en-US Tue, 08 Apr 2025 11:32:48 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 216724330 The New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing and Caul Baby returns with an epic, multi-generational novel that illuminates the legacy of slavery and the power of romantic love.

Harlem, 2019. Ardelia and Oliver are hosting their engagement party. As the guests get ready to leave, he hands her a love letter on a yellowing, crumbling piece of paper . . .

Natchez, 1865. Discharged from the Union Army as a free man after the war’s end, Harrison returns to Mississippi to reunite with the woman he loves, Tirzah. Upon his arrival at the Freedmen’s Bureau, though, he catches the eye of a woman working there, who’s determined to thwart his efforts to find his beloved. After tragedy strikes, Harrison resigns himself to a life with her.Ěý

Meanwhile in Louisiana, the newly free Tirzah is teaching at the Freedmen’s School, and discovers an advertisement in the local paper looking for her. Though she knows Harrison must have placed it, and longs to find him, the risks of fleeing are too great, and Tirzah chooses the life of seeming security right in front of her.

Spanning over a hundred and fifty years, Morgan Jerkins’s extraordinary novel intertwines the stories of these star-crossed lovers and their descendants. As Tirzah's family moves across the countryĚýduring the Great Migration, they challenge authority with devastating consequences, while of the legacy of heartbreak and loss continues on in the lives of Harrison's progeny.

When Ardelia meets Oliver, she finds his family’s history is as full of secrets and omissions as her own. Could their connection be a cosmic reconciliation satisfying the unfulfilled desires of their ancestors, or will the weight of the past, present and future tear them apart?

Sweeping, textured, and meticulously researched, Zeal is both a story of how one generation’s choices reverberate through the years and an indelible portrait of an enduring love.]]> 416 Morgan Jerkins 0063234084 Caim 0 to-read 4.18 2025
author: Morgan Jerkins
name: Caim
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/08
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]]> 215514839 From award-winning author and creative writing teacher at Tulane University comes an intimate and powerful memoir exploring inherited trauma, family secrets, and the enduring bonds of love between mothers and daughters.

On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died in a car crash near Detroit, only to be resuscitated after her mother pulled her from the flaming wreckage. Firstborn Girls traces her remarkable life from that moment up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar.

Growing up in 1980s Brooklyn, Bernice finds solace in books, summer trips to Barbados, and boarding school to escape her alcoholic father. Discovering the works of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, she finally sees herself and her loved ones reflected in their stories of “messy, beautiful, joyful Black people.�

Interwoven with Bernice's personal journey is her family's history, beginning with her four-times enslaved great-grandmother Louisa Vicey Wilson in 1822 Hancock County, Georgia. Her descendants survived Reconstruction and Jim Crow, joined the Great Migration, and mourned Dr. King’s assassination during the Civil Rights Movement. These women's wisdom, secrets, and fierce love are passed down like Louisa's handmade quilt.

A memoir of many threads, Firstborn Girls is an extraordinarily moving portrait of a life shaped by family, history, and the drive to be something more.]]> 400 Bernice L. McFadden 0593184971 Caim 0 currently-reading 4.55 2025
author: Bernice L. McFadden
name: Caim
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: currently-reading
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]]> 33533645
But Tangy Mae has been selected to be part of the first integrated class at a nearby white high school. She has a chance to change her life, but can she break from Rozelle's grasp without ruinous--even fatal--consequences?]]> 390 Delores Phillips 1616958723 Caim 3 4.43 2004
author: Delores Phillips
name: Caim
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/07
date added: 2025/04/07
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]]> 34313931 339 Etaf Rum 0062699768 Caim 3 4.25 2019
author: Etaf Rum
name: Caim
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/09
date added: 2025/04/04
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review:

]]> 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 Caim 4 4.11 2024
author: Alison Espach
name: Caim
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> 210719174 The beloved author of Don’t Cry for Me and Perfect Peace returns with a poignant, emotionally exuberant novel about a young queer Black man finding his voice in 1980s Chicago—a novel of family, forgiveness and perseverance, for fans of The Great Believers and On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous.

Isaac is at a crossroads in his young life. Growing up in Missouri, the son of a caustic, hard-driving father, he was conditioned to suppress his artistic pursuits and physical desires, notions that didn’t align with a traditional view of masculinity. But now, in late �80s Chicago, Isaac has finally carved out a life of his own. He is sensitive and tenderhearted and has built up the courage to seek out a community. Yet just as he begins to embrace who he is, two social catalysts—the AIDS crisis and Rodney King’s attack—collectively extinguish his hard-earned joy. At a therapist’s encouragement, Isaac begins to write down his story. In the process, he taps into a creative energy that will send him on a journey back to his family, his ancestral home in Arkansas and the inherited trauma of the nation’s dark past. But a surprise discovery will either unlock the truths he’s seeking or threaten to derail the life he’s fought so hard to claim.

Poignant, sweeping and luminously told, Isaac's Song is a return to the beloved characters of Don’t Cry for Me and a high-water mark in the career of an award-winning author.]]> 320 Daniel Black 133509041X Caim 5 4.31 2025
author: Daniel Black
name: Caim
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/25
date added: 2025/03/30
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]]> 220062546 A girl takes on a series of identities to survive, shrouding herself in layer upon layer of secrets, until one morning years later when she is forced to reckon with her past.

"This debut is a beautiful, if sometimes harrowing, exploration of one woman’s journey. . . to a life built by her own grit and determination." -Library Journal, Starred Review.

"A coming-of-age story that is at once shocking and necessary. . . the story is too important and gripping to put down." - Kirkus

"A powerful story of resilience and reinvention... this satisfies." - Publisher's Weekly

On an ordinary day in an upscale Atlanta suburb, Maya is making breakfast for her two sons, when her husband drops a red-and-blue striped envelope on the counter and asks a devastating question: Who is Sunny?

Maya is sent reeling back to her childhood in Guyana—a time when Sunny was her only name. Unbeknownst to her husband, Maya is not who she claims to be. The letter, from her long-lost sister Roshi, now threatens to expose her true identity and shatter the seemingly perfect existence Maya worked so hard to build.

As she frantically weighs the impact of the truth on her future, Maya relives the harrowing details of her past—her journey to America on the “backtrack,� the shock of being delivered into the hands of an abusive family while being severed from her own, and her many evolutions of self as she struggles to find a path forward against all odds.

Steeped in sensory detail, this striking debut transports the reader from the sugar cane fields of Guyana to the world of immigrant laborers in Miami to the affluent suburbs of Atlanta. Nanda Reddy takes us on a wrenching journey of assimilation, survival, and reinvention that explores the very construct of identity—all the while underscoring the strength of chosen family, love, and the resilience of the human spirit.]]> 384 Nanda Reddy Caim 5 4.28 2025
author: Nanda Reddy
name: Caim
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/30
date added: 2025/03/30
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]]> 216247526 'It's time we name our kingdom!' he shouted over the wind. 'I say we call this place Happy Land. If this ain't the land of happy people, then where is it? Why not create our heaven right here on earth?'

In the hills of Appalachia, there once existed a land ruled by a king and queen. Inspired by memories of African kingdoms, a community of formerly enslaved men and women grasped freedom on mountain land they owned. But freedom doesn't always last forever . . .

Today, after years of silence, Nikki has been summoned to North Carolina by her estranged grandmother. But instead of revealing answers about their recent past, Mother Rita tells Nikki a shocking story about her great-great-great grandmother, Queen Luella, and the very land they stand on. Land Mother Rita insists must be protected at all costs.

As Nikki learns about the Kingdom of the Happy Land, she comes to realise how much of her identity is rooted in this family land, and how much they stand to lose if it, like so much else, is taken from them. It's time to reclaim what's theirs.]]> 368 Dolen Perkins-Valdez 0593337727 Caim 0 to-read 4.49 2025
author: Dolen Perkins-Valdez
name: Caim
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/25
shelves: to-read
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]]> 217044886 A glorious chronicle of a life like none other—enlightening, entertaining, surprising, empowering—and a testament to the world-changing power of Black motherhood

"You are Celestine," she said. She squatted to push the hair off my face and pull leaves off my pajama legs. "Like my sister and my grandmother." And there under the pecan tree, as she did countless times, that day my mother told me stories of the mothers and daughters that went before me.

Tina Knowles, the mother of iconic singer-songwriters Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Solange Knowles, and bonus daughter Kelly Rowland, is known the world over as a Matriarch with a capital M: a determined, self-possessed, self-aware, and wise woman who raised and inspired some of the great artists of our time. But this story is about so much more than that.

Matriarch begins with a precocious, if unruly, little girl growing up in 1950s Galveston, the youngest of seven. She is in love with her world, with extended family on every other porch and the sounds of Motown and the lapping beach always within earshot. But as the realities of race and the limitations of girlhood set in, she begins to dream of the world beyond. Her instincts and impulsive nature drive her far beyond the shores of Texas to discover the life awaiting her on the other side of childhood.

That life's journey—through grief and tragedy, creative and romantic risks and turmoil, the nurturing of superstar offspring and of her own special gifts—is the remarkable story she shares with readers here. This is a page-turning chronicle of family love and heartbreak, of loss and perseverance, and of the kind of creativity, audacity, and will it takes for a girl from Galveston to change the world. It's one brilliant woman's intimate and revealing story, and a multigenerational family saga that carries within it the story of America—and the wisdom that women pass on to each other, mothers to daughters, across generations.]]> 720 Tina Knowles Caim 0 to-read 5.00 2025
author: Tina Knowles
name: Caim
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/24
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]]> 152387598 You are cordially invited to the wedding of Amerie Cross and Arnold Hightower.

And now a toast from the maid of honor, Janelle Cross!

Hi everyone, thank you for being here.

Some of you may know me as the sister of the bride.

Some of you may know me as the ex-girlfriend of the groom.

But I'm willing to bet none of you know me as the woman secretly sleeping with the best man.

I am.

I know, I'm just as surprised as you.

It was only supposed to be for the week; but every kiss, adventure, and stolen moment with Rome Martin feels like it could last forever.

Oh well. What happens in Tulum stays in Tulum.

Right?]]> 244 Natasha Bishop Caim 0 to-read, kindle-audio 4.36 2023
author: Natasha Bishop
name: Caim
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read, kindle-audio
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]]> 219301727 In this vibrant, gratifying novel, a pious, small-town teenager travels to Atlanta to get an abortion and finds herself smack in the middle of the civil rights movement and the secret lives of queer Black people.

Where do you get an abortion in 1960 Georgia, especially if the town midwife goes to the same church as your parents? For seventeen-year-old Doris Steele, the answer is Atlanta, where her favorite teacher, Mrs. Lucas, calls upon her brash, wealthy childhood best friend, Sylvia, for help. While waiting to hear from the doctor who has agreed to do the procedure, Doris spends the weekend scandalized by, but drawn to, the people who move in and out of Sylvia's celebrities whom Doris has seen in the pages of Jet and Ebony, political leaders like Coretta Scott King and Diane Nash, women who dance close together, atheists!ĚýAnd even more shocking? Mrs. Lucas seems right at home.

The young people Doris encounters are no less surprising. When he's not flirting too hard or talking too much, Sylvia’s nephew, Dexter, brings Doris into the heart of Atlanta’s civil rights movement, where some activists practice nonviolence to prepare for sit-ins, while others carry guns to protect Black families from the Klan.

From the guests at a queer kickback to the student activists at a SNCC conference, Doris suddenly finds herself surrounded by so many people who seem to know exactly who or what they want. Doris knows she doesn’t want a baby, but what does she want? Will this trip help her find out?

These Heathens! is a funny, poignant story about Black women’s obligations and ambitions, what we owe to ourselves, and the transformative power of leaving your bubble, even for just one chaotic weekend.]]> 272 Mia McKenzie 0593596943 Caim 0 to-read 4.70 2025
author: Mia McKenzie
name: Caim
average rating: 4.70
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/21
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]]> 209166121 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.]]> 320 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 0593803477 Caim 0 to-read 3.95 2025
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Caim
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/20
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]]> 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 Caim 3 4.07 2025
author: Charmaine Wilkerson
name: Caim
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/19
date added: 2025/03/19
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]]> 58469344
There is Olivia, the beautiful elder Davenport daughter, ready to do her duty by getting married. . . until she meets the charismatic civil rights leader Washington DeWight and sparks fly. The younger daughter, Helen, is more interested in fixing cars than falling in love—unless it's with her sister's suitor. Amy-Rose, the childhood friend turned maid to the Davenport sisters, dreams of opening her own business—and marrying the one man she could never be with, Olivia and Helen's brother, John. But Olivia's best friend, Ruby, also has her sights set on John Davenport, though she can't seem to keep his interest . . . until family pressure has her scheming to win his heart, just as someone else wins hers.

The first book in a breathless new series, The Davenports offers a glimpse into a period of African American history often overlooked, while delivering a totally escapist, swoon-worthy read. Inspired by the real-life story of C.R. Patterson and his family, it's the tale of four determined and passionate young Black women discovering the courage to steer their own path in life—and love.]]> 384 Krystal Marquis 0593463331 Caim 0 to-read 3.64 2023
author: Krystal Marquis
name: Caim
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/14
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]]> 54304256 Kink is a groundbreaking anthology of literary short fiction exploring love and desire, BDSM, and interests across the sexual spectrum, edited by lauded writers R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell, and featuring a roster of all-star contributors including Alexander Chee, Roxane Gay, Carmen Maria Machado, and more.

Kink is a dynamic anthology of literary fiction that opens an imaginative door into the world of desire. The stories within this collection portray love, desire, BDSM, and sexual kinks in all their glory with a bold new vision. The collection includes works by renowned fiction writers such as Callum Angus, Alexander Chee, Vanessa Clark, Melissa Febos, Kim Fu, Roxane Gay, Cara Hoffman, Zeyn Joukhadar, Chris Kraus, Carmen Maria Machado, Peter Mountford, Larissa Pham, and Brandon Taylor, with Garth Greenwell and R.O. Kwon as editors.

The stories within explore bondage, power-play, and submissive-dominant relationships; we are taken to private estates, therapists� offices, underground sex clubs, and even a sex theater in early-20th century Paris. While there are whips and chains, sure, the true power of these stories lies in their beautiful, moving dispatches from across the sexual spectrum of interest and desires, as portrayed by some of today’s most exciting writers.]]> 288 R.O. Kwon 198211021X Caim 0 to-read, bookish-htx 3.11 2021
author: R.O. Kwon
name: Caim
average rating: 3.11
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/14
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]]> 50892338
A flying demon feeding on human energies.

A secret society of so called “Legendborn� students that hunt the creatures down.

And a mysterious teenage mage who calls himself a “Merlin� and who attempts—and fails—to wipe Bree’s memory of everything she saw.

The mage’s failure unlocks Bree’s own unique magic and a buried memory with a hidden connection: the night her mother died, another Merlin was at the hospital. Now that Bree knows there’s more to her mother’s death than what’s on the police report, she’ll do whatever it takes to find out the truth, even if that means infiltrating the Legendborn as one of their initiates.

She recruits Nick, a self-exiled Legendborn with his own grudge against the group, and their reluctant partnership pulls them deeper into the society’s secrets—and closer to each other. But when the Legendborn reveal themselves as the descendants of King Arthur’s knights and explain that a magical war is coming, Bree has to decide how far she’ll go for the truth and whether she should use her magic to take the society down—or join the fight.]]> 502 Tracy Deonn 1534441603 Caim 0 to-read, bookish-htx 4.32 2020
author: Tracy Deonn
name: Caim
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/14
shelves: to-read, bookish-htx
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]]> 60556912
Every day I clean the Winchesters� beautiful house top to bottom. I collect their daughter from school. And I cook a delicious meal for the whole family before heading up to eat alone in my tiny room on the top floor.

I try to ignore how Nina makes a mess just to watch me clean it up. How she tells strange lies about her own daughter. And how her husband Andrew seems more broken every day. But as I look into Andrew’s handsome brown eyes, so full of pain, it’s hard not to imagine what it would be like to live Nina’s life. The walk-in closet, the fancy car, the perfect husband.

I only try on one of Nina’s pristine white dresses once. Just to see what it’s like. But she soon finds out� and by the time I realize my attic bedroom door only locks from the outside, it’s far too late.

But I reassure myself: the Winchesters don’t know who I really am.

They don’t know what I’m capable of�

An unbelievably twisty read that will have you glued to the pages late into the night. Anyone who loves The Woman in the Window, The Wife Between Us and The Girl on the Train won’t be able to put this down!]]> 329 Freida McFadden 1803144378 Caim 0 to-read, bookish-htx 4.31 2022
author: Freida McFadden
name: Caim
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/14
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]]> 23156251
Jazz is the story of a triangle of passion, jealousy, murder and redemption, of sex and spirituality, of slavery and liberation, country and city, of being male and female, African American, and above all being human.]]> 258 Toni Morrison Caim 0 to-read, bookish-htx 3.93 1992
author: Toni Morrison
name: Caim
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/14
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]]> 201866614 From the National Book Award–winning author of All That She Carried, an intimate and revelatory reckoning with the myth and the truth behind an American everyone knows and few really understand

Harriet Tubman is, if surveys are to be trusted, one of the ten most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she’s a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero—the woman who, despite being barely five feet tall, illiterate, and suffering from a brain injury, managed to escape from her own enslavement, return again and again to lead others north to freedom without loss of life, speak out powerfully against slavery, and then become the first American woman in history to lead a military raid, freeing some 750 people. You could almost say she’s America’s Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood.

Tiya Miles’s extraordinary Night Flyer changes all that. With her characteristic tenderness and imaginative genius, Miles explores beyond the stock historical grid to weave Tubman’s life into the fabric of her world. She probes the ecological reality of Tubman’s surroundings and examines her kinship with other enslaved women who similarly passed through a spiritual wilderness and recorded those travels in profound and moving memoirs. What emerges, uncannily, is a human being whose mysticism becomes the more palpable the more we understand it—a story that offers us powerful inspiration for our own time of troubles. Harriet Tubman traversed many boundaries, inner and outer. Now, thanks to Tiya Miles, she becomes an even clearer and sharper signal from the past, one that can help us to echolocate a more just and sustainable path.]]> 336 Tiya Miles 0593491165 Caim 0 to-read, bookish-htx 4.06 2024
author: Tiya Miles
name: Caim
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/14
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]]> 186926 The Street tells the poignant, often heartbreaking story of Lutie Johnson, a young black woman, and her spirited struggle to raise her son amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s. Originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a masterwork, The Street was Ann Petry's first novel, a beloved bestseller with more than a million copies in print. Its haunting tale still resonates today.]]> 435 Ann Petry 0395901499 Caim 0 to-read, bookish-htx 4.26 1946
author: Ann Petry
name: Caim
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1946
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/14
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]]> 61918818
Chareese “Reese� Devlin spent every summer of her childhood in the lake town of Mount Dora, Florida, where her days were filled with fun in the sun. Reese never realized that the idyllic haven hid a deep divide between the town’s haves and have-nots. Not until the summer she turned seventeen and fell for Duncan McNeal, a boy who lacked the pedigree so valued by her parents and their equally well-connected friends.

After her family squashed the budding romance, Reese refused to return to the place she lost her heart. Now, ten years later, she’s back to attend her sister’s debutante ball and must come to terms with all she’s missed. But the biggest surprise of all is that Duncan is now a successful real estate developer in Mount Dora—and time hasn’t weakened the connection between them.

Behind the multimillion-dollar homes of the Shores lay old grudges and secrets capable of collapsing any family legacy. As the summer progresses, Reese must fix the sins of the past by facing the lines between truth and deception, tradition and breaking free, and family expectations and self-discovery.]]> 320 C. Chilove 1538705621 Caim 3 3.68
author: C. Chilove
name: Caim
average rating: 3.68
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/14
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]]> 60114402 The fifth book in the beloved, bestselling Harry Potter series, now illustrated in brilliant full color.

There is a door at the end of a silent corridor. And it's haunting Harry Potter's dreams. Why else would he be waking in the middle of the night, screaming in terror? It's not just the upcoming O.W.L. exams; a new teacher with a personality like poisoned honey; a venomous, disgruntled house-elf; or even the growing threat of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Now Harry Potter is faced with the unreliability of the very government of the magical world and the impotence of the authorities at Hogwarts. Despite this (or perhaps because of it), he finds depth and strength in his friends, beyond what even he knew; boundless loyalty; and unbearable sacrifice.


This stunning illustrated edition brings together the talents of award-winning artists Jim Kay and Neil Packer in a visual feast, featuring iconic scenes and much loved characters -- Tonks, Luna Lovegood, and many more -- as the Order of the Phoenix keeps watch over Harry Potter’s fifth year at Hogwarts. With its oversized format, high-quality paper, ribbon bookmark, and color on nearly every page, this edition is the perfect gift for Harry Potter fans and book lovers of all ages.]]> 566 J.K. Rowling 054579143X Caim 5 my-library 4.77 2003
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Caim
average rating: 4.77
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: my-library
review:

]]> 212806648 A young girl must face a life-altering decision after awakening her sister’s ghost, navigating truths about love, friendship, and power as the Civil War looms.

Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her family, and tending to the white master’s daughter, Violet. Her daydreams are filled with poetry and faraway worlds, while she spends her nights secretly roaming through the forest, consumed with grief over the sudden death of her older sister, Minnie.

When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at marriage for Violet and upending Junie’s life, she commits a desperate act—one that rouses Minnie’s spirit from the grave, tethered to this world unless Junie can free her. She enlists the aid of Caleb, the guests� coachman, and their friendship soon becomes something more. Yet as long-held truths begin to crumble, she realizes Bellereine is harboring dark and horrifying secrets that can no longer be ignored.

With time ticking down, Junie begins to push against the harsh current that has controlled her entire life. As she grapples with an increasingly unfamiliar world in which she has little control, she is forced to ask herself: When we choose love and liberation, what must we leave behind?]]> 368 Erin Crosby Eckstine 0593725115 Caim 0 to-read 4.22 2025
author: Erin Crosby Eckstine
name: Caim
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 212806640 The extraordinary story of Jessie Redmon Fauset whose exhilarating world of friends, rivals, and passions all combined to create the magic that was the Harlem Renaissance, written by Victoria Christopher Murray, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Personal Librarian.
Ěý
In 1919, as civil and social unrest grips the country, there is a little corner of America, a place called Harlem where something special is stirring. Here, the New Negro is rising and Black pride is evident everywhere…in music, theatre, fashion and the arts. And there on stage in the center of this renaissance is Jessie Redmon Fauset, the new literary editor ofĚýthe preeminent Negro magazine The Crisis.
Ěý
W.E.B. Du Bois, the founder and editor of The Crisis, has charged her with discovering young writers whose words will change the world. Jessie attacks the challenge with fervor, quickly finding sixteen-year-old Countee Cullen, seventeen-year-old Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen, who becomes one of her best friends.ĚýUnder Jessie’s leadership, The Crisis thrives, the writers become notable and magazine subscriptions soar. Every Negro writer in the country wants their work published in the magazine now known for its groundbreaking poetry and short stories.Ěý
Ěý
Jessie’s rising star is shining bright�.but her relationship with W.E.B. could jeopardize all that she’s built. The man, considered by most to be the leader of Black America, is not only Jessie’s boss, he’s her lover. And neither his wife, nor their fourteen-year-age difference can keep the two apart. Their torrid and tumultuous affair is complicated by a secret desire that Jessie harbors � to someday, herself, become the editor of the magazine, a position that only W.E.B. Du Bois has held.
Ěý
In the face of overwhelming sexism and racism, Jessie must balance her drive with her desires. However, as she strives to preserve her legacy, she’ll discover the high cost of her unparalleled success.]]> 400 Victoria Christopher Murray 0593638484 Caim 0 to-read, my-library 4.12 2025
author: Victoria Christopher Murray
name: Caim
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read, my-library
review:

]]> 59808232
New York City. Late 1980s to early 1990s.

Mercy and Lenox Howard have always only had each other. Growing up on the mean streets of Harlem with an absentee mother meant that they had to have each other's backs. Now young, smart mothers they are determined to survive in New York City while raising their two sons, who have bright futures ahead of them.

Mercy is the quiet, straight laced hospital administrator, struggling to make ends meet. At night and on weekends, she pours her heart into her cooking and her dream of owning her own restaurant. Lenox is the diva, the wild child, looking for excitement and her big come up in life and love. Their boys, Deon and Judah, have been raised more like brothers than cousins, forging a bond that is unbreakable.

When Lenox heads down a path that she believes will bring success and power, it changes the entire course of her life and her family’s life forever. As a result of their mother’s choices, cousins Deon and Judah soon find themselves in uncharted territory.]]> 336 Tracy Brown 1250834937 Caim 0 to-read 4.31 2022
author: Tracy Brown
name: Caim
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 39336718
Think you know what it's like being a baller's girl?
You don't.
My fairy tale is upside down.
A happily never after.
I kissed the prince and he turned into a fraud.
I was a fool, and his love - fool's gold.

Now there's a new player in the game, August West.
One of the NBA's brightest stars.
Fine. Forbidden.
He wants me. I want him.
But my past, my fraudulent prince, just won't let me go.

*Contains domestic/sexual abuse not involving the hero. Read reviews for further guidance.]]> 462 Kennedy Ryan Caim 3 kindle-audio 4.18 2018
author: Kennedy Ryan
name: Caim
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: kindle-audio
review:

]]> 207298990
Named after his well-respected father who disappeared when he was two, Wallo grew up in North Philadelphia with his mom, brothers, and grandmother, feeling pressure to achieve the success and reputation his father had on the streets. Spending time in and out of juvenile detention centers, school psychologists and counselors labeled him “criminal-minded� and his luck on the streets involving petty crimes would soon run out. After his involvement in an armed robbery, Wallo was arrested and received a prison sentence of nineteen to fifty-two years. Upon serving twenty years of his sentence, Wallo was released and returned home to Philadelphia.

This memoir traces the journey from Wallo’s youth and incarceration to his incredible success. In his time spent in prison, Wallo came to understand that he was armed with the wrong intentions despite great potential via a lack of guidance and proper mindset. With this understanding, he reckoned with the choices that put him there, accepted responsibility for his own actions, and vowed to arm himself with only good intentions upon his release.

Wallo’s reflection and new-found philosophy—which he now shares with you—informed the new trajectory of his life. On the day of his release, Wallo moved back to Philly and started on a new frontier of entrepreneurialism. Armed with vigor and intention, his viral motivational content gained Wallo over sixty-thousand Instagram followers on his first day of freedom. This would prove to only be the start of his continuously growing career utilizing his social influence as a motivational speaker, entrepreneur, and cultural changemaker.

In Armed with Good Intentions, Wallo shares his hardships and triumphs and personal philosophy with his widest audience yet. Wallo spins his story of despair and tragedy into sage wisdom, inspiring anyone who is looking for the motivation to revise how they see the obstacles in their own lives.]]> 240 Wallo 267 1668036258 Caim 4 4.16
author: Wallo 267
name: Caim
average rating: 4.16
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/03
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves:
review:

]]> 1073968 199 Jim Schutze 0806510463 Caim 0 to-read, my-library 4.34 1987
author: Jim Schutze
name: Caim
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: to-read, my-library
review:

]]> 227986 297 Jessie Redmon Fauset 1555530664 Caim 0 to-read 3.94 1924
author: Jessie Redmon Fauset
name: Caim
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1924
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 202165946 A thrilling new novel from the bestselling, award-winning Akwaeke Emezi, about five friends trying to outrun and outmatch a powerful, underground world

One weekend. The elite underbelly of a Nigerian city. A breakup that starts a spiral. A party that goes awry. A tangled web of sex and lies and corruption that leaves no one unscathed. Little Rot is a whirling journey through the city’s dark side, told through the eyes of five people, each determined to run from the twisted powers out to destroy them.

Aima and Kalu are a longtime couple who have just split. When Kalu, reeling from his loss, visits a sex party hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, he makes a decision that will plunge them all into chaos, brutally upending their lives. Ola and Souraya, two Nigerian sex workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur, intersect with the three old friends as everything goes to hell. Sucked into the city’s corrupt underworld, they’re all looking for a way out of the trouble they’ve instigated, driven by loss and fueled by a desperate need to escape the dangerous threat that looms over them. They careen madly in the face of the poison of power, sexual violence, murder, betrayals. Little Rot tests how far these five will go to save each other—or themselves—when confronted by evil, culminating in a shattering denouement.

With each novel, with each creation, Akwaeke Emezi shows their genius as a storyteller, as a visionary force who has created a thrilling tale of sex, power, and deviance in Little Rot. You won’t be able to look away.]]> 276 Akwaeke Emezi 0525541632 Caim 0 to-read, my-library 3.59 2024
author: Akwaeke Emezi
name: Caim
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read, my-library
review:

]]> 584512 341 Zora Neale Hurston 0060916486 Caim 0 to-read, my-library 4.11 1935
author: Zora Neale Hurston
name: Caim
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1935
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read, my-library
review:

]]> 219520677 From the author of Oprah's Book Club pick and New York Times best seller Nightcrawling, here isĚýan astonishing new novel aboutĚýthe joys and entanglements of a fierce group of teenage mothers in a small town on the Florida panhandle.

Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck.

The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for love, making and breaking friendships, and navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood.

Full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends� secrets and betrayals, The Girls Who Grew Big confirms Leila Mottley’s promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.]]> 352 Leila Mottley 0593801121 Caim 0 to-read 4.21 2025
author: Leila Mottley
name: Caim
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 213816144 Set between Nigeria and New Orleans, The Edge of Water tells the story of a young woman who dreams of life in America, as the collision of traditional prophecy and individual longing tests the bonds of a family during a devastating storm.

In Ibadan, Nigeria, a mother receives a divination that foretells danger for her daughter in America. In spite of this warning, she allows her to forge her own path, and Amina arrives in New Orleans filled with hope. But just as Amina begins to find her way, a hurricane threatens to destroy the city, upending everything she’d dreamed of and the lives of all she holds dear. Years later, her daughter is left with questions about the mother she barely knew, and the family she has yet to discover in Nigeria.

Exploring the love of a determined mother and dreaming daughter who do not say enough to each other until it is too late, the detangling of Yoruba Christianity, traditional religion, and folklore, and the tellings of three generations of daring women—through times of longing, promise, and romance, as well as heartbreak—Olufunke Grace Bankole’s The Edge of Water is a luminous debut novel about a young woman brave enough to leave all she knows behind, and the way her fate transforms a family destined to stay together.



]]> 272 Olufunke Grace Bankole 1963108051 Caim 0 to-read 4.01 2025
author: Olufunke Grace Bankole
name: Caim
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214175053 For fans of Behold the Dreamers, immigrant stories, and family sagas, a compelling novel about a tightly bound Nigerian family living in Florida and the wounds that get passed down from generation to generation, by the significant new literary voice who wrote the acclaimedĚýMr. and Mrs. Doctor.

When 276 schoolgirls are abducted from their school in Nigeria, Fidelis Ewerike, a Florida-based barrister, poet, and former POW of the Nigerian Civil War, begins to go mad, consumed by memories of his younger sister Ugochi, who went missing during that conflict. Consumed by survivor’s guilt and fearful that the same fate awaits Amara, his sixteen-year-old daughter who bears an uncanny resemblance to Ugochi, Fidelis locks her in her bedroom, offering no words of explanation, only lovingly—if poorly—made meals and sweets.

Amid that singular action, the Ewerike family spirals into After unsuccessful attempts to free her daughter from her room, his wife Adaobi seeks the counsel of a preacher, praying for spiritual liberation from the curse she is certain has plagued her family since leaving Nigeria. Fourteen-year-old Chuk, beset by his own war with the neighborhood boys, receives a painful education on force, masculinity, and his tenuous position within his family. And rebellious, resentful Amara is hungry for her life to be hers, so the moment she is able to escape her imprisonment, she falls in love—not with the Aba-born engineer-in-training her mother envisages, but with Maksym Kostyk, the son of the town drunk. Before long, the two have concocted a plan to run away from the trappings of their familial traumas.

Perfect for readers ofĚýSing, Unburied, Sing,ĚýJulie Iromuanya's A Season of Light is an all-consuming masterpiece. To peer into the window of the Ewerike family’s lives is a gift.]]> 256 Julie Iromuanya 164375551X Caim 0 to-read 3.02 2025
author: Julie Iromuanya
name: Caim
average rating: 3.02
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 524878
Beautifully illustrated with postcards from Steinbach’s journeys, this revealing and witty book transports you into a fascinating inner and outer journey, an unforgettable voyage of discovery.]]> 295 Alice Steinbach 0375758453 Caim 0 to-read 3.81 2000
author: Alice Steinbach
name: Caim
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 9749711
Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon’s families� the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered. As Jones explores the backstories of her rich and flawed characters, she also reveals the joy, and the destruction, they brought to each other’s lives.

At the heart of it all are the two girls whose lives are at stake, and like the best writers, Jones portrays the fragility of her characers with raw authenticity as they seek love, demand attention, and try to imagine themselves as women.]]> 340 Tayari Jones 1565129903 Caim 0 to-read 3.87 2011
author: Tayari Jones
name: Caim
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58884736
"A story of love and hope as interweaving characters display: how all moments, big and small, can measure a life. If you want joy, love, romance, and hope—read with us." —Jenna Bush Hager
A luminous, spirit-lifting blockbuster that asks: would you choose to find out the length of your life?

Eight ordinary people. One extraordinary choice.

It seems like any other day. You wake up, drink a cup of coffee, and head out.

But today, when you open your front door, waiting for you is a small wooden box. The contents of this mysterious box tells you the exact number of years you will live.

From suburban doorsteps to desert tents, every person on every continent receives the same box. In an instant, the world is thrust into a collective frenzy. Where did these boxes come from? What do they mean? Is there truth to what they promise?

As society comes together and pulls apart, everyone faces the same shocking choice: Do they wish to know how long they’ll live? And, if so, what will they do with that knowledge?

The Measure charts the dawn of this new world through an unforgettable cast of characters whose decisions and fates interweave with one another: best friends whose dreams are forever entwined, pen pals finding refuge in the unknown, a couple who thought they didn’t have to rush, a doctor who cannot save himself, and a politician whose box becomes the powder keg that ultimately changes everything.

Enchanting and deeply uplifting, The Measure is an ambitious, invigorating story about family, friendship, hope, and destiny that encourages us to live life to the fullest.]]> 353 Nikki Erlick 0063204207 Caim 0 to-read 3.96 2022
author: Nikki Erlick
name: Caim
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61431922 Enter the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragon riders...

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.

But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile� humans. They incinerate them.

With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.

She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.

Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom's protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.

Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die]]> 665 Rebecca Yarros 1649374046 Caim 0 to-read 4.56 2023
author: Rebecca Yarros
name: Caim
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 90202302 “The first year is when some of us lose our lives. The second year is when the rest of us lose our humanity.� —Xaden Riorson

Everyone expected Violet Sorrengail to die during her first year at Basgiath War College—Violet included. But Threshing was only the first impossible test meant to weed out the weak-willed, the unworthy, and the unlucky.

Now the real training begins, and Violet’s already wondering how she’ll get through. It’s not just that it’s grueling and maliciously brutal, or even that it’s designed to stretch the riders� capacity for pain beyond endurance. It’s the new vice commandant, who’s made it his personal mission to teach Violet exactly how powerless she is–unless she betrays the man she loves.

Although Violet’s body might be weaker and frailer than everyone else’s, she still has her wits—and a will of iron. And leadership is forgetting the most important lesson Basgiath has taught her: Dragon riders make their own rules.

But a determination to survive won’t be enough this year.

Because Violet knows the real secret hidden for centuries at Basgiath War College—and nothing, not even dragon fire, may be enough to save them in the end.]]> 623 Rebecca Yarros 1649374178 Caim 0 to-read 4.34 2023
author: Rebecca Yarros
name: Caim
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 29939064
Recently Lonnie has plopped the family in a New Jersey upper class suburb, which lacks the diversity that Bea craves but has the school district and zip code envy that Lonnie wants. The demands of carrying a third child and fitting into this new environment while pretending that her husband is not cheating on her again, is more than she can handle. And just when she thinks things can’t get any worst, the ultimate deception snaps the little thread that was holding her life together and all comes tumbling down.]]> 304 Sadeqa Johnson 1250074169 Caim 2 3.48 2017
author: Sadeqa Johnson
name: Caim
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2017
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves:
review:
2.75/5 � (generous) This was not it. I’ll write out more thoughts later (maybe?). I’m glad that this wasn’t the first book I’ve read by the author because I loved HOE (
]]> 198385439 320 Onyi Nwabineli 1525896032 Caim 0 to-read 3.74 2024
author: Onyi Nwabineli
name: Caim
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 194897179 A Jamaican girl is determined to bake her way out of her dysfunctional family and into the opportunity of a lifetime.

Pumkin Patterson is a thirteen-year-old girl living in a tiny two-room house in Kingston, Jamaica with her grandmother (who wants to improve the family’s social standing); her aunt Sophie (who dreams of a new life in Paris for her and Pumkin); and her mother Paulette (who’s rarely home). When Sophie is offered the chance to move to France for work, she seizes the opportunity and promises to send for her niece in one year’s time. All Pumkin has to do is pass her French entrance exam so she can attend school there. But when Pumkin’s grandmother dies, she’s left alone with her volatile mother, and as soon as her estranged father turns up—as lazy and conniving as ever—the household’s fortunes take a turn for the worse.

Pumkin must somehow find a way to raise the money for her French exam. In a moment of ingenuity she turns her passion for baking into a true business. Making batches of sweet potato pudding, coconut drops and chocolate cakes, Pumkin develops a booming trade—but when her school and her mother find out what she’s up to, everything she’s worked so hard for may slip through her fingers.]]> 368 Ishi Robinson 0063334879 Caim 0 to-read 4.29 2024
author: Ishi Robinson
name: Caim
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 6271122
"What do you read after HARRY POTTER? Finally, there's a satisfying answer - you read REPOTTING HARRY POTTER for a whole new depth of appreciation and enjoyment. This book allows anyone intimidated by literature classes to sneak a seat in a class with one of those professors every student loves. You'll come away with a new depth of knowledge of Rowling's epic but also with a list of related literature you will want to read; great insights for aspiring writers too." Connie Neal, author of THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO HARRY POTTER]]> 352 James W. Thomas 0982238525 Caim 0 my-library, to-read 4.32 2009
author: James W. Thomas
name: Caim
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: my-library, to-read
review:

]]> 139560194 400 Sarai Johnson 0063294435 Caim 5 4.32 2024
author: Sarai Johnson
name: Caim
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/22
date added: 2025/01/22
shelves:
review:

]]> 203590129 From the bestselling author of Hidden Pictures comes a breathtaking work of suspense about a father trying to save his daughter from a life-altering decision that will put everything he loves on the line.

Frank Szatowski is shocked when his daughter, Maggie, calls him for the first time in three years. He was convinced that their estrangement would become permanent. He’s even more surprised when she invites him to her upcoming wedding in New Hampshire. Frank is ecstatic, and determined to finally make things right.

He arrives to find that the wedding is at a private estate—very secluded, very luxurious, very much out of his league. It seems that Maggie failed to mention that she’s marrying Aidan Gardner, the son of a famous tech billionaire. Feeling desperately out of place, Frank focuses on reconnecting with Maggie and getting to know her new family. But it’s difficult: Aidan is withdrawn and evasive; Maggie doesn’t seem to have time for him; and he finds that the locals are disturbingly hostile to the Gardners. Frank needs to know more about this family his daughter is marrying into, but if he pushes too hard, he could lose Maggie forever.

An edge-of-your-seat thriller that delves deep into the heart of one family, The Last One at the Wedding is a work of brilliant suspense from a true modern master.]]> 352 Jason Rekulak 1250895790 Caim 3 If you enjoy thoughtful symbolism, layered themes, and humorous chaos, it’s worth the read—even if it leaves you with more questions than answers.

Whew! Nostalgia, suburban surrealism, and chaotic romance collide. Think As the World Turns soap opera meets Little Orphan Annie.

In a nutshell: The Last One at the Wedding is a thoughtful exploration of belonging, nostalgia, privilege and (to an extent) social pressure to conform or appease the folks who are near and dear to us, but its fast-paced ending felt too neat and tidy. It doesn't help that I'd just finished watching The Perfect Couple on Netflix, which shared some wedding-centric similarities to this book. The symbolism is rich and thought-provoking, yet its potential feels unfulfilled, especially with the unresolved mysteries and lack of closure (see: my questions listed below). Still, there’s so much to appreciate in its exploration of motherhood, connection, and the messiness of relationships.

Ms. Toggart’s depiction of motherhood stood out—I’m glad Frank braved that arduous trek down the hill (and outside Hugo’s watchful eye) to visit her and (try to) uncover the truth about Dawn. It added an emotional layer to Frank’s journey and showed a quieter strength in Ms. Toggart’s story.

The Potterhead in me loved the Harry Potter mentions: the "next JKR" quip, the "Bible" (under the disguise of maybe The Deathly Hallows), and the Hogwarts LEGO castle were subtle but meaningful nods to nostalgia and the struggle between childhood comforts and adult chaos. That said, some motifs—like the daddy long legs. bird-themed cottages at Osprey Cove and Waffle House pancakes—felt underexplored, and Ms. Szatowski’s death? A glaring mystery left untouched.

So many unanswered (rhetorical, Book Club conversation starter) questions:
* Was "the picture" real or fake? If fake, why?
* How did Ms. Szatowski die? And why was her death left unexplained?
* How much does it cost to ignore the obvious (Tammy, looking at you)?
* * * HOW did Maggie get away with so much chaos (almost) unscathed?
* Did Frank ever resolve his back pain (literal or metaphorical)?
* * * * * Why did the wedding charades continue after someone died on the property?

Observations
The book’s physicality was so vivid—Frank’s back pain, Hugo’s piercing interrogations, and the disgust (and mystery) surrounding watching Catherine wither away in her room all leapt off the page. The geography of Osprey Cove was meticulously described, emphasizing just how much exploration Frank undertook in the longest (and messiest) 72 hours of his life.

Verdict
The ending felt rushed, like the story ran out of steam just when it needed to slow down. It left me feeling like I’d experienced an Orange is the New Black-style whirlwind—chaotic, intriguing, but incomplete. Still, I don’t regret reading it. Matching its dreamy, gaslighting, and messy romantic energy to Chemtrails Over the Country Club, Sea Change and Frank Sinatra ballads added another layer of enjoyment and a way for me to expand my music playlist.]]> 3.76 2024
author: Jason Rekulak
name: Caim
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/13
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves:
review:
Rating: 3.6�/5
If you enjoy thoughtful symbolism, layered themes, and humorous chaos, it’s worth the read—even if it leaves you with more questions than answers.

Whew! Nostalgia, suburban surrealism, and chaotic romance collide. Think As the World Turns soap opera meets Little Orphan Annie.

In a nutshell: The Last One at the Wedding is a thoughtful exploration of belonging, nostalgia, privilege and (to an extent) social pressure to conform or appease the folks who are near and dear to us, but its fast-paced ending felt too neat and tidy. It doesn't help that I'd just finished watching The Perfect Couple on Netflix, which shared some wedding-centric similarities to this book. The symbolism is rich and thought-provoking, yet its potential feels unfulfilled, especially with the unresolved mysteries and lack of closure (see: my questions listed below). Still, there’s so much to appreciate in its exploration of motherhood, connection, and the messiness of relationships.

Ms. Toggart’s depiction of motherhood stood out—I’m glad Frank braved that arduous trek down the hill (and outside Hugo’s watchful eye) to visit her and (try to) uncover the truth about Dawn. It added an emotional layer to Frank’s journey and showed a quieter strength in Ms. Toggart’s story.

The Potterhead in me loved the Harry Potter mentions: the "next JKR" quip, the "Bible" (under the disguise of maybe The Deathly Hallows), and the Hogwarts LEGO castle were subtle but meaningful nods to nostalgia and the struggle between childhood comforts and adult chaos. That said, some motifs—like the daddy long legs. bird-themed cottages at Osprey Cove and Waffle House pancakes—felt underexplored, and Ms. Szatowski’s death? A glaring mystery left untouched.

So many unanswered (rhetorical, Book Club conversation starter) questions:
* Was "the picture" real or fake? If fake, why?
* How did Ms. Szatowski die? And why was her death left unexplained?
* How much does it cost to ignore the obvious (Tammy, looking at you)?
* * * HOW did Maggie get away with so much chaos (almost) unscathed?
* Did Frank ever resolve his back pain (literal or metaphorical)?
* * * * * Why did the wedding charades continue after someone died on the property?

Observations
The book’s physicality was so vivid—Frank’s back pain, Hugo’s piercing interrogations, and the disgust (and mystery) surrounding watching Catherine wither away in her room all leapt off the page. The geography of Osprey Cove was meticulously described, emphasizing just how much exploration Frank undertook in the longest (and messiest) 72 hours of his life.

Verdict
The ending felt rushed, like the story ran out of steam just when it needed to slow down. It left me feeling like I’d experienced an Orange is the New Black-style whirlwind—chaotic, intriguing, but incomplete. Still, I don’t regret reading it. Matching its dreamy, gaslighting, and messy romantic energy to Chemtrails Over the Country Club, Sea Change and Frank Sinatra ballads added another layer of enjoyment and a way for me to expand my music playlist.
]]> 8127 Anne of Green Gables is also a wonderful portrait of a time, a place, a family� and, most of all, love.

WITH AN AFTERWORD BY JENNIFER LEE CARELL]]> 320 L.M. Montgomery 0451528824 Caim 0 to-read 4.30 1908
author: L.M. Montgomery
name: Caim
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1908
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 17978443
Now, however, they’re about to face their most challenging year yet. Proud, talented Clarice is struggling to keep up appearances as she deals with her husband’s humiliating infidelities; beautiful Barbara Jean is rocked by the tragic reverberations of a youthful love affair; and fearless Odette is about to embark on the most terrifying battle of her life. With wit, style and sublime talent, Edward Kelsey Moore brings together three devoted allies in a warmhearted novel that celebrates female friendship and second chances.]]> 384 Edward Kelsey Moore 0307950433 Caim 0 to-read 4.01 2013
author: Edward Kelsey Moore
name: Caim
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 43319659
Mary Anne thinks that Stacey should leave Scott alone and focus on the Pike kids, but Stacey's in love. Looking for reasons to hang around his lifeguard stand takes up all of her time, which means Mary Anne has to do the job of two baby-sitters. Mary Anne doesn't like it one bit! How can she tell Stacey that Scott just isn't interested without ruining their friendship and breaking Stacey's heart?]]> 165 Gale Galligan 1338304518 Caim 0 to-read, my-library 4.29 2019
author: Gale Galligan
name: Caim
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read, my-library
review:

]]> 39863515
Dr. Shields seems to know what Jess is thinking� and what she’s hiding.

Jessica’s behavior will not only be monitored, but manipulated.

Caught in a web of attraction, deceit and jealousy, Jess quickly learns that some obsessions can be deadly.

From the authors of the blockbuster bestseller The Wife Between Us, Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, An Anonymous Girl will keep you riveted through the last shocking twist.]]> 375 Greer Hendricks 1250133734 Caim 0 to-read, my-library 3.79 2019
author: Greer Hendricks
name: Caim
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read, my-library
review:

]]> 50416762 An ITW Thriller Award and Anthony Award winner.

Perfect town. Perfect homes. Perfect families. It’s enough to drive some women mad�

In a tale inspired by real events, pregnant journalist Joan Harken is cautiously excited to follow her fiancé back to his Minnesota hometown. After spending a childhood on the move and chasing the screams and swirls of news-rich city life, she’s eager to settle down. Lilydale’s motto, “Come Home Forever,� couldn’t be more inviting.

And yet, something is off in the picture-perfect village.

The friendliness borders on intrusive. Joan can’t shake the feeling that every move she makes is being tracked. An archaic organization still seems to hold the town in thrall. So does the sinister secret of a little boy who vanished decades ago. And unless Joan is imagining things, a frighteningly familiar figure from her past is on watch in the shadows.

Her fiancĂ© tells her she’s being paranoid.ĚýHe might be right. Then again, she might have moved to the deadliest small town on earth.]]> 347 Jess Lourey 1542016290 Caim 0 to-read, my-library 3.89 2021
author: Jess Lourey
name: Caim
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read, my-library
review:

]]> 22674105 Kevin Kwan, bestselling author of Crazy Rich Asians, is back with a wickedly funny new novel of social climbing, secret e-mails, art-world scandal, lovesick billionaires, and the outrageous story of what happens when Rachel Chu, engaged to marry Asia's most eligible bachelor, discovers her birthfather.

On the eve of her wedding to Nicholas Young, heir to one of the greatest fortunes in Asia, Rachel should be over the moon. She has a flawless Asscher-cut diamond from JAR, a wedding dress she loves more than anything found in the salons of Paris, and a fiance willing to sacrifice his entire inheritance in order to marry her. But Rachel still mourns the fact that her birthfather, a man she never knew, won't be able to walk her down the aisle. Until: a shocking revelation draws Rachel into a world of Shanghai splendor beyond anything she has ever imagined. Here we meet Carlton, a Ferrari-crashing bad boy known for Prince Harry-like antics; Colette, a celebrity girlfriend chased by fevered paparazzi; and the man Rachel has spent her entire life waiting to meet: her father. Meanwhile, Singapore's It Girl, Astrid Leong, is shocked to discover that there is a downside to having a newly minted tech billionaire husband. A romp through Asia's most exclusive clubs, auction houses, and estates, China Rich Girlfriend brings us into the elite circles of Mainland China, introducing a captivating cast of characters, and offering an inside glimpse at what it's like to be gloriously, crazily, China-rich.]]> 378 Kevin Kwan 0385539088 Caim 0 to-read, my-library 3.80 2015
author: Kevin Kwan
name: Caim
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read, my-library
review:

]]> 35924499 On a bright January morning in the London suburbs, a family moves into the house they’ve just bought in Trinity Avenue.

Nothing strange about that. Except it is your house. And you didn’t sell it.

When Fiona Lawson comes home to find strangers moving into her house, she's sure there's been a mistake. She and her estranged husband, Bram, have a modern co-parenting arrangement: bird's nest custody, where each parent spends a few nights a week with their two sons at the prized family home to maintain stability for their children. But the system built to protect their family ends up putting them in terrible jeopardy. In a domino effect of crimes and misdemeanors, the nest comes tumbling down.

Now Bram has disappeared and so have Fiona's children. As events spiral well beyond her control, Fiona will discover just how many lies her husband was weaving and how little they truly knew each other. But Bram's not the only one with things to hide, and some secrets are best kept to oneself, safe as houses.]]> 404 Louise Candlish 045148911X Caim 0 to-read, my-library 3.60 2018
author: Louise Candlish
name: Caim
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read, my-library
review:

]]> 60142750 In the propulsive debut novel from the host of the #1 true crime podcast Crime Junkie, a journalist uncovers her hometown’s dark secrets when she becomes obsessed with the unsolved murder of her childhood neighbor—and the disappearance of another girl twenty years later.

You can’t ever know for sure what happens behind closed doors.

Everyone from Wakarusa, Indiana, remembers the infamous case of January Jacobs, who was discovered in a ditch hours after her family awoke to find her gone. Margot Davies was six at the time, the same age as January—and they were next-door neighbors. In the twenty years since, Margot has grown up, moved away, and become a big-city journalist. But she’s always been haunted by the feeling that it could’ve been her. And the worst part is, January’s killer has never been brought to justice.

When Margot returns home to help care for her uncle after he is diagnosed with early-onset dementia, she feels like she’s walked into a time capsule. Wakarusa is exactly how she remembers—genial, stifled, secretive. Then news breaks about five-year-old Natalie Clark from the next town over, who’s gone missing under circumstances eerily similar to January’s. With all the old feelings rushing back, Margot vows to find Natalie and to solve January’s murder once and for all.

But the police, Natalie’s family, the townspeople—they all seem to be hiding something. And the deeper Margot digs into Natalie’s disappearance, the more resistance she encounters, and the colder January’s case feels. Could January’s killer still be out there? Is it the same person who took Natalie? And what will it cost to finally discover what truly happened that night twenty years ago?

Twisty, chilling, and intense, All Good People Here is a searing tale that asks: What are your neighbors capable of when they think no one is watching?]]> 312 Ashley Flowers 0593496477 Caim 0 to-read, my-library 3.81 2022
author: Ashley Flowers
name: Caim
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read, my-library
review:

]]> 51167337 Carefree Black Girls is an exploration and celebration of black women’s identity and impact on pop culture, as well as the enduring stereotypes they face, from a film and culture critic for HuffPost.

In 2013, Zeba Blay was one of the first people to coin the viral term “carefreeblackgirls� on Twitter. It was, as she says, “a way to carve out a space of celebration and freedom for black women online.�

In this collection of essays, Blay expands on that initial idea by looking at the significance of influential black women throughout history, including Josephine Baker, Michelle Obama, Rihanna, and Cardi B. Incorporating her own personal experiences as well as astute analysis of these famous women, Blay presents an empowering and celebratory portrait of black women and their effect on American culture. She also examines the many stereotypes that have clung to black women throughout history, whether it is the Mammy, the Angry Black Woman, or more recently, the Thot.]]> 240 Zeba Blay 1250231566 Caim 0 to-read 4.33 2021
author: Zeba Blay
name: Caim
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60206855 A young mother finds refuge and friendship at a boardinghouse in 1960s Memphis, Tennessee, where family encompasses more than just blood and hidden truths can bury you or set you free.

Sara King has nothing, save for her secrets and the baby in her belly, as she boards the bus to Memphis, hoping to outrun her past in Chicago. She is welcomed with open arms by Mama Sugar, a kindly matriarch and owner of the popular boardinghouse The Scarlet Poplar.

Like many cities in early 1960s America, Memphis is still segregated, but change is in the air. News spreads of the Freedom Riders. Across the country, people like Martin Luther King Jr. are leading the fight for equal rights. Black literature and music provide the stories and soundtrack for these turbulent and hopeful times, and Sara finds herself drawn in by conversations of education, politics and a brighter tomorrow with Jonas, a local schoolteacher. Romance blooms between them, but secrets from Mama Sugar's past threaten their newfound happiness with Sara and Jonas soon caught in the crosshairs, leading Sara to make decisions that will reshape the rest of their lives.

With a charismatic cast of characters, The Two Lives of Sara is an emotional and unforgettable story of hope, resilience, and unexpected love.]]> 320 Catherine Adel West 0778333221 Caim 0 to-read 3.75 2022
author: Catherine Adel West
name: Caim
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 62919742 Educated and Born a Crime, How to Say Babylon is the stunning story of the author’s struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as a woman and poet.

Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.

In an effort to keep Babylon outside the gate, he forbade almost everything. In place of pants, the women in her family were made to wear long skirts and dresses to cover their arms and legs, head wraps to cover their hair, no make-up, no jewelry, no opinions, no friends. Safiya’s mother, while loyal to her father, nonetheless gave Safiya and her siblings the gift of books, including poetry, to which Safiya latched on for dear life. And as Safiya watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under housework and the rigidity of her father’s beliefs, she increasingly used her education as a sharp tool with which to find her voice and break free. Inevitably, with her rebellion comes clashes with her father, whose rage and paranoia explodes in increasing violence. As Safiya’s voice grows, lyrically and poetically, a collision course is set between them.

How to Say Babylon is Sinclair’s reckoning with the culture that initially nourished but ultimately sought to silence her; it is her reckoning with patriarchy and tradition, and the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica. Rich in lyricism and language only a poet could evoke, How to Say Babylon is both a universal story of a woman finding her own power and a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we may know how to name, Rastafari, but one we know little about.']]> 352 Safiya Sinclair 1982132337 Caim 0 to-read 4.44 2023
author: Safiya Sinclair
name: Caim
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 127823210 SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAYA ANGELOU BOOK AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE STANFORDS' FICTION WITH A SENSE OF PLACE AWARD
LONGLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD

Set against the backdrop of developing modern China, this mesmerizing literary debut is part coming-of-age tale, part family and social drama, as it follows two generations searching for belonging and opportunity in a rapidly changing world.

Shanghai, 2007: Fourteen-year-old Alva has always longed for more. Raised by her American expat mother, she’s never known her Chinese father, and she is certain a better life awaits them in America. But when her mother announces her engagement to their wealthy Chinese landlord, Lu Fang, Alva’s hopes are dashed. She plots for the next best thing: the American School in Shanghai. Upon admission, though, Alva is surprised to discover an institution run by an exclusive community of expats and the ever-wilder thrills of a city where foreigners can ostensibly act as they please.

1985: In the seaside city of Qingdao, Lu Fang is a young married man and a lowly clerk in a shipping yard. Although he once dreamed of a bright future, he is now one of many casualties in his country’s harsh political reforms. So when China opens its doors to the first wave of foreigners in decades, Lu Fang’s world is split wide openĚýafter he meets an American woman who makes him confront difficult questions aboutĚýhis current status in life and how much will ever be enough.

In a stunning reversal of the east-to-west immigrant narrative and set against China’s political history and economic rise,ĚýRiver East, River West is an intimate family drama and a sharp social novel. Alternating between Alva and Lu Fang’s points of view, this is a profoundlyĚýmoving exploration of race and class, cultural identity and belonging, and the often-false promise of the American Dream.]]> 352 Aube Rey Lescure 0063257858 Caim 0 to-read 4.00 2024
author: Aube Rey Lescure
name: Caim
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 201750876 343 Regina Porter 059324186X Caim 0 to-read 3.30 2024
author: Regina Porter
name: Caim
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 48656130
Get ready to fall for this year's most extraordinary love story

Quinn and Minnie are born on New Year's Eve, in the same hospital, one minute apart.

Their lives may begin together, but their worlds couldn't be more different.

Thirty years later they find themselves together again in the same place, at the same time.

What if fate is trying to bring them together?

Maybe it's time to take a chance on love...]]> 352 Sophie Cousens Caim 3 my-library
This Time Next Year is both inspirational and aspirational, encouraging readers to love themselves enough to discern what constitutes a “good enough� love—whether from family, friends, or potential romantic partners. The story beautifully highlights how friendship can be an anchor in life’s toughest moments and reminds us that our parents are people, too, with their own flaws and struggles.

While the romantic comedy tropes and film references occasionally felt heavy-handed, the music mentions inspired me to create a playlist to follow the story. That said, the premise of repeatedly crossing paths with your “perfect 10� lover felt a bit unrealistic, and the ending leaned heavily into drama. Still, I found myself enjoying the journey overall. Minnie having a brother helped showcase how differently her mom adored him. However, I wanted more insight into why Minnie’s mother was so aloof toward her. I was glad to see how Minnie and her father's relationship differed, but it would've been nice to have more writing scenes with her brother, too. Similarly, Quinn’s father’s absence—both figurative and literal—was intriguing but underexplored. I also wished the book had delved deeper into how Connie and Tara rekindled their happenstance friendship, as it felt like a missed opportunity for emotional depth.

On the surface, the story might seem familiar and trope-heavy, but it’s worth pausing to reflect on the recurring symbolism of clocks and owls. Their presence prompted me to consider themes of time passing, watchfulness, and wisdom gained through observation. I even had to look up the term “lemming o’clock,� which added another layer of curiosity to my reading experience. At the time, I didn’t realize the book had been adapted into a movie, but now I’m intrigued enough to watch it. I also wanted more from Greg and Lucy—opening the story with them was some of the most engaging writing in the book. I’m glad Minnie eventually broke up with Greg and found strength in her resilient friendship with Leila. Ultimately, This Time Next Year is a feel-good book that left me reflecting on my own aspirations. It encouraged me to think about where I might want to be by the start of 2026—a perfect reminder to be intentional with the time I have.]]> 3.79 2020
author: Sophie Cousens
name: Caim
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/08
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: my-library
review:
3.3/5 �

This Time Next Year is both inspirational and aspirational, encouraging readers to love themselves enough to discern what constitutes a “good enough� love—whether from family, friends, or potential romantic partners. The story beautifully highlights how friendship can be an anchor in life’s toughest moments and reminds us that our parents are people, too, with their own flaws and struggles.

While the romantic comedy tropes and film references occasionally felt heavy-handed, the music mentions inspired me to create a playlist to follow the story. That said, the premise of repeatedly crossing paths with your “perfect 10� lover felt a bit unrealistic, and the ending leaned heavily into drama. Still, I found myself enjoying the journey overall. Minnie having a brother helped showcase how differently her mom adored him. However, I wanted more insight into why Minnie’s mother was so aloof toward her. I was glad to see how Minnie and her father's relationship differed, but it would've been nice to have more writing scenes with her brother, too. Similarly, Quinn’s father’s absence—both figurative and literal—was intriguing but underexplored. I also wished the book had delved deeper into how Connie and Tara rekindled their happenstance friendship, as it felt like a missed opportunity for emotional depth.

On the surface, the story might seem familiar and trope-heavy, but it’s worth pausing to reflect on the recurring symbolism of clocks and owls. Their presence prompted me to consider themes of time passing, watchfulness, and wisdom gained through observation. I even had to look up the term “lemming o’clock,� which added another layer of curiosity to my reading experience. At the time, I didn’t realize the book had been adapted into a movie, but now I’m intrigued enough to watch it. I also wanted more from Greg and Lucy—opening the story with them was some of the most engaging writing in the book. I’m glad Minnie eventually broke up with Greg and found strength in her resilient friendship with Leila. Ultimately, This Time Next Year is a feel-good book that left me reflecting on my own aspirations. It encouraged me to think about where I might want to be by the start of 2026—a perfect reminder to be intentional with the time I have.
]]> 60018635 A warm and uplifting novel about an isolated witch whose opportunity to embrace a quirky new family--and a new love--changes the course of her life.

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

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

As Mika begins to find her place at Nowhere House, the thought of belonging somewhere begins to feel like a real possibility. But magic isn't the only danger in the world, and when a threat comes knocking at their door, Mika will need to decide whether to risk everything to protect a found family she didn't know she was looking for....
]]> 318 Sangu Mandanna 059343935X Caim 0 to-read 4.05 2022
author: Sangu Mandanna
name: Caim
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 52578297
When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change.

The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life. But things aren't always what she imagined they'd be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger.

Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live?]]> 288 Matt Haig 0525559477 Caim 0 to-read 3.96 2020
author: Matt Haig
name: Caim
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 34840184
But it's going to be memorable for all the wrong reasons after tragedy strikes: a body is discovered in Nantucket Harbor just hours before the ceremony-and everyone in the wedding party is suddenly a suspect. As Chief of Police Ed Kapenash interviews the bride, the groom, the groom's famous mystery-novelist mother, and even a member of his own family, he discovers that every wedding is a minefield-and no couple is perfect. Featuring beloved characters from The Castaways, Beautiful Day, and A Summer Affair, The Perfect Couple proves once again that Elin Hilderbrand is the queen of the summer beach read.]]> 480 Elin Hilderbrand 0316375241 Caim 0 to-read 3.93 2018
author: Elin Hilderbrand
name: Caim
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 78257
Quicksand , Nella Larsen's powerful first novel, has intriguing autobiographical parallels and at the same time invokes the international dimension of African American culture of the 1920s. It also evocatively portrays the racial and gender restrictions that can mark a life.]]> 192 Nella Larsen 0141181273 Caim 0 to-read 3.72 1928
author: Nella Larsen
name: Caim
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1928
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 18954670
On the eve of the 2012 Grammy Awards, the world learned of a stunning Whitney Houston, unquestionably one of the most remarkable and powerful voices in all of music, had been silenced forever. Over the weeks and months that followed, family, friends, and fans alike tried to understand how such a magnificent talent and beautiful soul could have been taken so early and so unexpectedly. Glamorous and approachable, captivating and sweet, Whitney had long ago won the hearts of America, but in recent years her tumultuous personal life had grabbed as many headlines as her soaring vocal talents. Her sudden death left behind not only a legacy of brilliance, but also painful questions with no easy answers.

Now, for the first time, the beloved superstar's mother, Cissy Houston—a gospel legend in her own right—relates the full, astonishing scope of the pop icon's life and career. From Whitney's earliest days singing in the church choir to her rapid ascent to the pinnacles of music stardom, from her string of number one hits to her topping the Hollywood box office, Cissy recounts her daughter's journey to becoming one of the most popular and successful artists of all time. Setting the record straight, Cissy also speaks candidly about Whitney's struggles in the limelight, revealing the truth about her turbulent marriage to singer Bobby Brown, her public attempts to regain her celebrated voice, and the battle with drugs that ultimately proved too much.

In this poignant and tender tribute to her "Nippy," Cissy summons all her strength to reveal not only Whitney the superstar, but also Whitney as a sweet girl, a bright-eyed young woman, and a deeply caring mother. Complete with never-before-seen family photographs, Remembering Whitney is an intimate, heartfelt portrait of one of our most revered artists, from the woman who cherished her most.]]> 321 Cissy Houston Caim 3 4.14 2013
author: Cissy Houston
name: Caim
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/02
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves:
review:
Rating: 3.5/5 � Coincidentally, Cissy released this book New Years 2013 and it’s my first read of 2025. Whitney (2018), a Netflix documentary, is what made me want to read more about her life, so why not start with her mama’s rendition? I found out A LOT about Cissy’s own upbringing & career that (eventually) helped me understand Whitney’s intro into the music industry, and her personality (that her mama contrasted to her own “toughness� a bit too harshly to me�). I do not believe whatsoever that her mama wasn’t aware of her drug use. Every other chapter was “I didn’t know�. For a family that big, and this being her only daughter, their relationship was painfully estranged and I suspect if it was because her mama came across as extremely judgmental and tough. This family’s legacy is full of both talent and gut wrenching heartbreak. My takeaway from this book: family has the incomparable power to bring you happiness, hurt, hindrance, and/or harm. Or a mixture of all.
]]> 44674459 After decades of silence, Robyn Crawford, close friend, collaborator, and confidante of Whitney Houston, shares her story.

Whitney Houston is as big a superstar as the music business has ever known. She exploded on the scene in 1985 with her debut album and spent the next two decades dominating the charts and capturing the hearts of fans around the world. One person was there by her side through it all--her best friend, Robyn Crawford.

Since Whitney's death in 2012, Robyn has stayed out of the limelight and held the great joys, wild adventures, and hard truths of her life with Whitney close to her heart. Now, for the first time ever, Crawford opens up in her new memoir, A Song for You.

With warmth, candor, and an impressive recall of detail, Robyn describes the two meeting as teenagers in the 1980s, and how their lives and friendship evolved as Whitney recorded her first album and Robyn pursued her promising Division I basketball career. Together during countless sold-out world tours, behind the scenes as hit after hit was recorded, through Whitney's marriage and the birth of her daughter, the two navigated often challenging families, great loves, and painful losses, always supporting each other with laughter and friendship.

Deeply personal and heartfelt, A Song for You is the vital, honest, and previously untold story that provides an understanding of the complex life of Whitney Houston. Finally, the person who knew her best sets the record straight.]]> 336 Robyn Crawford 1524742848 Caim 0 to-read 4.11 2019
author: Robyn Crawford
name: Caim
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 33590210
This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward—with hope and pain—into the future.]]> 308 Tayari Jones 1616201347 Caim 5 3.91 2018
author: Tayari Jones
name: Caim
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/12
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves:
review:

]]> 6 734 J.K. Rowling 0439139597 Caim 4 4.56 2000
author: J.K. Rowling
name: Caim
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves:
review:

]]> 60568471
It couldn’t save their marriage.

Yasmen wasn’t prepared for how her life fell apart, but she is finally starting to find joy again. She and Josiah have found a new rhythm, co-parenting their two kids and running a thriving business together. Yet like magnets, they’re always drawn back to each other, and now they’re beginning to wonder if they’re truly ready to let go of everything they once had.

Soon, one stolen kiss leads to another…and then more. It's hot. It's illicit. It's all good—until old wounds reopen. Is it too late for them to find forever? Or could they even be better, the second time around?

Award-winning and bestselling "powerhouse" author Kennedy Ryan is at her absolute best in this compelling, scorching novel about hope and healing, and what it truly means to love for a lifetime (USA Today).]]> 391 Kennedy Ryan 1538706792 Caim 3 4.32 2022
author: Kennedy Ryan
name: Caim
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/27
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves:
review:

]]> 145624993 The Immortal Life ofĚýHenriettaĚýLacks, a page-turning 93-year history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the nation’s last segregated asylums, thatĚý New York Times Ěýbestselling author Clint Smith describes as “a book that left me breathless.â€�

On a cold day in March ofĚý1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland.ĚýUnder the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve patients of the state’s Hospital for the Negro Insane. For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum.
Ěý
In Madness, Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family’s experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations.
Ěý
As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America’s evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. During its peak years, the hospital’s wards were overflowing with almost 2,700 patients. By the end of the 20th-century, the asylum faded from view as prisons and jails became America’s new focus.
Ěý
In Madness, Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable.
Ěý]]> 368 Antonia Hylton 1538723697 Caim 0 to-read 4.25 2024
author: Antonia Hylton
name: Caim
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: to-read
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]]> 50732413
Welcome to Oak Bluffs, the most exclusive black beach community in the country. Known for its gingerbread Victorian-style houses and modern architectural marvels, this picturesque town hugging the sea is a mecca for the crème de la crème of black society—where Michelle and Barack Obama vacation and Meghan Markle has shopped for a house for her mom. Black people have lived in this pretty slip of the Vineyard since the 1600s and began buying property in the 1800s, making this posh town the embodiment of “old money.�

Every summer, Esperenza “Perry� Soto, a beautiful and talented Afro-Latina lawyer, escapes the fetid heat of New York City for the gorgeous weather, cool water, and stunning views Oak Bluffs offers. Sharing a cottage on the beach, owned by her “Ama�, with her husband and two god sisters, Perry is looking forward to trading meetings and clients for days of languor and fun.

When Memorial Day arrives and the season begins, some of the nation’s wealthiest, most powerful, and famous from the worlds of politics, art, and entertainment meet to swim, dance, party, and chill. While a few can’t leave work behind, others indulge in a different kind of business affair.Ěý

But this summer on the Bluffs is different. Ama is moving to the south of France to reunite with her college sweetheart. She is going to give the house to one of her goddaughters and she has invited all three of them to spend the summer with her the way they did when they were kids. Each of the women want the house desperately. Each is grappling with a secret that they fear will make them lose Ama’s approval and the house. . . .


]]> 432 Sunny Hostin 0062994174 Caim 0 to-read 3.68 2021
author: Sunny Hostin
name: Caim
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 48902303 A funny, sexy, profound dramedy about two young people at a crossroads in their relationship and the limits of love.

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

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

Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they've ever known. And just maybe they'll all be okay in the end. Memorial is a funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you're supposed to be, and the limits of love.]]> 320 Bryan Washington Caim 0 to-read 3.54 2020
author: Bryan Washington
name: Caim
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 123279501 A gripping, painfully honest, and ultimately inspirational memoir from global superstar and creator of the Red Table Talk series Jada Pinkett Smith. In a media driven landscape that crafts narratives for our celebrities, Smith recounts her story in an intimate conversation with readers. Along the way, she explores her path to accepting her power as a woman, and her discovery that a strong sense of self is every woman’s right and saving grace.

An impactful and rare memoir that engages and educates, Worthy is a courageous love song to self, to family, to life, and to the world.

From an unconventional upbringing in Baltimore, to an unconventional marriage to one of the most famous men in the world, adhering to the status quo has never been a familiar road for Jada Pinkett Smith. In Worthy, Smith strips herself of all the labels and stories crafted by others, and reclaims her narrative with radical self-love. Worthy teaches us who Jada is, and how to embrace our most authentic lovable souls.]]> 416 Jada Pinkett Smith 0063320681 Caim 3 kindle-audio 3.62 2023
author: Jada Pinkett Smith
name: Caim
average rating: 3.62
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: kindle-audio
review:

]]> 63133205 The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.

In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history.

Written with remarkable candor and humor, Spears’s groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love—and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.]]> 288 Britney Spears 1668009048 Caim 2 kindle-audio 3.83 2023
author: Britney Spears
name: Caim
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/19
date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: kindle-audio
review:

]]> 173754979 A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Caim 0 to-read 4.47 2024
author: Percival Everett
name: Caim
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 208516656 If you knew your future, would you try to fight fate?

Aside from a delay, there will be no problems. The flight will be smooth, it will land safely. Everyone who gets on the plane will get off. But almost all of them will be forever changed.

Because on this ordinary, short, domestic flight, something extraordinary happens. People learn how and when they are going to die. For some, their death is far in the future—age 103!—and they laugh. But for six passengers, their predicted deaths are not far away at all.

How do they know this? There were ostensibly more interesting people on the flight (the bride and groom, the jittery, possibly famous woman, the giant Hemsworth-esque guy who looks like an off-duty superhero, the frazzled, gorgeous flight attendant) but none would become as famous as “The Death Lady.�

Not a single passenger or crew member will later recall noticing her board the plane. She wasn’t exceptionally old or young, rude or polite. She wasn’t drunk or nervous or pregnant. Her appearance and demeanor were unremarkable. But what she did on that flight was truly remarkable.

A few months later, one passenger dies exactly as she predicted. Then two more passengers die, again, as she said they would. Soon no one is thinking this is simply an entertaining story at a cocktail party.

If you were told you only had a certain amount of time left to live, would you do things differently? Would you try to dodge your destiny?

Liane Moriarty’s Here One Moment is a brilliantly constructed tale that looks at free will and destiny, grief and love, and the endless struggle to maintain certainty and control in an uncertain world. A modern-day Jane Austen who humorously skewers social mores while spinning a web of mystery, Moriarty asks profound questions in her newest I-can’t-wait-to-find-out-what-happens novel.]]> 512 Liane Moriarty 0593798600 Caim 0 to-read 3.99 2024
author: Liane Moriarty
name: Caim
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 199798217 A heartfelt novel of friendship, betrayal, and redemption set against three transformative decades in Tehran, Iran.

In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams of a friend to alleviate her isolation.

Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind, passionate girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the stone kitchen of Homa’s warm home, wander through the colorful stalls of the Grand Bazaar, and share their ambitions for becoming “lion women.�

But their happiness is disrupted when Ellie and her mother are afforded the opportunity to return to their previous bourgeois life. Now a popular student at the best girls� high school in Iran, Ellie’s memories of Homa begin to fade. Years later, however, her sudden reappearance in Ellie’s privileged world alters the course of both of their lives.

Together, the two young women come of age and pursue their own goals for meaningful futures. But as the political turmoil in Iran builds to a breaking point, one earth-shattering betrayal will have enormous consequences.]]> 327 Marjan Kamali 1668036584 Caim 0 to-read 4.48 2024
author: Marjan Kamali
name: Caim
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58687126
This is my story, from a crumbling apartment in Central Falls, Rhode Island, to the stage in New York City, and beyond. This is the path I took to finding my purpose but also my voice in a world that didn’t always see me.

As I wrote Finding Me, my eyes were open to the truth of how our stories are often not given close examination. We are forced to reinvent them to fit into a crazy, competitive, judgmental world. So I wrote this for anyone running through life untethered, desperate and clawing their way through murky memories, trying to get to some form of self-love. For anyone who needs reminding that a life worth living can only be born from radical honesty and the courage to shed facades and be . . . you.

Finding Me is a deep reflection, a promise, and a love letter of sorts to self. My hope is that my story will inspire you to light up your own life with creative expression and rediscover who you were before the world put a label on you.]]> 304 Viola Davis 0063037327 Caim 5 kindle-audio 4.54 2022
author: Viola Davis
name: Caim
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/10
date added: 2024/11/10
shelves: kindle-audio
review:
Beautiful, harrowing, triumphant. A must READ � listening as an audiobook was a mistake that I’ll never make again. I want to visually pour over her words that were so resounding, while sometimes disturbing, but also optimistic knowing that she eventually climbed her way out of despair through a long journey of self-acceptance and self-love while also finding the love through Julius that became life changing. A story!
]]> 54304031 Wench and Twelve Years a Slave, this harrowing story follows an enslaved woman forced to barter love and freedom while living in the most infamous slave jail in Virginia.

Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Brown was promised her freedom on her eighteenth birthday. But when her birthday finally comes around, instead of the idyllic life she was hoping for with her true love, she finds herself thrust into the bowels of slavery at the infamous Devil’s Half-Acre, a jail where slaves are broken, tortured, and sold every day. Forced to become the mistress of the brutal man who owns the jail, Pheby faces the ultimate sacrifice to protect her heart in this powerful, thrilling story of one slave’s fight for freedom.]]> 278 Sadeqa Johnson 1982149108 Caim 0 to-read 4.41 2021
author: Sadeqa Johnson
name: Caim
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 50093704 Where do you see yourself in five years?

When Type-A Manhattan lawyer Dannie Kohan is asked this question at the most important interview of her career, she has a meticulously crafted answer at the ready. Later, after nailing her interview and accepting her boyfriend's marriage proposal, Dannie goes to sleep knowing she is right on track to achieve her five-year plan.

But when she wakes up, she’s suddenly in a different apartment, with a different ring on her finger, and beside a very different man. The television news is on in the background, and she can just make out the scrolling date. It’s the same night—December 15—but 2025, five years in the future.

After a very intense, shocking hour, Dannie wakes again, at the brink of midnight, back in 2020. She can’t shake what has happened. It certainly felt much more than merely a dream, but she isn’t the kind of person who believes in visions. That nonsense is only charming coming from free-spirited types, like her lifelong best friend, Bella. Determined to ignore the odd experience, she files it away in the back of her mind.

That is, until four-and-a-half years later, when by chance Dannie meets the very same man from her long-ago vision.

Brimming with joy and heartbreak, In Five Years is an unforgettable love story that reminds us of the power of loyalty, friendship, and the unpredictable nature of destiny.]]> 272 Rebecca Serle 1982137444 Caim 3 3.74 2020
author: Rebecca Serle
name: Caim
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/07
date added: 2024/11/07
shelves:
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]]> 28815371
"All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season."

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

In entrancing, lyrical prose, The Mothers asks whether a "what if" can be more powerful than an experience itself. If, as time passes, we must always live in servitude to the decisions of our younger selves, to the communities that have parented us, and to the decisions we make that shape our lives forever.]]> 288 Brit Bennett 0399184511 Caim 4 3.88 2016
author: Brit Bennett
name: Caim
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/07
date added: 2024/11/05
shelves:
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]]> 127280110
In The Ultimate Wizarding World History of Magic , the editors of MuggleNet document all of the significant historical events the shaped the wizarding world, from Herpo's first breakthrough through the final adventures of Harry Potter and his friends. Readers will learn about the founding of Hogwarts, the beginnings of Quidditch and its rules, the creation of the sword of Gryffindor and much more. It's the only book of its kind to delve so deep into the history and mysteries of the world of witches and wizards.

Topics covered
· The creation of the Chamber of Secrets
· The beginnings of the Triwizard Tournament
· Incidents related to Muggle "magic," such as the Salem witch trials, and their impact upon the wizarding world
· The founding of Gringotts Bank
· Important historical figures, including those shared with the Muggle world such as Merlin
· The birth of Albus Dumbledore
· World War I and its impact upon the wizarding world
· The Battle of Hogwarts
· The installment of Harry Potter as Head of the Auror Department
· And much more

Informed by dozens of different official sources, and supplemented with family trees and informative timelines, The Ultimate Wizarding World History of Magic provides all the information fans could want to fill in the holes of the Harry Potter narrative, while shining a light on everything that makes the wizarding world feel so complex, deep and infused with a sense of mythic grandeur.]]> 224 The Editors of MuggleNet 1956403493 Caim 0 to-read 4.08
author: The Editors of MuggleNet
name: Caim
average rating: 4.08
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> 58724616
Certain to make reading (or re-reading) the Harry Potter series that much more intriguing, this book explores the traditional and extraordinary in equal measure, uncovering details about the school that readers will savor, including:

- The history and traditions of Hogwarts, including notable alumni
- Details of the four founders, Godric Gryffindor, Helga Hufflepuff, Rowena Ravenclaw and Salazar Slytherin
- How the school is organized with teachers, prefects, headboys and headgirls
- Holidays, feasts and celebrations
- The castle layout, classrooms, common rooms, courtyards, dungeons, secret rooms and more
- Details into the "living" artwork throughout the castle
- Artifacts, enchantments, protections and secret passageways
- Hagrid's Hut, the Whomping Willow, The Forbidden Forest and beyond!
- A visitor's guide to Hogsmeade
- Castle inhabitants, including professors, ghosts and staff
- Details of student life, academics, text books and much more!

The Unofficial Harry Potter Hogwarts Handbook is the next best thing to attending Hogwarts itself, providing more Wizarding World insight, detail and fun than ever before recorded in a single book.]]> 224 The Editors of MuggleNet 1948174952 Caim 0 to-read 4.28
author: The Editors of MuggleNet
name: Caim
average rating: 4.28
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60784667
In The Unofficial Harry Potter Volume 2 Chamber of Secrets , first-time readers and longtime fans will discover deep and insightful analysis, Hermione-worthy commentary, and a Hogwarts library-sized collection of fun and magical Potter facts summoned from a variety of official sources.

Whether you are studying with your class, re-reading for pleasure, or looking for a great fact to stump your friends at trivia night, this is the book for you!

Discover &
- Should Harry have been in Slytherin?
- Who is the face behind Hermione’s whiskers?
- World War II and Hogwarts
- Narcissist or Nobody?
- Dark Magic 101
- Breaking down the foreshadowing and misdirection of a glorious whodunit
- Does Pepper-up Potion work on Squibs?
- Mandrake Liberation Front, unite for the history of these peculiar plants!

Presented by the dedicated minds behind the popular Alohomora! podcast, which has been downloaded by more than 7 million global listeners, there is always something new to gad about with your ghouls. From magical theories about the wizarding world to real-life literary references, this book will guide you through Harry’s thrilling journey from breaking the bars at Privet Drive to slithering down the Hogwarts pipes, all without putting another toe out of line.]]> 160 Alohomora! 1956403159 Caim 0 to-read 4.32
author: Alohomora!
name: Caim
average rating: 4.32
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 57917078
When it comes to Harry Potter’s first year at Hogwarts, there’s a lot to unpack―and that doesn’t just include his Invisibility Cloak! In The Unofficial Harry Potter Volume I Sorcerer’s Stone , first-time readers and longtime fans will discover deep and insightful analysis, Hermione-worthy commentary, and a Hogwarts library-sized collection of fun and magical Potter facts summoned from a variety of official sources.

Whether you are studying with your class, re-reading for pleasure, or looking for a great fact to stump your friends at trivia night, this is the book for you!

Discover &
- Harry’s four classmates who are never mentioned again.
- Can owls use the Floo Network?
- Which character has a connection to Jane Austen?
- The real significance of “Mars is bright tonight.�
- On what day did Harry’s first Quidditch match take place?
- How the Mirror of Erised arrived at Hogwarts.
- What is the meaning behind Hagrid’s name?

Presented by the dedicated minds behind the popular Alohomora! podcast, which has been downloaded by more than 7 million global listeners, there is always something new to ensnare your senses. From magical theories about the wizarding world to real-life literary references, this book will help you see Harry’s incredible journey as if you’re stepping onto the Hogwarts Express for the first time…again.]]> 128 Alohomora! 1948174936 Caim 0 to-read 4.29
author: Alohomora!
name: Caim
average rating: 4.29
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 33574165
Eloquent rage keeps us all honest and accountable. It reminds women that they don’t have to settle for less. When Cooper learned of her grandmother's eloquent rage about love, sex, and marriage in an epic and hilarious front-porch confrontation, her life was changed. And it took another intervention, this time staged by one of her homegirls, to turn Brittney into the fierce feminist she is today. In Brittney Cooper’s world, neither mean girls nor fuckboys ever win. But homegirls emerge as heroes. This book argues that ultimately feminism, friendship, and faith in one's own superpowers are all we really need to turn things right side up again.]]> 288 Brittney Cooper 1250112575 Caim 0 to-read 4.38 2018
author: Brittney Cooper
name: Caim
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 27071490 An alternate cover edition can be found here.

A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.

Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi's magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.]]> 305 Yaa Gyasi Caim 5 african-american-fiction 4.48 2016
author: Yaa Gyasi
name: Caim
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/24
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: african-american-fiction
review:

]]> 48570454 Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.

Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.

But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief--a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut.]]> 264 Yaa Gyasi Caim 0 dnf, to-read 4.11 2020
author: Yaa Gyasi
name: Caim
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/21
shelves: dnf, to-read
review:

]]> 88564046
While on a drive in Los Angeles, on a seemingly average afternoon, Kerry Washington received a text message that would send her on a life-changing journey of self-discovery. In an instant, her very identity was torn apart, with everything she thought she knew about herself thrown into question.
Ěý
In Thicker than Water, Washington gives readers an intimate view into both her public and private worlds—as a mother, daughter, wife, artist, advocate, and trailblazer. Chronicling her upbringing and life’s journey thus far, she reveals how she faced a series of challenges and setbacks, effectively hid childhood traumas, met extraordinary mentors, managed to grow her career, and crossed the threshold into stardom and political advocacy, ultimately discovering her truest self and, with it, a deeper sense of belonging.
Ěý
Throughout this profoundly moving and beautifully written memoir, Washington attempts to answer the questions so many have struggled Who am I? What is my truest and most authentic self? How do I find a deeper sense of connection and belonging? With grace and honesty, she inspires readers to search for—and find—themselves.]]> 320 Kerry Washington 0316497398 Caim 0 to-read 3.85 2023
author: Kerry Washington
name: Caim
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58303 261 Lois-Ann Yamanaka 0380731398 Caim 0 to-read 3.89 1997
author: Lois-Ann Yamanaka
name: Caim
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/02
shelves: to-read
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]]> 194477900

New York, 1924. Born to English immigrants who’ve built a comfortable life, idealistic Alice Jones longs for the kind of true love her mother and father have. She believes she’s found it with Leonard “Kip� Rhinelander, the shy heir to his prominent white family’s real estate fortune. Alice too, is “white�, though she is vaguely aware of rumors that question her ancestry—gossip her parents dismiss. But when the lovers secretly wed, Kip’s parents threaten his inheritance unless he annuls the marriage.
Ěý
Devastated but determined, Alice faces overwhelming odds both legally and in the merciless court of public opinion. But there is one person who can either help her—or shatter her hopes for Reporter Marvel Cunningham. The proud daughter of an accomplished Black family, Marvel lives to chronicle social change and the Harlem Renaissance’s fiery creativity.
Ěý
At first, Marvel sees Alice’s case as a tabloid sensation generated by a self-hating woman who failed to “pass.� But the deeper she investigates, the more she will recognize just how much she and Alice have in common. For Rhinelander vs. Rhinelander will bring to light stunning truths that will force both women to confront who they are, and who they can be, in a world that is all too quick to judge.]]> 336 Denny S. Bryce 1496737873 Caim 0 to-read 3.75 2024
author: Denny S. Bryce
name: Caim
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 96177629
Now he is. . .

Without a home

Waiting for his stand-up career to take off

Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn't looking

Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of his ruined relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. But Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend's side of the story�

In this sharply funny and exquisitely relatable story of romantic disaster and friendship, Dolly Alderton offers up a love story with two endings, demonstrating once again why she is one of the most exciting writers today, and the true voice of a generation.]]> 345 Dolly Alderton 0241523672 Caim 0 to-read 3.85 2023
author: Dolly Alderton
name: Caim
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 52268640
Summer 1995: Ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father’s explosive temper and seek refuge at her mother’s ancestral home in Memphis. This is not the first time violence has altered the course of the family’s trajectory. Half a century earlier, Joan’s grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglass—only to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city. Joan tries to settle into her new life, but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected.

As she grows up, Joan finds relief in her artwork, painting portraits of the community in Memphis. One of her subjects is their enigmatic neighbor Miss Dawn, who claims to know something about curses, and whose stories about the past help Joan see how her passion, imagination, and relentless hope are, in fact, the continuation of a long matrilineal tradition. Joan begins to understand that her mother, her mother’s mother, and the mothers before them persevered, made impossible choices, and put their dreams on hold so that her life would not have to be defined by loss and anger—that the sole instrument she needs for healing is her paintbrush.

Unfolding over seventy years through a chorus of unforgettable voices that move back and forth in time, Memphis paints an indelible portrait of inheritance, celebrating the full complexity of what we pass down, in a family and as a country: brutality and justice, faith and forgiveness, sacrifice and love.]]> 272 Tara M. Stringfellow 0593230485 Caim 0 to-read 4.05 2022
author: Tara M. Stringfellow
name: Caim
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/01
shelves: to-read
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]]> 75593884
When Remy Wadia left India for the United States, he carried his resentment of his cold and inscrutable mother with him and has kept his distance from her. Years later, he returns to Bombay, planning to adopt a baby from a young pregnant girl—and to see his elderly mother again before it is too late. She is in the hospital, has stopped talking, and seems to have given up on life.

Struck with guilt for not realizing just how ill she had become, Remy devotes himself to helping her recover and return home. But one day in her apartment he comes upon an old photograph that demands explanation. As shocking family secrets surface, Remy finds himself reevaluating his entire childhood and his relationship to his parents, just as he is on the cusp of becoming a parent himself. Can Remy learn to forgive others for their human frailties, or is he too wedded to his sorrow and anger over his parents� long-ago decisions?

Surprising, devastating, and ultimately a story of redemption and healing still possible between a mother and son,Ěý The Museum of Failures is a tour de force from one of our most elegant storytellers about the mixed bag of love and regret. It is also, above all, a much-needed reminder that forgiveness comes from empathy for others.]]> 358 Thrity Umrigar 164375355X Caim 0 to-read 4.04 2023
author: Thrity Umrigar
name: Caim
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 38330854 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 9780143132172.

When Myriam, a French-Moroccan lawyer, decides to return to work after having children, she and her husband look for the perfect nanny for their two young children. They never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite, devoted woman who sings to the children, cleans the family's chic apartment in Paris's upscale tenth arrondissement, stays late without complaint, and hosts enviable kiddie parties. But as the couple and the nanny become more dependent on one another, jealousy, resentment, and suspicions mount, shattering the idyllic tableau.]]> 228 LeĂŻla Slimani Caim 2 3.24 2016
author: LeĂŻla Slimani
name: Caim
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/24
date added: 2024/09/25
shelves:
review:

]]> 57905388 So. Where were we?

Right, you and I left off in October 2017, when my first book came out. The weeks before were filled with dreams of loss. Pets dying. My husband leaving me. Babies not being born. My therapist told me it was my soul preparing for my true self to emerge after letting go of my grief. I had finally spoken openly about my fertility journey. I was having second thoughts—in fact, so many thoughts they were organizing to go on strike. But I knew I had to be honest because I didn’t want other women going through IVF to feel as alone as I did. I had suffered in isolation, having so many miscarriages that I could not give an exact number. Strangers shared their own journeys and heartbreak with me. I had led with the truth, and it opened the door to compassion.

When I released We’re Going to Need More Wine, the response was so great people asked when I would do a sequel. The New York Times even ran a headline reading “We’re Going to Need More Gabrielle Union.� Frankly, after being so open and honest in my writing, I wasn’t sure there was more of me I was ready to share. But life happens with all its plot twists. And new stories demand to be told. This time, I need to be more vulnerable—not so much for me, but anyone who feels alone in what they’re going through.

A lot has changed in four years—I became a mom and I’m raising two amazing girls. My husband retired. My career has expanded so that I have the opportunity to lift up other voices that need to be heard. But the world has also shown us that we have a lot we still have to fight for—as women, as black women, as mothers, as aging women, as human beings, as friends. In You Got Anything Stronger?, I show you how this ever-changing life presents challenges, even as it gives me moments of pure joy. I take you on a girl’s night at Chateau Marmont, and I also talk to Isis, my character from Bring It On. For the first time, I truly open up about my surrogacy journey and the birth of Kaavia James Union Wade. And I take on racist institutions and practices in the entertainment industry, asking for equality and real accountability.

You Got Anything Stronger? is me at my most vulnerable. I have recently found true strength in that vulnerability, and I want to share that power with you here, through this book.]]> 242 Gabrielle Union 0062979930 Caim 3 4.11 2021
author: Gabrielle Union
name: Caim
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/25
date added: 2024/09/25
shelves:
review:

]]> 200627028 335 Rebecca Serle Caim 4
]]> 3.70 2024
author: Rebecca Serle
name: Caim
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/22
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves:
review:
For once, I visited the library, browsed the shelves & picked up a book at random without reading any reviews!


]]> 452306
But Tibby says they’re great. She'd love to have them. Lena and Bridget also think they’re fabulous. Lena decides that they should all try them on. Whoever they fit best will get them.

Nobody knows why, but the pants fit everyone perfectly. Even Carmen (who never thinks she looks good in anything) thinks she looks good in the pants. Over a few bags of cheese puffs, they decide to form a sisterhood and take the vow of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants . . . the next morning, they say good-bye.

And then the journey of the pants � and the most memorable summer of their lives � begins.]]> 294 Ann Brashares 0385729332 Caim 2
The challenging lessons they learned throughout the summer was enough for even adults to be overwhelmed by: death, disappointing/strained family and romantic relationships, misfits, etc.

It was a funny coincidence for UVA & lots of familiar DC streets to come about. I guess that makes sense since the author went to Sidwell. ]]> 3.85 2001
author: Ann Brashares
name: Caim
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2001
rating: 2
read at: 2024/09/19
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves:
review:
The idea of “magical pants� gifting a group of 4 best friends with the comfort (& confidence) to make impactful decisions throughout their first summer apart was cute in theory, but not fleshed out enough for me. I doubted the reality of minors being able to 1) book flights and travel alone on a whim across state lines, 2) move about as freely as they did…I wanted to learn more about the parents than the kids, tbh. Or even Bailey who seemed more mature than the group of friends � I suppose a terminal illness might do that.

The challenging lessons they learned throughout the summer was enough for even adults to be overwhelmed by: death, disappointing/strained family and romantic relationships, misfits, etc.

It was a funny coincidence for UVA & lots of familiar DC streets to come about. I guess that makes sense since the author went to Sidwell.
]]> 38746485
In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it—in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations—and whose story inspires us to do the same.]]> 426 Michelle Obama 1524763136 Caim 5 4.42 2018
author: Michelle Obama
name: Caim
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves:
review:

]]> 58438593
But then Jess hears about GeneticAlly, a buzzy new DNA-based matchmaking company that’s predicted to change dating forever. Finding a soulmate through DNA? The reliability of numbers: This Jess understands.

At least she thought she did, until her test shows an unheard-of 98 percent compatibility with another subject in the database: GeneticAlly’s founder, Dr. River Peña. This is one number she can’t wrap her head around, because she already knows Dr. Peña. The stuck-up, stubborn man is without a doubt not her soulmate. But GeneticAlly has a proposition: Get to know him and we’ll pay you. Jess—who is barely making ends meet—is in no position to turn it down, despite her skepticism about the project and her dislike for River. As the pair are dragged from one event to the next as the “Diamond� pairing that could launch GeneticAlly’s valuation sky-high, Jess begins to realize that there might be more to the scientist—and the science behind a soulmate—than she thought.

The Soulmate Equation proves that the delicate balance between fate and choice can never be calculated.]]> 360 Christina Lauren 1982171111 Caim 0 to-read 3.96 2021
author: Christina Lauren
name: Caim
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 195095780
In this ingenious, sweeping novel, Phillip B. Williams introduces us to an enigmatic woman named Saint, a fearsome conjuror who, in the 1830s, annihilates plantations all over Arkansas to rescue the people enslaved there. She brings those she has freed to a haven of her own a town just north of St. Louis, magically concealed from outsiders, named Ours.

It is in this miraculous place that Saint’s grand experiment—a truly secluded community where her people may flourish—takes root. But although Saint does her best to protect the inhabitants of Ours, over time, her conjuring and memories begin to betray her, leaving the town vulnerable to intrusions by newcomers with powers of their own. As the cracks in Saint’s creation are exposed, some begin to wonder whether the community’s safety might be yet another form of bondage.

Set over the course of four decades and steeped in a rich tradition of American literature informed by Black surrealism, mythology, and spirituality, Ours is a stunning exploration of the possibilities and limitations of love and freedom by a writer of capacious vision and talent.]]> 592 Phillip B. Williams 059365482X Caim 0 to-read 3.80 2024
author: Phillip B. Williams
name: Caim
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]>