Chi's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 25 Apr 2025 06:53:09 -0700 60 Chi's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]>
336 Miranda July 0593190262 Chi 0 3.52 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Chi
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/25
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<![CDATA[One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter]]> 30658435 A collection of essays about growing up the daughter of Indian immigrants in Canada, "a land of ice and casual racism," by the cultural observer, Scaachi Koul.

In One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Scaachi deploys her razor-sharp humour to share her fears, outrages and mortifying experiences as an outsider growing up in Canada. Her subjects range from shaving her knuckles in grade school, to a shopping trip gone horribly awry, to dealing with internet trolls, to feeling out of place at an Indian wedding (as an Indian woman), to parsing the trajectory of fears and anxieties that pressed upon her immigrant parents and bled down a generation. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of colour, where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision or outright scorn. Where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, forcing her to confront questions about gender dynamics, racial tensions, ethnic stereotypes and her father's creeping mortality--all as she tries to find her feet in the world.]]>
241 Scaachi Koul 0385685351 Chi 0 to-read 3.72 2017 One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
author: Scaachi Koul
name: Chi
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[T-Shirt Swim Club: Stories from Being Fat in a World of Thin People]]> 199273494
Ian Karmel's weighed eight pounds and he’s weighed 420 pounds and right now he’s almost exactly in between the two, but this book is not a weight loss book. It’s about being a fat person in a skinny world. It’s about gym class and football practice; about chicken wings and juice cleanses; about airplane seats and rollercoasters, about fat jokes and Jabba the Hutt; about crying in the Big and Tall section and the joys of being a sneakerhead; about pre-diabetes and gout; and about realizing that you actually don’t want eat yourself to death and hoping it’s not too late.

This book also includes a "What Now?" section from Ian's sister Alisa, who herself cycled through so many fad diets that she eventually pursued a master’s in nutrition and a doctorate of psychology, with the goal of changing the contemporary narrative around fatness, so it’s helpful too.

Ian and Alisa Karmel grew up fat. As kids, they never talked about it. They were too busy fighting over the last Snackwell Devil’s Food cookie. Now, decades later, having both turned into fat adults who eventually figured out how to get their health under control, they are finally ready to unpack the impact their weight has had on them.

For Ian the T-Shirt Swim Club is meant to be a place of support for anyone who struggles with weight issues. A place of care and candor, free of shame. A place to not deny or avoid the emotions you feel, the experiences you go through, the embarrassment, the anger, the resentment. The T-Shirt Swim Club is about being a fat person and how the world treats fat people—but also an acknowledgement that maybe it doesn’t always have to feel quite so lonely.]]>
304 Ian Karmel 0593580923 Chi 3 3.96 T-Shirt Swim Club: Stories from Being Fat in a World of Thin People
author: Ian Karmel
name: Chi
average rating: 3.96
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rating: 3
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Ambition Monster: A Memoir 199898067 A deeply personal memoir about workaholism, the addictive nature of ambition, and the humbling process of picking yourself up when the world lets you down—an anti-girlboss tale for our times for readers of A Love Story and Uncanny Valley.After years of relentlessly racing up the professional ladder, Jennifer Romolini reached the kind of success many a high-profile, C-suite dream job, a book well-received enough that reporters wanted to know the secrets to her success, and a gig traveling around the country giving speeches on “making it.� She had a handsome and clever husband, a precocious child, and a home in a desirable Los Angeles neighborhood. But beneath this shiny surface, Romolini was falling apart. Written with self-deprecation and wit, Ambition Monster is a gutsy and powerful look at workaholism and the addictive nature of achievement, the lingering effect of childhood trauma, and the failures of our modern rat race. This is a Cinderella story of success and a brutal appraisal of the cost of capitalism—perfect for people pleasers, overachievers, and those whose traumas have driven them to strike for “goodness,� no matter the cost. With its timely and resonant deconstructing of the American Dream, Ambition Monster is a singular excavation of selfhood, an essential interrogation about the way we work, and an inspiring and affirming call to always bet on yourself.]]> 303 Jennifer Romolini 1668056607 Chi 4 3.96 2024 Ambition Monster: A Memoir
author: Jennifer Romolini
name: Chi
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/04/07
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Grief Is for People 127282631 Following the death of her closest friend, Sloane Crosley explores multiple kinds of loss in this disarmingly witty and poignant memoir.

Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and surprisingly suspenseful portrait of friendship and a book about loss packed with verve for life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in friends, philosophy, and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.]]>
208 Sloane Crosley 0374609845 Chi 5 3.84 2024 Grief Is for People
author: Sloane Crosley
name: Chi
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/07
date added: 2025/04/07
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<![CDATA[Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask: Young Readers Edition]]> 54503784 Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask (Young Readers Edition) does exactly what its title says for young readers, in a style consistently thoughtful, personal, and engaging.

Updated and expanded to include:

� Dozens of New Questions and New Sections—including a social activism section that explores the Dakota Access Pipeline, racism, identity, politics, and more!
� Over 50 new Photos
� Adapted text for broad appeal]]>
383 Anton Treuer 1646140451 Chi 5 4.40 2021 Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask: Young Readers Edition
author: Anton Treuer
name: Chi
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/20
date added: 2025/04/07
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<![CDATA[Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia]]> 127489378 The definitive takedown of fatphobia, drawing on personal experience as well as rigorous research to expose how size discrimination harms everyone, and how to combat it—from the acclaimed author of Down Girl and Entitled

“An elegant, fierce, and profound argument for fighting fat oppression in ourselves, our communities, and our culture.”—Roxane Gay, author of Hunger

For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. She can tell you what she weighed on any significant her wedding day, the day she became a professor, the day her daughter was born. She’s been bullied and belittled for her size, leading to extreme dieting. As a feminist philosopher, she wanted to believe that she was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger. But she was not.

Blending intimate stories with the trenchant analysis that has become her signature, Manne shows why fatphobia has become a vital social justice issue. Over the last several decades, implicit bias has waned in every category, from race to sexual orientation, except body size. Manne examines how anti-fatness operates—how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person’s attractiveness, fortitude, and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression. Fatphobia is responsible for wage gaps, medical neglect, and poor educational outcomes; it is a straitjacket, restricting our freedom, our movement, our potential.

In this urgent call to action, Manne proposes a new politics of “body reflexivity”—a radical reevaluation of who our bodies exist in the world ourselves and no one else. When it comes to fatphobia, the solution is not to love our bodies more. Instead, we must dismantle the forces that control and constrain us, and remake the world to accommodate people of every size.]]>
297 Kate Manne 0593593847 Chi 4 4.18 2024 Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia
author: Kate Manne
name: Chi
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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Small Things Like These 58662236
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]>
128 Claire Keegan 0802158749 Chi 5 to-read 4.13 2021 Small Things Like These
author: Claire Keegan
name: Chi
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/05
date added: 2025/04/07
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<![CDATA[Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction]]> 215179636 Thyme Travellerscollects fourteen of the Palestinian diaspora’s best voices in speculative fiction. Speculative fiction as a genre invites a reconfiguring of reality, and here each story is a portal into realms of history, folklore and futures.


A man stands on the shore waiting to commune with those who live in the ocean. Pilgrims stretch into the distance, passing a stone cairn with a mysterious light streaming from it. Two Australian women fervently dig a tunnel to Jerusalem. Men from Gaza swim in the sea until they drown, still unconcerned. A father and son struggle to connect over the AI scripts prompting their conversation.


Building on the work of trailblazing anthologies such asReworlding RamallahԻPalestine +100, this volume is the first of its kind in Canada. Editor Sonia Sulaiman brings together stories by speculative fiction veterans and emerging writers from Australia to Egypt, Lebanon to Canada.ձ>
170 Sonia Sulaiman 1773637045 Chi 5 4.12 Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction
author: Sonia Sulaiman
name: Chi
average rating: 4.12
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rating: 5
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<![CDATA[Washing My Mother's Body: A Ceremony for Grief]]> 215805839 A beautifully illustrated edition of Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s poem “Washing My Mother’s Body,� which offers a way through grief when the loss appears unbearable.

As I wash my mother’s face, I tell her
how beautiful she is, how brave, how her beauty and bravery
live on in her grandchildren. Her face is relaxed, peaceful.
Her earth memory body has not left yet,
but when I see her the next day, embalmed and in the casket
in the funeral home, it will be gone.
Where does it go?

Through lyrical prose and evocative watercolor illustrations by award-winning Muscogee artist Dana Tiger, Washing My Mother’s Body explores the complexity of a daughter’s grief as she reflects on the joys and sorrows of her mother’s life. She lays her mother to rest in the landscape of her memory, honoring the hands that raised her, the body that protected her, and the legs that carried her mother through adversity.

Moving, comforting, and deeply emotional, Washing My Mother’s Body is a tender look at mother-daughter relationships, the complexity of grieving the loss of a parent, and the enduring love of those left behind.]]>
80 Joy Harjo 1984861360 Chi 0 to-read 4.59 Washing My Mother's Body: A Ceremony for Grief
author: Joy Harjo
name: Chi
average rating: 4.59
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<![CDATA[More, Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for "Enough"]]> 179311300 208 Emma Specter 0063278375 Chi 0 3.47 2024 More, Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for "Enough"
author: Emma Specter
name: Chi
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/12
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<![CDATA[The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption]]> 60835840 Part memoir, part speculative fiction, The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be explores the often surreal experience of growing up as a mixed-Black transracial adoptee.

Dream Country author Shannon Gibney returns with The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be, a book woven from her true story of growing up as a mixed-Black transracial adoptee and fictional story of Erin Powers, the name Shannon was given at birth, a child raised by a white, closeted lesbian.

At its core, the novel is a tale of two girls on two different timelines occasionally bridged by a mysterious portal and their shared search for a complete picture of their origins. Gibney surrounds that story with reproductions of her own adoption documents, letters, family photographs, interviews, medical records, and brief essays on the surreal absurdities of the adoptee experience.

The end result is a remarkable portrait of an American experience rarely depicted in any form.]]>
256 Shannon Gibney 0593111990 Chi 0 3.86 2023 The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption
author: Shannon Gibney
name: Chi
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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Darling Girls 127280429 SISTERS, SECRETS, LOVE, AND MURDER... Sally Hepworth’s new novel has it all.

For as long as they can remember, Jessica, Norah, and Alicia have been told how lucky they are. As young girls they were rescued from family tragedies and raised by a loving foster mother, Miss Fairchild, on an idyllic farming estate and given an elusive second chance at a happy family life.

But their childhood wasn’t the fairy tale everyone thinks it was. Miss Fairchild had rules. Miss Fairchild could be unpredictable. And Miss Fairchild was never, ever to be crossed. In a moment of desperation, the three broke away from Miss Fairchild and thought they were free. Even though they never saw her again, she was always somewhere in the shadows of their minds. When a body is discovered under the home they grew up in, the foster sisters find themselves thrust into the spotlight as key witnesses. Or are they prime suspects?

A thrilling page-turner of sisterhood, secrets, love, and murder by New York Times bestselling author Sally Hepworth.]]>
359 Sally Hepworth 125028452X Chi 0 3.98 2024 Darling Girls
author: Sally Hepworth
name: Chi
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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The Silent Patient 40097951
Alicia’s refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety. The price of her art skyrockets, and she, the silent patient, is hidden away from the tabloids and spotlight at the Grove, a secure forensic unit in North London.

Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who has waited a long time for the opportunity to work with Alicia. His determination to get her to talk and unravel the mystery of why she shot her husband takes him down a twisting path into his own motivations—a search for the truth that threatens to consume him....

The Silent Patient is a shocking psychological thriller of a woman’s act of violence against her husband—and of the therapist obsessed with uncovering her motive.]]>
336 Alex Michaelides 1250301696 Chi 0 4.17 2019 The Silent Patient
author: Alex Michaelides
name: Chi
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/07
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(S)Kin 199635094
Fifteen-year-old Marisol is the daughter of a soucouyant. Every new moon, she sheds her skin like the many women before her, shifting into a fireball witch who must fly into the night and slowly sip from the lives of others to sustain her own. But Brooklyn is no place for fireball witches with all its bright lights, shut windows, and bolt-locked doors.� While Marisol hoped they would leave their old traditions behind when they emigrated from the islands, she knows this will never happen while she remains ensnared by the one person who keeps her chained to her magical past—her mother.

Seventeen-year-old Genevieve is the daughter of a college professor and a newly minted older half sister of twins. Her worsening skin condition and the babies� constant wailing keep her up at night, when she stares at the dark sky with a deep longing to inhale it all. She hopes to quench the hunger that gnaws at her, one that seems to reach for some memory of her estranged mother. When a new nanny arrives to help with the twins, a family secret connecting her to Marisol is revealed, and Gen begins to find answers to questions she hasn’t even thought to ask.

But the girls soon discover that the very skin keeping their flames locked beneath the surface may be more explosive to the relationships around them than any ancient magic.]]>
400 Ibi Zoboi 0062888870 Chi 0 to-read 3.99 2025 (S)Kin
author: Ibi Zoboi
name: Chi
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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Everyone Is Watching 127975602
Five contestants have been chosen to compete for ten million dollars on the game show One Lucky Winner. The catch? None of them knows what (or who) to expect, and it will be live streamed all over the world. Completely secluded in an estate in Northern California, with strict instructions not to leave the property and zero contact with the outside world, the competitors start to feel a little too isolated.

When long-kept secrets begin to rise to the surface, the contestants realize this is no longer just a reality show—someone is out for blood. And the game can’t end until the world knows who the contestants really are…]]>
320 Heather Gudenkauf 0778310795 Chi 0 3.61 2024 Everyone Is Watching
author: Heather Gudenkauf
name: Chi
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/03
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<![CDATA[You Get What You Pay For: Essays]]> 157056100
Dubbed a voice of her generation, poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood in therapy, trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation she feels in nearly every aspect of life,from her lifelong singleness to her battle with depression. She traces this loneliness to an inability to feel truly safe with others and a historic hyper-awareness stemming from the effects of slavery.

In this collection of essays as intimate as being in the room with Morgan and her therapist, Morgan examines America's cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages, through such topics as the ubiquity of a beauty culture that excludes Black women, the implications of Bill Cosby's fall from grace in a culture predicated on acceptance through respectability, and the pitfalls of visibility as seen through the mischaracterizations of Serena Williams as alternately iconic and too ambitious.

With piercing wit and incisive observations, You Get What You Pay For is ultimately a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness and its effects on mental well-being in America today. Weaving unflinching criticism with intimate anecdotes, this devastating memoir-in-essays paints a portrait of one Black woman's psyche—and of the writer's search to both tell the truth and deconstruct it.]]>
214 Morgan Parker 052551144X Chi 5 4.17 2024 You Get What You Pay For: Essays
author: Morgan Parker
name: Chi
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/22
date added: 2025/03/01
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<![CDATA[Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia]]> 42129163
The work is divided into three sections. The two chapters in the first part consider how Renaissance white women and women of color were depicted as plump and feminine, separated by class, yet belonging to the same gender. The second part of the work charts the rise of modern racial ideologies that yoked feminine beauty to Protestant, Anglo-Saxon whiteness. Later chapters and the epilogue consider how Americans normalized the "scientific management" of white women's bodies for the purpose of racial uplift, a project that continued to situate black women as the embodied Other.

The author does not address fat from the angle of health or previous attitudes white Europeans held towards corpulence.]]>
296 Sabrina Strings 1479886750 Chi 5 4.25 2019 Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
author: Sabrina Strings
name: Chi
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/01
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<![CDATA[Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm]]> 165940214 A personal and cultural look at the dark underbelly of Western beauty standards and the lethal culture of disordered eating they've wreaked

In Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein tells the story of her own disordered eating alongside, and through, other women from history, pop culture and the girls she's known and loved. Tracing the medical and cultural history of anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and orthorexia, Clein investigates the economic conditions underpinning our eating disorder epidemic, and illuminates the ways racism and today's feminism have been complicit in propping up the thin ideal. While examining Goop, Simone Weil, pro-anorexia blogs, and the flawed logic of our current treatment methods, Clein grapples with the myriad ways disordered eating has affected her own friendships and romantic relationships.

Dead Weight makes the case that we are faced with a culture of suppression and denial that is insidious, pervasive, and dangerous, one that internalizes and promotes the fetish of self-shrinking as a core tenet of the American cult of femininity. This is replicated in our algorithms, our television shows, our novels, and our relationships with one another. Dead Weight is a sharp, perceptive, and revelatory polemic for readers fascinated by the external forces shaping their lives.]]>
288 Emmeline Clein 0593536908 Chi 5 3.86 2024 Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm
author: Emmeline Clein
name: Chi
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/15
date added: 2025/02/18
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<![CDATA[Don't Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body]]> 55711615
Savala Nolan knows what it means to live in the in-between. Descended from a Black and Mexican father and a white mother, Nolan’s mixed-race identity is obvious, for better and worse. At her mother’s encouragement, she began her first diet at the age of three and has been both fat and painfully thin throughout her life. She has experienced both the discomfort of generational poverty and the ease of wealth and privilege.

It is these liminal spaces—of race, class, and body type—that the essays in Don’t Let It Get You Down excavate, presenting a clear and nuanced understanding of our society’s most intractable points of tension. The twelve essays that comprise this collection are rich with unforgettable anecdotes and are as humorous and as full of Nolan’s appetites as they are of anxieties. The result is lyrical and magnetic.

In “On Dating White Guys While Me,� Nolan realizes her early romantic pursuits of rich, preppy white guys weren’t about preference, but about self-erasure. In the titular essay “Don’t Let it Get You Down,� we traverse the cyclical richness and sorrow of being Black in America as Black children face police brutality, “large Black females� encounter unique stigma, and Black men carry the weight of other people’s fear. In “Bad Education,� we see how women learn to internalize rage and accept violence in order to participate in our culture. And in “To Wit and Also� we meet Filliss, Grace, and Peggy, the enslaved women owned by Nolan’s white ancestors, reckoning with the knowledge that America’s original sin lives intimately within our present stories. Over and over again, Nolan reminds us that our true identities are often most authentically lived not in the black and white, but in the grey of the in-between.

Perfect for fans of Heavy by Kiese Laymon and Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, Don’t Let It Get You Down delivers an essential perspective on race, class, bodies, and gender in America today.]]>
208 Savala Nolan 1982137266 Chi 0 4.21 2021 Don't Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body
author: Savala Nolan
name: Chi
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/18
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<![CDATA[The Loneliness Files: A Memoir in Essays]]> 96178188
What does it mean to be a body behind a screen, lost in the hustle of an online world? In our age of digital hyper-connection, Athena Dixon invites us to consider this question with depth, heart, and ferocity, investigating the gaps that technology cannot fill and confronting a lifetime of loneliness.

Living alone as a middle-aged woman without children or pets and working forty hours a week from home, more than three hundred and fifty miles from her family and friends, Dixon begins watching mystery videos on YouTube, listening to true crime podcasts, and playing video game walk-throughs just to hear another human voice. She discovers the story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a woman who died alone, her body remaining in front of a glowing television set for three years before the world finally noticed. Searching for connection, Dixon plumbs the depths of communal loneliness, asking essential questions of herself and all of us: How had her past decisions left her so alone? Are we, as humans, linked by a shared loneliness? How do we see the world and our place in it? And finally, how do we find our way back to each other?

Searing and searching, The Loneliness Files is a groundbreaking memoir in essays that ultimately brings us together in its piercing, revelatory examination of how and why it is that we break apart.]]>
192 Athena Dixon 1959030124 Chi 0 3.54 2023 The Loneliness Files: A Memoir in Essays
author: Athena Dixon
name: Chi
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/11
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<![CDATA[The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church]]> 126918658 The first definitive book that names the massive social movement of people leaving the white evangelical church—the exvangelicals

Growing up in a deeply evangelical family in the Midwest in the �80s and �90s, Sarah McCammon was strictly taught to fear God, obey him, and not question the faith. Persistently worried that her gay grandfather would go to hell unless she could reach him, or that her Muslim friend would need to be converted, and that she, too, would go to hell if she did not believe fervently enough, McCammon was a rule-follower and--most of the time--a true believer. But through it all, she was increasingly plagued by fears and deep questions as the belief system she'd been carefully taught clashed with her expanding understanding of the outside world.

After spending her early adult life striving to make sense of an unraveling worldview, by her 30s, she found herself face-to-face with it once again as she covered the Trump campaign for NPR, where she witnessed first-hand the power and influence that evangelical Christian beliefs held on the political right. McCammon also came to discover that she is among a rising generation of the children of evangelicalism who are growing up and fleeing the fold, who are thinking for themselves and deconstructing what feel like the “alternative facts� of their childhood.

Rigorously reported and deeply personal, The Exvangelicals is the story of the people who make up this generational tipping point, including McCammon herself. Part memoir, part investigative journalism, this is the first definitive book that names and describes the post-evangelical movement--identifying its origins, telling the stories of its members, and examining its vast cultural, social, and political impact.]]>
310 Sarah McCammon 1250284481 Chi 0 4.20 2024 The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church
author: Sarah McCammon
name: Chi
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[“You Just Need to Lose Weight�: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People]]> 60808740 The co-host of the Maintenance Phase podcast and creator of Your Fat Friend equips you with the facts to debunk common anti-fat myths and with tools to take action for fat justice

The pushback that shows up in conversations about fat justice takes exceedingly predicable form. Losing weight is easy—calories in, calories out. Fat people are unhealthy. We’re in the midst of an obesity epidemic. Fat acceptance “glorifies obesity.� The BMI is an objective measure of size and health. Yet, these myths are as readily debunked as they are pervasive.

In “You Just Need to Lose Weight,� Aubrey Gordon equips readers with the facts and figures to reframe myths about fatness in order to dismantle the anti-fat bias ingrained in how we think about and treat fat people. Bringing her dozen years of community organizing and training to bear, Gordon shares the rhetorical approaches she and other organizers employ to not only counter these pernicious myths, but to dismantle the anti-fat bias that so often underpin them.

As conversations about fat acceptance and fat justice continue to grow, “You Just Need to Lose Weight� will be essential to ensure that those conversations are informed, effective, and grounded in both research and history.

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205 Aubrey Gordon 0807006475 Chi 0 4.34 2023 “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People
author: Aubrey Gordon
name: Chi
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/08
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The Unboxing of a Black Girl 195861999
Finalist, 2025 YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults Award

The Children's Book Review,Best Kids Nonfiction Books of 2024

The Chicago Public Library's Best Books of 2024, Teens Nonfiction

School Library Journal (SLJ), Best Poetry Books of 2024

"Shanté adeptly addresses racism, implicit bias, gender, sexuality, sexual violence, and mental health, encouraging readers to care for themselves, think, research, and act. VERDICT Strongly recommended for all young adult collections."
--SLJ, starred review

"[A]n intoxicating and lyrical celebration of the complexities of being a young Black woman in America."
--National Book Foundation

"By weaving her personal experiences with reflections and observations, the author provides a rich tapestry of perspectives on Black girlhood. [...] A highly creative way of providing insightful social commentary."
--Kirkus Reviews

Written as a collection of vignettes and poetry, The Unboxing of a Black Girl is a creative nonfiction reflection on Black girlhood. The debut YA title, by award-winning author Angela Shanté, is a love letter to Black girls set in New York City and serves as a personal and political critique of how the world raises Black girls.

As Shanté navigates the city through memory, she balances poetry with vignettes that explore the innocence and joy of childhood eroded by adultification. Through this book, she illuminates the places where Black girls are nurtured or exploited in stories and poems about personal and political boxes, love, loss, and sexual assault. Many entries are also studded with cultural footnotes designed to further understanding.]]>
160 Angela Shanté Chi 0 to-read 4.35 2024 The Unboxing of a Black Girl
author: Angela Shanté
name: Chi
average rating: 4.35
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Ghostroots: Stories 200196202 A debut collection of stories set in a hauntingly reimagined Lagos where characters vie for freedom from ancestral ties.

’Pemi Aguda opens her collection of twelve stories with the chilling tale of a woman who uncannily resembles her sinister, deceased grandmother. When the woman shows a capacity for deadly violence, she wonders—can evil be genetic, passed from generation to generation?

Set in Lagos, Nigeria, Aguda’s stories unfold against a spectral cityscape where the everyday business of living—the birth of a baby, a market visit, a conversation between mothers and daughters—is charged with an air of supernatural menace. In “Breastmilk� a new mother’s inability to lactate takes on preternatural overtones. In �24, Alhaji Williams Street� a mysterious disease wreaks havoc with frightening precision. In “The Hollow,� an architect stumbles on a vengeful house.

Evocative, strange, and yet familiar, “the speculative conceits of these stories are elegantly balanced with the gorgeous fullness of human emotion, all the hunger and longing and fear and delight of being a human in the world� (Lauren Groff).]]>
224 Pemi Aguda 1324065850 Chi 0 to-read 4.05 2024 Ghostroots: Stories
author: Pemi Aguda
name: Chi
average rating: 4.05
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<![CDATA[Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl]]> 199897827
A daughter of Korean immigrants, Hyeseung Song spends her earliest years in the cane fields of Texas where her loyalties are divided between a restless father in search of Big Money, and a beautiful yet domineering mother whose resentments about her own life compromises her relationship with her daughter. With her parents at constant odds, Song learns more words in Korean for hatred than for love. When the family’s fake Gucci business lands them in bankruptcy, Song moves to a new elementary school. On her first day, a girl asks the teacher: “Can she speak English?�

Neither rich nor white, Song does what is necessary to be visible: she internalizes the model minority myth as well as her beloved mother’s dreams to see her on a secure path. Song meets these expectations by attending the best Ivy League universities in the country. But when she wavers, in search of an artistic life on her own terms, her mother warns, “Happiness is what unexceptional people tell themselves when they don’t have the talent and drive to go after real success.� Years of self-erasure take a toll and Song experiences recurring episodes of depression and mania. A thought repeats: I want to die. I want to die. Song enters a psychiatric hospital where she meets patients with similar struggles. So begins her sweeping journey to heal herself by losing everything.

Unflinching and lyrical, Docile is one woman’s story of subverting the model minority myth, contending with mental illness, and finding her self-worth by looking within.]]>
300 Hyeseung Song Chi 0 to-read 4.01 2024 Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl
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name: Chi
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<![CDATA[Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture]]> 134119018 A history and investigation of a world ruled by algorithms, which determine the shape of culture itself.

From trendy restaurants to city grids, to TikTok and Netflix feeds the world round, algorithmic recommendations dictate our experiences and choices. The algorithm is present in the familiar neon signs and exposed brick of Internet cafes, be it in Nairobi or Portland, and the skeletal, modern furniture of Airbnbs in cities big and small. Over the last decade, this network of mathematically determined decisions has taken over, almost unnoticed—informing the songs we listen to, the friends with whom we stay in touch—as we’ve grown increasingly accustomed to our insipid new normal.

This ever-tightening web woven by algorithms is called “Filterworld.� Kyle Chayka shows us how online and offline spaces alike have been engineered for seamless consumption, becoming a source of pervasive anxiety in the process. Users of technology have been forced to contend with data-driven equations that try to anticipate their desires—and often get them wrong. What results is a state of docility that allows tech companies to curtail human experiences—human lives—for profit. But to have our tastes, behaviors, and emotions governed by computers, while convenient, does nothing short of call the very notion of free will into question.

In Filterworld, Chayka traces this creeping, machine-guided curation as it infiltrates the furthest reaches of our digital, physical, and psychological spaces. With algorithms increasingly influencing not just what culture we consume, but what culture is produced, urgent questions What happens when shareability supersedes messiness, innovation, and creativity—the qualities that make us human? What does it mean to make a choice when the options have been so carefully arranged for us? Is personal freedom possible on the Internet?

To the last question, Filterworld argues yes—but to escape Filterworld, and even transcend it, we must first understand it.]]>
290 Kyle Chayka Chi 0 to-read 3.66 2024 Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
author: Kyle Chayka
name: Chi
average rating: 3.66
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<![CDATA[The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family]]> 194803883 The riveting story of five families shattered by pernicious, pervasive conspiracy theories, and how we might set ourselves free from a crisis that could haunt American life for generations.

“SHED MY DNA�: three excruciating words uttered by a QAnon-obsessed mother, once a highly respected lawyer, to her only son, once the closest person in her life. QAnon beliefs and adjacent conspiracy theories have had devastating political consequences as they’ve exploded in popularity. What’s often overlooked is the lasting havoc they wreak on our society at its most basic and intimate level—the family.

In The Quiet Damage, celebrated reporter Jesselyn Cook paints a harrowing portrait of the vulnerabilities that have left so many of us susceptible to outrageous falsehoods promising order, purpose, and control. Braided throughout are the stories of five American families: an elderly couple whose fifty-year romance takes a heartbreaking turn; millennial sisters of color who grew up in dire poverty—one to become a BLM activist, the other, a hardcore conspiracy theorist pulling her little boy down the rabbit hole with her; a Bay Area hippie-type and her business-executive fiancé, who must decide whether to stay with her as she turns into a stranger before his eyes; evangelical parents whose simple life in a sleepy suburb spirals into delusion-fueled chaos; and a rural mother-son duo who, after carrying each other through unspeakable tragedy, stop speaking at all as ludicrous untruths shatter a bond long thought unbreakable.

Charting the arc of each believer’s path from their first intersection with conspiracy theories to the depths of their cultish conviction, to—in some cases—their rejection of disinformation and the mending of fractured relationships, Cook offers a rare, intimate look into the psychology of how and why ordinary people come to believe the unbelievable. Profound, brilliantly researched, and beautifully written, The Quiet Damage lays bare how we have been taken hostage by grifters peddling lies built on false hope—and how we might release our loved ones, and ourselves, from their grasp.]]>
250 Jesselyn Cook 059344325X Chi 0 to-read 4.46 2024 The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family
author: Jesselyn Cook
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<![CDATA[Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative]]> 208580653 From the award-winning novelist of The Parisian and Enter Ghost comes an outstanding essay on the Palestinian struggle and the power of narrative.

Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University nine days before October 7th, 2023. The text of Hammad’s seminal speech and her afterword, written in the early weeks of 2024, together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what seems a turning point in the narrative of human history. Profound and moving, Hammad writes from within the moment, giving voice to the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Recognizing the Stranger is a brilliant melding of literary and cultural analysis by one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and a foremost writer of fiction in the world today.

"Extraordinary and amazingly erudite. Hammad shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing.� � Rashid Khalidi, author of the New York Times bestseller The Hundred Years� War on Palestine]]>
96 Isabella Hammad 0802163920 Chi 0 to-read 4.68 2024 Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative
author: Isabella Hammad
name: Chi
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<![CDATA[First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream]]> 203579146 An unflinching and intimate memoir of recovery by Jessica Hoppe, Latinx writer, advocate, and creator of @NuevaYorka.

In this deeply moving and lyrical memoir, Hoppe shares an intimate, courageous account of what it means to truly interrupt cycles of harm. For readers of The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford, and Heavy by Kiese Laymon.

During the first year of quarantine, drug overdoses spiked, the highest ever recorded. And Hoppe’s cousin was one of them. “I never learned the true history of substance use disorder in my family,� Hoppe writes. “People just disappeared.� At the time of her cousin’s death, she’d been in recovery for nearly four years, but she hadn’t told anyone.

In First in the Family, Hoppe shares her journey, the first in her family to do so, and takes the reader on a remarkable investigation of her family’s history, the American dream, and the erasure of POC from recovery institutions and narratives, leaving the reader with an urgent message of hope.]]>
272 Jessica Hoppe 1250865220 Chi 0 to-read 3.85 2024 First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream
author: Jessica Hoppe
name: Chi
average rating: 3.85
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<![CDATA[I'm Laughing Because I'm Crying]]> 207567772 “Do you know what happens if you laugh while crying? Hair grows out of your butthole.� It was a constant truism Youngmi Mayer’s mother would say threateningly after she would make her daughter laugh while crying. Her mother used it to cheer her up in moments when she could tell Youngmi was overtaken with grief. The humorous saying would never fail to lighten the mood, causing both daughter and mother to laugh and cry at the same time. Her mother had learned this trick from her mother, and her mother had learned this from her mother before it had also helped an endless string of her family laugh through suffering.

In I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying, Youngmi jokes through the retelling of her childhood as an offbeat biracial kid in Saipan, a place next to a place that Americans might know. She jokes through her difficult adolescence where she must parent her own mother, who married her husband because he looked like white Jesus (and the singer of The Bee Gees). And with humor and irreverence and full-throated openness, she jokes even while sharing the story of what her family went through during the last century of colonialism and war in Korea, while reflecting how years later, their wounds affect her in New York City as a single mom, all the while interrogating whiteness, gender, and sexuality.

Youngmi jokes through these stories in hopes of passing onto the reader what her family passed down to The gift of laughing while crying. The gift of a hairy butthole. Because throughout it all, the one thing she learned was one cannot exist without the other. And like a yin and yang, this duality is reflected in this whip-smart, heart-wrenching, and disarmingly funny memoir told by a bright new voice with so much heart and wisdom.

ձ>
256 Youngmi Mayer 0316569232 Chi 0 to-read 4.25 2024 I'm Laughing Because I'm Crying
author: Youngmi Mayer
name: Chi
average rating: 4.25
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Frighten the Horses: A Memoir 197525486 A textured, sharply written memoir about coming of age in the fourth decade of one’s life and embracing one's truest self in a world that demands gender fit in neat boxes

From the outside, Oliver Radclyffe spent four decades living an immensely privileged, beautifully composed life. As the daughter of two well-to-do British parents and the wife of a handsome, successful man from an equally privileged family, Oliver played the parts expected of him. He checked off every box—marriage, children (four), a white-picket fence surrounding a stately home in Connecticut, and a golden retriever named Biscuit.

But beneath the shiny veneer, Oliver was desperately trying to stay afloat as he struggled to maintain a facade of normalcy—his hair was falling out in clumps, he couldn’t eat, and his mood swings often brought him to tears. And then, on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon in September, Oliver Radclyffe woke up and realized the life of a trapped housewife was not one he was ever meant to live. In fact, Oliver had spent his entire life denying the deepest, truest parts of himself. In the wake of this realization, he began the challenging, messy journey toward self-acceptance and living a truer life, knowing he risked the life he’d built to do so.

That journey was fraught, as Oliver navigated leaving a marriage and reintroducing himself to his children. And despite the challenges he faced, Oliver realized there was no way for him to go back to the beautiful lie of his previous life. Not if he wanted to survive.

Frighten the Horses is a trans man’s coming of age story, about a housewife who comes out as a lesbian and tentatively, at first, steps into the world of queerness. With growing courage and the support of his newfound community, Oliver is finally able to face the question of his gender identity and become the man he is supposed to be. The story of a flawed, fascinating, gorgeously queer man, Frighten the Horses introduces Oliver Radclyffe as a witty, arresting, unforgettable voice.ձ>
352 Oliver Radclyffe 0802163157 Chi 0 to-read 4.32 2024 Frighten the Horses: A Memoir
author: Oliver Radclyffe
name: Chi
average rating: 4.32
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<![CDATA[A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole]]> 203579170 One woman’s decades-long journey to a diagnosis of autism, and the barriers that keep too many neurodivergent people from knowing their true selvesMarian Schembari was thirty-four years old when she learned she was autistic. By then, she’d spent decades hiding her tics and shutting down in public, wondering why she couldn’t just act like everyone else. Therapists told her she had Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sensory processing disorder, social anxiety, and recurrent depression. They prescribed breathing techniques and gratitude journaling. Nothing helped.It wasn’t until years later that she finally learned the she wasn’t weird or deficient or moody or sensitive or broken. She was autistic.Today, more people than ever are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Testing improvements have made it easier to identify neurodivergence, especially among women and girls who spent decades dismissed by everyone from parents to doctors, and misled by gender-biased research. A diagnosis can end the cycle of shame and invisibility, but only if it can be found.In this deeply personal and researched memoir, Schembari’s journey takes her from the mountains of New Zealand to the tech offices of San Francisco, from her first love to her first child, all with unflinching honesty and good humor.A Little Less Broken breaks down the barriers that leave women in the dark about their own bodies, and reveals what it truly means to embrace our differences.]]> 272 Marian Schembari 1250895758 Chi 0 to-read 4.46 A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole
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Look in the Mirror 202514059
Maria, once an ambitious medical student, is a nanny for the super-rich. The money’s better, and so are the destinations where her work takes her. Just one more gig, and she’ll be set. Finally, she’ll be secure. But when her wards never show, Maria begins to make herself at home, spending her days luxuriating by the pool and in the sauna.

There’s just one rule: Don’t go in the basement. That room is off-limits. But her curiosity might just get the better of her.

And soon, she’ll wish her only worry was not getting paid.]]>
320 Catherine Steadman 059372576X Chi 0 3.57 2024 Look in the Mirror
author: Catherine Steadman
name: Chi
average rating: 3.57
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If Something Happens to Me 195790670
With no trace of Ali or the car, a cloud of suspicion hangs over Ryan. But with no proof and a good lawyer, he’s never charged, though that doesn’t matter to the podcasters and internet trolls. Now, Ryan has changed his last name, and entered law school. He's put his past behind him.

Until, on a summer trip abroad to Italy with his law-school classmates, Ryan gets a call from his father: Ali's car has finally been found, submerged in a lake in his hometown. Inside are two dead men and a cryptic note with five words written on the envelope in Ali’s handwriting: If something happens to me�

Then, halfway around the world, the unthinkable happens: Ryan sees the man who has haunted his dreams since that night.

As Ryan races from the rolling hills of Tuscany, to a rural village in the UK, to the glittering streets of Paris in search of the truth, he has no idea that his salvation may lie with a young sheriff’s deputy in Kansas working her first case, and a mobster in Philadelphia who’s experienced tragedy of his own.

In classic Alex Finlay form, If Something Happens to Me is told from several distinct, compelling characters whose paths intersect, detonating into a story of twist after pulse-pounding twist. The story cements Finlay as one of the leading thriller writers today.]]>
324 Alex Finlay 1250863791 Chi 0 3.69 2024 If Something Happens to Me
author: Alex Finlay
name: Chi
average rating: 3.69
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<![CDATA[Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career]]> 65215677 Nothing Good Can Come from This.

What would you sacrifice for your career? All your free time? Your sense of self-worth? Your sanity?

In 2006, Kristi Coulter left her cozy but dull job for a promising new position at the fast-growing Amazon, but she never expected the soul-crushing pressure that came with it.

In no time she finds the challenge and excitement she'd been craving―along with seven-day workweeks, lifeboat exercises, widespread burnout, and a culture driven largely by fear. But the chase, the visibility, and, let's face it, the stock options, proved intoxicating, and so, for twelve years, she stayed―until she no longer recognized the face in the mirror or the mission she'd signed up for.

Unsparing, absurd, and wickedly funny, Exit Interview is a rare journey inside the crucible that is Amazon. An intimate, surprisingly relatable look at the work life of a driven woman in a world that loves the idea of female ambition but balks at the reality.]]>
384 Kristi Coulter 0374600902 Chi 0 4.14 Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career
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Only If You're Lucky 60891867
And so Margot finds herself living in an off-campus house with three other girls, Lucy, the ringleader; Sloane, the sarcastic one; and Nicole, the nice one, the three of them opposites but also deeply intertwined. It's a year that finds Margot finally coming out of the shell she's been in since the end of high school, when her best friend Eliza died three weeks after graduation. Margot and Lucy have become the closest of friends, but by the middle of their sophomore year, one of the fraternity boys from the house next door has been brutally murdered... and Lucy Sharpe is missing without a trace.

A tantalizing thriller about the nature of friendship and belonging, about loyalty, envy, and betrayal—another gripping novel from an author quickly becoming the gold standard in psychological suspense.]]>
371 Stacy Willingham 1250887933 Chi 0 3.54 2024 Only If You're Lucky
author: Stacy Willingham
name: Chi
average rating: 3.54
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Thunder Song: Essays 185767242
Drawing on a rich family archive as well as the anthropological work of her late great-grandmother, Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe explores themes ranging from indigenous identity and stereotypes to cultural displacement and environmental degradation to understand what our experiences teach us about the power of community, commitment, and conscientious honesty.

Unapologetically punk, the essays in Thunder Song segue between the miraculous and the mundane, the spiritual and the physical, as they examine the role of art--in particular music--and community in helping a new generation of indigenous people claim the strength of their heritage while defining their own path in the contemporary world.]]>
256 Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe 1640096353 Chi 0 to-read 4.41 2024 Thunder Song: Essays
author: Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe
name: Chi
average rating: 4.41
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<![CDATA[The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America]]> 203579143 A groundbreaking exploration of Native American identity, tribal enrollment, ancestry, and what all of this reveals about our understandings of race and politicsThe number of people in the United States who self-identify as Native has exploded in the last two decades. In the 2020 Census, more than twice as many people checked the box for “American Indian or Alaska Native� than in 2000. Sure, there have been improvements to the ways that we are able to identify race in this once-a-decade survey, and there have been efforts to reduce the undercount of people living on reservations. But it’s clear that some people are lying, some people are wrong, and many are caught in a growing chasm between self-identity and verification.The concept of having evidence to determine your tribal identity through measurable, objective means, is somewhat unique to Native Americans who, unlike any other racial or ethnic group in the United States, undergo bureaucratic processes to prove themselves. Every tribe is different � some trace lineage, others consult historic rolls, and some calculate blood quantum. Having a card to confirm your tribal enrollment is not synonymous with being Native, and yet it offers a way to validate something intangible.In The Indian Card, Carrie Schuettpelz dives deep into the idiosyncrasy and the often violent history of the ways that Native people establish an identity that is cultural, racial, and political all at once. How do blood, land, money, integrity, and tradition define tribal citizenship? How was kinship determined before colonization? And what would it look like to define community for ourselves?]]> 259 Carrie Schuettpelz 1250903165 Chi 0 to-read 4.31 2024 The Indian Card: Who Gets to Be Native in America
author: Carrie Schuettpelz
name: Chi
average rating: 4.31
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Whiskey Tender: A Memoir 158649919 An Oprah Daily "Best New Book" and "Riveting Nonfiction and Memoir You Need to Read" * A New York Times "New Book to Read" * A The New Yorker "Best Book out now" * An Esquire "Best Book (so far)" * A Zibby Mag "Most Anticipated Book" * An Elle "Best Book" * A Washington Post "Book to Read this Summer" * Publishers Weekly "Top 10 Memoir and Biography" * A San Francisco Chronicle "New Book to Cozy Up With" * A Publishers Weekly "Memoirs & Biographies: Top 10" * The Millions "Most Anticipated" * An Electric Lit “Books By Women of Color to Read" * An Amazon Editors "Best Book of the Month"

“We have more Native stories now, but we have not heard one like this. Whiskey Tender is unexpected and propulsive, indeed tender, but also bold, and beautifully told, like a drink you didn’t know you were thirsty for. This book, never anything less than mesmerizing, is full of family stories and vital Native history. It pulses and it aches, and it lifts, consistently. It threads together so much truth by the time we are done, what has been woven together equals a kind of completeness from brokenness, and a hope from knowing love and loss and love again by naming it so.� � Tommy Orange, National Bestselling Author of There There

Reminiscent of the works of Mary Karr and Terese Marie Mailhot, a memoir of family and survival, coming-of-age on and off the reservation, and of the frictions between mainstream American culture and Native inheritance; assimilation and reverence for tradition.

Deborah Jackson Taffa was raised to believe that some sacrifices were necessary to achieve a better life. Her grandparents—citizens of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe—were sent to Indian boarding schools run by white missionaries, while her parents were encouraged to take part in governmental job training off the reservation. Assimilation meant relocation, but as Taffa matured into adulthood, she began to question the promise handed down by her elders and by American society: that if she gave up her culture, her land, and her traditions, she would not only be accepted, but would be able to achieve the “American Dream.�

Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian� status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories. Taffa’s childhood memories unspool into meditations on tribal identity, the rampant criminalization of Native men, governmental assimilation policies, the Red Power movement, and the negotiation between belonging and resisting systemic oppression. Pan-Indian, as well as specific tribal histories and myths, blend with stories of a 1970s and 1980s childhood spent on and off the reservation.

Taffa offers a sharp and thought-provoking historical analysis laced with humor and heart. As she reflects on her past and present—the promise of assimilation and the many betrayals her family has suffered, both personal and historical; trauma passed down through generations—she reminds us of how the cultural narratives of her ancestors have been excluded from the central mythologies and structures of the “melting pot� of America, revealing all that is sacrificed for the promise of acceptance.]]>
304 Deborah Jackson Taffa 0063288516 Chi 0 to-read 4.11 2024 Whiskey Tender: A Memoir
author: Deborah Jackson Taffa
name: Chi
average rating: 4.11
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The Glass Castle 7445 THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant and charismatic father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn't want the responsibility of raising a family.

The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered.

The Glass Castle is truly astonishing--a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family.]]>
288 Jeannette Walls 074324754X Chi 0 4.32 2005 The Glass Castle
author: Jeannette Walls
name: Chi
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2005
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The Wife Between Us 34189556
You will assume you are reading about a jealous ex-wife.

You will assume she is obsessed with her replacement � a beautiful, younger woman who is about to marry the man they both love.

You will assume you know the anatomy of this tangled love triangle.

Assume nothing.

Twisted and deliciously chilling, Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen's The Wife Between Us exposes the secret complexities of an enviable marriage - and the dangerous truths we ignore in the name of love.

Read between the lies.]]>
432 Greer Hendricks 1250130921 Chi 0 3.82 2018 The Wife Between Us
author: Greer Hendricks
name: Chi
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2018
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<![CDATA[Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom]]> 74445 234 John O'Donohue 006092943X Chi 0 to-read 4.30 1996 Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom
author: John O'Donohue
name: Chi
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1996
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<![CDATA[They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life]]> 60979214
Comforting a family member or friend, soothing children, providing company for the elderly, ensuring that people feel well enough to work; this is all essential labour. Without it, capitalism would cease to function. They Call It Love investigates the work that makes a haven in a heartless world, examining who performs this labor, how it is organised, and how it might change. In this groundbreaking book, Alva Gotby calls this work “emotional reproduction,� unveiling its inherently political nature. It not only ensures people’s well-being but creates sentimental attachments to social hierarchy and the status quo. Drawing on the thought of the feminist movement Wages for Housework, Gotby demonstrates that emotion is a key element of capitalist reproduction. To improve the way we relate to one another will require a radical restructuring of society.]]>
192 Alva Gotby 1839767030 Chi 0 to-read 3.80 They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life
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<![CDATA[Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement]]> 77265030
When bioethicist and professor Ashley Shew became a self-described “hard-of-hearing chemobrained amputee with Crohn’s disease and tinnitus,� there was no returning to “normal.� Suddenly well-meaning people called her an “inspiration� while grocery shopping or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don’t want what the abled assume they want—nor are they generally asked. Almost everyone will experience disability at some point in their lives, yet the abled persistently frame disability as an individual’s problem rather than a social one.

In a warm, feisty voice and vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community. To forge a more equitable world, Shew argues that we must eliminate “technoableism”—the harmful belief that technology is a “solution� for disability; that the disabled simply await being “fixed� by technological wizardry; that making society more accessible and equitable is somehow a lesser priority.

This badly needed introduction to disability expertise considers mobility devices, medical infrastructure, neurodivergence, and the crucial relationship between disability and race. The future, Shew points out, is surely disabled—whether through changing climate, new diseases, or even through space travel. It’s time we looked closely at how we all think about disability technologies and learn to envision disabilities not as liabilities, but as skill sets enabling all of us to navigate a challenging world.]]>
160 Ashley Shew 1324036664 Chi 0 to-read 4.30 2023 Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement
author: Ashley Shew
name: Chi
average rating: 4.30
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<![CDATA[The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning]]> 199388132 We can bury the girlboss, but what comes next? The former executive editor of Teen Vogue tells the story of her personal workplace reckoning and argues for collective responsibility to reimagine work as we know it.

“As I sat in the front row that day, I was 80 percent faking it with a 100-percent-real Gucci bag.� Samhita Mukhopadhyay had finally made it: she had her dream job, dream clothes—dream life. But time and time again, she found herself sacrificing time with family and friends, paying too much for lattes, and limping home after working twelve hours a day. Success didn’t come without costs, right? Or so she kept telling herself. And Mukhopadhyay wasn’t alone: Far too many of us are taught that we need to work ourselves to the bone to live a good life. That we just need to climb up the corporate ladder, to “lean in� and “hustle,� to enact change. But as Mukhopadhyay shows, these definitions of success are myths—and they are seductive ones.

Mukhopadhyay traces the origins of these myths, taking us from the sixties to the present. She forms a critical overview of workplace feminism, looking at stories from her own professional career, analysis from activists and experts, and of course, experiences of workers at different levels. As more individuals continue to question whether their professional ambitions can lead to happiness and fulfillment in the first place, Mukhopadhyay asks, What would it mean to have a liberated workplace? Mukhopadhyay emerges with a vision for a workplace culture that pays fairly, recognizes our values, and gives people access to the resources they need.

A call to action to redefine and reimagine work as we know it, The Myth of Making It is a field guide and manifesto for all of us who are tired, searching for justice, and longing to be liberated from the oppressive grip of hustle culture.]]>
256 Samhita Mukhopadhyay 059344809X Chi 0 to-read 3.75 The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning
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name: Chi
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Rejection 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

In “The Feminist,� a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics� spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,� a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]>
272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Chi 0 to-read 3.87 2024 Rejection
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Chi
average rating: 3.87
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<![CDATA[The Last Mrs. Parrish (Mrs. Parrish, #1)]]> 34043643
To everyone in the exclusive town of Bishops Harbor, Connecticut, Daphne—a socialite and philanthropist—and her real-estate mogul husband, Jackson, are a couple straight out of a fairy tale.

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

With shocking turns and dark secrets that will keep you guessing until the very end, The Last Mrs. Parrish is a fresh, juicy, and utterly addictive thriller from a diabolically imaginative talent.]]>
560 Liv Constantine 0062688162 Chi 0 to-read 3.93 2017 The Last Mrs. Parrish (Mrs. Parrish, #1)
author: Liv Constantine
name: Chi
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2017
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The Couple Next Door 28815474 You never know what's happening on the other side of the wall.

Your neighbour told you that she didn't want your six-month-old daughter at the dinner party. Nothing personal, she just couldn't stand her crying.

Your husband said it would be fine. After all, you only live next door. You'll have the baby monitor and you'll take it in turns to go back every half hour.

Your daughter was sleeping when you checked on her last. But now, as you race up the stairs in your deathly quiet house, your worst fears are realized. She's gone.

You've never had to call the police before. But now they're in your home, and who knows what they'll find there.

What would you be capable of, when pushed past your limit?]]>
308 Shari Lapena 0735221081 Chi 0 to-read 3.80 2016 The Couple Next Door
author: Shari Lapena
name: Chi
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2016
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The Golden Couple 57693416 The next electrifying novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author duo behind The Wife Between Us.

Wealthy Washington suburbanites Marissa and Matthew Bishop seem to have it all—until Marissa is unfaithful. Beneath their veneer of perfection is a relationship riven by work and a lack of intimacy. She wants to repair things for the sake of their eight-year-old son and because she loves her husband. Enter Avery Chambers.

Avery is a therapist who lost her professional license. Still, it doesn’t stop her from counseling those in crisis, though they have to adhere to her unorthodox methods. And the Bishops are desperate.

When they glide through Avery’s door and Marissa reveals her infidelity, all three are set on a collision course. Because the biggest secrets in the room are still hidden, and it’s no longer simply a marriage that’s in danger.]]>
329 Greer Hendricks 125027320X Chi 0 to-read 3.94 2022 The Golden Couple
author: Greer Hendricks
name: Chi
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2022
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House of Glass 195790531
A young nanny who plunged to her death, or was she pushed? A nine-year-old girl who collects sharp objects and refuses to speak. A lawyer whose job it is to uncover who in the family is a victim and who is a murderer. But how can you find out the truth when everyone here is lying?

Rose Barclay is a nine-year-old girl who witnessed the possible murder of her nanny - in the midst of her parent's bitter divorce - and immediately stopped speaking. Stella Hudson is a best interest attorney, appointed to serve as counsel for children in custody cases. She never accepts clients under thirteen due to her own traumatic childhood, but Stella's mentor, a revered judge, believes Stella is the only one who can help.

From the moment Stella passes through the iron security gate and steps into the gilded, historic DC home of the Barclays, she realizes the case is even more twisted, and the Barclay family far more troubled, than she feared. And there's something eerie about the house itself: It's a plastic house, with not a single bit of glass to be found.

As Stella comes closer to uncovering the secrets the Barclays are desperate to hide, danger wraps around her like a shroud, and her past and present are set on a collision course in ways she never expected. Everyone is a suspect in the nanny's murder. The mother, the father, the grandmother, the nanny's boyfriend. Even Rose. Is the person Stella's supposed to protect the one she may need protection from?]]>
341 Sarah Pekkanen 125028399X Chi 0 3.84 2024 House of Glass
author: Sarah Pekkanen
name: Chi
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
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The Lion Women of Tehran 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 Chi 0 to-read 4.47 2024 The Lion Women of Tehran
author: Marjan Kamali
name: Chi
average rating: 4.47
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What Have You Done? 201102399 The new binge-worthy novel from the “queen of the one-sit read,� and New York Times bestselling author of The Couple Next Door

Nothing ever happens in sleepy little Fairhill, Vermont. But this morning that will change. And one innocent question could be deadly. What have you done?

The teenagers get their kicks telling ghost stories in the old graveyard. The parents trust their kids will arrive home safe from school. Everyone knows everyone. Curtains rarely twitch. Front doors are left unlocked.

But Diana Brewer isn’t lying safely in her bed where she belongs. Instead she lies in a hayfield, circled by vultures, discovered by a local farmer.

How quickly a girl becomes a ghost. How quickly a town of friendly, familiar faces becomes a town of suspects, a place of fear and paranoia.

Someone in Fairhill did this. Everyone wants answers.]]>
307 Shari Lapena 0593489969 Chi 0 3.73 2024 What Have You Done?
author: Shari Lapena
name: Chi
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/06
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<![CDATA[Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses]]> 87040 Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses. Robin Wall Kimmerer's book is not an identification guide, nor is it a scientific treatise. Rather, it is a series of linked personal essays that will lead general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings, from salmon and hummingbirds to redwoods and rednecks. Kimmerer clearly and artfully explains the biology of mosses, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating organisms have to teach us.

Drawing on her diverse experiences as a scientist, mother, teacher, and writer of Native American heritage, Kimmerer explains the stories of mosses in scientific terms as well as in the framework of indigenous ways of knowing. In her book, the natural history and cultural relationships of mosses become a powerful metaphor for ways of living in the world.

Gathering Moss will appeal to a wide range of readers, from bryologists to those interested in natural history and the environment, Native Americans, and contemporary nature and science writing.

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168 Robin Wall Kimmerer 0870714996 Chi 0 4.39 2003 Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Chi
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2003
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Listen for the Lie 127279000 What if you thought you murdered your best friend? And if everyone else thought so too? And what if the truth doesn't matter?

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

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

The truth is out there, if we just listen.]]>
352 Amy Tintera 1250880319 Chi 0 4.07 2024 Listen for the Lie
author: Amy Tintera
name: Chi
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
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First Lie Wins 164444179 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593492918.

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

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

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

Evie Porter must stay one step ahead of her past while making sure there’s still a future in front of her. The stakes couldn’t be higher—but then, Evie has always liked a challenge. . . .]]>
340 Ashley Elston Chi 0 3.97 2024 First Lie Wins
author: Ashley Elston
name: Chi
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2024
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Middle of the Night 199026522 In the latest jaw-dropping thriller from New York Times bestselling author Riley Sager, a man must contend with the long-ago disappearance of his childhood best friend—and the dark secrets lurking just beyond the safe confines of his picture-perfect neighborhood.

The worst thing to ever happen on Hemlock Circle occurred in Ethan Marsh’s backyard. One July night, ten-year-old Ethan and his best friend and neighbor, Billy, fell asleep in a tent set up on a manicured lawn in a quiet, quaint New Jersey cul de sac. In the morning, Ethan woke up alone. During the night, someone had sliced the tent open with a knife and taken Billy. He was never seen again.

Thirty years later, Ethan has reluctantly returned to his childhood home. Plagued by bad dreams and insomnia, he begins to notice strange things happening in the middle of the night. Someone seems to be roaming the cul de sac at odd hours, and signs of Billy’s presence keep appearing in Ethan’s backyard. Is someone playing a cruel prank? Or has Billy, long thought to be dead, somehow returned to Hemlock Circle?

The mysterious occurrences prompt Ethan to investigate what really happened that night, a quest that reunites him with former friends and neighbors and leads him into the woods that surround Hemlock Circle. Woods where Billy claimed monsters roamed and where a mysterious institute does clandestine research on a crumbling estate.

The closer Ethan gets to the truth, the more he realizes that no place—be it quiet forest or suburban street—is completely safe. And that the past has a way of haunting the present.]]>
367 Riley Sager 0593472373 Chi 0 to-read 3.65 2024 Middle of the Night
author: Riley Sager
name: Chi
average rating: 3.65
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Where You End 127278989 A Good Morning America Buzz Pick
A Mary Calvi Book Club Pick

“A perfectly paced, addictive thriller with a vicious twist.� —Paula Hawkins

When Kat Bird wakes up from a coma, she sees her mirror image: Jude, her twin sister. Jude’s face and name are the only memories Kat has from before her accident. As Kat tries to make sense of things, she believes Jude will provide all the answers to her most pressing questions: What happened? Where am I? Who am I?

Amid this tragedy, Jude sees an irresistible opportunity: she can give her sister a brand-new past, one worlds away from the lives they really led. She spins tales of an idyllic childhood, exotic travels, and a bright future.

But if everything was so perfect, who are the mysterious people following Kat? And what explains her uncontrollable flashes of violent anger, which begin to jeopardize a sweet new romance?

Duped by the one person she trusted, Kat must try to untangle fact from fiction. Yet as she pulls at the threads of Jude’s elaborate tapestry, she has no idea of the catastrophe she’s inviting.

Intensely creepy and beautifully written, Abbott Kahler’s Where You End is an unforgettable tale of intrigue, revenge, and the quest for redemption.]]>
336 Abbott Kahler 125087324X Chi 0 3.12 2024 Where You End
author: Abbott Kahler
name: Chi
average rating: 3.12
book published: 2024
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<![CDATA[There Is No Ethan: How Three Women Caught America's Biggest Catfish]]> 201294595 Part memoir, part explosive window into the mind of a catfisher, a thrilling personal account of three women coming face-to-face with an internet predator and teaming up to expose them

In 2011 three successful and highly educated women fell head over heels for the brilliant and charming Ethan Schuman. Unbeknownst to the others, each exchanged countless messages with Ethan, staying up late into the evenings to deepen their connections with this fascinating man. His detailed excuses about broken webcams and complicated international calling plans seemed believable, as did last-minute trip cancellations. After all, why would he lie? Ethan wasn't after money—he never convinced his marks to shell out thousands of dollars for some imagined crisis. Rather, he ensnared these women in a web of intense emotional intimacy.

After the trio independently began to question inconsistencies in their new flame's stories, they managed to find one another and uncover a greater deception than they could have ever imagined. As Anna Akbari and the women untangled their catfish’s web, they found other victims and realized that without a proper crime, there was no legal reason for “Ethan� to ever stop.

There is No Ethan catalogues Akbari's experience as both victim and observer. By looking at the bigger picture—a world where technology mediates our relationships; where words and images are easily manipulated; and where truth, reality, and identity have become slippery terms—Akbari provides an explanation for why these stories matter.]]>
304 Anna Akbari 1538742195 Chi 0 to-read 3.57 2024 There Is No Ethan: How Three Women Caught America's Biggest Catfish
author: Anna Akbari
name: Chi
average rating: 3.57
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Consent: A Memoir 200798634 Half a Life. She asks herself whether she told the whole truth back then. What did truth look like to her in the era of love-bead curtains, when no one asked who was served by the permissibility of May-December romance? With new understanding about the imbalance of power between an older man and a minor girl, Ciment re-explores the erotic wild ride and intellectual flowering that shaped an improbable but blissful marriage that lasted for forty-five years, until her husband’s death at age ninety-three.]]> 145 Jill Ciment 0593701062 Chi 0 to-read 3.83 2024 Consent: A Memoir
author: Jill Ciment
name: Chi
average rating: 3.83
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<![CDATA[Love Is a Burning Thing: A Memoir]]> 195888818 A riveting memoir about a daughter’s investigation into the wirings of her loving, unpredictable mother

Ten years before Nina St. Pierre was born, her mother attempted suicide by lighting herself on fire. During her mother's recovery in the burn unit, a nurse initiated her into Transcendental Meditation. From that day on, her mother's pain became intertwined with the pursuit of enlightenment.

Growing up, Nina longed for a normal life; instead, she and her brother were at the whims of their mother, who chased ascension up and down the state of California, swapping out spiritual practices as often as apartments. When they finally settled at the foot of a mountain—reputed to be cosmic—in Northern California, Nina hoped life would stabilize. But after another fire, and a tragic fallout, she was forced to confront the shadow side of her mother's mystical narratives. With obsessive dedication, Nina discovered the truth that would eventually release her.

In Love Is a Burning Thing, Nina interrogates what happens to those undiagnosed and unseen. This is a transfixing, moving portrait of a mother-daughter relationship that examines mental health, stigma, poverty, and gender—and the role that spirituality plays within each.]]>
320 Nina St. Pierre 0593473825 Chi 0 to-read 3.88 2024 Love Is a Burning Thing: A Memoir
author: Nina St. Pierre
name: Chi
average rating: 3.88
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Half a Life: A Memoir 99575
Ciment turned herself into a girl for whom a father is unnecessary-a tough girl who survived any way she could. She and her brother Jack helped support the family by working for a shady market researcher, quickly learning to supply their own answers to burning questions like, "Did we like Swanson TV dinners? If so, why? On a scale of one to ten, how would we rate the new Talking Barbie? Arrow wax? Dr. Ross's dog food?" She became a gang girl, a professional forger, and a Times Square porn model. Using a friend's SAT score she cheated her way into art school, and seduced and eventually married her art teacher, a married man thirty years her senior.

By turns comic, tragic, and heartrending, Half a Life is a bold, unsentimental portrait of the artist as a girl from nowhere, making herself up from scratch, acting up, and finally overcoming the consequences of being the child of a father incapable of love and responsibility.]]>
224 Jill Ciment 0385488912 Chi 0 to-read 3.71 1996 Half a Life: A Memoir
author: Jill Ciment
name: Chi
average rating: 3.71
book published: 1996
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Here After 182095845 272 Amy Lin 195850632X Chi 0 to-read 4.24 2024 Here After
author: Amy Lin
name: Chi
average rating: 4.24
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The Heart and Other Monsters 49882286
In November 2013, Rose Andersen's younger sister Sarah died of an overdose in the bathroom of her boyfriend's home in a small town with one of the highest rates of opioid use in the state. Like too many of her generation, she had become addicted to heroin. Sarah was 24 years old.

To imagine her way into Sarah's life and her choices, Rose revisits their volatile childhood, marked by their stepfather's omnipresent rage. As the dysfunction comes into focus, so does a broader picture of the opioid crisis and the drug rehabilitation industry in small towns across America. And when Rose learns from the coroner that Sarah's cause of death was a methamphetamine overdose, the story takes a wildly unexpected turn.

As Andersen sifts through her sister's last days, we come to recognize the contours of grief and its aftermath: the psychic shattering which can turn to anger, the pursuit of ever an ever-elusive verdict, and the intensely personal rites of imagination and art needed to actually move on.

Reminiscent of Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich's The Fact of a Body, Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder, and Lacy M. Johnson's The Other Side, Andersen's debut is a potent, profoundly original journey into and out of loss.]]>
208 Rose Andersen 1635575141 Chi 0 to-read 4.14 2020 The Heart and Other Monsters
author: Rose Andersen
name: Chi
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2020
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The Professor 65211810 For fans of Tana French, The Professor investigates the darkest corners of academic ambition, lies, and obsession.

On a spring afternoon in Athens, Georgia, Ethan Haddock is discovered in his apartment, dead, apparently by his own hand. His fatality immediately garners media not because his death reflects the troubling increase of depression and mental health issues among college students, but because the media has caught the whiff of a scandal. His professor, Dr. Verena Sobek, has been taken in for questioning, and there are rumors his death is the result of a bad romance. A Title IX investigation is opened, the professor is suspended, and social media crusaders and trolls alike are out for blood.

Marlitt Kaplan never investigated love affairs. A former detective turned research assistant, she misses the excitement of her old job, but most of all the friendship of her partner, Teddy. When her mother, a professor at the university and colleague of the accused professor, asks for her help, she finds herself in the impossible position of proving something didn't happen. Without the credentials to interview suspects or access phone records, she will have to get closer to a victim's life than ever before. And she quickly finds herself in his apartment, having dinner with his roommates, even sleeping in his bed. But is she too close to see the truth?

In her relentless pursuit to uncover the mystery behind Ethan’s death, Marlitt will be forced to confront the power structures ingrained in the classroom against the backdrop of a historic campus and an institution that sometimes fails its most vulnerable members.]]>
336 Lauren Nossett 1250845351 Chi 0 3.42 2023 The Professor
author: Lauren Nossett
name: Chi
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World]]> 208840291 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.

As indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love.

Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”]]>
112 Robin Wall Kimmerer 1668072246 Chi 0 4.39 2024 The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
name: Chi
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead]]> 126919062 What if everything you know about the worst night of your life turns out not to be true?

Nine years ago, with the world's eyes on her, Charlie Colbert fled. The press and the police called Charlie a "witness" to the nightmarish events at her elite graduate school on Christmas Eve—events known to the public as "Scarlet Christmas"—though Charlie knows she was much more than that.

Now, Charlie has meticulously rebuilt her life: She's the editor-in-chief of a major magazine, engaged to the golden child of the publishing industry, and hell-bent on never, ever letting her guard down again. But when a buzzy film made by one of Charlie's former classmates threatens to shatter everything she's worked for, Charlie realizes how much she's changed in nine years. Now, she's not going to let anything—not even the people she once loved most—get in her way.]]>
292 Jenny Hollander 1250890845 Chi 0 3.20 2024 Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead
author: Jenny Hollander
name: Chi
average rating: 3.20
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/22
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The Wife Before 59201362
Samira settles into the mansion, blissfully happy—until she discovers long-hidden journals belonging to Roland’s late wife, Melanie, who died in a tragic accident. With each dusty page, Samira comes to realize that perhaps it was no accident at all—that perhaps her perfect husband is not as perfect as she thought. Even as her trust in Roland begins to dwindle and a shadow falls over her marriage and she begins to fear for her own life, Samira is determined to uncover the truth of Melanie’s troubled last days. But even good wives should know that the truth is not always what it seems . . .]]>
320 Shanora Williams 1496731115 Chi 0 3.68 2022 The Wife Before
author: Shanora Williams
name: Chi
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/06
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Happiness Falls 75495002 When a father goes missing, his family's desperate search leads them to question everything they know about him and one another--both a riveting page-turner and a deeply moving portrait of a family in crisis from the award-winning author of Miracle Creek.

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

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

What follows is both a ticking-clock investigation into the whereabouts of a father and an emotionally rich portrait of a family whose most personal secrets just may be at the heart of his disappearance. Full of shocking twists and fascinating questions of love, language, race, and human connection, Happiness Falls is a mystery, a family drama, and a novel of profound philosophical inquiry. With all the powerful storytelling she brought to her award-winning debut Miracle Creek, Angie Kim turns the missing person story into something wholly original, creating an indelible tale of a family who must go to remarkable lengths to truly understand one another.]]>
387 Angie Kim 0593448200 Chi 0 3.72 2023 Happiness Falls
author: Angie Kim
name: Chi
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence]]> 61885057 From award-winning journalist Meg Kissinger, a searing memoir of a family besieged by mental illness, as well as an incisive exploration of the systems that failed them and a testament to the love that sustained them.

Growing up in the 1960s in the suburbs of Chicago, Meg Kissinger’s family seemed to live a charmed life. With eight kids and two loving parents, the Kissingers radiated a warm, boisterous energy. Whether they were spending summer days on the shores of Lake Michigan, barreling down the ski slopes, or navigating the trials of their Catholic school, the Kissingers always knew how to live large and play hard.

But behind closed doors, a harsher reality was unfolding—a heavily medicated mother hospitalized for anxiety and depression, a manic father prone to violence, and children in the throes of bipolar disorder and depression, two of whom would take their own lives. Through it all, the Kissingers faced the world with their signature dark humor and the unspoken family rule: never talk about it.

While You Were Out begins as the personal story of one family’s struggles then opens outward, as Kissinger details how childhood tragedy catalyzed a journalism career focused on exposing our country’s flawed mental health care. Combining the intimacy of memoir with the rigor of investigative reporting, the book explores the consequences of shame, the havoc of botched public policy, and the hope offered by new treatment strategies.

Powerful, candid and filled with surprising humor, this is the story of one family’s love and resilience in face of great loss.]]>
320 Meg Kissinger 1250793777 Chi 0 4.26 2023 While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence
author: Meg Kissinger
name: Chi
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2023
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The Truth about the Devlins 181350612
But one night, TJ’s world turns upside down after his older brother John confesses that he just murdered one of the clients, an accountant he’d confronted with proof of embezzlement. It seems impossible coming from John, the firstborn son and Most Valuable Devlin.

TJ plunges into the investigation, seizing the chance to prove his worth and save his brother. But in no time, TJ and John find themselves entangled in a lethal web of deception and murder. TJ will fight to save his family, but what he learns might break them first.]]>
384 Lisa Scottoline 0525539700 Chi 0 3.68 2024 The Truth about the Devlins
author: Lisa Scottoline
name: Chi
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures]]> 52668915
Neither plant nor animal, it is found throughout the earth, the air and our bodies. It can be microscopic, yet also accounts for the largest organisms ever recorded, living for millennia and weighing tens of thousands of tonnes. Its ability to digest rock enabled the first life on land, it can survive unprotected in space, and thrives amidst nuclear radiation.

In this captivating adventure, Merlin Sheldrake explores the spectacular and neglected world of fungi: endlessly surprising organisms that sustain nearly all living systems. They can solve problems without a brain, stretching traditional definitions of ‘intelligence�, and can manipulate animal behaviour with devastating precision. In giving us bread, alcohol and life-saving medicines, fungi have shaped human history, and their psychedelic properties, which have influenced societies since antiquity, have recently been shown to alleviate a number of mental illnesses. The ability of fungi to digest plastic, explosives, pesticides and crude oil is being harnessed in break-through technologies, and the discovery that they connect plants in underground networks, the ‘Wood Wide Web�, is transforming the way we understand ecosystems. Yet they live their lives largely out of sight, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented.

Entangled Life is a mind-altering journey into this hidden kingdom of life, and shows that fungi are key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel and behave. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.]]>
352 Merlin Sheldrake 0525510311 Chi 0 to-read 4.34 2020 Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
author: Merlin Sheldrake
name: Chi
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0)]]> 29633913
Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality� based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.]]>
280 Adrienne Maree Brown 1849352607 Chi 0 4.27 2017 Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0)
author: Adrienne Maree Brown
name: Chi
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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Real Americans 62929342 Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

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

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

Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made, and if so, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?

From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family, and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures? ]]>
399 Rachel Khong 0593537254 Chi 0 to-read 3.94 2024 Real Americans
author: Rachel Khong
name: Chi
average rating: 3.94
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The God of the Woods 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]>
490 Liz Moore Chi 0 to-read 4.15 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Chi
average rating: 4.15
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<![CDATA[Something in the Woods Loves You]]> 204593663 An inspiring blend of nature writing and memoir that explores nature’s crucial role in our emotional and mental health. Bats can hear shapes, plants can eat light, and bees can dance maps.When his life took him to a painfully dark place, the poet behind The Cryptonaturalist, Jarod K. Anderson, found comfort and redemption in these facts and the shift in perspective that comes from paying a new kind of attention to nature.Something in the Woods Loves Youtells the story of the darkest stretch of a young person’s life, and how deliberate and meditative encounters with plants and animals helped him see the light at every turn. Ranging from optimistic contemplations of mortality to appreciations of a single mushroom, Anderson has written a lyrical love letter to the natural world and given us the tools to see it all anew.]]> 368 Jarod K. Anderson 1643262297 Chi 0 to-read 4.34 2024 Something in the Woods Loves You
author: Jarod K. Anderson
name: Chi
average rating: 4.34
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The New Couple in 5B 128007059 A couple inherits an apartment with a spine-tingling past in this binge-worthy thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six.

Rosie and Chad Lowan are barely making ends meet in New York City when they receive life-changing news: Chad’s late uncle has left them his luxury apartment at the historic Windermere in glamorous Murray Hill. With its prewar elegance and impeccably uniformed doorman, the building is the epitome of old New York charm. One would almost never suspect the dark history lurking behind its perfectly maintained facade.

At first, the building and its eclectic tenants couldn’t feel more welcoming. But as the Lowans settle into their new home, Rosie starts to suspect that there’s more to the Windermere than meets the eye. Why is the doorman ever-present? Why are there cameras everywhere? And why have so many gruesome crimes occurred there throughout the years? When one of the neighbors turns up dead, Rosie must get to the truth about the Windermere before she, too, falls under its dangerous spell.]]>
384 Lisa Unger 0778333345 Chi 0 3.55 2024 The New Couple in 5B
author: Lisa Unger
name: Chi
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents]]> 51152447 The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions.

“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.�

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.]]>
544 Isabel Wilkerson 0593230256 Chi 0 4.52 2020 Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
author: Isabel Wilkerson
name: Chi
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2020
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The Heiress 126919284
But to everyone’s surprise, Cam wants little to do with the house or the money—and even less to do with the surviving McTavishes. Instead, he rejects his inheritance, settling into a normal life as an English teacher in Colorado and marrying Jules, a woman just as eager to escape her own messy past.

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

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

But Ruby’s plans were always more complicated than they appeared. As Ashby House tightens its grip on Jules and Camden, questions about the infamous heiress come to light. Was there any truth to the persistent rumors following her disappearance as a girl? What really happened to those four husbands, who all died under mysterious circumstances? And why did she adopt Cam in the first place? Soon, Jules and Cam realize that an inheritance can entail far more than what’s written in a will—and that the bonds of family stretch far beyond the grave.]]>
294 Rachel Hawkins 1250280036 Chi 0 to-read 3.80 2024 The Heiress
author: Rachel Hawkins
name: Chi
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2024
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<![CDATA[Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection]]> 59724109
A collection of powerful interconnected essays and affirmations that follow Mimi Zhu’s journey toward embodying and re-learning love after a violent romantic relationship, a stunning and provocative book that will guide and inspire readers to lean into love with softness

In their early twenties, Mimi Zhu was a survivor of intimate-partner abuse. This left them broken, in search of healing and ways to re-learn love. This work is a testament to the strength and adaptability all humans possess, a tribute to love. Be Not Afraid of Love explores the intersections of love and fear in self-esteem, friendship, family dynamics, and romantic relationships, and extends out to its effects on society and the greater political realm. In sharing their own intimate encounters with oppression, healing, joy, and community, Mimi invites readers to reflect deeply on their own experiences as well, with the intention of acting as a guide to undoing the hurt or uncertainty within them. In this heartrending and revolutionary book, Mimi reminds us, be not afraid of love.]]>
256 Mimi Zhu 0143137123 Chi 0 to-read 4.10 2022 Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection
author: Mimi Zhu
name: Chi
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2022
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<![CDATA[The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century]]> 9674787 224 Grace Lee Boggs 0520269241 Chi 0 currently-reading 4.35 2011 The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
author: Grace Lee Boggs
name: Chi
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Loving Corrections (Emergent Strategy #12)]]> 198843270
This selection of prescient, compassionate essays explores patterns we engage in that are rooted in limited thinking. Through a lens of “loving correction� rather than mere critique, author adrienne mareebrown helps us reimagine how to hold ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities accountable bysetting clear boundaries, engaging in reflection, and nurturing honest relationships.

Loving Correctionsis divided into two sections, with the first portion featuring new essaysincluding “A Word for White People� and “Relinquishing the Patriarchy� and writing ontopics like moving from fragility to fortitude, disability, and navigating critique within activist communities.The second section expands and updates pieces from brown's popular monthly column “Murmurations� inYES!Magazinethatexplore accountability—within oneself and community—with depth,inventiveness, and empathy.

Along with allowing us more authentic access to ourselves and to each other, the “corrections� in the book’s title are intended toexplore and break identity-based patterns including white supremacy, fragility, patriarchy, and ableism. brown also offers practical guidance on how to apologize and be accountablefrom our nuanced positions of power, history, and resources.

Building on her previous work—especiallyHolding ChangeԻWe Will Not Cancel Us—brown reminds us how much we need each "It is only through relationship that we learn how to be, understand our impact on others and explore small shifts that may yield remarkable collective change."]]>
203 Adrienne Maree Brown 1849355134 Chi 0 currently-reading 4.34 Loving Corrections (Emergent Strategy #12)
author: Adrienne Maree Brown
name: Chi
average rating: 4.34
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<![CDATA[Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines]]> 25363234
Revolutionary Love on the Frontlines is an anthology that centers mothers of color and marginalized mothers� voices—women who are in a world of necessary transformation. The challenges faced by movements working for antiviolence, anti-imperialist, and queer liberation, as well as racial, economic, reproductive, gender, and food justice are the same challenges that marginalized mothers face every day. Motivated to create spaces for this discourse because of the authors� passionate belief in the power of a radical conversation about mothering, they have become the go-to people for cutting-edge inspired work on this topic for an overlapping committed audience of activists, scholars, and writers. Revolutionary Mothering is a movement-shifting anthology committed to birthing new worlds, full of faith and hope for what we can raise up together. Contributors include alba onofrio, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ariel Gore, Arielle Julia Brown, Autumn Brown, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, China Martens, Christy NaMee Eriksen, Claire Barrera, Cynthia Dewi Oka, Esteli Juarez Boyd, Fabielle Georges, Fabiola Sandoval, Gabriela Sandoval, H. Bindy K. Kang, Irene Lara, June Jordan, Karen Su, Katie Kaput, Layne Russell, Lindsey Campbell, Lisa Factora-Borchers, Loretta J. Ross, Mai’a Williams, Malkia A. Cyril, Mamas of Color Rising, Micaela Cadena, Noemi Martinez, Norma A. Marrun, Panquetzani, Rachel Broadwater, Sumayyah Talibah, Tara CC Villaba, Terri Nilliasca, tk karakashian tunchez, Victoria Law, and Vivian Chin.]]>
272 Alexis Pauline Gumbs 1629631108 Chi 0 currently-reading 4.57 2016 Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines
author: Alexis Pauline Gumbs
name: Chi
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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All Her Little Secrets 57505278 In this fast-paced thriller, Wanda M. Morris crafts a twisty mystery about a black lawyer who gets in over her head after the sudden death of her boss. A debut perfect for fans of Attica Locke, Alyssa Cole, Harlan Coben, and Celeste Ng, with shades ofHow to Get Away with Murder and John Grisham’s The Firm.

Everyone has something to hide...

Ellice Littlejohn seemingly has it all: an Ivy League law degree, a well-paying job as a corporate attorney in midtown Atlanta, great friends, and a “for fun� relationship with a rich, charming executive—her white boss, Michael.

But everything changes one cold January morning when Ellice goes to meet Michael� and finds him dead with a gunshot to his head.

And then she walks away like nothing has happened. Why? Ellice has been keeping a cache of dark secrets, including a small-town past and a kid brother who’s spent time on the other side of the law. She can’t be thrust into the spotlight�again.

But instead of grieving this tragedy, people are gossiping, the police are getting suspicious, and Ellice, the company’s lone black attorney, is promoted to replace Michael. While the opportunity is a dream-come-true, Ellice just can’t shake the feeling that something is off.

When she uncovers shady dealings inside the company, Ellice is trapped in an impossible ethical and moral dilemma. Suddenly, Ellice’s past and present lives collide as she launches into a pulse-pounding race to protect the brother she tried to save years ago and stop a conspiracy far more sinister than she could have ever imagined…]]>
384 Wanda M. Morris 0063204339 Chi 0 3.66 2021 All Her Little Secrets
author: Wanda M. Morris
name: Chi
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/08
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Dream Girl 55425157 Following up on her acclaimed and wildly successful New York Times bestseller Lady in the Lake, Laura Lippman returns with a dark, complex tale of psychological suspense with echoes of Misery involving a novelist, incapacitated by injury, who is plagued by mysterious phone calls.

After being injured in a freak accident, novelist Gerry Andersen lies in a hospital bed in his glamorous but sterile apartment, isolated from the busy world he can see through his windows, utterly dependent on two women he barely knows: his young assistant and a night nurse whose competency he questions.

But Gerry is also beginning to question his own competency. As he moves in and out of dreamlike memories and seemingly random appearances of a persistent ex-girlfriend at his bedside, he fears he may be losing his grip on reality, much like his mother who recently passed away from dementia.

Most distressing, he believes he’s being plagued by strange telephone calls, in which a woman claiming to be the titular character of his hit novel Dream Girl swears she will be coming to see him soon. The character is completely fictitious, but no one has ever believed Gerry when he makes that claim. Is he the victim of a cruel prank—or is he actually losing his mind� There is no record of the calls according to the log on his phone. Could there be someone he has wronged★�Is someone coming to do him harm as he lies helplessly in bed�

Then comes the morning he wakes up next to a dead body—and realizes his nightmare is just beginning...]]>
320 Laura Lippman 0062390074 Chi 0 3.18 2021 Dream Girl
author: Laura Lippman
name: Chi
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir]]> 59686816
A vocal and fearless opponent, Aziz resists under the British mandatory period, then under Jordan, and, finally, under Israel. As a young man, Raja fails to recognise his father's courage and, in turn, his father does not appreciate Raja's own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. When Aziz is murdered in 1985, it changes Raja irrevocably.

This is not only the story of the battle against the various oppressors of the Palestinians, but a moving portrait of a particular father and son relationship.]]>
160 Raja Shehadeh 1788169972 Chi 0 4.18 2023 We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir
author: Raja Shehadeh
name: Chi
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/04
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The Good Sister 53137974 An alternate cover edition of ASIN B08BYCWK6T can be found here.

Sally Hepworth, the author of The Mother-In-Law delivers a knock-out of a novel about the lies that bind two sisters in The Good Sister.

There's only been one time that Rose couldn't stop me from doing the wrong thing and that was a mistake that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Fern Castle works in her local library. She has dinner with her twin sister Rose three nights a week. And she avoids crowds, bright lights and loud noises as much as possible. Fern has a carefully structured life and disrupting her routine can be...dangerous.

When Rose discovers that she cannot get pregnant, Fern sees her chance to pay her sister back for everything Rose has done for her. Fern can have a baby for Rose. She just needs to find a father. Simple.

Fern's mission will shake the foundations of the life she has carefully built for herself and stir up dark secrets from the past, in this quirky, rich and shocking story of what families keep hidden.]]>
309 Sally Hepworth 1250120950 Chi 0 4.11 2020 The Good Sister
author: Sally Hepworth
name: Chi
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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The Trade Off 61884905
For Stella, deputy editor of The Globe , the choice has always been clear. It doesn’t matter how low she has to stoop―getting the best story is what she’s built her reputation on.

For Jess, The Globe ’s rookie reporter, the story stops when the truth does. But she knows that the dirty tricks of the tabloids will be hard to overturn.

And when a celebrity is hounded by The Globe and pays the ultimate price, Jess wonders just how much Stella and the paper are responsible.

Determined to show the world what the tabloid is capable of, Jess will do whatever it takes to uncover the truth, but she needs to watch her back, because someone else is prepared to kill to bury it.

RISK or REWARD. JUSTICE or REVENGE. INNOCENCE or GUILT.]]>
304 Sandie Jones 125083693X Chi 0 3.22 2023 The Trade Off
author: Sandie Jones
name: Chi
average rating: 3.22
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World]]> 195888446 From one of the most prominent voices in the trauma conversation comes a groundbreaking new way to heal on a personal and a collective level.

As we emerge from the past few years of collective upheaval, are we ready to face the complexities of our time with joy, authenticity, and connection? Now more than ever, we must learn to heal ourselves, connect, and embody our values. In this revolutionary book, Prentis Hemphill shows us how.

What It Takes to Heal asserts that the principles of embodiment—the recognition of our body’s sensations and habits, and the beliefs that inform them—are critical to lasting healing and change. Hemphill, an expert embodiment practitioner, therapist, and activist who has partnered with Brené Brown, Tarana Burke, and Esther Perel, among others, shows us that we don't have to carry our emotional burdens alone. Hemphill demonstrates a future in which healing is done in community, weaving together stories from their own experience as a trauma survivor with clinical accounts and lessons learned from their time as a social movement architect. They ask, “What would it do to movements, to our society and culture, to have the principles of healing at the very center? And what does it do to have healing at the center of every structure and everything we create?�

In this life-affirming framework for the way forward, Hemphill shows us how to heal our bodies, minds, and souls—to develop the interpersonal skills necessary to break down the doors of disconnection and take the necessary risks to reshape our world toward justice.
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256 Prentis Hemphill 0593596838 Chi 0 4.50 What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World
author: Prentis Hemphill
name: Chi
average rating: 4.50
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The Five Year Lie 195853534 Bestselling romance author Sarina Bowen’s debut thriller, about one woman’s search for the truth after receiving a text from her deceased ex.

She thought it was love. Then he vanished.

On an ordinary Monday morning, Ariel Cafferty's phone buzzes with a disturbing text message. Something’s happened. I need to see you. Meet me under the candelabra tree ASAP. The words would be jarring from anyone, but the sender is the only man she ever loved. And it's been several years since she learned he died.

Seeing Drew’s name pop up is heart-stopping. Ariel’s gut says it can’t be real. But she goes to the tree anyway. She has to.

Nobody shows. But the text upends everything she thought she knew about the day he left her. The more questions she asks, the more sinister the answers get. Only two things are clear: everything she was told five years ago is wrong, and someone is still lying to her.

The truth has to be out there somewhere. To safeguard herself—and her son—she’ll have to find it before it finds her. And with it, the answer to what became of Drew.

With a heart-stopping romance that only Sarina Bowen can execute, The Five Year Lie is a page-turning, spine-tingling thriller that will have you guessing until the very end.]]>
421 Sarina Bowen 0063280604 Chi 0 3.84 2024 The Five Year Lie
author: Sarina Bowen
name: Chi
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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Such a Bad Influence 198509143
Hazel Davis is drifting: she’s stalled in her career, living in a city she hates, and less successful than her younger sister @evelyn, a lifestyle influencer. Evie came of age on the family YouTube channel after a viral video when she was five. Ten years older and spotlight-averse, Hazel managed to dodge the family business—so although she can barely afford her apartment, at least she made her own way.

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

As theories about Evie’s disappearance tear through the internet, inspiring hashtags, Reddit threads, and podcast episodes, Hazel throws herself into the darkest parts of her sister’s world to untangle the truth. After all, Hazel knows Evie better than anyone else . . . doesn’t she?]]>
336 Olivia Muenter 1683694015 Chi 0 3.38 2024 Such a Bad Influence
author: Olivia Muenter
name: Chi
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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You Shouldn't Have Come Here 61458888
Despite her uneasiness and misgivings from Calvin's friends and family, the two grow close and start to fall for one another. However, as her departure date nears, things between them start to change for the worse. Grace grows wary of Calvin as his infatuation for her seems to turn into obsession. Calvin fears that Grace is hiding something from him.

Told from dual points of view, You Shouldn't Have Come Here is a thrill ride and a cautionary tale of what can go wrong when you open up your house and your heart to a total stranger.]]>
292 Jeneva Rose Chi 0 3.31 2023 You Shouldn't Have Come Here
author: Jeneva Rose
name: Chi
average rating: 3.31
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/26
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Five Bad Deeds 62792245 A gripping tale of revenge, loyalty, and the secrets hidden between the walls of the most beautiful home in town. Ellen Walsh has done something very, very bad. If only she knew what it was...

Teacher, mother, wife, and all-around good citizen Ellen is juggling nonstop commitments, from raising a teen and two toddlers to job-hunting to finally renovating her dream home, the Meadowhouse. Amidst the chaos, an ominous note arrives in the mail, People have to learn there are consequences, Ellen. And I’m going to teach you that lesson. Right under your nose.

Why would someone send her this? Ellen has no clue. She’s no angel—a white lie here, an occasional sharp tongue there—but nothing to incur the wrath of an anonymous enemy. She’d never intentionally hurt anyone. But intention doesn’t matter to someone. Someone blames this supposed “good person� for all the bad they’ve experienced. And maybe they have reason to? Because few of us get through life without leaving a black mark on someone else’s. Could the five bad deeds that come to haunt Ellen explain why things have gone so horribly wrong?As she races to discover who’s set on destroying her reputation and her future, Ellen continues to receive increasingly threatening messages... each one hitting closer to everything she cherishes.]]>
416 Caz Frear 0063091119 Chi 0 3.36 2023 Five Bad Deeds
author: Caz Frear
name: Chi
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century]]> 51456746
From Harriet McBryde Johnson’s account of her debate with Peter Singer over her own personhood to original pieces by authors like Keah Brown and Haben Girma; from blog posts, manifestos, and eulogies to Congressional testimonies, and beyond: this anthology gives a glimpse into the rich complexity of the disabled experience, highlighting the passions, talents, and everyday lives of this community. It invites readers to question their own understandings. It celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. It looks to the future and the past with hope and love.]]>
309 Alice Wong 1984899422 Chi 0 4.46 2020 Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century
author: Alice Wong
name: Chi
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/10/01
date added: 2024/10/26
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The Weekend Retreat 75339198 Three couples. Three days. A family getaway to die for.

Every year, the illustrious Van Ness siblings—heirs to a copper fortune—gather at their luxury winery estate for a joint birthday celebration. It's a tradition they've followed nearly all their lives, and now they are back with their significant others for a much-needed weekend of rest and relaxation, away from the public spotlight.

With lavish comforts, gorgeous scenery, and indulgent drinking, the trip should be the perfect escape. But it soon becomes clear that even a remote idyllic getaway can’t keep out the problems simmering in each of their lives. As old tensions are reignited, the three couples are pushed to the edge. Will their secrets destroy them, or will they destroy each other first? And who’s been watching them from beyond the vineyard gates?

When a torrential rainstorm hits, plunging them into darkness, the answers prove all too deadly…]]>
350 Tara Laskowski 1525811452 Chi 0 3.39 2023 The Weekend Retreat
author: Tara Laskowski
name: Chi
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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The Bitter Truth 199222233
For Jolene “Jo� Baker, the least she can do for her adoring husband, Dominic, is give unwavering support for his North Carolina gubernatorial run. He is not only the love of her life, he's also helping her prove that she's far more than just a pampered trophy wife. With huge crowds showing up at Dominic’s speeches and the polls consistently in his favor, she's never been happier to stand proudly by his side . . .

Until she and Dominic start seeing the same, strangely ominous woman turning up all along the campaign trail. Until their tour starts becoming a nightmare of botched events, crucial missed information, and increasingly dangerous “accidents.� Suddenly Jo can't get any answers from Dominic—or understand why he is acting so paranoid and terrified . . .

What Jo can do is start digging into his past—one she's never really questioned beyond his perfect image and dazzling accomplishments. What results is an alarming series of events that leave her Good friends turn into enemies, truths are revealed to be lies, and all clues lead back to one secret, shattering weekend that changes Jo’s entire life. With her world splintering into pieces, can Jo risk trying to set things right? Or will hiding the bitter truth by any means necessary destroy her as well?]]>
320 Shanora Williams 1496745825 Chi 0 3.88 2024 The Bitter Truth
author: Shanora Williams
name: Chi
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/10/26
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She Started It 62292419 For fans of Lucy Foley and Liane Moriarty, She Started It is a hot, twisty summer debut thriller about a group of young women whose Caribbean bachelorette party takes a sinister turn. It’s Lord of the Flies meets And Then There Were None...but with Instagram and too much prosecco.

The party of a lifetime is nothing like what they expected...

Annabel, Esther, Tanya, and Chloe are best friends—or were, as children. Despite drifting apart in adulthood, shared secrets have kept them bonded for better or worse, even as their childhood dreams haven’t quite turned out as they’d hoped. Then one day they receive a wholly unexpected—but not entirely unwelcome—invitation from another old friend. Poppy Greer has invited them all to her extravagant bachelorette party: a first-class plane ticket to three days of white sand, cocktails, and relaxation on a luxe private island in the Bahamas.

None of them has spoken to Poppy in years. But Poppy’s Instagram pics shows that the girl they used to consider the weakest link in their group has definitely made good—and made money. Curiosity gets the better of them. Besides, who can turn down a posh all-expenses-paid vacation on a Caribbean island?

The first-class flight and the island’s accommodations are just as opulent as expected...even if the scenic island proves more remote than they’d anticipated. Quite remote, in fact, with no cell service, and no other guests. The women quickly discover they’ve underestimated Poppy, and each other. As their darkest secrets are revealed, the tropical adventure morphs into a terrifying nightmare.

Endlessly twisty, sharply observant, and deliciously catty, She Started It is sure to shock readers until the very end.]]>
352 Sian Gilbert 0063286297 Chi 0 3.56 2023 She Started It
author: Sian Gilbert
name: Chi
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Dark Corners (Rachel Krall, #2)]]> 61884922
When they hit a wall in the investigation, the FBI reluctantly asks for Rachel’s help in finding the missing influencer. Maddison seems only to exist on social media; she has no family, no friends, and other than in her posts, most people have never seen her. Who is she, really? Using a fake Instagram account, Rachel Krall goes undercover to BuzzCon, a popular influencer conference, where she discovers a world of fierce rivalry that may have turned lethal.

When police find the body of a woman with a tattoo of a snake eating its tail, the FBI must consider a chilling possibility: Bailey has an accomplice on the outside and a dangerous obsession with influencers, including Rachel Krell herself. Suddenly a target of a monster hiding in plain sight, Rachel is forced to confront the very real dangers that lurk in the dark corners of the internet.

Rachel Krall, the true crime podcaster star of Megan Goldin’s acclaimed Night Swim returns to search for a popular social media influencer who disappeared after visiting a suspected serial killer.]]>
343 Megan Goldin 1250280680 Chi 0 3.82 2023 Dark Corners (Rachel Krall, #2)
author: Megan Goldin
name: Chi
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/26
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Pretty Girls 25574782
Now another girl has disappeared, with chilling echoes of the past. And it seems that she might not be the only one.

Claire is convinced Julia's disappearance is linked.

But when she begins to learn the truth about her sister, she is confronted with a shocking discovery, and nothing will ever be the same...]]>
432 Karin Slaughter 0062430874 Chi 0 3.99 2015 Pretty Girls
author: Karin Slaughter
name: Chi
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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The Ex 25817395 In this breakout standalone novel of suspense in the vein ofGone GirlԻTheGirl on a Train, a woman agrees to help an old boyfriend who has been framed for murder—but begins to suspect that she is the one being manipulated.

And look for Alafair Burke’s latest heart-racing novel of psychological suspense,The Wife,coming in January 2018.

Twenty years ago she ruined his life. Now she has the chance to save it.

Widower Jack Harris has resisted the dating scene ever since the shooting of his wife Molly by a fifteen-year-old boy three years ago.An early morning run along the Hudson River changes that when he spots a woman in last night’s party dress, barefoot, enjoying a champagne picnic alone, reading his favorite novel. Everything about her reminds him of what he used to have with Molly. Eager to help Jack find love again, his best friend posts a message on a popular website after he mentions the encounter. Days later, that same beautiful stranger responds and invites Jack to meet her in person at the waterfront. That’s when Jack’s world falls apart.

Olivia Randall is one of New York City’s best criminal defense lawyers. When she hears that her former fiancé, Jack Harris, has been arrested for a triple homicide—and that one of the victims was connected to his wife’s murder—there is no doubt in her mind as to his innocence. The only question is who would go to such great lengths to frame him—and why?

For Olivia, representing Jack is a way to make up for past regrets, to absolve herself of guilt from a tragic decision, a secret she has held for twenty years. But as the evidence against him mounts, she is forced to confront her doubts. The man she knew could not have done this.But what if she never really knew him?]]>
304 Alafair Burke 0062390481 Chi 0 3.68 2016 The Ex
author: Alafair Burke
name: Chi
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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