Sarah S's bookshelf: all en-US Sat, 12 Apr 2025 18:03:38 -0700 60 Sarah S's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Float Test 216325984
The Kenner siblings are at odds. Jenn is a harried mom struggling under the weight of family obligations. Fred is a novelist who can’t write, maybe because she’s lost faith in storytelling itself. Jude is a recovering corporate lawyer with her own story to tell, and a grudge against her former favorite sister, Fred. George, the baby, is estranged from his wife and harboring both a secret about his former employer and an ill-advised crush on one of his sisters� friends. Gathered after a major loss, each sibling needs the others more than ever—if only they could trust each other.

A family story is, of course, only as honest as the person telling it. This family story in particular is fraught with secrets about kids and sex and jobs and why the Kenner matriarch had a gun in her underwear drawer. The biggest secret of all though is the secret of what happened between Jude and Fred to create such a rift between the two once-close middle sisters. Over the course of a sweltering Florida summer, the Kenner siblings will revisit what it means to be a family and, if they are smart and kind and lucky, come out on the other side better for having each other.

A rich exploration of family, ambition, secrets, and love, The Float Test is an elegant and gripping testament to the power that family has to both nurture and destroy us from a critically acclaimed writer working at the top of her craft.]]> 272 Lynn Steger Strong 0063390736 Sarah S 2 library-books 3.33 The Float Test
author: Lynn Steger Strong
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.33
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/12
date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: library-books
review:

]]> Audition 216247518 One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In Audition, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day—partner, parent, creator, muse—and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best.]]> 208 Katie Kitamura 059385232X Sarah S 0 audiobooks 3.79 2025 Audition
author: Katie Kitamura
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/12
date added: 2025/04/12
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> Reef Road 61145046 When a severed hand washes ashore in the wealthy enclave of Palm Beach, Florida, the lives of two women—a lonely writer obsessed with the unsolved murder of her mother’s best friend and a panicked wife whose husband has disappeared with their children—collide as the world shutters in the pandemic lockdown of 2020.

A young woman’s life seems perfect until her family goes missing. A writer lives alone with her dog and collects arcane murder statistics. What each of them stands to lose as they sneak around the do-not-enter tape blocking Reef Road beach is exposed by the steady tightening of the cincture encircling them.

In a nod to the true crime that inspired it, Deborah Goodrich Royce’s Reef Road probes unhealed generational scars in a wrenching and original work of fiction. It is both stunning and sexy and, like a bystander surprised by a curtain left open, you won’t be able to look away.]]> 320 Deborah Goodrich Royce 1637584962 Sarah S 4 3.75 3.49 2023 Reef Road
author: Deborah Goodrich Royce
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/10
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: audiobooks, library-books, mystery-thriller
review:
3.75
]]> Kate & Frida 214537798 From the author of instant national bestseller Love & Saffron, this bright and comforting novel follows the surprising friendship between two young women in 1990s Seattle and Paris, illuminating the power of books to change our lives.

A buoyant, mouth-watering oasis of a novel, Kate & Frida is a love letter to bookshops and booksellers, to the way stories shape how we perceive ourselves, to the passion we bring to life in our twenties, and to the last precious years before the internet changed everything.

Twenty-something Frida Rodriguez comes to Paris in 1991, relishing the city’s butter-soaked cuisine and seeking her future as a war correspondent. But when she writes to a bookshop in Seattle, she receives more than just the book she requests. A friendship begins that will redefine the person she thought she wanted to become.

Seattle bookseller Kate Fair is transformed by Frida’s free spirit, spurred to kiss her handsome coworker, to believe in herself as a writer, and to find beauty even in loss.Through the most tumultuous years of their young lives—personally and globally—Kate and Frida’s friendship sustains and nourishes them as they show each other how to overcome self-doubt and the necessity of embracing joy even through our darkest hours.]]> 288 Kim Fay 0593852389 Sarah S 4 audiobooks 4.5 4.11 2025 Kate & Frida
author: Kim Fay
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/09
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: audiobooks
review:
4.5
]]> We Could Be Rats 214152402 A moving story about two very different sisters, and a love letter to childhood, growing up, and the power of imagination—from the bestselling author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead and Interesting Facts About Space.

Sigrid hates working at the Dollar Pal but having always resisted the idea of growing up into the trappings of adulthood, she did not graduate high school, preferring to roam the streets of her small town with her best friend Greta, the only person in the world who ever understood her. Her older sister Margit is baffled and frustrated by Sigrid’s inability to conform to the expectations of polite society.

But Sigrid’s detachment veils a deeper turmoil and sensitivity. She’s haunted by the pains of her past—from pretending her parents were swamp monsters when they shook the floorboards with their violent arguments to grappling with losing Greta’s friendship to the opioid epidemic ravaging their town. As Margit sets out to understand Sigrid and the secrets she has hidden, both sisters, in their own time and way, discover that reigniting their shared childhood imagination is the only way forward.

What unfolds is an unforgettable story of two sisters finding their way back to each other, and a celebration of that transcendent, unshakable bond.]]> 256 Emily R. Austin 1668058146 Sarah S 0 4.08 2025 We Could Be Rats
author: Emily R. Austin
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: currently-reading, botm, lgbtqiap, me-and-my-mental-health
review:

]]> The Sun Was Electric Light 221560078 � I read this pure, pained, beautiful book in a single burst, and emerged from it with heart and nerves rinsed clean.� Helen Garner

Disillusioned with her life in New York, Ruth returns to a lake town in Guatemala where she had been happy a decade earlier. There, in Panajachel, she meets two very different women: the calm and practical Emilie, and the turbulent and intoxicating Carmen. Deciding to stay and build a life at the lake, Ruth finds work first as a nanny to a wealthy local family, then as an English teacher at a village school. Meanwhile, she becomes increasingly infatuated by her friendship with Carmen, pushing away the stability of her connection with Emilie. As Carmen’s fragile relationship with the world splinters, the difference between being a visitor and truly belonging becomes clear, and Ruth is forced to act.]]> 224 Rachel Morton 0702268895 Sarah S 4 botm 4.25 3.68 The Sun Was Electric Light
author: Rachel Morton
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.68
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/07
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: botm
review:
4.25
]]> The Hearing Test 185767235 The Hearing Test, an artist in her late twenties, awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear, she is diagnosed with sudden deafness but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the specter of total deafness looms, she keeps a record of her year—a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned—while living alone in a New York City studio apartment with her dog.

Through a series of fleeting and often humorous encounters—with neighbors, an ex-lover, doctors, strangers, family members, faraway friends, and with the lives and works of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and philosophers—making meaningbecomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival.

At once a rumination on silence and a novel on seeing, The Hearing Test is a work of vitalizing intellect and playfulness that marks the arrival of a major new literary writer with a rare command of form, compression, and intent.]]> 162 Eliza Barry Callahan 164622213X Sarah S 4 audiobooks 3.27 2024 The Hearing Test
author: Eliza Barry Callahan
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.27
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> Love, Sex & Frankenstein 204743942 1816, Villa Diodati, Lake Geneva. A summer storm is brewing.

Mary Shelley, eighteen-years-old, has fled London with her lover, Percy Shelley, and her step-sister, Claire. Mary is tormented by Shelley's infidelities, haunted by the loss of their baby daughter and suspicious of her sister's intentions.

Geneva promises a new start.

Forced to wait out rain and thunder, Mary is locked in a villa with Shelly, her infuriating sister, and the infamous Lord Byron. But far from being a refuge, the summer is freakishly cold and stormy, skies shrouded with volcanic ash. Whilst waiting for the air to clear beyond their villa's walls, madness and salacious scandal take root indoors. Haunted by repressed desires and the spectres of their pasts, Byron suggests each write a supernatural tale.

Mary has an idea . . . From her fervour, the tale of Frankenstein is born.]]> 0 Caroline Lea 1405949015 Sarah S 0 to-read 4.71 Love, Sex & Frankenstein
author: Caroline Lea
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.71
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Shōgun (Asian Saga, #1) 52382796
Powerful and engrossing, capturing both the rich pageantry and stark realities of life in feudal Japan, Shōgun is a critically acclaimed powerhouse of a book. Heart-stopping, edge-of-your-seat action melds seamlessly with intricate historical detail and raw human emotion. Endlessly compelling, this sweeping saga captivated the world to become not only one of the best-selling novels of all time but also one of the highest-rated television miniseries, as well as inspiring a nationwide surge of interest in the culture of Japan. Shakespearean in both scope and depth, Shōgun is, as the New York Times put it, "...not only something you read--you live it." Provocative, absorbing, and endlessly fascinating, there is only one: Shōgun.]]> 1152 James Clavell 1982603844 Sarah S 4 4.42 1975 Shōgun (Asian Saga, #1)
author: James Clavell
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.42
book published: 1975
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/05
shelves: modern-classics, slow-but-steady, 600-pages-or-more
review:

]]> Creep: A Love Story 216497102 From a blistering new voice in dark literary fiction, an unsettling portrait of loneliness, obsession, and identity which asks: if a stranger was left alone in your house, how well could they truly get to know you—enough to fall in love with you?

Alice and Tom are made for each other. Deeply connected, they share a flat in London, go to galleries together, enjoy the same books and wine. They even share a toothbrush. It’s all picture perfect.

Except Alice and Tom have never met.

Alice has been cleaning Tom’s apartment every Wednesday for a year. With every smudge wiped from his coffee cup, every multivitamin counted in the jar, Alice spirals deeper into infatuation, imagining a love so powerful it might erase a lifetime of self-hatred and loneliness.

But as Alice prepares for the moment when she and Tom will finally meet face-to-face, she discovers that love might not be the cure she thought it was. Instead, their coming together sets off a chain of events that shatters everything Alice thought she knew and burns her world to the ground.

Told in Alice’s compelling, deliciously acidic voice, Creep is a literary study of unreliability and unlikability. Exploring alienation and loneliness, class and race, it's a skilled debut with resonance in the way that we view women, mental health, and the lost in society.]]> 256 Emma van Straaten 0063411016 Sarah S 4 3.55 2025 Creep: A Love Story
author: Emma van Straaten
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: audiobooks, me-and-my-mental-health
review:

]]> Port Anna 220160936 An enchanting debut novel exploring second chances and blossoming romance in a charming port town in Maine, perfect for fans of J. Courtney Sullivan’s The Cliffs and Catherine Newman’s Sandwich.

Just about everything has gone wrong for Gwen Gilmore over the past year. She’s lost her mother, her teaching job, and been dumped by her—albeit not that great—long-term boyfriend. Adrift and out of options, she packs her life into her barely functioning car and makes the lonely drive north, to the only place she can think of her family’s aging cottage on the Maine coast, Periwinkle, which she’s recently inherited.

The cottage and Port Anna, the foggy Maine town of Gwen’s childhood, are unchanged in many ways. For Gwen, they are full of the ghosts of her past—boyfriends, forgotten creative dreams, and painful memories of a sister lost too young. Periwinkle is also home to some more literal The Misses, friendly spirits who have long watched over the cottage, but who now seem strangely unsettled, slamming doors and moving furniture in the night. And behind its charming façade, Port Anna has not escaped the realities of modern life. Family homes are being razed to make space for garish condos, the cottage, coveted by a relentless local realtor, is about to be condemned, and the unsolved disappearance of a teenage girl has set the town on edge. On the face of it, it’s an odd place to try to make a new start.

But there are glimmers of hope everywhere, if only Gwen can open herself up to possibility. Sparks fly with Leandro, an Argentinian artist, as aloof and witty as he is wildly attractive. Old friends and former flames come out of the woodwork, bringing with them new opportunities and chances to laugh again. Even in the face of potential happiness, though, it seems some secrets refuse to stay buried. As the summer crowds return to the city and the locals hunker down for another harsh Maine winter, Gwen will be forced to make choices that will change her life forever.]]> 352 Libby Buck 1668060078 Sarah S 0 to-read 4.06 2025 Port Anna
author: Libby Buck
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Finding Grace 215570667
Years later Tom makes a decision that ripples through their families' lives in ways he could not have foreseen. As the consequences of that fateful choice unfold, two women's paths become irrevocably intertwined. But when old love clashes with new, who will be left standing? And what happens when your secrets come back to haunt you?]]> 336 Loretta Rothschild 1250381827 Sarah S 0 to-read 4.12 2025 Finding Grace
author: Loretta Rothschild
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Bright Years 214152211 One family. Four generations. A secret son. A devastating addiction. A Texas family is met with losses and surprises of inheritance, but they’re unable to shake the pull back toward each other in this big-hearted family saga perfect for readers of Mary Beth Keane and Claire Lombardo.

Ryan and Lillian Bright are deeply in love, recently married, and now parents to a baby girl, Georgette. But Lillian has a son she hasn’t told Ryan about, and Ryan has an alcohol addiction he hasn’t told Lillian about, so Georgette comes of age watching their marriage rise and fall.

When a shocking blow scatters their fragile trio, Georgette tries to distance herself from reminders of her parents. Years later, Lillian’s son comes searching for his birth family, so Georgette must return to her roots, unearth her family’s history, and decide whether she can open up to love for them—or herself—while there’s still time.

Told from three intimate points of view, The Bright Years is a tender, true-to-life novel that explores the impact of each generation in a family torn apart by tragedy but, over time, restored by the power of grace and love.]]> 288 Sarah Damoff 1668061449 Sarah S 0 to-read 4.49 2025 The Bright Years
author: Sarah Damoff
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Heartwood 220259184 Heartwood takes you on a journey as a search and rescue team race against time when an experienced hiker mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail in Maine.

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.

At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental.]]> 320 Amity Gaige 1668063603 Sarah S 4 audiobooks, read-w-jenna 4.5 4.03 2025 Heartwood
author: Amity Gaige
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: audiobooks, read-w-jenna
review:
4.5
]]> Magma 202135660
Lilja er ung og ástfangin, svo ástfangin að hún er tilbúin að leggja allt í sölurnar til að þóknast manninum sem hún elskar. En þegar hún hættir að setja honum mörk missir hún tökin á raunveruleikanum. Er hægt að leysast hreinlega upp af ást?

Hér er dregin upp mögnuð, raunsönn mynd af andlegu ofbeldissambandi, lituðu af klámvæðingu samtímans, og skelfilegum afleiðingum þess fyrir unga konu. Kvika er ljóðrænn en baneitraður kokteill af firrtri ást, sjálfsblekkingu, sársauka og grimmd sem seint á eftir að líða úr minni.

Þóra Hjörleifsdóttir hefur tekið þátt í að skrifa og gefa út bækurnar Ég er ekki að rétta upp hönd (2017) og Ég er fagnaðarsöngur (2018) með Svikaskáldum. Hún býr í Reykjavík og er með meistaragráðu í ritlist. Kvika er fyrsta skáldsaga hennar.]]> 0 Thóra Hjörleifsdóttir 1867572877 Sarah S 4 audiobooks 3.65 2019 Magma
author: Thóra Hjörleifsdóttir
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/20
date added: 2025/04/03
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus]]> 216247502
Arriving at the University of Edinburgh for her first term, Pen knows her divorced parents back in Canada are hiding something from her. She believes she’ll find the answer here in Scotland, where an old friend of her father’s—now a famous writer known as Lord Lennox—lives. When she is invited to spend the weekend at Lord Lennox’s centuries-old estate with his enveloping, fascinating family, Pen begins to unravel her parents� secret, just as she’s falling in love for the first time . . .

As Pen experiences the sharp shock of adulthood, she comes to rely on herself for the first time in her life. A rich and rewarding novel of campus life, of sexual awakening, and ultimately, of the many ways women can become mothers in this world, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus asks to what extent we need to look back in order to move forward.]]> 384 Emma Knight 0593830458 Sarah S 4 3.40 The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus
author: Emma Knight
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.40
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/08
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: audiobooks, library-books, read-w-jenna
review:

]]> Hard Times 15778981 Thomas Gradgrind is the guiding luminary of the Coketown school, stern proponent of the Philosophy of Fact, whose ill-conceived idealism blinds him to the essential humanity of those around him, with calamitous results. His daughter Louisa becomes trapped in a loveless marriage and falls prey to an idle seducer, and her brother Tom is ruined thanks to their father's pet theories. Meanwhile Sleary's circus offers a vision of escape and entertainment, a joyful contrast to the dreariness of life in Coketown. The hardship of the workers and the victimization of Stephen Blackpool are set against the exuberance of the circus people in Dickens's much-loved moral tale. Gradgrind is forced to reconsider his cherished system when he realizes that 'Facts alone' are not, after all, enough. (From the back cover)



Hard Times is Dickens's shortest novel, and arguably his greatest triumph. A useful appendix of the author's working notes, together with an enlightening introduction and full explanatory notes, will ensure that this edition becomes the obvious choice for anyone studying the novel. Paul Schlike is Lecturer in English at the University of Aberdeen.

]]> 356 Charles Dickens 0141199563 Sarah S 3 classics 3.37 Hard Times
author: Charles Dickens
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.37
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2017/08/19
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: classics
review:
My second Dickens. Won't be the last.
]]> A Whole Life 28220930
Set in the mid-twentieth century and told with beauty and tenderness, Robert Seethaler's A Whole Life is a story of man's relationship with an ancient landscape, of the value of solitude, of the arrival of the modern world, and above all, of the moments, great and small, that make us who we are.]]> 160 Robert Seethaler 0374289867 Sarah S 4 man-booker 4.09 2014 A Whole Life
author: Robert Seethaler
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2019/07/08
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: man-booker
review:
For such a small book this really packs a punch.
]]> Brimstone (Fae & Alchemy, #2) 222139748 Duty. Blood. Honour. Power.

Saeris Fane doesn't want power. The very last thing she needs is her name whispered on an entire court's lips, but now that she's been crowned queen of the Blood Court, she's discovering that a queen's life is not her own. A heavy weight rests upon her shoulders.

Her ward - and her brother - need her back in her homeland . . . but the changes that have strengthened Saeris have also made her weak. Born under blazing suns, Saeris will surely die if she makes her way home through the Quicksilver. Which means that, once again, she must send someone else in her stead . . .

'Keep your mouth shut. Stick to the shadows. And for the love of all seven Gods, do NOT crack any jokes.'

Kingfisher of the Ajun Gate has defeated armies and survived all manner of horrors, but traveling back to Zilvaren with Carrion Swift might just be the death of him. The male just will not shut up. Hidden dangers await them down the narrow alleyways of the Silver City. Unfolding secrets pose impossible threats. Fisher must wrangle the smuggler and accomplish his goals quickly if he wants to see his mate again.

A darkness falls across Yvelia. The realm and their friends are in danger. Together, Saeris and Fisher will pass through fire and brimstone to save them.]]> 720 Callie Hart 1538774224 Sarah S 0 to-read 4.29 2025 Brimstone (Fae & Alchemy, #2)
author: Callie Hart
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Quicksilver (Fae & Alchemy, #1)]]> 217536270
In the land of the unforgiving desert, there isn't much a girl wouldn't do for a glass of water.

Twenty-four-year-old Saeris Fane is good at keeping secrets. No one knows about the strange powers she possesses, or the fact that she has been picking pockets and stealing from the Undying Queen's reservoirs for as long as she can remember.

But a secret is like a knot. Sooner or later, it is bound to come undone.

When Saeris comes face-to-face with Death himself, she inadvertently re-opens a gateway between realms and is transported to a land of ice and snow. The Fae have always been the stuff of myth, of legend, of nightmares... but it turns out they're real, and Saeris has landed herself in the middle of a centuries-long conflict that might just get her killed.

The first of her kind to tread the frozen mountains of Yvelia in over a thousand years, Saeris mistakenly binds herself to Kingfisher, a handsome Fae warrior, who has secrets and nefarious agendas of his own. He will use her Alchemist's magic to protect his people, no matter what it costs him . . . or her.

Death has a name. It is Kingfisher of the Ajun Gate. His past is murky. His attitude stinks. And he's the only way Saeris is going to make it home.]]> 624 Callie Hart 1538774194 Sarah S 0 4.30 2024 Quicksilver (Fae & Alchemy, #1)
author: Callie Hart
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: currently-reading, 600-pages-or-more, audiobooks, library-books, sff
review:

]]> Hot Air 214986266 A joyfully unhinged story of money, marriage, sex, and revenge unspools when a billionaire crashes his hot air balloon into the middle of a post-pandemic first date.

Joannie hasn’t been on a date in seven years when Johnny invites Joannie and her daughter to dinner. His house is beautiful, his son is sweet, and their first kiss is, well, it’s not the best, but Joannie could convince herself it was nice enough. But when Joannie’s childhood crush, a summer camp fling turned famous billionaire, crash lands his hot air balloon in Johnny’s swimming pool, Joannie dives in.

Soon she finds herself alighting on a lost weekend with Johnny the bad kisser, Jonathan the billionaire, and Julia his smart, stunning wife. Does Joannie want Jonathan? Does Julia want her husband? Or Joannie? Or Joannie’s beautiful little girl? Does Johnny want Julia? Does Jonathan want Joannie, or Julia, or maybe, his much younger personal assistant, Vivian, who is tasked to fix it all? A tale of lust and money and lust for money, Hot Air is as astonishing as it is blisteringly funny, a delirious, delicious story for our billionaire era.]]> 208 Marcy Dermansky 0593320905 Sarah S 4 4.5 3.45 2025 Hot Air
author: Marcy Dermansky
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/01
date added: 2025/04/01
shelves: audiobooks, me-and-my-mental-health
review:
4.5
]]> Obsidian (Lux #1) 195790629
Starting over sucks.

When we moved to West Virginia right before my senior year, I'd pretty much resigned myself to thick accents, dodgy internet access, and a whole lot of boring...until I spotted my hot neighbor, with his looming height and eerie green eyes. Things were looking up.

And then he opened his mouth.

Daemon is infuriating. Arrogant. Stab-worthy. We do not get along. At all. But when a stranger attacks me and Daemon literally freezes time with a wave of his hand, well, something...unexpected happens.

The hot alien living next door marks me.

You heard me. Alien. Turns out Daemon and his sister have a galaxy of enemies wanting to steal their abilities, and Daemon's touch has me lit up like the Vegas Strip. The only way I'm getting out of this alive is by sticking close to Daemon until my alien mojo fades.

If I don't kill him first, that is.

Read the entire bestselling series!
#1: Obsidian (from Katy's point of view)
#2: Onyx (from Katy's point of view)
#3: Opal (from Katy's point of view)
#4: Origin
#5: Opposition
Oblivion (Books 1-3 from Daemon's point of view) CAN BE READ FIRST OR AFTER KATY'S POV!
Shadows (Dawson's story)]]> 416 Jennifer L. Armentrout 1649376111 Sarah S 3 sff, young-adult 3.98 2011 Obsidian (Lux #1)
author: Jennifer L. Armentrout
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: sff, young-adult
review:

]]> Bad Tourists 199798187 Three tight-knit friends embark on an extravagant divorce trip to the Maldives where they can unwind and celebrate a new chapter in midlife—until they realize the resort of their dreams is harboring a killer.

Best friends Darcy, Camilla, and Kate escape for a post-divorce retreat in the Maldives, the perfect place to relax, reset, and embrace a fresh start in life. Darcy is learning how to be a free woman at forty-two. Camilla has found the perfect calling as a fitness and wellness influencer with a devoted following. And Kate is finally working on the book she was meant to write after years of telling other people’s stories.

Their dream getaway? The exclusive and isolated Sapphire Island Resort. With luxurious private villas, crystal-clear waters, and sun-drenched white sand beaches, relaxation is guaranteed. But this is no ordinary friendship, and they’re not the only guests on the island with secrets. Who left the body on the beach—and who’s next?

A propulsive and deliciously dark tale about female friendship, loyalty, and lies, Bad Tourists is a white-hot thriller from the first word to its mind-blowing finish.]]> 336 Caro Carver 1668058847 Sarah S 3 botm, mystery-thriller 3.5 3.62 2024 Bad Tourists
author: Caro Carver
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: botm, mystery-thriller
review:
3.5
]]> Hot Wax 224103430 The new novel from the bestselling author of If We Were Villains and Graveyard Shift—a vivid and immersive tale of one woman’s reckless mission to make sense of the events that shattered her childhood, and made her who she is

Summer, 1989: ten-year-old Suzanne is drawn like a magnet to her father’s forbidden world of electric guitars and tricked-out cars. When her mother remarries, she jumps at the chance to tag along on the concert tour that just might be Gil and the Kills� wild ride to glory. But fame has sharper fangs than anybody realized, and as the band blazes up the charts, internal power struggles set Gil and his group on a collision course destined for a bloody reckoning—one shrouded in mystery and lore for decades to come.

The only witness to a desperate act of violence, Suzanne spends the next twenty-nine years trying to disappear. She trades the music and mayhem of her youth for the quiet of the suburbs and the company of her mild-mannered husband Rob. But when her father’s sudden death resurrects the troubled past she tried so hard to bury, she leaves it all behind and hits the road in search of answers. Hitching her fate and Gil’s beloved car to two vagabonds who call an old Airstream trailer home, she finds everything she thought she’d lost desire, adventure, and the woman she once wanted to be. But Rob refuses to let her go. Determined to bring her back where she belongs, he chases her across the country—and drives her to a desperation all her own.

Drenched in knock-down drag-out rock and roll, Hot Wax is a raucous, breakneck ride to hell and back—where getting lost might be the only way to find yourself and save your soul.]]> 400 M.L. Rio 1668070022 Sarah S 0 to-read 4.00 2025 Hot Wax
author: M.L. Rio
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend]]> 214152206 From rare book dealer and guest star of the hit show Pawn Stars, a page-turning literary adventure that introduces readers to the women writers who inspired Jane Austen—and investigates why their books have disappeared from our shelves.

Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more.

But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn’t a boor sings the praises of Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes such a stir in Mansfield Park is a real one by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. In fact, the phrase “pride and prejudice� came from Frances Burney’s second novel Cecilia. The women that populated Jane Austen’s bookshelf profoundly influenced her work; Austen looked up to them, passionately discussed their books with her friends, and used an appreciation of their books as a litmus test for whether someone had good taste. So where had these women gone? Why hadn’t Romney—despite her training—ever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon?

Jane Austen’s Bookshelf investigates the disappearance of Austen’s heroes—women writers who were erased from the Western canon—to reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Each chapter profiles a different writer including Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth—and recounts Romney’s experience reading them, finding rare copies of their works, and drawing on connections between their words and Austen’s. Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen’s bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf will encourage you to look beyond assigned reading lists, question who decides what belongs there, and build your very own collection of favorite novels.]]> 464 Rebecca Romney 1982190248 Sarah S 0 to-read 4.45 2025 Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend
author: Rebecca Romney
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Stardust Thief (The Sandsea Trilogy, #1)]]> 58950705
With no choice but to obey or be executed, Loulie journeys with the sultan’s oldest son to find the artifact. Aided by her bodyguard, who has secrets of his own, they must survive ghoul attacks, outwit a vengeful jinn queen, and confront a malicious killer from Loulie’s past. And, in a world where story is reality and illusion is truth, Loulie will discover that everything—her enemy, her magic, even her own past—is not what it seems, and she must decide who she will become in this new reality.

Inspired by stories from One Thousand and One Nights,The Stardust Thief weaves the gripping tale of a legendary smuggler, a cowardly prince, and a dangerous quest across the desert to find a legendary, magical lamp.]]> 468 Chelsea Abdullah 0316368768 Sarah S 3 3.75 3.98 2022 The Stardust Thief (The Sandsea Trilogy, #1)
author: Chelsea Abdullah
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: library-books, sff, audiobooks, botm
review:
3.75
]]> <![CDATA[Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games, #0.5)]]> 214331246 When you’ve been set up to lose everything you love, what is there left to fight for?

As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes.

Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves.

When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.]]> 382 Suzanne Collins 1546171460 Sarah S 4 4.25 4.66 2025 Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games, #0.5)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.66
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: audiobooks, library-books, young-adult
review:
4.25
]]> <![CDATA[A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail]]> 9791 A Walk in the Woods will make you long for the great outdoors (or at least a comfortable chair to sit and read in).]]> 397 Bill Bryson 0307279464 Sarah S 0 4.07 1998 A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
author: Bill Bryson
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: currently-reading, audiobooks, library-books, non-fiction
review:

]]> The Lamb 216867498
But Mama’s want is stronger than her hunger sometimes, and when a beautiful, white-toothed stray named Eden turns up in the heart of a snowstorm, Margot must confront the shifting dynamics of her family, untangle her own desires, and make her own bid for freedom.

With this gothic coming-of-age tale, novelist Lucy Rose explores how women swallow their anger, desire, and animal instincts—and wrings the relationship between mother and daughter until blood drips from it.]]> 336 Lucy Rose 1399619713 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.95 2025 The Lamb
author: Lucy Rose
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Water Moon 211479192 A woman inherits a pawnshop where you can sell your regrets, and then embarks on a magical journey when a charming young physicist wanders into the shop, in this dreamlike and enchanting fantasy novel.

On a backstreet in Tokyo lies a pawnshop, but not everyone can find it. Most will see a cozy ramen restaurant. And only the chosen ones—those who are lost—will find a place to pawn their life choices and deepest regrets.

Hana Ishikawa wakes on her first morning as the pawnshop’s new owner to find it ransacked, the shop’s most precious acquisition stolen, and her father missing. And then into the shop stumbles a charming stranger, quite unlike its other customers, for he offers help instead of seeking it.

Together, they must journey through a mystical world to find Hana’s father and the stolen choice—by way of rain puddles, rides on paper cranes, the bridge between midnight and morning, and a night market in the clouds.

But as they get closer to the truth, Hana must reveal a secret of her own—and risk making a choice that she will never be able to take back.]]> 384 Samantha Sotto Yambao 0593724992 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.81 2025 Water Moon
author: Samantha Sotto Yambao
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Ashfire King (The Sandsea Trilogy, #2)]]> 60910208
Neither here nor there, but long ago� After fleeing a patricidal prince, legendary merchant Loulie al-Nazari and banished prince Mazen bin Malik find themselves in the realm of jinn. But instead of sanctuary, they find a world on the cusp of collapse.

The jinn cities, long sheltered beneath the Sandsea by the magic of its kings, are sinking. Amid the turmoil, political alliances are forming, and rebellion is on the rise. When Loulie assists a dissenter—one of her bodyguard’s old comrades—she puts herself in the center of a centuries-old war.

Trapped in a world that isn’t her own and wielding magic that belongs to a fallen king, Loulie must decide: Will she carry on someone else’s legacy or carve out her own?]]> 544 Chelsea Abdullah Sarah S 0 to-read 4.29 2025 The Ashfire King (The Sandsea Trilogy, #2)
author: Chelsea Abdullah
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> In Ascension 197063361
Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth's first life forms � what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings. Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency.

Drawn deeper into the agency's work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.

Exploring the natural world with the wonder and reverence we usually reserve for the stars,In Ascensionis a compassionate, deeply inquisitive epic that reaches outward to confront the greatest questions of existence, looks inward to illuminate the smallest details of the human heart, and shows how � no matter how far away we might be and how much we have lost hope � we will always attempt to return to the people and places we call home.]]> 496 Martin MacInnes 0802163467 Sarah S 3 3.70 2023 In Ascension
author: Martin MacInnes
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/23
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: library-books, man-booker, sff
review:

]]> Upgrade 59838811 You are the next step in human evolution.

At first, Logan Ramsay isn’t sure if anything’s different. He just feels a little . . . sharper. Better able to concentrate. Better at multitasking. Reading a bit faster, memorizing better, needing less sleep.

But before long, he can’t deny it: Something’s happening to his brain. To his body. He’s starting to see the world, and those around him—even those he loves most—in whole new ways.

The truth is, Logan’s genome has been hacked. And there’s a reason he’s been targeted for this upgrade. A reason that goes back decades to the darkest part of his past, and a horrific family legacy.

Worse still, what’s happening to him is just the first step in a much larger plan, one that will inflict the same changes on humanity at large—at a terrifying cost.

Because of his new abilities, Logan’s the one person in the world capable of stopping what’s been set in motion. But to have a chance at winning this war, he’ll have to become something other than himself. Maybe even something other than human.

And even as he’s fighting, he can’t help wondering: what if humanity’s only hope for a future really does lie in engineering our own evolution?

Intimate in scale yet epic in scope, Upgrade is an intricately plotted, lightning-fast tale that charts one man’s thrilling transformation, even as it asks us to ponder the limits of our humanity—and our boundless potential.]]> 352 Blake Crouch 0593157532 Sarah S 3 library-books, sff 3.5 3.77 2022 Upgrade
author: Blake Crouch
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/23
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: library-books, sff
review:
3.5
]]> <![CDATA[The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #1)]]> 78411
I'm sorry to say that the book you are holding in your hands is extremely unpleasant. It tells an unhappy tale about three very unlucky children. Even though they are charming and clever, the Baudelaire siblings lead lives filled with misery and woe. From the very first page of this book when the children are at the beach and receive terrible news, continuing on through the entire story, disaster lurks at their heels. One might say they are magnets for misfortune.

In this short book alone, the three youngsters encounter a greedy and repulsive villain, itchy clothing, a disastrous fire, a plot to steal their fortune, and cold porridge for breakfast.

It is my sad duty to write down these unpleasant tales, but there is nothing stopping you from putting this book down at once and reading something happy, if you prefer that sort of thing.

With all due respect,
Lemony Snicket]]> 162 Lemony Snicket 0439206472 Sarah S 0 4.02 1999 The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #1)
author: Lemony Snicket
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/25
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Flight Attendant (Vintage Contemporaries)]]> 36959637 A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER
A USA TODAY BESTSELLER
A NATIONAL INDIEBOUND BESTSELLER

From the author of The Guest Room, a powerful story about the ways an entire life can change in one night: A flight attendant wakes up in the wrong hotel, in the wrong bed, with a dead man - and no idea what happened.

Cassandra Bowden is no stranger to hungover mornings. She's a binge drinker, her job with the airline making it easy to find adventure, and the occasional blackouts seem to be inevitable. She lives with them, and the accompanying self-loathing. When she awakes in a Dubai hotel room, she tries to piece the previous night back together, counting the minutes until she has to catch her crew shuttle to the airport. She quietly slides out of bed, careful not to aggravate her already pounding head, and looks at the man she spent the night with. She sees his dark hair. His utter stillness. And blood, a slick, still wet pool on the crisp white sheets.

Afraid to call the police - she's a single woman alone in a hotel room far from home - Cassie begins to lie. She lies as she joins the other flight attendants and pilots in the van. She lies on the way to Paris as she works the first class cabin. She lies to the FBI agents in New York who meet her at the gate. Soon it's too late to come clean-or face the truth about what really happened back in Dubai. Could she have killed him? If not, who did?

Set amid the captivating world of those whose lives unfold at forty thousand feet, The Flight Attendant unveils a spellbinding story of memory, of the giddy pleasures of alcohol and the devastating consequences of addiction, and of murder far from home.]]> 368 Chris Bohjalian 052543268X Sarah S 2 mystery-thriller 2.5 3.54 2018 The Flight Attendant (Vintage Contemporaries)
author: Chris Bohjalian
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2018
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/25
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: mystery-thriller
review:
2.5
]]> The Tenant 221733722 There’s no place like home�

Blake Porter is riding high, until he's not. Fired abruptly from his job as a VP of marketing and unable to make the mortgage payments on the new brownstone that he shares with his fiancee, he's desperate to make ends meet.

Enter Whitney. Beautiful, charming, down-to-earth, and looking for a room to rent. She's exactly what Blake's looking for. Or is she?

Because something isn't quite right. The neighbors start treating Blake differently. The smell of decay permeates his home, no matter how hard he scrubs. Strange noises jar him awake in the middle of the night. And soon Blake fears someone knows his darkest secrets...

Danger lives right at home, and by the time Blake realizes it, it'll be far too late. The trap is already set.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Freida McFadden knocks at your door with a gripping story of revenge, privilege, and secrets turned sour�]]> 368 Freida McFadden 1464227314 Sarah S 0 to-read 4.45 2025 The Tenant
author: Freida McFadden
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us]]> 199797799
Everyone knows Judy Blume.

Her books have garnered her fans of all ages for decades and sold tens of millions of copies. But why were people so drawn to them? And why are we still talking about them now in the 21st century?

In The Genius of Judy , her remarkable story is revealed as never before, beginning with her as a mother of two searching for purpose outside of her home in 1960s suburban New Jersey. The books she wrote starred regular children with genuine thoughts and problems. But behind those deceptively simple tales, Blume explored the pillars of the growing women’s rights movement, in which girls and women were entitled to careers, bodily autonomy, fulfilling relationships, and even sexual pleasure. Blume wasn’t trying to be a revolutionary—she just wanted to tell honest stories—but in doing so, she created a cohesive, culture-altering vision of modern adolescence.

Blume’s bravery provoked backlash, making her the country’s most-banned author in the mid-1980s. Thankfully, her works withstood those culture wars and it’s no coincidence that Blume has resurfaced as a cultural touchstone now. Young girls are still cat-called, sex education curricula are getting dismissed as pornography, and entire shelves of libraries are being banned. As we face these challenges, it’s only natural we look to Blume, the grand dame of so-called dirty books. This is the story of how a housewife became a groundbreaking artist, and how generations of empowered fans are her legacy, today more than ever.]]> 288 Rachelle Bergstein 1668010909 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.79 2024 The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us
author: Rachelle Bergstein
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Eleanor & Park 15745753 "So did Jerry Lee Lewis," Eleanor answers.
"I'm not kidding," he says.
"You should be," she says, "we're 16."
"What about Romeo and Juliet?"
"Shallow, confused, then dead."
"I love you," Park says.
"Wherefore art thou," Eleanor answers.
"I'm not kidding," he says.
"You should be."

Set over one school year in 1986, Eleanor & Park is the story of two star-crossed misfits—smart enough to know first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try.]]> 328 Rainbow Rowell 1250012570 Sarah S 4 3.92 2012 Eleanor & Park
author: Rainbow Rowell
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2013/05/15
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: young-adult, library-books, cr-press-list
review:

]]> Old Sins 668640 992 Penny Vincenzi 0099672901 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.99 1989 Old Sins
author: Penny Vincenzi
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Wicked Pleasures 325765 929 Penny Vincenzi 1857979982 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.79 1992 Wicked Pleasures
author: Penny Vincenzi
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Cruel and Fated Light (The Hollow Star Saga, #2)]]> 59365203
After thwarting the man behind the gruesome ironborn murders—and breaking several fae laws to do so—all Arlo wants is a quiet summer. As the deity of luck’s Hollow Star, capable of bringing about endless possibilities, this shouldn’t be too much to ask, right?

But someone is still trying to summon the mythical Seven Deadly Sins. All signs point to immortal meddling, and if this is the gods� attempt at returning to the Mortal Realm, it’s Arlo they’re going to use to do it.

When Queen Riadne offers to host Arlo at the Seelie Summer palace, she jumps at the chance. She’ll get to see more of Vehan and Aurelian and perhaps even work out her complicated feelings for the gorgeous ex-Fury, Nausicaä. But no one trusts the infamous Queen of Light, even as Arlo wonders if she’s just been greatly misunderstood.

With the Summer Solstice quickly approaching, everyone expects Riadne to finally challenge the High King for his crown. And as Arlo struggles to get control of her powers and take charge of her destiny, she’ll soon be faced with a choice that won’t only change the fate of the Mortal Realm forever but could condemn it to a cruelty the likes of which the Courts have never known.]]> 640 Ashley Shuttleworth 1534453709 Sarah S 0 to-read 4.25 2022 A Cruel and Fated Light (The Hollow Star Saga, #2)
author: Ashley Shuttleworth
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Dark and Hollow Star (The Hollow Star Saga, #1)]]> 53341666 Choose your player.

The “ironborn� half-fae outcast of her royal fae family.
A tempestuous Fury, exiled to earth from the Immortal Realm and hellbent on revenge.
A dutiful fae prince, determined to earn his place on the throne.
The prince’s brooding guardian, burdened with a terrible secret.

For centuries, the Eight Courts of Folk have lived among us, concealed by magic and bound by law to do no harm to humans. This arrangement has long kept peace in the Courts—until a series of gruesome and ritualistic murders rocks the city of Toronto and threatens to expose faeries to the human world.

Four queer teens, each who hold a key piece of the truth behind these murders, must form a tenuous alliance in their effort to track down the mysterious killer behind these crimes. If they fail, they risk the destruction of the faerie and human worlds alike. If that’s not bad enough, there’s a war brewing between the Mortal and Immortal Realms, and one of these teens is destined to tip the scales. The only question is: which way?

Wish them luck. They’re going to need it.]]> 512 Ashley Shuttleworth 1534453679 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.78 2021 A Dark and Hollow Star (The Hollow Star Saga, #1)
author: Ashley Shuttleworth
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sorcery and Small Magics (The Wildersongs Trilogy, #1)]]> 199826249 Desperate to undo the curse binding them to each other, an impulsive sorcerer and his curmudgeonly rival venture deep into a magical forest in search of a counterspell—only to discover that magic might not be the only thing pulling them together.

Leovander Loveage is a master of small magics.

He can summon butterflies with a song, or turn someone’s hair pink by snapping his fingers. Such minor charms don’t earn him much admiration from other sorcerers (or his father), but anything more elaborate always blows up in his face. Which is why Leo vowed years ago to never again write powerful magic.

That is, until a mix-up involving a forbidden spell binds Leo to obey the commands of his longtime nemesis, Sebastian Grimm. Grimm is Leo’s complete opposite—respected, exceptionally talented, and an absolutely insufferable curmudgeon. The only thing they agree on is that getting caught using forbidden magic would mean the end of their careers. They need a counterspell, and fast. But Grimm casts spells, he doesn’t undo them, and Leo doesn’t mess with powerful magic.

Chasing rumors of a powerful sorcerer with a knack for undoing curses, Leo and Grimm enter the Unquiet Wood, a forest infested with murderous monsters and dangerous outlaws alike. To dissolve the curse, they’ll have to uncover the true depths of Leo’s magic, set aside their long-standing rivalry, and—much to their horror—work together.

Even as an odd spark of attraction flares between them.]]> 416 Maiga Doocy 0356523993 Sarah S 0 to-read 4.32 2024 Sorcery and Small Magics (The Wildersongs Trilogy, #1)
author: Maiga Doocy
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Archived (The Archived, #1)]]> 10929432 Imagine a place where the dead rest on shelves like books.

Each body has a story to tell, a life seen in pictures only Librarians can read. The dead are called Histories, and the vast realm in which they rest is the Archive.

Da first brought Mackenzie Bishop here four years ago, when she was twelve years old, frightened but determined to prove herself. Now Da is dead, and Mac has grown into what he once was: a ruthless Keeper, tasked with stopping often violent Histories from waking up and getting out. Because of her job, she lies to the people she loves, and she knows fear for what it is: a useful tool for staying alive.

Being a Keeper isn't just dangerous—it's a constant reminder of those Mac has lost, Da's death was hard enough, but now that her little brother is gone too, Mac starts to wonder about the boundary between living and dying, sleeping and waking. In the Archive, the dead must never be disturbed. And yet, someone is deliberately altering Histories, erasing essential chapters. Unless Mac can piece together what remains, the Archive itself may crumble and fall.

In this haunting, richly imagined novel, Victoria Schwab reveals the thin lines between past and present, love and pain, trust and deceit, unbearable loss and hard-won redemption.]]> 327 Victoria E. Schwab 1423157311 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.96 2013 The Archived (The Archived, #1)
author: Victoria E. Schwab
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Madness of Crowds (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #17)]]> 56269078 You’re a coward.

Time and again, as the New Year approaches, that charge is leveled against Armand Gamache.

It starts innocently enough.

While the residents of the Québec village of Three Pines take advantage of the deep snow to ski and toboggan, to drink hot chocolate in the bistro and share meals together, the Chief Inspector finds his holiday with his family interrupted by a simple request.

He’s asked to provide security for what promises to be a non-event. A visiting Professor of Statistics will be giving a lecture at the nearby university.

While he is perplexed as to why the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec would be assigned this task, it sounds easy enough. That is until Gamache starts looking into Professor Abigail Robinson and discovers an agenda so repulsive he begs the university to cancel the lecture.

They refuse, citing academic freedom, and accuse Gamache of censorship and intellectual cowardice. Before long, Professor Robinson’s views start seeping into conversations. Spreading and infecting. So that truth and fact, reality and delusion are so confused it’s near impossible to tell them apart.

Discussions become debates, debates become arguments, which turn into fights. As sides are declared, a madness takes hold.

Abigail Robinson promises that, if they follow her, ça va bien aller. All will be well. But not, Gamache and his team know, for everyone.

When a murder is committed it falls to Armand Gamache, his second-in-command Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and their team to investigate the crime as well as this extraordinary popular delusion.

And the madness of crowds.]]> 436 Louise Penny 1250145260 Sarah S 4 audiobooks, mystery-thriller 4.5 4.05 2021 The Madness of Crowds (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #17)
author: Louise Penny
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves: audiobooks, mystery-thriller
review:
4.5
]]> <![CDATA[Calls May Be Recorded for Training and Monitoring Purposes]]> 220158919
In a London call centre, Jimmie helps holiday makers with myriad problems, but he is hardly a model employee. He doesn’t simply provide customer service to his clients and advice to his colleagues, he gets involved in their fantasies and frustrations, and now he’s about to be hauled up in front of the boss.

From perfecting his roles as an undertaker and as a clown to performing duties above and beyond his employment contract, he debates the importance of the optimum shade for lipstick and bathroom walls, the pros and cons of nudist versus textile, as well as the psychological impacts of an Italian mother and an emotional support animal.

This is the second, ribald, scatological novel from the brilliant author of The Appointment. Jimmie’s sly, sharp, melancholy insights into the indignities of a world which aims to eliminate the human will make you laugh, weep and never look the same way at an electric carving knife again.]]> 176 Katharina Volckmer 1911648896 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.20 Calls May Be Recorded for Training and Monitoring Purposes
author: Katharina Volckmer
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.20
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[House of Shade: Death in Zanzibar, Death in Andamans, Death in Kashmir]]> 3363209 912 M.M. Kaye 014017270X Sarah S 0 to-read 3.86 1993 House of Shade: Death in Zanzibar, Death in Andamans, Death in Kashmir
author: M.M. Kaye
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Party of Liars 217388119 A lavish, Texas-sized Sweet Sixteen turns deadly in this twisty, pulse-pounding new novel � serving up a fresh take on a classic locked-room whodunnit. Let the festivities begin�

Today is Sophie Matthews’s sixteenth birthday party, an exclusive black-tie bash in the heart of the Texas Hill Country, where secrets are as deep-rooted as the sprawling live oaks. Sophie’s dad has spared no expense, and his renovated cliffside mansion—once thought haunted—is now hosting the event of the season. Then, just before the candles on the three-tiered red velvet cake are blown out, a body falls from the balcony onto the starlit dance floor below.

It’s a killer guest list . . .

DANI: Sophie’s new stepmother who’s been plagued by self-doubt ever since the birth of her own baby girl

Ѹ鳢ձ: the superstitious Irish nanny who senses a looming danger in this cavernous house

MIKAYLA: the birthday girl’s best friend who is not nearly as meek as the popular kids assume

KIM: the cunning ex-wife who has a grudge she can’t let go of . . .

Everyone is invited in. Not everyone will get out alive. ]]> 336 Kelsey Cox 1250378818 Sarah S 0 to-read 4.06 2025 Party of Liars
author: Kelsey Cox
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Animal Instinct 214986208 Fleishman Is in Trouble meets Big Swiss in thisdarkly humorous and tantalizing pandemic-ridden portrait of sex, divorce, and midlife, about a Brooklynite who frankensteins the perfect lover, from the critically acclaimed author of Unseen City.

It’s spring of 2020 and Rachel Bloomstein, mother of three, recent divorcee, and Brooklynite is stuck inside. But her newly awakened sexual desire and lust for a new life refuse to be contained. Leaning on her best friend Lulu to show her the ropes, Rachel dips a toe in the online dating world, leading to park bench dates with younger men, ongoing flirtations with beautiful women, and finally, actual, in-person sex. None of them, individually, are perfect . . . hence her rotation.

But what if one person could perfectly cater to all her emotional needs?
Driven by this possibility, Rachel creates Frankie, the AI chatbot she programs with all the good parts of dating in middle age . . . and some of the bad. But as Rachel plays with her fantasy to her heart’s content, she begins to realize she can’t reprogram her ex-husband, or her children, or her friends, or the roster of paramours that’s grown unwieldy. Perhaps real life has more in store for Rachel than she could ever program for herself.

Animal Instinct is at once a provocative tale of one woman’s burgeoning freedom, an indictment and celebration of our fraught relationship with technology, and a snapshot of life at its most fragile and most precious.]]> 288 Amy Shearn 059371833X Sarah S 0 to-read 3.48 2025 Animal Instinct
author: Amy Shearn
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> With a Vengeance 219603177 One train. No stops. A deadly game of survival and revenge.

In 1942, six people destroyed Anna Matheson’s family.Twelve years later, she’s ready for retribution.

Under false pretenses, Anna has lured those responsible for her family’s downfall ontoa luxurytrain from Philadelphia to Chicago,an overnightjourney of fourteen hours. Her goal? Confront the people who’ve wronged her, get them to confess their crimes, and deliver them into the hands of authorities waiting at the end of the line. Justice will at last be served.

But Anna’s plan is quickly derailed by the murder of one of the passengers. As the train barrels through the night, it becomes clear that someone else on board is enacting their own form of revenge—and that they won’t stop until everyone else is dead.

With time running out before the train reaches its destination, Anna is forced to hunt the killer in their midst while protecting the people she hates the most. In order to destroy her enemies, she must first save them—even though it means putting her own life at risk.]]> 400 Riley Sager 0593472403 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.64 2025 With a Vengeance
author: Riley Sager
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Exiles 211003843
A year on, Kim Gillespie’s absence casts a long shadow as her friends and loved ones gather deep in the heart of South Australian wine country to welcome a new addition to the family.

Joining the celebrations is federal investigator Aaron Falk. But as he soaks up life in the lush valley, he begins to suspect this tight-knit group may be more fractured than it seems.

Between Falk’s closest friend, a missing mother, and a woman he’s drawn to, dark questions linger as long-ago truths begin to emerge.

An outstanding novel, a brilliant mystery and a heart-pounding read from the author of The Dry, Force of Nature, The Lost Man and The Survivors.]]> 448 Jane Harper 1250378044 Sarah S 0 to-read 4.36 2022 Exiles
author: Jane Harper
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Jente, 1983 59075859 Called a “masterpiece� (Ali Smith), this stunning novel explores desire and anxiety, beauty and youth, memory and power.

Paris, a winter’s night in 1983. The girl is sixteen years old, lost in unfamiliar streets. On a scrap of paper in her pocket is the address of a photographer, K, thirty years her senior. Almost four decades later, as her life and the world around her begins to unravel, the grown woman seeks to comprehend the young girl of before. Set in Oslo, New York, and Paris, Girl, 1983 is a bravura quest through layers of oblivion that probes the elegiac sway of memory as she looks for ways to disclose a long-guarded secret. A delineation of time and place over the course of a life, this remarkable novel insistently crisscrosses the path of a wayward sixteen-year-old girl lost in Paris. Girl, 1983 is a raw, stark, and haunting exposure of beauty and forgetting, desire and shame, power and powerlessness.]]> 260 Linn Ullmann 8249519795 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.77 2021 Jente, 1983
author: Linn Ullmann
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Broken Country 214151202 “The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.�

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

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

A sweeping love story with the pace and twists of a thriller, Broken Country is a novel of simmering passion, impossible choices, and explosive consequences that toggles between the past and present to explore the far-reaching legacy of first love.]]> 320 Clare Leslie Hall 166807818X Sarah S 1 botm, reese-s-book-club Beth is selfish, dumb and self absorbed.
I guessed all the twists. Pathetic excuse for a love story. ]]> 4.44 2025 Broken Country
author: Clare Leslie Hall
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2025
rating: 1
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: botm, reese-s-book-club
review:
1.5
Beth is selfish, dumb and self absorbed.
I guessed all the twists. Pathetic excuse for a love story.
]]> Victorian Psycho 213395480 From the acclaimed author of Mrs. March comes the riveting tale of a bloodthirsty governess who learns the true meaning of vengeance.

Grim Wolds, England: Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect governess—she’ll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children. But long, listless days spent within the estate’s dreary confines come with an intimate knowledge of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family—Mr. Pounds can’t keep his eyes off Winifred’s chest, and Mrs. Pounds takes a sickly pleasure in punishing Winifred for her husband’s wandering gaze. Compounded with her disdain for the entitled Pounds children, Winifred finds herself struggling at every turn to stifle the violent compulsions of her past. French tutoring and needlework are one way to pass the time, as is admiring the ugly portraits in the gallery . . . and creeping across the moonlit lawns. . . .

Patience. Winifred must have patience, for Christmas is coming, and she has very special gifts planned for the dear souls of Ensor House. Brimming with sardonic wit and culminating in a shocking conclusion, Victorian Psycho plunges readers into the chilling mind of an iconic new literary psychopath.]]> 208 Virginia Feito 1631498630 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.63 2025 Victorian Psycho
author: Virginia Feito
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Black Woods Blue Sky 213243955 An unforgettable dark fairy tale that asks, Can love save us from ourselves?

Birdie’s keeping it together; of course she is. So she’s a little hungover sometimes, and she has to bring her daughter, Emaleen, to her job waiting tables at an Alaskan roadside lodge, but she’s getting by as a single mother in a tough town. Still, Birdie can remember happier times from her youth, when she was free in the wilds of nature.

Arthur Neilsen, a soft-spoken and scarred recluse who appears in town only at the change of seasons, brings Emaleen back to safety when she gets lost in the woods. Most people avoid him, but to Birdie he represents everything she’s ever longed for. She finds herself falling for Arthur and the land he knows so well. Against the warnings of those who care about them, Birdie and Emaleen move to his isolated cabin in the mountains on the far side of the Wolverine River.

It’s just the three of them in the vast black woods, far from roads, telephones, electricity, and outside contact, but Birdie believes she has come prepared. At first, it’s idyllic, but soon Birdie discovers that Arthur is something much more mysterious and dangerous than she could have imagined, and that like the Alaska wilderness, a fairy tale can be as dark as it is beautiful.]]> 306 Eowyn Ivey 0593231023 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.70 2025 Black Woods Blue Sky
author: Eowyn Ivey
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Business Trip 211003858
Stephanie and Jasmine have nothing and everything in common. The two women don’t know each other but are on the same plane. Stephanie is on a business trip and Jasmine is fleeing an abusive relationship. After a few days, they text their friends the same exact messages about the same man—the messages becoming stranger and more erratic.

And then the two women vanish. The texts go silent, the red flags go up, and the panic sets in. When Stephanie and Jasmine are each declared missing and in danger, it begs the questions: Who is Trent McCarthy? What did he do to these women� or what did they do to him?

Twist upon twist, layer upon layer, where nothing is as it seems, THE BUSINESS TRIP takes you on a descent into the depths of a mastermind manipulator. But who is playing who?]]> 344 Jessie Garcia 1250364418 Sarah S 2 2.5 3.63 2025 The Business Trip
author: Jessie Garcia
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: library-books, mystery-thriller
review:
2.5
]]> Crooked Seeds 191746392 A woman in post-apartheid South Africa confronts her family's troubling past in this taut and daring novel about national trauma and collective guilt--from the Booker Prize-longlisted author of An Island.

Cape Town, 2028. The land cracks from a years-long drought, the nearby mountains threaten to burn, and the queue for the water trucks grows ever longer.

In her crumbling corner of a public housing complex, Deidre van Deventer receives a call from the South African police. Her family home, recently reclaimed by the government, has become the scene of a criminal investigation. The remains of several bodies have just been unearthed from her land, after decades underground. Detectives pepper Deidre with Was your brother a member of a pro-apartheid group in the 1990s? Is it true that he was building bombs as part of a terrorist plot?

Deidre doesn't know the answers to the detectives' questions. All she knows is that she was denied - repeatedly - the life she felt she deserved. Overshadowed by her brother, then left behind by her daughter after she emigrated, Deidre must watch over her aging mother and make do with government help and the fading generosity of her neighbors while the landscape around her grows more and more combustible. As alarming evidence from the investigation continues to surface, and detectives pressure her to share what she knows of her family's disturbing past, Deidre must finally face her own shattered memories so that something better might emerge for her and her country.

In exquisitely spare prose, Karen Jennings weaves a singularly powerful novel about post-apartheid South Africa. It is an unforgettable, propulsive story of fractured families, collective guilt, the ways we become trapped in prisons of our own making, and how we can begin to break free.]]> 240 Karen Jennings 0593597125 Sarah S 3 audiobooks, womens-prize 3.5 3.56 2024 Crooked Seeds
author: Karen Jennings
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: audiobooks, womens-prize
review:
3.5
]]> Dream Count 219520778 A publishing event ten years in the making�a searing, exquisite new novel by the best-selling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists�the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires.

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until � betrayed and brokenhearted � she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America � but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.]]> 416 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 0593802721 Sarah S 3 library-books, womens-prize 3.97 2025 Dream Count
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves: library-books, womens-prize
review:

]]> Milk Fed 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 Sarah S 5 audiobooks, belletrist 3.56 2021 Milk Fed
author: Melissa Broder
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2021/02/10
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves: audiobooks, belletrist
review:
TW: eating disorder, abusive parent, graphic sex scenes. I love this book! The mixture of Judaism and millennial life in LA was so perfect. If you love Halle Butler and Otessa Moshfegh you will love this.
]]> <![CDATA[Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)]]> 204811915 People) of a novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.

With her remarkable insight into the human condition and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters—Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and more—as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone’s life mean?�

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known—“unrecorded lives,� Olive calls them—reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.

Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”]]> 326 Elizabeth Strout 0593446097 Sarah S 4 library-books, womens-prize 3.99 2024 Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/21
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves: library-books, womens-prize
review:
4.5 Hard topics beautifully written with care and precision.
]]> The Wedding People 198902277 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250899576.

A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help her start anew.

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.]]> 384 Alison Espach Sarah S 2 botm, read-w-jenna 4.11 2024 The Wedding People
author: Alison Espach
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/20
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves: botm, read-w-jenna
review:
2.5 stars. This book glosses over a very serious topic that cannot just be mended by meeting an easy to talk to man.
]]> <![CDATA[Behind the Red Velvet Curtain: An American Ballerina in Russia]]> 215017896
But dancing in Moscow was not the Onion Dome and Tchaikovsky soundtrack fairy tale she’d hoped for. The Bolshoi and its school were filled with cutthroat competition, acts of violence, and coaches who encouraged obsessive devotion. They sent her on stage with broken bones, helped her forge immigration paperwork, and encouraged her to toe a dangerous political line - all for the privilege of dancing on one of the world's most storied stages.

As Joy’s career took off and she made a name for herself in the Russian ballet world, she had to face a hard choice. Despite her love for her adopted homeland and its world-famous theaters, she was aware of the growing dangers of a professional lifestyle descending into corruption. Her concerns grew stronger with the awareness of a possible war with Russia's neighbor, Ukraine.

Joy spent three years dancing prima roles for the Kremlin Palace Theater and now lives in Paris with her husband, where she performs internationally and with the Paris Opera.]]> 274 Joy Womack 1538199378 Sarah S 0 to-read 4.41 Behind the Red Velvet Curtain: An American Ballerina in Russia
author: Joy Womack
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.41
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Middle Spoon: A Novel 224198827 A whipsmart, blazingly funny novel about heartbreak, unconventional love, and the way society could be, from National Book Award finalist Alejandro Varela

The narrator of Middle Spoon appears to be living the He has a doting husband, two precocious children, all the comforts of a quiet bourgeois life—and a sexy younger boyfriend to accompany him to farmers markets and cocktail parties. But when his boyfriend abruptly dumps him, he spirals into heartbreak for the first time and must confront a world still struggling to understand polyamorous relationships. Faced with the judgment of friends and the sting of rejection, he’s left towonder if sharing a life with both his family and his lover could ever truly be possible.

With a big heart and just the right dose of the anxieties that define the modern era, Middle Spoon reveals the rawness of infatuation while reimagining what relationships, marriage, and family life can look like. Alejandro Varela boldly probes the corners of society in desperate need of change—from taboos around intimacy to the shortcomings of Oscar season, pop culture, and gluten-free food—offering a surprising perspective on the tangled dynamics that shape our lives. Equal parts heart-wrenching and uproariously funny, Middle Spoon is for anyone who has longed, nursed a broken heart, or grappled with love at its messiest.]]> 336 Alejandro Varela Sarah S 0 to-read 4.00 Middle Spoon: A Novel
author: Alejandro Varela
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Strange Case of Jane O. 213870076
In the first year after her child is born, Jane suffers a series of strange episodes: amnesia, premonitions, hallucinations, and an inexplicable sense of dread. As her psychiatrist struggles to solve the mystery of what is happening to Jane’s mind, she suddenly goes missing. A day later she is found unconscious in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, in the midst of what seems to be an episode of dissociative fugue; when she comes to, she has no memory of what has happened to her.

Are Jane’s strange experiences related to the overwhelm of single motherhood, or are they the manifestation of a long-buried trauma from her past? Why is she having visions of a young man who died twenty years ago, who warns her of a disaster ahead? Jane’s symptoms lead her psychiatrist ever-deeper into the furthest reaches of her mind, and cause him to question everything he thought he knew about so-called reality—including events in his own life.

Karen Thompson Walker’s profound and beautifully written novel is a speculative mystery about memory, identity, and fate, a mesmerizing story about the bonds of love between a mother and child, a man and a woman, and those who we’ve lost but may still be alive among us.]]> 288 Karen Thompson Walker 1984853945 Sarah S 3 audiobooks, belletrist 3.5 3.92 2025 The Strange Case of Jane O.
author: Karen Thompson Walker
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/13
date added: 2025/03/13
shelves: audiobooks, belletrist
review:
3.5
]]> The Dreamers 34409176
Mei, an outsider in the cliquish hierarchy of dorm life, finds herself thrust together with an eccentric, idealistic classmate. Two visiting professors try to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. A father succumbs to the illness, leaving his daughters to fend for themselves. And at the hospital, a new life grows within a college girl, unbeknownst to her—even as she sleeps. A psychiatrist, summoned from Los Angeles, attempts to make sense of the illness as it spreads through the town. Those infected are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, more than has ever been recorded. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what?]]> 303 Karen Thompson Walker 0812994167 Sarah S 5 library-books 3.61 2019 The Dreamers
author: Karen Thompson Walker
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/11
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: library-books
review:

]]> A Language of Limbs 210373324
Over the following three decades, these two lives almost intersect in pivotal moments, the distance between them at times drawing so thin they nearly collide. Against the backdrop of an era including Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see these two lives ebb and flow, with joy and grief and loss and desire, until at last they come together in the most beautiful and surprising of fashions.

A Language of Limbs is about love and how it's policed, friendship and how it transcends, and hilarity in the face of heartbreak - the jokes you tell as you're dying and the ways laughing at a funeral softens the edges of our grief. An unashamed celebration of queer life in all its vibrancy and colour, this story finds the humanity in all of us, and demands we claim our futures for ourselves.]]> 277 Dylin Hardcastle 1761562428 Sarah S 0 to-read 4.39 2024 A Language of Limbs
author: Dylin Hardcastle
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Good Girl 195644142
A girl can get in almost anywhere, even if she can’t get out.

In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist.

Then in the haze of Berlin’s legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of personal and artistic freedom. But as Nila finds herself pulled further into Marlowe’s controlling orbit, ugly, barely submerged racial tensions begin to roil Germany—and Nila’s family and community. After a year of running from her future, Nila stops to ask herself the most important question: Who does she want to be?

A story of love and family, raves and Kafka, staying up all night and surviving the mistakes of youth, Good Girl is the virtuosic debut novel by a celebrated young poet and, now, a major new voice in fiction.]]> 368 Aria Aber Sarah S 4 womens-prize 3.73 2025 Good Girl
author: Aria Aber
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/10
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: womens-prize
review:

]]> The Favorites 211399784 To the world, they were a scandal. To each other, an obsession.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER � An epic love story set in the sparkling, savage sphere of elite figure skating, starring a woman determined to carve her own path on and off the ice

“P Wuthering Heights and part Daisy Jones & The Six, this novel is as brilliantly choreographed as a gold medal performance and will keep you guessing until its last page.”—Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of By Any Other Name

She might not have a famous name, funding, or her family’s support, but Katarina Shaw has always known that she was destined to become an Olympic skater. When she meets Heath Rocha, a lonely kid stuck in the foster care system, their instant connection makes them a formidable duo on the ice. Clinging to skating—and each other—to escape their turbulent lives, Kat and Heath go from childhood sweethearts to champion ice dancers, captivating the world with their scorching chemistry, rebellious style, and roller-coaster relationship.

Until a shocking incident at the Olympic Games brings their partnership to a sudden end.

As the ten-year anniversary of their final skate approaches, an unauthorized documentary reignites the public obsession with Shaw and Rocha, claiming to uncover the “real story� through interviews with their closest friends and fiercest rivals. Kat wants nothing to do with the documentary, but she can’t stand the thought of someone else defining her legacy. So, after a decade of silence, she’s telling her story: from the childhood tragedies that created her all-consuming bond with Heath to the clash of desires that tore them apart. Sensational rumors have haunted their every step for years, but the truth may be even more shocking than the headlines.]]> 448 Layne Fargo 0593732049 Sarah S 2 audiobooks 4.19 2025 The Favorites
author: Layne Fargo
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: audiobooks
review:
I hate read the last 30% of this vapid, inane bs. The only reason I’m giving it two and not one is because the audio production was stellar.
]]> Good Dirt 213618132 The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom in this moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake, a Read with Jenna Book Club Pick

When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well.

The crime was never solved—and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England—the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans want is another media frenzy splashing their family across the papers, but when Ebby's high profile romance falls apart without any explanation, that's exactly what they get.

So Ebby flees to France, only for her past to follow her there. And as she tries to process what's happened, she begins to think about the other loss her family suffered on that day eighteen years ago—the stoneware jar that had been in their family for generations, brought North by an enslaved ancestor. But little does she know that the handcrafted piece of pottery held more than just her family's history—it might also hold the key to unlocking her own future.

In this sweeping, evocative novel, Charmaine Wilkerson brings to life a multi-generational epic that examines how the past informs our present.]]> 368 Charmaine Wilkerson 0593358368 Sarah S 3 library-books 4.06 2025 Good Dirt
author: Charmaine Wilkerson
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: library-books
review:

]]> The Ministry of Time 199798179 A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all:

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

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

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.]]> 339 Kaliane Bradley 1668045141 Sarah S 3 botm, womens-prize 3.54 2024 The Ministry of Time
author: Kaliane Bradley
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/31
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: botm, womens-prize
review:

]]> All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Sarah S 2 audiobooks, womens-prize 3.54 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/26
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: audiobooks, womens-prize
review:
With all of the multiple partners I feel the author should have had a conversation about safe sex practices and STI testing. The narrator is selfish and only concerned with her own desire and acts shocked when things blow up in her face.
]]> The Safekeep 199798201
A house is a precious thing...

It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl—Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to infatuation—leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva—nor the house in which they live—are what they seem.

Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is a brilliantly plotted and provocative debut novel you won’t soon forget.]]> 272 Yael van der Wouden 1668034344 Sarah S 3 3.5 4.05 2024 The Safekeep
author: Yael van der Wouden
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/26
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves: audiobooks, man-booker, womens-prize
review:
3.5
]]> On a Quiet Street 58977601 A New York Times Book Review Summer Read andEdgar Award nominee!Don’t miss this unputdownable psychological thriller! Perfect for fans of Lucy Foley and Ruth Ware!

When you really start to look beyond the airy open floor plans and marble counters, Brighton Hills is filled with secrets. Some big, some little, some deadly. And one by one, they’re about to be revealed� “A writer to watch.� �Publishers Weekly

The perfect neighborhood can be the perfect place to hide�

Who wouldn’t want to live in Brighton Hills? This exclusive community on the Oregon coast is the perfect mix of luxury and natural beauty. Stunning houses nestle beneath mighty Douglas firs, and lush backyards roll down to the lakefront. It’s the kind of place where neighbors look out for one another. Sometimes a little too closely�

Cora thinks her husband, Finn, is cheating—she just needs to catch him in the act. That’s where Paige comes in. Paige lost her son to a hit-and-run last year, and she’s drowning in the kind of grief that makes people do reckless things like spying on the locals, searching for proof that her son’s death was no accident…and agreeing to Cora’s plan to reveal what kind of man Finn really is. All the while, their reclusive new neighbor, Georgia, is acting more strangely every day. But what could such a lovely young mother possibly be hiding?

Don't miss Seraphina's upcoming novel, The Vanishing Hour. You won't be able to put it down!

Other thrillers from Seraphina to keep you up all
The Vanishing Hour Such a Good Wife Someone’s Listening

]]> 302 Seraphina Nova Glass 0369717058 Sarah S 0 dnf DNF at 49% 4.13 2022 On a Quiet Street
author: Seraphina Nova Glass
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/03
shelves: dnf
review:
DNF at 49%
]]> Worry 214152235
It’s March of 2019, and twenty-eight-year-old Jules Gold—anxious, artistically frustrated, and internet-obsessed—has been living alone in the apartment she once shared with the man she thought she’d marry when her younger sister Poppy comes to crash. Indefinitely. Poppy is a year out from a suicide attempt only Jules knows about, and as she searches for work and meaning in Brooklyn, Jules spends her days hate-scrolling the feeds of Mormon mommy bloggers and waiting for life to happen.

Then the hives that’ve plagued Poppy since childhood flare up. Jules’s uterus turns against her. Poppy brings home a maladjusted rescue dog named Amy Klobuchar. The girls� mother—a newly devout Messianic Jew—starts falling for the same deep-state conspiracy theories as Jules’s online mommies. A trip home to Florida ends in disaster. Amy Klobuchar may or may not have rabies. And Jules struggles halfheartedly to scrape her way to the source of her ennui, slowly and cruelly coming to blame Poppy for her own insufficiencies as a friend, a writer, and a sister. As the year shambles on and a new decade looms near, Jules and Poppy—comrades, competitors, permanent fixtures in each other’s lives—must ask themselves what they want their futures to look like, and whether they’ll spend them together or apart.

Deadpan, dark, and brutally funny, Worry is a sharp portrait of two sisters enduring a dread-filled American moment from a nervy new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 320 Alexandra Tanner 1668018624 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.22 2024 Worry
author: Alexandra Tanner
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.22
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Private Rites 199645404 From the bestselling author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a haunting novel of three sisters navigating queer love and faith at the end of the world.

There’s no way to bury a body in earth which is flooded
It is a fact consigned to history along with almost everything else

It’s been raining for a long time now, for so long that the lands have reshaped themselves. Old places have been lost. Arcane rituals and religions have crept back into practice.

Sisters Isla, Irene and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their estranged father dies. A famous architect revered for making the new world navigable, he had long cut himself off from public life. They find themselves uncertain of how to grieve his passing when everything around them seems to be ending anyway.

As the sisters come together to clear the grand glass house that is the pinnacle of his legacy, they begin to sense that the magnetic influence of their father lives on through it. Something sinister seems to be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always been unusually interested in their lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperilled world.]]> 327 Julia Armfield 0008608032 Sarah S 4 lgbtqiap 4.25 3.82 2024 Private Rites
author: Julia Armfield
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: lgbtqiap
review:
4.25
]]> Penitence 211003837 For readers of Ann Patchett and Celeste Ng, Penitence is a poignant exploration of love and forgiveness. It’s a suspenseful, addictive page-turner filled with literary insight that compels readers to consider whether each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.

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

Spanning decades, from the ski slopes of rural Colorado to the streets of post-9/11 New York City and back again, Kristin Koval’s debut novel Penitence is an examination of the complexities of familial loyalty, the journey of redemption, and the profound experience of true forgiveness.]]> 320 Kristin Koval 1250342996 Sarah S 4 botm 3.69 2025 Penitence
author: Kristin Koval
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: botm
review:

]]> Selfish Girls 224800743 NOTHING HURTS LIKE FAMILY.

Ines is reluctantly moving home on the edge of a breakdown, her childhood sweetheart in tow. He's only ever wanted what was best for her.

Gwen is elated that her prodigal daughter has returned.

Dylan is still licking her wounds from a rejection she can't forget.

And Emma is quietly suffocating in the perfect marriage she wanted so badly.

They were inseparable once. But that was a long time ago. Now, they're back in the Welsh town where they grew up, peeling back the layers of a once forgotten, haunting past. What they find may be the end of them...

Uninhibited, claustrophobic and complex, Selfish Girls spans generations, buried resentments, and an unexpected love story. It is a clear-eyed portrait of a dysfunctional family and the pain we inflict on those we love most.

'Sharply real and ethereal, as though reading this novel enters you into a dream-like state' Emma Gannon, Sunday Times bestseller

'Bold, lean and enduring' Maxime Mei-Fung Chung, author of What Women Want]]> Abigail Bergstrom Sarah S 0 to-read 0.0 Selfish Girls
author: Abigail Bergstrom
name: Sarah S
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Overspill 218692215 Tender, brutal, devastating, OVERSPILL is the debut novel from incredible new literary talent, Charlotte Paradise.

Sara is twenty-five. She has never used a tampon without having a panic attack.

She starts dating Miles. For three months, they don’t touch. Miles respects her boundaries, though he longs for them to melt away. Sara desires Miles, but she knows her body, or rather she knows it is an unknowable thing.

Sara wants to be in love, to find a person who allows her to be herself. Someone who is happy with everything she is and everything she isn’t. Miles hopes he won’t hurt her.

But how do you navigate a relationship for which there is no blueprint? How do you love someone when your body is not your own, and how do you reclaim it?

Overspill is a luminous, shattering debut about love, trauma and self-acceptance, perfect for fans of Sally Rooney and Coco Mellors.]]> 405 Charlotte Paradise 0008560013 Sarah S 0 to-read 4.04 Overspill
author: Charlotte Paradise
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Money to Burn 212434611 Is it possible to love under capitalism?

Maggie and Kurt are a couple struggling to hold their marriage together after their only daughter has left home. They live in a old farmhouse in Nyborg but somehow keep missing each other, unable to discuss the events that brought them together.

Decades ago, a passenger ferry called the Scandinavian Star caught fire, killing hundreds of people. The event is still considered a national tragedy in Denmark and Norway. Years later, it was revealed not to be an accident, but the result of an insurance scam gone wrong.

How is the Scandinavian Star disaster connected to Maggie and Kurt's relationship? How does money affect and infect our closest relationships? And is it ever possible to escape? Money to Burn is both a dazzling work of fiction and a true-crime investigation into the unshakeable hold of money, greed and desire on us all.]]> 156 Asta Olivia Nordenhof 1529934516 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.69 2020 Money to Burn
author: Asta Olivia Nordenhof
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Inseperables 60123266
The girls become close. They talk for hours about equality, justice, war and religion; they lose respect for their teachers; they build a world of their own. But they can't stay like this forever.

Written in 1954, five years after The Second Sex, the novel was never published in Simone de Beauvoir's lifetime. This first English edition includes an afterword by her adopted daughter, who discovered the manuscript hidden in a drawer, and photographs of the real-life friendship which inspired and tormented the author.]]> 148 Simone de Beauvoir Sarah S 4 modern-classics 4.5 4.14 2020 The Inseperables
author: Simone de Beauvoir
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/25
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: modern-classics
review:
4.5
]]> The Applicant 61359016 A singular debut, The Applicant explores with wit and brevity what it means to be an immigrant, woman, and emerging writer

It’s 2017 and Leyla, a Turkish twenty-something living in Berlin is scrubbing toilets at an Alice in Wonderland-themed hostel after failing her thesis, losing her student visa, and suing her German university in a Kafkaesque attempt to reverse her failure.

Increasingly distant from what used to be at arm’s reach—writerly ambitions, tight knit friendships, a place to call home—Leyla attempts to find solace in the techno beats of Berlin’s nightlife, with little success. Right as the clock winds down on the hold on her visa, Leyla meets a conservative Swedish tourist and—against her political convictions and better judgment—begins to fall in love, or something like it. Will she accept an IKEA life with the Volvo salesman and relinquish her creative dreams, or return to Turkey to her mother and sister, codependent and enmeshed, her father’s ghost still haunting their lives?

While she waits for the German court’s verdict on her future, in the pages of her diary, Leyla begins to parse her unresolved past and untenable present. An indelible character at once precocious and imperiled, Leyla gives voice to the working-class and immigrant struggle to find safety, self-expression, and happiness. The Applicant is an extraordinary dissection of a liminal life between borders and identities, an original and darkly funny debut.]]> 256 Nazli Koca 0802160549 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.52 2023 The Applicant
author: Nazli Koca
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Abandoners: On Mothers and Monsters]]> 205478839
What kind of mother abandons her child? It’s a question that conjures the worst kind of moral judgment. Yet during the pandemic, trapped at home with young children and struggling to find creative space to write, journalist Begoña Gómez Urzaiz became fixated on artistic women who were able to overcome both society’s condemnation and their own maternal instincts to leave their children—at will or due to economic or other circumstances. More than anything, she was fascinated by her own prejudice toward these women, so clearly tied up in a much wider cultural bias.

The Abandoners is sharp, at times slyly humorous, and always deeply empathetic. Using famous examples such as Ingrid Bergman, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, and Maria Montessori as well as fictional ones like Anna Karenina and the many roles of Meryl Streep, and interrogating modern trends like “momfluencers,� Gómez Urzaiz reveals what our judgement of these women tells us about our judgement of all women.]]> 256 Begoña Gómez Urzaiz 1324079479 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.92 2022 The Abandoners: On Mothers and Monsters
author: Begoña Gómez Urzaiz
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> We Do Not Part 205436018 Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter of Korean history.

One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama.

A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend's house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.]]> 256 Han Kang 0593595459 Sarah S 4 audiobooks 3.88 2021 We Do Not Part
author: Han Kang
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: audiobooks
review:

]]> Bitter Water Opera 127282246
In 1967, the dancer Marta Becket and her husband were traveling through Death Valley Junction when they came across an abandoned theater. Marta decided it was hers. She painted her ideal audience on its walls and danced her own dances until her death five decades later.

In the present day, Gia has ended a relationship and taken a leave from her job in film studies at a university. She is sleeping fifteen hours a night and ignoring calls from her mother. In a library archive, she comes across a photo of Marta Becket and decides to write her a letter. Soon Marta magically appears in her home.

Gia hopes Marta Becket will guide her out of her despair. But is Marta―the example of her single-minded, solitary life―enough? Through precise, vivid vignettes, Bitter Water Opera follows Gia as she resists the urge to escape into herself and struggles to form a lasting connection to the world. Her search has her reckoning with a set of terrifying charcoal drawings on her garage walls, a corpse in the middle of a pond, a crooked pear sapling, and other mysterious entities before bringing her to Marta’s theater, the Amargosa Opera House. There in the desert, Gia finds one answer.

In this brief, astonishing novel, Nicolette Polek describes an individual awakening to faith while exploring our deepest existential questions. How do we look beyond ourselves? Where do words go? What is art for?]]> 128 Nicolette Polek 1644452839 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.87 2024 Bitter Water Opera
author: Nicolette Polek
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Skunks 199056181
Dear Skunks, I wrote. Then I got stuck. What was there to say about the skunks? Of course there was the smell—the spraying. Everyone’s mind jumped to the spraying. I often forgot about the spraying entirely, which was nice because it made me feel that I wasn’t like other people.

From the outside, Isabel doesn’t seem to have much going on. It’s the summer after college graduation and she’s moved back to her hometown, where she spends her days house-sitting, babysitting, working the front desk at a yoga studio, and hanging out with her childhood friend Ellie. But on the inside, Isabel’s mind is always running, always analyzing, and right now, she’s trying hard to not let her thoughts give weight to boys. So when Isabel spots three baby skunks in the yard, their presence is not only a strangely thrilling break from the expected, it feels like a fortuitous sign from the universe. Skunks. That’s what she should be thinking about.

As the summer unfolds, Isabel becomes increasingly preoccupied with the skunks, while also navigating her various jobs and an ambiguous relationship with Eli, the son of the couple she’s house-sitting for. In her own life and in the imagined inner lives of the skunks, Isabel ponders the nature of existence, love vs. infatuation, and the many small moments that make us animal, make us human. The Skunks is an unforgettable coming-of-age story about the complexities of crushes, desire, friendship, and modern life.]]> 240 Fiona Warnick 1959030612 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.64 2024 The Skunks
author: Fiona Warnick
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Alive at the End of the World 60418994 Pierced by grief and charged with history, this new poetry collection from the award-winning author of Prelude to Bruise and How We Fight for Our Lives confronts our everyday apocalypses.

In haunted poems glinting with laughter, Saeed Jones explores the public and private betrayals of life as we know it. With verve, wit, and elegant craft, Jones strips away American artifice in order to reveal the intimate grief of a mourning son and the collective grief bearing down on all of us.

Drawing from memoir, fiction, and persona, Jones confronts the everyday perils of white supremacy with a finely tuned poetic ear, identifying moments that seem routine even as they open chasms of hurt. Viewing himself as an unreliable narrator, Jones looks outward to understand what’s within, bringing forth cultural icons like Little Richard, Paul Mooney, Aretha Franklin and Diahann Carroll to illuminate how long and how perilously we’ve been living on top of fault lines. As these poems seek ways to love and survive through America’s existential threats, Jones ushers his readers toward the realization that the end of the world is already here—and the apocalypse is a state of being.]]> 104 Saeed Jones Sarah S 0 to-read 4.34 2022 Alive at the End of the World
author: Saeed Jones
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Blue Graffiti 171669110
Living in the home he inherited from his mother and abandoned by his father, painter and construction worker, Cash, has never known anything beyond the fields of Johnston, WI—never particularly wanted to, either. Why would he when his friends are there, his work is there, his history is there. He loves Johnston. But when an emerald-eyed stranger named Rose blows into town one summer evening in his favorite local bar, everything changes. It's love at first sight. For Cash, anyway.

What follows is an intimate reflection on the love, faith, and tragedy that courses through the blood of America’s backbone. Cash and his closest friends find themselves vital threads in the fabric of their community, the memory of those forgotten, and partners in a new enterprise: adventure.

A bluesey ode to the Beat generation for the modern era, Blue Graffiti is Wisconsin-raised writer Calahan Skogman's poetic debut imbued with an essential freedom, romance, and longing for a bygone era.]]> 301 Calahan Skogman 1951213955 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.80 2024 Blue Graffiti
author: Calahan Skogman
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Margery Kempe 243972 204 Robert Glück 185242334X Sarah S 0 to-read 3.84 1994 Margery Kempe
author: Robert Glück
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Make Me Famous 217223430 Daisy Jones and the Six meets Patricia Highsmith in this addictive, intense novel about the brutal and ferocious road to glory, from the award-winning author of My Husband.

Ever since she was a child, Cléo, the French-American daughter of two academics, has had only one becoming a famous singer. Over the years, to everyone’s surprise but her own, she overcomes every obstacle and becomes a global superstar with millions of dollars, countless awards, and several Los Angeles villas to her name. But as any celebrity will tell you, getting to the top is one thing; staying there is another.

Now thirty-three years old, Cléo is taking her first real vacation in years, on a remote island with no one else in sight. With the never-ending spin cycle of her life finally on pause and no paparazzi peeking out from behind the coconut palms, she can work on her fourth album in peace. Except that with so much time to think, she can’t help but ruminate on her past—including how, just six months earlier, things started to go very, very wrong . . .

Taking place between New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and the South Pacific, How to Become a Celebrity is a brilliant sophomore novel from Maud Ventura that dives intoxicatingly deep into the machinations of one woman’s complicated mind, and her relentless pursuit of fame.


]]> 352 Maud Ventura 0063427516 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.85 2024 Make Me Famous
author: Maud Ventura
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Shades of Her 59854277
When former beauty pageant queen, Sage Miller, leaves her life in New York City for a quiet life in the suburbs down South, she thinks she has finally found solace from her dark past riddled with bad habits. Sage, now married and a stay-at-home mom of two, is learning that you can have it all� just not at the same time, and not unless you get creative. Replacing her tiara with a messy bun and late-night parties with rocking her young children to sleep, her new life behind a white picket fence seems like the cleanest place to hide her dirtiest secrets.

A slew of murders, suspicious events, and devious affairs begin to unravel in the sweet suburbs Sage calls home, and she realizes that something far more sinister is happening. She thought she enjoyed being watched and wanted, but now someone is watching her when she doesn’t want to be seen. Someone is lurking in her shadows, obsessing over her, and digging up secrets she thought were buried.

The only problem with secrets is once someone knows them, they will either protect you fiercely or fiercely destroy you. After receiving startling images and messages, Sage quickly realizes that once you’re a sinner, no amount of repentance can make you a saint.

Roses are red, violets are blue, someone is dead, let’s hope it’s not you…]]> 354 Monica Arya Sarah S 0 dnf 3.96 2022 Shades of Her
author: Monica Arya
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: dnf
review:
DNF at 43%. Just lost interest. So repetitive.
]]> A Reason to See You Again 199531902
The women of the Cohen family are in crisis. Triggered by the death of their patriarch, Rudy, the glue that held them all together, everyone’s lives soon take a dramatic turn.

Shelly, the younger of the two Cohen sisters, runs off to the West Coast to immerse herself in the emerging (and lucrative) world of technology. Her sister, Nancy, gets married at the age of twenty-one to a traveling salesman with a shadowy lifestyle, while their mother, Frieda, hurls herself into a boozy, troubled existence in Miami, trying to forget the past even as it haunts her.

But they each learn in different ways that running from the past can’t save you—and then must make life-altering decisions about what they want their family to be and what they need to move forward.

Beginning in the 1970s and spanning forty years, A Reason to See You Again takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey through motherhood, the American workforce, the tech industry, the self-help movement, inherited trauma, the ever-evolving ways we communicate with one another, and the many unexpected forms that love can take.]]> 240 Jami Attenberg 0063039842 Sarah S 4 4.5 3.20 2024 A Reason to See You Again
author: Jami Attenberg
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: audiobooks, me-and-my-mental-health
review:
4.5
]]> I'll Come to You 208425024 A story of family, I'll Come to You chronicles intersecting lives over the course of 1995, anchored by the anticipation and arrival of a child.

With empathy, insight, and humor, Rebecca Kauffman explores overlapping narratives involving a couple whose struggle to become pregnant has both softened and hardened them; a woman whose husband of forty years has left her for reasons he’s unwilling to share and the man who is now disastrously attempting to woo her; a couple in denial about a looming health crisis, and their son who is fumbling toward middle age and can’t stop lying. These storylines converge into a dramatic and harrowing turn of events.]]> 224 Rebecca Kauffman 164009671X Sarah S 0 to-read 3.67 2025 I'll Come to You
author: Rebecca Kauffman
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Familiar Stranger 59964527
Lillian Smith leads an unexceptional life, writing obituaries and killing time with her inattentive husband and disconnected son. Then she meets David, a handsome stranger, in a coffee shop. Lured into an affair, she invents a new persona, one without strings, deadlines, or brooding husbands.

Lillian has never felt so reckless, unpredictable, or wanted. But as her affair with David intensifies, she withdraws from everything that’s real, even her closest friend. When evidence of her life as a secret lover finds its way onto her son’s social media, she risks ruining much more than her marriage or reputation.

As lies beget lies, Lillian’s two worlds spiral dangerously out of control. And betrayals run deeper than she imagines. Because Lillian isn’t the only one leading a double life.]]> 275 A.R. Torre 1662500130 Sarah S 2 audiobooks, mystery-thriller 3.69 2022 A Familiar Stranger
author: A.R. Torre
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: audiobooks, mystery-thriller
review:

]]> Queer 10287367 150 William S. Burroughs Sarah S 4 modern-classics, lgbtqiap 3.38 1985 Queer
author: William S. Burroughs
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.38
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: modern-classics, lgbtqiap
review:

]]> Theory & Practice 213619983 With echoes of Shirley Hazzard and Virginia Woolf, a new novel of startling intelligence from prize–winning author Michelle de Kretser, following a woman looking back on her young adulthood, and grappling with the collision of her emotions and her values

In the late 1980s, the narrator of Theory & Practice—a first generation immigrant from Sri Lanka who moved to Sydney in her childhood—sets up a life in Melbourne for graduate school. Jilted by a lover who cheats on her with another self-described "feminist," she is thrown into deeper confusion about her identity and the people around her.

The narrator begins to fall for a man named Kit, who is in a “deconstructed relationship� with a woman named Olivia. She struggles to square her feminism against her jealousy toward Olivia—and her anti-colonialism against her feelings about Virginia Woolf, whose work she is called to despite her racism.

What happens when our desires run contrary to our beliefs? What should we do when the failings of revered figures come to light? Who is shamed when the truth is told? In Theory & Practice, Michelle de Kretser offers a spellbinding meditation on the moral complexities that arise in this gap. Peopled with brilliantly drawn characters, the novel also stitches together fiction and essay, taking up Woolf’s quest for adventurous literary form.]]> 192 Michelle de Kretser 1646222873 Sarah S 0 to-read 3.66 2024 Theory & Practice
author: Michelle de Kretser
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood]]> 214151357
She felt like an imposter in her own body. She grew distant from her friends and husband. She suffered from anxiety, fear, guilt, and shame. She also experienced trauma at the hands of one of her doctors—a stark trigger. And eventually, when her son was born, there was no� joy. Instead, she felt “disoriented, lonely, and like none of my clothes fit.� Why was she seeing and hearing things that weren’t there? Why was she so angry and miserable when she had everything she thought she wanted? Why was the life she’d built falling apart?

It took her months to discover that she was suffering from severe postpartum depression. And it took even longer to trace all the threads that came to inform her experience.

At its core, The Motherload> is about learning to forgive yourself for not being what you’ve been told you must be and for not loving the way you’ve been told you should. It’s about the uniquely female experience of constantly grappling with expectation versus reality, no matter your circumstance, and a rejection of the cultural idea of the mother as a perfect being. It is a moving, exciting, roller coaster ride, and a propulsive addition to the canon of women’s literature.]]> 352 Sarah Hoover 1668010135 Sarah S 0 dnf She does drugs while pregnant and sperm donor aka husband is a selfish artist that only can only see how said pregnancy affects his travel schedule. No thank you.]]> 3.89 The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood
author: Sarah Hoover
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.89
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: dnf
review:
DNF’d at 18%
She does drugs while pregnant and sperm donor aka husband is a selfish artist that only can only see how said pregnancy affects his travel schedule. No thank you.
]]> <![CDATA[The Perfect Nurse (The Perfect Nurse #1)]]> 212184073
If you saw me walking down the street, you’d think I was pretty ordinary � I wear the typical crisp, white nursing uniform, my hands are scrubbed clean and you’d have no reason to believe I was anything other than a good citizen. A good nurse.

But looks can be deceiving. You shouldn’t trust me � because I don’t even know if I can trust myself.

Now I stare at the reflection in the mirror � dark smudges under my eyes and blood on my hands � listening for the sound of police sirens.

Because the truth is I had to do something terrible. I broke all the rules a nurse should follow. I wanted someone gone so badly. And now they’re dead because of me.

I’m looking over my shoulder everywhere I go because I’m sure someone knows my secret. Then when my home is broken into I know one simple truth: this isn’t over yet�

It’s only the beginning.

The police are the least of my worries now. But to save myself, am I going to have to kill again?]]> 280 Daniel Hurst 1835256082 Sarah S 3 ebooks, mystery-thriller 3.82 The Perfect Nurse (The Perfect Nurse #1)
author: Daniel Hurst
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.82
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: ebooks, mystery-thriller
review:

]]> The Drowning Woman 62874245
Lee Gulliver never thought she’d find herself living on the streets—no one ever does—but when her restaurant fails, and she falls deeper into debt, she leaves her old life behind with nothing but her clothes and her Toyota Corolla. In Seattle, she parks in a secluded spot by the beach to lay low and plan her next move—until early one morning, she sees asobbing woman throw herself into the ocean. Lee hauls the woman back to the surface, but instead of appreciation, she is met with fury. The drowning woman, Hazel, tells her that she wanted to die, that she’s trapped in a toxic, abusive marriage, that she’s a prisoner in her own home. Lee has thwarted her one chance to escape her life.

Out of options, Hazel retreats to her gilded cage, and Lee thinks she’s seen the last of her, until her unexpected return the next morning. Bonded by disparate but difficult circumstances, the women soon strike up a close and unlikely friendship. And thenone day, Hazel makes a shocking request: she wants Lee to help her disappear. It’ll be easy, Hazel assures her, but Lee soon learns that nothing is as it seems, and that Hazel may not be the friend Lee thought she was.]]> 336 Robyn Harding 1538726769 Sarah S 2 ebooks, mystery-thriller 2.5 3.99 2023 The Drowning Woman
author: Robyn Harding
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/15
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: ebooks, mystery-thriller
review:
2.5
]]> Prima Facie 60913708
After several acclaimed productions in Australia and winning the Australian Writers' Guild Award for Drama, the play received its European premiere at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London's West End in April 2022.]]> 98 Suzie Miller 1839040645 Sarah S 0 to-read 4.67 Prima Facie
author: Suzie Miller
name: Sarah S
average rating: 4.67
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Blob: A Love Story 212994452 'A modern-day Mrs. Caliban, BLOB is a book that looks at identity and desire in profoundly interesting ways'
Kevin Wilson, author of Nothing to See Here

A hilarious and moving debut novel about a young woman who decides to turn a sentient blob into her perfect boyfriend...

The daughter of a Taiwanese father and white mother, Vi Liu has never quite fit into her Midwestern college town. Now at twenty-three, after getting dumped and dropping out of college, Vi works as a front desk attendant at a hotel where she refills cucumber water samovars and fends off overtures of friendship from her bubbly blond coworker, Rachel. But when Vi decides to accompany Rachel to a local drag show, her life changes forever. In the alley outside the bar, next to a trash can, is a blob with beady black eyes. Unable to leave it behind, Vi picks up the creature and, in a moment of drunken desperation, takes it home with her.

As her pet blob becomes sentient, Vi realizes it obeys her commands and she decides to mold the blob into her ideal partner. She feeds it sugary cereal and a stream of pop culture, and soon the creature transforms into a movie-star handsome white man. But as Vi's desire to be loved unconditionally threatens to spiral out of control, she is forced to confront her lonely childhood, the ex-boyfriend who has unfriended her, and the racial marginalization that has defined her relationships. Ultimately, Vi embarks on a journey of self-discovery and learns that it's impossible to control those you love.

Blending the familiar with the fantastical, BLOB tells a witty, heartfelt story of what it means to be human.

'An inventive, utterly unique debut'
Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light]]> 256 Maggie Su 0063358646 Sarah S 5 I didn’t want it to end!!! 3.42 2025 Blob: A Love Story
author: Maggie Su
name: Sarah S
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: audiobooks, me-and-my-mental-health
review:
I didn’t want it to end!!!
]]>