Nikki's bookshelf: all en-US Sat, 26 Apr 2025 21:08:34 -0700 60 Nikki's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Secret Life of Bees 37435 The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina--a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.]]> 302 Sue Monk Kidd 0142001740 Nikki 0 currently-reading 4.10 2001 The Secret Life of Bees
author: Sue Monk Kidd
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/26
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Before Dorothy 219301734 Long before Dorothy visits Oz, her aunt, Emily Gale, sets off on her own grand adventure, leaving gritty Chicago behind for Kansas and a life that will utterly change her, in this transporting new novel from New York Times bestselling author Hazel Gaynor.

Chicago, 1924: Emily Gale and her new husband, Henry, yearn to leave the bustle of Chicago behind for the promise of their own American dream. But leaving the city means leaving Emily’s beloved sister, Annie, who was once closer to her than anyone in the world.

Kansas, 1932: Emily and Henry have made a life in the warmth of the community of Liberal, Kansas, and among the harsh beauty of the prairie. Their lives hold a precarious and hopeful purpose, until tragedy strikes and their orphaned niece, Dorothy, lands on their doorstep.

The wide-eyed child isn’t the only thing to disrupt Emily’s world. Drought and devastating dust storms threaten to destroy everything, and their much-loved home becomes a place of uncertainty and danger. When the past catches up with the present and old secrets are exposed, Emily fears she will lose the most cherished thing of Dorothy.

Bursting with courage and heart, Before Dorothy tells the story of the woman who raised a beloved heroine, and ponders the what is the true meaning of home?]]> 368 Hazel Gaynor 0593440331 Nikki 0 to-read 4.59 Before Dorothy
author: Hazel Gaynor
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.59
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Unmaking of June Farrow 100183621
In the small mountain town of Jasper, North Carolina, June Farrow is waiting for fate to find her. The Farrow women are known for their thriving flower farm - and the mysterious curse that has plagued their family line. The whole town remembers the madness that led to Susanna Farrow's disappearance, leaving June to be raised by her grandmother and haunted by rumors.

It's been a year since June started seeing and hearing things that weren't there. Faint wind chimes, a voice calling her name, and a mysterious door appearing out of nowhere - the signs of what June always knew was coming. But June is determined to end the curse once and for all, even if she must sacrifice finding love and having a family of her own.

After her grandmother's death, June discovers a series of cryptic clues regarding her mother's decades-old disappearance, except they only lead to more questions. But could the door she once assumed was a hallucination be the answer she's been searching for? The next time it appears, June realizes she can touch it and walk past the threshold. And when she does, she embarks on a journey that will not only change both the past and the future, but also uncover the lingering mysteries of her small town and entangle her heart in an epic star-crossed love.

With The Unmaking of June Farrow, Adrienne Young delivers a brilliant novel of romance, mystery, and a touch of the impossible--a story you will never forget.]]> 321 Adrienne Young 0593598687 Nikki 3 4.24 2023 The Unmaking of June Farrow
author: Adrienne Young
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/23
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves:
review:

]]> All That Life Can Afford 228418244 Listening Length: 11 hours and 2 minutes

A taut and lyrical coming-of-age debut about a young American woman navigating class, lies, and love amid London’s jet-set elite.

I would arrive, blank like a sheet of notebook paper, and write myself new.

Anna first fell in love with London at her hometown library—its Jane Austen balls a far cry from her life of food stamps and hand-me-downs. But when she finally arrives after college, the real London is a moldy flat and the same paycheck-to-paycheck grind—that fairy-tale life still out of reach.

Then Anna meets the Wilders, who fly her to Saint-Tropez to tutor their teenage daughter. Swept up by the sphinxlike elder sister, Anna soon finds herself plunged into a heady whirlpool of parties and excess, a place where confidence is a birthright. There she meets two handsome young men—one who wants to whisk her into his world in a chauffeured car, the other who sees through Anna’s struggle to outrun her past. It’s like she’s stepped into the pages of a glittering new novel, but what will it cost her to play the part?

Sparkling with intelligence and insight, All That Life Can Afford peels back the glossy layers of class and privilege, exploring what it means to create a new life for yourself that still honors the one you’ve left behind.]]> Emily Everett Nikki 4 3.67 2025 All That Life Can Afford
author: Emily Everett
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/23
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Rabbit Moon 217182494 A family drama set in Shanghai, where a fractured American family faces its complicated past

Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared for: Their twenty-two-year-old daughter Lindsey, teaching English in China during a college gap year, has been critically injured in a hit-and-run accident. At a Shanghai hospital they wait at her bedside, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.

The accident unearths a deeper fissure in the family: the shocking event that ended the Litvaks� marriage and turned Lindsey against them. Estranged from her parents, she has confided only in her younger sister, Grace, adopted as an infant from China. As Claire and Aaron struggle to get their bearings in bustling, cosmopolitan Shanghai, the newly prosperous “miracle city,� they face troubling questions about Lindsey’s life there, in which nothing is as it seems.]]> 288 Jennifer Haigh 0316577138 Nikki 0 3.84 Rabbit Moon
author: Jennifer Haigh
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.84
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves: currently-reading, book-club, arc-copy
review:

]]> The River Has Roots 211004176 Follow the river Liss to the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, and meet two sisters who cannot be separated, even in death.

“Oh what is stronger than a death? Two sisters singing with one breath.�

In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family.

There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees.

But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters� bond but also their lives will be at risk…]]> 133 Amal El-Mohtar 1250341086 Nikki 4 arc-copy 4.19 2025 The River Has Roots
author: Amal El-Mohtar
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/22
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves: arc-copy
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Tempest of Tea (Blood and Tea, #1)]]> 59406549 Why save the world when you can have tea?

On the streets of White Roaring, Arthie Casimir is a criminal mastermind and collector of secrets. Her prestigious tearoom transforms into an illegal bloodhouse by dark, catering to the vampires feared by society. But when her establishment is threatened, Arthie is forced to strike an unlikely deal with an alluring adversary to save it—and she can’t do the job alone.

Calling on some of the city's most skilled outcasts, Arthie hatches a plan to infiltrate the sinister, glittering vampire society known as the Athereum. But not everyone in her ragtag crew is on her side, and as the truth behind the heist unfolds, Arthie finds herself in the midst of a conspiracy that will threaten the world as she knows it.

From the New York Times—bestselling author of We Hunt the Flame comes the first book in a hotly anticipated fantasy duology teeming with romance and revenge, led by an orphan girl willing to do whatever it takes to save her self-made kingdom. Dark, action-packed, and swoonworthy, this is Hafsah Faizal better than ever.]]> 338 Hafsah Faizal 0374389403 Nikki 3 3.49 2024 A Tempest of Tea (Blood and Tea, #1)
author: Hafsah Faizal
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/04/15
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves:
review:

]]> Fahrenheit 451 28502000 Nearly seventy years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.� But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.]]> 249 Ray Bradbury 1451673310 Nikki 5 book-club, banned-book-club 3.91 1953 Fahrenheit 451
author: Ray Bradbury
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1953
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/08
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: book-club, banned-book-club
review:

]]> Blood Over Bright Haven 208430658 Magic has made the city of Tiran an industrial utopia, but magic has a cost—and the collectors have come calling.

An orphan since the age of four, Sciona has always had more to prove than her fellow students. For twenty years, she has devoted every waking moment to the study of magic, fueled by a mad desire to achieve the impossible: to be the first woman ever admitted to the High Magistry. When she finally claws her way up the ranks to become a highmage, however, she finds that her challenges have just begun. Her new colleagues will stop at nothing to let her know she is unwelcome, beginning with giving her a janitor instead of a qualified lab assistant.

What neither Sciona nor her peers realize is that her taciturn assistant was once more than a janitor; before he mopped floors for the mages, Thomil was a nomadic hunter from beyond Tiran’s magical barrier. Ten years have passed since he survived the perilous crossing that killed his family. But working for a highmage, he sees the opportunity to finally understand the forces that decimated his tribe, drove him from his homeland, and keep the Tiranish in power.

Through their fractious relationship, mage and outsider uncover an ancient secret that could change the course of magic forever—if it doesn’t get them killed first. Sciona has defined her life by the pursuit of truth, but how much is one truth worth with the fate of civilization in the balance?

A standalone dark academia brimming with mystery, tragedy, and the damning echoes of the past. For fans of Leigh Bardugo, V. E. Schwab, and Fullmetal Alchemist.

(Content warnings for gore, sexual assault, and suicidal ideation)]]> 430 M.L. Wang 0593873351 Nikki 0 to-read 4.40 2023 Blood Over Bright Haven
author: M.L. Wang
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Wild Reverence 222376906
Ten years ago, Vincent of Beckett wrote to Matilda on the darkest night of his life―begging the goddess he befriended in dreams to help him. When his request went unanswered, Vincent moved on, becoming the hardened, irreverent lord of the river who has long forgotten Matilda. That is, until she comes tumbling into his bedroom window with a letter for him.

As Fate would have it, Matilda and Vincent were destined to find each other beyond dreams. There may be a chance for Matilda to rewrite the blood-soaked ways of the gods, but at immense sacrifice. She will have to face something she fears even more than losing her magic: to be vulnerable, and to allow herself to finally be loved.]]> 544 Rebecca Ross 1250373352 Nikki 0 to-read 4.67 2025 Wild Reverence
author: Rebecca Ross
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.67
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Persuasion: An Audible Original Drama]]> 62195246
Directed by Emma Hearn. With Annabel Baldwin, Michael Fox, Julian Wadham, Laure Stockley, Lizzie Stables, Oscar Batterham, Ewan Bailey, Samantha BĂ©art, Andrew Wheildon-Dennis, Al Weaver, Tom Andrew, Molly Harris, Martha Mackintosh, Vineeta Rishi, Isabel Adomakoh Young and Sophie Aldred.]]> 6 Jane Austen Nikki 5 4.08 1817 Persuasion: An Audible Original Drama
author: Jane Austen
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1817
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/29
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves:
review:
loved it. that is all. Florence Pugh you were amazing and kudos to your fabulous ensemble.
]]> Broken Country 214151202 “The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.�

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

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

A sweeping love story with the pace and twists of a thriller, Broken Country is a novel of simmering passion, impossible choices, and explosive consequences that toggles between the past and present to explore the far-reaching legacy of first love.]]> 320 Clare Leslie Hall 166807818X Nikki 3 book-club 4.42 2025 Broken Country
author: Clare Leslie Hall
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/27
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: book-club
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Boleyn Traitor (The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels, #11)]]> 220235413 From the author of The Other Boleyn Girl, legendary historical novelist Philippa Gregory returns to the court of Henry VIII with this dazzling and provocative tour de force about the high cost of loyalty, love, and betrayal.

Sister. Liar. Spy. Traitor.

Her secrets shaped a kingdom.

Her loyalty was deadly.

Jane Boleyn watches from the shadows of the Tudor court, where nothing is more powerful than a secret. And power rests on the edge of a tyrant King’s sword.

She wears many masks � loving wife, devoted sister, and obedient spy. It’s what a woman must do to survive.

The only weapon she has is her voice.

They say Jane’s whispers sealed the fate of two queens. They called her a liar and a traitor.

But the truth is far more dangerous�

Philippa Gregory brings the Boleyn traitor out of the shadows in an explosive story of one woman’s survival in the deadly dance of the Tudor Court.]]> 480 Philippa Gregory 0063439689 Nikki 0 to-read 4.78 Boleyn Traitor (The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels, #11)
author: Philippa Gregory
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.78
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Katabasis 210191773 Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own.

Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality—her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world—that is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.

Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion.]]> 560 R.F. Kuang 0063021471 Nikki 0 to-read 4.27 2025 Katabasis
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Favorites 223164553 To the world, they were a scandal. To each other, an obsession.

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

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

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

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

As the ten-year anniversary of their final skate approaches, an unauthorized documentary reignites the public obsession with Shaw and Rocha, claiming to uncover the “real story� through interviews with their closest friends and fiercest rivals. Kat wants nothing to do with the documentary, but she can’t stand the thought of someone else defining her legacy. So, after a decade of silence, she’s telling her story: from the childhood tragedies that created her all-consuming bond with Heath to the clash of desires that tore them apart. Sensational rumors have haunted their every step for years, but the truth may be even more shocking than the headlines.]]> Layne Fargo Nikki 4 If that sounds like a lot ....it is... and its wonderful! Katerina and Heath your story still lingers in my mind, as I'm sure it will for a long time. This book is solid gold. Read it !]]> 4.19 2025 The Favorites
author: Layne Fargo
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/18
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves:
review:
4.5 stars for The Favorites by Layne Fargo. My favorite new release so far in 2025! This book hits on so many levels. Its Daisy Jones meets Carrie Soto on Ice with a more than a dash of Wuthering Heights.
If that sounds like a lot ....it is... and its wonderful! Katerina and Heath your story still lingers in my mind, as I'm sure it will for a long time. This book is solid gold. Read it !
]]> The Alice Network 40004610
1947. In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive. So when Charlie's parents banish her to Europe to have her "little problem" taken care of, Charlie breaks free and heads to London, determined to find out what happened to the cousin she loves like a sister.

1915. A year into the Great War, Eve Gardiner burns to join the fight against the Germans and unexpectedly gets her chance when she's recruited to work as a spy. Sent into enemy-occupied France, she's trained by the mesmerizing Lili, code name Alice, the "queen of spies", who manages a vast network of secret agents right under the enemy's nose.

Thirty years later, haunted by the betrayal that ultimately tore apart the Alice Network, Eve spends her days drunk and secluded in her crumbling London house. Until a young American barges in uttering a name Eve hasn't heard in decades, and launches them both on a mission to find the truth...no matter where it leads.]]> 564 Kate Quinn Nikki 4 4.47 2017 The Alice Network
author: Kate Quinn
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves:
review:

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

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

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

With time ticking down, Junie begins to push against the harsh current that has controlled her entire life. As she grapples with an increasingly unfamiliar world in which she has little control, she is forced to ask herself: When we choose love and liberation, what must we leave behind?]]> 368 Erin Crosby Eckstine 0593725115 Nikki 4 4.21 2025 Junie
author: Erin Crosby Eckstine
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves:
review:

]]> Annie Bot 215989058
She’s learning, too.

Doug says he loves that Annie’s artificial intelligence makes her seem more like a real woman, but the more human Annie becomes, the less perfectly she behaves. As Annie's relationship with Doug grows more intricate and difficult, she starts to wonder whether Doug truly desires what he says he does. In such an impossible paradox, what does Annie owe herself?]]> 240 Sierra Greer 0063312700 Nikki 0 to-read 3.91 2024 Annie Bot
author: Sierra Greer
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> This Is a Love Story 216426697 An intimate and lyrical celebration of great love, great art, and the sacrifices we make for both

For fifty years Abe and Jane have been coming to Central Park, as starry-eyed young lovers, as frustrated and exhausted parents, as artists watching their careers take flight. They came alone when they needed to get away from each other, and together when they had something important to discuss. The Park has been their witness for half a century of love. Until now.

Jane is dying, and Abe is recounting their life together as a way of keeping them going: the parts they knew—their courtship and early marriage, their blossoming creative lives—and the parts they didn’t always want to know—the determined young student of Abe’s looking for a love story of her own, and their son, Max, who believes his mother chose art over parenthood and who has avoided love and intimacy at all costs. Told in various points of view, even in conversation with Central Park itself, these voices weave in and out to paint a portrait as complicated and essential as love itself.]]> 304 Jessica Soffer 0593851269 Nikki 3 book-club, arc-copy 3.21 This Is a Love Story
author: Jessica Soffer
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.21
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/27
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: book-club, arc-copy
review:
3.5 stars for a beautifully written book? about a New York couple and their complicated relationships with each other, with their art, with life, loss and with New York itself. I say book ? because it felt like a poem most times written in second person. The descriptions of these people made them incredibly real, although for me, except one, generally unlikable. They are flawed, but selfish, and hard to root for. But that may be the point. Central Park may actually be one of the stars of the book as well, and as a New Yorker, it's easy to see the joy in those pages.
]]> Mad Honey 60214567 464 Jodi Picoult 1984818392 Nikki 4 4.20 2022 Mad Honey
author: Jodi Picoult
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands (Emily Wilde, #2)]]> 87177197
Emily Wilde is a genius scholar of faerie folklore—she just wrote the world’s first comprehensive of encylopaedia of faeries. She’s learned many of the secrets of the Hidden Folk on her adventures . . . and also from her fellow scholar and former rival, Wendell Bambleby.

Because Bambleby is more than infuriatingly charming. He’s an exiled faerie king on the run from his murderous mother, and in search of a door back to his realm. So despite Emily’s feelings for Bambleby, she’s not ready to accept his proposal of marriage: Loving one of the Fair Folk comes with secrets and danger.

And she also has a new project to focus a map of the realms of faerie. While she is preparing her research, Bambleby lands her in trouble yet again, when assassins sent by Bambleby’s mother invade Cambridge. Now Bambleby and Emily are on another adventure, this time to the picturesque Austrian Alps, where Emily believes they may find the door to Bambley’s realm, and the key to freeing him from his family’s dark plans.

But with new relationships for the prickly Emily to navigate and dangerous Folk lurking in every forest and hollow, Emily must unravel the mysterious workings of faerie doors, and of her own heart.]]> 352 Heather Fawcett 0356519155 Nikki 4 4.29 2024 Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands (Emily Wilde, #2)
author: Heather Fawcett
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/11
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Emma 41734863
Before she began writing, Jane Austen wrote, 'I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like' and thus introduces the handsome, clever, rich - and flawed - Emma Woodhouse. Emma is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage; nothing, however, delights her more than matchmaking her fellow residents of Highbury. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protegee Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected.

This lively comedy of manners, with its witty and subtle exploration of relationships, is often seen as Jane Austen's masterpiece.

Public Domain (P)2018 Audible, Ltd.]]> 8 Jane Austen Nikki 5 4.10 2018 Emma
author: Jane Austen
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/06
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves:
review:
My favorite Jane Austen in a wonderful adaptation.
]]> Great Big Beautiful Life 218559595 Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a couple of plot twists up her sleeve in this dazzling and sweeping new novel from Emily Henry.

Alice Scott is an eternal optimist still dreaming of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer-prize winning human thundercloud. And they’re both on balmy Little Crescent Island for the same reason: To write the biography of a woman no one has seen in years--or at least to meet with the octogenarian who claims to be the Margaret Ives. Tragic heiress, former tabloid princess, and daughter of one of the most storied (and scandalous) families of the 20th Century.

When Margaret invites them both for a one-month trial period, after which she’ll choose the person who’ll tell her story, there are three things keeping Alice’s head in the game.

One: Alice genuinely likes people, which means people usually like Alice—and she has a whole month to win the legendary woman over.

Two: She’s ready for this job and the chance to impress her perennially unimpressed family with a Serious Publication

Three: Hayden Anderson, who should have no reason to be concerned about losing this book, is glowering at her in a shaken-to-the core way that suggests he sees her as competition.

But the problem is, Margaret is only giving each of them pieces of her story. Pieces they can’t swap to put together because of an ironclad NDA and an inconvenient yearning pulsing between them every time they’re in the same room.

And it’s becoming abundantly clear that their story—just like the tale Margaret’s spinning—could be a mystery, tragedy, or love ballad…depending on who’s telling it.]]> 432 Emily Henry Nikki 0 to-read 4.22 2025 Great Big Beautiful Life
author: Emily Henry
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Isola 212806636 A young woman and her lover are marooned on an island in this epic saga of love, faith, and defiance from the bestselling author of Sam.

Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian—an enigmatic and volatile man—spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. Isolated and afraid, Marguerite befriends her guardian’s servant and the two develop an intense attraction. But when their relationship is discovered, they are brutally punished and abandoned on a small island with no hope for rescue.

Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she’d never before needed.

Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.]]> 368 Allegra Goodman 0593730089 Nikki 0 to-read 4.00 2025 Isola
author: Allegra Goodman
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Beautiful Ugly 213911704 Listening Length: 9 hours and 45 minutes

The million-copy bestselling Queen of Twists Alice Feeney returns with a gripping and deliciously dark thriller about marriage. . .
. . . and revenge.

Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life.

Grady calls his wife to share some exciting news as she is driving home. He hears Abby slam on the brakes, get out of the car, then nothing. When he eventually finds her car by the cliff edge the headlights are on, the driver door is open, her phone is still there. . . but his wife has disappeared.

A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can’t sleep, and he can’t write, so he travels to a tiny Scottish island to try to get his life back on track. Then he sees the impossible � a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife.

Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t.
Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.]]> 10 Alice Feeney Nikki 4 3.89 2025 Beautiful Ugly
author: Alice Feeney
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/30
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Lady Awakened (Blackshear Family, #1)]]> 11938752
Theophilus Mirkwood ought to be insulted. Should be appalled. But how can he resist this siren in widow’s weeds, whose offer is simply too outrageously tempting to decline? Determined she’ll get her money’s worth, Theo endeavors to awaken this shamefully neglected beauty to the pleasures of the flesh—only to find her dead set against taking any enjoyment in the scandalous bargain. Surely she can’t resist him forever. But could a lady’s sweet surrender open their hearts to the most unexpected arrival of all . . . love?]]> 346 Cecilia Grant 0553593838 Nikki 4 first-reads 3.68 2011 A Lady Awakened (Blackshear Family, #1)
author: Cecilia Grant
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2011/12/09
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves: first-reads
review:
I really enjoyed this "Austenesque" romance for its newly widowed heroine Martha Russell and her rogueish love interest Theo Mirkwood, two polar opposites brought together by fate and curcumstances into an agreement of a most delicate and illicit nature. This arrangement awakens each of them, in different ways and their passion although slow to start, much like Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, is worth the wait. I thought the author did a fine job of balancing an interesting romance with some steamy love scenes, while still recreating a vivid time period with wonderful use of the language, and focusing on womens rights and issues of women as landowners. Kudos to Cecilia Grant on a fine debut...I will definetely read whatever she writes next.
]]> Enslaved Enslaved 7041790 448 Virginia Henley 0307567478 Nikki 3 3.10 1996 Enslaved Enslaved
author: Virginia Henley
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.10
book published: 1996
rating: 3
read at: 2012/08/19
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves:
review:
I enjoyed this bit of brain candy, All my fellow Borders buddies said read it and I was in the mood for a bit of adult fun. If you don't want to think too much and you are looking for a sexy time traveling romp to Ancient Rome, Marcus is worth the trouble.
]]> Liesl & Po 10425811 That same night, an alchemist's apprentice, Will, bungles an important delivery. He accidentally switches a box containing the most powerful magic in the world with one containing something decidedly less remarkable.

Will's mistake has tremendous consequences for Liesl and Po, and it draws the three of them together on an extraordinary journey.

From New York Times bestselling author Lauren Oliver comes a luminous and magnificent novel that glows with rare magic, ghostly wonders, and a true friendship that lights even the darkest of places.

]]> 313 Lauren Oliver 006201451X Nikki 4 "The Other Side" still interested in the living, is not for every child. Interesting examination of death and the "afterlife" for middle graders. I think its more of a 3.5 stars for me, but I did enjoy the challenges posed by the darker characters and the way friendship is valued in all forms. Also the illustrations are wonderful!!!]]> 3.85 2011 Liesl & Po
author: Lauren Oliver
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2013/05/29
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves:
review:
The story of Liesl, a captive mortal girl seeking to bury her father, and Po, a ghost from
"The Other Side" still interested in the living, is not for every child. Interesting examination of death and the "afterlife" for middle graders. I think its more of a 3.5 stars for me, but I did enjoy the challenges posed by the darker characters and the way friendship is valued in all forms. Also the illustrations are wonderful!!!
]]> <![CDATA[The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus]]> 216247502
Arriving at the University of Edinburgh for her first term, Pen knows her divorced parents back in Canada are hiding something from her. She believes she’ll find the answer here in Scotland, where an old friend of her father’s—now a famous writer known as Lord Lennox—lives. When she is invited to spend the weekend at Lord Lennox’s centuries-old estate with his enveloping, fascinating family, Pen begins to unravel her parents� secret, just as she’s falling in love for the first time . . .

As Pen experiences the sharp shock of adulthood, she comes to rely on herself for the first time in her life. A rich and rewarding novel of campus life, of sexual awakening, and ultimately, of the many ways women can become mothers in this world, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus asks to what extent we need to look back in order to move forward.]]> 384 Emma Knight 0593830458 Nikki 3 book-club, arc-copy 3.40 The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus
author: Emma Knight
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.40
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/24
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: book-club, arc-copy
review:

]]> Martyr! 152505241 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 11 Kaveh Akbar 0593824563 Nikki 4 4.08 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves:
review:

]]> All the Bright Places 59354756 The Fault in Our Stars meets Eleanor and Park in this exhilarating and heart-wrenching love story about a girl who learns to live from a boy who intends to die.

Theodore Finch is fascinated by death, and he constantly thinks of ways he might kill himself. But each time, something good, no matter how small, stops him.
Ěý
Violet Markey lives for the future, counting the days until graduation, when she can escape her Indiana town and her aching grief in the wake of her sister’s recent death.
Ěý
When Finch and Violet meet on the ledge of the bell tower at school, it’s unclear who saves whom. And when they pair up on a project to discover the “natural wonders� of their state, both Finch and Violet make more important discoveries: It’s only with Violet that Finch can be himself—a weird, funny, live-out-loud guy who’s not such a freak after all. And it’s only with Finch that Violet can forget to count away the days and start living them. But as Violet’s world grows, Finch’s begins to shrink.
Ěý
This is an intense, gripping novel perfect for fans of Jay Asher, Rainbow Rowell, John Green, Gayle Forman, and Jenny Downham from a talented new voice in YA, Jennifer Niven.]]> 391 Jennifer Niven Nikki 4 books-girls 4.10 2015 All the Bright Places
author: Jennifer Niven
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/10
date added: 2025/01/10
shelves: books-girls
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Pillars of the Earth (Kingsbridge, #1)]]> 34518659

Ken Follett is known worldwide as the master of split-second suspense, but his most beloved and bestselling book tells the magnificent tale of a twelfth-century monk driven to do the seemingly impossible: build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has ever known.
Everything readers expect from Follett is here: intrigue, fast-paced action, and passionate romance. But what makes The Pillars of the Earth extraordinary is the time the twelfth century; the place feudal England; and the subject the building of a glorious cathedral. Follett has re-created the crude, flamboyant England of the Middle Ages in every detail. The vast forests, the walled towns, the castles, and the monasteries become a familiar landscape. Against this richly imagined and intricately interwoven backdrop, filled with the ravages of war and the rhythms of daily life, the master storyteller draws the reader irresistibly into the intertwined lives of his characters into their dreams, their labors, and their loves: Tom, the master builder; Aliena, the ravishingly beautiful noblewoman; Philip, the prior of Kingsbridge; Jack, the artist in stone; and Ellen, the woman of the forest who casts a terrifying curse. From humble stonemason to imperious monarch, each character is brought vividly to life.

The building of the cathedral, with the almost eerie artistry of the unschooled stonemasons, is the center of the drama. Around the site of the construction, Follett weaves a story of betrayal, revenge, and love, which begins with the public hanging of an innocent man and ends with the humiliation of a king.

"At once a sensuous and endearing love story and an epic that shines with the fierce spirit of a passionate age, The Pillars of the Earth is without a doubt Ken Follett's masterpiece."

]]> 1008 Ken Follett Nikki 0 currently-reading 4.19 1989 The Pillars of the Earth (Kingsbridge, #1)
author: Ken Follett
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1989
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> I Was Anastasia 33998348 333 Ariel Lawhon 0385541694 Nikki 0 to-read 3.72 2018 I Was Anastasia
author: Ariel Lawhon
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]]> 10727860 254 Mark Twain Nikki 3 book-club 3.09 1884 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
author: Mark Twain
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.09
book published: 1884
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: book-club
review:

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

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

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

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780385550369.]]> 303 Percival Everett Nikki 4 book-club 4.46 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: book-club
review:

]]> The Amalfi Curse 218674082 “Sarah Penner transported me to the sea-swept cliffs of Positano and introduced me to characters I’ll never forget. A magical read!�
â€�Emilia Hart,ĚýNew York TimesĚýbestselling author of The Sirens

Powerful witchcraft. A hunt for sunken treasure. Forbidden love on the high seas. Beware the Amalfi Curse�

Haven Ambrose, a trailblazing nautical archaeologist, has come to the sun-soaked village of Positano to investigate the mysterious shipwrecks along the Amalfi Coast. But Haven is hoping to find more than old artifacts beneath the azure waters; she is secretly on a quest to locate a trove of priceless gemstones her late father spotted on his final dive. Upon Haven’s arrival, strange maelstroms and misfortunes start plaguing the town. Is it nature or something more sinister at work?

As Haven searches for her father’s sunken treasure, she begins to unearth a centuries-old tale of ancient sorcery and one woman’s quest to save her lover and her village by using the legendary art ofĚýstregheria, a magical ability to harness the ocean. Could this magic be behind Positano’s latest calamities? Haven must unravel the Amalfi Curse before the region is destroyed foreverâ€�

Against the dazzling backdrop of the Amalfi Coast, this bewitching novel shimmers with mystery, romance and the untamed magic of the sea.
Ěý]]> 336 Sarah Penner 0778308006 Nikki 0 to-read 4.26 2025 The Amalfi Curse
author: Sarah Penner
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Mickey7 (Mickey7, #1) 212900322 Now experience where the hit movie from Academy Award-winning director Bong Joon-ho, starring Robert Pattinson, started in Mickey7 (the inspiration for the film Mickey 17).

Dying isn’t any fun…but at least it’s a living.

Mickey7 is an Expendable: a disposable employee on a human expedition sent to colonize the ice world Niflheim. Whenever there’s a mission that’s too dangerous—even suicidal—the crew turns to Mickey. After one iteration dies, a new body is regenerated with most of his memories intact. After six deaths, Mickey7 understands the terms of his deal…and why it was the only colonial position unfilled when he took it.

On a fairly routine scouting mission, Mickey7 goes missing and is presumed dead. By the time he returns to the colony base, surprisingly helped back by native life, Mickey7’s fate has been sealed. There’s a new clone, Mickey8, reporting for Expendable duties. The idea of duplicate Expendables is universally loathed, and if caught, they will likely be thrown into the recycler for protein.

Mickey7 must keep his double a secret from the rest of the colony. Meanwhile, life on Niflheim is getting worse. The atmosphere is unsuitable for humans, food is in short supply, and terraforming is going poorly. The native species are growing curious about their new neighbors, and that curiosity has Commander Marshall very afraid. Ultimately, the survival of both lifeforms will come down to Mickey7.

That is, if he can just keep from dying for good.]]> 320 Edward Ashton 1250385407 Nikki 0 to-read 3.74 2022 Mickey7 (Mickey7, #1)
author: Edward Ashton
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Atmosphere 220817728 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six comes an epic new novel set against the backdrop of the 1980s Space Shuttle program about the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits.

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s Space Shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easy-going even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.

As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.

Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes in an instant.

Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, with complex protagonists, telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love, this time among the stars.]]> 352 Taylor Jenkins Reid 0593158717 Nikki 0 to-read 4.45 2025 Atmosphere
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Wild Dark Shore 211004089
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place.

Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.]]> 303 Charlotte McConaghy 1250827957 Nikki 0 to-read 4.28 2025 Wild Dark Shore
author: Charlotte McConaghy
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Curse Carved in Bone (Saga of the Unfated, #2)]]> 216602917 A shield maiden fights to break the shackles of prophecy—and to overcome the betrayal of the man who broke her heart—in this searing conclusion to the Norse-inspired fantasy romance duology that began with the bestselling A Fate Inked in Blood.

The secret of her divine heritage revealed, Freya finds herself on a path that will see thousands of lives lost to the magic in her blood. Desperate to avoid this dark fate, she risks an alliance with Skaland’s greatest enemy to seek answers from the seer who foretold her future—the same seer who sent Bjorn to kill her.

While Freya still seethes with rage over Bjorn’s betrayal, the blood oaths that bind her demand that she keep him close as she hunts for a way to avert the looming war. Her magic draws her to the front lines of an old enmity, embroiling her with Nordeland’s Unfated—children of the gods who serve the king she was raised to fear. The same king who, unlike Bjorn, is now willing to fight at her back. For despite the desire that burns hot between Bjorn and Freya, his growing distrust of her chosen path threatens to drag them further apart.

As war approaches, gods and mortals must choose their weapons. Yet the fiercest battle will be the one Freya wages within herself. With the magic of two goddesses burning in her veins, she must weave the threads of destiny to decide her own fate: Will she be the shield that protects her people or the curse that destroys them?]]> 416 Danielle L. Jensen 0593599861 Nikki 0 to-read 4.27 2025 A Curse Carved in Bone (Saga of the Unfated, #2)
author: Danielle L. Jensen
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Moon Sister (Seven Sisters, #5)]]> 51132501 From New York Times bestselling author Lucinda Riley, The Moon Sister transports you to the grandeur of the remote Scottish Highlands and the gypsy caves of Granada, just as Spain descends into civil war, interweaving the stories of two women searching for their destinies, at the risk of potentially losing their chance at love.

Tiggy D’Aplièse spends her days experiencing the raw beauty of the Scottish Highlands doing a job she loves at a deer sanctuary. But when the sanctuary is forced to close, she is offered a job as a wildlife consultant on the vast and isolated estate of the elusive and troubled laird, Charlie Kinnaird. She has no idea that the move will not only irrevocably alter her future, but also bring her face-to-face with her past.

At the estate, she meets Chilly, a gypsy who fled from Spain seventy years before. He tells her that not only does she possess a sixth sense passed down from her ancestors, but it was foretold long ago that he would be the one to send her back home�

In 1912, in the poor gypsy community outside the city walls of Granada, Lucía Amaya-Albaycin is born. Destined to be the greatest flamenco dancer of her generation—and named La Candela, due to the inner flame that burns through her when she dances� Lucía is whisked away by her ambitious and talented guitarist father at the tender age of ten to dance in the flamenco bars of Barcelona. Her mother is devastated by the loss of her daughter and as civil war threatens in Spain, tragedy strikes the rest of her family. Now in Madrid, Lucía and her troupe of dancers are forced to flee for their lives, their journey taking them far across the water to South America and eventually, to North America and New York—Lucía’s long-held dream. But to pursue it, she must choose between her passion for her career and the man she adores. The Moon Sister follows these two women on their journey to discover their true futures—but at the risk of potentially losing the men they had hoped to build futures with.

RUNNING TIME � 19hrs. and 53mins.

©2018 Lucinda Riley (P)2018 W.F. Howes Ltd]]> Lucinda Riley Nikki 4 3.80 2018 The Moon Sister (Seven Sisters, #5)
author: Lucinda Riley
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/11
date added: 2024/12/13
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits]]> 215768414
On the brink of adulthood in the early 2000s, destiny intervened, catapulting the sisters into the spotlight as the pop sensation the Griffin Sisters, hitting all the touchstones of early aughts fame—SNL, MTV, Rolling Stone magazine—along the way.

But after a whirlwind year in the public eye, the band abruptly broke up.

Two decades later, Zoe’s a housewife; Cassie’s off the grid. The sisters aren’t speaking, and the real reason for the Griffin Sisters� breakup is still a mystery. Zoe’s teenage daughter, Cherry, who’s determined to be a star in spite of Zoe’s warnings, is on a quest to learn the truth about what happened to the band all those years ago.

As secrets emerge, all three women must face the consequences of their choices: the ones they made and the ones the music industry made for them. Can they forgive each other—and themselves? And will the Griffin Sisters ever make music again?]]> 384 Jennifer Weiner 0063342448 Nikki 0 to-read 3.93 2025 The Griffin Sisters' Greatest Hits
author: Jennifer Weiner
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Like Mother, Like Mother 203164564
Detroit, 1960. Lila Pereira is two years old when her angry, abusive father has her mother committed to an asylum. Lila never sees her mother again. Three decades later, having mustered everything she has—brains, charm, talent, blond hair—Lila rises to the pinnacle of American media as the powerful, brilliant executive editor of The Washington Globe. Lila unapologetically prioritizes her career, leaving the rearing of her daughters to her generous husband, Joe. He doesn’t mind—until he does.

But Grace, their youngest daughter, feels abandoned. She wishes her mother would attend PTA meetings, not White House correspondents� dinners. As she grows up, she cannot shake her resentment. She wants out from under Lila’s shadow, yet the more she resists, the more Lila seems to shape her life. Grace becomes a successful reporter, even publishing a bestselling book about her mother. In the process of writing it, she realizes how little she knows about her own family. Did Lila’s mother, Grace’s grandmother, die in that asylum? Is refusal to look back the only way to create a future? How can you ever be yourself, Grace wonders, if you don’t know where you came from?

Spanning generations, and populated by complex, unforgettable characters, Like Mother, Like Mother is an exhilarating, portrait of family, marriage, ambition, power, the stories we inherit, and the lies we tell to become the people we believe we’re meant to be.]]> 336 Susan Rieger 0525512497 Nikki 3 book-club 3.76 2024 Like Mother, Like Mother
author: Susan Rieger
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/02
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: book-club
review:

]]> The Berry Pickers 123036004 A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a tragic mystery that haunts the survivors, unravels a community, and remains unsolved for nearly fifty years.

July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.

For readers of The Vanishing Half and Woman of Light, this showstopping debut by a vibrant new voice in fiction is a riveting novel about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time.]]> 307 Amanda Peters 1646221958 Nikki 4 4.04 2023 The Berry Pickers
author: Amanda Peters
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/02
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves:
review:

]]> Mansfield Park 1410527
Mansfield Park is a study of three families--the Bertrams, the Crawfords, and the Prices--with the isolated figure of the heroine, Fanny Price, as its centre. Fanny's quiet passivity, her steadfast loyalty, and love for the son of the family who regard her as the poor relation, and who have taken her under their roof, are among qualities whose true worth is not appreciated until they are tried against the brilliant and witty Mary and Henry Crawford, the unfortunate consequences of whose influence are felt by everyone. Jane Austen uses Fanny's emotional involvement with the people around her to explore the social and moral values by which she and they try to order their lives.]]> 474 Jane Austen 0192833634 Nikki 4 3.70 1814 Mansfield Park
author: Jane Austen
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1814
rating: 4
read at: 2014/09/30
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Fate Inked in Blood (Saga of the Unfated, #1)]]> 165940202
Bound in an unwanted marriage, Freya spends her days gutting fish, but dreams of becoming a warrior. And of putting an axe in her boorish husband’s back.

Freya’s dreams abruptly become reality when her husband betrays her to the region’s jarl, landing her in a fight to the death against his son, Bjorn. To survive, Freya is forced to reveal her deepest secret: She possesses a drop of a goddess’s blood, which makes her a shield maiden with magic capable of repelling any attack. It was foretold such a magic would unite the fractured nation of Skaland beneath the one who controls the shield maiden’s fate.

Believing he’s destined to rule Skaland as king, the fanatical jarl binds Freya with a blood oath and orders Bjorn to protect her from their enemies. Desperate to prove her strength, Freya must train to fight and learn to control her magic, all while facing perilous tests set by the gods. The greatest test of all, however, may be resisting her forbidden attraction to Bjorn. If Freya succumbs to her lust for the charming and fierce warrior, she risks not only her own destiny but the fate of all the people she swore to protect.]]> 419 Danielle L. Jensen 0593599837 Nikki 4 3.91 2024 A Fate Inked in Blood (Saga of the Unfated, #1)
author: Danielle L. Jensen
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/20
date added: 2024/11/20
shelves:
review:

]]> The Wicked City 31824681 New York Times bestselling author Beatriz Williams recreates the New York City of A Certain Age in this deliciously spicy adventure that mixes past and present and centers on a Jazz Age love triangle involving a rugged Prohibition agent, a saucy redheaded flapper, and a debonair Princetonian from a wealthy family.

When she discovers her husband cheating, Ella Hawthorne impulsively moves out of their SoHo loft and into a small apartment in an old Greenwich Village building. Her surprisingly attractive new neighbor, Hector, warns her to stay out of the basement at night. Tenants have reported strange noises after midnight—laughter, clinking glasses, jazz piano—even though the space has been empty for decades. Back in the Roaring Twenties, the place hid a speakeasy.

In 1924, Geneva "Gin" Kelly, a smart-mouthed flapper from the hills of western Maryland, is a regular at this Village hideaway known as the Christopher Club. Caught up in a raid, Gin becomes entangled with Prohibition enforcement agent Oliver Anson, who persuades her to help him catch her stepfather Duke Kelly, one of Appalachia’s most notorious bootleggers.

Headstrong and independent, Gin is no weak-kneed fool. So how can she be falling in love with the taciturn, straight-arrow Revenue agent when she’s got Princeton boy Billy Marshall, the dashing son of society doyenne Theresa Marshall, begging to make an honest woman of her? While anything goes in the Roaring Twenties, Gin’s adventures will shake proper Manhattan society to its foundations, exposing secrets that shock even this free-spirited redhead—secrets that will echo from Park Avenue to the hollers of her Southern hometown.

As Ella discovers more about the basement speakeasy, she becomes inspired by the spirit of her exuberant predecessor, and decides to live with abandon in the wicked city too. . . .]]> 384 Beatriz Williams Nikki 4 books-girls 3.84 2017 The Wicked City
author: Beatriz Williams
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/30
date added: 2024/10/30
shelves: books-girls
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Perfect Divorce (Perfect, #2)]]> 219240806 From the author of the multimillion-copy bestselling thriller The Perfect Marriage

Till death do us part. Yours. Not Mine.

It’s been eleven years since high-powered attorney Sarah Morgan defended her husband, Adam, against the charge of murdering his mistress. Sarah has long since moved on, starting a family with her new husband, Bob Miller, and changing careers. Her life is back to being exactly how she always wanted � or is it?

After discovering Bob engaged in a one-night stand, Sarah wastes no time filing for divorce. However, amid their ugly separation, new DNA evidence is uncovered in the case against Adam, forcing the police to reopen the investigation and putting Sarah right back in the spotlight. Everyone wants to know what really happened, most of all former deputy Marcus Hudson, who is hell-bent on finding the truth.

But when the woman Bob slept with is reported missing, he and Sarah start to fight dirty, and a high-stakes game of cat and mouse ensues. Filled with page-turning suspense and Jeneva Rose’s signature twists and turns, this book will have readers wondering: Can Bob and Sarah achieve the perfect divorce? Or will it be “’til death do us part�?]]> 288 Jeneva Rose Nikki 0 to-read 4.19 2025 The Perfect Divorce (Perfect, #2)
author: Jeneva Rose
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Mighty Red 199793431
Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his.

Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He’s determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker.

Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter’s and her own.

Human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths, is set against the speed of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008-2009. How much does a dress cost? A used car? A package of cinnamon rolls? Can you see the shape of your soul in the everchanging clouds? Your personal salvation in the giant expanse of sky? These are the questions the people of the Red River Valley of the North wrestle with every day.

The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.

A new novel by Louise Erdrich is a major literary event; gorgeous and heartrending, The Mighty Red is a triumph.]]> 384 Louise Erdrich 0063277050 Nikki 4 arc-copy, books-girls 3.78 2024 The Mighty Red
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/24
date added: 2024/10/26
shelves: arc-copy, books-girls
review:

]]> House of Glass 200302487
The next thrilling novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Sarah Pekkanen, House of Glass.

On the outside they were the golden family with the perfect life. On the inside they built the perfect lie.

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?]]> Sarah Pekkanen Nikki 4 3.68 2024 House of Glass
author: Sarah Pekkanen
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/24
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves:
review:

]]> North Woods 214642600
This magisterial and highly inventive novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason brims with love and madness, humor and hope. Following the cycles of history, nature, and even language, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment, to history, and to one another. It is not just an unforgettable novel about secrets and destinies, but a way of looking at the world that asks the timeless question: How do we live on, even after we’re gone?]]> 374 Daniel Mason 0593597044 Nikki 4 arc-copy 4.12 2023 North Woods
author: Daniel Mason
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/20
date added: 2024/10/20
shelves: arc-copy
review:

]]> Dracula (audible edition) 21797548 Audie Award, Multi-voiced Performance, 2013
Audie Award Nominee, Classic, 2013
Because of the widespread awareness of the story of the evil Transylvanian count and the success of numerous film adaptations that have been created over the years, the modern audience hasn't had a chance to truly appreciate the unknowing dread that readers would have felt when reading Bram Stoker's original 1897 manuscript. Most modern productions employ campiness or sound effects to try to bring back that gothic tension, but we've tried something different. By returning to Stoker's original storytelling structure - a series of letters and journal entries voiced by Jonathan Harker, Dr. Van Helsing, and other characters - with an all-star cast of narrators, we've sought to recapture its originally intended horror and power.
This production of Dracula is presented by what is possibly the best assemblage of narrating talent ever for one audiobook: Emmy Award nominees Alan Cumming and Tim Curry plus an all-star cast of Audie award-winners Simon Vance (The Millenium Trilogy), Katherine Kellgren (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), Susan Duerden (The Tiger’s Wife), John Lee (Supergods) and customer favorites Graeme Malcolm (Skippy Dies), Steven Crossley (The Oxford Time Travel series), Simon Prebble (The Baroque Cycle), James Adams (Letters to a Young Contrarian), Nicola Barber (The Rose Garden), Victor Villar-Hauser (Fun Inc.), and Marc Vietor (1Q84). These stellar narrators have been cast as follows:
Dr. Seward: Alan Cumming
Jonathan Harker: Simon Vance
Mina Murray/Harker: Katy Kellgren
Lucy Westenra: Susan Duerden
Van Helsing: Tim Curry
Graeme Malcolm: Dailygraph correspondent
Steven Crossley: Zookeeper’s account and reporter
Simon Prebble: Varna
James Adams: Patrick Hennessey
Nicola Barber: Sister Agatha
Victor Villar-Hauser: Arthur Holmwood
Marc Vietor: Quincey Morris
John Lee: Introductory paragraph, various letters
Public Domain (P)2011 Audible, Inc.]]> Bram Stoker Nikki 5 gothic-listen 4.03 1897 Dracula (audible edition)
author: Bram Stoker
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1897
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/11
date added: 2024/10/11
shelves: gothic-listen
review:
Beautifully done. What an incredible achievement by Bram Stoker. To tell this story in letters and journals. A masterpiece. I felt every rush of wind and snow and howl of the wolves. The cast of narrators lead by Alan Cumming and Tim Curry were superb and truly made this a wonderful listen.
]]> Scarlett 225473 823 Alexandra Ripley 0446515078 Nikki 3 3.41 1991 Scarlett
author: Alexandra Ripley
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.41
book published: 1991
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2024/10/03
shelves:
review:

]]> One to Watch 51170419 Real love...as seen on TV

Bea Schumacher is a devastatingly stylish plus-size fashion blogger who has amazing friends, a devoted family, legions of Insta followers--and a massively broken heart. Like the rest of America, Bea indulges in her weekly obsession: the hit reality show Main Squeeze. The fantasy dates! The kiss-off rejections! The surprising amount of guys named Chad! But Bea is sick and tired of the lack of body diversity on the show. Since when is being a size zero a prerequisite for getting engaged on television?

Just when Bea has sworn off dating altogether, she gets an intriguing call: Main Squeeze wants her to be its next star, surrounded by men vying for her affections. Bea agrees, on one condition--under no circumstances will she actually fall in love. She's in this to supercharge her career, subvert harmful anti-fat beauty standards, inspire women across America, and get a free hot air balloon ride. That's it.

But when the cameras start rolling, Bea realizes things are more complicated than she anticipated. She's in a whirlwind of sumptuous couture, Internet culture wars, sexy suitors, and an opportunity (or two, or five) to find messy, real-life love in the midst of a made-for-TV fairy tale. In this joyful, razor-sharp debut, Bea has to decide whether it might just be worth trusting these men--and herself--for a chance to live happily ever after.]]> 424 Kate Stayman-London 0525510435 Nikki 4 books-girls 3.99 2020 One to Watch
author: Kate Stayman-London
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/28
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: books-girls
review:

]]> Cleopatra's Daughter 8141616
The fateful tale of Selene and Alexander is brought brilliantly to life in Cleopatra’s Daughter. Recounted in Selene’s youthful and engaging voice, it introduces a compelling cast of historical Octavia, the emperor Octavian’s kind and compassionate sister, abandoned by Marc Antony for Cleopatra; Livia, Octavian's bitter and jealous wife; Marcellus, Octavian’s handsome, flirtatious nephew and heir apparent; Tiberius, Livia’s sardonic son and Marcellus’s great rival for power; and Juba, Octavian’s watchful aide, whose honored position at court has far-reaching effects on the lives of the young Egyptian royals.

Selene’s narrative is animated by the concerns of a young girl in any time and place–the possibility of finding love, the pull of friendship and family, and the pursuit of her unique interests and talents. While coping with the loss of both her family and her ancestral kingdom, Selene must find a path around the dangers of a foreign land. Her accounts of life in Rome are filled with historical details that vividly capture both the glories and horrors of the times. She dines with the empire’s most illustrious poets and politicians, witnesses the creation of the Pantheon, and navigates the colorful, crowded marketplaces of the city where Roman-style justice is meted out with merciless authority.

Based on meticulous research, Cleopatra’s Daughter is a fascinating portrait of imperial Rome and of the people and events of this glorious and most tumultuous period in human history. Emerging from the shadows of the past, Selene, a young woman of irresistible charm and preternatural intelligence, will capture your heart.


From the Hardcover edition.]]> 448 Michelle Moran 0307462382 Nikki 4 4.13 2009 Cleopatra's Daughter
author: Michelle Moran
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2013/08/28
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves:
review:
The beggining of the story I knew well having read several versions of Cleopatra's life, but after Cleopatra's famous death I was swept up in Selene's story.She and her twin brother were brought to Rome by Octavian at eleven years old and the story continues for four years til they each turn fifteen.According to Roman tradition, Alexander would then become a man and Selene would be of marrying age. Their life as they grew and things that happened and what may have happened, is a story worth reading and Michelle Moran did a wonderful job telling this tale. I would reccommend this for fans of Kate Quinn, Phillipa Gregory, and other historical fiction fans.
]]> <![CDATA[The Wedding Witch (The Ex Hex, #3)]]> 75663738 276 Erin Sterling 0063297590 Nikki 0 to-read 3.68 2024 The Wedding Witch (The Ex Hex, #3)
author: Erin Sterling
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> No Exit 39938177
A kidnapped little girl locked in a stranger’s van. No help for miles. What would you do?

On her way to Utah to see her dying mother, college student Darby Thorne gets caught in a fierce blizzard in the mountains of Colorado. With the roads impassable, she’s forced to wait out the storm at a remote highway rest stop. Inside are some vending machines, a coffee maker, and four complete strangers.

Desperate to find a signal to call home, Darby goes back out into the storm . . . and makes a horrifying discovery. In the back of the van parked next to her car, a little girl is locked in an animal crate.

Who is the child? Why has she been taken? And how can Darby save her?

There is no cell phone reception, no telephone, and no way out. One of her fellow travelers is a kidnapper. But which one?

Trapped in an increasingly dangerous situation, with a child’s life and her own on the line, Darby must find a way to break the girl out of the van and escape.

But who can she trust?]]> 336 Taylor Adams 0062875655 Nikki 4 books-girls 3.98 2017 No Exit
author: Taylor Adams
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/26
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves: books-girls
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Iron Daughter (The Iron Fey, #2)]]> 22826037 From the limitless imagination of New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Julie Kagawa, return to the world of The Iron Fey.

Half Summer faery princess, half human, Meghan has never fit in anywhere. Deserted by the Winter prince she thought loved her, she is prisoner of the Winter faery queen. As war looms between Summer and Winter, Meghan knows that the real danger comes from the Iron Fey—ironbound faeries that only she and her absent prince have seen. But no one believes her.

Worse, Meghan’s own fey powers have been cut off. She’s stuck in Faery with only her wits for help. Trusting anyone would be foolish. Trusting a seeming traitor could be deadly. But even as she grows a backbone of iron, Meghan can’t help but hear the whispers of longing in her all-too-human heart.

Books and novellas in the Iron Fey
The Iron King (special edition includes “Winter’s Passage�* ebook novella)
The Iron Daughter (special edition includes the “Guide to the Iron Fey�*)
The Iron Queen (special edition includes “Summer’s Crossing�* ebook novella)
The Iron Knight (special edition includes “Iron’s Prophecy�* ebook novella)
The Lost Prince
The Iron Traitor
The Iron Warrior

*Also available in The Iron Legends anthology

Books in the Iron Evenfall
The Iron Raven]]> 296 Julie Kagawa 1426864159 Nikki 4 3.97 2010 The Iron Daughter (The Iron Fey, #2)
author: Julie Kagawa
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2012/10/19
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves:
review:
Yes, I love fantasy, and Meaghan Chase is a wonderful magical heroine who I will continue to read for the pure enjoyment of it. Love what the author does with Queen Mab and Oberon, let the battles continue. Also enjoyed Meaghan's close encounters with Puck and a very dreamy winter prince...ASH.
]]> <![CDATA[Shadow of Night (All Souls Trilogy, #2)]]> 19438067 A Discovery of Witches� cliffhanger ending, Shadow of Night takes Diana and Matthew on a trip through time to Elizabethan London, where they are plunged into a world of spies, magic, and a coterie of Matthew’s old friends, the School of Night. As the search for Ashmole 782 deepens and Diana seeks out a witch to tutor her in magic, the net of Matthew’s past tightens around them, and they embark on a very different—and vastly more dangerous—journey.]]> 721 Deborah Harkness 1101578939 Nikki 2 4.28 2012 Shadow of Night (All Souls Trilogy, #2)
author: Deborah Harkness
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2012
rating: 2
read at: 2015/01/18
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves:
review:
The entire time I was reading this long book I kept hoping it would get better. I liked but didn't love Discovery of Witches, mostly because I couldn't warm up to Matthew. In Shadow of Night, I was hopeful the time travel element would inspire the story which picks up exactly where "Discovery" ends, and Matthew would show more character. Instead the storyline went everywhere and I liked it less than "Discovery". Ms. Harkness will have some job trying to tie up all these storylines in Book three. I don't know if I can make myself read it.
]]> The Thirteenth Child 205181098 This is the story of Hazel, a young healer navigating a ruthless court to save the life of the king, grappling with a pantheon of gods with questionable agendas as she fights for agency and true love in her own life as the goddaughter of none other than Death himself.

All gifts come with a price.

Hazel Trépas has always known she wasn’t like the rest of her siblings. A thirteenth child, promised away to one of the gods, she spends her childhood waiting for her godfather—Merrick, the Dreaded End—to arrive.

When he does, he lays out exactly how he’s planned Hazel’s future. She will become a great healer, known throughout the kingdom for her precision and skill. To aid her endeavors, Merrick blesses Hazel with a gift, the ability to instantly deduce the exact cure needed to treat the sick.

But all gifts come with a price. Hazel can see when Death has claimed a patient—when all hope is gone—and is tasked to end their suffering, permanently. Haunted by the ghosts of those she’s killed, Hazel longs to run. But destiny brings her to the royal court, where she meets Leo, a rakish prince with a disdain for everything and everyone. And it’s where Hazel faces her biggest dilemma yet—to save the life of a king marked to die. Hazel knows what she is meant to do and knows what her heart is urging her toward, but what will happen if she goes against the will of Death?

From the astonishing mind of Erin A. Craig comes the breathtaking fairy tale retelling readers have been waiting for� what does a life well-lived mean, and how do we justify the impossible choices we make for the ones we love?]]> 512 Erin A. Craig 0593482581 Nikki 0 to-read 4.08 2024 The Thirteenth Child
author: Erin A. Craig
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Colored Television 201102398 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593544372

A dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the racial identity–industrial complex

Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she; her painter husband, Lenny; and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend’s luxurious home in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane’s sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her “mulatto War and Peace,� she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp.

But things don’t work out quite as hoped. In search of a plan B, like countless writers before her, Jane turns her desperate gaze to Hollywood. After she meets with a hot young producer to create “diverse content� for a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer.� She can create what he envisions as the greatest biracial comedy to ever hit the small screen. Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.]]> 277 Danzy Senna Nikki 3 book-club 3.53 2024 Colored Television
author: Danzy Senna
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/19
date added: 2024/09/19
shelves: book-club
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Night Pleasures (Dark-Hunter, #1)]]> 41153107 Librarian's note: See alternate cover edition of ASIN B003E4CXQS here.

The Dark-Hunters are ancient warriors who have sworn to protect mankind and the fate of the world is in their hands. . .

ĚýHe is solitude. He is darkness. He is the ruler of the night. Yet Kyrian of Thrace has just woken up handcuffed to his worst nightmare: An accountant. Worse, she's being hunted by one of the most lethal vampires out there. And if Amanda Devereaux goes down, then he does too. But it's not just their lives that are hanging in the balance. ĚýKyrian and Amanda are all that stands between humanity and oblivion. Let's hope they win.]]> 338 Sherrilyn Kenyon 1429906103 Nikki 3 4.25 2002 Night Pleasures (Dark-Hunter, #1)
author: Sherrilyn Kenyon
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2002
rating: 3
read at: 2015/12/17
date added: 2024/09/18
shelves:
review:
A fun romp with handsome men and some supernatural sexy suspense.
]]> A Great Marriage 213937404
Days after their engagement dinner, Austin hears unsettling news from London that wrecks their plans. Dara abruptly cancels the wedding. She refuses to reveal why, not even to her best friends or her parents or grandmother, disrupting their family tradition of openness.

Dara escapes by travelling east, while Austin, back in London, faces a major tragedy, the consequences of which are life-changing. And then an impulsive visit to London by Dara’s mother alters their fate�

With her signature warmth and humour, beloved author Frances Mayes has written a multigenerational story about the complexity of love and the great mystery ride of marriage. A Great Marriage introduces two unforgettable families and the arrival of a stranger who rearranges their futures.

francesmayesbooks.com]]> 331 Frances Mayes 1761349236 Nikki 3 4.08 2024 A Great Marriage
author: Frances Mayes
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/18
date added: 2024/09/18
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Iron Queen (The Iron Fey, #3)]]> 10249102 I thought it was over. That my time with the fey, the impossible choices I had to make, the sacrifices of those I loved, was behind me. But a storm is approaching, an army of Iron fey that will drag me back, kicking and screaming. Drag me away from the banished prince who's sworn to stand by my side. Drag me into the core of conflict so powerful, I'm not sure anyone can survive it.
This time, there will be no turning back.]]> 358 Julie Kagawa 1426884478 Nikki 4 4.17 2011 The Iron Queen (The Iron Fey, #3)
author: Julie Kagawa
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2013/01/24
date added: 2024/09/17
shelves:
review:
This is the third book in the series and I am still enjoying this YA fantasy with its half human heroine, Meghan Chase, who happens to be the daughter of Oberon and one third of a love triangle involving Puck. Yes, even Robin Goodfellow has feelings for this girl, now the Iron Queen. Can't wait to see what happens next.
]]> The Dead Romantics 58417825 A disillusioned millennial ghostwriter who, quite literally, has some ghosts of her own, has to find her way back home in this sparkling adult debut from national bestselling author Ashley Poston.

Florence Day is the ghostwriter for one of the most prolific romance authors in the industry, and she has a problem—after a terrible breakup, she no longer believes in love. It’s as good as dead.

When her new editor, a too-handsome mountain of a man, won’t give her an extension on her book deadline, Florence prepares to kiss her career goodbye. But then she gets a phone call she never wanted to receive, and she must return home for the first time in a decade to help her family bury her beloved father.

For ten years, she’s run from the town that never understood her, and even though she misses the sound of a warm Southern night and her eccentric, loving family and their funeral parlor, she can’t bring herself to stay. Even with her father gone, it feels like nothing in this town has changed. And she hates it.

Until she finds a ghost standing at the funeral parlor’s front door, just as broad and infuriatingly handsome as ever, and he’s just as confused about why he’s there as she is.

Romance is most certainly dead . . . but so is her new editor, and his unfinished business will have her second-guessing everything she’s ever known about love stories.]]> 366 Ashley Poston 0593336496 Nikki 4 4.02 2022 The Dead Romantics
author: Ashley Poston
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/16
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves:
review:

]]> The Haunting of Hill House 89717 182 Shirley Jackson 0143039989 Nikki 4 3.85 1959 The Haunting of Hill House
author: Shirley Jackson
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1959
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/10
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West]]> 200229918
When Dorothy triumphed over the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum’s classic tale, we heard only her side of the story. But what about her arch-nemesis, the mysterious Witch? Where did she come from? How did she become so wicked? Gregory Maguire has created a fantasy world so rich and vivid that we will never look at Oz the same way again. Wicked is about a land where animals talk and strive to be treated like first-class citizens, Munchkinlanders seek the comfort of middle-class stability, and the Tin Man becomes a victim of domestic violence. And then there is the little green-skinned girl named Elphaba, who will grow up to become the infamous Wicked Witch of the West―a smart, prickly, and misunderstood creature who challenges all our preconceived notions about the nature of good and evil.]]> 416 Gregory Maguire 0063391082 Nikki 0 to-read 3.38 1995 Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
author: Gregory Maguire
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.38
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Fear the Flames (Fear the Flames, #1)]]> 203956681 NATIONAL BESTSELLER � An exiled princess teams up with the last man she thought she could trust in the start of a dazzling and unforgettable epic fantasy romance series.

As a child, Elowen Atarah was ripped away from her dragons and imprisoned by her father, King Garrick of Imirath. Years later, Elowen is now a woman determined to free her dragons. Having established a secret kingdom of her own called Aestilian, she’s ready to do what’s necessary to save her people and seek vengeance. Even if that means having to align herself with the Commander of Vareveth, Cayden Veles, the most feared and dangerous man in all the kingdoms of Ravaryn.

Cayden is ruthless, lethal, and secretive, promising to help Elowen if she will stand with him and all of Vareveth in the pending war against Imirath. Despite their contrasting motives, Elowen can’t ignore their undeniable attraction as they combine their efforts and plot to infiltrate the impenetrable castle of Imirath to steal back her dragons and seek revenge on their common enemy.

As the world tries to keep them apart, the pull between Elowen and Cayden becomes impossible to resist. Working together with their crew over clandestine schemes, the threat of war looms, making the imminent heist to free her dragons their most dangerous adventure yet. But for Elowen, her vengeance is a promise signed in blood, and she’ll stop at nothing to see that promise through.

An immersive fantasy filled with a sizzling reluctant-allies-to-lovers romance, a world to get lost in, dangerous quests, dragon bonds, and an entertaining band of characters to root for, Fear the Flames marks the stunning debut of Olivia Rose Darling.]]> 384 Olivia Rose Darling 0593873890 Nikki 0 to-read 3.76 2022 Fear the Flames (Fear the Flames, #1)
author: Olivia Rose Darling
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Creation Lake 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Nikki 3 arc-copy, booker-longlist 3.35 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/09
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves: arc-copy, booker-longlist
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Book of Life (All Souls, #3)]]> 18892998 The #1 New York Times bestselling series finale and sequel to A Discovery of Witches and Shadow of Night

Bringing the magic and suspense of the All Souls Trilogy to a deeply satisfying conclusion, this highly anticipated finale went straight to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. In The Book of Life, Diana and Matthew time-travel back from Elizabethan London to make a dramatic return to the present—facing new crises and old enemies. At Matthew’s ancestral home, Sept-Tours, they reunite with the beloved cast of characters from A Discovery of Witches—with one significant exception. But the real threat to their future has yet to be revealed, and when it is, the search for Ashmole 782 and its missing pages takes on even more urgency.]]> 564 Deborah Harkness Nikki 0 to-read 4.36 2014 The Book of Life (All Souls, #3)
author: Deborah Harkness
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/04
shelves: to-read
review:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liane Moriarty’s Here One Moment is a brilliantly constructed tale that looks at free will and destiny, grief and love, and the endless struggle to maintain certainty and control in an uncertain world. A modern-day Jane Austen who humorously skewers social mores while spinning a web of mystery, Moriarty asks profound questions in her newest I-can’t-wait-to-find-out-what-happens novel.]]> 512 Liane Moriarty 0593798600 Nikki 0 to-read 3.99 2024 Here One Moment
author: Liane Moriarty
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Blue Sisters 195430687 Three estranged siblings return to their family home in New York after their beloved sister's death in this unforgettable story of grief, identity, and the complexities of family.

The three Blue sisters are exceptional—and exceptionally different. Avery, the eldest and a recovering heroin addict turned strait-laced lawyer, lives with her wife in London; Bonnie, a former boxer, works as a bouncer in Los Angeles following a devastating defeat; and Lucky, the youngest, models in Paris while trying to outrun her hard-partying ways. They also had a fourth sister, Nicky, whose unexpected death left Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky reeling. A year later, as they each navigate grief, addiction, and ambition, they find they must return to New York to stop the sale of the apartment they were raised in.

But coming home is never as easy as it seems. As the sisters reckon with the disappointments of their childhood and the loss of the only person who held them together, they realize the greatest secrets they've been keeping might not have been from each other, but from themselves.]]> 342 Coco Mellors 0593723767 Nikki 0 to-read 3.93 2024 Blue Sisters
author: Coco Mellors
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Playground 205478762 The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.]]> 381 Richard Powers 1324086033 Nikki 0 to-read 4.16 2024 Playground
author: Richard Powers
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Briar Club 181110045 A haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, D.C. boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.

Washington, D.C., 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital, where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; police officer’s daughter Nora, who is entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Bea, whose career has ended along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.

Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears apart the house, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: Who is the true enemy in their midst?]]> 432 Kate Quinn 0063244748 Nikki 4 4.26 2024 The Briar Club
author: Kate Quinn
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/29
date added: 2024/08/29
shelves:
review:
4.5 stars for Kate Quinn's 1950's Historical novel set in McCarthy Era, Washington DC. This story of female friendships and the struggles of women in that time period were well portrayed by the different characters, each with their own chapters. The story revolves around a women's boarding house, Briarwood house, which in a nod to gothic form is also given a voice. "If these walls could talk... and they did" This book starts out with a murder mystery, which does not get wrapped up until the end, but so worth the wait. Until then you are given a peek into the lives of so many wonderful characters, who were all strangers, until Grace March, one member of house decides to have a weekly supper night, which becomes much more than just food. Book is complete with recipes. We should all have friends like "The Briar Club."
]]> The Wedding People 198902277 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781250899576.

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

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

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.]]> 384 Alison Espach Nikki 3 arc-copy, book-club
"She is so good at predicting what will happen in books, so bad at predicting what will happen in life.
That is why she has always preferred books-because to be alive is so much harder"

Loved all the literary references. ]]> 4.11 2024 The Wedding People
author: Alison Espach
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/27
date added: 2024/08/27
shelves: arc-copy, book-club
review:
3.5 stars for this second chance story about a divorced, childless cat lady professor who finds connections at the most overindulgent wedding WEEK that even the Kardashians would be humbled.

"She is so good at predicting what will happen in books, so bad at predicting what will happen in life.
That is why she has always preferred books-because to be alive is so much harder"

Loved all the literary references.
]]> Private Rites 203579085 From the award-winning author of Our Wives Under the Sea, a speculative reimagining of King Lear, centering three sisters navigating queer love and loss in a drowning world

It’s been raining for a long time now, so long that the land has reshaped itself and arcane rituals and religions are creeping back into practice. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father dies. An architect as cruel as he was revered, his death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will.

More estranged than ever, the sisters� lives spin out of control: Irene’s relationship is straining at the seams; Isla’s ex-wife keeps calling; and cynical Agnes is falling in love for the first time. But something even more sinister might be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always seemed unusually interested in the sisters� lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperiled world.]]> 291 Julia Armfield 125034431X Nikki 0 to-read 3.58 2024 Private Rites
author: Julia Armfield
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.58
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Queens of Crime 211003830 The Mystery of Mrs. Christie returns with a thrilling story of Christie’s legendary rival Dorothy Sayers, the race to solve a murder, and the power of friendship among women.

London, 1930. The five greatest women crime writers have banded together to form a secret society with a single goal: to show they are no longer willing to be treated as second-class citizens by their male counterparts in the legendary Detection Club. Led by the formidable Dorothy L. Sayers, the group includes Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Baroness Emma Orczy. They call themselves the Queens of Crime. Their plan? Solve an actual murder, that of a young woman found strangled in a park in France who may have connections leading to the highest levels of the British establishment.

May Daniels, a young English nurse on an excursion to France with her friend, seemed to vanish into thin air as they prepared to board a ferry home. Months later, her body is found in the nearby woods. The murder has all the hallmarks of a locked room mystery for which these authors are famous: how did her killer manage to sneak her body out of a crowded train station without anyone noticing? If, as the police believe, the cause of death is manual strangulation, why is there is an extraordinary amount of blood at the crime scene? What is the meaning of a heartbreaking secret letter seeming to implicate an unnamed paramour? Determined to solve the highly publicized murder, the Queens of Crime embark on their own investigation, discovering they’re stronger together. But soon the killer targets Dorothy Sayers herself, threatening to expose a dark secret in her past that she would do anything to keep hidden.

Inspired by a true story in Sayers� own life, New York Times bestselling author Marie Benedict brings to life the lengths to which five talented women writers will go to be taken seriously in the male-dominated world of letters as they unpuzzle a mystery torn from the pages of their own novels.]]> 310 Marie Benedict 1250280753 Nikki 0 to-read 3.82 2025 The Queens of Crime
author: Marie Benedict
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Love of My Afterlife 199928276 A recently deceased woman meets “the one� in the afterlife waiting room, scoring a second chance at life (and love!) if she can find him on Earth before ten days are up�.

If she wasn’t dead already, Delphie would be dying of embarrassment. Not only did she just die by choking on a microwaveable burger, she’s also now standing in her "sparkle and shine" nightie in front of the hottest man she’s ever seen. And he’s smiling at her.

As they start to chat, everything else becomes background noise. That is, until someone comes running through a door yelling something about a huge mistake and sends the dreamy stranger back down to Earth. And here Delphie was thinking her luck might be different in the afterlife.

When Delphie is offered a deal in which she can return to Earth and reconnect with the mysterious man, she jumps at the opportunity to find her possible soulmate and a fresh start. But to find him in a city of millions, Delphie is going to have to listen to her heart, learn to ask for help, and perhaps even see the magic in the life she’s leaving behind. . . .]]> 369 Kirsty Greenwood 0593816137 Nikki 0 to-read 4.05 2024 The Love of My Afterlife
author: Kirsty Greenwood
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> All the Colors of the Dark 203019740
Amerika, 1975. In het dorpje Monta Clare, Missouri, wordt tiener Joseph 'Patch' Macauley ontvoerd. Saint Brown, zet alles op het spel om haar beste vriend te vinden.

Patch ligt alleen in een pikdonkere kamer totdat hij een hand in de zijne voelt. Ze heet Grace en in het donker is haar stem zijn redding. Als Patch ontsnapt, is er echter geen bewijs dat ze ooit heeft bestaan, dus begint hij een grootse zoektocht om haar te vinden.

Terwijl jaren decennia worden en hoop een obsessie, jaagt Patch's jeugdvriendin Saint op de man die de twee ontvoerde en daarmee de enige jongen van wie ze ooit heeft gehouden een doel in het leven gaf.]]> 608 Chris Whitaker 0593798872 Nikki 0 to-read 4.23 2024 All the Colors of the Dark
author: Chris Whitaker
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Moloka'i (Moloka'i, #1) 8366378 400 Alan Brennert Nikki 4 books-girls 4.32 2003 Moloka'i (Moloka'i, #1)
author: Alan Brennert
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2021/06/11
date added: 2024/08/15
shelves: books-girls
review:

]]> Long Island (Eilis Lacey, #2) 199798868 New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work, twenty years later.

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting.

Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis� life are thunderous and dangerous, and there’s no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she’d lost.]]> 294 Colm Tóibín 1476785112 Nikki 4 3.68 2024 Long Island (Eilis Lacey, #2)
author: Colm TĂłibĂ­n
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/15
date added: 2024/08/15
shelves:
review:
More please. Thats all. Give me more. I need it.
]]> <![CDATA[My Lady Jane (The Lady Janies, #1)]]> 22840421 This comical, fantastical, romantical, New York Times bestselling, (not) entirely true story of Lady Jane Grey is “an uproarious historical fantasy that’s not to be missed� (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

In My Lady Jane, coauthors Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows have created a one-of-a-kind YA fantasy in the tradition of The Princess Bride, featuring a reluctant king, an even more reluctant queen, a noble steed, and only a passing resemblance to actual history—because sometimes history needs a little help.

At sixteen, Lady Jane Grey is about to be married off to a stranger and caught up in a conspiracy to rob her cousin, King Edward, of his throne. But those trifling problems aren’t for Jane to worry about. Jane gets to be Queen of England.

Like that could go wrong.]]> 474 Cynthia Hand 0062391798 Nikki 4 4.00 2016 My Lady Jane (The Lady Janies, #1)
author: Cynthia Hand
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/09
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Wizard of Oz and Other Wonderful Books of Oz: The Emerald City of Oz and Glinda of Oz (Oz, #1, 6, 14)]]> 13013592 The coveted and award-winning Penguin Threads series continues with three more enchanting, beautifully sewn covers by a talented visual artist

With paper and pen or needle and thread, storytelling has many traditions. Penguin's award-winning art director Paul Buckley presents Penguin Threads, a series of Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions inspired by the aesthetic of handmade crafts with specially commissioned cover art. Jillian Tamaki's embroidered artwork appears on The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Emma by Jane Austen, and Black Beauty by Anna Sewell. This latest set features three beloved classics for both adults and children with cover art by painter and illustrator Rachell Sumpter. Sketched in a traditional illustrative manner, the final covers are sculpt embossed and present full front and reverse hand-stitched designs. Through story, style and texture, the Penguin Threads is an exciting chapter in Penguin's long history of excellence in book design, for true lovers of the book, design, and handcrafted beauty.

This fully annotated volume collects three of Baum's fourteen Oz novels in which he developed his utopian vision and which garnered an immense and loyal following. The Wizard of Oz (1900) introduces Dorothy, who arrives from Kansas and meets the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion, and a host of other characters. The Emerald City of Oz (1910) finds Dorothy, Aunt Em, and Uncle Henry coming to Oz just as the wicked Nome King is plotting to conquer its people. In Baum's final novel, Glinda of Oz (1920), Dorothy and Princess Ozma try to prevent a battle between the Skeezers and the Flatheads. Tapping into a deeply rooted desire in himself and his loyal readers to live in a peaceful country which values the sharing of talents and gifts, Baum's imaginative creation, like all great utopian literature, holds out the possibility for change. Also included is a selection of the original illustrations by W. W. Denslow and John R. Neill.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 432 L. Frank Baum 0143106635 Nikki 0 to-read 4.03 The Wizard of Oz and Other Wonderful Books of Oz: The Emerald City of Oz and Glinda of Oz (Oz, #1, 6, 14)
author: L. Frank Baum
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.03
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Happier Life 204844379 Listening length: 11 hours, 30 minutes

The New York Times bestselling author of The Summer of Songbirds and the Peachtree Bluff series presents a tender and touching novel about a young woman who discovers the family she has always longed for when she spends a life-changing summer in North Carolina.

Present Day: Keaton Smith is desperate for a fresh start. So when her mother needs someone to put her childhood home in Beaufort, North Carolina, on the market—the home that Keaton didn’t know existed until now—she jumps at the chance to head south. Keaton’s grandparents died in a tragic car accident before she was born, so she’s eager to learn more about the family she never met. But even though she has help from her charming next-door-neighbor, his precocious ten-year-old son, and a flock of endearingly feisty town busybodies, Keaton soon finds that she has more questions than answers.

1976: After meeting her adoring husband Townsend, Rebecca “Becks� Saint James abandoned the life she knew and never looked back. Forty years later, she’s made a name for herself as the best hostess North Carolina has ever seen. Her annual summer suppers have become the stuff of legend, and locals and out-of-towners alike clamor for an invitation to her stunning historic home. But she’s struggling behind the façade. Becks strives to make the lives of those around her as easy as possible, but this summer she is facing a dilemma that even she can’t solve. And as the end of the season looms, she is brought to a decision she never wanted to make.

As both Keaton and Becks face new challenges and chapters, they are connected through time by the house on Sunset Lane, which has protected the secrets, hopes, and dreams of the women in their family for generations.]]> 12 Kristy Woodson Harvey Nikki 4 4.06 2024 A Happier Life
author: Kristy Woodson Harvey
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/04
date added: 2024/08/05
shelves:
review:
4 stars. I usually choose a few summer books to read every year. This is my first Kristy Woodson Harvey. I loved how she created a sense of nostalgia with Becks POV and her historic seaside home made me want to visit, especially those summer suppers. Of course, I expected there would be obstacles in "A Happier Life" (no good story without them) however, I didn't expect the level of emotion in this book. More than a few times I had to wipe the tears. It is dual timeline and told from three points of view. But I like many others in the novel cannot stop thinking about Rebecca St. James. "Becks". If you still have time for another summer book. Read it.
]]> Clear 177058810
Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies's intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us. Perfectly structured and surprising at every turn, Clear is a marvel of storytelling, an exquisite short novel by a master of the form.]]> 203 Carys Davies Nikki 4 4.01 Clear
author: Carys Davies
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.01
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/26
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Mickey7 (Mickey7, #1) 57693457 After several deaths punctuating a series of all-too-brief life spans, a clone reassesses his purpose � and his humanity � in Edward Ashton’s Mickey7, “a unique blend of thought-provoking sci-fi concepts, farcical relationship drama, and exotic body horror� (New York Times bestselling author Jason Pargin).

EXPENDABLE \ik’spen-d�-b’l\ n. A human clone utilized for dangerous work on space exploration missions. An Expendable’s personality and memories may be transferred intact to a new body if and when the current host dies.

Mickey Barnes is an Expendable, now on his seventh iteration, living � and dying � among his fellow colonists on the near-uninhabitable ice world of Niflheim. Some consider him immortal. Others believe he’s a soulless monstrosity. For the past nine years, he has been deployed for hazardous assignments and subjected to experiments that test the limits of human endurance, his humanity sacrificed for the greater good.

While on reconnaissance, Mickey7 is injured and left for dead, only to be saved by Niflheim’s native species, thought to be insentient by the colonists. Returning to base, Mickey7 meets his next generation, Mickey8. Neither clone is willing to recycle himself, but if anyone discovers multiple Mickeys exist, they’ll both be executed � and there won’t ever be a Mickey9.

But Mickey7’s premature twin isn’t his only secret. He hasn’t uploaded his memories in a month, leaving his clone in the dark about his near death and close encounter with the planet’s inhabitants. Mickey7 also doesn’t know how all of his previous selves died, and those he remembers have left him traumatized and mistrustful of the colony’s mission. A mission that has Mickey Barnes questioning his moral and mortal existence...again...and again....]]> 296 Edward Ashton 1250275032 Nikki 0 to-read 3.74 2022 Mickey7 (Mickey7, #1)
author: Edward Ashton
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Thousand Acres 10465445 374 Jane Smiley Nikki 4 3.98 1991 A Thousand Acres
author: Jane Smiley
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/22
date added: 2024/07/22
shelves:
review:

]]> 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 Nikki 4 book-club 4.15 2024 The God of the Woods
author: Liz Moore
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/20
date added: 2024/07/20
shelves: book-club
review:

]]> The Sirens 210411871 A story of sisters separated by hundreds of years but bound together in more ways than they can imagine

2019: Lucy awakens in her ex-lover’s room in the middle of the night with her hands around his throat. Horrified, she flees to her sister’s house on the coast of New South Wales hoping Jess can help explain the vivid dreams that preceded the attack—but her sister is missing. As Lucy waits for her return, she starts to unearth strange rumours about Jess’s town—tales of numerous missing men, spread over decades. A baby abandoned in a sea-swept cave. Whispers of women’s voices on the waves. All the while, her dreams start to feel closer than ever.

1800: Mary and Eliza are torn from their loving home in Ireland and forced onto a convict ship heading for Australia. As the boat takes them farther and farther away from all they know, they begin to notice unexplainable changes in their bodies.

A breathtaking tale of female resilience, The Sirens is an extraordinary novel that captures the sheer power of sisterhood and the indefinable magic of the sea.]]> 337 Emilia Hart 1250280826 Nikki 0 to-read 3.82 2025 The Sirens
author: Emilia Hart
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Ninth House (Alex Stern, #1) 43263680
Still searching for answers to this herself, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. These eight windowless “tombs� are well-known to be haunts of the future rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street and Hollywood’s biggest players. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive.]]> 461 Leigh Bardugo 1250313074 Nikki 4 4.00 2019 Ninth House (Alex Stern, #1)
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2019/12/27
date added: 2024/07/10
shelves:
review:
4.5 stars for this adult fantasy debut by Leigh Bardugo. I just finished my ARC copy and I liked it so much I think I need to go and buy the hardcover and read it again ! It's so detailed and rich, I feel I missed so much, I want to go back and read it again to see what clues I might have missed the first time !! Plus I want to know more about the Houses of the Veil not included in my ARC. Excited for more from Alex Stern. Bring on book two.
]]> You Are Here 206029727
Michael is coming undone. Adrift after his wife's departure, he has begun taking himself on long, solitary walks across the English countryside. Becoming ever more reclusive, he’ll do anything to avoid his empty house.

Marnie, on the other hand, is stuck. Hiding alone in her London flat, she avoids old friends and any reminders of her rotten, selfish ex-husband. Curled up with a good book, she’s battling the long afternoons of a life that feels like it’s passing her by.

When a persistent mutual friend and some very unpredictable weather conspire to toss Michael and Marnie together on the most epic of ten-day hikes, neither of them can think of anything worse. Until, of course, they discover exactly what they’ve been looking for.

Michael and Marnie are on the precipice of a bright future . . . if they can survive the journey.]]> 9 David Nicholls Nikki 3 book-club 3.70 2024 You Are Here
author: David Nicholls
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/28
date added: 2024/06/28
shelves: book-club
review:

]]> Malas 198563738 A story full of passion and revenge, following one family living on the Texas Mexico border and a curse that reverberates across generations--"Fuentes has achieved something rare and indelible with this story of complex women.� (Erika L. Sánchez)

In 1951, a mysterious old woman confronts Pilar Aguierre in the small border town of La Cienega, Texas. The old woman is sure Pilar stole her husband and, in a heated outburst, lays a curse on Pilar and her family.

More than forty years later, Lulu Muñoz is dodging chaos at every turn: her troubled father’s moods, his rules, her secret life as singer in a punk band, but most of all her upcoming quinceañera. When her beloved grandmother passes away, Lulu finds herself drawn to the glamorous stranger who crashed the funeral and who lives on the alone and shunned on the edge of town.

Their unexpected kinship picks at the secrets of Lulu’s family’s past. As the quinceañera looms—and we move between these two strong, irascible female voices—one woman must make peace with the past, and one girl pushes to embrace her future.

Rich with cinematic details—from dusty rodeos to the excitement of a Selena concert and the comfort of conjunto ballads played at family gatherings—this memorable debut is a love letter to the Tejano culture and community that sustain both of these women as they discover what family means.]]> 375 Marcela Fuentes 0593655788 Nikki 0 to-read 3.92 2024 Malas
author: Marcela Fuentes
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/06/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Last Animal 61387955 A playful, witty, and resonant novel in which a single mother and her two teen daughters engage in a wild scientific experiment and discover themselves in the process, from the award-winning writer of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Jane is a serious scientist on the cutting-edge team of a bold project looking to "de-extinct" the woolly mammoth. She's privileged to have been sent to Siberia to hunt for ancient DNA, but there's a catch: Jane's two "tagalong" teen daughters are there with her in the Arctic, and they're bored enough to cause trouble. Brilliant, fiery, sharp-tongued Eve is fifteen and willing to talk back to the male scientists in a way her mother is not. And sweet, thirteen-year-old Vera, who seems to absorb all the emotional burdens of her small family, just wants to be home in Berkeley, baking cakes and watching bad TV.

When Eve and Vera stumble upon a four-thousand-year-old baby mammoth that has been perfectly preserved, their discovery sets off a chain of events that pits Jane against her colleagues, and soon her status at the lab is tenuous at best. So what does a female scientist do when she's a passionate devotee of her field but her gender and life history hold her back? She goes rogue.

As Jane and her daughters ping-pong from the slopes of Siberia to a university in California, from the shores of Iceland to an exotic animal farm in Italy, The Last Animal takes readers on an expansive, bighearted journey that explores the possibility and peril of the human imagination on a changing planet, what it's like to be a woman and a mother in a field dominated by men, and how a wondrous discovery can best be enjoyed with family. Even teenagers.]]> 278 Ramona Ausubel 0593420527 Nikki 4 3.39 2023 The Last Animal
author: Ramona Ausubel
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/25
date added: 2024/06/25
shelves:
review:

]]> The Measure 56898742 Eight ordinary people. One extraordinary choice.

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

But today, when you open your front door, waiting for you is a small wooden box. This box holds your fate: the answer to the exact number of years you will live.

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

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

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

Enchanting and deeply uplifting, The Measure is a sweeping, ambitious, and invigorating story about family, friendship, hope, and destiny that encourages us to live life to the fullest.]]> 348 Nikki Erlick 0063204223 Nikki 4 4.05 2022 The Measure
author: Nikki Erlick
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/16
date added: 2024/06/16
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Evolution of Annabel Craig]]> 123286446
“Lisa Grunwald is a national treasure.Ěý. . .ĚýAn essential American story from a master craftsman.”—Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Left Undone

I had never questioned a miracle, witnessed a gunfight, or seen a dead body. . . . I had thought I knew exactly what I wanted and what I didn't. Before the summer was over, all that and much more would change.
Ěý
Annabel Hayes—born, baptized, and orphaned in the sleepy conservative town of Dayton, Tennessee—is thrilled to find herself falling quickly and deeply in love with George Craig, a sophisticated attorney newly arrived from Knoxville. But before the end of their first year of marriage, their lives are beset by losses. The strain on their relationship is only intensified when John T. Scopes is arrested for teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution at the local high school.

Foreshadowing today’s culture wars, the trial against Scopes is a spectacle unlike any the country has seen. William Jennings Bryan—a revered Southern politician—joins the prosecution, pitting himself and his faith against the renowned defense attorney Clarence Darrow. Journalists descend in a frenzy, thrusting the town and its citizens into the national spotlight. And when George joins the team defending Scopes, Annabel begins to question both her beliefs and her vows.

As the ongoing trial divides neighbor against neighbor, it also divides the Craigs in unexpected ways. But in the midst of these conflicts—one waged in an open courtroom, the other behind closed doors—Annabel will discover that the path to her own evolution begins with the courage to think for herself.]]> 320 Lisa Grunwald 0593596153 Nikki 4 3.82 2024 The Evolution of Annabel Craig
author: Lisa Grunwald
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/12
date added: 2024/06/14
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Murder Your Employer (The McMasters Guide to Homicide, #1)]]> 61272658 The McMasters Conservatory for the Applied Arts - a luxurious, clandestine college dedicated to the fine art of murder where earnest students study how best to "delete" their most deserving victim.


Who hasn’t wondered for a split second what the world would be like if a person who is the object of your affliction ceased to exist? But then you’ve probably never heard of The McMasters Conservatory, dedicated to the consummate execution of the homicidal arts. To gain admission, a student must have an ethical reason for erasing someone who deeply deserves a fate no worse (nor better) than death. The campus of this “Poison Ivy League� college—its location unknown to even those who study there—is where you might find yourself the practice target of a classmate…and where one’s mandatory graduation thesis is getting away with the perfect murder of someone whose death will make the world a much better place to live.

Prepare for an education you’ll never forget. A “fiendishly funny� (Booklist) mix of witty wordplay, breathtaking twists and genuine intrigue, Murder Your Employer will gain you admission into a wholly original world, cocooned within the most entertaining book about well-intentioned would-be murderers you’ll ever read.]]> 400 Rupert Holmes 1451648219 Nikki 4 3.79 2023 Murder Your Employer (The McMasters Guide to Homicide, #1)
author: Rupert Holmes
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/31
date added: 2024/05/31
shelves:
review:

]]> 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 Nikki 3 arc-copy, book-club 3.94 2024 Real Americans
author: Rachel Khong
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/26
date added: 2024/05/26
shelves: arc-copy, book-club
review:

]]> Funny Story 194802722 A shimmering, joyful new novel about a pair of opposites with the wrong thing in common, from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.

Daphne always loved the way her fiancé, Peter, told their story. How they met (on a blustery day), fell in love (over an errant hat), and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it... right up until the moment he realized he was actually in love with his childhood best friend Petra.

Which is how Daphne begins her new story: stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only person who could possibly understand her predicament: Petra’s ex, Miles Nowak.

Scruffy and chaotic—with a penchant for taking solace in the sounds of heart break love ballads—Miles is exactly the opposite of practical, buttoned-up Daphne, whose coworkers know so little about her they have a running bet that she’s either FBI or in witness protection. The roommates mainly avoid one another, until one day, while drowning their sorrows, they form a tenuous friendship and a plan. If said plan also involves posting deliberately misleading photos of their summer adventures together, well, who could blame them?

But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex... right?]]> 400 Emily Henry Nikki 4 4.21 2024 Funny Story
author: Emily Henry
name: Nikki
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/22
date added: 2024/05/22
shelves:
review:

]]> Sharks in the Time of Saviors 48550623
Nainoa's family, struggling amidst the collapse of the sugarcane industry, hails his rescue as a sign of favor from ancient Hawaiian gods - a belief that appears validated after he exhibits puzzling new abilities. But as time passes, this supposed divine favor begins to drive the family apart: Nainoa, working now as a paramedic on the streets of Portland, struggles to fathom the full measure of his expanding abilities; further north in Washington, his older brother Dean hurtles into the world of elite college athletics, obsessed with wealth and fame; while in California, risk-obsessed younger sister Kaui navigates an unforgiving academic workload in an attempt to forge her independence from the family's legacy.

When supernatural events revisit the Flores family in Hawaii - with tragic consequences - they are all forced to reckon with the bonds of family, the meaning of heritage, and the cost of survival.

One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020. Named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the New York Times (#30), the Guardian, the Boston Globe, Oprah Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, BBC Culture, Good Housekeeping, LitHub, Spectrum Culture, Third Place Books, and Powell's Books.]]> 386 Kawai Strong Washburn 0374720770 Nikki 4 3.97 2020 Sharks in the Time of Saviors
author: Kawai Strong Washburn
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/12
date added: 2024/05/12
shelves:
review:

]]> Diva 172248821
When she met the fabulously rich Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, for the first time in her life, she believed she’d found someone who saw the woman within the legendary soprano. She fell desperately in love. He introduced her to a life of unbelievable luxury, showering her with jewels and sojourns in the most fashionable international watering holes with celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

And then suddenly, it was over. The international press announced that Aristotle Onassis would marry the most famous woman in the world, former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, leaving Maria to pick up the pieces.

In this remarkable novel, Daisy Goodwin brings to life a woman whose extraordinary talent, unremitting drive and natural chic made her a legend. But it was only in confronting the heartbreak of losing the man she loved that Maria Callas found her true voice and went on to triumph.

(11 hours and 46 minutes)]]> 12 Daisy Goodwin Nikki 4 3.89 2024 Diva
author: Daisy Goodwin
name: Nikki
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/08
date added: 2024/05/08
shelves:
review:

]]>