at the nearby hippy commune in the woods. But when Sheriff Keagan and his deputies investigate the Blevins House, they discover there's more to Abigail's story than she's told them. Much more. "]]>
author: Brian Moreland
name: Heather
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: free
review:
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author: Michael Siemsen
name: Heather
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: to-read, bookclub
review:
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Professional basketball player Kasey Johnson makes a point of keeping his sexual preference under guard and out of the public eye. Empty, off-season flings are all he can look forward to until he retires. He figures his secret is safe—until he meets Ingram Fletcher, a nightclub owner who ignites a passionate inferno in his body.
Gram has lusted after Kasey ever since the long, tall basketball player was traded to Phoenix a year ago. But with Kasey’s twin brother running interference, up until now Gram’s been unsure if it’s safe to make a play. Then some incidental contact in the crowded club leads to a kiss that starts Gram wondering if a relationship is possible—now, and beyond March Madness.
A romantic weekend together answers that question. Now the only one remaining is if Kasey is ready make a fast break out of his comfort zone.]]>
author: T.A. Chase
name: Heather
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: free
review:
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Katie Greene’s worst nightmare comes true when her mother dies, and she’s devastated to learn that she will have to leave the only home she’s ever known. Desperate to find where she belongs, she must decide if she has what it takes to start a new life across the ocean.
For Yuu Tomohiro, every day is a nightmare. He struggles to control his strange ability, and keeps everyone at a distance so they won’t get hurt—even his girlfriend, Myu. At night, a shadow haunts his dreams, and a mysterious woman torments him with omens of death and destruction. But these haunting premonitions are only the beginning…]]>
author: Amanda Sun
name: Heather
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: free
review:
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Kayla’s best friend Marcus returned from Kuwait just in time to celebrate her fortieth birthday. She never expected to cry about it or let him comfort her with sex, but that’s what happened.
The next day Marcus confessed the feelings he’d had for her all along and then gave her the best lovemaking of her life. After spending her week-long “staycation� in bed with Marcus, can Kayla let him leave when he’s transferred to Alaska? She won’t go with him. The career she worked so hard to build is something she loves too.]]>
author: Ashlyn Chase
name: Heather
average rating: 3.17
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: free
review:
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A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014
Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting pain—real and imagined, her own and others'—Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory—from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration—in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.]]>
author: Leslie Jamison
name: Heather
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/26
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author: Hampton Fancher
name: Heather
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: ng, to-read
review:
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"I want to taste you." His voice seduced her. His body, costumed in a linen kilt and a mask of the ancient Egyptian lion-headed god of the massacre, made her body burn. It was inappropriate, unprofessional, but when he spoke, "I'm not a gentle lover. I'll take you fast. I'll take you hard, and I won't stop until we've both come." Diana willingly took the plunge into decadence, forgetting where they were and who she was.]]>
author: Grace Samuels
name: Heather
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/25
shelves: free
review:
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Miss Polly had a dolly. A beautiful daughter that she called her Baby Doll. Every day she dressed her in dresses and brushed her hair before they went outside to show off to the neighbors. On the playground, one day her Baby Doll talked to a boy, and for one unforgivable second, Miss Polly let herself be distracted by a woman telling her how adorable she thought her daughter was. When Miss Polly finally turned to look for her Baby Doll again, she was gone.
Many years later Emma Frost hears about the disappearance of the little girl and learns that she is not the only one to have gone missing from Fanoe Island back in the nineties. As she digs deeper into the story, she soon finds herself entangled in a web of strange and very disturbing events.
Warning: Contains graphic scenes.
˃˃˃ Miss Polly had a dolly is the second novel in Willow Rose's Best-selling series about the Danish author Emma Frost. Grab a copy today. ]]>
author: Willow Rose
name: Heather
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/25
shelves: to-read
review:
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