en-US Thu, 13 Feb 2025 18:28:05 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 199797582
Three years later, Anna is a starving artist living paycheck to paycheck while West is a Stanford professor. He may be one of four heirs to the Weston Foods conglomerate, but he has little interest in working for the heartless corporation his family built from the ground up. He is interested, however, in his one-hundred-million-dollar inheritance. There’s just one catch.

Due to an antiquated clause in his grandfather’s will, Liam won’t see a penny until he’s been happily married for five years. Just when Liam thinks he’s in the home stretch, pressure mounts from his family to see this mysterious spouse, and he has no choice but to turn to the one person he’s afraid to introduce to his one-percenter parents � his unpolished, not-so-ex-wife.

But in the presence of his family, Liam’s fears quickly shift from whether the feisty, foul-mouthed, paint-splattered Anna can play the part to whether the toxic world of wealth will corrupt someone as pure of heart as his surprisingly grounded and loyal wife. Liam will have to ask himself if the price tag on his flimsy cover story is worth losing true love that sprouted from a lie.]]> 352 Christina Lauren 1668017725 Jaime 3 4.07 2024
author: Christina Lauren
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/30
date added: 2025/02/13
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]]> 34964916
The last place Lana Lee thought she would ever end up is back at her family’s restaurant. But after a brutal break-up and a dramatic workplace walk-out, she figures that a return to the Cleveland area to help wait tables is her best option for putting her life back together. Even if that means having to put up with her mother, who is dead-set on finding her a husband.

Lana’s love life soon becomes yesterday’s news once the restaurant’s property manager, Mr. Feng, turns up dead―after a delivery of shrimp dumplings from Ho-Lee. But how could this have happened when everyone on staff knew about Mr. Feng’s severe, life-threatening shellfish allergy? Now, with the whole restaurant under suspicion for murder and the local media in a feeding frenzy―to say nothing of the gorgeous police detective who keeps turning up for take-out―it’s up to Lana to find out who is behind Feng’s killer order. . . before her own number is up.]]> 328 Vivien Chien 125012915X Jaime 1 3.62 2018
author: Vivien Chien
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2018
rating: 1
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2025/01/03
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]]> 55905003
But her increasingly erratic behavior is unsettling. And Helen’s not the only one who’s noticed. Her friends and family begin to suspect that her strange new friend may be linked to their shared history in unexpected ways. When Rachel threatens to expose a past crime that could destroy all of their lives, it becomes clear that there are more than a few secrets laying beneath the broad-leaved trees and warm lamplight of Greenwich Park.]]> 384 Katherine Faulkner 1982150319 Jaime 4 3.80 2021
author: Katherine Faulkner
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/28
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]]> 56304464 Combining the incisive intimacy of Sally Rooney with the sharp wit of Helen Fielding, a compulsively readable and astonishingly relatable debut novel about marriage, motherhood, love, self and the vibrant, surprising city that is modern Tokyo.

Mizuki is a Japanese housewife. She has a hardworking husband, two adorable children, and a beautiful Tokyo apartment. It’s everything a woman could want, yet sometimes she wonders whether she would rather throw herself off the high-rise balcony than spend another evening not talking to her husband and hanging up laundry.

Then, one rainy night, she meets Kiyoshi, a successful restaurateur. In him, she rediscovers freedom, friendship, and the neon, electric pulse of the city she has always loved. But the further she falls into their relationship, the clearer it becomes that she is living two lives—and in the end, we can choose only one.

Funny, provocative, and startlingly honest, Fault Lines is for anyone who has ever looked in the mirror and asked, who am I and how did I get here? A bittersweet love story and a piercing portrait of female identity, it introduces Emily Itami as a debut novelist with astounding resonance and wit.]]> 224 Emily Itami 0063099802 Jaime 5 3.68 2021
author: Emily Itami
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/20
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]]> 200028726 From the beloved author of We All Want Impossible Things, a moving, hilarious story of a family summer vacation full of secrets, lunch, and learning to let go.

For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family’s yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their humble beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, sunny days, great meals, and messes of all kinds: emotional, marital, and—thanks to the cottage’s ancient plumbing—septic too.

This year’s vacation, with Rocky sandwiched between her half-grown kids and fully aging parents, promises to be just as delightful as summers past—except, perhaps, for Rocky’s hormonal bouts of rage and melancholy. (Hello, menopause!) Her body is changing—her life is, too. And then a chain of events sends Rocky into the past, reliving both the tenderness and sorrow of a handful of long-ago summers.

It's one precious week: everything is in balance; everything is in flux. And when Rocky comes face to face with her family’s history and future, she is forced to accept that she can no longer hide her secrets from the people she loves.]]> 240 Catherine Newman 0063345161 Jaime 0 to-read 3.54 2024
author: Catherine Newman
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 203164564
Detroit, 1960. Lila Pereira is two years old when her angry, abusive father has her mother committed to an asylum. Lila never sees her mother again. Three decades later, having mustered everything she has—brains, charm, talent, blond hair—Lila rises to the pinnacle of American media as the powerful, brilliant executive editor of The Washington Globe. Lila unapologetically prioritizes her career, leaving the rearing of her daughters to her generous husband, Joe. He doesn’t mind—until he does.

But Grace, their youngest daughter, feels abandoned. She wishes her mother would attend PTA meetings, not White House correspondents� dinners. As she grows up, she cannot shake her resentment. She wants out from under Lila’s shadow, yet the more she resists, the more Lila seems to shape her life. Grace becomes a successful reporter, even publishing a bestselling book about her mother. In the process of writing it, she realizes how little she knows about her own family. Did Lila’s mother, Grace’s grandmother, die in that asylum? Is refusal to look back the only way to create a future? How can you ever be yourself, Grace wonders, if you don’t know where you came from?

Spanning generations, and populated by complex, unforgettable characters, Like Mother, Like Mother is an exhilarating, portrait of family, marriage, ambition, power, the stories we inherit, and the lies we tell to become the people we believe we’re meant to be.]]> 336 Susan Rieger 0525512497 Jaime 0 to-read 3.75 2024
author: Susan Rieger
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 214152244 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781668076217.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo meets First Lie Wins in this electric, voice-driven debut novel about an elusive bestselling author who decides to finally confess her true identity after years of hiding from her past.

Cate Kay knows how to craft a story. As the creator of a bestselling book trilogy that struck box office gold as a film series, she’s one of the most successful authors of her generation. The thing is, Cate Kay doesn’t really exist. She’s never attended author events or granted any interviews. Her real identity had been a closely guarded secret, until now.

As a young adult, she and her best friend Amanda dreamed of escaping their difficult homes and moving to California to become movie stars. But the day before their grand adventure, a tragedy shattered their dreams and Cate has been on the run ever since, taking on different names and charting a new future. But after a shocking revelation, Cate understands that returning home is the only way she’ll be a whole person again.]]> 304 Kate Fagan Jaime 0 to-read 3.74 2025
author: Kate Fagan
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 176443380
As her paranoia spirals out of control, Enid must contend with her mounting suspicion that something is seriously wrong with her. Because at the end of the day there’s only one person she can’t outrun—herself.

Brimming with quirky humor, charm, and heart, Interesting Facts about Space effortlessly shows us the power of revealing our secret shames, the most beautifully human parts of us all.]]> 320 Emily R. Austin 1668014238 Jaime 5 3.84 2024
author: Emily R. Austin
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/11
date added: 2024/12/11
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]]> 208584952 From the award-winning author of Chemistry, a sharp-witted, insightful novel about a marriage as seen through the lens of two family vacations.

Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection (“To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,� says her father), while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his “foreign� wife.

Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation. At a Cape Cod beach house, and later at a luxury Catskills bungalow, Keru, Nate, and their giant sheepdog navigate visits from in-laws and unexpected guests, all while wondering if they have what it takes to answer the big questions: How do you cope when your spouse and your family of origin clash? How many people (and dogs) make a family? And when the pack starts to disintegrate, what can you do to shepherd everyone back together?]]> 224 Weike Wang 0593545540 Jaime 0 to-read 3.30 2024
author: Weike Wang
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read
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]]> 156023123
She’s learning, too.

Doug says he loves that Annie’s artificial intelligence makes her seem more like a real woman, but the more human Annie becomes, the less perfectly she behaves. As Annie's relationship with Doug grows more intricate and difficult, she starts to wonder whether Doug truly desires what he says he does. In such an impossible paradox, what does Annie owe herself?]]> 231 Sierra Greer 0063312697 Jaime 4 3.81 2024
author: Sierra Greer
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/07
date added: 2024/12/07
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]]> 199223201 Two women—separated by decades and continents, and united by a mysterious family heirloom—discover second chances at love in this sweeping novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer Wives.

New England, 2022. Three years ago, single mother Mallory Dunne received the telephone call every parent dreads—her ten-year-old son, Sam, had been airlifted from summer camp with acute poisoning from a toxic death cap mushroom, leaving him fighting for his life. Now, searching for the donor kidney that will give her son a chance for a normal life, Mallory’s forced to confront two harrowing secrets from her past: her mother’s adoption from an infamous Irish orphanage in 1952, and her own all-consuming summer romance fourteen years earlier with her childhood best friend, Monk Adams� one of the world’s most beloved singer-songwriters—a fairy tale cut short by a devastating betrayal.

Cairo, 1951. After suffering tragedy beyond comprehension in the war, Hungarian refugee Hannah Ainsworth has forged a respectable new life for herself—marriage to a wealthy British diplomat with a coveted posting in glamorous Cairo. But a fateful encounter with the enigmatic manager of a hotel bristling with spies leads to a passionate affair that will reawaken Hannah’s longing for everything she once lost. As revolution simmers in the Egyptian streets, a pregnant Hannah finds herself snared in a game of intrigue between two men . . . and an act of sacrifice that will echo down the generations.

Timeless and bittersweet, Husbands & Lovers takes readers on an unforgettable journey of heartbreak and redemption, from the revolutionary fires of midcentury Egypt to the moneyed beaches of contemporary New England. Acclaimed author Beatriz Williams has written a poignant and beautifully voiced novel of deeply human characters entangled by morally complex issues—of privilege, class, and the female experience—inside worlds brought shimmeringly to life.]]> 384 Beatriz Williams 0593724224 Jaime 2 4.07 2024
author: Beatriz Williams
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/11/28
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]]> 61281769 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780063239920.

One Day meets Groundhog Day, in this heartwarming and emotionally poignant novel about a stressed woman who must relive the same day over and over, keeping her family and work life from imploding as she attempts to spare her husband from an unfortunate fate.

It is an ordinary Monday and harried London literary agent Emma is flying out of the door as usual. Preoccupied with work and her ever growing to-do list, she fails to notice her lovely husband Dan seems bereft, her son can barely meet her eye, and her daughter won’t go near her. Even the dog seems sad.

She is far too busy, buried deep in her phone; social media alerts pinging; clients messaging with “emergencies�; keeping track of a dozen WhatsApp groups about the kids� sports, school, playdates, all of it. Her whole day is frantic—what else is new—and as she rushes back through the door for dinner, Dan is still upset. They fight, and he walks out, desolate, dragging their poor dog around the block. Just as she realizes it is their anniversary and she has forgotten, again, she hears the screech of brakes.

Dan is dead.

The next day Emma wakes up� and Dan is alive. And it’s Monday again.

And again.

And again.

Emma tries desperately to change the course of fate by doing different things each time she wakes up: leaving WhatsApp, telling her boss where to get off, writing to Dan, listening to her kids, reaching out to forgotten friends, getting drunk and buying out Prada. But will Emma have the chance to find herself again, remember what she likes about her job, reconnect with her children, love her husband? Will this be enough to change the fate they seem destined for?

A moving “What if� story of what it is to be a woman in the modern world—never feeling we’re getting it quite right—about learning to slow down and appreciate life that is sure to resonate with women’s fiction fans.]]> 384 Cesca Major Jaime 4 3.63 2023
author: Cesca Major
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/13
date added: 2024/11/13
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]]> 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Jaime 2 3.52 2024
author: Miranda July
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/02
date added: 2024/11/02
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]]> 62047984
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]> 319 R.F. Kuang 000853277X Jaime 4 3.69 2023
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/21
date added: 2024/10/21
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]]> 45011012 Temporary, a young woman's workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it's shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, "there is nothing more personal than doing your job."

This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.]]> 208 Hilary Leichter 1566895669 Jaime 0 to-read 3.80 2020
author: Hilary Leichter
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 52696537 If I Had Your Face plunges us into the mesmerising world of contemporary Seoul - a place where extreme plastic surgery is as routine as getting a haircut, where women compete for spots in secret 'room salons' to entertain wealthy businessmen after hours, where K-Pop stars are the object of all-consuming obsession and ruthless social hierarchies dictate your every move.

Navigating this cutthroat city are four young women balancing on the razor edge of survival: Kyuri, an exquisitely beautiful woman whose hard-won status at an exclusive 'room salon' is threatened by an impulsive mistake with a client; her flatmate, Miho, an orphan who wins a scholarship to a prestigious art school in New York, where her life becomes tragically enmeshed with the super-wealthy offspring of the Korean elite; Wonna, their neighbour, pregnant with a child that she and her husband have no idea how they will afford to raise in a fiercely competitive economy; and Ara, a hair stylist living down the hall, whose infatuation with a fresh-faced K-Pop star drives her to violent extremes.]]> 288 Frances Cha 0593129466 Jaime 4 3.74 2020
author: Frances Cha
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/17
date added: 2024/10/17
shelves:
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]]> 65678550
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents—roused by Chona's kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.]]> 385 James McBride 0593422945 Jaime 0 to-read 3.83 2023
author: James McBride
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 171793386
From the #1 internationally bestselling author of The Murder Rule comes an emotional novel of suspense about two families at war.

Nina and Simon are the perfect couple. Young, fun and deeply in love. Until they leave for a weekend at his family’s cabin in Vermont, and only Simon comes home.

WHAT HAPPENED TO NINA?

Nobody knows. Simon’s explanation about what happened in their last hours together doesn’t add up. Nina’s parents push the police for answers, and Simon’s parents rush to protect him. They hire expensive lawyers and a PR firm that quickly ramps up a vicious, nothing-is-off-limits media campaign.

HOW FAR WILL HIS FAMILY GO TO KEEP HIM SAFE?

Soon, facts are lost in a swirl of accusation and counter-accusation. Everyone chooses a side, and the story goes viral, fueled by armchair investigators and wild conspiracy theories and illustrated with pretty pictures taken from Nina’s social media accounts. Journalists descend on their small Vermont town, followed by a few obsessive "fans."

HOW FAR WILL HER FAMILY GO TO GET TO THE TRUTH?

Nina’s family is under siege, but they never lose sight of the only thing that really matters—finding their daughter. Out-gunned by Simon’s wealthy, powerful family, Nina’s parents recognize that if playing by the rules won’t get them anywhere, it’s time to break them.]]> 328 Dervla McTiernan Jaime 4 4.05 2024
author: Dervla McTiernan
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/09
date added: 2024/10/09
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]]> 58468990 From the New York Times bestselling author of The Guest List comes a new locked room mystery, set in a Paris apartment building in which every resident has something to hide�

Jess needs a fresh start. She’s broke and alone, and she’s just left her job under less than ideal circumstances. Her half-brother Ben didn’t sound thrilled when she asked if she could crash with him for a bit, but he didn’t say no, and surely everything will look better from Paris. Only when she shows up � to find a very nice apartment, could Ben really have afforded this? � he’s not there.

The longer Ben stays missing, the more Jess starts to dig into her brother’s situation, and the more questions she has. Ben’s neighbors are an eclectic bunch, and not particularly friendly. Jess may have come to Paris to escape her past, but it’s starting to look like it’s Ben’s future that’s in question.

The socialite � The nice guy � The alcoholic � The girl on the verge � The concierge

Everyone’s a neighbor. Everyone’s a suspect. And everyone knows something they’re not telling.]]> 360 Lucy Foley 0063003058 Jaime 4 3.62 2022
author: Lucy Foley
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/06
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]]> 60149532 Older women often feel invisible, but sometimes that's their secret weapon.

They've spent their lives as the deadliest assassins in a clandestine international organization, but now that they're sixty years old, four women friends can't just retire - it's kill or be killed in this action-packed thriller.

Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie have worked for the Museum, an elite network of assassins, for forty years. Now their talents are considered old-school and no one appreciates what they have to offer in an age that relies more on technology than people skills.

When the foursome is sent on an all-expenses paid vacation to mark their retirement, they are targeted by one of their own. Only the Board, the top-level members of the Museum, can order the termination of field agents, and the women realize they've been marked for death.

Now to get out alive they have to turn against their own organization, relying on experience and each other to get the job done, knowing that working together is the secret to their survival. They're about to teach the Board what it really means to be a woman--and a killer--of a certain age.]]> 368 Deanna Raybourn 0593200683 Jaime 4 3.82 2022
author: Deanna Raybourn
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/29
date added: 2024/09/29
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]]> 193781998 An exuberant debut, The Husbands delights in how do we navigate life, love, and choice in a world of never-ending options?

When Lauren returns home to her flat in London late one night, she is greeted at the door by her husband, Michael. There’s only one problem—she’s not married. She’s never seen this man before in her life. But according to her friends, her much-improved decor, and the photos on her phone, they’ve been together for years.

As Lauren tries to puzzle out how she could be married to someone she can’t remember meeting, Michael goes to the attic to change a lightbulb and abruptly disappears. In his place, a new man emerges, and a new, slightly altered life re-forms around her. Realizing that her attic is creating an infinite supply of husbands, Lauren confronts the question: If swapping lives is as easy as changing a lightbulb, how do you know you’ve taken the right path? When do you stop trying to do better and start actuallyĚýliving?]]> 352 Holly Gramazio 0385550618 Jaime 4 3.50 2024
author: Holly Gramazio
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/23
date added: 2024/09/23
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]]> 200987323 In this wildly funny and heartwarming office comedy, an admin worker accidentally gains access to her colleagues� private emails and DMs and decides to use this intel to save her job—a laugh-till-you-cry debut novel you’ll be eager to share with your entire list of contacts, perfect for fans of Anxious People and Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.

As far as Jolene is concerned, her interactions with her colleagues should start and end with her official duties as an admin for Supershops, Inc. Unfortunately, her irritating, incompetent coworkers don’t seem to understand the importance of boundaries. Her secret to survival? She vents her grievances in petty email postscripts, then changes the text colour to white so no one can see. That is, until one of her secret messages is exposed. Her punishment: sensitivity training (led by the suspiciously friendly HR guy, Cliff) and rigorous email restrictions.

When an IT mix-up grants her access to her entire department’s private emails and DMs, Jolene knows she should report it, but who could resist reading what their coworkers are really saying? And when she discovers layoffs are coming, she realizes this might just be the key to saving her job. The plan is simple: gain her boss’s favour, convince HR she’s Supershops material and beat out the competition.

But as Jolene is drawn further into her coworker’s private worlds and secrets, her carefully constructed walls begin to crumble—especially around Cliff, who she definitely cannot have feelings for. Soon she will need to decide if she’s ready to leave the comfort of her cubicle, even if it means coming clean to her colleagues.

Crackling with laugh-out-loud dialogue and relatable observations, I Hope This Finds You Well is a fresh and surprisingly tender comedy about loneliness and love beyond our computer screens. This sparkling debut novel will open your heart to the everyday eccentricities of work culture and the undeniable human connection that comes with it.]]> 338 Natalie Sue 0063320363 Jaime 4 3.74 2024
author: Natalie Sue
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/12
date added: 2024/09/12
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]]> 62802760
“A satire both cutting and careful in its approach, The Glow is a triumph.”� Elle (Best New Books to Read in Summer 2023)

Jane Dorner has two PR Jane, twenty-five, chummy, and eager to sell you a feminist vibrator or a self-care/bereavement subscription box; and Actual Jane, twenty-nine, drifting through mediocre workdays and lackluster dates while paralyzed by her crushing mountain of overdue medical bills. When her job performance is called into question, Jane’s last-ditch effort to preserve her livelihood and pay off her debt is to land a white whale of a client.

Enter the impossibly gorgeous Cass—whom Jane discovers scrolling through Instagram—and her unassuming husband, Tom—proprietors of a “wellness retreat� based out of a ramshackle country house that may or may not be giving off cult vibes. Suddenly Jane realizes she might have found the one ladder she can climb—if she can convince them that transforming Cass herself into a high-end wellness brand is the key to all three of their futures. Magnetic yet mysterious, Cass is primed to be an She speaks in a mix of inspirational quotes and Zen koans, eats only zucchini (the most spiritually nourishing vegetable), and has baby-perfect skin. Despite Tom’s reticence about selling out, Jane sets out to mold Cass into the kind of guru who can offer inner peace and make your skin glow—all at a hefty price, of course. As Jane reckons with her own long-dormant ambitions, she Can a person really “do good� for others while profiting off them? And what parts of our selves do we lose when we trade power, influence, and beauty?

Sparklingly plotted, deliciously deadpan, and irresistibly entertaining, The Glow is a razor-sharp sendup of an industry built on the peculiar intersection of money and wellness, where health is a commodity and self-care a luxury.]]> 320 Jessie Gaynor 0593447875 Jaime 3 3.17 2023
author: Jessie Gaynor
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.17
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/07
date added: 2024/09/07
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]]> 17802724 At the heart of The Husband’s Secret is a letter that’s not meant to be read

My darling Cecilia, if you’re reading this, then I’ve died...

Imagine that your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret—something with the potential to destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others as well. Imagine, then, that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much alive. . . .

Cecilia Fitzpatrick has achieved it all—she’s an incredibly successful businesswoman, a pillar of her small community, and a devoted wife and mother. Her life is as orderly and spotless as her home. But that letter is about to change everything, and not just for her: Rachel and Tess barely know Cecilia—or each other—but they too are about to feel the earth-shattering repercussions of her husband’s secret.

Acclaimed author Liane Moriarty has written a gripping, thought-provoking novel about how well it is really possible to know our spouses—and, ultimately, ourselves.]]> 396 Liane Moriarty 0399159347 Jaime 3 3.94 2013
author: Liane Moriarty
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/02
date added: 2024/09/02
shelves:
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]]> 59336625
As the long overdue change occurs, however, painful episodes from Fuyuko’s past surface and her behavior slips further and further beyond the pale. All the Lovers in the Night is acute and insightful, entertaining and engaging; it will make readers laugh, and it will make them cry, but it will also remind them, as only the best books do, that sometimes the pain is worth it.]]> 224 Mieko Kawakami 1609456998 Jaime 0 to-read 3.70 2011
author: Mieko Kawakami
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 182484360
Lights. Camera. Lies.

18-year-old Bel has lived her whole life in the shadow of her mom’s mysterious disappearance. Sixteen years ago, Rachel Price vanished and young Bel was the only witness, but she has no memory of it. Rachel is gone, long presumed dead, and Bel wishes everyone would just move on.

But the case is dragged up from the past when the Price family agree to a true crime documentary. Bel can’t wait for filming to end, for life to go back to normal. And then the impossible happens. Rachel Price reappears, and life will never be normal again.

Rachel has an unbelievable story about what happened to her. Unbelievable, because Bel isn’t sure it’s real. If Rachel is lying, then where has she been all this time? And � could she be dangerous? With the cameras still rolling, Bel must uncover the truth about her mother, and find out why Rachel Price really came back from the dead . . .

From world-renowned author Holly Jackson comes a mind-blowing masterpiece about one girl’s search for the truth, and the terror in finding out who your family really is.]]> 438 Holly Jackson 0593374207 Jaime 4 4.09 2024
author: Holly Jackson
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/30
date added: 2024/08/30
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]]> 199344873
She’s unprepared, though, for what comes next: a surprise announcement from her straight-arrow son, an impending separation from her spikey teenaged daughter, and a seductive resurgence of the past, all of which threaten to draw her back into the patterns that had previously kept her on a razor’s edge.

Same As It Ever Was traverses the rocky terrain of real life, —exploring new avenues of maternal ambivalence, intergenerational friendship, and the happenstantial cause-and-effect that governs us all. Delving even deeper into the nature of relationships—how they grow, change, and sometimes end—Lombardo proves herself a true and definitive cartographer of the human heart and asserts herself among the finest novelists of her generation.]]> 498 Claire Lombardo 0385549555 Jaime 4 3.81 2024
author: Claire Lombardo
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/26
date added: 2024/08/26
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]]> 16181775
Don Tillman, professor of genetics, has never been on a second date. He is a man who can count all his friends on the fingers of one hand, whose lifelong difficulty with social rituals has convinced him that he is simply not wired for romance. So when an acquaintance informs him that he would make a “wonderful� husband, his first reaction is shock. Yet he must concede to the statistical probability that there is someone for everyone, and he embarks upon The Wife Project. In the orderly, evidence-based manner with which he approaches all things, Don sets out to find the perfect partner. She will be punctual and logical—most definitely not a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker, or a late-arriver.

Yet Rosie Jarman is all these things. She is also beguiling, fiery, intelligent—and on a quest of her own. She is looking for her biological father, a search that a certain DNA expert might be able to help her with. Don's Wife Project takes a back burner to the Father Project and an unlikely relationship blooms, forcing the scientifically minded geneticist to confront the spontaneous whirlwind that is Rosie—and the realization that love is not always what looks good on paper.

The Rosie Project is a moving and hilarious novel for anyone who has ever tenaciously gone after life or love in the face of overwhelming challenges.]]> 292 Graeme Simsion 1476729085 Jaime 3 4.00 2013
author: Graeme Simsion
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/06
date added: 2024/08/06
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]]> 62818725
She sees them at her son’s new playgroup. The other mothers. A group of sleek, sophisticated women who live in a neighborhood of tree-lined avenues and stunning houses. The sort of mothers Tash herself would like to be. When the mothers welcome her into their circle, Tash discovers the kind of life she has always dreamt of—their elegant London townhouses a far cry from her cramped basement flat and endless bills. She is quickly swept up into their wealthy world via coffees, cocktails, and playdates.

But when another young woman is found dead, it’s clear there’s much more to the community than meets the eye. The more Tash investigates, the more she’s led uncomfortably close to the other mothers. Are these women really her friends? Or is there another, more dangerous reason why she has been so quickly accepted into their exclusive world? Who, exactly, is investigating who?]]> 384 Katherine Faulkner 1668024802 Jaime 4 4.00 2023
author: Katherine Faulkner
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2023
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/08/05
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]]> 143372703 Bernadette, Eleanor Oliphant, Rosie, Ove . . . meet Amazing Grace Adams,the funny, touching, unforgettable story of an invisible everywoman pushed to the brink—who finally pushes back.

Grace Adams gave birth, blinked, and now suddenly she is forty-five, perimenopausal and stalled—the unhappiest age you can be, according to the Guardian. And today she’s really losing it. Stuck in traffic, she finally has had enough. To the astonishment of everyone, Grace gets out of her car and simply walks away.

Grace sets off across London, armed with a £200 cake, to win back her estranged teenage daughter on her sixteenth birthday. Because today is the day she’ll remind her daughter that no matter how far we fall, we can always get back up again. Because Grace Adams used to be amazing. Her husband thought so. Her daughter thought so. Even Grace thought so. But everyone seems to have forgotten. Grace is about to remind them . . . and, most important, remind herself.]]> 272 Fran Littlewood 1250334152 Jaime 3 3.24 2023
author: Fran Littlewood
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/30
date added: 2024/07/30
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]]> 126919284
But to everyone’s surprise, Cam wants little to do with the house or the money—and even less to do with the surviving McTavishes. Instead, he rejects his inheritance, settling into a normal life as an English teacher in Colorado and marrying Jules, a woman just as eager to escape her own messy past.

Ten years later, Camden is a McTavish in name only, but a summons in the wake of his uncle’s death brings him and Jules back into the family fold at Ashby House. Its views are just as stunning as ever, its rooms just as elegant, but coming home reminds Cam why he was so quick to leave in the first place.

Jules, however, has other ideas, and the more she learns about Cam’s estranged family—and the twisted secrets they keep—the more determined she is for her husband to claim everything Ruby once intended for him to have.

But Ruby’s plans were always more complicated than they appeared. As Ashby House tightens its grip on Jules and Camden, questions about the infamous heiress come to light. Was there any truth to the persistent rumors following her disappearance as a girl? What really happened to those four husbands, who all died under mysterious circumstances? And why did she adopt Cam in the first place? Soon, Jules and Cam realize that an inheritance can entail far more than what’s written in a will—and that the bonds of family stretch far beyond the grave.]]> 294 Rachel Hawkins 1250280036 Jaime 4 3.80 2024
author: Rachel Hawkins
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/26
date added: 2024/07/26
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]]> 55884467 In this gripping prequel to the blockbuster best seller and Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick 'The Last Mrs. Parrish', readers will discover exactly how Amber Patterson transformed from small-town girl to master manipulator - after all, practice makes perfect.

Amber Patterson has many secrets. This much is clear when she sneaks out of her home in the dead of night and hitchhikes across state lines to meet up with a man she hasn’t seen or spoken to since high school graduation. So begins her desperate attempt to leave her old life behind, and she’ll use everything and everyone at her disposal, from social media stalking to the kindness of unsuspecting strangers, to get where she needs to go. It’s not long before she’s ready for the main event: armed with a new identity and a new purpose, she heads to Gunnison, Colorado, preparing herself to meet her future husband among the wealthy vacationers.

Even the smallest misstep could derail this carefully-laid plan, and in the end, can you even truly outrun your past? 'THE FIRST SHOT' is an absorbing, binge-able thriller that shows just how far some will go to build the lives they want.]]> 3 Liv Constantine Jaime 0 to-read 3.62
author: Liv Constantine
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.62
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/16
shelves: to-read
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]]> 34043643
To everyone in the exclusive town of Bishops Harbor, Connecticut, Daphne—a socialite and philanthropist—and her real-estate mogul husband, Jackson, are a couple straight out of a fairy tale.

Amber’s envy could eat her alive . . . if she didn't have a plan. Amber uses Daphne’s compassion and caring to insinuate herself into the family’s life—the first step in a meticulous scheme to undermine her. Before long, Amber is Daphne’s closest confidante, traveling to Europe with the Parrishes and their lovely young daughters, and growing closer to Jackson. But a skeleton from her past may undermine everything that Amber has worked towards, and if it is discovered, her well-laid plan may fall to pieces.

With shocking turns and dark secrets that will keep you guessing until the very end, The Last Mrs. Parrish is a fresh, juicy, and utterly addictive thriller from a diabolically imaginative talent.]]> 560 Liv Constantine 0062688162 Jaime 3 3.93 2017
author: Liv Constantine
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/16
date added: 2024/07/16
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]]> 56803179 In every person's story, there is something to hide...

The ornate reading room at the Boston Public Library is quiet, until the tranquility is shattered by a woman's terrified scream. Security guards take charge immediately, instructing everyone inside to stay put until the threat is identified and contained. While they wait for the all-clear, four strangers, who'd happened to sit at the same table, pass the time in conversation and friendships are struck. Each has his or her own reasons for being in the reading room that morning—it just happens that one is a murderer.

Award-winning author Sulari Gentill delivers a sharply thrilling read with The Woman in the Library, an unexpectedly twisty literary adventure that examines the complicated nature of friendship and shows us that words can be the most treacherous weapons of all.]]> 292 Sulari Gentill Jaime 3 3.46 2022
author: Sulari Gentill
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/13
date added: 2024/07/13
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]]> 127305853
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.]]> 471 Kristin Hannah 1250178630 Jaime 0 to-read 4.58 2024
author: Kristin Hannah
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/08
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]]> 127279000 What if you thought you murdered your best friend? And if everyone else thought so too? And what if the truth doesn't matter?

Lucy and Savvy were the golden girls of their small Texas town: pretty, smart, and enviable. Lucy married a dream guy with a big ring and an even bigger new home. Savvy was the social butterfly loved by all and, if you believe the rumors, especially popular with the men in town. But after Lucy is found wandering the streets, covered in her best friend Savvy’s blood, everyone thinks she is a murderer.

It’s been years since that horrible night, a night Lucy can’t remember anything about, and she has since moved to LA and started a new life. But now the phenomenally huge hit true crime podcast Listen for the Lie and its too-good looking host, Ben Owens, have decided to investigate Savvy’s murder for the show’s second season. Lucy is forced to return to the place she vowed never to set foot in again to solve her friend’s murder, even if she is the one who did it.

The truth is out there, if we just listen.]]> 352 Amy Tintera 1250880319 Jaime 0 to-read 4.07 2024
author: Amy Tintera
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> 199534613
“[An] enormously entertaining and lovable book.� —Nick Hornby, New York Times Book Review

A bold, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartwarming story about one young woman’s attempt to navigate adulthood, new motherhood, and her meager bank account in our increasingly online world—from the PEN/Faulkner finalist and critically acclaimed author of The Knockout Queen.

As the child of a Hooters waitress and an ex-pro wrestler, Margo Millet's always known she’d have to make it on her own. So she enrolls at her local junior college, even though she can’t imagine how she’ll ever make a living. She’s still figuring things out and never planned to have an affair with her English professor—and while the affair is brief, it isn’t brief enough to keep her from getting pregnant. Despite everyone’s advice, she decides to keep the baby, mostly out of naiveté and a yearning for something bigger.

Now, at twenty, Margo is alone with an infant, unemployed, and on the verge of eviction. She needs a cash infusion—fast. When her estranged father, Jinx, shows up on her doorstep and asks to move in with her, she agrees in exchange for help with childcare. Then Margo begins to form a plan: she’ll start an OnlyFans as an experiment, and soon finds herself adapting some of Jinx’s advice from the world of wrestling. Like how to craft a compelling character and make your audience fall in love with you. Before she knows it, she’s turned it into a runaway success. Could this be the answer to all of Margo’s problems, or does internet fame come with too high a price?

Blisteringly funny and filled with sharp insight, Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a tender tale starring an endearing young heroine who’s struggling to wrest money and power from a world that has little interest in giving it to her. It’s a playful and honest examination of the art of storytelling and controlling your own narrative, and an empowering portrait of coming into your own, both online and off.

“A wholly original novel. . . . Thorpe is both poetic and profound in the way she brings her remarkable story to an end.� —The Associated Press]]> 304 Rufi Thorpe 0063356589 Jaime 4 3.86 2024
author: Rufi Thorpe
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/06
date added: 2024/07/06
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]]> 61053935 A compelling debut novel about an ambitious woman who, after a lifetime of conning alongside her mother, wants to leave her dark past behind and marry the heir to one of the country's wealthiest families.

Like any enterprising woman, Bea knows what she’s worth and is determined to get all she deserves—it just so happens that what she deserves is to marry rich. After a lifetime of forced instruction in the art of swindling men by her mother, Bea wants nothing more than to escape her shadow, close the door on their sordid past, and disappear safely into old-money domesticity.

When Bea finds her final mark in the perfectly dull blue-blooded Collin, she’s ready to deploy all her tricks one last time. The challenge isn’t getting the ring, but rather the approval of Collin’s family and everyone else in their tax bracket, particularly his childhood best friend Gale. Going toe-to-toe with Gale isn’t a threat to an expert like Bea, but what begins as an amusing cat-and-mouse game quickly develops into a dangerous chase. As the truth of Bea’s past threatens to come roaring out, she finds herself racing against the clock to pass the finish line before everything is exposed.]]> 353 Rachel Koller Croft 0593547500 Jaime 3 3.63 2023
author: Rachel Koller Croft
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/28
date added: 2024/06/28
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]]> 63057863
Shy, nerdy Tanvi has always thought of her perfect cousin Mimi as her sister. Not only did Mimi’s family raise Tanvi after the tragic death of her parents, fierce Mimi has always protected Tanvi at school. At least until Mimi fell under the spell of their flawless, rich classmate, Beth . . . Tanvi’s biggest bully.

Fearing another terrible year, Tanvi decides to take a desperate, preemptive strike—and captures an incriminating photo of Mimi and Beth at a party. When Tanvi wakes up the next day with a bump on her head, scratches on her leg, and no memory of what caused her injuries, Mimi is gone.

When the investigation for the missing girl takes a dark turn, Tanvi begins to fill the gaps in her memory, hoping to bring her cousin home alive. She questions Mimi’s friends and enemies—including Mimi’s shady boyfriend, who refuses to answer her questions, and Beth, who catalyzed the split between the once-close cousins. Meanwhile, the cops announce that they are now hunting a murderer—are they hunting Tanvi?

To preserve her family and find the truth, Tanvi must revisit the worst night of her life and the darkest parts of her past to discover if she’s capable of murder—and the truth of what happened to Mimi.


PRAISE for When Mimi Went Missing:

"(A) heartstopping Debut" -- Teen Vogue
She Reads Most Anticipated YA Thrillers of Fall]]> 288 Suja Sukumar 1641295368 Jaime 0 to-read 3.66 2024
author: Suja Sukumar
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/26
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]]> 57016623 A bestselling, prizewinning novel of obsession and psychological intrigue about two enigmatic unmarried women, one of whom manipulates the other from afar, by one of Japan's most acclaimed young writers

Almost every day, the Woman in the Purple Skirt buys a single cream bun and goes to the park, where she sits on a bench to eat it as the local children taunt her. She is observed at all times by the undetected narrator, the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan. From a distance the Woman in the Purple Skirt looks like a schoolgirl, but there are age spots on her face, and her hair is dry and stiff. Like the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan, she is single, she lives in a small, run-down apartment, and she is short on money. The Woman in the Yellow Cardigan lures her to a job where she herself works, as a hotel housekeeper; soon the Woman in the Purple Skirt is having an affair with the boss. Unfortunately, no one knows or cares about the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan. That's the difference between her and the Woman in the Purple Skirt.

Studiously deadpan, highly original, and unsettling, The Woman in the Purple Skirt explores the dynamics of envy, the mechanisms of power in the workplace, and the vulnerability of unmarried women in a taut, voyeuristic narrative about the sometimes desperate desire to be seen.]]> 222 Natsuko Imamura 0525507647 Jaime 0 3.47 2019
author: Natsuko Imamura
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/19
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]]> 13538873
Clay Jannon tells how serendipity, sheer curiosity, and the ability to climb a ladder like a monkey has sent him from Web Drone to night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. After just a few days on the job, Clay realizes just how curious this store is.

A few customers come in repeatedly without buying anything. Instead they “check out� obscure volumes from strange corners of the store. All runs according to some elaborate, long-standing arrangement with the gnomic Mr. Penumbra. The store must be a front for something larger, Clay concludes.

He embarks on a complex analysis of the customers� behavior and ropes in friends to help. Once they bring their findings to Mr. Penumbra, it turns out the secrets extend far outside the walls of the bookstore. A quest to New York City dips in a world conspiracy for eternal life. The current of romance pulls Clay onward.]]> 288 Robin Sloan 0374214913 Jaime 2 3.71 2012
author: Robin Sloan
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2012
rating: 2
read at: 2024/06/17
date added: 2024/06/17
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]]> 164444179 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593492918.

Evie Porter has everything a nice Southern girl could want: a doting boyfriend, a house with a white picket fence, a tight group of friends. The only catch: Evie Porter doesn’t exist.

The identity comes first: Evie Porter. Once she’s given a name and location by her mysterious boss, Mr. Smith, she learns everything there is to know about the town and the people in it. Then the mark: Ryan Sumner. The last piece of the puzzle is the job.

Evie isn’t privy to Mr. Smith’s real identity, but she knows this job isn’t like the others. Ryan has gotten under her skin, and she’s starting to envision a different sort of life for herself. But Evie can’t make any mistakes—especially after what happened last time.

Evie Porter must stay one step ahead of her past while making sure there’s still a future in front of her. The stakes couldn’t be higher—but then, Evie has always liked a challenge. . . .]]> 340 Ashley Elston Jaime 3 3.97 2024
author: Ashley Elston
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/11
date added: 2024/06/11
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]]> 190118193 From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures?

Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.

In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance—a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.

Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made? And if we are made, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?]]> 610 Rachel Khong 0593537262 Jaime 0 to-read 4.15 2024
author: Rachel Khong
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 25430578 A rigorous, skeptical, deeply reported look at the new science behind the mind's surprising ability to heal the body

Have you ever felt a surge of adrenaline after narrowly avoiding an accident? Salivated at the sight (or thought) of a sour lemon? Felt turned on just from hearing your partner's voice? If so, then you've experienced how dramatically the workings of your mind can affect your body.

Yet while we accept that stress or anxiety can damage our health, the idea of "healing thoughts" was long ago hijacked by New Age gurus and spiritual healers. Recently, however, serious scientists from a range of fields have been uncovering evidence that our thoughts, emotions and beliefs can ease pain, heal wounds, fend off infection and heart disease and even slow the progression of AIDS and some cancers.

In Cure, award-winning science writer Jo Marchant travels the world to meet the physicians, patients and researchers on the cutting edge of this new world of medicine. We learn how meditation protects against depression and dementia, how social connections increase life expectancy and how patients who feel cared for recover from surgery faster. We meet Iraq war veterans who are using a virtual arctic world to treat their burns and children whose ADHD is kept under control with half the normal dose of medication. We watch as a transplant patient uses the smell of lavender to calm his hostile immune system and an Olympic runner shaves vital seconds off his time through mind-power alone.

Drawing on the very latest research, Marchant explores the vast potential of the mind's ability to heal, lays out its limitations and explains how we can make use of the findings in our own lives. With clarity and compassion, Cure points the way towards a system of medicine that treats us not simply as bodies but as human beings.]]> 320 Jo Marchant 0385348150 Jaime 0 to-read 4.06 2016
author: Jo Marchant
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/17
shelves: to-read
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]]> 198563729 Daphne and Amber Parrish are thrust back into each other’s lives upon the resurgence of a long-forgotten threat, forcing a vicious game of cat and mouse where everything is on the line, in this thrilling sequel to the million-copy-bestselling Reese’s Book Club pick The Last Mrs. Parrish.

Amber Patterson Parrish has come a long way from being an invisible wallflower. Her hard work and immaculate planning have paid off now that she’s a prominent socialite, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been bumps along the way. Less than a year since her husband Jackson’s tax-evasion scandal, Amber is still at the top of the Bishops Harbor community pecking order, free to do as she wishes while Jackson sits in prison. But that freedom is quickly coming to an end. With Jackson getting released from prison, Amber’s time—and money—is vanishing.

Meanwhile, Daphne Parrish left Bishops Harbor after her divorce from Jackson Parrish, swearing she would never go back. But when one of her daughters runs away from home, desperate to see her father, Daphne agrees to return for the summer to allow him supervised visits. Once out of prison, Jackson swears he’s a changed man, but Daphne knows all too well that he can’t be trusted.

When a ghost from Amber’s past emerges looking for revenge, the three of them find unlikely allies in one another, but who is playing who? When all is said and done, they’ll have to fight tooth and nail for everything they have left in this zero-sum game.

With shocking turns and entertaining characters, The Next Mrs. Parrish will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about duplicity and betrayal.]]> 336 Liv Constantine 0593599926 Jaime 0 to-read 3.75 2024
author: Liv Constantine
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 59586261 The prequel to We Were Liars takes readers back to the story of another summer, another generation, and the secrets that will haunt them for decades to come.

A windswept private island off the coast of Massachusetts.
A hungry ocean, churning with secrets and sorrow.
A fiery, addicted heiress. An irresistible, unpredictable boy.
A summer of unforgivable betrayal and terrible mistakes.

Welcome back to the Sinclair family.
They were always liars.]]> 299 E. Lockhart 059356880X Jaime 0 to-read 3.75 2022
author: E. Lockhart
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/04/05
shelves: to-read
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]]> 58733693 Remarkably Bright Creatures, an exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope, tracing a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors--until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.]]> 368 Shelby Van Pelt 0063204150 Jaime 4 4.35 2022
author: Shelby Van Pelt
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/01
date added: 2024/04/01
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]]> 16143347 A private island.
A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy.
A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive.
A revolution. An accident. A secret.
Lies upon lies.
True love.
The truth.

We Were Liars is a modern, sophisticated suspense novel from New York Times bestselling author, National Book Award finalist, and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart.

Read it.

And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE.]]> 242 E. Lockhart 0385741278 Jaime 3 3.65 2014
author: E. Lockhart
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2014
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/03/26
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]]> 60291217 In a debut novel as radiant as it is caustic, a former influencer confronts her past—and takes inventory of the damages that underpin the surface-glamour of social media.

At 19, she was an Instagram celebrity. Now, at 35, she works behind the cosmetic counter at the “black and white store,� peddling anti-aging products to women seeking physical and spiritual transformation. She too is seeking rebirth. She’s about to undergo the high-risk, elective surgery Aesthetica�, a procedure will reverse all her past plastic surgery procedures, returning her, she hopes, to a truer self. Provided she survives the knife.

But on the eve of the surgery, her traumatic past resurfaces when she is asked to participate in the public takedown of her former manager/boyfriend, who has rebranded himself as a paragon of “woke� masculinity in the post-#MeToo world. With the hours ticking down to her life-threatening surgery, she must confront the ugly truth about her experiences on and off the Instagram grid.

Propulsive, dark, and moving, Aesthetica is a Veronica for the age of “Instagram face,� delivering a fresh, nuanced examination of feminism, #metoo, and mother-daughter relationships, all while confronting our collective addiction to followers, filters, and faux realities.]]> 264 Allie Rowbottom 1641294000 Jaime 2 3.33 2022
author: Allie Rowbottom
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2024/03/15
date added: 2024/03/15
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]]> 63094957
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.]]> 304 Caroline O'Donoghue 0593535707 Jaime 3 4.06 2023
author: Caroline O'Donoghue
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/10
date added: 2024/03/10
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]]> 63024304
But when Scott is caught falsifying blood samples at work, he sets in motion a series of scandals that threatens to shatter his family. Deb leaves him for a female power broker; Maya rekindles a hazardous affair from her youth; and Gideon drops out of college to go on a dangerous journey that will put his principles to the test.

From Brookline to Berlin to the battlefields of Syria, Hope follows the Greenspans over the course of one tumultuous year as they question, and compromise, the values that have shaped their lives. But in the midst of their disillusionment, they’ll discover their own capacity for resilience, connection, and, ultimately, hope.]]> 432 Andrew Ridker 0593493338 Jaime 4 3.59 2023
author: Andrew Ridker
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/06
date added: 2024/03/06
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]]> 61349388 256 Elizabeth Passarella 1400219019 Jaime 2 3.94 2023
author: Elizabeth Passarella
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2023
rating: 2
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date added: 2024/02/29
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]]> 65650229 A witty and poignant novel about marriage, middle age, tech-obsessed health culture and the bonds that keep people together

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the '90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago's thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit.ĚýFast-forward twenty years to married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter cults disguised as mindfulness support groups, polyamorous would-be suitors, Facebook wars, and something called Love Potion Number Nine. For the first time Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize one another, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.Ěý]]> 611 Nathan Hill 0593536118 Jaime 4 3.97 2023
author: Nathan Hill
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/26
date added: 2024/02/26
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]]> 58684300 The bestselling, beloved writer of romantic comedies like You've Got Mail tells her own late-in-life love story, complete with a tragic second act and joyous resolution.

Delia Ephron had struggled through several years of heartbreak. She’d lost her sister, Nora, and then her husband, Jerry, both to cancer. Several months after Jerry’s death, she decided to make one small change in her life—she shut down his landline, which crashed her internet. She ended up in Verizon hell.
Ěý
She channeled her grief the best way she knew: by writing a New York Times op-ed. The piece caught the attention of Peter, a Bay Area psychiatrist, who emailed her to commiserate. Recently widowed himself, he reminded her that they had shared a few dates fifty-four years before, set up by Nora. Delia did not remember him, but after several weeks of exchanging emails and sixties folk songs, he flew east to see her. They were crazy, utterly, in love.
Ěý
But this was not a rom-com: four months later she was diagnosed with AML, a fierce leukemia.
Ěý
In Left on Tenth, Delia Ephron enchants as she seesaws us between tears and laughter, navigating the suicidal lows of enduring cutting-edge treatment and the giddy highs of a second chance at love. With Peter and her close girlfriends by her side, with startling clarity, warmth, and honesty about facing death, Ephron invites us to join her team of warriors and become believers ourselves.]]> 304 Delia Ephron 0316267651 Jaime 0 to-read 3.99 2022
author: Delia Ephron
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/23
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]]> 60290773 The Devil Wears Prada meets The Assistants in this compulsively readable debut following a young woman who takes a job working for an enigmatic influencer and quickly discovers there’s a dark side to being a #girlboss.

After a series of go-nowhere jobs in the New York publishing world, Harper Cruz is broke, lonely, and desperate for a salary that won’t leave her scrambling to make rent each month. So when she stumbles across a job posting from an influencer offering triple her last paycheck, she automatically submits her résumé.

Harper may not be familiar with self-help guru Charlotte Green, but her relentless optimism and charismatic can-do spirit has created a cult-like following of women across the country. When she selects Harper among thousands of other applicants in less than twenty-four hours, it’s obvious she sees something she likes. Despite the pressure to accept the offer just as quickly as she’s been given it, Harper decides to take a leap of faith and become the newest member of The Greenhouse.

Accepting the job means a move to Nashville, and Harper is quickly dazzled by the glamorous world Charlotte has built in Music City. The Greenhouse is more than a workplace—it’s a family—and Harper soon finds herself swept into its inner circle. At first, she loves working in such an inspirational environment, where mandatory dance parties, daily intentions, and group bonding activities make up for long hours and Charlotte’s persistent demands for loyalty. But the deeper Harper is pulled into Charlotte’s world, the more she realizes that having it all and being it all comes with a price.]]> 320 Noelle Crooks Jaime 3 3.39 2023
author: Noelle Crooks
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/21
date added: 2024/02/21
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]]> 198509143
Hazel Davis is drifting: she’s stalled in her career, living in a city she hates, and less successful than her younger sister @evelyn, a lifestyle influencer. Evie came of age on the family YouTube channel after a viral video when she was five. Ten years older and spotlight-averse, Hazel managed to dodge the family business—so although she can barely afford her apartment, at least she made her own way.

Evie is eighteen now, with a multimillion-dollar career, but Hazel is still protective of her little sister and skeptical of the way everyone seems to want a piece of her: Evie’s followers, her YouTuber boyfriend and influencer frenemies, and their opportunistic mother. So when Evie disappears one day during an unsettling live stream that cuts out midsentence, Hazel is horrified to have her worst instincts proven right.

As theories about Evie’s disappearance tear through the internet, inspiring hashtags, Reddit threads, and podcast episodes, Hazel throws herself into the darkest parts of her sister’s world to untangle the truth. After all, Hazel knows Evie better than anyone else . . . doesn’t she?]]> 336 Olivia Muenter 1683694015 Jaime 0 to-read 3.38 2024
author: Olivia Muenter
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62800971
Back in Florida, Huơng is simultaneously mourning her mother and resenting her for having the relationship with Ann that she never did. Then Ann and Huơng learn that Minh has left them both the Banyan House, the crumbling old manor that was Ann’s childhood home, in all its strange, Gothic glory. Under the same roof for the first time in years, mother and daughter must face the simmering questions of their past and their uncertain futures, while trying to rebuild their relationship without the one person who’s always held them together.

Running parallel to this is Minh’s story, as she goes from a lovestruck teenager living in the shadow of the Vietnam War to a determined young mother immigrating to America in search of a better life for her children. And when Ann makes a shocking discovery in the Banyan House’s attic, long-buried secrets come to light as it becomes clear how decisions Minh made in her youth affected the rest of her life—and beyond.

Spanning decades and continents, from 1960s Vietnam to the wild swamplands of the Florida coast, Banyan Moon is a stunning and deeply moving story of mothers and daughters, the things we inherit, and the lives we choose to make out of that inheritance.]]> 336 Thao Thai 0063267101 Jaime 0 to-read 3.86 2023
author: Thao Thai
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 61897971
When Aidan’s wife dies, he and his thirteen-year-old daughter Cecilia are forced to move. Aidan has no choice but to bring Rachel along, introducing her to Cecilia as a “family friend� who needs a place to stay. Aidan is betting on Rachel, after five years of captivity, being too brainwashed and fearful to attempt to escape. But Rachel is a fighter and survivor, and recognizes Cecilia might just be the lifeline she has waited for all these years. As Rachel tests the boundaries of her new living situation, she begins to form a tenuous connection with Cecilia. And when Emily, a local restaurant owner, develops a crush on the handsome widower, she finds herself drawn into Rachel and Cecilia’s orbit, coming dangerously close to discovering Aidan’s secret.

Told through the perspectives of Rachel, Cecilia, and Emily, The Quiet Tenant explores the psychological impact of Aidan’s crimes on the women in his life—and the bonds between those women that give them the strength to fight back. Both a searing thriller and an astute study of trauma, survival, and the dynamics of power, The Quiet Tenant is an electrifying debut thriller by a major talent.]]> 303 Clémence Michallon 0593534646 Jaime 0 to-read 3.80 2023
author: Clémence Michallon
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 75492257
Hannah and Finn have spent every Christmas together since college. Neither has anywhere else to go—Hannah’s parents died, and Finn’s disowned him when he came out. Their tradition of offbeat holiday adventures only grows more outrageous with time. When the pair starts their adult lives in New York City, they add stylish Priya and mysterious Theo to the group, solidifying a found family and sense of belonging they’ve always craved.

But now, when Finn announces a move to L.A., this Christmas may be their last. Hannah is terrified of losing the family she’s built for herself, even as her boyfriend nudges her toward commitment. Meanwhile, Finn struggles with the things he’s about to leave behind—namely, his unexpressed feelings for Theo. Does growing up mean growing apart? This Christmas the changes these friends fear may be exactly what they need. . . .]]> 368 Becca Freeman 0143138030 Jaime 0 to-read 3.75 2023
author: Becca Freeman
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 60018635 A warm and uplifting novel about an isolated witch whose opportunity to embrace a quirky new family--and a new love--changes the course of her life.

As one of the few witches in Britain, Mika Moon knows she has to hide her magic, keep her head down, and stay away from other witches so their powers don't mingle and draw attention. And as an orphan who lost her parents at a young age and was raised by strangers, she's used to being alone and she follows the rules...with one exception: an online account, where she posts videos pretending to be a witch. She thinks no one will take it seriously.

But someone does. An unexpected message arrives, begging her to travel to the remote and mysterious Nowhere House to teach three young witches how to control their magic. It breaks all of the rules, but Mika goes anyway, and is immediately tangled up in the lives and secrets of not only her three charges, but also an absent archaeologist, a retired actor, two long-suffering caretakers, and...Jamie. The handsome and prickly librarian of Nowhere House would do anything to protect the children, and as far as he's concerned, a stranger like Mika is a threat. An irritatingly appealing threat.

As Mika begins to find her place at Nowhere House, the thought of belonging somewhere begins to feel like a real possibility. But magic isn't the only danger in the world, and when a threat comes knocking at their door, Mika will need to decide whether to risk everything to protect a found family she didn't know she was looking for....
]]> 318 Sangu Mandanna 059343935X Jaime 0 to-read 4.04 2022
author: Sangu Mandanna
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/18
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]]> 61884939
When Ava Harrison receives a letter containing an unusual job listing one month after the sudden death of her ex-boyfriend, she thinks she’s being haunted. The listing—a job as a live-in caretaker for a peculiar old man and his cranky cat in Driftwood, Alabama—is the perfect chance to start a new life. A normal life. Ava has always been too fearful to even travel, so no one’s more surprised than she is when she throws caution to the wind and drives to the distant beachside town.

On the surface, Maggie Mae Brightwell is a bundle of energy as she runs Magpie’s, Driftwood’s coffee and curiosity shop, where there’s magic to be found in pairing the old with the new. But lurking under her cheerful exterior is a painful truth—keeping busy is the best way to distract herself from the lingering loss of her mama and her worries about her aging father. No one knows better than she does that you can’t pour from an empty cup, but holding on to the past is the only thing keeping the hope alive that her mama will return home one day.

Ava and Maggie soon find they’re kindred spirits, as they’re both haunted—not by spirits, but by regret. Both must learn to let go of the past to move on—because sometimes the waves of change bring you to the place where you most belong.]]> 320 Heather Webber 1250867266 Jaime 0 to-read 3.89 2023
author: Heather Webber
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> 39507318
Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a mesmerizing and uniquely compelling book that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.

In The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries across the country and around the world, from their humble beginnings as a metropolitan charitable initiative to their current status as a cornerstone of national identity; brings each department of the library to vivid life through on-the-ground reporting; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; reflects on her own experiences in libraries; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago.

Along the way, Orlean introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters from libraries past and present—from Mary Foy, who in 1880 at eighteen years old was named the head of the Los Angeles Public Library at a time when men still dominated the role, to Dr. C.J.K. Jones, a pastor, citrus farmer, and polymath known as “The Human Encyclopedia� who roamed the library dispensing information; from Charles Lummis, a wildly eccentric journalist and adventurer who was determined to make the L.A. library one of the best in the world, to the current staff, who do heroic work every day to ensure that their institution remains a vital part of the city it serves.

Brimming with her signature wit, insight, compassion, and talent for deep research, The Library Book is Susan Orlean’s thrilling journey through the stacks that reveals how these beloved institutions provide much more than just books—and why they remain an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country. It is also a master journalist’s reminder that, perhaps especially in the digital era, they are more necessary than ever.]]> 317 Susan Orlean 1476740186 Jaime 0 to-read 3.88 2018
author: Susan Orlean
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/17
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]]> 59314709 The Reese's Book Club hardcover edition can be found here.

For fans of Hustlers and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, the story of two Asian American women who band together to grow a counterfeit handbag scheme into a global enterprise--an incisive and glittering blend of fashion, crime, and friendship from the author of Bury What We Cannot Take and Soy Sauce for Beginners.

Money can't buy happiness... but it can buy a decent fake.

Ava Wong has always played it safe. As a strait-laced, rule-abiding Chinese American lawyer with a successful surgeon as a husband, a young son, and a beautiful home--she's built the perfect life. But beneath this façade, Ava's world is crumbling: her marriage is falling apart, her expensive law degree hasn't been used in years, and her toddler's tantrums are pushing her to the breaking point.

Enter Winnie Fang, Ava's enigmatic college roommate from Mainland China, who abruptly dropped out under mysterious circumstances. Now, twenty years later, Winnie is looking to reconnect with her old friend. But the shy, awkward girl Ava once knew has been replaced with a confident woman of the world, dripping in luxury goods, including a coveted Birkin in classic orange. The secret to her success? Winnie has developed an ingenious counterfeit scheme that involves importing near-exact replicas of luxury handbags and now she needs someone with a U.S. passport to help manage her business--someone who'd never be suspected of wrongdoing, someone like Ava. But when their spectacular success is threatened and Winnie vanishes once again, Ava is left to face the consequences.

Swift, surprising, and sharply comic, Counterfeit is a stylish and feminist caper with a strong point of view and an axe to grind. Peering behind the curtain of the upscale designer storefronts and the Chinese factories where luxury goods are produced, Kirstin Chen interrogates the myth of the model minority through two unforgettable women determined to demand more from life.]]> 288 Kirstin Chen Jaime 3 3.43 2022
author: Kirstin Chen
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/17
date added: 2024/02/17
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]]> 75495002 When a father goes missing, his family's desperate search leads them to question everything they know about him and one another--both a riveting page-turner and a deeply moving portrait of a family in crisis from the award-winning author of Miracle Creek.

"We didn't call the police right away." Those are the first words of this extraordinary novel about a biracial Korean-American family in Virginia whose lives are upended when their beloved father and husband goes missing.

Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything--which is why she isn't initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don't return from a walk in a nearby park. They must have lost their phone. Or stopped for an errand somewhere. But by the time Mia's brother runs through the front door bloody and alone, it becomes clear that the father in this tight-knit family is missing and the only witness is Eugene, who has the rare genetic condition Angelman syndrome and cannot speak.

What follows is both a ticking-clock investigation into the whereabouts of a father and an emotionally rich portrait of a family whose most personal secrets just may be at the heart of his disappearance. Full of shocking twists and fascinating questions of love, language, race, and human connection, Happiness Falls is a mystery, a family drama, and a novel of profound philosophical inquiry. With all the powerful storytelling she brought to her award-winning debut Miracle Creek, Angie Kim turns the missing person story into something wholly original, creating an indelible tale of a family who must go to remarkable lengths to truly understand one another.]]> 387 Angie Kim 0593448200 Jaime 5 3.72 2023
author: Angie Kim
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/16
date added: 2024/02/16
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]]> 61987507 A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK
“A Time-Twisting Delight� —Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club June �23 Pick)

If you had the power to change the past…where would you start?
Cassandra Penelope Dankworth is a creature of habit. She likes what she likes (museums, jumpsuits, her boyfriend, Will) and strongly dislikes what she doesn't (mess, change, her boss drinking out of her mug). Her life runs in a pleasing, predictable order…until now.
� She's just been dumped.
� She's just been fired.
� Her local café has run out of banana muffins.

Then, something truly unexpected happens: Cassie discovers she can go back and change the past. One small rewind at a time, Cassie attempts to fix the life she accidentally obliterated, but soon she'll discover she's trying to fix all the wrong things.

“A great read-alike for The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion, Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore, and The Boys by Katie Hafner.� �Booklist (STARRED)]]> 362 Holly Smale Jaime 4 3.51 2023
author: Holly Smale
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/12
date added: 2024/02/12
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]]> 61771675
But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters� unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?]]> 416 Ann Napolitano Jaime 4 4.14 2023
author: Ann Napolitano
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/09
date added: 2024/02/09
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]]> 16248311
Newlywed Grace Monroe doesn’t fit anyone’s expectations of a successful 1950s London socialite, least of all her own. When she receives an unexpected inheritance from a complete stranger, Madame Eva d’Orsey, Grace is drawn to uncover the identity of her mysterious benefactor.

Weaving through the decades, from 1920s New York to Monte Carlo, Paris, and London, the story Grace uncovers is that of an extraordinary women who inspired one of Paris’s greatest perfumers. Immortalized in three evocative perfumes, Eva d’Orsey’s history will transform Grace’s life forever, forcing her to choose between the woman she is expected to be and the person she really is.

The Perfume Collector explores the complex and obsessive love between muse and artist, and the tremendous power of memory and scent.]]> 456 Kathleen Tessaro 0062257838 Jaime 3 3.96 2013
author: Kathleen Tessaro
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/04
date added: 2024/02/04
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]]> 63222079
The Loverlys sit by the hospital bed of their young son who is in a coma after falling from his bedroom window in the middle of the night; his mother, Whitney, will not speak to anyone. Back home, their friends and neighbors are left in shock, each confronting their own role in the events that led up to what happened that terrible night: the warm, altruistic Parks who are the Loverlys' best friends; the young, ambitious Goldsmiths who are struggling to start a family of their own; and the quiet, elderly Portuguese couple who care for their adult son with a developmental disability, and who pass the long days on the front porch, watching their neighbors go about their busy lives.

The story spins out over the course of one week, in the alternating voices of the women in each family as they are forced to face the secrets within the walls of their own homes, and the uncomfortable truths that connect them all to one another. Set against the heartwrenching drama of what will happen to Xavier, who hangs between death and life, or a life changed forever, THE WHISPERS is a novel about what happens when we put our needs ahead of our children's. Exploring the quiet sacrifices of motherhood, the intuitions that we silence, the complexities of our closest friendships, and the danger of envy, this is a novel about the reverberations of life's most difficult decisions.]]> 336 Ashley Audrain 1984881698 Jaime 1 3.78 2023
author: Ashley Audrain
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2024/01/29
date added: 2024/02/02
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]]> 58690308 One summer. Two rivals. A plot twist they didn't see coming....

Nora Stephens� life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby.

Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters� trip away—with visions of a small-town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute.

If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again—in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow—what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.]]> 377 Emily Henry 0593334833 Jaime 5 4.09 2022
author: Emily Henry
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/26
date added: 2024/01/26
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]]> 44594871 Amaryllis Fox's riveting memoir tells the story of her ten years in the most elite clandestine ops unit of the CIA, hunting the world's most dangerous terrorists in sixteen countries while marrying and giving birth to a daughter

Amaryllis Fox was in her last year as an undergraduate at Oxford studying theology and international law when her writing mentor Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded. Galvanized by this brutality, Fox applied to a master's program in conflict and terrorism at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, where she created an algorithm that predicted, with uncanny certainty, the likelihood of a terrorist cell arising in any village around the world. At twenty-one, she was recruited by the CIA. Her first assignment was reading and analyzing hundreds of classified cables a day from foreign governments and synthesizing them into daily briefs for the president. Her next assignment was at the Iraq desk in the Counterterrorism center. At twenty-two, she was fast-tracked into advanced operations training, sent from Langley to "the Farm," where she lived for six months in a simulated world learning how to use a Glock, how to get out of flexicuffs while locked in the trunk of a car, how to withstand torture, and the best ways to commit suicide in case of captivity. At the end of this training she was deployed as a spy under non-official cover--the most difficult and coveted job in the field as an art dealer specializing in tribal and indigenous art and sent to infiltrate terrorist networks in remote areas of the Middle East and Asia.
Life Undercover is exhilarating, intimate, fiercely intelligent--an impossible to put down record of an extraordinary life, and of Amaryllis Fox's astonishing courage and passion.]]> 256 Amaryllis Fox Jaime 0 to-read 4.02 2019
author: Amaryllis Fox
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/24
shelves: to-read
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]]> 42201431
Olive braces herself to get through 24 hours of wedding hell before she can return to her comfortable, unlucky life. But when the entire wedding party gets food poisoning from eating bad shellfish, the only people who aren’t affected are Olive and Ethan. And now there’s an all-expenses-paid honeymoon in Hawaii up for grabs.

Putting their mutual hatred aside for the sake of a free vacation, Olive and Ethan head for paradise, determined to avoid each other at all costs. But when Olive runs into her future boss, the little white lie she tells him is suddenly at risk to become a whole lot bigger. She and Ethan now have to pretend to be loving newlyweds, and her luck seems worse than ever. But the weird thing is that she doesn’t mind playing pretend. In fact, she feels kind of... lucky.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781501128035.]]> 432 Christina Lauren 1501128035 Jaime 0 to-read 3.88 2019
author: Christina Lauren
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/21
shelves: to-read
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]]> 58724801 Hannah Brooks looks more like a kindergarten teacher than somebody who could kill you with her bare hands. But the truth is, she's an elite bodyguard and she's just been hired to protect a superstar actor from his stalker.

Jack Stapleton's a Hollywood heartthrob - captured by paparazzi on beaches the world over, rising out of the waves in clingy board shorts and glistening like a Roman deity.

When Jack's mom gets sick, he comes home to the family's Texas ranch to help out. Only one catch: He doesn't want his family to know about his stalker. Or the bodyguard thing. And so Hannah - against her will and her better judgment - finds herself pretending to be Jack's girlfriend as a cover.

Protecting Jack should be easy. But protecting her own heart? That's the hardest thing she's ever done...]]> 302 Katherine Center 1250219396 Jaime 3 3.94 2022
author: Katherine Center
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/19
date added: 2024/01/21
shelves:
review:

]]> 60877616 A hilarious and painfully relatable debut novel about one woman’s messy search for joy and meaning in the wake of an unexpected breakup, from comedian, essayist, and award-winning screenwriter Monica Heisey

Maggie is fine. She’s doing really good, actually. Sure, she’s broke, her graduate thesis on something obscure is going nowhere, and her marriage only lasted 608 days, but at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, Maggie is determined to embrace her new life as a Surprisingly Young Divorcée�.

Now she has time to take up nine hobbies, eat hamburgers at 4 am, and “get back out there� sex-wise. With the support of her tough-loving academic advisor, Merris; her newly divorced friend, Amy; and her group chat (naturally), Maggie barrels through her first year of single life, intermittently dating, occasionally waking up on the floor and asking herself tough questions along the way.

Laugh-out-loud funny and filled with sharp observations, Really Good, Actually is a tender and bittersweet comedy that lays bare the uncertainties of modern love, friendship, and our search for that thing we like to call “happiness�. This is a remarkable debut from an unforgettable new voice in fiction.]]> 370 Monica Heisey 0063235412 Jaime 1 3.14 2023
author: Monica Heisey
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.14
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2024/01/19
date added: 2024/01/19
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review:

]]> 61796683 REESE'S BOOK CLUB MAY 2023 PICK

BOOK OF THE MONTH MAY 2023 PICK

A multigenerational saga that traverses the glamour of old Hollywood and the seductive draw of modern-day showbiz

When Kitty Karr Tate, a White icon of the silver screen, dies and bequeaths her multimillion-dollar estate to the St. John sisters, three young, wealthy Black women, it prompts questions. Lots of questions.

A celebrity in her own right, Elise St. John would rather focus on sorting out Kitty’s affairs than deal with the press. But what she discovers in one of Kitty’s journals rocks her world harder than any other brewing scandal could—and between a cheating fiancé and the fallout from a controversial social media post, there are plenty.

The truth behind Kitty's ascent to stardom from her beginnings in the segregated South threatens to expose a web of unexpected family ties, debts owed, and debatable crimes that could, with one pull, unravel the all-American fabric of the St. John sisters and those closest to them.

As Elise digs deeper into Kitty's past, she must also turn the lens upon herself, confronting the gifts and burdens of her own choices and the power that the secrets of the dead hold over the living. Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? is a sprawling page-turner set against the backdrop of the Hollywood machine, an insightful and nuanced look at the inheritances of family, race, and gender—and the choices some women make to break free of them.]]> 416 Crystal Smith Paul 1250815304 Jaime 4 3.70 2023
author: Crystal Smith Paul
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/19
date added: 2024/01/19
shelves:
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]]> 62052300
The success of Irby's career has taken her to new heights. She fields calls with job offers from Hollywood and walks the red carpet with the iconic ladies of Sex and the City. Finally, she has made it. But, behind all that new-found glam, Irby is just trying to keep her life together as she always had.

Her teeth are poisoning her from inside her mouth, and her diarrhea is back. She gets turned away from a restaurant for wearing ugly clothes, she goes to therapy and tries out Lexapro, gets healed with Reiki, explores the power of crystals, and becomes addicted to QVC. Making light of herself as she takes us on an outrageously funny tour of all the details that make up a true portrait of her life, Irby is once again the relatable, uproarious tonic we all need.]]> 290 Samantha Irby 0593315693 Jaime 0 to-read 3.67 2023
author: Samantha Irby
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/15
shelves: to-read
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]]> 38357895
A brilliant depiction of an unusual psyche and a world hidden from view, Convenience Store Woman is an ironic and sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures to conform, as well as a charming and completely fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine.]]> 163 Sayaka Murata Jaime 5 3.70 2016
author: Sayaka Murata
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/11
date added: 2024/01/11
shelves:
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]]> 123921296
One In a Millennial is an exploration of pop culture, nostalgia, the millennial zeitgeist, and the life lessons learned (for better and for worse) from coming of age as a member of a much-maligned generation.

Kate is a pop culture commentator and host of the popular millennial-focused podcast Be There in Five . Part-funny, part-serious, Kate navigates the complicated nature of celebrating and criticizing the culture that shaped her as a woman, while arguing that great depths can come from surface-level interests.

With her trademark style and vulnerability, One In a Millennial is sharp, hilarious, and heartwarming all at once. She tackles AOL Instant Messenger, purity culture, American Girl Dolls, going out tops, Spice Girl feminism, her feelings about millennial motherhood, and more. Kate’s laugh-out-loud asides and keen observations will have you nodding your head and maybe even tearing up.]]> 328 Kate Kennedy 1250285127 Jaime 0 to-read 3.73 2024
author: Kate Kennedy
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 57797679 An incisive and exhilarating debut novel of female friendship following three Anglo-Nigerian best friends and the lethally glamorous fourth woman who infiltrates their group—the most unforgettable girls since Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda.

Ronke wants happily ever after and 2.2. kids. She’s dating Kayode and wants him to be “the one� (perfect, like her dead father). Her friends think he’s just another in a long line of dodgy Nigerian boyfriends.

Boo has everything Ronke wants—a kind husband, gorgeous child. But she’s frustrated, unfulfilled, plagued by guilt, and desperate to remember who she used to be.

Simi is the golden one with the perfect lifestyle. No one knows she’s crippled by impostor syndrome and tempted to pack it all in each time her boss mentions her “urban vibe.� Her husband thinks they’re trying for a baby. She’s not.

When the high-flying, charismatic Isobel explodes into the group, it seems at first she’s bringing out the best in each woman. (She gets Simi an interview in Hong Kong! Goes jogging with Boo!) But the more Isobel intervenes, the more chaos she sows, and Ronke, Simi, and Boo’s close friendship begins to crack.

A sharp, modern take on friendship, ambition, culture, and betrayal, Wahala (trouble) is an unforgettable novel from a brilliant new voice.]]> 384 Nikki May 0063084244 Jaime 3 3.59 2022
author: Nikki May
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/10
date added: 2024/01/10
shelves:
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]]> 61986136 A young woman pretends to be someone she isn't in this stunning novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls.

Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome.

A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she's been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city.

With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarified world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.

Taut, propulsive, and impossible to look away from, Emma Cline's The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.]]> 304 Emma Cline 0812998626 Jaime 2 3.29 2023
author: Emma Cline
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/01/05
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves:
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]]> 89724 Shirley Jackson's beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family's dark secret.

Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. This edition features an afterword by Jonathan Lethem.]]> 152 Shirley Jackson 0143039970 Jaime 0 to-read 3.93 1962
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1962
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> 36552920
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.]]> 289 Ottessa Moshfegh 0525522115 Jaime 0 to-read 3.57 2018
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/01/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62919375
At first, Wren internally resists her husband’s fate. Is there a way for them to be together after Lewis changes? Then, a glimpse of Lewis’s developing carnivorous nature activates long-repressed memories for Wren, whose story vacillates between her childhood living on a houseboat in Oklahoma, her time with her college ex-girlfriend, and her unusual friendship with a woman pregnant with twin birds.]]> 416 Emily Habeck 1668006499 Jaime 5 3.95 2023
author: Emily Habeck
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/03
date added: 2024/01/03
shelves:
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]]> 57968220 A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK SELECTED BY * POPSUGAR * BUSTLE * BUZZFEED * BOOKPAGEĚý* GOODREADS MEMBERS

"The Matzah Ball had me laughing out loud...an all-around terrific read."—Debbie Macomber, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Oy! to the world

Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt is a nice Jewish girl with a shameful she loves Christmas. For a decade she’s hidden her career as a Christmas romance novelist from her family. Her talent has made her a bestseller even as her chronic illness has always kept the kind of love she writes about out of reach.

But when her diversity-conscious publisher insists she write a Hanukkah romance, her well of inspiration suddenly runs dry. Hanukkah’s not magical. It’s not merry. It’s not Christmas. Desperate not to lose her contract, Rachel’s determined to find her muse at the Matzah Ball, a Jewish music celebration on the last night of Hanukkah, even if it means working with her summer camp archenemy—Jacob Greenberg.

Though Rachel and Jacob haven’t seen each other since they were kids, their grudge still glows brighter than a menorah. But as they spend more time together, Rachel finds herself drawn to Hanukkah—and Jacob—in a way she never expected. Maybe this holiday of lights will be the spark she needed to set her heart ablaze.Ěý

"A luminous celebration of all types of love, threaded with the message that everyone is worthy of it.”—Rachel Lynn Solomon, author of The Ex Talk
Ěý]]> 416 Jean Meltzer 0369706099 Jaime 3 3.82 2021
author: Jean Meltzer
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/29
date added: 2023/12/29
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]]> 58349243
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction
Finalist for the California Book Awards
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Novel

Rachel Kushner meets David Lynch in this fever dream of an LA novel about a young woman who commits a drunken act of violence just before her sister vanishes without a trace.

On the night of her high school graduation, a young woman follows her older sister Debbie to Salvation, a Los Angeles bar patronized by energy healers, aspiring actors, and all-around misfits. After the two share a bag of unidentified pills, the evening turns into a haze of sensual and risky interactions—nothing unusual for two sisters bound in an incredibly toxic relationship. Our unnamed narrator has always been under the spell of the alluring and rebellious Debbie and, despite her own hesitations, she has always said yes to nights like these. That is, until Debbie disappears.

Falling deeper into the life she cultivated with her sister, our narrator gets a job as an emergency room secretary where she steals pills to sell on the side. Cue Sasha, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who arrives at the hospital claiming to be a psychic tasked with acting as the narrator’s spiritual guide. The nature of this relationship evolves and blurs, a kaleidoscope of friendship, sex, mysticism, and ambiguous power dynamics.

With prose pulsing like a neon sign, Ruth Madievsky’s All-Night Pharmacy is an intoxicating portrait of a young woman consumed with unease over how a person should be. As she attempts sobriety and sexual embodiment, she must decide whether to search for her estranged sister, or allow her to remain a relic of the past.]]> 304 Ruth Madievsky Jaime 0 to-read 3.48 2023
author: Ruth Madievsky
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 60784312
Is it enough?

Does he respond to texts? Honor his commitments? Make advance plans? Sometimes, rarely, and no, not at all. But when he shines his light on her, the world makes sense, and Adelaide is convinced that, in his heart, he’s fallen just as deeply as she has. Then, when Rory is rocked by an unexpected tragedy, Adelaide does everything in her power to hold him together—even if it means losing herself in the process.

When love asks too much of us, how do we find the strength to put ourselves first?

With unflinching honesty and heart, this relatable debut from a fresh new voice explores grief and mental health while capturing the timeless nature of what it’s like to be young and in love—with your friends, with your city, and with a person who cannot, will not, love you back.]]> 304 Genevieve Wheeler 1250280842 Jaime 4
As others have mentioned, Adelaide hits differently based on the season of life you’re in. At some points in my life I think this would have easily been five stars. Currently, it was difficult to get through. The story seemed too repetitive and Adelaide the character just felt annoying. However, I think that was the beauty of the book. It was real. Sometimes life is so obvious, so -how many times do I have to repeat myself before you understand?- which Adelaide (the book) couldn’t have captured better. Overall, I can see this book from a lot of angles.

Additionally, Adelaide’s (the character) experiences with mental illness seemed to be written very accurately. It was all so well-rounded with nothing sensationalized, glamorized, or tied up in a pretty bow. I can’t think of a better depiction in any other books, TV, movies, etc. ]]> 3.93 2023
author: Genevieve Wheeler
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/24
date added: 2023/12/24
shelves:
review:
Initially, a 2. On some reflection, 4. I read this via audiobook which was good but I think I would have gotten more out of it if I could have put my own inflection and emphasis on the words as I read.

As others have mentioned, Adelaide hits differently based on the season of life you’re in. At some points in my life I think this would have easily been five stars. Currently, it was difficult to get through. The story seemed too repetitive and Adelaide the character just felt annoying. However, I think that was the beauty of the book. It was real. Sometimes life is so obvious, so -how many times do I have to repeat myself before you understand?- which Adelaide (the book) couldn’t have captured better. Overall, I can see this book from a lot of angles.

Additionally, Adelaide’s (the character) experiences with mental illness seemed to be written very accurately. It was all so well-rounded with nothing sensationalized, glamorized, or tied up in a pretty bow. I can’t think of a better depiction in any other books, TV, movies, etc.
]]> 25574782
Now another girl has disappeared, with chilling echoes of the past. And it seems that she might not be the only one.

Claire is convinced Julia's disappearance is linked.

But when she begins to learn the truth about her sister, she is confronted with a shocking discovery, and nothing will ever be the same...]]> 432 Karin Slaughter 0062430874 Jaime 3
1. This book is giving me nightmares. It is so beyond just a mystery, which is my own fault for not taking the term “horror� in the genre description seriously enough.

2. It feels like a TV show that’s going on one season too many AND put way too many episodes into that last season. (Hence why I can’t wait until the end of the book to write this review)

3. I’m finding it predictable in the way a Law & Order SVU is predictable. However, I can’t put it down.

The low rating is for the predictably and my own queasiness. Maybe I’ll change it after finishing. We’ll see!

Edit: Finished and I completely agree with everything I wrote above. ]]> 3.99 2015
author: Karin Slaughter
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/16
date added: 2023/12/24
shelves:
review:
I haven’t actually finished this book yet (80% in) but it’s dragging on so long that I can’t wait to write a brief review.

1. This book is giving me nightmares. It is so beyond just a mystery, which is my own fault for not taking the term “horror� in the genre description seriously enough.

2. It feels like a TV show that’s going on one season too many AND put way too many episodes into that last season. (Hence why I can’t wait until the end of the book to write this review)

3. I’m finding it predictable in the way a Law & Order SVU is predictable. However, I can’t put it down.

The low rating is for the predictably and my own queasiness. Maybe I’ll change it after finishing. We’ll see!

Edit: Finished and I completely agree with everything I wrote above.
]]> 41817577 My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is an audacious new form of nonfiction that remakes the boundaries between criticism, biography, and autobiography in search of two identities.

While working as an intern in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center, Jenn Shapland encounters the love letters of Carson and a woman named Annemarie―letters are that are tender, intimate, and unabashed in their feelings. Shapland recognizes herself in the letters� language―but does not see Carson as history has portrayed her.

And so, Shapland is compelled to undertake a recovery of the full narrative and language of Carson's life: She wades through the therapy transcripts; she stays at Carson’s childhood home, where she lounges in her bathtub and eats delivery pizza; she relives Carson’s days at her beloved Yaddo. As Shapland reckons with the expanding and collapsing distance between her and Carson, she see the way Carson’s story has become a way to articulate something about herself. The results articulate something entirely new not only about this one remarkable, walleyed life, but about the way we tell queer love stories.

In genre-defying vignettes, Jenn Shapland interweaves her own story with Carson McCullers’s to create a vital new portrait of one of America’s most beloved writers, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.]]> 266 Jenn Shapland 1947793284 Jaime 0 4.10 2020
author: Jenn Shapland
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/19
shelves: want-a-strong-read, currently-reading
review:

]]> 65212083 Filled with the romance and angst that defines the years you come to know yourself, with a shifting timeline covering two decades and ratcheting up the tension, Maybe Once, Maybe Twice is a novel of second chances and finding your own way.

You know that old saying, “if we are still single when we’re 35, we should get married?� Well, Maggie Vine made that vow with two different people, at two very different stages of her life.

And they both showed up.

Maggie Vine’s life is going extra-medium. At 35 she’s pursuing her dreams of being a singer and being a mother—though neither is successfully panning out. So when Garrett Scholl—stifled hedge fund manager by day but electrifying aspiring rock singer by night—comes to her 35th birthday party with the intention to kiss Maggie senseless, it feels like one piece might click into place. Except he’s engaged to someone else, and Maggie knows she won’t fit into the cookie-cutter life he’s building for himself.

Enter Asher Reyes. Her first boyfriend from summer camp, turned into heartthrob actor, he’s lived a successful yet private life ever since he got famous. When a career-changing opportunity is presented to Maggie after her reconnection with Asher, it feels like everything—music, love, family—will fall into place. But her past won’t let her move on without a fight.]]> 336 Alison Rose Greenberg 1250791626 Jaime 0 to-read 3.61 2023
author: Alison Rose Greenberg
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60784605 Shortlisted for the TikTok Book Awards in the Book of the Year, 2023 and the Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ Debut and Fiction Book of the Year, 2023.

It’s fair to say that Maddie’s life in London is far from rewarding. With a mother who spends most of her time in Ghana (yet still somehow manages to be overbearing), Maddie is the primary caretaker for her father, who suffers from advanced stage Parkinson’s. At work, her boss is a nightmare and Maddie is tired of always being the only Black person in every meeting.

When her mum returns from her latest trip to Ghana, Maddie leaps at the chance to get out of the family home and finally start living. A self-acknowledged late bloomer, she’s ready to experience some important “firsts�: She finds a flat share, says yes to after-work drinks, pushes for more recognition in her career, and throws herself into the bewildering world of internet dating. But it's not long before tragedy strikes, forcing Maddie to face the true nature of her unconventional family, and the perils—and rewards—of putting her life on the line.

Smart, funny, and deeply affecting, Jessica George's Maame deals with the themes of our time with humor and poignancy: from familial duty and racism, to female pleasure, the complexity of love, and the life-saving power of friendship. Most important, it explores what it feels like to be torn between two homes and cultures―and it celebrates finally being able to find where you belong.]]> 320 Jessica George Jaime 0 to-read 4.03 2023
author: Jessica George
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 101124639
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.]]> 384 Jessica Knoll 1501153226 Jaime 0 to-read 3.99 2023
author: Jessica Knoll
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 91239751
Out on the sun-scorched trail, the woman encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious and poignant.]]> 240 Melissa Broder 1668024845 Jaime 0 to-read 3.46 2023
author: Melissa Broder
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 36337550
There are eight days, and eight witnesses for you to inhabit.

We will only let you escape once you tell us the name of the killer.

Understood? Then let's begin . . .

Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others . . .

The most inventive debut of the year twists together a mystery of such unexpected creativity it will leave listeners guessing until the very last second.]]> 432 Stuart Turton Jaime 0 to-read 3.78 2018
author: Stuart Turton
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58587872 The eagerly anticipated second essay collection from Jessi Klein, author of the acclaimed New York Times bestselling debut You'll Grow Out of It.

"Sometimes I think about how much bad news there is to tell my kid, the endlessly long, looping CVS receipt scroll of truly terrible things that have happened, and I want to get under the bed and never come out. How do we tell them about all this? Can we just play Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire and then brace for questions? The first of which should be, how is this a song that played on the radio?"

In New York Times bestselling author and Emmy Award-winning writer and producer Jessi Klein's second collection, she hilariously explodes the cultural myths and impossible expectations around motherhood and explore the humiliations, poignancies, and possibilities of midlife.

In interconnected essays like "Listening to Beyonc� in the Parking Lot of Party City," "Your Husband Will Remarry Five Minutes After You Die," "Eulogy for My Feet," and "An Open Love Letter to Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent," Klein explores this stage of life in all its cruel ironies, joyous moments, and bittersweetness.

Written with Klein's signature candor and humanity, I'll Show Myself Out is an incisive, moving, and often uproarious collection.]]> 288 Jessi Klein 0062981595 Jaime 0 to-read 3.90 2022
author: Jessi Klein
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58984701 IT WAS A STORY THAT CASSIE BOWMAN COULDN'T RESIST.
LORE RIVERA LOVED TWO MEN.
UNTIL ONE OF THEM SHOT THE OTHER...

Lore Rivera was married to two men at once, until on a baking hot day in 1986, one of them found out and shot the other. A secret double life, a tragic murder. That's the story the world knows.

It's not the story that fascinates Cassie Bowman.

Carrying the weight of her own family tragedy, true-crime writer Cassie wants to know more about the mysterious woman at the heart of it all, Lore. How did one woman fall in love with two different men? How did she balance the love and the lies?

To her surprise, Cassie finds that Lore is willing to talk. To finally tell her heartbreaking story - about how a dance became an affair; how a marriage became a murder.

As the two women grow closer, Cassie finds she can't help but confess her own darkest secrets. But when she slowly starts to realise that there might be more to the night of the murder than anyone has realised, can either woman face up to the thing they've been hiding from: the truth?]]> 435 Katie Gutierrez 0063118459 Jaime 3 3.69 2022
author: Katie Gutierrez
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/12
date added: 2023/12/11
shelves:
review:

]]> 13526165
When her daughter Bee claims a family trip to Antarctica as a reward for perfect grades, Bernadette, a fiercely intelligent shut-in, throws herself into preparations for the trip. But worn down by years of trying to live the Seattle life she never wanted, Ms. Fox is on the brink of a meltdown. And after a school fundraiser goes disastrously awry at her hands, she disappears, leaving her family to pick up the pieces--which is exactly what Bee does, weaving together an elaborate web of emails, invoices, and school memos that reveals a secret past Bernadette has been hiding for decades. Where'd You Go Bernadette is an ingenious and unabashedly entertaining novel about a family coming to terms with who they are and the power of a daughter's love for her mother.]]> 330 Maria Semple 0316204277 Jaime 5 3.87 2012
author: Maria Semple
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/07
date added: 2023/12/07
shelves:
review:
I loved the audiobook. I’m not sure I’d rate it so high if it weren’t for the performance.
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Shot through with the indulgent pleasures of life among New York’s one-percenters, Pineapple Street is an addictive, escapist novel that sparkles with wit. Full of recognizable, lovable—if fallible—characters, it’s about the peculiar unknowability of someone else’s family, the miles between the haves and have-nots, and the insanity of first love—all wrapped in a deliciously funny, sharply observed debut of family, love, and class.]]> 304 Jenny Jackson 059349069X Jaime 3 3.49 2023
author: Jenny Jackson
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/03
date added: 2023/12/05
shelves:
review:

]]> 63241104 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]> 309 Ann Patchett 006332752X Jaime 3 3.92 2023
author: Ann Patchett
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/01
date added: 2023/12/02
shelves:
review:

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It began as a crowdsourced collection of names and somehow morphed into an anonymous account posting allegations on social media. Ola would usually be the first to support such a list—she’d retweet it, call for the men to be fired, write article after article. Except this time Michael’s name is on it.]]> 336 Yomi Adegoke 0063274876 Jaime 3 2.98 2023
author: Yomi Adegoke
name: Jaime
average rating: 2.98
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/28
date added: 2023/11/26
shelves:
review:

]]> 59912428 A soul-stirring novel about what we choose to keep from our past, and what we choose to leave behind.

Olivia McAfee knows what it feels like to start over. Her picture-perfect life—living in Boston, married to a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon, raising a beautiful son, Asher—was upended when her husband revealed a darker side. She never imagined she would end up back in her sleepy New Hampshire hometown, living in the house she grew up in, and taking over her father's beekeeping business.

Lily Campanello is familiar with do-overs, too. When she and her mom relocate to Adams, New Hampshire, for her final year of high school, they both hope it will be a fresh start.

And for just a short while, these new beginnings are exactly what Olivia and Lily need. Their paths cross when Asher falls for the new girl in school, and Lily can’t help but fall for him, too. With Ash, she feels happy for the first time. Yet at times, she wonders if she can she trust him completely . . .

Then one day, Olivia receives a phone call: Lily is dead, and Asher is being questioned by the police. Olivia is adamant that her son is innocent. But she would be lying if she didn’t acknowledge the flashes of his father’s temper in him, and as the case against him unfolds, she realizes he’s hidden more than he’s shared with her.

Mad Honey is a riveting novel of suspense, an unforgettable love story, and a moving and powerful exploration of the secrets we keep and the risks we take in order to become ourselves.]]> 464 Jodi Picoult 1984818384 Jaime 0 to-read 4.05 2022
author: Jodi Picoult
name: Jaime
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 112093865 From “weird, scary, ingenious� (The New York Times) stand-up comedian Maria Bamford, a brutally honest and hilariously frenetic memoir about show business, mental health, and the comfort of rigid belief systems—from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, to Suzuki violin training, to Richard Simmons, to 12-step programs.

Maria Bamford is a comedian’s comedian (an outsider among outsiders) and has forever fought to find a place to belong. From struggling with an eating disorder as a child of the 1980s, to navigating a career in the arts (and medical debt and psychiatric institutionalization), she has tried just about every method possible to not only be a part of the world, but to want to be a part of it.

In Bamford’s signature voice, Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult, brings us on a quest to participate in something. With sincerity and transparency, she recounts every anonymous fellowship she has joined (including but not limited Debtors Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, and Overeaters Anonymous), every hypomanic episode (from worrying about selling out under capitalism to enforcing union rules on her Netflix TV show set to protect her health), and every easy 1-to-3-step recipe for fudge in between.

Singular and inimitable, Bamford’s memoir explores what it means to keep going, and to be a member of society (or any group she’s invited to) despite not being very good at it. In turn, she hopes to transform isolating experiences into comedy that will make you feel less alone (without turning into a cult following).]]> 276 Maria Bamford 1982168560 Jaime 4 3.71 2023
author: Maria Bamford
name: Jaime
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/27
date added: 2023/11/23
shelves:
review:

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