Nicci's bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 28 Apr 2025 20:22:50 -0700 60 Nicci's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Book of Harlan 22642465
The Book of Harlan opens with the courtship of Harlan’s parents and his 1917 birth in Macon, Georgia. After his prominent minister grandfather dies, Harlan and his parents move to Harlem, where he becomes a musician. Soon, Harlan and his best friend, trumpeter Lizard Robbins, are lured across the Atlantic Ocean to perform at a popular cabaret in the Parisian enclave of Montmartre—affectionately referred to as “The Harlem of Paris� by black American musicians.

When the City of Light falls under Nazi occupation, Harlan and Lizard are thrown into Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp in Weimar, Germany. The experience irreparably changes the course of Harlan’s life.

Based on exhaustive research and told in McFadden’s mesmeric prose, The Book of Harlan skillfully blends the stories of McFadden’s familial ancestors with those of real and imagined characters.]]>
400 Bernice L. McFadden 1617754463 Nicci 0 currently-reading 4.05 2016 The Book of Harlan
author: Bernice L. McFadden
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/28
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All Fours 197828937
"A giddy, bold, mind-blowing tour de force by one of our most important literary writers." � George Saunders, Booker-Prize winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo

"Profound and bawdy and deeply human, a brilliant work of art from a completely blown open and fearless mind."—Emma Cline, New York Times bestselling author of The Guest

A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]>
333 Miranda July 0593190289 Nicci 4 3.47 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/25
date added: 2025/04/25
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<![CDATA[A Constellation of Vital Phenomena]]> 18428067
In the final days of December 2004, in a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa hides in the woods when her father is abducted by Russian forces. Fearing for her life, she flees with their neighbor Akhmed—a failed physician—to the bombed-out hospital, where Sonja, the one remaining doctor, treats a steady stream of wounded rebels and refugees and mourns her missing sister. Over the course of five dramatic days, Akhmed and Sonja reach back into their pasts to unravel the intricate mystery of coincidence, betrayal, and forgiveness that unexpectedly binds them and decides their fate.

With The English Patient's dramatic sweep and The Tiger's Wife's expert sense of place, Marra gives us a searing debut about the transcendent power of love in wartime, and how it can cause us to become greater than we ever thought possible.]]>
416 Anthony Marra 0770436420 Nicci 0 currently-reading 4.10 2013 A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
author: Anthony Marra
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/21
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The Song of Achilles 13537029
Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the kingdom of Phthia to be raised in the shadow of King Peleus and his golden son, Achilles. “The best of all the Greeks”—strong, beautiful, and the child of a goddess—Achilles is everything the shamed Patroclus is not. Yet despite their differences, the boys become steadfast companions. Their bond deepens as they grow into young men and become skilled in the arts of war and medicine—much to the displeasure and the fury of Achilles� mother, Thetis, a cruel sea goddess with a hatred of mortals.

When word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, the men of Greece, bound by blood and oath, must lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, and torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows. Little do they know that the Fates will test them both as never before and demand a terrible sacrifice.

Built on the groundwork of the Iliad, Madeline Miller’s page-turning, profoundly moving, and blisteringly paced retelling of the epic Trojan War marks the launch of a dazzling career.]]>
351 Madeline Miller Nicci 4 4.31 2011 The Song of Achilles
author: Madeline Miller
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/17
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<![CDATA[The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work]]> 59920818
In this thought-provoking book, David Frayne questions the central place of work in mainstream political visions of the future, laying bare the ways in which economic demands colonise our lives and priorities. Drawing on his original research into the lives of people who are actively resisting nine-to-five employment, Frayne asks what motivates these people to disconnect from work, whether or not their resistance is futile, and whether they might have the capacity to inspire an alternative form of development, based on a reduction and social redistribution of work.

A crucial dissection of the work-centred nature of modern society and emerging resistance to it, The Refusal of Work is a bold call for a more humane and sustainable vision of social progress.]]>
282 David Frayne 1783601205 Nicci 0 currently-reading 3.92 2015 The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work
author: David Frayne
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma 63904686 288 Claire Dederer 0525655123 Nicci 0 currently-reading 3.89 2023 Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma
author: Claire Dederer
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/21
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Small Rain 205592907 A medical crisis brings one man close to death—and to love, art, and beauty—in a profound and luminous novel by award-winning author Garth Greenwell.

A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind.

This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value—art, memory, poetry, music, care—are thrown into sharp relief. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. Small Rain surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind.]]>
299 Garth Greenwell 0374718156 Nicci 4 3.96 2024 Small Rain
author: Garth Greenwell
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/12
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<![CDATA[Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop]]> 201191818
For the first few months all Yeongju does is cry, but the long hours in the shop also give her time to mull over what makes a good bookseller and store. As she starts to read hungrily, host author events, and develop her own bookselling philosophy, she eases into her new setting. Surrounded by friends, writers, and the books that connect them all, she finds her new story as the Hyunam-dong Bookshop transforms into an inviting space for lost souls to rest, heal, and remember it's never too late to scrap the plot and start again.]]>
312 Hwang Bo-Reum 1639732438 Nicci 5 3.95 2022 Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop
author: Hwang Bo-Reum
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/09
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The Unworthy: A Novel 214208266 The long-awaited new novel from the author of global sensation Tender Is the Flesh: a thrilling work of literary horror about a woman cloistered in a secretive, violent religious order, while outside the world has fallen into chaos.

From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.

But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?

A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.]]>
188 Agustina Bazterrica Nicci 0 currently-reading 3.75 2023 The Unworthy: A Novel
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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Harlem Rhapsody 212807643 The extraordinary story of Jessie Redmon Fauset whose exhilarating world of friends, rivals, and passions all combined to create the magic that was the Harlem Renaissance, written by Victoria Christopher Murray, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Personal Librarian.
Ěý
In 1919, as civil and social unrest grips the country, there is a little corner of America, a place called Harlem where something special is stirring. Here, the New Negro is rising and Black pride is evident everywhere…in music, theatre, fashion and the arts. And there on stage in the center of this renaissance is Jessie Redmon Fauset, the new literary editor ofĚýthe preeminent Negro magazine The Crisis.
Ěý
W.E.B. Du Bois, the founder and editor of The Crisis, has charged her with discovering young writers whose words will change the world. Jessie attacks the challenge with fervor, quickly finding sixteen-year-old Countee Cullen, seventeen-year-old Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen, who becomes one of her best friends.ĚýUnder Jessie’s leadership, The Crisis thrives, the writers become notable and magazine subscriptions soar. Every Negro writer in the country wants their work published in the magazine now known for its groundbreaking poetry and short stories.Ěý
Ěý
Jessie’s rising star is shining bright�.but her relationship with W.E.B. could jeopardize all that she’s built. The man, considered by most to be the leader of Black America, is not only Jessie’s boss, he’s her lover. And neither his wife, nor their fourteen-year-age difference can keep the two apart. Their torrid and tumultuous affair is complicated by a secret desire that Jessie harbors � to someday, herself, become the editor of the magazine, a position that only W.E.B. Du Bois has held.
Ěý
In the face of overwhelming sexism and racism, Jessie must balance her drive with her desires. However, as she strives to preserve her legacy, she’ll discover the high cost of her unparalleled success.]]>
395 Victoria Christopher Murray 0593638492 Nicci 2 4.33 2025 Harlem Rhapsody
author: Victoria Christopher Murray
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2025
rating: 2
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The Message 210943364
The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the “steampunk� city of “old traditions and new machinery,� but everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Finally he travels to the slave castles off the coast and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream.

He takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he meets an educator whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates’s own books. There he discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed by the “racial reckoning� of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this reckoning and the deeper myths of the community—a capital of the confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares.

And in Palestine, Coates discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we’ve accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis and Palestinians—the old, who remember their dispossessions on two continents, and the young, who have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him—and makes the war that would soon come all the more devastating.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive nationalist myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.]]>
232 Ta-Nehisi Coates 0593230388 Nicci 0 to-read 4.51 2024 The Message
author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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I'll Give You the Sun 59354753 "We were all heading for each other on a collision course, no matter what. Maybe some people are just meant to be in the same story."

At first, Jude and her twin brother Noah, are inseparable. Noah draws constantly and is falling in love with the charismatic boy next door, while daredevil Jude wears red-red lipstick, cliff-dives, and does all the talking for both of them. Years later, they are barely speaking. Something has happened to change the twins in different yet equally devastating ways . . . but then Jude meets an intriguing, irresistible boy and a mysterious new mentor. The early years are Noah's to tell; the later years are Jude's. But they each have only half the story, and if they can only find their way back to one another, they'll have a chance to remake their world. This radiant, award-winning novel from the acclaimed author of The Sky Is Everywhere will leave you breathless and teary and laughing—often all at once.

Printz Award Winner Stonewall Honor Book.]]>
386 Jandy Nelson Nicci 5 4.27 2014 I'll Give You the Sun
author: Jandy Nelson
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/23
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Death of the Author 214329001 The future of storytelling is here.

Life has thrown Zelu some curveballs over the years, but when she's suddenly dropped from her university job and her latest novel is rejected, all in the middle of her sister's wedding, her life is upended. Disabled, unemployed and from a nosy, high-achieving, judgmental family, she's not sure what comes next.

In her hotel room that night, she takes the risk that will define her life - she decides to write a book VERY unlike her others. A science fiction drama about androids and AI after the extinction of humanity. And everything changes.

What follows is a tale of love and loss, fame and infamy, of extraordinary events in one world, and another. And as Zelu's life evolves, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur.

Because sometimes a story really does have the power to reshape the world.]]>
448 Nnedi Okorafor 0063391155 Nicci 4 4.04 2025 Death of the Author
author: Nnedi Okorafor
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/22
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Go Set a Watchman 24817626 To Kill a Mockingbird. Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch�"Scout"—returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt. Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in a painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past—a journey that can be guided only by one's conscience. Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of Harper Lee. Here is an unforgettable novel of wisdom, humanity, passion, humor and effortless precision—a profoundly affecting work of art that is both wonderfully evocative of another era and relevant to our own times. It not only confirms the enduring brilliance of To Kill a Mockingbird, but also serves as its essential companion, adding depth, context and new meaning to an American classic.]]> 278 Harper Lee 0062409859 Nicci 0 to-read 3.28 2015 Go Set a Watchman
author: Harper Lee
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/20
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<![CDATA[I'll Tell You When I'm Home: A Memoir]]> 220161011 The rich and deeply personal debut memoir by an award-winning Palestinian American writer, whose experience of motherhood via surrogacy forces her to reckon with her own past, and the legacy of her family’s exile and displacement, shaping the stories that will build her future.

After a decade of yearning for a child, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan makes the decision to use a surrogate. As her baby grows in the body of another woman, in another country, Hala finds her own life unraveling—her husband wants to leave; her mental health grows brittle; the city of her youth, Beirut, is collapsing. She turns to the stories of her family, of her grandmothers long gone, and maps their jagged paths from Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon, summoning memories and tales of invading armies, midnight escapes across deserts, places of refuge that proved temporary. She recalls the contradictions of a Midwestern childhood and years spent throughout the Arab world; the identities she tried on like outfits; the stories of men who walked away and those of women who disappeared in less obvious ways; the decisions they’d all have to make again and again—what to take and what to leave behind.

Meanwhile, as the baby grows from the size of a poppyseed to that of a grain of rice, then a lime, and on and on, Hala gathers these stories that are her legacy, setting down the ones that no longer serve her, holding close those that will set her free. It is emotionally charged, painstaking work, but now the stakes are much larger, extending beyond her own existence. How does one impart love for people who are no longer here, for places that one cannot touch? How to become someone else’s home, someone else’s safe place, when home and safety have eluded you?

A stunningly lyrical, raw, and powerful quest for motherhood, selfhood, and peoplehood, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is an indelible story of unraveling and becoming, of destruction and redemption, and of homelands lost and recreated.]]>
272 Hala Alyan 198218258X Nicci 0 to-read 4.69 2025 I'll Tell You When I'm Home: A Memoir
author: Hala Alyan
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.69
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/17
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Somadina 216412645 From the National Book Award finalist and author of Pet comes a novel set in a magical West African world, about a teen girl who must save her missing twin while learning to navigate her own terrifying new powers.

Somadina and her twin brother, Jayaike, are practically the same person: they finish each other's sentences and make each other whole. When the twins come of age, their magical gifts begin to develop, but while Jayaike's powers enchant, Somadina's cause fear to ripple through her town.

Always an outsider, Somadina now faces blatant--and dangerous--hostility. And things go from bad to worse when her brother—the one person she trusted—vanishes. Somadina knows that no matter the dangers, she must track him down. Even if it means entering the Sacred Forest. Even if it means grueling, otherworldly travel she may not survive. Even if it means finding the hidden places where those closest to the spirit world don't dare to go. Does Somadina have the strength --within both her body and her soul -- for the trying journey ahead?

National Book Award finalist Akwaeke Emezi masterfully weaves a tale of family, identity, and the power of the past, in a world where the extraordinary is ordinary.]]>
300 Akwaeke Emezi 0593309073 Nicci 0 to-read 4.37 2025 Somadina
author: Akwaeke Emezi
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/17
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Greta & Valdin 177058859
Greta is not letting her painfully unrequited crush (or her possibly pointless master’s thesis, or her pathetic academic salary...) get her down. She would love to focus on the charming fellow grad student she meets at a party and her friendships with a circle of similarly floundering twenty-somethings, but her chaotic family life won’t stop her mother is keeping secrets, her nephew is having a gay crisis, and her brother has suddenly flown to South America without a word.

Sharp, hilarious, and with an undeniable emotional momentum that builds to an exuberant conclusion, Greta & Valdin careens us through the siblings� misadventures and the messy dramas of their sprawling, eccentric Maaori-Russian-Catalonian family. An acclaimed bestseller in New Zealand, Greta & Valdin is fresh, joyful, and alive with the possibility of love in its many mystifying forms.]]>
351 Rebecca K. Reilly 1668028069 Nicci 5 3.82 2021 Greta & Valdin
author: Rebecca K. Reilly
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/11
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Speak 34845427
"Speak up for yourself—we want to know what you have to say."

From the first moment of her freshman year at Merryweather High, Melinda knows this is a big fat lie, part of the nonsense of high school. She is friendless, outcast, because she busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops, so now nobody will talk to her, let alone listen to her. As time passes, she becomes increasingly isolated and practically stops talking altogether. Only her art class offers any solace, and it is through her work on an art project that she is finally able to face what really happened at that terrible party: she was raped by an upperclassman, a guy who still attends Merryweather and is still a threat to her. Her healing process has just begun when she has another violent encounter with him. But this time Melinda fights back, refuses to be silent, and thereby achieves a measure of vindication.

In Laurie Halse Anderson's powerful novel, an utterly believable heroine with a bitterly ironic voice delivers a blow to the hypocritical world of high school. She speaks for many a disenfranchised teenager while demonstrating the importance of speaking up for oneself.

Speak was a 1999 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature.]]>
211 Laurie Halse Anderson Nicci 3 4.24 1999 Speak
author: Laurie Halse Anderson
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1999
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/08
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Homeseeking 211025407 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780593712993.

An epic and intimate tale of one couple across sixty years as world events pull them together and apart, illuminating the Chinese diaspora and exploring what it means to find home far from your homeland.

A single choice can define an entire life.

Haiwen is buying bananas at a 99 Ranch Market in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, his Suchi, for the first time in sixty years. To recently widowed Haiwen it feels like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back.

Suchi was seven when she first met Haiwen in their Shanghai neighborhood, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship blossomed into soul-deep love, but when Haiwen secretly enlisted in the Nationalist army in 1947 to save his brother from the draft, she was left with just his violin and a note: Forgive me.

Homeseeking follows the separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history as war, famine, and opportunity take them separately to the song halls of Hong Kong, the military encampments of Taiwan, the bustling streets of New York, and sunny California, telling Haiwen’s story from the present to the past while tracing Suchi’s from her childhood to the present, meeting in the crucible of their lives. Throughout, Haiwen holds his memories close while Suchi forces herself to look only forward, neither losing sight of the home they hold in their hearts.

At once epic and intimate, Homeseeking is a story of family, sacrifice, and loyalty, and of the power of love to endure beyond distance, beyond time.]]>
512 Karissa Chen Nicci 5 4.24 2025 Homeseeking
author: Karissa Chen
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/05
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Anita de Monte Laughs Last 127306192 New York Times bestselling author Xochitl Gonzalez delivers a mesmerizing novel about a first-generation Ivy League student who uncovers the genius work of a female artist decades after her suspicious death

1985. Anita de Monte, a rising star in the art world, is found dead in New York City; her tragic death is the talk of the town. Until it isn’t. By 1998 Anita’s name has been all but forgotten—certainly by the time Raquel, a third-year art history student is preparing her final thesis. On College Hill, surrounded by privileged students whose futures are already paved out for them, Raquel feels like an outsider. Students of color, like her, are the minority there, and the pressure to work twice as hard for the same opportunities is no secret.

But when Raquel becomes romantically involved with a well-connected older art student, she finds herself unexpectedly rising up the social ranks. As she attempts to straddle both worlds, she stumbles upon Anita’s story, raising questions about the dynamics of her own relationship, which eerily mirrors that of the forgotten artist.

Moving back and forth through time and told from the perspectives of both women, Anita de Monte Laughs Last is a propulsive, witty examination of power, love, and art, daring to ask who gets to be remembered and who is left behind in the rarefied world of the elite.]]>
342 Xóchitl González 1250786215 Nicci 4 3.76 2024 Anita de Monte Laughs Last
author: Xóchitl González
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/20
date added: 2025/02/20
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Hester 56686560 A vivid reimagining of the woman who inspired Hester Prynne, the tragic heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and a journey into the enduring legacy of New England's witchcraft trials.

Who is the real Hester Prynne?

Isobel Gamble is a young seamstress carrying generations of secrets when she sets sail from Scotland in the early 1800s with her husband, Edward. An apothecary who has fallen under the spell of opium, his pile of debts have forced them to flee Edinburgh for a fresh start in the New World. But only days after they've arrived in Salem, Edward abruptly joins a departing ship as a medic––leaving Isobel penniless and alone in a strange country, forced to make her way by any means possible.

When she meets a young Nathaniel Hawthorne, the two are instantly drawn to each other: he is a man haunted by his ancestors, who sent innocent women to the gallows––while she is an unusually gifted needleworker, troubled by her own strange talents. As the weeks pass and Edward's safe return grows increasingly unlikely, Nathaniel and Isobel grow closer and closer. Together, they are a muse and a dark storyteller; the enchanter and the enchanted. But which is which?

In this sensuous and hypnotizing tale, a young immigrant woman grapples with our country's complicated past, and learns that America's ideas of freedom and liberty often fall short of their promise. Interwoven with Isobel and Nathaniel's story is a vivid interrogation of who gets to be a "real" American in the first half of the 19th century, a depiction of the early days of the Underground Railroad in New England, and atmospheric interstitials that capture the long history of "unusual" women being accused of witchcraft. Meticulously researched yet evocatively imagined, Hester is]]>
336 Laurie Lico Albanese 1250278562 Nicci 2 4.16 2022 Hester
author: Laurie Lico Albanese
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/02/17
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Daemon (Daemon, #1) 6665847 A high-tech thriller for the wireless age that explores the unthinkable consequences of a computer program running without human control—a daemon—designed to dismantle society and bring about a new world order

Technology controls almost everything in our modern-day world, from remote entry on our cars to access to our homes, from the flight controls of our airplanes to the movements of the entire world economy. Thousands of autonomous computer programs, or daemons, make our networked world possible, running constantly in the background of our lives, trafficking e-mail, transferring money, and monitoring power grids. For the most part, daemons are benign, but the same can't always be said for the people who design them.

Matthew Sobol was a legendary computer game designer—the architect behind half-a-dozen popular online games. His premature death depressed both gamers and his company's stock price. But Sobol's fans aren't the only ones to note his passing. When his obituary is posted online, a previously dormant daemon activates, initiating a chain of events intended to unravel the fabric of our hyper-efficient, interconnected world. With Sobol's secrets buried along with him, and as new layers of his daemon are unleashed at every turn, it's up to an unlikely alliance to decipher his intricate plans and wrest the world from the grasp of a nameless, faceless enemy—or learn to live in a society in which we are no longer in control. . . .

Computer technology expert Daniel Suarez blends haunting high-tech realism with gripping suspense in an authentic, complex thriller in the tradition of Michael Crichton, Neal Stephenson, and William Gibson.]]>
632 Daniel Suarez 0451228731 Nicci 0 to-read 4.14 2006 Daemon (Daemon, #1)
author: Daniel Suarez
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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Witchcraft for Wayward Girls 207610827 There’s power in a book�

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to the Wellwood Home in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who knows she’s going to go home and marry her baby’s father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid…and it’s usually paid in blood.

In Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, the author of How to Sell a Haunted House and The Final Girl Support Group delivers another searing, completely original novel and further cements his status as a “horror master� (NPR).]]>
492 Grady Hendrix Nicci 1 4.09 2025 Witchcraft for Wayward Girls
author: Grady Hendrix
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 1
read at: 2025/02/08
date added: 2025/02/08
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I hated this book so much. And then I realized a man wrote it and I hated myself for reading it.
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Grown Women 83814904
Erudite Evelyn, her cynical daughter Charlotte, and Charlotte’s optimistic daughter Corinna see the world very differently. Though they love each other deeply, it’s no wonder that their personalities often clash. But their conflicts go deeper than run-of-the-mill disagreements. Here, there is deep, dark resentment for past and present hurt.ĚýĚý

When Corinna gives birth to her own daughter, Camille, the beautiful, intelligent little girl offers this trio of mothers something they all hope, joy, and an opportunity to reconcile. They decide to work together to raise their collective daughter with the tenderness and empathy they missed in their own relationships. Yet despite their best intentions, they cannot agree on what that means.

After Camille eventually leaves her mother and grandmother in rural Tennessee for a more cosmopolitan life in Washington, DC with her great-grandmother, it’s unclear whether this complex and self-contained girl will thrive or be overwhelmed by the fears and dreams of three generations she carries. As she grows into a gutsy young woman, Camille must decide for herself what happiness will look like.

ĚýIn masterful, elegant prose, debut novelist Sarai Johnson has created a rich and moving portrait of Black women’s lives today.]]>
392 Sarai Johnson 0063294451 Nicci 2 4.38 2024 Grown Women
author: Sarai Johnson
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/06
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<![CDATA[Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World]]> 138505710
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us―and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.]]>
416 Naomi Klein 0374610320 Nicci 0 to-read 4.21 2023 Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
author: Naomi Klein
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted]]> 51070797 A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission and, ultimately, a road trip of healing and self-discovery.

In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.� She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.

It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.

When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after three and a half years of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.

How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.]]>
288 Suleika Jaouad Nicci 5 4.58 2021 Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
author: Suleika Jaouad
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2021
rating: 5
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The Bog Wife 205670066 In this atmospheric Appalachian gothic, the Haddesley siblings of West Virginia must unearth long-buried secrets to carve out a future when the supernatural bargain entwining their fate with their ancestral land is suddenly ruptured

Since time immemorial, the Haddesley family has tended the cranberry bog. In exchange, the bog sustains them. The staunch seasons of their lives are governed by a strict covenant that is renewed each generation with the ritual sacrifice of their patriarch, and in return, the bog produces a “bog-wife.� Brought to life from vegetation, this woman is meant to carry on the family line. But when the bog fails—or refuses—to honor the bargain, the Haddesleys, a group of discordant siblings still grieving the mother who mysteriously disappeared years earlier, face an unknown future.

Middle child Wenna, summoned back to the dilapidated family manor just as her marriage is collapsing, believes the Haddesleys must abandon their patrimony. Her siblings are not so easily persuaded. Eldest daughter Eda, de facto head of the household, seeks to salvage the compact by desecrating it. Younger son Percy retreats into the wilderness in a dangerous bid to summon his own bog-wife. And as youngest daughter Nora takes desperate measures to keep her warring siblings together, fledgling patriarch Charlie uncovers a disturbing secret that casts doubt over everything the family has ever believed about itself.

Brimming with aching loss and the universal struggle between honoring family commitments and the drive to strike out on one’s own, The Bog Wife is a haunting invocation of the arcane power of the habits and habitats that bound us.]]>
331 Kay Chronister 1640096639 Nicci 3 3.67 2024 The Bog Wife
author: Kay Chronister
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/26
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11/22/63 12530184 On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? Stephen King’s heart-stoppingly dramatic new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination—a thousand page tour de force.

Following his massively successful novel Under the Dome, King sweeps readers back in time to another moment—a real life moment—when everything went wrong: the JFK assassination. And he introduces readers to a character who has the power to change the course of history.

Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.

Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life � a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

A tribute to a simpler era and a devastating exercise in escalating suspense, 11/22/63 is Stephen King at his epic best.

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866 Stephen King Nicci 3 4.41 2011 11/22/63
author: Stephen King
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/22
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The Mighty Red 204982648
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 0063277085 Nicci 2 4.03 2024 The Mighty Red
author: Louise Erdrich
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/01/12
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Beautiful Days: Stories 199468942 From New Yorker and Paris Review contributor Zach Williams comes a striking and savage debut story collection that confronts parenthood, mortality, and life’s broken promises.

A couple awakens in a home in the woods to find themselves rapidly aging as their toddler remains unchanged. A work-worn employee navigates conspiracy theories and the threat of violence in an abandoned office. A tour guide leads a troublesome group to an ancient structure, apparently nonhuman in origin, discovering along the way that the most mysterious creatures of all are right beside him.

These ten stories show the fallibility of time and how reality reveals itself behind the gauze of a dream—or a nightmare. Throughout, Williams illustrates how quickly we come to the edges of our patience and endurance, the hidden damages lurking in the shadows of the everyday, the distances we must travel to protect our families, and the tenuousness of even our deepest relationships. Williams sees the perversity in the mundane and dares readers to confront the power—and beauty—of time’s relentless movement.

With exquisite prose and a lacerating wit, Beautiful Days holds a mirror to the many absurdities of being human and refuses to let us look away.]]>
226 Zach Williams 0385550154 Nicci 3 3.32 2024 Beautiful Days: Stories
author: Zach Williams
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2024
rating: 3
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Horse 59109077 A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history

Kentucky, 1850. An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack.

New York City, 1954. Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a nineteenth-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance.

Washington, DC, 2019. Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse--one studying the stallion's bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success.

Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.]]>
401 Geraldine Brooks 0399562966 Nicci 3 4.17 2022 Horse
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 3
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Bel Canto 5826 318 Ann Patchett Nicci 3 3.93 2001 Bel Canto
author: Ann Patchett
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/26
date added: 2024/12/29
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Daisy Jones & The Six 81603439 A gripping novel about the whirlwind rise of an iconic 1970s rock group and their beautiful lead singer, revealing the mystery behind their infamous break up.

Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six, but nobody knows the real reason why they split at the absolute height of their popularity...until now.

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go-Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it's the rock and roll she loves most. By the time she's twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.

Another band getting noticed is The Six, led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she's pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.

Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.

The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.]]>
352 Taylor Jenkins Reid Nicci 4 4.22 2019 Daisy Jones & The Six
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2019
rating: 4
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This Motherless Land 203927997 From the acclaimed author ofĚýWahala,Ěýa “vibrantâ€� (Charmaine Wilkerson) retelling of Mansfield Park, exploring identity, culture, race, and love.

Quiet Funke is happy in Nigeria. She loves her art teacher mother, her professor father, and even her annoying little brother (most of the time). But when tragedy strikes, she’s sent to England, a place she knows only from her mother’s stories. To her dismay, she finds the much-lauded estate dilapidated, the food tasteless, the weather grey. Worse still, her mother’s family are cold and distant. With one exception: her cousin Liv.

Free-spirited Liv has always wanted to break free of her joyless family. She becomes fiercely protective of her little cousin, and her warmth and kindness give Funke a place to heal. The two girls grow into adulthood the closest of friends.

But the choices their mothers made haunt Funke and Liv, and when a second tragedy occurs their friendship is torn apart. Against the long shadow of their shared family history, each woman will struggle to chart a path forward, separated by country, misunderstanding, and ambition.

Moving between Somerset and Lagos over the course of two decades,ĚýThis Motherless LandĚýis a sweeping examination of identity, culture, race, and love that asks how we find belonging and whether a family’s generational wrongs can be righted.]]>
352 Nikki May 0063084317 Nicci 4 4.41 2024 This Motherless Land
author: Nikki May
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2024
rating: 4
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Babel 57945316 From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a historical fantasy epic that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British Empire

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. The tower and its students are the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver-working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as the arcane craft serves the Empire's quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide . . .

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?]]>
544 R.F. Kuang 0063021420 Nicci 3 4.17 2022 Babel
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 3
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The Thirty Names of Night 52764801
One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting the birds of North America. She famously and mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Z’s past is intimately tied to his mother’s—and his grandmother’s—in ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z’s story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he never knew. Realizing that he isn’t and has never been alone, he has the courage to officially claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning rare.

As unprecedented numbers of birds are mysteriously drawn to the New York City skies, Nadir enlists the help of his family and friends to unravel what happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save. Following his mother’s ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along.

Featuring Zeyn Joukhadar’s signature storytelling, The Thirty Names of Night is a timely exploration of how we all search for and ultimately embrace who we are.]]>
291 Zeyn Joukhadar 1982121491 Nicci 4 4.02 2020 The Thirty Names of Night
author: Zeyn Joukhadar
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2020
rating: 4
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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 Nicci 3 4.16 2024 Playground
author: Richard Powers
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 3
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Enter Ghost 74841758 WINNER OF THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE � Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction � A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of the Year




“Assured and formidable.� � Wall Street Journal


After years away from her family’s homeland, and reeling from a disastrous love affair, actress Sonia Nasir returns to Haifa to visit her older sister Haneen. This is her first trip back since the second intifada and the deaths of their while Haneen made a life here commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia remained in London to focus on her acting career and now dissolute marriage. On her return, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new.


At Haneen’s, Sonia meets the charismatic and candid Mariam, a local director, and finds herself roped into a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Sonia is soon rehearsing Gertude’s lines in Classical Arabic and spending more time in Ramallah than Haifa, along with a dedicated group of men from all over historic Palestine who, in spite of competing egos and priorities, each want to bring Shakespeare to that side of the wall. As opening night draws closer it becomes clear just how many violent obstacles stand before a troupe of Palestinian actors. Amidst it all, the life Sonia once knew starts to give way to the daunting, exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home.


A stunning rendering of present-day Palestine, Enter Ghost is a story of diaspora, displacement, and the connection to be found in family and shared resistance. Timely, thoughtful, and passionate, Isabella Hammad’s highly anticipated second novel is an exquisite feat, an unforgettable story of artistry under occupation.]]>
361 Isabella Hammad 0802162398 Nicci 2 4.12 2023 Enter Ghost
author: Isabella Hammad
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 2
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Small Things Like These 58662236
Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]>
128 Claire Keegan 0802158749 Nicci 1 4.13 2021 Small Things Like These
author: Claire Keegan
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 1
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A Woman Is No Man 41016483 368 Etaf Rum 0062699784 Nicci 4 4.29 2019 A Woman Is No Man
author: Etaf Rum
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/25
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The Sons of El Rey 199797716
Ernesto and Elena Vega arrive in Mexico City where Ernesto works on a construction site until he is discovered by a local lucha libre trainer. At a time when luchadores—Mexican wrestlers donning flamboyant masks and capes—were treated as daredevils or rockstars, Ernesto finds fame as El Rey Coyote, rapidly gaining name recognition across Mexico.

Years later, in East Los Angeles Freddy Vega is struggling to save his father’s gym while Freddy’s own son Julian is searching for professional and romantic fulfillment as a Mexican American gay man refusing to be defined by stereotypes. The once larger-than-life Ernesto Vega is now dying, leading Freddy and Julian to find their own passions and discover what really happened back in Mexico.

Told from alternating perspectives, Ernesto takes you from the ranches of Michoacán to the makeshift colonias and crowded sports arenas of Mexico City. Freddy describes life in the suburban streets of 1980s Los Angeles and the community their family built as Julian descends deep into the culture of hook-up apps, lucha burlesque shows, and the dark underbelly of West Hollywood, The Sons of El Rey is an intimate portrait of a family wading against time and legacy, yet always choosing the fight.]]>
384 Alex Espinoza 1668032783 Nicci 4 3.88 2024 The Sons of El Rey
author: Alex Espinoza
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/21
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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 Nicci 3 4.47 2017 The Alice Network
author: Kate Quinn
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/17
date added: 2024/09/21
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Freedom Is a Feast 203163907 In the tradition of Isabel Allende’s career-launching debut, The House of the Spirits, a multigenerational, Latin American saga of love and revolution in which a young man abandons his family for the cause—and receives a late-life chance at “a tour de forceâ€� from “the new masterâ€� (Luis Alberto Urrea, New York Times bestselling author of Good Night, Irene). In 1964, Stanislavo, a zealous young man devoted to his ideals, turns his back on his privilege to join the leftist movement in the jungles of Venezuela. There, as he trains, he meets Emiliana, a nurse and fellow revolutionary. Though their intense connection seems to be love at first sight, their romance is upended by a decision with consequences that will echo down through the generations. Ěý Forty years later, the country’s political landscape has drastically changed, as have the trajectories that Stanislavo and Emiliana followed in the intervening decades. When a young boy is accidentally shot on the eve of the attempted coup against President Chávez, Stanislavo’s chance encounter with the boy’s mother forces a reckoning with past missteps and the ways his actions have reverberated into the present. Ěý With its epic scope, gripping narrative, and unflinching intimacy, Freedom Is a FeastĚýannounces a major new talent. Alejandro Puyana has delivered an extraordinarily wise and moving debut about sticking to one’s beliefs at the expense of pain and chaos, about the way others can suffer for our misdeeds even when we have the best of intentions, and about the possibility for redemption when love persists across time.]]> 448 Alejandro Puyana 0316571784 Nicci 5 4.27 2024 Freedom Is a Feast
author: Alejandro Puyana
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/10
date added: 2024/09/10
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Hijab Butch Blues 68022109 A queer hijabi Muslim immigrant survives her coming-of-age by drawing strength and hope from stories in the Quran in this daring, provocative, and radically hopeful memoir.

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

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

This searingly intimate memoir in essays, spanning Lamya's childhood to her arrival in the United States for college through early-adult life in New York City, tells a universal story of courage, trust, and love, celebrating what it means to be a seeker and an architect of one's own life.]]>
284 Lamya H. 0593448774 Nicci 5 4.50 2023 Hijab Butch Blues
author: Lamya H.
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/24
date added: 2024/08/24
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<![CDATA[Persepolis. The story of a childhood (Persepolis, #1)]]> 9516
Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. Marjane’s child’s-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love.]]>
153 Marjane Satrapi 037571457X Nicci 0 to-read 4.27 2003 Persepolis. The story of a childhood (Persepolis, #1)
author: Marjane Satrapi
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/18
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Behind You Is the Sea 134246146 An exciting debut novel that gives voice to the diverse residents of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore—from young activists in conflict with their traditional parents to the poor who clean for the rich—lives which intersect across divides of class, generation, and religion.

Funny and touching, Behind You Is the Sea brings us into the homes and lives of three main families—the Baladis, the Salamehs, and the Ammars—Palestinian immigrants who’ve all found a different welcome in America.

Their various fates and struggles cause their community dynamic to sizzle and sometimes explode: The wealthy Ammar family employs young Maysoon Baladi, whose family struggles financially, to clean up after their spoiled teenagers. Meanwhile, Marcus Salameh, whose aunt married into the wealthy Ammar family, confronts his father in an effort to protect his younger sister for “dishonoring� the family. Only a trip to Palestine, where Marcus experiences an unexpected and dramatic transformation, can bridge this seemingly unbridgeable divide between the two generations.

Behind You Is the Sea faces stereotypes about Palestinian culture head-on and, shifting perspectives to weave a complex social fabric replete with weddings, funerals, broken hearts, and devastating secrets.]]>
251 Susan Muaddi Darraj 0063324253 Nicci 4 4.25 2024 Behind You Is the Sea
author: Susan Muaddi Darraj
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/13
date added: 2024/08/13
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Martyr! 139400713 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

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 the Persian Gulf 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.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]>
331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Nicci 5 4.22 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/09
date added: 2024/08/09
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<![CDATA[Death in Venice and Other Tales]]> 53064 384 Thomas Mann 0141181737 Nicci 4 3.92 1911 Death in Venice and Other Tales
author: Thomas Mann
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1911
rating: 4
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The First Bad Man 21412400 No One Belongs Here More Than You, a spectacular debut novel that is so heartbreaking, so dirty, so tender, so funny � so Miranda July � readers will be blown away.

Here is Cheryl, a tightly-wound, vulnerable woman who lives alone, with a perpetual lump in her throat. She is haunted by a baby boy she met when she was six, who sometimes recurs as other people's babies. Cheryl is also obsessed with Phillip, a philandering board member at the women's self-defense non-profit where she works. She believes they've been making love for many lifetimes, though they have yet to consummate in this one.

When Cheryl's bosses ask if their twenty-one-year-old daughter Clee can move into her house for a little while, Cheryl's eccentrically-ordered world explodes. And yet it is Clee � the selfish, cruel blond bombshell � who bullies Cheryl into reality and, unexpectedly, provides her the love of a lifetime.

Tender, gripping, slyly hilarious, infused with raging sexual fantasies and fierce maternal love, Miranda July's first novel confirms her as a spectacularly original, iconic and important voice today, and a writer for all time. The First Bad Man is dazzling, disorienting, and unforgettable.]]>
288 Miranda July 1439172560 Nicci 3 3.67 2015 The First Bad Man
author: Miranda July
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/05
date added: 2024/08/05
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Mipam: A Tibetan Love Story 2323171 345 Albert Arthur Yongden 0961706600 Nicci 0 to-read 4.35 1935 Mipam: A Tibetan Love Story
author: Albert Arthur Yongden
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1935
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe]]> 403517 1026 Edgar Allan Poe 0679600078 Nicci 4 4.39 1849 The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
author: Edgar Allan Poe
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1849
rating: 4
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<![CDATA[The Lost World (Jurassic Park, #2)]]> 8650
There are rumors that something has survived....]]>
448 Michael Crichton 0752224417 Nicci 4 3.85 1995 The Lost World (Jurassic Park, #2)
author: Michael Crichton
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/28
date added: 2024/07/28
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Wandering Stars 174162974 A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK � The Pulitzer Prize-finalist and author of the breakout bestseller There There delivers a masterful follow-up to his already classic first novel. Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous.

Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle,where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

In a novel that is by turns shattering and wondrous, Tommy Orange has conjured the ancestors of the family readers first fell in love with in There There—warriors, drunks, outlaws, addicts—asking what it means to bethe children and grandchildren of massacre. Wandering Stars is a novel about epigenetic and generational trauma that has the force and vision of a modern epic, an exceptionally powerful new book from one of the most exciting writers at work today and soaring confirmation of Tommy Orange’s monumental gifts.]]>
337 Tommy Orange 0593318269 Nicci 4 3.91 2024 Wandering Stars
author: Tommy Orange
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/24
date added: 2024/07/28
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Dark Matter 27833670 A mindbending, relentlessly surprising thriller from the author of the bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy.

Jason Dessen is walking home through the chilly Chicago streets one night, looking forward to a quiet evening in front of the fireplace with his wife, Daniela, and their son, Charlie—when his reality shatters.

"Are you happy with your life?"

Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious.

Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.

Before a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend."

In this world he's woken up to, Jason's life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.

Is it this world or the other that's the dream?

And even if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could've imagined—one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself even as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe.

Dark Matter is a brilliantly plotted tale that is at once sweeping and intimate, mind-bendingly strange and profoundly human--a relentlessly surprising science-fiction thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we'll go to claim the lives we dream of.]]>
342 Blake Crouch 1101904224 Nicci 5 4.13 2016 Dark Matter
author: Blake Crouch
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2018/10/30
date added: 2024/07/20
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Tender Is the Flesh 49090884
His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.� Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.

Then one day he’s given a a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.]]>
209 Agustina Bazterrica 1982150920 Nicci 4 3.75 2017 Tender Is the Flesh
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/15
date added: 2024/07/16
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<![CDATA[The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store]]> 85148114
ĚýĚýĚýĚýAs these charactersâ€� stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.]]>
400 James McBride 0593422961 Nicci 3 4.25 2023 The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
author: James McBride
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/13
date added: 2024/07/16
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Little Rot 202450824 A thrilling new novel from the bestselling, award-winning, visionary Akwaeke Emezi Ěý

One weekend.
The elite underbelly of a Nigerian city.
A party that goes awry.
A tangled web of sex and lies and corruption that leaves no one unscathed.


Aima and Kalu are a longtime couple who have just split. When Kalu, reeling from the breakup, visits an exclusive sex party hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, he makes a decision that will plunge them all into chaos, brutally and suddenly upending their lives. Ola and Souraya, two Nigerian sex workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur, collide into the scene just as everything goes to hell. Sucked into the city’s corrupt and glittering underworld, they’re all looking for a way out, fueled by a desperate need to escape the dangerous threat that looms over them.]]>
288 Akwaeke Emezi Nicci 2 3.75 2024 Little Rot
author: Akwaeke Emezi
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/06/30
date added: 2024/07/02
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The Bullet Swallower 125183438 The Bullet Swallower follows a Mexican bandido as he sets off for Texas to save his family, only to encounter a mysterious figure who has come, finally, to collect a cosmic debt generation in the making.

In 1895, Antonio Sonoro is the latest in a long line of ruthless men. He’s good with his gun and is drawn to trouble but he’s also out of money and out of options. A drought has ravaged the town of Dorado, Mexico, where he lives with his wife and children, and so when he hears about a train laden with gold and other treasures, he sets off for Houston to rob it—with his younger brother Hugo in tow. But when the heist goes awry and Hugo is killed by the Texas Rangers, Antonio finds himself launched into a quest for revenge that endangers not only his life and his family, but his eternal soul.

In 1964, Jaime Sonoro is Mexico’s most renowned actor and singer. But his comfortable life is disrupted when he discovers a book that purports to tell the entire history of his family beginning with Cain and Abel. In its ancient pages, Jaime learns about the multitude of horrific crimes committed by his ancestors. And when the same mysterious figure from Antonio’s timeline shows up in Mexico City, Jaime realizes that he may be the one who has to pay for his ancestors� crimes, unless he can discover the true story of his grandfather Antonio, the legendary bandido El Tragabalas, The Bullet Swallower.

A family saga that’s epic in scope and magical in its blood, and based loosely on the author’s own great-grandfather, The Bullet Swallower tackles border politics, intergenerational trauma, and the legacies of racism and colonialism in a lush setting and stunning prose that asks who pays for the sins of our ancestors, and whether it is possible to be better than our forebears.]]>
271 Elizabeth Gonzalez James 166800934X Nicci 3 4.07 2024 The Bullet Swallower
author: Elizabeth Gonzalez James
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/25
date added: 2024/06/25
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Winter Counts 50387703 An addictive and groundbreaking debut thriller set on a Native American reservation

Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.Ěý When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that’s hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil’s own nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal. He enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend and sets out to learn where the drugs are coming from, and how to make them stop.

They follow a lead to Denver and find that drug cartels are rapidly expanding and forming new and terrifying alliances. And back on the reservation, a new tribal council initiative raises uncomfortable questions about money and power. As Virgil starts to link the pieces together, he must face his own demons and reclaim his Native identity. He realizes that being a Native American in the twenty-first century comes at an incredible cost.

Winter CountsĚýis a tour-de-force of crime fiction, a bracingly honest look at a long-ignored part of American life, and a twisting, turning story that’s as deeply rendered as it is thrilling.

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331 David Heska Wanbli Weiden 0062968963 Nicci 3 4.00 2020 Winter Counts
author: David Heska Wanbli Weiden
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/17
date added: 2024/06/17
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<![CDATA[What Feasts at Night (Sworn Soldier, #2)]]> 126917866 Alex Easton, retired soldier, returns in this novella-length sequel to the bestselling What Moves The Dead.

When Easton travels to Gallacia as a favor to Miss Potter, they find their home empty, the caretaker dead, and the grounds troubled by a strange, uncanny silence.

The locals whisper of a strange breath-stealing being from Gallacian folklore that has taken up residence in Easton’s home . . . and in their dreams.]]>
145 T. Kingfisher Nicci 3 4.04 2024 What Feasts at Night (Sworn Soldier, #2)
author: T. Kingfisher
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/12
date added: 2024/06/12
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Now Is Not the Time to Panic 60755035
Sixteen-year-old Frankie Budge—aspiring writer, indifferent student, offbeat loner—is determined to make it through yet another sad summer in Coalfield, Tennessee, when she meets Zeke, a talented artist who has just moved into his grandmother’s unhappy house and who is as lonely and awkward as Frankie is. Romantic and creative sparks begin to fly, and when the two jointly make an unsigned poster, shot through with an enigmatic phrase, it becomes unforgettable to anyone who sees it. The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.

The posters begin appearing everywhere, and people wonder who is behind them. Satanists, kidnappers—the rumors won’t stop, and soon the mystery has dangerous repercussions that spread far beyond the town. The art that brought Frankie and Zeke together now threatens to tear them apart.

Twenty years later, Frances Eleanor Budge—famous author, mom to a wonderful daughter, wife to a loving husband—gets a call that threatens to upend everything: a journalist named Mazzy Brower is writing a story about the Coalfield Panic of 1996. Might Frances know something about that? And will what she knows destroy the life she’s so carefully built?

A bold coming-of-age story, written with Kevin Wilson’s trademark wit and blazing prose, Now Is Not The Time to Panic is a nuanced exploration of young love, identity, and the power of art. It’s also about the secrets that haunt us—and, ultimately, what the truth will set free.]]>
249 Kevin Wilson 0062913522 Nicci 2 3.76 2022 Now Is Not the Time to Panic
author: Kevin Wilson
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2024/06/08
date added: 2024/06/08
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Great Circle 56519331 627 Maggie Shipstead 0525656987 Nicci 4 4.29 2021 Great Circle
author: Maggie Shipstead
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/03
date added: 2024/06/03
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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 Nicci 5 4.46 2024 James
author: Percival Everett
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/23
date added: 2024/05/23
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Final Girls 59350631 Ten years ago, college student Quincy Carpenter went on vacation with five friends and came back alone, the only survivor of a horror movie-scale massacre. In an instant, she became a member of a club no one wants to belong to—a group of similar survivors known in the press as the Final Girls. Lisa, who lost nine sorority sisters to a college dropout's knife; Sam, who went up against the Sack Man during her shift at the Nightlight Inn; and now Quincy, who ran bleeding through the woods to escape Pine Cottage and the man she refers to onlyĚýas Him. The three girls are all attempting to put their nightmares behind them, and, with that, one another. Despite the media's attempts, they never meet.

Now, Quincy is doing well—maybe even great, thanks to her Xanax prescription. She has a caring almost-fiancé, Jeff; a popular baking blog; a beautiful apartment; and a therapeutic presence in Coop, the police officer who saved her life all those years ago. Her memory won’t even allow her to recall the events of that night; the past is in the past.

That is, until Lisa, the first Final Girl, is found dead in her bathtub, wrists slit, and Sam, the second, appears on Quincy's doorstep. Blowing through Quincy's life like a whirlwind, Sam seems intent on making Quincy relive the past, with increasingly dire consequences, all of which makes Quincy question why Sam is really seeking her out. And when new details about Lisa's death come to light, Quincy's life becomes a race against time as she tries to unravel Sam's truths from her lies, evade the police and hungry reporters, and, most crucially, remember what really happened at Pine Cottage, before what was started ten years ago is finished.

*From the Hardcover edition.

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373 Riley Sager Nicci 2 4.00 2017 Final Girls
author: Riley Sager
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2017
rating: 2
read at: 2024/05/20
date added: 2024/05/20
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The Women 126918788 From the celebrated author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds comes Kristin Hannah's The Women—at once an intimate portrait of coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of a nation divided.

Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie� McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.

As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is over-whelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. Each day is a gamble of life and death, hope and betrayal; friendships run deep and can be shattered in an instant. In war, she meets—and becomes one of—the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost.

But war is just the beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends. The real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam.

The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm’s way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has too often been forgotten. A novel about deep friendships and bold patriotism, The Women is a richly drawn story with a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage under fire will come to define an era.]]>
472 Kristin Hannah Nicci 4 4.71 2024 The Women
author: Kristin Hannah
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.71
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/14
date added: 2024/05/14
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Felix Ever After 48849624
From Stonewall and Lambda Award–winning author Kacen Callender comes a revelatory YA novel about a transgender teen grappling with identity and self-discovery while falling in love for the first time.

Felix Love has never been in love—and, yes, he’s painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it’s like and why it seems so easy for everyone but himĚýto find someone. What’s worse is that, even though he is proud of his identity, Felix also secretly fears that he’s one marginalization too many—Black, queer, and transgender—to ever get his own happily-ever-after.

When an anonymous student begins sending him transphobic messages—after publicly posting Felix’s deadname alongside images of him before he transitioned—Felix comes up with a plan for revenge. What he didn’t count his catfish scenario landing him in a quasi–love triangle....

But as he navigates his complicated feelings, Felix begins a journey of questioning and self-discovery that helps redefine his most important how he feels about himself.

Felix Ever After is an honest and layered story about identity, falling in love, and recognizing the love you deserve.

"Felix is attending an ultracompetitive arts summer program to have a better shot at a full scholarship to Brown when someone posts Felix’s dead name beside photos of him, pre-transition, in the school’s lobby. Felix’s plot to get revenge throws him onto the path of love and self-discovery."Ěý(Publishers Weekly, "An Anti-Racist Children's and YA Reading List")]]>
362 Kacen Callender Nicci 4 4.32 2020 Felix Ever After
author: Kacen Callender
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/09
date added: 2024/05/09
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The Reformatory 74891190 A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.

Gracetown, Florida

June 1950

Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.

Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Through his friends Redbone and Blue, Robbie is learning not just the rules but how to survive. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.

The Reformatory is a haunting work of historical fiction written as only American Book Award–winning author Tananarive Due could, by piecing together the life of the relative her family never spoke of and bringing his tragedy and those of so many others at the infamous Dozier School for Boys to the light in this riveting novel.]]>
573 Tananarive Due Nicci 3 4.50 2023 The Reformatory
author: Tananarive Due
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/03
date added: 2024/05/03
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American Dirt 45721673
Lydia Quixano Pérez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while there are cracks beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, her life is, by and large, fairly comfortable.

Even though she knows they’ll never sell, Lydia stocks some of her all-time favorite books in her store. And then one day a man enters the shop to browse and comes up to the register with a few books he would like to buy—two of them her favorites. Javier is erudite. He is charming. And, unbeknownst to Lydia, he is the jefe of the newest drug cartel that has gruesomely taken over the city. When Lydia’s husband’s tell-all profile of Javier is published, none of their lives will ever be the same.

Forced to flee, Lydia and eight-year-old Luca soon find themselves miles and worlds away from their comfortable middle-class existence. Instantly transformed into migrants, Lydia and Luca ride la bestia—trains that make their way north toward the United States, which is the only place Javier’s reach doesn’t extend. As they join the countless people trying to reach el norte, Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to?]]>
389 Jeanine Cummins Nicci 3 4.52 2020 American Dirt
author: Jeanine Cummins
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.52
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/18
date added: 2024/04/29
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Tom Lake 63256933 In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.]]>
310 Ann Patchett 0063327546 Nicci 2 4.13 2023 Tom Lake
author: Ann Patchett
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/04/28
date added: 2024/04/28
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The Wind Knows My Name 62583518 253 Isabel Allende 0593598113 Nicci 4 4.24 2023 The Wind Knows My Name
author: Isabel Allende
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/11
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The Prophets 52576333 9780593085684

A novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence.

Isaiah was Samuel’s and Samuel was Isaiah’s. That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of human refuge, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters. But when an older man—a fellow slave—seeks to gain favor by preaching the master’s gospel on the plantation, the enslaved begin to turn on their own. Isaiah and Samuel’s love, which was once so simple, is seen as sinful and a clear danger to the plantation’s harmony.

With a lyricism reminiscent of Toni Morrison, Robert Jones, Jr. fiercely summons the voices of slaver and the enslaved alike to tell the story of these two men; from Amos the preacher to the calculating slave-master himself to the long line of women that surround them, women who have carried the soul of the plantation on their shoulders. As tensions build and the weight of centuries—of ancestors and future generations to come—culminate in a climactic reckoning, The Prophets masterfully reveals the pain and suffering of inheritance, but is also shot through with hope, beauty, and truth, portraying the enormous, heroic power of love.]]>
400 Robert Jones Jr. Nicci 4 3.91 2021 The Prophets
author: Robert Jones Jr.
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/08
date added: 2024/04/08
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Shark Heart 74891998
At first, Wren internally resists her husband’s fate. Is there a way for them to be together after Lewis changes? Then, a glimpse of Lewis’s developing carnivorous nature activates long-repressed memories for Wren, whose story vacillates between her childhood living on a houseboat in Oklahoma, her time with her college ex-girlfriend, and her unusual friendship with a woman pregnant with twin birds.]]>
415 Emily Habeck Nicci 3 4.04 2023 Shark Heart
author: Emily Habeck
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/01
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The Covenant of Water 63429926 From the New York Times–bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial new epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala and following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret.

The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of Cutting for Stone. Published in 2009, Cutting for Stone became a literary phenomenon, selling over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years.

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. The family is part of a Christian community that traces itself to the time of the apostles, but times are shifting, and the matriarch of this family, known as Big Ammachi—literally “Big Mother”—will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life. All of Verghese’s great gifts are on display in this new there are astonishing scenes of medical ingenuity, fantastic moments of humor, a surprising and deeply moving story, and characters imbued with the essence of life.

A shimmering evocation of a lost India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.]]>
775 Abraham Verghese Nicci 5 4.58 2023 The Covenant of Water
author: Abraham Verghese
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/20
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Evil Eye 59381516 A Woman Is No Man returns with a striking exploration of the expectations of Palestinian-American women, the meaning of a fulfilling life, and the ways our unresolved pasts affect our presents.

Raised in a conservative and emotionally volatile Palestinian family in Brooklyn, Yara thought she would finally feel free when she married a charming entrepreneur who took her to the suburbs. She’s gotten to follow her dreams, completing an undergraduate degree in Art and landing a good job at the local college. As a traditional wife, she also raises their two school-aged daughters, takes care of the house, and has dinner ready when her husband gets home. With her family balanced with her professional ambitions, Yara knows that her life is infinitely more rewarding than her own mother’s. So why doesn’t it feel like enough?

After her dream of chaperoning a student trip to Europe evaporates and she responds to a colleague’s racist provocation, Yara is put on probation at work and must attend mandatory counseling to keep her position. Her mother blames a family curse for the trouble she’s facing, and while Yara doesn’t really believe in old superstitions, she still finds herself growing increasingly uneasy with her mother’s warning and the possibility of falling victim to the same mistakes.

Shaken to the core by these indictments of her life, Yara finds her carefully constructed world beginning to implode. To save herself, Yara must reckon with the reality that the difficulties of the childhood she thought she left behind have very real—and damaging—implications not just on her own future but that of her daughters.]]>
352 Etaf Rum 0062987909 Nicci 2 3.93 2023 Evil Eye
author: Etaf Rum
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/03/03
date added: 2024/03/03
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A Confederacy of Dunces 18162555
Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one adventure to the next. His stint as a hotdog vendor is less than successful, and he soon turns his employers at the Levy Pants Company on their heads. Ignatius's path through the working world is populated by marvelous secondary characters: the stripper Darlene and her talented cockatoo; the septuagenarian secretary Miss Trixie, whose desperate attempts to retire are constantly, comically thwarted; gay blade Dorian Greene; sinister Miss Lee, proprietor of the Night of Joy nightclub; and Myrna Minkoff, the girl Ignatius loves to hate. The many subplots that weave through A Confederacy of Dunces are as complicated as anything you'll find in a Dickens novel, and just as beautifully tied together in the end. But it is Ignatius--selfish, domineering, and deluded, tragic and comic and larger than life--who carries the story. He is a modern-day Quixote beset by giants of the modern age. His fragility cracks the shell of comic bluster, revealing a deep streak of melancholy beneath the antic humor. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he left behind, a fitting memorial to a talented and tormented life. --Alix Wilber]]>
417 John Kennedy Toole Nicci 1 3.86 1980 A Confederacy of Dunces
author: John Kennedy Toole
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1980
rating: 1
read at: 2024/02/21
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Land of Milk and Honey 101673225 The award-winning author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold returns with a rapturous and revelatory novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world

A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles.

There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.

In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.

Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in language as alluring as it is original, Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world. It is a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive. Most of all, it is a love letter to food, to wild delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite.]]>
240 C Pam Zhang 0593538242 Nicci 4 3.50 2023 Land of Milk and Honey
author: C Pam Zhang
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/28
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Meditations 30659 Meditations of Marcus Aurelius offer a remarkable series of challenging spiritual reflections and exercises developed as the emperor struggled to understand himself and make sense of the universe. While the Meditations were composed to provide personal consolation and encouragement, Marcus Aurelius also created one of the greatest of all works of philosophy: a timeless collection that has been consulted and admired by statesmen, thinkers and readers throughout the centuries.]]> 254 Marcus Aurelius 0140449337 Nicci 0 to-read 4.29 180 Meditations
author: Marcus Aurelius
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.29
book published: 180
rating: 0
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The Nightingale 21853621 In love we find out who we want to be.
In war we find out who we are.

FRANCE, 1939

In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says good-bye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France…but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When a German captain requisitions Vianne’s home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive.

Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gaëtan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can…completely. But when he betrays her, Isabelle joins the Resistance and never looks back, risking her life time and again to save others.]]>
564 Kristin Hannah 0312577222 Nicci 5 4.63 2015 The Nightingale
author: Kristin Hannah
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.63
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/10
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A Council of Dolls 63838775 From the mid-century metropolis of Chicago to the windswept ancestral lands of the Dakota people to the bleak and brutal Indian boarding schools, A Council of Dolls is the story of three women, told in part through the stories of the dolls they carried.

Sissy, born 1961: Sissy’s relationship with her beautiful and volatile mother is difficult, even dangerous, but her life is also filled with beautiful things, including a new Christmas present, a doll called Ethel. Ethel whispers advice and kindness in Sissy’s ear, and in one especially terrifying moment, maybe even saves Sissy’s life.

Lillian, born 1925: Born in her ancestral lands in a time of terrible change, Lillian clings to her sister, Blanche, and her doll, Mae. When the sisters are forced to attend an “Indian school� far from their home, Blanche refuses to be cowed by the school’s abusive nuns. But when tragedy strikes the sisters, the doll Mae finds her way to defend the girls.

Cora, born 1888: Although she was born into the brutal legacy of the “Indian Wars,� Cora isn’t afraid of the white men who remove her to a school across the country to be “civilized.� When teachers burn her beloved buckskin and beaded doll Winona, Cora discovers that the spirit of Winona may not be entirely lost.

A modern masterpiece, A Council of Dolls is gorgeous, quietly devastating, and ultimately hopeful, shining a light on the echoing damage of Indian boarding schools, and the historical massacres of Indigenous people.]]>
304 Mona Susan Power 0063281112 Nicci 5 4.07 2023 A Council of Dolls
author: Mona Susan Power
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/04
date added: 2024/02/04
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Yellowface 62060532
So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.

But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.]]>
329 R.F. Kuang Nicci 1 3.77 2023 Yellowface
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 1
read at: 2024/01/29
date added: 2024/01/30
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Take My Hand 55650158 Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a profoundly moving novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible wrong done to her patients, from the New York Times bestselling author of Wench.

Montgomery, Alabama 1973. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend has big plans to make a difference, especially in her African American community. At the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, she intends to help women make their own choices for their lives and bodies.

But when her first week on the job takes her down a dusty country road to a worn down one-room cabin, she’s shocked to learn that her new patients are children—just 11 and 13 years old. Neither of the Williams sisters has even kissed a boy, but they are poor and Black and for those handling the family’s welfare benefits that’s reason enough to have the girls on birth control. As Civil grapples with her role, she takes India, Erica and their family into her heart. Until one day, she arrives at the door to learn the unthinkable has happened and nothing will ever be the same for any of them.

Decades later, with her daughter grown and a long career in her wake, Dr. Civil Townsend is ready to retire, to find her peace and to leave the past behind. But there are people and stories that refuse to be forgotten.That must not be forgotten.

Because history repeats what we don’t remember.]]>
359 Dolen Perkins-Valdez 0593337697 Nicci 0 to-read 4.36 2022 Take My Hand
author: Dolen Perkins-Valdez
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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The Tsar of Love and Techno 36687433 A Constellation of Vital Phenomena—dazzling, poignant, and lyrical interwoven stories about family, sacrifice, the legacy of war, and the redemptive power of art.

This stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled their Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts. In stunning prose, with rich character portraits and a sense of history reverberating into the present, The Tsar of Love and Techno is a captivating work from one of our greatest new talents.]]>
354 Anthony Marra Nicci 4 4.31 2015 The Tsar of Love and Techno
author: Anthony Marra
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/27
date added: 2024/01/27
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Remarkably Bright Creatures 59710157 For fans of A Man Called Ove, a charming, witty and compulsively readable exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope that traces a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors--until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.]]>
362 Shelby Van Pelt 0063204177 Nicci 5 4.51 2022 Remarkably Bright Creatures
author: Shelby Van Pelt
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/19
date added: 2024/01/20
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<![CDATA[A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding]]> 27843800 In the tradition of Memoirs of a Geisha and The Piano Teacher, a heart-wrenching debut novel of family, forgiveness, and the exquisite pain of love

When Amaterasu Takahashi opens the door of her Philadelphia home to a badly scarred man claiming to be her grandson, she doesn’t believe him. Her grandson and her daughter, Yuko, perished nearly forty years ago during the bombing of Nagasaki. But the man carries with him a collection of sealed private letters that open a Pandora’s Box of family secrets Ama had sworn to leave behind when she fled Japan. She is forced to confront her memories of the years before the war: of the daughter she tried too hard to protect and the love affair that would drive them apart, and even further back, to the long, sake-pouring nights at a hostess bar where Ama first learned that a soft heart was a dangerous thing. Will Ama allow herself to believe in a miracle?]]>
299 Jackie Copleton 0698407326 Nicci 4 4.26 2015 A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding
author: Jackie Copleton
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/20
date added: 2024/01/20
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Banyan Moon 60127103 336 Thao Thai Nicci 4 4.11 2023 Banyan Moon
author: Thao Thai
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/16
date added: 2024/01/16
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The Wildest Sun 57822184
When tragedyĚýsends Delphine Auber, an aspiring writer on the cusp of adulthood, from her home in Paris, she seizes the opportunity to embark on the journeyĚýshe's long dreamed finding the father she has never known.ĚýBut her quest is complicated by the fact that she believes her father to be a famed literary icon, Ernest Hemingway, a man just as elusive as he is iconic.ĚýSheĚýdesperately yearns for his approval, as both a daughter and a writer, convinced that he holds the answer to who she's truly meant to be.ĚýButĚýwhat will happen if she is wrong, orĚýif her real story falls outside of the legend of her parentage that she’s revered all her life?Ěý

The answer takes herĚýfrom Paris toĚýNew York’s Harlem, toĚýHavanaĚýand Key West, asĚýDelphine fights to find her own triumphant place in the world and within herself, outside of the shadow of the myths she’s forged so strongly into her identity. Epically rendered as only Asha Lemmie’s vivid and lyrical voice can, The Wildest Sun is a dazzling and unexpected coming-of-age story about an unforgettable young woman who must come to terms with who she is and who she wants to be.]]>
336 Asha Lemmie Nicci 4 4.13 2023 The Wildest Sun
author: Asha Lemmie
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/11
date added: 2024/01/11
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A History of Burning 62315839 An epic, sweeping historical debut novel spanning continents and a century, and how one act of survival can reverberate through generations.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Pirbhai, a teenage boy looking for work, is taken from his village in India to labor on the East African Railway for the British. One day Pirbhai commits an act to ensure his survival that will haunt him forever and reverberate across his family's future for years to come.

Pirbhai's children are born and raised under the jacaranda trees and searing sun of Kampala during the waning days of British colonial rule. As Uganda moves towards independence and military dictatorship, Pirbhai's granddaughters, Latika, Mayuri, and Kiya, are three sisters coming of age in a divided nation. As they each forge their own path for a future, they must carry the silence of the history they've inherited. In 1972, under Idi Amin's brutal regime and the South Asian expulsion, the family has no choice but to flee, and in the chaos, they leave something devastating behind.

As Pirbhai's grandchildren, scattered across the world, find their way back to each other in exile in Toronto, a letter arrives that stokes the flames of the fire that haunts the family. It makes each generation question how far they are willing to go, and who they are willing to defy to secure their own place in the world.

A History of Burning is an unforgettable tour de force, an intimate family saga of complicity and resistance, about the stories we share, the ones that remain unspoken, and the eternal search for home.]]>
400 Janika Oza 1538724243 Nicci 0 to-read 4.12 2023 A History of Burning
author: Janika Oza
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/01/09
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Lessons in Chemistry 57684325
Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel–prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results.

But like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America’s most beloved cooking show Supper at Six. Elizabeth’s unusual approach to cooking (“combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride�) proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn’t just teaching women to cook. She’s daring them to change the status quo.]]>
400 Bonnie Garmus Nicci 3 4.47 2022 Lessons in Chemistry
author: Bonnie Garmus
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/06
date added: 2024/01/06
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<![CDATA[Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences]]> 112974854
They land on an idea: to retrace the thousands of miles Barbara trekked with Jedidiah’s father, travel writer Peter Jenkins, as part of the Walk Across America book trilogy that became a sensation in the 1970s. Beginning in New Orleans, they set off for the Oregon coast, listening to podcasts about outlaws and cult leaders—the only media they can agree on—while reliving the journey that changed Barbara’s life. Jedidiah discovers who Barbara was as a thirty-year-old writer walking across America and who she is now, as a parent who loves her son yet holds on to a version of faith that sees his sexuality as a sin.Ěý

Along the way, he peels back the layers of questions millions are asking: How do we stay in relationship when it hurts? When do boundaries turn into separation? When do we stand up for ourselves, and when do we let it go?Ěý

Tender, smart, and profound, Mother, Nature is a story of a remarkable mother-son bond and a moving meditation on the complexities of love.]]>
221 Jedidiah Jenkins 0593137264 Nicci 3 4.02 2023 Mother, Nature: A 5,000-Mile Journey to Discover if a Mother and Son Can Survive Their Differences
author: Jedidiah Jenkins
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/01/02
date added: 2024/01/02
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Prodigal Summer 6528648 National Bestseller"A blend of breathtaking artistry, encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world. . . and ardent commitment to the supremacy of nature."Ěý—ĚýSan Francisco ChronicleIn this beautiful novel, Barbara Kingsolver, New York Times bestselling author of Demon Copperhead and The Poisonwood Bible, weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia.Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes the lush countryside, this novel's intriguing protagonists—a reclusive wildlife biologist, a young farmer's wife marooned far from home, and a pair of elderly, feuding neighbors—face disparate predicaments but find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with whom they necessarily share a place. Their discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of biology, the realities of small farming, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one piece of life on earth.]]> 644 Barbara Kingsolver 0061839922 Nicci 4 4.25 2000 Prodigal Summer
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/31
date added: 2023/12/31
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Abolition. Feminism. Now. 53657256 An urgent, vital manifesto of intersectional, internationalist, abolitionist feminism, from leading scholar-activists Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, and Beth E. Richie.

As a politic and a practice, abolition increasingly shapes our political moment—halting the construction of new jails and propelling movements to divest from policing. Yet erased from this landscape are the central histories of feminist organizing—usually queer, anti-capitalist, grassroots, and women of color—that continue to cultivate abolition. Also erased is a recognition of the stark reality: abolition is our best response to endemic forms of state and interpersonal gender and sexual violence.

Amplifying the analysis and the theories of change generated from vibrant community based organizing, Abolition. Feminism. Now. surfaces necessary historical genealogies, key internationalist learnings, and everyday practices to grow our collective and flourishing present and futures.]]>
150 Angela Y. Davis Nicci 0 to-read 4.29 2022 Abolition. Feminism. Now.
author: Angela Y. Davis
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/27
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In Memoriam 62084507 Alternate cover edition of ISBN-13: 9780593534571, ISBN-10: 0593534573

It’s 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting.

Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle--an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood--without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt's family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt's horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.

An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.]]>
383 Alice Winn Nicci 5 4.54 2023 In Memoriam
author: Alice Winn
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/23
date added: 2023/12/23
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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 Nicci 5 3.97 2020 Sharks in the Time of Saviors
author: Kawai Strong Washburn
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/15
date added: 2023/12/20
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Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 46041199 A fierce international bestseller that launched Korea’s new feminist movement, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 follows one woman’s psychic deterioration in the face of rigid misogyny.

Truly, flawlessly, completely, she became that person.

In a small, tidy apartment on the outskirts of the frenzied metropolis of Seoul lives Kim Jiyoung. A thirtysomething-year-old “millennial everywoman,� she has recently left her white-collar desk job—in order to care for her newborn daughter full-time—as so many Korean women are expected to do. But she quickly begins to exhibit strange symptoms that alarm her husband, parents, and in-laws: Jiyoung impersonates the voices of other women—alive and even dead, both known and unknown to her. As she plunges deeper into this psychosis, her discomfited husband sends her to a male psychiatrist.

In a chilling, eerily truncated third-person voice, Jiyoung’s entire life is recounted to the psychiatrist—a narrative infused with disparate elements of frustration, perseverance, and submission. Born in 1982 and given the most common name for Korean baby girls, Jiyoung quickly becomes the unfavored sister to her princeling little brother. Always, her behavior is policed by the male figures around her—from the elementary school teachers who enforce strict uniforms for girls, to the coworkers who install a hidden camera in the women’s restroom and post their photos online. In her father’s eyes, it is Jiyoung’s fault that men harass her late at night; in her husband’s eyes, it is Jiyoung’s duty to forsake her career to take care of him and their child—to put them first.

Jiyoung’s painfully common life is juxtaposed against a backdrop of an advancing Korea, as it abandons “family planning� birth control policies and passes new legislation against gender discrimination. But can her doctor flawlessly, completely cure her, or even discover what truly ails her?

Rendered in minimalist yet lacerating prose, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 sits at the center of our global #MeToo movement and announces the arrival of writer of international significance]]>
163 Cho Nam-Joo 1631496700 Nicci 3 4.17 2016 Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
author: Cho Nam-Joo
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/20
date added: 2023/12/20
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The Secret History 75265531 An alternative cover edition for this ASIN can be found here.*

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.]]>
577 Donna Tartt Nicci 1 3.93 1992 The Secret History
author: Donna Tartt
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1992
rating: 1
read at: 2023/12/18
date added: 2023/12/18
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Know My Name 50196744
Now she reclaims her identity to tell her story of trauma, transcendence, and the power of words. It was the perfect case, in many ways–there were eyewitnesses, Turner ran away, physical evidence was immediately secured. But her struggles with isolation and shame during the aftermath and the trial reveal the oppression victims face in even the best-case scenarios. Her story illuminates a culture biased to protect perpetrators, indicts a criminal justice system designed to fail the most vulnerable, and, ultimately, shines with the courage required to move through suffering and live a full and beautiful life.

Know My Name will forever transform the way we think about sexual assault, challenging our beliefs about what is acceptable and speaking truth to the tumultuous reality of healing. It also introduces readers to an extraordinary writer, one whose words have already changed our world. Entwining pain, resilience, and humor, this memoir will stand as a modern classic.]]>
384 Chanel Miller 0735223718 Nicci 0 to-read 4.69 2019 Know My Name
author: Chanel Miller
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.69
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/02
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Victory City 61169712
In the fourteenth century of the Common Era, in the South of what we now call India, nine-year-old Pampa Kampana, orphaned by war, starts hearing the voice of a goddess. Inspired, and imbued with powerful magic, she vows to ensure that no more women suffer her beloved mother's unconscionable fate. Aided by miracles and a gift for prophecy, she creates a mighty city; her whispered words galvanize its people to grow and change. Her poetry maps the rise and fall of its empire. And the prophetess herself--beloved, feared, timeless--watches as the world changes across the centuries and her body, frozen in the beauty of youth for decades upon decades, fades along with her city's glory. Half a millennium later, her writing is discovered, deep in the ancient earth.

The thirteenth novel from the incomparable Salman Rushdie, Victory City is an epic tale with a message for us all: our power is fleeting, but our stories last forever.]]>
352 Salman Rushdie Nicci 3 4.04 2023 Victory City
author: Salman Rushdie
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/02
date added: 2023/12/02
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Everything I Never Told You 18693763
Lydia is the favourite child of Marilyn and James Lee; a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue - in Marilyn's case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James's case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the centre of every party. But Lydia is under pressures that have nothing to do with growing up in 1970s small town Ohio. Her father is an American born of first-generation Chinese immigrants, and his ethnicity, and hers, make them conspicuous in any setting.

When Lydia's body is found in the local lake, James is consumed by guilt and sets out on a reckless path that may destroy his marriage. Marilyn, devastated and vengeful, is determined to make someone accountable, no matter what the cost. Lydia's older brother, Nathan, is convinced that local bad boy Jack is somehow involved. But it's the youngest in the family - Hannah - who observes far more than anyone realises and who may be the only one who knows what really happened.

Everything I Never Told You is a gripping page-turner, about secrets, love, longing, lies and race.

Librarian's note: There is an Alternate Cover Edition for this edition of this book here.]]>
297 Celeste Ng 159420571X Nicci 0 to-read 3.81 2014 Everything I Never Told You
author: Celeste Ng
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/17
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The Book of Goose 59808607 A gripping, heartbreaking new novel about female friendship, art, and memory by the award-winning author of Where Reasons End.

Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised--the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now, Agnès is free to tell her story.

As children in a war-ravaged, backwater town, they'd built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves--until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.

A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to to the quiet Pennsylvania home where Agnès can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a haunting story of friendship, art, exploitation, and memory by the celebrated author Yiyun Li.]]>
348 Yiyun Li 037460634X Nicci 2 3.67 2022 The Book of Goose
author: Yiyun Li
name: Nicci
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2023/11/17
date added: 2023/11/17
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Clytemnestra 61361681 For fans of Madeline Miller's Circe, a stunning debut following Clytemnestra, the most notorious villainess of the ancient world and the events that forged her into the legendary queen.

As for queens, they are either hated or forgotten. She already knows which option suits her best...

You were born to a king, but you marry a tyrant. You stand by helplessly as he sacrifices your child to placate the gods. You watch him wage war on a foreign shore, and you comfort yourself with violent thoughts of your own. Because this was not the first offence against you. This was not the life you ever deserved. And this will not be your undoing. Slowly, you plot.

But when your husband returns in triumph, you become a woman with a choice.

Acceptance or vengeance, infamy follows both. So, you bide your time and force the gods' hands in the game of retribution. For you understood something long ago that the others never did.

If power isn't given to you, you have to take it for yourself.

A blazing novel set in the world of Ancient Greece for fans of Jennifer Saint and Natalie Haynes, this is a thrilling tale of power and prophecies, of hatred, love, and of an unforgettable Queen who fiercely dealt out death to those who wronged her.]]>
435 Costanza Casati 1728268230 Nicci 3 4.22 2023 Clytemnestra
author: Costanza Casati
name: Nicci
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/04
date added: 2023/11/04
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