en-US Wed, 08 Nov 2023 12:02:33 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 76355 Little Girls in Pretty Boxes portrays the horrors endured by girls at the hands of their coaches and sometimes their own families. An acclaimed expose that has already helped reform Olympic sports—now updated to reflect the latest developments in women's gymnastics and figure skating—it continues to plead for sanity, safety, and an end to our national obsession: winning at any cost.]]> 269 Joan Ryan 0446676829 Emily 0 3.96 1995
author: Joan Ryan
name: Emily
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at: 2023/11/08
date added: 2023/11/08
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]]> 125110199 While covering a news story together, their fiery clashes turn into first love. But when things fall apart, they’re left hurting.
A year later, they discover they’re both interning for the same university student paper. Awkward isn’t even the start of the tension between them. One thing that hasn’t died is the attraction between them. Still bruised and battling expectations from friends and family, can they be brave enough to repair what broke them?
An opposites attract, young adult lesbian romance about finding a way to fight for your future.]]> 354 Emily O’Beirne Emily 5 Well, I wrote it, so.... 3.93
author: Emily O’Beirne
name: Emily
average rating: 3.93
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/14
date added: 2023/09/14
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Well, I wrote it, so....
]]> 22896551
What if everything you knew about yourself changed in an instant?

When Kristin Lattimer is voted homecoming queen, it seems like another piece of her ideal life has fallen into place. She's a champion hurdler with a full scholarship to college and she's madly in love with her boyfriend. In fact, she's decided that she's ready to take things to the next level with him.

But Kristin's first time isn't the perfect moment she's planned—something is very wrong. A visit to the doctor reveals the truth: Kristin is intersex, which means that though she outwardly looks like a girl, she has male chromosomes, not to mention boy "parts."

Dealing with her body is difficult enough, but when her diagnosis is leaked to the whole school, Kristin's entire identity is thrown into question. As her world unravels, can she come to terms with her new self?]]> 328 I.W. Gregorio 0062335316 Emily 0 to-read 3.84 2015
author: I.W. Gregorio
name: Emily
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 43352954 Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.

Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There's still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war.]]> 209 Amal El-Mohtar Emily 0 to-read 3.87 2019
author: Amal El-Mohtar
name: Emily
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> 56179360
Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the to escape damnation, she must entice seven other violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. She has already delivered six. When Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender runaway, catches Shizuka's ear with her wild talent, Shizuka can almost feel the curse lifting. She's found her final candidate. But in a donut shop off a bustling highway in the San Gabriel Valley, Shizuka meets Lan Tran, retired starship captain, interstellar refugee, and mother of four. Shizuka doesn't have time for crushes or coffee dates, what with her very soul on the line, but Lan's kind smile and eyes like stars might just redefine a soul's worth. And maybe something as small as a warm donut is powerful enough to break a curse as vast as the California coastline. As the lives of these three women become entangled by chance and fate, a story of magic, identity, curses, and hope begins, and a family worth crossing the universe for is found.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.]]> 372 Ryka Aoki 1250789060 Emily 0 4.03 2021
author: Ryka Aoki
name: Emily
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2023/09/05
date added: 2023/09/05
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]]> 38452340 'A scorchingly intelligent first novel' New York Times'Spellbinding' New Yorker'Thrilling' GuardianIn New York, Alice, a young editor, begins an affair with Ezra Blazer, a world-famous, much older writer. At Heathrow airport, Amar, an Iraqi-American economist en route to Kurdistan, is detained by immigration. Somehow their lives are connected, in this unconventional love story that has things to say about all of contemporary life.]]> 277 Lisa Halliday 1783783613 Emily 0 3.51 2018
author: Lisa Halliday
name: Emily
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2023/09/05
date added: 2023/09/05
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]]> 36342706 A biting satire of the false promise of reinvention, by a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and Granta Best Young American Novelist

I'm still trying to make the dream possible: still might finish my cleaning project, still might sign up for that yoga class, still might, still might. I step into the shower and almost faint, an image of taking the day by the throat and bashing its head against the wall floating in my mind.

Thirty-year-old Millie just can't pull it together. Misanthropic and morose, she spends her days killing time at a thankless temp job until she can return home to her empty apartment, where she oscillates wildly between self-recrimination and mild delusion, fixating on all the little ways she might change her life. Then she watches TV until she drops off to sleep, and the cycle begins again.

When the possibility of a full-time job offer arises, it seems to bring the better life she's envisioning - one that involves nicer clothes, fresh produce, maybe even financial independence - within reach. But with it also comes the paralyzing realization, lurking just beneath the surface, of just how hollow that vision has become.

Darkly hilarious and devastating, The New Me is a dizzying descent into the mind of a young woman trapped in the funhouse of American consumer culture.]]> 193 Halle Butler 0143133608 Emily 0 3.31 2019
author: Halle Butler
name: Emily
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2023/08/01
date added: 2023/08/01
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]]> 52900615
At 3.04pm on a hot, sticky day in June, Bess finds out she's pregnant.

She could tell her social worker Henry, but he's useless.

She should tell her foster mother, Lisa, but she won't understand.

She really ought to tell Boy, but she hasn't spoken to him in weeks.

Bess knows more than anyone that love doesn't come without conditions.

But this isn't a love story...]]> 336 Kirsty Capes 1398700088 Emily 0 3.90 2021
author: Kirsty Capes
name: Emily
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/19
date added: 2023/07/19
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]]> 58298079
In spring of 2011, a young Australian man travels to the USA.

It is a quest of sorts, a quest as old as narrative itself: a young man striking out from home in search of experience and culture, which he associates with that talismanic word, America.

Beginning in the excessive, uncanny-familiar glamour and plenitude of New York City, Will crashes with expat chef and former nemesis Paul, and his girlfriend Justine, a rising star in the art scene. From here, he embarks on a doomed road trip into the American heartland, where he meets Wayne Gage. This charismatic, fast-living and deeply damaged Vietnam veteran, collector of exotic animals and would-be spirit guide, draws Will towards the dark conclusion of his journey.

Wild Abandon is a headlong tumble through the falling world of end-days capitalism, a haunting, hyperreal snapshot of our own strange times and what it means to be a tourist, or indeed a human, within them.]]> 449 Emily Bitto 1760879134 Emily 0 Also, the writing style feels excessive—like to the point of making the writing inaccessible to people who might not posses the vocab. It’s like it doesn’t want to be read.]]> 3.26 2021
author: Emily Bitto
name: Emily
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/06
date added: 2023/07/06
shelves:
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Unfortunate match between poor characterisation and strong writing. Hard to feel anything for these characters. Wayne never existed for me, and Will was, of course, intolerable. The only character I had a sense of was JT. And maybe Paul.
Also, the writing style feels excessive—like to the point of making the writing inaccessible to people who might not posses the vocab. It’s like it doesn’t want to be read.
]]> 52539553 A smart, mysterious and heartbreaking novel centred on two sets of sisters whose lives are braided together when tragedy changes them forever. From the award-winning author of The Golden Mean.

Saskia and Jenny are twins who are alike only in appearance. Saskia is a hard-working grad student whose interests are solely academic, while Jenny, an interior designer, is glamourous, thrill-seeking, capricious and narcissistic. Still, when Jenny is severely injured in an accident, Saskia puts her life on hold to be with her sister.

Sara and Mattie are sisters with a difficult relationship. Mattie, the younger sister, is affectionate, curious and intellectually disabled. As soon as Sara is able, she leaves home, in pursuit of a life of the mind and the body: she loves nothing more than fine wines, sensual perfumes, and expensive clothing. But when their mother dies, Sara inherits the duty of caring for her sister. Arriving at the house one day, she finds out that Mattie has married Robert, her wealthy mother's handyman. Though Mattie seems happy, Sara cannot let this go, forcing the annulment of the marriage and the banishment of Robert. With him out of the picture, though, she has no choice but to become her sister's keeper, sacrificing her own happiness and Mattie's too. When Robert turns up again, another tragedy happens. The waves from these events eventually engulf Sara and Saskia, sisters in mourning, in a quest for revenge.

Consent is a startling, moving, thought-provoking novel on the complexities of familial duty and on how love can become entangled with guilt, resentment and regret.]]> 224 Annabel Lyon 0345811453 Emily 0 3.49 2020
author: Annabel Lyon
name: Emily
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2023/07/06
date added: 2023/07/06
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]]> 9429864
Luckily, she has a best friend, a similarly undiscovered girl with whom she shares the everyday adventures of a 1970s American girlhood, incidents through which a world is revealed, and character is forged.

In time, their friendship is tested-- by their families' claims on them, by a clique of popular girls who stumble upon them as if they were found objects, and by the first, startling, subversive intimations of womanhood.

With dry wit and piercing observation, Jo Ann Beard shows us that in the seemingly quiet streets of America's innumerable Zanesvilles is a world of wonders, and that within the souls of the awkward and the overlooked often burns something radiant and unforgettable.]]> 287 Jo Ann Beard 0316084476 Emily 0 3.61 2011
author: Jo Ann Beard
name: Emily
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/26
date added: 2023/06/26
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]]> 35335134 A lesbian romance about the lies we tell ourselves.

108,000 words
Themes: Australia · media mogul boss · New York · newspaper · reporter]]> 339 Lee Winter 3955339009 Emily 0 4.32 2017
author: Lee Winter
name: Emily
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/22
date added: 2023/06/22
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]]> 28815371
"All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season."

It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. They are young; it's not serious. But the pregnancy that results from this teen romance—and the subsequent cover-up—will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. As Nadia hides her secret from everyone, including Aubrey, her God-fearing best friend, the years move quickly. Soon, Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey are full-fledged adults and still living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love triangle they must carefully maneuver, and dogged by the constant, nagging question: What if they had chosen differently? The possibilities of the road not taken are a relentless haunt.

In entrancing, lyrical prose, The Mothers asks whether a "what if" can be more powerful than an experience itself. If, as time passes, we must always live in servitude to the decisions of our younger selves, to the communities that have parented us, and to the decisions we make that shape our lives forever.]]> 288 Brit Bennett 0399184511 Emily 0 3.88 2016
author: Brit Bennett
name: Emily
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/22
date added: 2023/06/22
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]]> 54756850
Delilah Green swore she would never go back to Bright Falls—nothing is there for her but memories of a lonely childhood where she was little more than a burden to her cold and distant stepfamily. Her life is in New York, with her photography career finally gaining steam and her bed never empty. Sure, it’s a different woman every night, but that’s just fine with her.
Ěý
When Delilah’s estranged stepsister, Astrid, pressures her into photographing her wedding with a guilt trip and a five-figure check, Delilah finds herself back in the godforsaken town that she used to call home. She plans to breeze in and out, but then she sees Claire Sutherland, one of Astrid’s stuck-up besties, and decides that maybe there’s some fun (and a little retribution) to be had in Bright Falls, after all.
Ěý
Having raised her eleven-year-old daughter mostly on her own while dealing with her unreliable ex and running a bookstore, Claire Sutherland depends upon a life without surprises. And Delilah Green is an unwelcome surprise…at first. Though they’ve known each other for years, they don’t really know each other—so Claire is unsettled when Delilah figures out exactly what buttons to push. When they’re forced together during a gauntlet of wedding preparations—including a plot to save Astrid from her horrible fiancé—Claire isn’t sure she has the strength to resist Delilah’s charms. Even worse, she’s starting to think she doesn’t want to...]]> 375 Ashley Herring Blake 0593336402 Emily 0 4.06 2022
author: Ashley Herring Blake
name: Emily
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/21
date added: 2023/06/21
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]]> 58749443 372 Tegan Quin Emily 0 4.29 2019
author: Tegan Quin
name: Emily
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2022/09/23
date added: 2023/06/09
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]]> 58735038 A novel about a young woman's life-altering affair with a much older, married woman.

Mallory is a freshman in college, reeling from her mother's recent death, when she encounters the woman. She sees her for the first time at the university's gym, immediately entranced. Soon, they meet, drawn by an electric tension and shared past wounds; before long, they begin sleeping together in secret. Self-possessed, successful, brilliant, and aloof--the woman is everything Mallory wants...and wants to be. Desiring not only the woman but also the idea of who she is when they're together, Mallory retreats from the rest of the world, solidifying a sense of aloneness that has both haunted and soothed her since childhood and will continue to do so for years even after the affair ends. As an adult, Mallory must decide whether to stay safely in isolation or step fully into the world, to confront what the woman meant to her and how their relationship shaped her, for better or worse.

Mallory's life is transformed by loss and by love and by discovering who she is while enduring both. In this enthralling debut novel, the complexities of influence, obsession, and admiration reveal how desire and its consequences can alter the trajectory of someone's life.
]]> 224 Michelle Hart 0593329678 Emily 0 to-read 3.53 2022
author: Michelle Hart
name: Emily
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/06/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> 62075259
After the death of her wife, Shelby feels more alone than ever—until she meets Cammie, a charismatic woman unafraid of what anyone else thinks and whose own history of trauma draws Shelby close. When Cammie is fired from her job and admits she is in treatment for kidney cancer, Shelby devotes all her time to helping Cammie thrive. But Shelby’s intuition tells her there are things about Cammie’s past that don’t add up. Could the realest thing about Cammie be that she’s actually a scammer?

Gibson is almost forty, fresh from a divorce and deeply depressed. Then he meets and falls in love with Cammie. Suddenly, he’s having the best sex of his life with a woman so attractive he’s stunned she even glanced his way, and for the first time ever he feels truly known. This is the kind of desire and passion that musicians have been writing love songs about for centuries. But Gibson’s friends are wary of Cammie, and eventually he too has to admit that Cammie’s dramatic life can feel a bit over the top.

When Shelby and Gibson find out Cammie is a pathological liar, they struggle to understand what they really want from her—sometimes they want to help her heal from whatever causes her to invent reality, and sometimes they want revenge. But the biggest question of all is: how honest can Shelby and Gibson be about their own characters?]]> 208 Zoe Whittall 1524799440 Emily 0 to-read 3.42 2023
author: Zoe Whittall
name: Emily
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/05/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> 61111274 A queer hijabi Muslim immigrant survives her coming-of-age by drawing strength and hope from stories in the Quran in this daring, provocative, and radically hopeful memoir.

When fourteen-year-old Lamya H realizes she has a crush on her teacher--her female teacher--she covers up her attraction, an attraction she can't yet name, by playing up her roles as overachiever and class clown. Born in South Asia, she moved to the Middle East at a young age and has spent years feeling out of place, like her own desires and dreams don't matter, and it's easier to hide in plain sight. To disappear. But one day in Quran class, she reads a passage about Maryam that changes everything: when Maryam learned that she was pregnant, she insisted no man had touched her. Could Maryam, uninterested in men, be . . . like Lamya?

From that moment on, Lamya makes sense of her struggles and triumphs by comparing her experiences with some of the most famous stories in the Quran. She juxtaposes her coming out with Musa liberating his people from the pharoah; asks if Allah, who is neither male nor female, might instead be nonbinary; and, drawing on the faith and hope Nuh needed to construct his ark, begins to build a life of her own--ultimately finding that the answer to her lifelong quest for community and belonging lies in owning her identity as a queer, devout Muslim immigrant.

This searingly intimate memoir in essays, spanning Lamya's childhood to her arrival in the United States for college through early-adult life in New York City, tells a universal story of courage, trust, and love, celebrating what it means to be a seeker and an architect of one's own life.]]> 284 Lamya H. 0593448766 Emily 0 to-read 4.47 2023
author: Lamya H.
name: Emily
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/05/25
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]]> 51236405 Award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson returns with a bold reimagination of the novel, one that combines narrative and poetic fragments through a careful and fierce reclamation of Anishinaabe aesthetics.

Mashkawaji (they/them) lies frozen in the ice, remembering a long-ago time of hopeless connection and now finding freedom and solace in isolated suspension. They introduce us to the seven main characters: Akiwenzii, the old man who represents the narrator’s will; Ninaatig, the maple tree who represents their lungs; Mindimooyenh, the old woman who represents their conscience; Sabe, the giant who represents their marrow; Adik, the caribou who represents their nervous system; Asin, the human who represents their eyes and ears; and Lucy, the human who represents their brain. Each attempts to commune with the unnatural urban-settler world, a world of SpongeBob Band-Aids, Ziploc baggies, Fjällräven Kånken backpacks, and coffee mugs emblazoned with institutional logos. And each searches out the natural world, only to discover those pockets that still exist are owned, contained, counted, and consumed. Cut off from nature, the characters are cut off from their natural selves.

Noopiming is Anishinaabemowin for “in the bush,� and the title is a response to English Canadian settler and author Susanna Moodie’s 1852 memoir Roughing It in the Bush. To read Simpson’s work is an act of decolonization, degentrification, and willful resistance to the perpetuation and dissemination of centuries-old colonial myth-making. It is a lived experience. It is a breaking open of the self to a world alive with people, animals, ancestors, and spirits, who are all busy with the daily labours of healing � healing not only themselves, but their individual pieces of the network, of the web that connects them all together. Enter and be changed.]]> 368 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 1487007647 Emily 0 to-read 4.23 2020
author: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
name: Emily
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/05/25
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]]> 40539136 The award-winning, bestselling French novel by Philippe Besson about an affair between two teenage boys in 1984 France, translated with subtle beauty and haunting lyricism by the iconic and internationally acclaimed actress/writer Molly Ringwald.

We drive at high speed along back roads, through woods, vineyards, and oat fields. The bike smells like gasoline and makes a lot of noise, and sometimes I’m frightened when the wheels slip on the gravel on the dirt road, but the only thing that matters is that I’m holding on to him, that I’m holding on to him outside.

Just outside a hotel in Bordeaux, Philippe chances upon a young man who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back at the relationship he’s never forgotten, a hidden affair with a gorgeous boy named Thomas during their last year of high school. Without ever acknowledging they know each other in the halls, they steal time to meet in secret, carrying on a passionate, world-altering affair.

Dazzlingly rendered in English by Ringwald in her first-ever translation, Besson’s powerfully moving coming-of-age story captures the eroticism and tenderness of first love—and the heartbreaking passage of time.]]> 149 Philippe Besson 1501197878 Emily 0 4.25 2017
author: Philippe Besson
name: Emily
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2023/05/23
date added: 2023/05/23
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]]> 61273082
What would you do if you forgot the love of your life ever even existed?

Stevie and Nora had a love. A secret, epic, once-in-a-lifetime kind of love. They also had a plan: to leave their small, ultra-conservative town and families behind after graduation and move to California, where they could finally stop hiding that love.

But then Stevie has a terrible fall. And when she comes to, she can remember nothing of the last two years—not California, not coming to terms with her sexuality, not even Nora. Suddenly, Stevie finds herself in a life she doesn’t quite understand, one where she’s estranged from her parents, drifting away from her friends, lying about the hours she works, dating a boy she can’t remember crushing on, and headed towards a future that isn’t at all what her fifteen-year-old self would have envisioned.

And Nora finds herself…forgotten. Can the two beat the odds a second time and find their way back together when “together� itself is just a lost memory?]]> 320 Alyson Derrick 166590237X Emily 0 4.24 2023
author: Alyson Derrick
name: Emily
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/05/11
date added: 2023/05/11
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]]> 58284103 Run Towards the Danger explores memory and the dialogue between her past and her present

These are the most dangerous stories of my life. The ones I have avoided, the ones I haven't told, the ones that have kept me awake on countless nights. As these stories found echoes in my adult life, and then went another, better way than they did in childhood, they became lighter and easier to carry.

Sarah Polley's work as an actor, screenwriter, and director is celebrated for its honesty, complexity, and deep humanity. She brings all those qualities, along with her exquisite storytelling chops, to these six essays. Each one captures a piece of Polley's life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory, the mutability of reality in the mind, and the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person she is now but was not then. As Polley writes, the past and present are in a "reciprocal pressure dance."

Polley contemplates stories from her own life ranging from stage fright to high-risk childbirth to endangerment and more. After struggling with the aftermath of a concussion, Polley met a specialist who gave her wholly new advice: to recover from a traumatic injury, she had to retrain her mind to strength by charging towards the very activities that triggered her symptoms. With riveting clarity, she shows the power of applying that same advice to other areas of her life in order to find a path forward, a way through. Rather than live in a protective crouch, she had to run towards the danger.

In this extraordinary book, Polley explores what it is to live in one's body, in a constant state of becoming, learning, and changing.]]> 272 Sarah Polley 0593300351 Emily 0 4.29 2022
author: Sarah Polley
name: Emily
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/05/03
date added: 2023/05/03
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]]> 52219386 This story is, in short, about a monster meeting another monster.Ěý

One of the monsters is me.

Yunjae was born with a brain condition called Alexithymia that makes it hard for him to feel emotions like fear or anger. He does not have friends—the two almond-shaped neurons located deep in his brain have seen to that—but his devoted mother and grandmother aren’t fazed by his condition. Their little home above his mother’s used bookstore is decorated with colorful post-it notes that remind him when to smile, when to say "thank you," and when to laugh. Yunjae grows up content, even happy, with his small family in this quiet, peaceful space.

Then on Christmas Eve—Yunjae’s sixteenth birthday—everything changes. A shocking act of random violence shatters his world, leaving him alone and on his own. Struggling to cope with his loss, Yunjae retreats into silent isolation, until troubled teenager Gon arrives at his school and begins to bully Yunjae.Ěý

Against all odds, tormentor and victim learn they have more in common than they realized. Gon is stumped by Yunjae’s impassive calm, while Yunjae thinks if he gets to know the hotheaded Gon, he might learn how to experience true feelings. Drawn by curiosity, the two strike up a surprising friendship. As Yunjae begins to open his life to new people—including a girl at school—something slowly changes inside him. And when Gon suddenly finds his life in danger, it is Yunjae who will step outside of every comfort zone he has created to perhaps become a most unlikely hero.Ěý

The Emissary meets The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime in this poignant and triumphant story about how love, friendship, and persistence can change a life forever.]]> 272 Sohn Won-Pyung 0062961373 Emily 0 to-read 4.16 2017
author: Sohn Won-Pyung
name: Emily
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/04/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 49228706
PSYCHIATRIST: So how can I help you?

ME: I don't know, I'm � what's the word � depressed? Do I have to go into detail?

Baek Sehee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing a psychiatrist about her - what to call it? - depression? She feels persistently low, anxious, endlessly self-doubting, but also highly judgmental of others. She hides her feelings well at work and with friends, performing the calmness her lifestyle demands. The effort is exhausting, overwhelming, and keeps her from forming deep relationships. This can't be normal. But if she's so hopeless, why can she always summon a yen for her favorite street food: the hot, spicy rice cake, tteokbokki? Is this just what life is like?

Recording her dialogues with her psychiatrist over a twelve-week period, and expanding on each session with her own reflective micro-essays, Baek begins to disentangle the feedback loops, knee-jerk reactions, and harmful behaviors that keep her locked in a cycle of self-abuse. Part memoir, part self-help book, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki is a book to keep close and to reach for in times of darkness. It will appeal to anyone who has ever felt alone or unjustified in their everyday despair.


—â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä�


Aku: Bagaimana caranya agar bisa mengubah pikiran bahwa saya ini standar dan biasa saja?

Psikiater: Memangnya hal itu merupakan masalah yang harus diperbaiki?

Aku: Iya, karena saya ingin mencintai diri saya sendiri.

-----

I Want To Die But I Want To Eat Tteokpokki adalah esai yang berisi tentang pertanyaan, penilaian, saran, nasihat, dan evaluasi diri yang bertujuan agar pembaca bisa menerima dan mencintai dirinya.

Buku self improvement ini mendapatkan sambutan baik karena pembaca meraskan hal yang sama dengan kisah Baek Se Hee sehingga buku ini mendapatkan predikat bestseller di Korea Selatan.]]> 232 Baek Se-hee 6237351035 Emily 0 to-read 3.26 2018
author: Baek Se-hee
name: Emily
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/04/12
shelves: to-read
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]]> 57846774 They say it takes 28 Questions to fall in love. Then what?

'Funny, clever, sad without self-pity, and with an uplift that is the writing itself'ĚýJeanette Winterson

'If it's an addictive read you're after, consider this your next stop.'Ěý Stylist
'An intensely beautiful cleverly layered story of young queer love. An intense but entertaining read. Highly recommend.� Juno Roche

A queerĚýWhen Harry Met SallyĚýfor the Sally Rooney Generation

�Reader, imagine yielding to someone with a power so strong she has the ability to slice time. Before. Her. After.�
Ěý
When first-year music student Amalia stumbles into her Oxford college bar, she has no idea that everything is about to change. Seated across from her is Alex, a velvety-voiced fellow Australian with eyes the colour of her native sky. They strike up a friendship that is immediate - its intensity both thrilling and terrifying.
Ěý
As the days and weeks go by, they spend more and more time philosophising, hypothesising, questioning everything. There is nothing they cannot talk about, except the one thing that matters most. Dare they risk a romantic entanglement if it threatens this most perfect of friendships?

Set across four years and five cities, and suffused with music, literature, art, dance, sex, and the exquisite pain and pleasure of first love, 28 QuestionsĚýis a passionate and unforgettable first novel about love in all its guises, growing up, and figuring out who you are along the way.Ěý

Ěý]]> 368 Indyana Schneider 1398501115 Emily 0 3.87 2022
author: Indyana Schneider
name: Emily
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/04/10
date added: 2023/04/10
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]]> 60701439
One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in town and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship…]]> 336 Jen Beagin 1982153083 Emily 0 3.69 2023
author: Jen Beagin
name: Emily
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/03/23
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]]> 50175419 An intimate, bracingly intelligent debut novel about a millennial Irish expat who becomes entangled in a love triangle with a male banker and a female lawyer

Ava moved to Hong Kong to find happiness, but so far, it isn’t working out. Since she left Dublin, she’s been spending her days teaching English to rich children—she’s been assigned the grammar classes because she lacks warmth—and her nights avoiding petulant roommates in her cramped apartment.

When Ava befriends Julian, a witty British banker, he offers a shortcut into a lavish life her meager salary could never allow. Ignoring her feminist leanings and her better instincts, Ava finds herself moving into Julian’s apartment, letting him buy her clothes, and, eventually, striking up a sexual relationship with him. When Julian’s job takes him back to London, she stays put, unsure where their relationship stands.

Enter Edith. A Hong Kong–born lawyer, striking and ambitious, Edith takes Ava to the theater and leaves her tulips in the hallway. Ava wants to be her—and wants her. Ava has been carefully pretending that Julian is nothing more than an absentee roommate, so when Julian announces that he’s returning to Hong Kong, she faces a fork in the road. Should she return to the easy compatibility of her life with Julian or take a leap into the unknown with Edith?

Politically alert, heartbreakingly raw, and dryly funny, Exciting TimesĚýis thrillingly attuned to the great freedoms and greater uncertainties of modern love. In stylish, uncluttered prose, Naoise Dolan dissects the personal and financial transactions that make up a life—and announces herself as a singular new voice.]]> 243 Naoise Dolan 0062968742 Emily 0 3.20 2020
author: Naoise Dolan
name: Emily
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/02/23
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]]> 57693648 The debut adult novel by the bestselling and award-winning YA author Nina LaCour, following two women on a star-crossed journey toward each other

When Sara Foster runs away from home at sixteen, she leaves behind not only the losses that have shattered her world but the girl she once was, capable of trust and intimacy. Years later, in Los Angeles, she is a sought-after bartender, renowned as much for her brilliant cocktails as for the mystery that clings to her. Across the city, Emilie Dubois is in a holding pattern. In her seventh year and fifth major as an undergraduate, she yearns for the beauty and community her Creole grandparents cultivated but is unable to commit. On a whim, she takes a job arranging flowers at the glamorous restaurant Yerba Buena and embarks on an affair with the married owner.

When Sara catches sight of Emilie one morning at Yerba Buena, their connection is immediate. But the damage both women carry, and the choices they have made, pulls them apart again and again. When Sara's old life catches up to her, upending everything she thought she wanted just as Emilie has finally gained her own sense of purpose, they must decide if their love is more powerful than their pasts.

At once exquisite and expansive, astonishing in its humanity and heart, Yerba Buena is a love story for our time and a propulsive journey through the lives of two women finding their way in the world.]]> 304 Nina LaCour 1250810469 Emily 0 Ugh I love her writing. 3.85 2022
author: Nina LaCour
name: Emily
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2023/01/30
date added: 2023/01/30
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Ugh I love her writing.
]]> 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 Emily 0 3.56 2021
author: Melissa Broder
name: Emily
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2023/01/01
date added: 2023/01/28
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]]> 44088751 In the tradition of audacious and wryly funny novels like The Idiot and Convenience Store Woman comes the wildly original coming-of-age story of a pregnant pizza delivery girl who becomes obsessed with one of her customers.

Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial about it all. She's grieving the death of her father (who she has more in common with than she'd like to admit), avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future.

Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighborhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickled covered pizzas for her son's happiness. As one woman looks toward motherhood and the other towards middle age, the relationship between the two begins to blur in strange, complicated, and ultimately heartbreaking ways.

Bold, tender, propulsive, and unexpected in countless ways, Jean Kyoung Frazier's Pizza Girl is a moving and funny portrait of a flawed, unforgettable young woman as she tries to find her place in the world.]]> 208 Jean Kyoung Frazier 038554572X Emily 0 3.36 2020
author: Jean Kyoung Frazier
name: Emily
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2023/01/25
date added: 2023/01/25
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]]> 59808040 Like Jenny Lawson and Caitlin Moran, Emmy-nominated actress and writer Betty Gilpin delivers a lightning-strike dispatch of hilarious, intimate, and luminous essays on how to navigate this weird and wondrous life.

Betty Gilpin has a brain full of women. There’s Blanche VonFuckery, Ingrid St. Rash, and a host of others—some cowering in sweatpants, some howling plans for revolution, and some, oh God, and some…slowly vomiting up a crow without breaking eye contact? Jesus. These women take turns at the wheel. That’s why Betty feels like a million selves. With a raised eyebrow and a soul-scalpel, she tells us how she got this way.

Betty has depression, Betty has a dream, Betty has tits the size of printers. She has debilitating shame and then, impossibly, a tiny voice saying what if. She takes us from wild dissections of modern womanhood to boarding school to the glossy cringe of Hollywood. We laugh through the failures (monologue to beagle! Ancient mentors proposing fellatio!) and quietly hope with her for the dream. Whether that dream is love or liberation or enough iMDb credits to tase the demon snapping at her ankles, we won’t know until the shit-fanning end. There’s Hamlet, there’s self-sabotage, there’s PTSD from turkey. Stunning, candid, and laugh-out-loud funny, All the Women in My Brain is perfect for any reader who’s ever felt like they were more, or at least weirder, than the world expected.]]> 256 Betty Gilpin 1250795788 Emily 0 to-read 3.92 2022
author: Betty Gilpin
name: Emily
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/03
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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 Emily 0 to-read 3.87 2019
author: Jenny Slate
name: Emily
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/01/03
shelves: to-read
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]]> 31395589 Notes of a Crocodile depicts the coming-of-age of a group of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan's most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, Qiu Miaojin's cult classic novel is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and countercultural icon.

Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend.

Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.]]> 242 Qiu Miaojin 168137076X Emily 0 3.84 1994
author: Qiu Miaojin
name: Emily
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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]]> 1963101


Contributors: Chu T'ien-Wen, Qiu Miaojin, Chu T'ien-Hsin, Hsu Yoshen, Lin Yuyi, Lin Chun Ying, Chen Xue, Hong Ling, Chi Tawei, Wu Jiwen.]]> 256 Fran Martin 0824826612 Emily 0 to-read 3.70 2003
author: Fran Martin
name: Emily
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/12/29
shelves: to-read
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]]> 55466148
Electrifying athletes like Olga Korbut and Nadia Com�neci helped make women’s artistic gymnastics one of the most popular events in the Olympic Games. But the transition of gymnastics from a women’s sport to a girl’s sport in the 1970s also laid the foundation for a system of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of gymnasts around the world. Georgia Cervin offers a unique history of women's gymnastics, examining how the high-stakes diplomatic rivalry of the Cold War created a breeding ground for exploitation. Yet, a surprising spirit of international collaboration arose to decide the social values and image of femininity demonstrated by the sport. Cervin also charts the changes in style, equipment, training, and participants that transformed the sport, as explosive athleticism replaced balletic grace and gymnastics dominance shifted from East to West. Sweeping and revelatory, Degrees of Difficulty tells a story of international friction, unexpected cooperation, and the legacy of abuse and betrayal created by the win-at-all-cost attitudes of the Cold War.]]> 304 Georgia Cervin 0252043774 Emily 0 3.89
author: Georgia Cervin
name: Emily
average rating: 3.89
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rating: 0
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]]> 52516406 High school nemeses fall in love in this queer YA rom com perfect for fans of Becky Albertalli and Casey McQuiston.

After losing spectacularly to her ex-girlfriend in their first game since their break up, Scottie Zajac gets into a fender bender with the worst possible person: her nemesis, the incredibly beautiful and incredibly mean Irene Abraham. Things only get worse when their nosey, do-gooder moms get involved and the girls are forced to carpool together until Irene’s car gets out of the shop.

Their bumpy start only gets bumpier the more time they spend together. But when an opportunity presents itself for Scottie to get back at her toxic ex (and climb her school’s social ladder at the same time), she bribes Irene into playing along. Hijinks, heartbreak, and gay fake-dating scheme for the ages. From author Kelly Quindlen comes a new laugh-out-loud romp through the ups and downs of teen romance.]]> 288 Kelly Quindlen 1250209161 Emily 0 3.93 2021
author: Kelly Quindlen
name: Emily
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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]]> 2469188 Updated with a New Introduction

Fanciful dreams of becoming the next Nadia Comaneci led Jennifer Sey to become a gymnast at the age of six. Her early success propelled her family to sacrifice everything to help her become, by age 11, one of America’s elite. But as she set her sights higher and higher, Jennifer began to change, setting her needs, her health, and her well-being aside in the name of winning. And the adults in her life refused to notice her downward spiral.

Now, Sey reveals the tarnish beneath her gold medals. A powerful portrait of intensity and drive, eating disorders and stage parents, abusive coaches and manipulative businessmen, Chalked Up is the story of a young girl whose dreams would become subsumed by the adults around her.]]> 292 Jennifer Sey 0061351466 Emily 0 3.76 2008
author: Jennifer Sey
name: Emily
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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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 Emily 0 4.12 2022
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Emily
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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]]> 27274399 A “delightful and insightful� (The Wall Street Journal) account of the controversial world of gymnastics and its scoring system, which has propelled powerful and athletic American gymnasts to the top of the sport.It was the team finals of women’s gymnastics in the 2012 London Olympics and McKayla Maroney was on top of her game. The sixteen-year-old US gymnast was performing arguably the best vault of all time, launching herself unimaginably high into the air and sticking a flawless landing. But when her score came, many were 16.233. Three tenths of a point in deductions stood between her and a perfect score. But if that vault wasn’t perfection, what was? For years, gymnastics was scored on a 10.0 scale. During this era, more than 100 “perfect� scores were awarded in major international competitions. But when the 10.0 scoring system caused major judging controversies at the 2004 Olympics, international elite gymnastics made the switch to the open-ended scoring system it uses today, which values both difficulty and technical execution, making perfect scores a thing of the past—and forever altering the sport in the process. With insight, flair, and boundless love for the sport, gymnastics insider Dvora Meyers answers questions that fans have been asking since the last perfect score was handed out over twenty years ago. She reveals why successful female gymnasts like 2016 Olympics All Around medalists Simone Biles and Aly Raisman are older and more athletic than they have ever been before, how the United States became the gymnastics powerhouse it is today, and what the future of gymnastics may hold. Bolstered by dozens of exclusive interviews with professionals representing every aspect of the sport, The End of the Perfect 10 is “the Simone Biles of gymnastics books� (Slate), a captivating look at elite gymnastics� entry into the uncharted world of imperfection—and how it has created stronger athletes than ever before.]]> 336 Dvora Meyers 1501101404 Emily 2
This connects directly to the fact that I’m not sure who this book is for. It’s sort of sits strangely between being for people who enjoy gymnastics and want to know more and being for die hard fan who already know a lot about the sport. I feel like neither will be satisfied by this. It’s a bit too complex for people who are trying to find an entry point into the history of the sport. And, if you’re like me and know a lot about the sport, I didn’t really get much from it that I didn’t already know. And perhaps my enjoyment of this is coloured a little bit by having just read a far more academic and nuanced history of gymnastics.

However my biggest issue with this book is that it’s not about its title. It is incredibly and almost insultingly parochial. It’s largely a history of USA gymnastics. After a couple of chapters the author doesn’t even try to pretend that she is an any way interested in what was happening in any other countries in the world. The whole chapter about the centralisation of US gymnastics training in 2000 and Vanessa Atlas story just threw me. Why were we all of a sudden talking about this period of time and this gymnast? In a history of the end of the perfect 10? So, I might assume it’s because the author wanted to talk about centralisation of training. But the USA was by no means the only country that took on a centralised system with varying success. Why just focus on the US story here? They were by no means the most dominant nation at the time and they were by no means the only country implementing centralisation. It seems lazy.


And just one last thing I didn’t really enjoy a couple of off-colour jokes including one about eating disorders.]]> 3.80 2016
author: Dvora Meyers
name: Emily
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2022/12/03
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This book did not work for me. I’m also not sure this book really knew what it was about. The first couple of chapters started to do a decent job of outlining the history of gymnastics scoring and the role of the 10 in the sport. However, I don’t really think it served a general audience in the sense that it did not really adequately explain judging, and how judges train and do their jobs. feel like this was necessary for some segments the audience to fully understand the issues around scoring.

This connects directly to the fact that I’m not sure who this book is for. It’s sort of sits strangely between being for people who enjoy gymnastics and want to know more and being for die hard fan who already know a lot about the sport. I feel like neither will be satisfied by this. It’s a bit too complex for people who are trying to find an entry point into the history of the sport. And, if you’re like me and know a lot about the sport, I didn’t really get much from it that I didn’t already know. And perhaps my enjoyment of this is coloured a little bit by having just read a far more academic and nuanced history of gymnastics.

However my biggest issue with this book is that it’s not about its title. It is incredibly and almost insultingly parochial. It’s largely a history of USA gymnastics. After a couple of chapters the author doesn’t even try to pretend that she is an any way interested in what was happening in any other countries in the world. The whole chapter about the centralisation of US gymnastics training in 2000 and Vanessa Atlas story just threw me. Why were we all of a sudden talking about this period of time and this gymnast? In a history of the end of the perfect 10? So, I might assume it’s because the author wanted to talk about centralisation of training. But the USA was by no means the only country that took on a centralised system with varying success. Why just focus on the US story here? They were by no means the most dominant nation at the time and they were by no means the only country implementing centralisation. It seems lazy.


And just one last thing I didn’t really enjoy a couple of off-colour jokes including one about eating disorders.
]]> 13259719 New York Times bestseller, Olympic gold medalist Dominique Moceanu reveals the dark underbelly of Olympic gymnastics, the true price of success...and the shocking secret about her past and her family that she only learned years later.

At fourteen years old, Dominique Moceanu was the youngest member of the 1996 US Women's Olympic Gymnastics team, the first and only American women's team to take gold at the Olympics. Her pixyish appearance and ferocious competitive drive quickly earned her the status of media darling. But behind the fame, the flawless floor routines, and the million-dollar smile, her life was a series of challenges and hardships.

Off Balance vividly delineates each of the dominating characters who contributed to Moceanu's rise to the top, from her stubborn father and long-suffering mother to her mercurial coach, Bela Karolyi. Here, Moceanu finally shares the haunting stories of competition, her years of hiding injuries and pain out of fear of retribution from her coaches, and how she hit rock bottom after a public battle with her parents.

But medals, murder plots, drugs, and daring escapes aside (all of which figure into Moceanu's incredible journey), the most unique aspect of her life is the family secret that Moceanu discovers, opening a new and unexpected chapter in her adult life. A mysterious letter from a stranger reveals that she has a second sister--born with a physical disability and given away at birth--who has nonetheless followed in Moceanu's footsteps in an astonishing way.

A multilayered memoir that transcends the world of sports, Off Balance will touch anyone who has ever dared to dream of a better life.]]> 256 Dominique Moceanu 1451608659 Emily 0 3.80 2012
author: Dominique Moceanu
name: Emily
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at: 2022/11/03
date added: 2022/11/03
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]]> 55711706
In between trying to memorize the lines to Catholic mass, hiding the fact that she has a new girlfriend, and erecting a dirty dish tower in her crumbling apartment, Gilda strikes up an email correspondence with Grace’s old friend. She can’t bear to ignore the kindly old woman, who has been trying to reach her friend through the church inbox, but she also can’t bring herself to break the bad news. Desperate, she begins impersonating Grace via email. But when the police discover suspicious circumstances surrounding Grace’s death, Gilda may have to finally reveal the truth of her mortifying existence.]]> 256 Emily R. Austin 1982167351 Emily 0 3.86 2021
author: Emily R. Austin
name: Emily
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2022/10/16
date added: 2022/10/16
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]]> 40046077
While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women—all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in—have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they’ve ever known or should they dare to escape?

Based on real events and told through the “minutes� of the women’s all-female symposium, Toews’s masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.]]> 216 Miriam Toews 1635572584 Emily 0 3.61 2018
author: Miriam Toews
name: Emily
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2022/10/15
date added: 2022/10/15
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]]> 43697186
As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody's mother, for her own ceremony-- a celebration that ultimately never took place.

Unfurling the history of Melody's parents and grandparents to show how they all arrived at this moment, Woodson considers not just their ambitions and successes but also the costs, the tolls they've paid for striving to overcome expectations and escape the pull of history. As it explores sexual desire and identity, ambition, gentrification, education, class and status, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, Red at the Bone most strikingly looks at the ways in which young people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives--even before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be.]]> 196 Jacqueline Woodson 0525535276 Emily 0 to-read 3.96 2019
author: Jacqueline Woodson
name: Emily
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/10/15
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]]> 60093178 Award-winning author Malinda Lo returns to the Bay Area with another masterful coming-of-queer-age story, this time set against the backdrop of the first major Supreme Court decisions legalizing gay marriage. And almost sixty years after the end of Last Night at the Telegraph Club, Lo's new novel also offers a glimpse into Lily and Kath's lives since 1955.

Aria Tang West was looking forward to a summer on Martha's Vineyard with her best friends—one last round of sand and sun before college. But after a graduation party goes wrong, Aria's parents exile her to California to stay with her grandmother, artist Joan West. Aria expects boredom, but what she finds is Steph Nichols, her grandmother's gardener. Soon, Aria is second-guessing who she is and what she wants to be, and a summer that once seemed lost becomes unforgettable—for Aria, her family, and the working-class queer community Steph introduces her to. It's the kind of summer that changes a life forever.]]> 325 Malinda Lo 0525555285 Emily 0 to-read 3.83 2022
author: Malinda Lo
name: Emily
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/10/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> 58659343
Moving through something that only resembles normal life, Miri comes to realize that the life that they had before might be gone. Though Leah is still there, Miri can feel the woman she loves slipping from her grasp.

Our Wives Under The Sea is the debut novel from Julia Armfield, the critically acclaimed author of Salt Slow. It’s a story of falling in love, loss, grief, and what life there is in the deep deep sea.]]> 240 Julia Armfield 152901722X Emily 0 3.75 2022
author: Julia Armfield
name: Emily
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2022/10/09
date added: 2022/10/09
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]]> 59576064
But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads; jobs go off the rails; evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It's then that Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all.]]> 320 Sarah Thankam Mathews 0593489128 Emily 0 3.83 2022
author: Sarah Thankam Mathews
name: Emily
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2022/10/05
date added: 2022/10/05
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]]> 60766825
City girl Luce May’s first year out of high school has been the worst. When she escapes her turbulent life in Sydney to start over at a university in the middle of nowhere, the last thing she wants is anyone in her new life to know of her past. Especially that to escape her chaotic, alcoholic mother, Luce also had to abandon her teenage sister.

As Luce slowly starts to find another version of herself in this place, she also finds a new family in her eclectic group of friends. She even begins to find solace and possibility in her budding relationship with Eva, the girl who loves trees so much she travelled across the world to live among them.

But when Luce’s sister back home starts to follow Luce’s own wild footsteps, and Luce’s guilt starts to grow, she finds it harder to keep her old and new worlds apart. Can Luce find a way to embrace this new life and take care of her family without returning to her old destructive ways?]]> 278 Emily O’Beirne Emily 5 4.29 2022
author: Emily O’Beirne
name: Emily
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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date added: 2022/09/22
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Well, I wrote it, so I have to love it, right?
]]> 59364173
Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called “calorie restriction,� eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, “Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn’t tint hers?� She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly , she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!�), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.]]> 320 Jennette McCurdy Emily 0 to-read 4.45 2022
author: Jennette McCurdy
name: Emily
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/09/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 55100346
But when Aideen stumbles on her nemesis, overachiever Meabh Kowalski, in the midst of a full-blown meltdown, she sees a problem that—unlike her own disaster of a life—seems refreshingly easy to solve. Meabh is desperate to escape her crushing pile of extracurriculars. Aideen volunteers to help. By pushing Meabh down the stairs.

Problem? Solved. Meabh’s sprained ankle is the perfect excuse to ditch her overwhelming schedule. But when another student learns about their little scheme and brings Aideen another “client� who needs her “help,� it kicks off a semester of traded favors, ill-advised hijinks, and an unexpected chance at love. Fixing other people’s problems won’t fix her own, but it might be the push she needs to start.]]> 368 Ciara Smyth 0062957147 Emily 0 4.11 2021
author: Ciara Smyth
name: Emily
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/09/20
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]]> 58437812 She’s All That meets What If It’s Us in this swoon-worthy hate-to-love YA romantic comedy from #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of Five Feet Apart Rachael Lippincott and debut writer Alyson Derrick.

Alex Blackwood is a little bit headstrong, with a dash of chaos and a whole lot of flirt. She knows how to get the girl. Keeping her on the other hand…not so much. Molly Parker has everything in her life totally in control, except for her complete awkwardness with just about anyone besides her mom. She knows she’s in love with the impossibly cool Cora Myers. She just…hasn’t actually talked to her yet.

Alex and Molly don’t belong on the same planet, let alone the same college campus. But when Alex, fresh off a bad (but hopefully not permanent) breakup, discovers Molly’s hidden crush as their paths cross the night before classes start, they realize they might have a common interest after all. Because maybe if Alex volunteers to help Molly learn how to get her dream girl to fall for her, she can prove to her ex that she’s not a selfish flirt. That she’s ready for an actual commitment. And while Alex is the last person Molly would ever think she could trust, she can’t deny Alex knows what she’s doing with girls, unlike her.

As the two embark on their five-step plans to get their girls to fall for them, though, they both begin to wonder if maybe they’re the ones falling…for each other.]]> 384 Rachael Lippincott 1534493794 Emily 0 4.09 2022
author: Rachael Lippincott
name: Emily
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/09/20
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]]> 35283978
The only thing Abi ever wanted was a proper family. So when she falls pregnant by an Australian exchange student in London, she cannot pack up her old life in Croydon fast enough, to start all over in Sydney and make her own family. It is not until she arrives, with three-week-old Jude in tow, that Abi realises Stu is not quite ready to be a father after all. And he is the only person she knows in this hot, dazzling, confusing city, where the job of making friends is turning out to be harder than she thought. That is, until she meets Phyllida, her wealthy, charming, imperious older neighbour, and they become almost like mother and daughter. If only Abi had not told Phil that teeny tiny small lie, the very first day they met�

Imagine the warmth of Monica McInerney, the excruciating awkwardness of Offspring and the wit of Liane Moriarty, all rolled into one delightful, warm, funny and totally endearing novel about families � the ones we have, and the ones we want � and the stories we tell ourselves about them.]]> 448 Meg Mason 0730495337 Emily 0 4.03 2017
author: Meg Mason
name: Emily
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2022/09/19
date added: 2022/09/19
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]]> 12382651 The Man Without a Face is the chilling account of how a low- level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world.

Handpicked as a successor by the "family" surrounding an ailing and increasingly unpopular Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin seemed like a perfect choice for the oligarchy to shape according to its own designs. Suddenly the boy who had stood in the shadows, dreaming of ruling the world, was a public figure, and his popularity soared. Russia and an infatuated West were determined to see the progressive leader of their dreams, even as he seized control of media, sent political rivals and critics into exile or to the grave, and smashed the country's fragile electoral system, concentrating power in the hands of his cronies.

As a journalist living in Moscow, Masha Gessen experienced this history firsthand, and for The Man Without a Face she has drawn on information and sources no other writer has tapped. Her account of how a "faceless" man maneuvered his way into absolute-and absolutely corrupt-power has the makings of a classic of narrative nonfiction.]]> 304 Masha Gessen 1594488428 Emily 0 3.78 2010
author: Masha Gessen
name: Emily
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at: 2022/09/12
date added: 2022/09/12
shelves:
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]]> 49110165
Martha told Patrick before they got married that she didn't want to have children. He said he didn't mind either way because he has loved her since he was fourteen and making her happy is all that matters, although he does not seem able to do it.

By the time Martha finds out what is wrong, it doesn't really matter anymore. It is too late to get the only thing she has ever wanted. Or maybe it will turn out that you can stop loving someone and start again from nothing - if you can find something else to want.]]> 352 Meg Mason Emily 4 4.08 2020
author: Meg Mason
name: Emily
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/09/10
shelves:
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]]> 38902427
When Abbi Jacobson announced to friends and acquaintances that she planned to drive across the country alone, she was met with lots of questions and Why wasn't she going with friends? Wouldn't it be incredibly lonely? The North route is better! Was it safe for a woman? The Southern route is the way to go! You should bring mace! And a common one... why? But Abbi had always found comfort in solitude, and needed space to step back and hit the reset button. As she spent time in each city and town on her way to Los Angeles, she mulled over the big questions -- What do I really want? What is the worst possible scenario in which I could run into my ex? How has the decision to wear my shirts tucked in been pivotal in my adulthood?

In this collection of anecdotes, observations and reflections--all told in the sharp, wildly funny, and relatable voice that has endeared Abbi to critics and fans alike--readers will feel like they're in the passenger seat on a fun and, ultimately, inspiring journey. With some original illustrations by the author.]]> 320 Abbi Jacobson 1538713292 Emily 0 dnf 3.80 2018
author: Abbi Jacobson
name: Emily
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/09/10
shelves: dnf
review:

]]> 40749395 Stories of a young man finding his place among family and community in Houston, from a powerful, emerging American voice.

In the city of Houston—a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America—the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys.

This boy and his family experience the tumult of living in the margins, the heartbreak of ghosts, and the braveries of the human heart. The stories of others living and thriving and dying across Houston's myriad neighborhoods are woven throughout to reveal a young woman's affair detonating across an apartment complex, a rag-tag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, and a reluctant chupacabra.

Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world leaps off the page with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot is about love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

Lockwood --
Alief --
610 North, 610 West --
Shepherd --
Wayside --
Bayou --
Lot --
South Congress --
Navigation --
Peggy Park --
Fannin --
Waugh --
Elgin]]> 240 Bryan Washington 0525533672 Emily 5 3.75 2019
author: Bryan Washington
name: Emily
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/09/10
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]]> 48902303 A funny, sexy, profound dramedy about two young people at a crossroads in their relationship and the limits of love.

Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson's a Black day care teacher, and they've been together for a few years -- good years -- but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other.

But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Without Mike's immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it.

Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they've ever known. And just maybe they'll all be okay in the end. Memorial is a funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you're supposed to be, and the limits of love.]]> 320 Bryan Washington Emily 4 3.54 2020
author: Bryan Washington
name: Emily
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/09/10
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]]> 32187419 A sharply intelligent novel about two college students and the strange, unexpected connection they forge with a married couple.

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind--and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa's orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil--and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances's intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.

Written with gem-like precision and probing intelligence, Conversations With Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth."]]> 304 Sally Rooney 0451499077 Emily 3 3.74 2017
author: Sally Rooney
name: Emily
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/09/10
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]]> 58214333 From the award winning author of The Buddha in the Attic and When the Emperor Was Divine, a tour de force of economy, precision, and emotional power about what happens to a group of obsessed recreational swimmers when a crack appears at the bottom of their local pool.

The swimmers are unknown to each other except through their private routines (slow lane, fast lane), and the solace each takes in their morning or afternoon laps. But when a crack appears at the bottom of the pool, they are cast out into an unforgiving world without comfort or relief.

One of these swimmers is Alice, who is slowly losing her memory. For Alice, the pool was a final stand against the darkness of her encroaching dementia. Without the fellowship of other swimmers and the routine of her daily laps she is plunged into dislocation and chaos, swept into memories of her childhood and the Japanese internment camp in which she spent the war. Narrated by Alice's daughter, who witnesses her stark and devastating decline, The Swimmers is a searing, intimate story of mothers and daughters, and the sorrows of implacable loss, written in spellbinding, incantatory prose.

The most commanding and unforgettable work yet from a modern master.
]]> 176 Julie Otsuka 0593321332 Emily 4 3.65 2022
author: Julie Otsuka
name: Emily
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/09/10
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]]> 45754981 From the award-winning author of Station Eleven, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events–a massive Ponzi scheme collapse and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea.

Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby’s glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis is running an international Ponzi scheme, moving imaginary sums of money through clients� accounts. When the financial empire collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call.

In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, the business of international shipping, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives.]]> 307 Emily St. John Mandel 0525521143 Emily 3 3.66 2020
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Emily
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/09/10
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]]> 20170404 An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.]]> 333 Emily St. John Mandel 0385353308 Emily 5 4.05 2014
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Emily
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/09/10
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]]> 50358031
Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they've rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken. Ruth and G. H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and - with nowhere else to turn - they have come to the country in search of shelter.

But with the TV and internet down, and no phone service, the facts are unknowable. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple - and vice versa? What has happened back in New York? Is the holiday home, isolated from civilisation, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another?]]> 241 Rumaan Alam 0062667637 Emily 4 3.13 2020
author: Rumaan Alam
name: Emily
average rating: 3.13
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/09/10
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]]> 56978048 The beloved author of bestsellersĚýWomen Talking,ĚýA Complicated Kindness, andĚýAll My Puny SorrowsĚýreturns with a funny, smart, headlong rush of a novel full of wit, flawless writing, and a tribute to perseverance and love in an unusual family.
Ěý
Fight NightĚýis told in the unforgettable voice of Swiv, a nine-year-old living in Toronto with her pregnant mother, who is raising Swiv while caring for her own elderly, frail, yet extraordinarily lively mother. When Swiv is expelled from school, Grandma takes on the role of teacher and gives her the task of writing to Swiv's absent father about life in the household during the last trimester of the pregnancy. In turn, Swiv gives Grandma an assignment: to write a letter to "Gord," her unborn grandchild (and Swiv's soon-to-be brother or sister). "You’re a small thing," Grandma writes to Gord, "and you must learn to fight."

As Swiv records her thoughts and observations,ĚýFight NightĚýunspools the pain, love, laughter, and above all, will to live a good life across three generations of women in a close-knit family. But it is Swiv’s exasperating, wise and irrepressible Grandma who is at the heart of this novel: someone who knows intimately what it costs to survive in this world, yet has found a way—painfully, joyously, ferociously—to love and fight to the end, on her own terms.]]> 255 Miriam Toews 1635578175 Emily 4 4.02 2021
author: Miriam Toews
name: Emily
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/01
date added: 2022/09/10
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]]> 36499248 A confronting new novel from award winning Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist Michael Mohammed Ahmad.

'Bani Adam thinks he's better than us!' they say over and over until finally I shout back, 'Shut up, I have something to say!'

They all go quiet and wait for me to explain myself, redeem myself, pull my shirt out, rejoin the pack. I hold their anticipation for three seconds, and then, while they're all ablaze, I say out loud, 'I do think I'm better.'

As far as Bani Adam is concerned Punchbowl Boys is the arse end of the earth. Though he's a Leb and they control the school, Bani feels at odds with the other students, who just don't seem to care. He is a romantic in a sea of hypermasculinity.

Bani must come to terms with his place in this hostile, hopeless world, while dreaming of so much more.]]> 272 Michael Mohammed Ahmad 0733639011 Emily 0 3.65 2018
author: Michael Mohammed Ahmad
name: Emily
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2022/04/02
date added: 2022/04/02
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]]> 30962053 A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.

The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.

At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.]]> 423 Elif Batuman 1594205612 Emily 4 3.67 2017
author: Elif Batuman
name: Emily
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/10/22
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]]> 50496931 336 Melissa Lucashenko 0063032538 Emily 3 4.00 2018
author: Melissa Lucashenko
name: Emily
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2021/10/22
shelves:
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]]> 41081373
Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.

Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.]]> 453 Bernardine Evaristo 0241364906 Emily 4 4.27 2019
author: Bernardine Evaristo
name: Emily
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/10/22
shelves:
review:

]]> 53733106
As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats—from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness—begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. "Are we in hell?" the people of the portal ask themselves. "Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?"

Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: "Something has gone wrong," and "How soon can you get here?" As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.

Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.]]> 210 Patricia Lockwood 0593189582 Emily 4 3.57 2021
author: Patricia Lockwood
name: Emily
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/10/22
shelves:
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]]> 213185

Anya Ulinich has crafted an unforgettable story of familial fault lines, cross-cultural confusion, and the beguiling allure of new beginnings. Petropolis is a funny and poignant debut marking the arrival of a major new voice in fiction.

]]> 324 Anya Ulinich 0670038199 Emily 3 3.74 2006
author: Anya Ulinich
name: Emily
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2006
rating: 3
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date added: 2021/10/22
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]]> 23719408 Under the Udala Trees is a deeply searching, powerful debut about the dangers of living and loving openly.

Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does; born before independence, she is eleven when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child and they, star-crossed, fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities. They are also both girls.

When their love is discovered, Ijeoma learns that she will have to hide this part of herself. But there is a cost to living inside a lie.

As Edwidge Danticat has made personal the legacy of Haiti's political coming of age, Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees uses one woman's lifetime to examine the ways in which Nigerians continue to struggle toward selfhood. Even as their nation contends with and recovers from the effects of war and division, Nigerian lives are also wrecked and lost from taboo and prejudice. This story offers a glimmer of hope � a future where a woman might just be able to shape her life around truth and love.]]> 328 Chinelo Okparanta 0544003446 Emily 4 4.02 2015
author: Chinelo Okparanta
name: Emily
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/10/22
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]]> 44419020
She’s still piecing her confidence back together after not qualifying for the Olympics, her relationship with her twin brother is getting worse the more he hangs out with the popular kids, and then Kennedy Reed suddenly squeezes herself back into Quinn’s life. The girl who was her best friend. The girl who gave Quinn her first kiss. The girl who hasn’t spoken to her since.

Soon, Quinn finds herself juggling her new girlfriend, training for the biggest competition of her life, and discovering she’s not the only Hughes twin with a crush on Kennedy Reed. All these distractions are getting to her, and if she wants that medal she needs to find a way to stop drowning on dry land.]]> 240 Morgan Lee Miller 1635554578 Emily 0 4.09 2019
author: Morgan Lee Miller
name: Emily
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2019/09/07
shelves:
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]]> 27231198 When V’s life crumbles around her, she has two options: let it take her down with it or dive straight in

Virginia “V� Dunn is alone when her dog is hit by a car. Lucky’s back leg is shattered, and when she comforts him, his blood is wet on her hands. Suddenly, the monotony of V’s suburban life dissolves: Lucky is in a cast; her best friend, Eileen, is avoiding her; her mother’s drinking is getting worse; and her father is sick with a mysterious illness. Although V is surrounded by family, she is the loneliest girl in town.
Ěý
As V begins to question everything—death, friendship, family, betrayal—she finds there are few easy answers. The people she thought she knew are strangers, and life’s meaning eludes her. Into this mystery walks the captivating Jane, and V soon realizes that the only way forward seems to break every rule, and go beyond all limitations.
Ěý
Ěý]]> 230 Stacey Donovan 1504016904 Emily 5 3.57 1994
author: Stacey Donovan
name: Emily
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1994
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2019/09/05
shelves:
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]]> 28509532
Audrey, Katy and Adam have been friends since high school—a decade of sneaky cigarettes, drunken misadventures on Melbourne backstreets, heart-to-hearts, in-jokes.

But now Katy has gone. And without her, Audrey is thrown off balance: everything she thought she knew, everything she believed was true, is bent out of shape.

Audrey’s family—her neurotic mother, her wayward teenage brother, her uptight suburban sister—are likely to fall apart. Her boyfriend, Nick, tries to hold their relationship together. And Audrey, caught in the middle, needs to find a reason to keep going when everything around her suddenly seems wrong.

Evocative and exquisitely written, Our Magic Hour is a story of love, loss and discovery. Jennifer Down’s remarkable debut novel captures that moment when being young and invincible gives way to being open and vulnerable, when one terrible act changes a life forever.]]> 304 Jennifer Down 1925240835 Emily 0 3.92 2016
author: Jennifer Down
name: Emily
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2018/07/22
date added: 2018/07/22
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]]> 27779275
Sloane becomes closest to Vera, a social-media star who lights up any room, and Gabe, Vera's twin brother and the most serious person Sloane's ever met. When a beloved painting by the twins' late mother goes missing, Sloane takes on the responsibility of tracking it down, a journey that takes her across state lines—and ever deeper into the twins' lives.

Filled with intense and important friendships, a wonderful warts-and-all family, shiveringly good romantic developments, and sharp, witty dialogue, this story is about finding the people you never knew you needed.]]> 320 Emma Mills 1627799354 Emily 0 Lovely book about friendship. 4.06 2016
author: Emma Mills
name: Emily
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2018/07/12
date added: 2018/07/12
shelves:
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Lovely book about friendship.
]]> 226369 328 Anna Funder 1862076553 Emily 0 4.20 2003
author: Anna Funder
name: Emily
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at: 2018/07/02
date added: 2018/07/02
shelves:
review:
Re-read and just as good the second time around.
]]> 33849121
"Willa’s confusing. Sometimes she’s this sweet, sensitive soul. Other times she’s like a flaming arrow you hope isn’t coming for you."

Finn and Willa have been picked as team leaders in the future leader camp game. The usually confident Finn doesn’t know what’s throwing her more, the fact she’s leading a team of highly unenthusiastic overachievers or coming up against fierce, competitive Willa. And Willa doesn’t know which is harder, leaving her responsibilities behind to pursue her goals or opening up to someone.

Soon they both realise that the hardest thing of all is balancing their clashing ideals with their unexpected connection. And finding a way to win, of course.]]> 270 Emily O’Beirne Emily 0 4.14 2017
author: Emily O’Beirne
name: Emily
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/05/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 27803883
Sam has always had things going on in his head that no one else understands, even his mum. And now she’s dead, it’s worse than ever.

With nothing but his skateboard and a few belongings in a garbage bag, Sam goes to live with the strangers his mum cut ties with seven years ago: Aunty Lorraine and his cousins Shane and Minty.

Despite the suspicion and hostility emanating from their fibro shack, Sam reverts to his childhood habit of following Minty around and is soon surfing with Minty to cut through the static fuzz in his head. But as the days slowly meld into one another, and ghosts from the past reappear, Sam has to make the ultimate decision � will he sink or will he swim.]]> 305 Claire Zorn 0702253944 Emily 0 Lovely, lovely writing. 3.91 2016
author: Claire Zorn
name: Emily
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2018/03/28
date added: 2018/03/28
shelves:
review:
Lovely, lovely writing.
]]> 18656036
Deenie Nash is a diligent student with a close-knit family; her brother Eli is a hockey star, and her father is a popular teacher. But when Deenie's best friend is struck by a terrifying, unexplained seizure in class, the Nashes' seeming stability dissolves into chaos. As rumors of a hazardous outbreak spread through school, and hysteria and contagion swell, a series of tightly held secrets emerges, threatening to unravel friendships, families, and the town's fragile sense of security.

The Fever is a chilling story about guilt, lies, and the lethal power of desire.]]> 307 Megan Abbott 0316231053 Emily 0 3.09 2014
author: Megan Abbott
name: Emily
average rating: 3.09
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2018/02/25
date added: 2018/02/25
shelves:
review:

]]> 33590624 A World Without "Whom" is Eats, Shoots & Leaves for the internet age, and BuzzFeed global copy chief Emmy Favilla is the witty go-to style guru of webspeak.

As language evolves faster than ever before, what is the future of "correct" writing? When Favilla was tasked with creating a style guide for BuzzFeed, she opted for spelling, grammar, and punctuation guidelines that would reflect not only the site's lighthearted tone but also how readers actually use language IRL.

With wry cleverness and an uncanny intuition for the possibilities of internet-age expression, Favilla makes a case for breaking the rules laid out by Strunk and White: A world without "whom," she argues, is a world with more room for writing that's clear, timely, pleasurable, and politically aware. Featuring priceless emoji strings, sidebars, quizzes, and style debates among the most lovable word nerds in the digital media world--of which Favilla is queen--A World Without "Whom" is essential for readers and writers of virtually everything: news articles, blog posts, tweets, texts, emails, and whatever comes next--so basically everyone.]]> 311 Emmy J. Favilla 1632867575 Emily 0 3.73 2017
author: Emmy J. Favilla
name: Emily
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2018/02/11
date added: 2018/02/11
shelves:
review:

]]> 1059856 The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s. Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking.

Charming, sexy, and hilarious, The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living.

“I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm).� —Groucho Marx

“A cheerfully uninhibited...variation on the theme of the Innocents Abroad...Miss Dundy comes up with fresh and spirited comedy....Her novel is enormous fun—sparklingly written, genuinely youthful in spirit.� �The Atlantic]]> 260 Elaine Dundy 1590172329 Emily 0 dnf 3.66 1958
author: Elaine Dundy
name: Emily
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1958
rating: 0
read at: 2018/01/30
date added: 2018/01/30
shelves: dnf
review:

]]> 33830437
But for Grace, an only child who was adopted at birth, discovering that she is a middle child is a different ride altogether. After putting her own baby up for adoption, she goes looking for her biological family, including�

Maya, her loudmouthed younger bio sister, who has a lot to say about their newfound family ties. Having grown up the snarky brunette in a house full of chipper redheads, she’s quick to search for traces of herself among these not-quite-strangers. And when her adopted family’s long-buried problems begin to explode to the surface, Maya can’t help but wonder where exactly it is that she belongs.

And Joaquin, their stoic older bio brother, who has no interest in bonding over their shared biological mother. After seventeen years in the foster care system, he’s learned that there are no heroes, and secrets and fears are best kept close to the vest, where they can’t hurt anyone but him.]]> 374 Robin Benway 0062330624 Emily 0 4.25 2017
author: Robin Benway
name: Emily
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2018/01/13
date added: 2018/01/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 30199414 An electric debut novel about love, addiction, and loss; the story of two girls and the feral year that will cost one her life, and define the other’s for decades

Everything about fifteen-year-old Cat’s new town in rural Michigan is lonely and off-kilter, until she meets her neighbor, the manic, beautiful, pill-popping Marlena. Cat, inexperienced and desperate for connection, is quickly lured into Marlena’s orbit by little more than an arched eyebrow and a shake of white-blond hair. As the two girls turn the untamed landscape of their desolate small town into a kind of playground, Cat catalogues a litany of firsts—first drink, first cigarette, first kiss—while Marlena’s habits harden and calcify. Within the year, Marlena is dead, drowned in six inches of icy water in the woods nearby. Now, decades later, when a ghost from that pivotal year surfaces unexpectedly, Cat must try to forgive herself and move on, even as the memory of Marlena keeps her tangled in the past.

Alive with an urgent, unshakable tenderness, Julie Buntin’s Marlena is an unforgettable look at the people who shape us beyond reason and the ways it might be possible to pull oneself back from the brink.]]> 274 Julie Buntin 1627797645 Emily 0 3.68 2017
author: Julie Buntin
name: Emily
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2018/01/07
shelves:
review:

]]> 33281816
That night she experiences something she can’t explain. The funny girl isn’t laughing anymore. She’s haunted by voices and visions—but nobody believes a girl who cries wolf.

As she’s drawn deeper into a twenty-year-old mystery surrounding missing girl Hannah Holt, the thin veil between this world and the next begins to slip. She can no longer tell what’s real or imagined—all she knows is the ghosts of Swanston, including that of her own mother, are restless. It seems one of them has granted her an extraordinary gift at a terrible price.

Everything about her is changing—her body, her thoughts, even her actions seem to belong to a stranger. Grace is losing herself, and her friends don’t understand. Is she moving closer to the truth? Or is she heading for madness?]]> 309 Vikki Wakefield 1925355292 Emily 0 3.75 2017
author: Vikki Wakefield
name: Emily
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2018/01/06
date added: 2018/01/06
shelves:
review:

]]> 22082082
No, it isn't that kind of theory. Aki already knows she's bisexual—even if, until now, it's mostly been in the hypothetical sense. Aki has dated only guys so far, and her best friend, Lori, is the only person who knows she likes girls, too.

Actually, Aki's theory is that she's got only one shot at living an interesting life—and that means she's got to stop sitting around and thinking so much. It's time for her to actually do something. Or at least try.

So when Aki and Lori set off on a church youth-group trip to a small Mexican town for the summer and Aki meets Christa—slightly older, far more experienced—it seems her theory is prime for the testing.

But it's not going to be easy. For one thing, how exactly do two girls have sex, anyway? And more important, how can you tell if you're in love? It's going to be a summer of testing theories—and the result may just be love.]]> 384 Robin Talley 0373211988 Emily 0 dnf 3.65 2017
author: Robin Talley
name: Emily
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2017/12/28
date added: 2017/12/28
shelves: dnf
review:

]]> 19488665 The Ampersand Prize-winner Erin Gough delivers a heart-warming debut novel about queer romance, crap parents & finding your feet when life gets messy.

Seventeen-year-old Del drops out of high school when her romance with another girl goes horribly wrong. Preferring chaos to bullying, Del makes it her mission to save her dad's crumbling café, the Flywheel, while he 'finds himself' overseas.

Accompanied by her charming troublemaker best friend Charlie, Del sets out to save the cafe, keep Charlie out of prison, and maybe get a date with Rosa, the beautiful flamenco dancer from across the road. But when life is messy enough as it is, can girl-on-girl romance ever have a happy ending?

This hilarious and accident-prone novel is about how to be heartbroken and how to fall in love; about rising above high-school drama and wrestling with problems that are (almost) too big. It speaks directly to teens and assures them that they’re not alone, and does it all with an abundance of heart.]]> 309 Erin Gough 1742978177 Emily 0 3.70 2015
author: Erin Gough
name: Emily
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/12/17
shelves:
review:

]]> 15790884 Questions of Travel charts two very different lives. Laura travels the world before returning to Sydney, where she works for a publisher of travel guides. Ravi dreams of being a tourist until he is driven from Sri Lanka by devastating events.

Around these two superbly drawn characters, a double narrative assembles an enthralling array of people, places and stories - from Theo, whose life plays out in the long shadow of the past, to Hana, an Ethiopian woman determined to reinvent herself in Australia.

Award-winning author Michelle de Kretser illuminates travel, work and modern dreams in this brilliant evocation of the way we live now. Wonderfully written, Questions of Travel is an extraordinary work of imagination - a transformative, very funny and intensely moving novel.]]> 480 Michelle de Kretser 0316219223 Emily 0 3.09 2012
author: Michelle de Kretser
name: Emily
average rating: 3.09
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/12/16
shelves:
review:

]]> 26802671 We’re sitting there with matching milkshakes, Sasha and me, and somehow, things aren’t going like I always thought they would. We’re face to face under 24-hour fluorescents with the thoroughly unromantic buzz of aircon in our ears and endless flabby wedges of seated trucker’s arsecrack as our only visual stimulus.

In a dead-end town like Barwen a girl has only got to be a little different to feel like a freak. And Clancy, a typical sixteen-year-old misfit with a moderately dysfunctional family, a genuine interest in Nature Club and a major crush on the local hot girl, is packing a capital F.

As the summer begins, Clancy’s dad is involved in a road smash that kills two local teenagers. While the family is dealing with the reaction of a hostile town, Clancy meets someone who could possibly—at last—become a friend. Not only that, the unattainable Sasha starts to show what may be a romantic interest.

In short, this is the summer when Clancy has to figure out who the hell she is.]]> 282 Christopher Currie 1925240401 Emily 0 3.65 2015
author: Christopher Currie
name: Emily
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/12/16
shelves:
review:

]]> 35597095
Pippa is an Australian writer who longs for the success of her novelist teacher and eventually comes to fear that she “missed everything important.� In Paris, Celeste tries to convince herself that her feelings for her married lover are reciprocated. Ash makes strategic use of his childhood in Sri Lanka, but blots out the memory of a tragedy from that time and can’t commit to his trusting girlfriend, Cassie. Sri Lankan Christabel, who is generously offered a passage to Sydney by Bunty, an old acquaintance, endures her dull job and envisions a brighter future that “rose, glittered, and sank back,� while she neglects the love close at hand.

The stand-alone yet connected worlds of The Life to Come offer meditations on intimacy, loneliness, and our flawed perception of reality. Enormously moving, gorgeously observant of physical detail, and often very funny, this new novel by Michelle de Kretser reveals how the shadows cast by both the past and the future can transform and distort the present. It is teeming with life and earned wisdom—exhilaratingly contemporary, with the feel of a classic.]]> 384 Michelle de Kretser 1760296562 Emily 0 3.18 2017
author: Michelle de Kretser
name: Emily
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2017/12/15
date added: 2017/12/15
shelves:
review:

]]> 33296199 "What will happen when you don't come back?"

A genre-smashing kidnapping drama about Tamara, who's faced with an impossible choice when she falls for her captors.

Yet this is no ordinary kidnapping. Tamara has been living on a freighter in deep space, and her kidnappers are terrifying Crowpeople � the only aliens humanity has ever encountered. No-one has ever survived a Crowpeople attack, until now � and Tamara must use everything she has just to stay alive.

But survival always comes at a price, and there’s no handbook for this hostage crisis. As Tamara comes to know the Crowpeople's way of life, and the threats they face from humanity's exploration into deep space, she realises she has an impossible choice to make. Should she stay as the only human among the Crows, knowing she'll never see her family again � or inevitably betray her new community if she wants to escape?

This ground-breaking thriller is the latest YA novel to win the Ampersand Prize, a stand-out entry with a blindingly original voice: raw, strange and deeply sympathetic. With its vivid and immersive world-building, this electrifying debut is The Knife of Never Letting Go meets Homeland, for the next generation of sci-fi readers.]]> 320 Cally Black 1760128643 Emily 0 to-read 3.78 2017
author: Cally Black
name: Emily
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/12/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 29073707 To All the Boys I've Loved Before and part Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda.

Sixteen-year-old Sana Kiyohara has too many secrets. Some are small, like how it bothers her when her friends don’t invite her to parties. Some are big, like the fact thatĚýher father may be having an affair. And then there’s the one that she can barely even admit toĚýherself—theĚýone about how she might have a crush on her best friend.

When Sana and her family move to California, she begins to wonder if it’s finally time forĚýsome honesty, especially after she meets Jamie Ramirez. Jamie is beautiful and smart and unlike anyone Sana’s ever known.ĚýThere are just a few Sana's newĚýfriends don't trust Jamie's crowd; Jamie's friends clearly don't want her around anyway; and a sweet guy named Caleb seems to have more-than-friendly feelings for her. Meanwhile, her dad’s affair is becoming too obvious to ignore.

Sana always figured that the hardest thing would be to tell people that she wants to date a girl, but as she quickly learns, telling the truth is easy…what comes after it, though, is a whole lot more complicated.]]> 400 Misa Sugiura 0062473433 Emily 0 3.54 2017
author: Misa Sugiura
name: Emily
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2017/12/04
date added: 2017/12/04
shelves:
review:

]]> 464260 The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,� written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose,� The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.]]> 106 James Baldwin 067974472X Emily 5
And then there’s the writing..,

“The central quality of Elijah’s face is pain, and his smile is a witness to it—pain so old and deep and black that it becomes personal and particular only when he smiles. One wonders what he would sound like if he could sing.”]]> 4.55 1963
author: James Baldwin
name: Emily
average rating: 4.55
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2017/12/02
date added: 2017/12/02
shelves:
review:
What a beautiful, strident and true (now, as ever) entreaty to work to make America what “it must become.� Which is not great “again�, but great, period.

And then there’s the writing..,

“The central quality of Elijah’s face is pain, and his smile is a witness to it—pain so old and deep and black that it becomes personal and particular only when he smiles. One wonders what he would sound like if he could sing.�
]]> 92484
Author of Lookaway, Lookaway

Wilton Barnhardt's novel of coming of age in New York City brims with energy, surprise, irresistible humor, and the heady rush of youth. Its hero, Gil Freeman, a midwestern aspiring actor, comes to the city in search of stardom―but instead encounters the perils of Alphabet City, the desperation of off-off-off-Broadway theater...and the exhilarating, exasperating, absolutely unique Emma, around whom his life comes to turn. Charming and engaging, quintessentially American, Emma Who Saved My Life is one of the extraordinary fiction debuts of our time.]]> 496 Wilton Barnhardt 0312191189 Emily 5
I love this book for being an ode to New York City. For being hilariously funny. For being such a beautiful snapshot of being twenty-something in a time and place I'll never know. But most of all for dealing so well with capturing that relationship you can have with someone who is so big and alive, but so fragile and messed-up at the same time. It portrays the reality of caring so much for someone who can't care back because of their own mental health.

I might never read it again, given that it has, at some points, taken on that feeling when,even after years of not hearing it, that song you listened to over and over and over again makes you a bit sick to listen to again. But still, I'm glad I did.

I heart this book. A lot.]]> 3.80 1989
author: Wilton Barnhardt
name: Emily
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1989
rating: 5
read at: 2017/11/29
date added: 2017/11/29
shelves:
review:
I couldn't let another chunk of years go by without re-visiting this book. This book that I have read I don't know how many times since I discovered it in my mother's bookshelf, but haven't re-visited for years. It's a book that is such a part of my life that I even put it in one of my own books, as the inspiration for two girls' subway odyssey, and dedicated it to the author

I love this book for being an ode to New York City. For being hilariously funny. For being such a beautiful snapshot of being twenty-something in a time and place I'll never know. But most of all for dealing so well with capturing that relationship you can have with someone who is so big and alive, but so fragile and messed-up at the same time. It portrays the reality of caring so much for someone who can't care back because of their own mental health.

I might never read it again, given that it has, at some points, taken on that feeling when,even after years of not hearing it, that song you listened to over and over and over again makes you a bit sick to listen to again. But still, I'm glad I did.

I heart this book. A lot.
]]> 35163861
Watching her app go viral is amazing. Leaderboards are filling up! Everyone's making new friends. And with all the data Allie is collecting, she has an even better shot at beating her archenemy, Nathan, at the upcoming youth coding competition. But when Allie discovers a glitch that threatens to expose everyone's secrets, she has to figure out how to make things right, even if that means sharing the computer lab with Nathan. Can Allie fix her app, stop it from doing any more damage, and win back the friends it hurt-all before she steps on stage to present CLICK'D to the judges?

New York Times best-selling author Tamara Ireland Stone combines friendship, coding, and lots of popcorn in her fun and empowering middle-grade debut.]]> 208 Tamara Ireland Stone 1484798481 Emily 0 to-read 4.17 2017
author: Tamara Ireland Stone
name: Emily
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/11/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 32069603 "It feels real without being tedious, and heart-warming without being sappy. It's not all roses, and it's not all doom and gloom. It's great.� - Jon "Just Juliet is the story I wish I could have given to my parents to read when I was 16 so that they knew what I was going through." - Caro M. ]]> 322 Charlotte Reagan Emily 0 dnf 3.95 2016
author: Charlotte Reagan
name: Emily
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2017/11/25
date added: 2017/11/25
shelves: dnf
review:

]]> 21954803
In awe of her grandmother, Elizabeth also wants to be a good daughter, and no one is more concerned with what people think than her mother, so different from Nan it's sometimes hard to believe she came from the woman's womb.

When Nan gets sick and needs full-time care, she invites Yankee nurse Ariel Brandt into their lives. Smart, funny and beautiful, Ariel is a lot like Nan in a lot of ways, and Elizabeth is drawn to her at once. As her feelings for Ariel grow out of her control, Elizabeth finds herself torn between her own desires and the deeply-ingrained rules of the society in which she lives.

Her brother at war, a new suitor trying to court her, and Ariel keeping a safe distance, Elizabeth is charged with an errand. Nan wants her to travel to New Orleans to find someone she once knew and pass along a wooden box that holds an important letter.

Can the unexpected journey into Nan's past help Elizabeth find her future?]]> 243 Riley Lashea Emily 0 to-read 4.27 2014
author: Riley Lashea
name: Emily
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/11/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 30070140
Alex Ryan lives a simple life. She has her farm in the Scottish countryside, and the self imposed seclusion suits her, until a crime that has haunted her for years, tears through the calm and shatters the fragile peace she’d finally managed to find.
Lori Hunter’s greatest love is the mountains. They’re her escape from the constant hustle and bustle of everyday life. Growing up was neither traditional nor easy for Lori, but now she’s beginning to realise she’s settled for both. A dead end relationship and little to look forward to. Her solution when the suffocation sets in? Run for the hills.
A chance encounter in the mountains of the Scottish Highlands leads Alex and Lori into a whirlwind of heartache and a fight for survival as they build a formidable bond that will be tested to its ultimate limits.

Length: 92,000 words
Themes: British Mystery · lesbian · Scottish countryside · Scottish Highlands]]> 343 Wendy Hudson Emily 0 4.11 2016
author: Wendy Hudson
name: Emily
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2017/11/24
date added: 2017/11/24
shelves:
review:

]]> 7620849 Obwohl intelligent und gut situiert, nimmt sie Drogen, verweigert die Schule und hat sogar Argumente dafür. Anstatt sich an Konventionen abzuarbeiten hinterfragt und analysiert sie nämlich permanent die gesellschaftliche Situation, in der sie sich befindet. Sie wohnt bei ihren wohlstandsverwahrlosten Halbgeschwistern und ihr Vater steckt noch immer in seiner frühkindlichen Allmachtsphase. Freiheit und Selbstzerstörung fallen zusammen und Mifti entlarvt in ihren von Wahn und Genie geprägten Zwischenwelten Sprache, Lebensentwürfe und Vorgegebenheiten der Erwachsenen. Sie kokettiert mit ihrer Kaputtheit und sucht im 'allgemeinen Dahinschimmeln' nach einem Zugriff auf ihr eigenes Leben.]]> 208 Helene Hegemann 3550087926 Emily 0 Dnf 2.43 2010
author: Helene Hegemann
name: Emily
average rating: 2.43
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at: 2017/11/23
date added: 2017/11/23
shelves:
review:
Dnf
]]> 26626118 352 Ashley Herring Blake 1328698955 Emily 0 4.11 2017
author: Ashley Herring Blake
name: Emily
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2017/11/23
date added: 2017/11/23
shelves:
review:

]]> 35492492 Kate - brainy boarder taking risks to pursue the music she loves.
Clem - disenchanted swim-star losing her heart to the wrong boy.

All are targeted by PSST, a toxic website that deals in gossip and lies. St Hilda's antidote to the cyber-bullying? The Year 10 Wellness program. Nice try - but sometimes all it takes is three girls.]]> 439 Cath Crowley 1742612741 Emily 0
The best thing about Take Three Girls for me was the writing. Co (tri?)-penned by two of my favourite OzYA authors, Cath Crowley and Fiona Wood, and Simmone Howell, who I'm yet to read, the language and the descriptions are really very lovely at times.

(For my queer reading buddies who like a f/f storyline, there's a wee one in there, but it's a very small part of the plot.)

]]> 3.98 2017
author: Cath Crowley
name: Emily
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2017/11/08
date added: 2017/11/23
shelves:
review:
Three talented girls form an unlikely friendship at a posh-as girls' high school while taking life paths they didn't expect they were going to take. A LOT happens in this book, probably because it was written by three people who could have formed a novel out of each of these girls' storylines with one arms tied behind their backs.

The best thing about Take Three Girls for me was the writing. Co (tri?)-penned by two of my favourite OzYA authors, Cath Crowley and Fiona Wood, and Simmone Howell, who I'm yet to read, the language and the descriptions are really very lovely at times.

(For my queer reading buddies who like a f/f storyline, there's a wee one in there, but it's a very small part of the plot.)


]]> 34909565 Future Leaders of Nowhere, Finn and Willa come home from camp to find everything is different. Even as they grow more sure of their feelings for each other, everything around them feels less certain.

When Finn gets involved in a new community project, she’s forced to question where her priorities lie at school. Meanwhile, her dad has moved interstate, her mother is miserable, and her home feels like a ghost town.

Willa’s discovering how to negotiate the new terrains of romance and school friendships when an accident at home reminds her just how tenuous her family situation is. Suddenly, even with her dad in town, she’s shouldering more responsibility than ever.

As they try to navigate these new worlds together, Finn’s learning she has to figure out what she wants, and Willa how to ask for what she needs.]]> 305 Emily O’Beirne 3955338967 Emily 0 4.35 2017
author: Emily O’Beirne
name: Emily
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/11/23
shelves:
review:

]]> 29921478
Five girls, five tickets overseas. It’s exactly what they all need after the final slog of high school. But when Kit’s suddenly forced to drop out, Liza’s left with three girls she barely knows.

There’s Mai, committed only to partying. There’s Tam, who already has her doubts about leaving her sick father behind. And there’s Olivia, so miserable about screwing up exams she’s not even sure she wants to get out of bed, let alone on a plane. Meanwhile Kit’s stuck working double shifts to pay off a debt, wondering if she’ll ever get it together.

All Liza wants from this trip is to discover a new version of herself. She just hadn’t planned on doing it without Kit by her side.

And they’re all learning that travel isn’t just about the places you go, but who you’re with at the time.]]> 300 Emily O’Beirne Emily 0 4.04 2016
author: Emily O’Beirne
name: Emily
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2017/11/23
shelves:
review:

]]>