en-US Mon, 24 Feb 2025 08:13:27 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 44279110
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

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 0525522131 Tamara 0 currently-reading 3.62 2018
author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Tamara
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/24
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]]> 75715117 Selected as an Evening Standard 'one to watch in 2023'

It's the early 1990s, and in the Irish village of Crossmore, Lucy feels out of place. Despite her fierce friendships, she's always felt this way, and the conventional path of marriage and motherhood doesn't appeal to her at all. Not even with handsome and doting Martin, her closest childhood friend.

Lucy begins to make sense of herself during a long hot summer, when a spark with her school friend Susannah escalates to an all-consuming infatuation, and, very quickly, to a desperate and devastating love.

Fearful of rejection from her small and conservative community, Lucy begins living a double life, hiding the most honest parts of herself in stolen moments with Susannah.

But with the end of school and the opportunity to leave Crossmore looming, Lucy must choose between two places, two people and two futures, each as terrifying as the other. But only one can offer her real happiness.

Sunburn is an astute and tender portrayal of first love, adolescent anxiety and the realities of growing up in a small town where tradition holds people tightly in its grasp.]]> 288 Chloe Michelle Howarth 0857308416 Tamara 0 to-read 4.33 2023
author: Chloe Michelle Howarth
name: Tamara
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/09
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]]> 173404023
Leap years are a strange, enchanted time. And for some, even a single February can be life-changing.

Ricki Wilde has many talents, but being a Wilde isn’t one of them. As the impulsive, artistic daughter of a powerful Atlanta dynasty, she’s the opposite of her famous socialite sisters. Where they’re long-stemmed roses, she’s a dandelion: an adorable bloom that’s actually a weed, born to float wherever the wind blows. In her bones, Ricki knows that somewhere, a different, more exciting life awaits her.

When regal nonagenarian, Ms. Della, invites her to rent the bottom floor of her Harlem brownstone, Ricki jumps at the chance for a fresh beginning. She leaves behind her family, wealth, and chaotic romantic decisions to realize her dream of opening a flower shop. And just beneath the surface of her new neighborhood, the music, stories and dazzling drama of the Harlem Renaissance still simmers.

One evening in February as the heady, curiously off-season scent of night-blooming jasmine fills the air, Ricki encounters a handsome, deeply mysterious stranger who knocks her world off balance in the most unexpected way.

Set against the backdrop of modern Harlem and Renaissance glamour, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is a swoon-worthy love story of two passionate artists drawn to the magic, romance, and opportunity of New York, and whose lives are uniquely and irreversibly linked.]]> 352 Tia Williams 153872670X Tamara 0 to-read 3.98 2024
author: Tia Williams
name: Tamara
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/09
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]]> 49083140
Placed on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, she is offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery, promising to revive her career in the art world and offering an escape from her rut of drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. The news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, centred around Irina’s relationship with her obsessive best friend, and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention�

Boy Parts is the incendiary debut novel from Eliza Clark, a pitch-black comedy both shocking and hilarious, fearlessly exploring the taboo regions of sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century.]]> 304 Eliza Clark 1910312649 Tamara 5 3.74 2020
author: Eliza Clark
name: Tamara
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2020
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/11/03
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]]> 54304105 The Pisces and So Sad Today.

Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting.

Early in the detox, Rachel meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam—by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family—and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.

Pairing superlative emotional insight with unabashed vivid fantasy, Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we as humans can compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is a tender and riotously funny meditation on love, certitude, and the question of what we are all being fed, from one of our major writers on the psyche—both sacred and profane.]]> 304 Melissa Broder 1982142499 Tamara 0 to-read 3.56 2021
author: Melissa Broder
name: Tamara
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/12
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]]> 53285047 We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other Bunny, and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled Smut Salon, and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus Workshop where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.

Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, Electric Literature, and The New York Public Library]]> 305 Mona Awad 0525559752 Tamara 0 to-read 3.43 2019
author: Mona Awad
name: Tamara
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/12
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]]> 157184735 From the critically acclaimed author of Bunny comes a horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep?

For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.

Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut in this surreal descent into the dark side of beauty, envy, grief, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. With black humor and seductive horror, Rouge explores the cult-like nature of the beauty industry—as well as the danger of internalizing its pitiless gaze. Brimming with California sunshine and blood-red rose petals, Rouge holds up a warped mirror to our relationship with mortality, our collective fixation with the surface, and the wondrous, deep longing that might lie beneath.]]> 383 Mona Awad Tamara 0 to-read 3.54 2023
author: Mona Awad
name: Tamara
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/12
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]]> 44294655
But there is something within Dorothy that's different from everyone else, and having suppressed it long enough, she starts to embrace what makes Dorothy uniquely, terrifyingly herself. Recounting her life from a seemingly idyllic farm-to-table childhood, the heights of her career, to the moment she plunges an ice pick into a man's neck on Fire Island, Dorothy Daniels show us what happens when a woman finally embraces her superiority.

A satire of early foodieism, a critique of how gender is defined, and a showcase of virtuoso storytelling, Chelsea G. Summers' A Certain Hunger introduces us to the food world's most charming psychopath and an exciting new voice in fiction.]]> 250 Chelsea G. Summers Tamara 0 to-read 3.73 2019
author: Chelsea G. Summers
name: Tamara
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/12
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]]> 320 417 Gabriel García Márquez Tamara 0 to-read 4.10 1967
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: Tamara
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1967
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/11
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]]> 15796700 477 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Tamara 0 to-read 4.32 2013
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Tamara
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/11
shelves: to-read
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]]> 34273236
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned � from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren � an enigmatic artist and single mother � who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother–daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town � and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at an unexpected and devastating cost . . .]]> 338 Celeste Ng 0735224293 Tamara 0 to-read 4.05 2017
author: Celeste Ng
name: Tamara
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/11
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]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

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

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]> 401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Tamara 0 to-read 4.12 2022
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Tamara
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/11
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]]> 55648820
When Shane and Eva meet unexpectedly at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their past buried traumas, but the eyebrows of New York's Black literati. What no one knows is that twenty years earlier, teenage Eva and Shane spent one crazy, torrid week madly in love. They may be pretending that everything is fine now, but they can't deny their chemistry - or the fact that they've been secretly writing to each other in their books ever since.

Over the next seven days in the middle of a steamy Brooklyn summer, Eva and Shane reconnect, but Eva's not sure how she can trust the man who broke her heart, and she needs to get him out of New York so that her life can return to normal. But before Shane disappears again, there are a few questions she needs answered...

With its keen observations of Black life and the condition of modern motherhood, as well as the consequences of motherless-ness, Seven Days in June is by turns humorous, warm and deeply sensual.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781538719107.]]> 336 Tia Williams Tamara 0 to-read 3.98 2021
author: Tia Williams
name: Tamara
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/11
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]]> 15745753 "So did Jerry Lee Lewis," Eleanor answers.
"I'm not kidding," he says.
"You should be," she says, "we're 16."
"What about Romeo and Juliet?"
"Shallow, confused, then dead."
"I love you," Park says.
"Wherefore art thou," Eleanor answers.
"I'm not kidding," he says.
"You should be."

Set over one school year in 1986, Eleanor & Park is the story of two star-crossed misfits—smart enough to know first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try.]]> 328 Rainbow Rowell 1250012570 Tamara 0 to-read 3.92 2012
author: Rainbow Rowell
name: Tamara
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/11
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]]> 836203 181 Alice Miller 3518374508 Tamara 0 currently-reading 4.03 1979
author: Alice Miller
name: Tamara
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1979
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/04
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 10956 250 Jeffrey Eugenides 0747560595 Tamara 0 currently-reading 3.81 1993
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Tamara
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/29
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 57693262 For readers of Modern Lovers and Conversations with Friends, an addictive, humorous, and poignant debut novel about the shock waves caused by one couple's impulsive marriage.

Twenty-four-year-old British painter Cleo has escaped from England to New York and is still finding her place in the sleepless city when, a few months before her student visa ends, she meets Frank. Twenty years older and a self-made success, Frank's life is full of all the excesses Cleo's lacks. He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint, and the opportunity to apply for a Green Card. But their impulsive marriage irreversibly changes both their lives, and the lives of those close to them, in ways they never could've predicted.

Each compulsively readable chapter explores the lives of Cleo, Frank, and an unforgettable cast of their closest friends and family as they grow up and grow older. Whether it's Cleo's best friend struggling to embrace his gender queerness in the wake of Cleo's marriage, or Frank's financially dependent sister arranging sugar daddy dates to support herself after being cut off, or Cleo and Frank themselves as they discover the trials of marriage and mental illness, each character is as absorbing, and painfully relatable, as the last.

As hilarious as it is heartbreaking, entertaining as it is deeply moving, Cleopatra and Frankenstein marks the entry of a brilliant and bold new talent.]]> 368 Coco Mellors 1635576814 Tamara 4 3.70 2022
author: Coco Mellors
name: Tamara
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/29
date added: 2023/10/29
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]]> 44284906 An alternate cover edition can be found here.

Hello and welcome to my book. Inside you will find:

Ă— The smell of honeysuckle
Ă— Heartbreak
Ă— A French-kissing rabbit
Ă— A haunted house
Ă— Death
Ă— A vagina singing sad old songs
Ă— Young geraniums in an ancient castle
Ă— Birth
Ă— A dog who appears in dreams as a spiritual guide
Ă— Divorce
Ă— Electromagnetic energy fields
Ă— Emotional horniness
Ă— The ghost of a sea captain
Ă— And more

I hope you enjoy these little weirds.

Love,
Jenny Slate]]> 224 Jenny Slate Tamara 0 to-read 3.87 2019
author: Jenny Slate
name: Tamara
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/15
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]]> 33921696 New American Best Friend. Gatwood's poems deftly deconstruct traditional stereotypes. The focus shifts from childhood to adulthood, gender to sexuality, violence to joy. And always and inexorably, the book moves toward celebration, culminating in a series of odes: odes to the body, to tough women, to embracing your own journey in all its failures and triumphs.]]> 55 Olivia Gatwood 1943735107 Tamara 0 to-read 4.30 2017
author: Olivia Gatwood
name: Tamara
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/12
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]]> 20758105 643 Patrick Ness 0763676195 Tamara 0 4.18 2010
author: Patrick Ness
name: Tamara
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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]]> 20758103
Fleeing before a relentless army, Todd has carried a desperately wounded Viola right into the hands of their worst enemy, Mayor Prentiss. Immediately separated from Viola and imprisoned, Todd is forced to learn the ways of the Mayor's new order. But what secrets are hiding just outside of town? And where is Viola? Is she even still alive? And who are the mysterious Answer? And then, one day, the bombs begin to explode...

"The Ask and the Answer" is a tense, shocking and deeply moving novel of resistance under the most extreme pressure. This is the second title in the "Chaos Walking" trilogy.]]> 553 Patrick Ness 0763676179 Tamara 0 4.16 2009
author: Patrick Ness
name: Tamara
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/24
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]]> 20758104 528 Patrick Ness 0763676187 Tamara 0 4.02 2008
author: Patrick Ness
name: Tamara
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/24
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]]> 75602457 Wo geht die Liebe hin, wenn man sagt, sie ist verschwunden?

Eine Frau will ihren Mann verlassen. Nach vielen Jahren Zusammenleben und Ehe ist sie entschlossen und bestürzt Wie konnte es nur dazu kommen? Während sie ihr Fortgehen plant, begibt sie sich in ihren Gedanken weit zurück. Da waren die rauschhaften Jahre der Verliebtheit, an der Universität, zu zweit im Ausland und später mit den kleinen Kindern, aber da gab es auch die Kehrseite � Momente, die zu Wendepunkten wurden und das Scheitern schon vorausahnen ließen. Doch ist etwas überhaupt gescheitert, wenn es so lange dauert? Julia Schoch, literarische Archäologin ihres Lebens, legt frei, was im Alltag eines Paares oft verborgen die Liebesmuster, die Schönheit auch in der Ernüchterung. Ein Loblied auf die Liebe. ]]> 193 Julia Schoch Tamara 0 3.64
author: Julia Schoch
name: Tamara
average rating: 3.64
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]]> 60507310
Ein Roman ĂĽber eine junge Frau, die zusehen muss, wie ihre groĂźe Liebe von einer psychischen Krankheit geradezu verschlungen wird.]]> 608 Lize Spit 3103971249 Tamara 0 4.21 2020
author: Lize Spit
name: Tamara
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/09/24
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]]> 59470083
»Das bisschen Haushalt« � diese unsäglich anstrengende, undankbare Aufgabe kostet viele Frauen bis heute den letzten Nerv. Egal, ob sie berufstätig oder »nur« Hausfrau (und Mutter) sind. Doch unter welchen ökonomisch-gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen konnte sich überhaupt ein solches Rollenmodell etablieren, das Frauen nicht nur in finanzielle Abhängigkeit drängte, sondern enormen psychischen Belastungen aussetzte?

Evke Rulffes erzählt die historische Entwicklung der Hausfrau nach und zeigt, wo sich diese alten Verhältnisse trotz all der politischen Bemühungen um ein gleichberechtigtes Miteinander heute noch wiederfinden, wie sie uns prägen und beeinflussen: Warum haben vor allem Mütter das Gefühl, sie müssen alles alleine schaffen? Warum ist es ihnen unangenehm, sich Hilfe zu organisieren? Und warum bleibt selbst das Organisieren von Hilfe in der Regel bei ihnen hängen?

Pointiert, fundiert und erhellend zeigt uns die Autorin die historischen Gründe für unseren Gender-Gap und was die Erfindung der Hausfrau mit dem schlechten Gewissen der Mutter zu tun hat. Denn »Das bisschen Haushalt« kommt nicht von ungefähr �

Ein Plädoyer für mehr Gerechtigkeit und Wertschätzung von Care- und Hausarbeit]]> 288 Evke Rulffes Tamara 5 3.50 2021
author: Evke Rulffes
name: Tamara
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/24
date added: 2023/09/24
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]]> 48894407
Auf einer Arche, die aus tausend Inseln besteht und wo Menschen mechanisch absurden Gesetzen folgen, muss sich Ophelia allein durch ein immer bedrohlicheres Geflecht an Lügen kämpfen - und kommt auf ihrer Suche nach Thorn der "letzten Wahrheit" riskant nah.]]> 515 Christelle Dabos Tamara 5 4.20 2017
author: Christelle Dabos
name: Tamara
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/24
date added: 2023/09/24
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]]> 58309264
Vom glamourösen Hof der Himmelsburg in das abgründige Universum der Sanduhren und Orte, die gar keine sind � um ihr Leben sowie das ihrer Familie zu retten, muss Ophelia an ihre Grenzen gehen. Und das in einer Welt, in der sie so gut wie niemandem trauen kann, womöglich nicht einmal ihrem zukünftigen Ehemann Thorn?]]> 624 Christelle Dabos Tamara 5 4.34 2015
author: Christelle Dabos
name: Tamara
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/20
date added: 2022/02/16
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]]> 40969531
Ophelia lives on Anima, an ark where objects have souls. Beneath her worn scarf and thick glasses, the young girl hides the ability to read and communicate with the souls of objects, and the power to travel through mirrors. Her peaceful existence on the Ark of Anima is disrupted when she is promised in marriage to Thorn, from the powerful Dragon clan. Ophelia must leave her family and follow her fiancée to the floating capital on the distant Ark of the Pole. Why has she been chosen? Why must she hide her true identity? Though she doesn’t know it yet, she has become a pawn in a deadly plot.]]> 446 Christelle Dabos 1787701425 Tamara 5 3.90 2013
author: Christelle Dabos
name: Tamara
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/06
date added: 2022/02/16
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]]>